“Oh, that reminds me. Make sure you keep any receipts for expenses, assuming you wish to claim them back,” Elias finishes.
“And assuming we don’t, you know, die,” Jon says, folding his arms over his chest.
Martin flinches, but Elias doesn’t even blink. “Yes. If you die, I’m afraid you probably won’t be able to claim your expenses. Don’t worry about staying in contact, I’ll know when it starts.” He turns on his heel and walks out of the Archives.
Melanie snorts and sticks her hands on her hips. “That went well.”
“Mm. It’s almost suspicious.” Jon rubs his forehead. “I suggest we all go home for a few hours. Get some rest. Tomorrow is going to be…it’s going to be a lot.”
“What time?” Sasha asks.
Jon shrugs. “We move when Daisy tells us.”
Sasha looks conflicted. “Well. In case we don’t get to see you before…” She holds out her hand to Jon. “Good luck.”
Jon accepts the handshake, only to make a startled noise when Sasha pulls him into a hug. She squeezes him tightly for a moment, then turns to Tim and doesn’t even make a pretense at a handshake, just goes straight for the hug. That one lasts a little longer, and she must say something to him, because Tim nods before easing back.
Melanie salutes both Jon and Tim. “Good luck. Try not to die. See you in the morning, Martin.”
“Yeah. Sure.” Martin tries and fails to smile.
They have a plan. It’s a good plan, he tries to tell himself. It’s going to work out. They’re all going to be fine and nobody’s going to die. They’ll stop the Unknowing, and even if they don’t save the world, they’ll be able to do more than just delay it for a few years—they’ll be able to outright disrupt it and it’ll be centuries before the Stranger can try again. And the other half of them will be able to take care of Elias. It’s not a perfect plan, but it’s as close as they’re going to get.
Martin just wishes he didn’t feel like this is his last night of peace before everything goes to hell.
He slips one arm around Jon and the other around Tim, not caring that the three of them walking abreast means no one else can walk down the sidewalk. He’s scared, damn it, he doesn’t know what to expect tomorrow, and he wants them close as long as he can. From the way both of them crowd against him and mimic his gesture, he guesses they’re feeling the same way.
“So,” he says. “What’s the plan for tonight?”
“I vote we don’t make one,” Tim says. “I vote we just go home and…see what happens.”
Jon nods. “I can get behind that. Just a nice, quiet evening at home. Like tomorrow’s not going to be—” He pauses. “No. We have to acknowledge that tomorrow is going to be—you know.”
“A lot?” Tim and Martin supply in unison.
“Right. I can’t—I can’t do this and not know that there’s not a risk,” he says in a low voice. “That this might be the last time we get to do this.”
Martin pulls both Jon and Tim a little closer, and if that makes it hard to walk, well, tough.
Charlie is standing on their front step when they get home, reaching for the doorbell, but he turns and beams at them when he hears their footsteps. “Hi! I thought you were home already.”
“We had a meeting at work that ran over,” Jon tells him. “Is everything all right?”
“Uh-huh. I can’t stay long. I have to go finish studying for my spelling test tomorrow. It’s on all the words we learned this term, so it’s a big test.” Charlie bounces up and down on the balls of his feet. “I just wanted to ask you—our end-of-term picnic is on Friday and we’re allowed to invite our families to come and meet everybody and see what we’ve been doing this year, and I was hoping maybe you’d want to come?” He asks all of this in a single breathless rush and looks up at them beseechingly.
Martin’s heart sinks. They’ve planned and double-planned, worked timing down to the second, strategized and set up—and in all that, they’ve forgotten that they need to tell Charlie they’re going. Or maybe not forgotten; the fewer people who know about it, the better. Even though they know Charlie won’t betray them, it still puts him at risk.
Tim kneels down to put himself on Charlie’s eye level. “Buddy, we’d love to come to your picnic. Nothing would make us happier. But we have to go out of town tomorrow for a big, important work…thing. We’re going to be spending the night up there at least, so we probably won’t be back in time. We’ll try, but we can’t promise, okay? What time is it?”
“Twelve,” Charlie says in a small voice.
Tim looks up helplessly at Martin, who scoops Charlie up into the air and hugs him. “Tell you what. If we can’t make it to your end-of-term picnic, when we get back, we’ll go on one, just the three of us, how’s that?”
“Okay, I guess.” Charlie rests his head against Martin’s shoulder. “I just really want you to meet my teacher.”
“We’ll have other opportunities.” Martin fervently hopes that’s true. “Do you do anything at the end of summer term?”
“I think so.”
“Let us know when that is and we’ll plan ahead for it. Cross my heart.”
Charlie sighs. “Okay.”
“And we will try, Charlie,” Jon promises. “We’re going to be three hours away, but what we have to do should be over tomorrow night, so we might be able to come back in the morning.”
“Okay,” Charlie says again, but he sounds a little more confident this time.
Martin kisses his forehead and sets him gently on the ground. He gives Martin one more quick squeeze, then hugs Tim and Jon tightly before running home to study his spelling. Over his shoulder, he calls, “Have a safe trip!”
“Bye, Charlie,” Tim calls back.
A chill runs up Martin’s spine. There’s a sad note in Tim’s voice that makes that goodbye sound…awfully final.
The moment they’re inside, Jon sags slightly. “I didn’t think about Charlie.”
“I know. Neither did I,” Martin admits.
Tim stares vacantly in the direction of the window. “It’ll be okay. We’re doing this for him.”
And it gives them something to come back to, Martin adds silently as he heads for the kitchen. Charlie’s expecting them back. If nothing else, that has to be something worth holding on to.
Jon pitches in to help Martin make dinner. Tim, with his hand in a cast, isn’t much help, but he does what he can. They decide they want spaghetti only to discover that they’re out, so Tim tries to talk them through his grandmother’s homemade pasta recipe. Flour gets everywhere and at first they make some oddly-shaped noodles, but they’re enjoying themselves.
As Jon reaches into the cupboard where they keep the cans and jars, he pauses. “What did you put the preserves on?”
“Huh?” Martin frowns at Jon. They’re scrupulous about keeping the pantry organized, not necessarily because it bothers them if they don’t but because, on the rare occasions the Primes come over, they want Martin Prime to know where everything is, so the preserves ought to be in the same place as always.
“When you were little, when—in the Keeper’s statement, he said you had ‘alphabet soup and cherry preserves’ before he left,” Jon clarifies. “What did you put them on?”
“Crumpets, I think,” Martin says, trying to remember. “I know it was savory. Mum was always on me about eating too many sweets.”
Tim scowls. “Martin, I don’t know if any of us have ever said this out loud before, but I really don’t like your mother.”
Martin pauses in the act of dropping pasta into the boiling water and looks over at Tim. “You know what? I don’t, either.”
Oddly, the confession makes him feel a bit lighter, a bit less weighed down. And it makes both Tim and Jon laugh, which is a victory.
They don’t talk about it over dinner. Or afterward. There’s something that’s almost tangibly not being discussed, and Martin isn’t quite sure what it is. It’s not exactly the whole we might be dead tomorrow thing, but it’s…something. They eat their misshapen spaghetti with sauce from a jar and spread cherry preserves on slices of baguette instead of garlic butter, and they talk about the weather and the seaside and how many rooms Rosie might have booked for them at the bed and breakfast Elias picked out, and whatever it is sits on the table next to the napkins and is ignored. Jon washes the dishes and Martin dries them and Tim wipes the sticky bits off the table, and then they sit down and play Crazy Eights for a while until Tim’s left hand, unaccustomed to holding the cards, starts to hurt.
“What did you used to do?” he asks Martin as Jon riffles the deck to put it away. “Before your dad went out to sea. Did you have—he mentioned a routine.”
Martin shrugs. “We’ve basically done it. We’d have alphabet soup and cherry preserves—he taught me to read using alphabet soup, he used to spell out words before he’d serve me and pretend it happened on its own—and then he’d put me to bed. We’d read for a bit and then sing our song together, and then I’d fall asleep and in the morning he’d be gone.”
His voice shakes a little on the last word. Even though he knows that won’t happen, even though he knows it won’t be…he can’t shake that fear. That this will be the last time one of them leaves.
He almost says it then. Almost blurts out his feelings. He should, he knows that, but at the last second he reels it back in. He’s reasonably confident that he won’t lose either of their friendship if he admits to his feelings—and, hell, Jon already knows about his crush on him—but at the same time, they’re going to be in a van with each other for three hours. It’s not fair for him to throw that on them and then not give them space to breathe if it turns out they don’t reciprocate.
After, he tells himself. They’ll have plenty of time to discuss things after. For now, he’s going to enjoy what he’s got tonight. Tomorrow can take care of itself and then they’ll have forever to discuss the future.
“We’ve got the next Redwall book,” Jon says, a bit hopefully. “We could read from that.”
“Sounds like a good idea to me,” Tim says.
Just like the day before Jon left for Beijing, they pile into the bed together, lit only by the glow of the bedside lamp. Somehow Martin’s in the middle this time, Jon and Tim cuddled close against him, but he isn’t complaining. It occurs to him that depending on the bed and breakfast they’ve been booked into, they might not be able to do this tomorrow night.
As Tim hands Martin the book, Jon voices it aloud. “If we’re booked in separate rooms tomorrow night, I don’t know that I’m going to want to use them. Especially…you know, depending on how things go.”
“That’s fair,” Martin agrees. “I don’t know that I’m going to want to, either.”
“Yeah,” Tim says, a little distantly. He rests his head on Martin’s shoulder. “Going to have a hard enough time sleeping as it is. No sense making it worse by trying to sleep apart.”
Martin hums. They manage, through a series of complicated maneuvers, to get it so he can wrap his arms around both of them and still hold the book, and then he begins to read.
They read through three chapters, each of them taking a turn, but Martin is willing to admit that he isn’t taking in a single word. He’s too distracted by Tim and Jon’s nearness, by the solid warmth of them on either side of him, and most importantly by the overwhelming sense that he can hear a ticking clock in the back of his head, counting down the seconds before they leave. Before they get into peril.
Before he might lose them both.
It’s going to be fine, he reminds himself again. If Daisy’s right about the charges, and they have no reason to doubt her about that, they should be able to be set off from outside the building. Once they’re set, they’ll be able to duck out, press the detonator, and blow Nikola Orsinov and her puppets to hell. There’s no reason to assume they’re going to be in danger, unless something goes wrong.
Granted, it’s them. The probability of things going wrong is high. But he has to have hope or he won’t get through this.
“Martin?” Jon says quietly as Tim reaches the end of the chapter.
“Yeah, Jon?”
“That song…the one you used to sing with your father. Is it the one you sang before I left for Beijing?”
Martin swallows and nods. “That’s the one.”
Jon’s silent for a moment. “Will you sing it tonight? If it’s…was it for luck?”
“It—kind of? It’s more that it was just a song about—about leaving, and promising to come back.”
Tim takes the book and puts it on the nightstand. From the fact that he doesn’t slip a bookmark into it, Martin surmises that he hasn’t been paying much attention to it, either. “Do you have anything that will work better? That might, you know, more fit the situation?”
Martin is about to say that he doesn’t, then realizes that he does. “Yeah. Actually, there is one.”
Jon switches off the light and curls back around Martin, reaching for Tim’s arm as Tim does the same from the other side. Martin clasps both of them as tightly to himself as he can, takes a deep breath, and softly begins to sing. It’s not a sea shanty, just an old folk song, but it’s one he’s always loved. Tim flinches against him, and at first Martin worries that he’s said too much with the song, but when he hits the chorus for the second time, Tim joins in. Martin slides easily into the harmony out of habit.
His shoulder is wet, and it doesn’t take much for Martin to realize that Jon has started to silently cry. The hitch in Tim’s voice tells him he’s crying, too, and honestly, Martin can feel the tears in his own eyes. Maybe this wasn’t the best choice, but he can’t bring himself to stop.
“It’s okay,” Jon whispers when he finally finishes the song. “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”
“It has to be,” Martin says. “Otherwise, what are we even doing all this for?”
Tim sighs and somehow burrows even closer to Martin. “Anything worth having is worth fighting for,” he murmurs.
“How dare you use my own words against me.” Martin takes a risk and kisses the top of Tim’s head gently. The pained, slightly frightened whimper it draws out of Tim is surprising and almost makes him apologize, but he decides to just…not acknowledge it. It seems better that way.
Is it just his imagination, or is there a hint of relief in Tim’s voice? “It’s still true.”
“I know.” Martin sighs heavily and leans back against the pillows with Jon and Tim more on top of him than not. He wants to stay awake as long as he can, to cherish every moment he has with them, but rather to his surprise, he falls asleep almost as soon as his head touches his pillow.
He’s not surprised by his dreams. Not at first In the last couple of weeks, he’s become all too familiar with them—the woman with the flaming ghost, the man with the spiders—familiar with the fact that he just stands and watches, watches one to its conclusion and then drifts to another. Usually that’s it; he watches the first impassively, watches the second just as impassively, and then wakes up. He ought to think of them as proper nightmares, but they don’t frighten him. At least not while he’s watching them.
Tonight, though, as he turns away from the flat covered in spiders, he sees something he’s never noticed before—a door, weatherbeaten and warped, and unlike the door where the man struggles in vain to break free, it is free of webbing. The man doesn’t seem to notice it, even when he turns to look pleadingly at Martin. Part of Martin wants to help, but he doesn’t think there’s a way out over there, so instead he simply pulls open the clean door…and steps through into another dream.
He stands in a long, narrow room, perhaps wide enough for a single person to walk down but tall, so very tall. Before him is a frame, and in that frame is a painting, filling the corridor, the figures upon it life-sized and oh so very realistic. He knows the figures in the painting. It’s Jon and Tim, in what is recognizably the Archives, half-in and half-out of the trapdoor. Both of them are screaming in pain and terror, clutching one another. Standing over them is a woman Martin remembers staring down himself—Jane Prentiss, her body nearly consumed by those small silvery-white worms, the floor alive with them as they try to claim Tim and Jon. A small greyish-white plaque, almost unobtrusive, sits on the wall to its left—Martin wouldn’t notice it at all if he wasn’t coming from that direction, so to speak.
Ah, Shit, 2016.
There is noise from down the corridor. Martin turns and heads towards it, trying to ignore the other “paintings” as he goes. He doesn’t usually get afraid in these nightmares, not anymore, but this? This scares him. Not the least because he knows what it is.
The noise he hears, unsurprising, is panicked breathing, half-sobbing, a broken voice gasping out pleas to a God that surely isn’t listening here. He wants to go faster. He can’t. He can only maintain this steady, even pace, drawing ever closer to the source of the fear—a man with too much white in his hair for his young age, tears streaking his face and his clothes rumpled and disheveled, trying to back away from one of the paintings even though there’s no room. This is Martin Prime, reliving his journey back in time.
But why now? Why tonight?
There’s another figure behind Martin Prime—two of them. There shouldn’t be anyone else here, but there they are, and with a jolt, Martin realizes it’s Jon. They’re both Jon, one scarred and wearing a sweater Martin himself knitted when he was sixteen, one shirtless and unmarred, both of them watching with expressions of distress. He hears more footsteps on the corridor and looks over Martin Prime’s head as he tries to turn away—and there’s Tim, face pale, walking towards them at the same pace Martin is.
Jon Prime’s eyes are fixed on Martin Prime, but Jon looks up and seems to notice them both at the same time. He stretches out his hands just as Tim does, and Martin does the same. Their hands meet and clasp, closing in a circle around Martin Prime—
—and Martin jolts awake with a gasp as a phone rings shrilly into the silence of the bedroom.
Tim pushes himself up, putting a little too much pressure on Martin’s chest as he does so, and stares at both Martin and Jon with wide, frantic eyes. He’s breathing heavily, and looking up at him, Martin doesn’t need any special powers to know that he wasn’t imagining them in that corridor. They were all there. Jon squeezes Tim’s hand and presses his cheek briefly against Martin’s shoulder, then extracts himself and grabs his phone. “Hello?” he says hoarsely.
Martin manages to sit up, rubbing his eyes, and reaches over to touch Tim’s arm wordlessly. Tim nods silently in response.
Martin isn’t even sure what he just asked.
“Right. Okay. You know the plan. See you then.” Jon hangs up and rubs his face, the rasp of hand on stubble almost preternaturally loud in the darkness. “That was Daisy. She’ll meet us at the Institute in an hour.” He snaps on the bedside lamp and turns to look at Martin and Tim, scanning their faces like he’s memorizing them, just in case this is the last chance he gets to see them. Martin can understand that, because he’s looking from Jon to Tim the same way. “It’s time.”