Work Text:
2015
The only sound in the office was the slow, clunky, ticking of the clock on the far wall. It was wrong, an hour behind, but Jon had never bothered to climb up there and fix it.
The desk was piled with papers, a cluttered mess that swallowed the scratched mahogany. Statement files and research reports covered in vibrant sticky notes lay scattered discordantly. His laptop was open but ignored, the screen idle and flipping through photos of coral reefs. Tapes littered the desk, some piled on the floor.
Nearly two months into this job and he hadn’t even begun to make a dent in the mess that was the Archives. Jon sighed wearily, picking up his mug only to find it long since drained of coffee.
His eyes burned from how long he’d held them open. He’d stayed the night in his office, waking up from a cat nap slumped over his desk with a sticky note plastered to his forehead and a statement in his lap. Jon had simply freshened up in the restroom and clocked in for the new day, no reason to head home at five in the morning just to come back at eight.
He had half a mind to wonder why no one had come in and woke him before they left the night before but, well, he wasn’t the most welcoming when they randomly opened his door. His hair was a mess, starting to curl back up, and without looking he knew there were bags under his eyes.
Jon needed to go home, take a shower, sleep in an actual bed, but there was so much work to do. The sea of statements was never ending and taking research into account, it took at least two days to fully file one.
Glancing to the closed door, he shrugged out of his jacket and looked at his wrist. He wondered what they would’ve said—would they have called, exasperated fondness in their tone when he wasn’t home at his usual time, greeted him at the door with a smile and gently herd him towards bed? Would they pick him up after they got off work, walk home with him?
In another life, maybe.
With another sigh, he gently traced his thumb over the words etched into his left wrist. It was an old habit—most people had it, really—tracing those words for comfort.
The letters were raised, pale and white as scar tissue, but the skin was soft beneath his finger. They were the first unique words his soulmate would ever say to him–Jon had always appreciated that particular forethought from the universe. It wouldn’t be very practical if every other person had ‘hello’ on their wrist.
His words, his grandmother always remarked as being particularly unique. She was convinced they were sarcastic or a joke, but the longer Jon spent reading these statements day after day, the more he thought it wasn’t sarcasm.
You’re new. Did you kill them?
His eyes followed the chicken-scratch handwriting he’d been staring at since he was old enough to think, the first words he ever learned to read. The skin was cold under his thumb, but how much of it was because of the chill that hung in the archives or how much was from weird soulmate bullshit, he had no idea.
On his right, Thank you, Jon. The last words they would’ve said to him.
An ache swelled in his throat and he pointedly choked it down. It was a bone-deep ache, one that would never leave. It sat within him like a great chasm that grew wider and wider until it finally consumed him from the inside out.
Jon had learned to live with it, but that didn’t make it hurt any less.
Glancing once more at the clock, he figured he had time to record one more statement.
Jon reached for the tape recorder but it was already recording, whirring quietly as the tapes spun. He hadn’t realized he’d already turned it on. He picked up the statement nearest to him and opened it.
“Statement of Markus Cooper, regarding a recurring visitor to his antique bookshop and his purchases. Original statement given April 5th, 2005,” he read, voice rough and tired.
The statement wasn’t very long, thankfully, and it spun the story of a book from the library of Jurgen Leitner that bled from its pages. It ended with a tall, mysterious, goth burning the screaming book in a trash can and taking his leave without so much as a parting word.
“Statement ends.” Jon leafed through the file, searching for the follow up notes.
Unwittingly, his eyes drifted towards the brief description of the book burner. Some strange fondness for this man coated his tongue as he spoke—anyone who destroyed those damn Leitners had Jon’s utmost respect. “It seems we have another appearance of Gerard Keay. Something tells me there’s more to him than—”
The door to his office flung open.
“Evening boss!” Tim sang as he entered. A pile of papers was in one hand and a cup of what unfortunately looked like water was in his other.
“Tim,” Jon greeted dryly, closing the statement file.
It was hard not to stare, though Jon was more than used to it.
Tim’s wrists were always bare—most people wore bracelets or long sleeves to cover their soulmark. Jon could remember when Tim wore a multitude of bright beaded bracelets to hide his words, but he hadn’t in a long time.
The red letters in looping cursive across his wrist were displayed proudly and boldly ever since the day they left Sasha’s mouth. It was a slow Thursday morning in Research, nearly four years ago, when Sasha accidentally knocked all her papers off her side of the desk she and Jon shared.
Tim, who was walking by, scooped them up and placed them back on her desk before she could even stand up.
Glad to see chivalry isn’t dead, pretty boy, she’d laughed in that half-joking, half-teasing way of hers and Jon swore he watched stars form in Tim’s eyes. Tim replied with some shitty, fated, pick up line and the rest was history.
“Brought you some more follow ups,” Tim said, holding out his offerings. Jon took the brick of papers, flipping through the different reports. “There should be a sticky note with all of the case numbers somewhere in there, but let me know if…”
Tim trailed off as his eyes floated downward and stilled. Jon followed his gaze down to his hands, no, his wrists—his bare wrists—and cold dread flooded through him. Tim could see his words. He never put his jacket back on.
Jon quickly pulled his hands into his lap, staring down at the mess of papers. All at once he felt caught, unable to meet Tim’s pitying gaze. He wanted him out–he wanted him to stop looking at him but it didn’t matter, the secret was out.
“Oh, Jon,” he breathed. “I’m..I had no idea.”
“I didn’t want you to,” Jon snapped, the words sharp and biting as they left his lips.
Tim shifted somewhat nervously, hand unconsciously reaching up to hold his own wrist, tracing his soulmate’s impression on his skin.
Jon viciously stamped down the cold coil of jealousy that rose in him–it wasn’t fair to Tim. It wasn’t his fault Jon’s soulmate was dead while his own was just outside the door. Jon couldn’t even be mad over the fact that the moment Tim left his office, he’d tell her what he saw.
If Jon was in Tim’s place, he’d tell his soulmate everything.
“When…?” Tim asks, unable to say it out loud. When did they die? When did your soulmate die, is what he cannot bring himself to say. Even now, Jon can barely bring himself to think of it.
He swallows thickly as he traces his fingers over the faded words, almost afraid to open his mouth. If he does, he doesn’t entirely trust himself not to start crying. “Last, last year,” he gets out after another beat of suffocating silence.
Last year, he turned the words over in his head. Has it truly been that long? Has it truly been over three hundred and sixty-five days since a part of him was taken?
It had been late into the night when his soulmate died.
Jon awoke from a dead sleep with a gasp, eyes flinging open into the darkness. Tears were already streaming down his face, a sob choking him. Something was wrong. His chest hurt, everything ached with such an acute, heavy sorrow that he couldn’t think.
Jon’s breath stuttered, he felt so cold.
Something in him was screaming, something primal and ornate and delicate within him was broken when it had once been whole and it hurt.
He didn’t know how long he laid there before he pulled himself up, his limbs shaking so bad from the fear and the ache and the sudden brokenness that he could barely hold his own weight.
Blindly, he fumbled for his phone. For a moment he briefly thought he should call for an ambulance, but his vision was so blurry with tears he just clicked on the first contact he saw.
After nearly four rings, whoever he called answered. “Jon, what the hell? It’s four in the morning–” Georgie’s sleepy voice answered.
Jon just sobbed raggedly into the phone. “Something’s wrong—I don’t, I don’t know. I can’t—something’s missing. It, it hurts,” he had gasped out, his words dissolving into a wordless cry.
The sound of fabric shuffling floated through over the speakers. “Oh, shit, fuck. What hurts, Jon? What happened? Are you at your flat?”
Jon’s wrists hurt, his heart hurt; it felt ripped from him, skinned and carved and hollowed out like a ripe pomegranate.
He turned on the lamp with a shaking hand, hyperventilating into the phone, something close to a realization thrumming beneath his skin. He needed the light—he just, he needed to see, to make sure…
The words that were across his left wrist were white. They’d been red when he went to bed. Now they were white as scars, as bone.
He felt his phone slip away from his ear numbly.
Words that hadn’t been on his right wrist just hours ago were now there, no longer needing to be hidden. “They’re dead,” he whispered to himself.
Jon’s memory starts to get fuzzy around then, his vision tunneling. All he recalls with perfect clarity is how soft and golden the lamp light had been as it spilled across his white sheets, how it seemed to glint on the scarred over words. He couldn’t stop staring at his wrists, now adorned with the first and last words he’d never get to hear, in handwriting he’d never see on paper.
His soulmate was dead. His soulmate was dead and he was so, so cold.
Jon remembers a broken sound leaving him and not stopping for some time, a shaking keening filling his ears. He remembers Georgie arriving an unknown amount of time later, tugging his hands away from his chest, thinking he was hurt somehow. He remembers her gasp of terror.
He remembers that at some point he started throwing up, Georgie holding his hair away from his face as she cursed and whispered empty reassurances.
Jon remembers he started asking her if he was going to die too. It felt like he was; he thinks he did, a bit.
It couldn’t have been a year ago, not when that ache still burns just as strong.
Tim’s voice pulls him from the memory. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Please leave, Tim,” Jon replied, voice barely above a whisper, and he numbly realizes hot tears are trailing down his face. “Please just–”
Tim nods and quickly takes his leave, the door closing quietly behind him.
That evening, after Jon walked home alone, he laid in his bed and stared at the ceiling. No matter how many blankets he piled on himself, he never seemed to be able to get warm anymore.
2013
The fluorescent lights of the corner store were doing nothing for Gerry’s raging headache. He’d been staring at the shelf of hair dye for the past few minutes, eyes scanning over the brands and colors.
“Find what you need?” he asked without looking away from the shelf, hearing Gertrude’s soft footsteps and the rustle of her cardigan as she walked towards him.
Gertrude hummed in confirmation, holding a plastic bag with a little yellow smiley face printed on the side. They’d stopped to get cigarettes, paracetamol, and something quick to eat for the night. They were a few hours out of London and were staying in a hotel for the night, as neither of them were rested enough to drive.
She stood silently at his side, observing him consider the difference between Midnight and Pitch black. His roots were showing more than normal and the black dye had faded to a weird gray that made his hair look almost moldy.
It seemed this particular store was sold out of his usual brand, but he’d use just about anything if it meant he didn’t have to stare at his natural blonde a moment longer.
Gerry felt her gaze drift towards his wrists, covered in bracelets. His skin began to crawl with the sensation of being seen, of the Eye digging around in his head. “I’ve already asked you not to Know things about my soulmate,” he dryly said, picking up a box and feeling her eyes follow his hand.
“It’s nothing you’ve not already figured out yourself,” she retorted, her voice prim but gravelly from her years of smoking.
Gerry set the box back on the shelf with a little huff. His bracelets jangled, bits of red letters peeking out between the chinks in the chains. “So? Doesn’t mean I want you to know it.”
Gertrude shrugged, but he knew she wasn’t going to let it go. She turned towards the shelf Gerry was currently glaring daggers at. After a moment she reached over and moved some pink dye out of the way, grabbing what was hidden behind it.
“I believe this is your usual,” she said, a tad bit amused, as she handed him the only box in the entire store of his favorite black hair dye.
He took it from her, lips pulling into an unwitting smile. She had her moments.
Gerry quickly paid, ignoring the curious looks from the teenage cashier, and the pair trudged down the street to the hotel. The soles of Gerry’s feet burned, his eyes heavy from the day’s work of tracking down dancers of the Unknowing.
The receptionist in the lobby of the hotel assumed he was Gertrude’s son. It was a common assumption, one Gertrude seemed content never to correct, always smirking at him as though it was some grand inside joke.
Maybe it was. He smirked back, shaking his head. They looked nothing alike.
In their hotel room, they took turns taking showers and heating up their microwave dinners. The old box tv illuminated most of the room when Gerry left the bathroom in an old t-shirt and dye-slick hair wrapped in the smiley-face plastic bag.
Gertrude sat at the little desk in her plaid pajamas watching the nightly news as she ate her food. He sat down across from her with his steaming lo mein, ripping the plastic off his utensils he stole from the hotel lobby.
They ate in silence for a few moments, the scene far too domestic for either of them to be entirely comfortable with. The news anchor buzzed in the background, reporting on some warehouse fire they started a few hours prior and the general grim state of the world.
“Your soulmate works in the Institute,” Gertrude said, breaking the silence. As he predicted, she wasn’t ready to drop this topic.
Gerry glared at her but he imagined he didn’t look very intimidating in his ripped MCR shirt, a plastic bag on his head, and no makeup on.
“You could easily find them if you tried,” she continued.
With a huff, he stabbed at his noodles, bracelets jangling far too loudly. “I’m aware.”
The Eye had been very adamant to inform him of that, but he always withheld from Looking or wandering around until he ran into them.
Sooner or later, the universe would put them in each other’s way. It was fated, after all. “They don’t need to be involved in all this any more than they already are,” he said, though the words caused his heart to ache.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to meet them—of course he did. There were times when those words, the person on the other side of that connection in his chest, were the only things keeping him sane. No matter what horrors he saw, no matter what his mother said, he could always look at his wrist and know that there was someone out there for him. There was someone out there that would understand.
He couldn’t corrupt them with all this, with the Fears. It was his duty to protect them for as long as possible, until the universe decided to finally throw them together.
Beneath those bracelets, the handwriting that was endearingly messy was his reminder to fight. The skin there was warm, tingling.
If Gerry really focused, he could’ve swore it felt like fingers running over the words there.
“You think you can protect them from the Fears?” Gertrude asked. It wasn’t cruel—it was a valid question. “If they already work at the Institute, chances are they’re already somewhat aware of the supernatural.”
Gerry sighed, glancing up at Gertrude. Her wrists were usually covered by the long sleeves of her cardigans and sweaters, but they were currently bare. He felt no shame looking at them, after all, she seemed completely fine to try and catch glances of his soulmark. Her words, however, were white.
So, you’re my anchor then, on her left.
It’s my destiny, on her right.
“Could you protect them?” he asked in lieu of answering, pointing at her wrist resting on the table.
Gertrude looked down at her words, face perfectly impassive save for the slight crease between her stern eyebrows. She was silent and for a moment Gerry began to think he might’ve gone too far, but then she answered. “Agnes was beyond me. She didn’t want my help.”
There was the faintest hint of melancholy in her tone, but when she met Gerry’s eyes her brown eyes were hard as stone. “Your soulmate might not want your protection.”
“Well they have it,” he snapped and the conversation was over.
Gerry would keep them from his world, this world of terror and pain, for as long as he could. He owed it to them.
2016
It had been months since Jane Prentiss’s attack on the Archives. It’d been exactly six months since Tim’s soulmarks went white despite Sasha standing in the room talking to a police officer (That’s not her, Tim kept saying. That’s not her, she’s dead, I can feel it. That’s not her.) and Gertrude's body was found in the tunnels.
The stares of his assistants were sharper now. There was something behind their eyes, something Jon couldn’t trust. The posters and paintings on the walls of the Institute stared at him. No matter where he went, he couldn’t shake a feeling of dread, of being observed like a bug trapped in a microscope.
Jon sat alone in his dusty, cold, flat, lost in his own head. Elias had banned him from entering the tunnels below the Archives, but he was going to anyway. He wanted—no, he needed to see. He needed to know what had happened to Gertrude before it happened to him.
His fingernails were chewed to the quick, the skin around them torn and crusted over with dried blood. A brief burst of pain shot through his finger as he picked at the loose skin.
He shivers from the chill in the air, and flinches when a car honks its horn on the street below.
You’re being dramatic, a voice whispers in the back of his mind as he pulls his blinds tightly shut and it sounds like his grandmother.
The coffee table is a mess. On its chipped oak surface, Jon has created a web of all the files he could pull and statements and notes. He’s pulled work history, resumes, old photos, all to create a map of the lives of his coworkers.
His laptop is open, straining under the weight of the many tabs and windows. Gertrude’s laptop is off to the side, newly unlocked and waiting.
There’s no one he could trust, no one to confide in.
Tim was avoiding him and Jon couldn’t blame him. Sasha, or whoever that was, was rarely in the office. Martin was mostly the same but was even more timid around the others, trying desperately to keep the peace between Tim and Jon while taking on most of the research work.
There was no one he could trust. Jon anxiously rubbed at his soulmark, staring down at the mystery he just couldn’t crack. Never before had he been so acutely alone.
With his throat suddenly tight, he grabbed a random notebook and pen off the table. He flipped to a blank page.
‘To you, he wrote. A part of me keeps thinking I need to tell you what happened. That makes no sense because I never met you, but I feel like I have. In some distant dream, maybe, or maybe it’s because our souls were made to be a pair.
The Archives were attacked. My predecessor was murdered and all my friends are suspects. I’m alone and can’t shake the feeling something is out to get me. I wish you were here. I know I could trust you.
Without you I feel unwhole. The ache in my bones has still not gone away and I don’t think I want it to. The absence you have left is better than nothing at all.
Many times, in times like this, I think of you—a faceless, featureless figure of my imagination that is warm and golden and so right and my other half and arms wrapped around me.
I imagine what you would say. Your voice sounds like mine in my own head but its tone carries a softness I don’t think I possess, it’s exasperated and fond and it asks me if I’m okay. I don’t know what my answer would be but I know I’d ask you the same question.’
Tears blurred his vision. He could barely see the lines as they dripped onto the paper.
‘I miss you.’
2014
Gerry was dying.
It was shocking how quickly a person could go from being fine to dead. Stage 4, tumor in the brain, “we can make you comfortable.” They’d taken his clothes and he had to remove his piercings and jewelry, lest they interfere with the scans and machines and wires that now stuck out of him.
Part of him was distantly satisfied that in the end, it hadn’t been because of some gruesome terror ripping him to shreds. So much of his life—all of it really—had been defined by the supernatural, the Fears, Leitner, his mother. His death, at least, could be mundane. It could be normal.
He still didn’t want to die, though.
Many nights he wandered the halls of the American hospital, dragging his IV pole along with him. The wheels rattled like falling bones on the linoleum floors as his fellow patients coughed and died and bled in their sterile rooms. A TV was almost always playing in the corner where two walls met down at the nurse’s desk.
Sometimes the nurse sitting there would let him stand and watch the old Seinfeld reruns with them, even offering a seat once or twice, but sometimes they would herd him back to his room. It’s hard to say no to a dying twenty-eight year old, he’s discovered.
There was a television in his room, but it wasn’t the TV he really wanted.
Despite being in Pittsburgh, the nurse that most commonly checks on him has a thick Southern accent. She was older, around Gertrude’s age, and he can’t always understand what she’s saying but she sometimes brings him snacks from the vending machine in the nurse’s breakroom.
Her name was Eileen and she called him ‘honey’ without making it sound condescending. She was Marked by the End—nothing worrisome, just the impression of death burrowed into her from so many years of working in a hospital. He saw it in her eyes, how she looked at him.
They pushed drugs to help with the seizures and the headaches, which was nice, but with each passing day he could feel a bit more of himself slip. It got harder to walk the halls, he was so dizzy and his limbs were so uncoordinated.
Above all, even with the drugs, he’d say his biggest symptom was a sense of impending doom. He’d heard that was a symptom of a heart attack once. He gets it now.
He knows he’s going to die in this hospital in America. He doesn’t cry, but he comes close.
Gertrude comes by often. There might be sadness in her eyes but Gerry knows better. She’s losing an asset, not a friend.
At least that’s what he tells himself.
She signs in at the front desk as his mother and brings him food that isn’t from the hospital cafeteria. It doesn’t mean anything to her, he tells himself.
She pats his arm and he’s not sure.
As he lays in his bed, he finds himself thinking of his soulmate a lot. He stares at the words for hours, feeling the phantom brush of fingers over his skin.
No, I didn’t? I mean, that’s not what this is.
Gerry wonders what kind of interaction would cause such a reply. He wonders if they’ll ever make it out of the Institute, find freedom, or if they’ll be consumed by one power or another.
He tried to protect them but he tried too hard; now they’ll never meet.
The universe was not a caring one. If there was indeed a benevolent force out there, it would’ve let them meet at least once.
Eileen was in to change his IV bag and check his vitals when she tapped her cold finger on his bare wrist. She always smelled like hand sanitizer and jasmine perfume and her fingernails were painted baby pink.
“Didya ever meet them, honey? I ain’t ever see anyone your age visiting you,” she asked.
Gerry couldn’t find it in himself to be offended by the prying question. “No. I didn’t,” he replied and for the first time during his stay, he feels his throat tightening with tears.
Eileen’s face goes blurry.
No, he didn’t meet them. He never will. There’d be no fated, blush filled meeting or a person waiting for him to get home and be happy to see him. There’d be no hand in his, there’d be no dinners, no hearing the words he’s been longing to hear his entire life, no happy endings.
“Oh, oh, honey I didn’t mean to make you cry,” she soothed, her weathered hand squeezing his bicep gently. She sat down on the edge of his bed, taking a small pack of tissues out of her breast pocket.
She didn’t tell him it would be okay, which he appreciated. He accepted the offered tissue and wiped his eyes, half sobbing and half laughing.
“Did you meet your soulmate?” he asked, sniffling. She wore an elastic bracelet around her left wrist covered in doves and Christian crosses.
There was a small smile on her lips. She took off the bracelet to reveal a completely blank wrist. “My patients are my soulmates,” she said and took his snotty tissue from him.
Gerry had nothing to say.
“You might never have met em, but they love you,” Eileen told him.
That, he was somehow sure of.
He didn’t walk the halls anymore. His legs didn’t like to hold him.
The last days of his life passed staring at the white ceiling and listening to conversations just outside his door. Gertrude was coming less and less—she was busy, he knew that she needed to go home to London soon and he wasn’t getting any better.
She’d have to leave without him.
He’d have to leave his soulmate.
Gerry dies on a Sunday, at around eleven PM eastern time.
He’s half aware that he’s seizing, that there’s nurses and doctors surrounding him and Gertrude is in the corner of the room watching, but his mind is mostly an unthinking rush of terror and panic.
I miss you, is the last coherent thing he thought before everything went black.
Whether he’s talking to himself, Gertrude, his mother, the life he’ll never live, or the person to which the handwriting on his wrist belonged, he didn’t know.
2017
“...and so Gerard Keay ended.”
From the wisps of smoke rising out of the stub of his extinguished cigarette, the shape of a person began to form in the chair across from Jon.
Some part of Jon expected him to be transparent or floating, but no. He looked almost perfectly tangible, perfectly alive, except for the blur around his edges and the way his split ends floated on an unfelt breeze.
It was undoubtedly the man he’d heard of so many times in statements, the tattooed eyes adorning each of his joints rolled their pinprick pupils to study Jon. His hair was messily dyed pitch black, just as each statement giver made a point to note.
However, he was wearing no makeup, no jewelry or heavy leather trench coat with hand-sewn patches.
Gerard Keay’s wispy form sat before him in nothing but a blue hospital gown. Something about that made Jon’s chest ache—it looked wrong.
In all of the statements, Gerard had seemed almost this mythical figure, the man who hunted down and destroyed the books that plagued both of their childhoods.
Jon saw him now as he had been, just a man who died too soon.
Gerard's dark brown eyes opened with a soft inhale and settled on him. His eyelashes were long and dark blonde. The cicadas had never been louder than at that moment.
A brief look of surprise passed across Gerard’s face, then settled on cold and bitter indifference.
“You’re new,” he deadpanned. “Did you kill them?”
“N-no? I didn’t,” Jon stammered, his brows furrowed in confusion and slight surprise. “I mean, that’s not what this is.”
Gerard froze and only then does Jon process what had been said. He’d been so caught up in getting answers, in defending himself, he hadn’t even realized.
You’re new. Did you kill them?
Jon gasps softly. The cicadas were silent.
Jon’s heart was pounding behind his sternum so hard he thought it might be trying to dig its way out, to reach across the table.
Gerard was his…he said his…
Jon felt his eyes go wide, as he looked down at his burning wrist. The words are still scarred and white, but they seem to glow in the flickering lamp light.
When he looked across the table, he saw Gerard staring at his wrist, staring at the red words that just left Jon’s lips in a panicked stammer.
“You,” he breathed and his voice broke.
Gerard looks up at him and oh. The ache that’d long since settled in his bones roared to the surface, as a tidal wave crashes onto a shore, and Jon nearly drowned.
Now he saw it—those were the eyes that looked at him under a kinder sun in only his dreams, back when he still dreamt. And then Gerard started laughing. It was a broken, bitter cackle that tugged at the very atoms of Jon’s soul.
It sounded much more like sobbing after a moment. Jon could only listen and watch, frozen.
It was a bit funny in a messed up way. They were fated to meet, but neither of them had thought that extended to postmortem.
“You,” Gerard echoed when his laughter stopped.
Jon ached.
“What’s your name?” Gerard asked, his ghostly hand drifting closer across the table. His fingers stopped, curled into a loose fist, as if just remembering he was dead.
“Jon,” he replied, forcing his voice to be steady. “Jonathan Sims.”
Gerard’s lips pulled into a smile—he bared all his teeth in his smile, Jon knew that now, flashing his bright white canines. “Jon,” he echoed, trying out the shape of it in his mouth.
Jon wanted to hear him say it again. “I thought I’d never hear you say those words,” he whispered.
“Me either,” Gerard replied softly. It carried that gentleness Jon thought he would never receive. His heart felt cracked open, crushed, and filled with light. “God, I—you have no idea how bad I wanted to hear it.”
Jon laughed humorlessly. “Believe me, I do.”
Gerard looked at him sadly, fingers drumming soundlessly on the table. He opened his mouth, but it clicked shut before he could say what he was thinking.
There was so much he wanted to ask him, so much he wanted to say. All the worlds welled up in his throat and lodged there, choking him. I’ve missed you, I can’t believe I found you, I want you to stay.
His eyes drifted to the book to which Gerard was bound. Anger swelled in him all at once, thinking of Gertrude and Julia and Trevor, and he grabbed the book.
Jon carefully, but with quick and panicked hands, tore Gerard’s page out. The page was thick, crinked, stained with blood, and Jon nearly gagged when he remembered it was skin—Gerard’s skin.
He had no idea what possessed him to do it, but all at once he knew he wasn’t leaving Gerard here with the Hunters. He couldn’t let them use him, he couldn’t let them have him.
Gerard made a surprised sound but didn’t protest.
Jon stared at the page in his hands when it was done, breathing shakily.
He heard movement outside on the porch and flinched. “We don’t—we don’t have much time. The Hunters…they’ll kill me for this.”
“They gave me to you for information?” Gerard guessed.
“Yes, but…” But that’s not my top priority? I don’t care anymore? Jon didn’t know what to say. Yes, he needed information but he didn’t want to waste what time they had.
The Unknowing wouldn’t stop for a found soulmate.
“Promise you’ll burn my page and I’ll talk,” Gerard said, pointing at his piece of flayed skin in Jon’s shaking hands. “It hurts, being like this.”
At once Jon knew what that meant—Gerard would be gone, utterly and completely. A selfish desire rose in him. A desire to keep the page, keep the last scraps of his soulmate with him.
That wasn’t right. Jon swallowed thickly, carefully folding the page and tucking it into his pocket. “I promise.”
With little prompting, Gerard began weaving his tale of what he knew. They started with the Unknowing—Gerard didn’t know much, but what he did know would help. It was better than nothing.
He took Gertrude’s death with grace, if not bitterly. Some small part of Jon could understand why she’d bind him to the book, but not why she left him.
The statement of his mother was angry and bloodstained, Jon and the Eye drank it in. He hung off every word, desperately trying to memorize the sound of Gerard’s voice, his cadence and tone, his story.
They went through the list of Fears and everything slowly began to click into place, all the things Jon had been theorizing about and losing sleep over now had names and solid connections.
By the end of it all, Jon’s head was swimming with information.
Gerard stared at him from across the table, his long and choppy black hair spilling over his shoulder in rippling waves. His eyes, such a dark brown they were almost black, were aged beyond the twenty-eight years he lived.
“Are you alright?” Jon asked, voice quiet.
Gerard shrugged, his hospital gown rustling. “Are you?”
Jon answered with a mirroring shrug.
They watched each other across the table, both trying to commit the other to memory—the sound of Jon’s breathing, the gap between Gerard’s two front teeth, all the things that in any other life they would have years to learn.
All the things that, in any other life, weren’t taken away.
“Jon,” Gerard said after a far too brief moment and Jon crumbled because he knew what he was about to say. “I think…I think I’m ready to go now.”
Jon rapidly shook his head, throat closing painfully tight as his eyes began stinging. “Maybe…maybe there’s some way we can bring you back? I have the page, we could find someone, an avatar of the End, maybe? I can figure something out, I can get you back.”
He was rambling, he knew he was. It was a useless string of words and half-baked plans that, as he said them, knew wouldn’t work.
Gerard shook his head sadly, softly. His hand reached across the table and his fingers passed through Jon’s hand as they met.
The skin grew cold but Jon couldn’t feel his touch. Gerard’s fingers curled around Jon’s in a rough imitation of holding hands. Jon inhaled sharply, tears slipping down his face.
“Jon,” Gerard said again. “You can’t bring me back. The morgue burned my body, that page is all that’s left.”
Tears blurred his vision and he blinked them away viciously. He knew Gerard was right—he was gone, he’d been gone, and there was no bringing him back.
They were lucky they got this, this hour of time together.
“Maybe in another life we got to be together,” Gerard said, his voice wobbly and defeated. It wasn’t as comforting as it was supposed to be.
Gerard was crying, Jon realized, watching the shimmering tears disappear into nothing when they fell off his pale face.
“I want to be with you in this one,” Jon whispered.
Gerard said nothing. The words hung tensely in the air. The apparition of his hand was freezing against Jon’s skin.
Once, Jon asked his grandmother how she dealt with her husband’s passing. They’d been soulmates and often Jon found himself staring at her scarred over words with frightened curiosity. How could she do it? Even at seven years old, he couldn’t fathom it.
How does one keep living, even for a short amount of time, when half of themself is dead?
His grandmother gave him a hard stare, her brown eyes milky with the first beginnings of cataracts. Her weathered hands wrapped around his wrist, tapping his soulmark.
I let him go. His soul was not done with me, but done with this world, and I could not make him stay here, she said.
To a seven year old, that’d made little sense.
Now, though, he thinks he finally understands. Jon could not keep Gerard here in this world that swallowed him whole, the world that only ever took from him, the world that clung to his spirit with clawed hands. It wasn’t fair to him.
Loving was knowing when to keep going, despite. Loving was missing but not dwelling. Loving was allowing yourself, and them, to be at peace.
Jon had to let him go, let him rest. He wouldn’t be his soulmate if he didn’t. He took a deep breath, steadying himself.
“Thank you, Gerard, for your help. And for this,” Jon said with a weary sigh, though his voice cracked.
“Gerry.”
“What?”
Gerard chuckled to himself, almost embarrassed. “Gerard was what my mum called me. I always wanted someone to call me Gerry.”
Jon smiled at him through the tears, through the heartache. “Thank you, Gerry,” he amended. “I’ll burn your page.”
Jon took one last look.
Gerry smiled back at him and uttered the last words he ever would to Jon, or to anyone. “Thank you, Jon.”
Then, he was gone.
The cicadas were screaming, the fireflies were dancing in the cool summer night, and Jon was alone.
…
And as the vestiges of his soul burned away, somewhere, some place under a happier sun, the words “Just rest,” wrote themselves across Gerry Keay’s wrist.