Chapter Text
“Ceaseless Watcher, you know why I am here.” Jon paused to look at the figure above him, Jonah Magnus’s expression frozen and blank even as an endless stream of words passed through his lips. “Release him.”
There was a swelling of static as the Eye let go of Jonah. He descended gradually at first, until with one last burst he completely fell from the air and collapsed on the floor in the very center of the tower that had once been the panopticon.
Jon knew that Jonah was not the Pupil that the Eye wanted. However, it was still more of a reaction than he had expected that when the man stirred, his first action was to roll over and start coughing blood onto the floor.
After a few moments, Jonah seemed to gain control of himself, and slowly pushed off of the floor. When he was floating in the center of the panopticon not a minute before, he had looked otherworldly, godlike. Now, as he shakily pushed himself into a sitting position and wiped blood away from his mouth, he looked anything but.
“J-Jon?” Jonah coughed again. “Is that you?”
Jon didn’t dignify that with a response. “Jonah Magnus,” he said instead, his voice icy.
Jonah visibly shook himself, and unsteadily rose to his feet. He glanced around the room, to Jon and to all of Jon’s remaining friends, gathered near the doorway to watch the scene. “You’re… here to kill me, then. Replace me.” He sounded tired and resigned. Good, a vicious part of Jon thought, and was sure his companions felt the exact same way.
Instead of voicing that thought just yet, Jon just crossed his arms. “So you knew. That the Eye didn’t want you to be its Pupil.”
Jonah smiled faintly before another cough rattled through his body. He straightened up and wiped the blood from his mouth once again, once the fit had subsided. “Y-yes, I suppose I did.”
“And how did that work out for you?” Jon made the words as scathing as he possibly could. “Your plans of immortality? You saw, didn’t you? The End. Immortality is not possible, and you’ve therefore doomed yourself, the world, and the Fears for no reason.”
“...Yes.” Jonah sounded less weak now, like he was recovering, but the confidence he had carried from before the apocalypse was gone. His voice was hollow. “I suppose I always knew that, deep down. But I had hoped…”
“And again, how did that work out for you?”
Jonah laughed hollowly. “You already know, don’t you? I’ve seen more than I could have lived in a thousand lifetimes, in a body that wasn’t made for it. It was… it was horrible.”
Truthfully, Jon didn’t need to keep needling Jonah about his failures. Anyone could see just from looking at the man that being the Pupil had been far worse of an experience than Jonah ever could have imagined.
But… Jonah had caused this. Jonah had doomed the whole world because of his own hubris and selfish fears. Jon couldn’t find it in himself to feel even a little bit bad for forcing the man to admit it, and from the grim expressions on his friend’s faces as they watched, they echoed his thoughts exactly.
“So, you are going to kill me, correct?” Jonah said dully. He glanced over. “I assume Martin will be the one to do it.”
“No.”
“Hm. Melanie?”
“No. Nobody will be killing you.”
Jonah’s eyebrows slowly rose up his face. “What, you think the Eye will let both of us go free? I can’t think of a reason why you would want to do that in the first place. I’m sure you were happy enough just knowing how much agony I was in, up there.”
“Oh, we were,” Martin piped up, moving forward to stand next to Jon. Now that the initial confrontation was over, the others followed suit, until they were in a semi-circle facing the still somewhat shaky Jonah. “But we have a plan.”
Jonah gave another hollow laugh. “Do you really think you can stop this? It’s too late.”
“Not necessarily,” Basira said.
“It’s not just us,” Georgie added. “We got help from some other avatars.”
“Help for what ?”
“It’s like we said,” Jon stated. “This world is finite. Eventually, every animal on this planet will die, and all of the Fears will be left starving for the rest of eternity. And maybe the Eye, maybe none of them realized that before this all started, when they were still far away and never truly conscious. But now they’re here, and they know that they’ve doomed themselves to an inevitable end. And so we think that they will want out of this just as much as we do.”
“We want to make a deal,” Melanie added.
“A deal with… the Eye?”
“Exactly,” Jon confirmed. “If I become the Pupil, I should be able to control it, communicate with it, and find a way to stop this.”
Nobody spoke for a long moment.
“It’s not a perfect plan,” Martin blurted out into the silence (“It’s not really a plan at all, ” Melanie scoffed quietly), “but it’s all we’ve got, alright? Jon could figure out some way to… reverse this, time travel, something, and we need to try, because the alternatives are not very good.”
“Right.” Jonah stared at them for a second. “So, what now?”
“You should leave the tower,” Jon said. “Then I will become the Pupil. And then…”
“Then we’ll put an end to this,” Martin said.
“Right.”
“Right,” Jonah echoed.
They all started to file out of the room, leaving Jon in the center. Martin stayed back, slightly biting his lip and clasping Jon’s hands in his own. “You’re sure you’ll be alright?”
“I’m sure,” Jon said with more than a little bit of false confidence. “The Eye wants me to survive this, I’m sure of that. I’ll be fine.”
“Alright.” Martin looked at Jon for another long moment, then nodded to himself and let go. “I’ll see you soon, then.”
“I’ll see you soon,” Jon echoed, and prayed that he was telling the truth.
And against all odds, it worked. As soon as they all left the tower (with Rosie in tow) and Jon was alone, the Eye had taken over. When it did, for a few, terrifying moments, Jon had really thought that he would be just as powerless to the onslaught of visions as Jonah had been.
But then he got control over it. Well, after a statement, but that was hardly surprising, and in any case the statement had felt… final.
And then he felt great. He descended the staircase of the tower with a crystal-clear clarity of anything he so much as had even the smallest passing thought about. He could See Martin, Jonah, Melanie, Georgie, Basira, and Rosie waiting for him at the base of the tower, their faces full of nervous anticipation. And then there was of course Annabelle and Helen, who hadn’t entered the tower itself but had been an integral part of the plan. (None of them had trusted the two avatars at first, for obvious reasons, but it had eventually become extremely clear that they wanted to stop the apocalypse just as much as the rest of them. Being an avatar of fear did not make one immune to the dread of an inevitable end.)
When Jon opened the door to the tower, they all turned towards him and immediately fell silent, holding their breaths almost as one.
“It worked,” Jon announced into the silence.
Evidently, everyone had spent the entire time Jon was gone just getting more and more nervous, because it now took them an entire minute to collect themselves again. Martin, for one, had clearly been able to tell that Jon had been bluffing a little bit, because the hug he pulled him into had more than a little bit of stark relief that proved how worried he had really been. Georgie hugged him too, and then finally everyone had calmed down enough that they gathered back into a loose circle to talk.
“We were just discussing if we should go back and check on you,” Georgie said to Jon, her voice full of relief. “You took a while, and we were worried, that. Well. The worst had happened.”
“No,” Jon assured her. “It wasn’t that bad, actually. It’s just that,” he exhaled a short laugh, “I had to make a statement.”
“Of course you did,” Martin groaned, but with much more humour than the many times Jon had said the same while they were out travelling through the various hellscapes.
“So,” Melanie said, unsurprisingly the one to get them back on track. “You said it worked. Do you mean you have an actual plan, or just that ‘it worked’ that you became the Pupil without turning out like Elias over there?”
“No, I have a plan,” Jon confirmed. “My connection with the Eye is very strong now, and it’s not… I’m not sure if I would call it sapient, but it’s definitely sentient, enough to agree that the apocalypse is bad for it and needs to be reversed. And so it showed me a way out. …Well. Kind of.”
“Kind of?”
“It’s…” Jon winced slightly. “Martin, I think you gave this option as a joke, but the answer is time travel.”
Everyone was silent for a second.
“Well, I for one think that makes perfect sense,” Helen said cheerily. “I’ve never found time to be really real anyway.”
“By you you mean the Distortion, right? I’m pretty sure Helen Richardson thought time was real,” Martin said.
Helen just shrugged.
“I want to know how this time travel is going to work,” Basira said, forcing them back on track again. With almost ten people involved, it was apparently going to be difficult to keep everyone focused.
“Right.” Jon steeled himself. “We’ll have to travel to a specific domain, some combination of the Web and the Spiral, which I’ll need both Annabelle and Helen’s help getting through.”
“You,” Melanie noted immediately. “You’ll need their help.”
“Yeah. Just me.” He grimaced. “I’ll have to go alone. I’m the only one who can withstand the journey.”
They all fell into silence once again.
“But I should be able to go back to just before the apocalypse started,” Jon said. “I know you’ll all be missing… however long it’s been. I’d bring you along if I could. But I promise I’ll tell you, all of you, what happened.”
“This is probably for the best, actually,” Melanie said with a short bitter laugh. “This hasn’t been fun. I, for one, would rather live my life without memories of all the awful things that we’ve experienced.”
“Yeah,” Martin echoed. “Yeah. This… is good.”
“Then it’s settled,” Basira said with finality. “We go to this domain, Jon goes in, he travels back to just before the apocalypse, and he makes sure Jonah here never starts it.”
“Exactly.” Jon paused. “Well, none of us need to rest or eat, so… it’s going to be a long journey, should we get going?”
And so they did.
The journey to the domain was long, but shorter now that Jon no longer had to constantly make statements. After all, he could now See as much fear as the Eye wanted without any effort at all.
When they reached the edge of the domain, Jon said his goodbyes. They all wished him good luck; some goodbyes were more grim, but he once again swore to all of them once again that he’d tell them all what happened.
Then he stepped into the maze with Helen and Annabelle in tow.
The route was complex and twisting, but compared to the journey before it was not very long (or maybe it just felt like that; it didn’t really matter, in the end). Before they knew it, Jon was standing in front of a door set into the stone wall. At first glance, it was totally nondescript; but upon closer inspection, it seemed to be carved from a tree trunk with rings spiralling from the center, and there were cobwebs gathered in the corners of the doorframe.
Jon opened it, and on the other side was… nothing.
He stepped over the threshold.
The world fell away.
And Jon woke up.