Chapter Text
Somewhere, a kettle whistles.
Jon wakes with a paper clip all but stamped into the side of his cheek, the deep imprint of office supplies, metal marking him during a fitful night’s sleep. A blanket has been draped across his shoulders, wool bunched in the crook of his elbow. He’s breathing hard, his ribcage the accordion, his lungs its punctured, wheezing bellows. His heart rattles, and Jon knows that twenty-nine should be much too young for cardiac arrest, but suddenly he’s not so sure. Something sharp twinges in his abdomen, and on instinct Jon reaches for a wound, hands patting. His wrists are shaking, fingers trembling, but he’s whole.
No, perhaps that’s not true. Where’s the rest of him? There’s something lost—stolen? He notices for the first time how dim the room is. Not a shadow to be seen, but Jon gets the feeling that his periphery has shrunk. He gets the feeling that he’s supposed to be able to see through these walls, or to know through them at least.
The walls. He recognises the walls.
It’s almost like downloading a file on his grandmother’s clunky, useless computer back in Bournemouth. Back twenty years ago.
But it’s not a file. It’s years of pain, and pain beyond that Jon hadn’t measured in days, but in footsteps. In statements.
He sees those last few moments play out, credits rolling up on the big screen. And there his hands go, feeling for where Martin cut the tether. Feeling for blood, anything.
Jon is whole—no, he is hollowed out.
Martin. Martin’s breath in his ear, I love you too , clutching the shards of Jon’s shattered promises. Where is Martin? Jon can’t remember enough, he can’t fucking see. Martin was there, holding him when the tape ran out. Martin is supposed to be here, wherever here is. Had Jon left him behind, crushed beneath the collapsing weight of the Panopticon? No, no. Jon had been holding him too.
Jon tries to know, but stumbles, blinded. Static howls in his head and Jon’s thoughts coalesce into one frantic tangle. Statements blur his mind. The angles cut me when I try to think. Jon thinks (because he no longer knows) he understands what Sergey Ushanka had meant.
Jon tries to stand, his legs stinging, pins and needles, and nearly topples over, just barely catching himself on the desk.
His desk. His office. His archive. Jon grips the wood, remembering these walls, hating these walls, hating what they had hidden.
“Martin,” he croaks.
On the desk is a typed up, printed statement. The staple sits neatly at a forty-five degree angle, Sasha’s work, no doubt.
Jon’s fingers roam over his torso once more, still not believing he’s alive, not when Martin isn’t here with him. There had been something built-in about Martin for a while, ever since Jon had promised he knew the way home, out of the fog, and perhaps long before then. Maybe that’s the part that Jon’s missing.
On the desk is a tape recorder. Jon’s hands don’t itch like they used to, but his chest—his chest burns. Jon takes the recorder, and on shaky legs, stomps it into the ground.
“Fuck. You.”
Jon likes how it looks, cracked and battered like that. He kicks it underneath his desk, out of sight. He wonders if Georgie had had the right idea after all. It wasn’t unusual, Georgie being right and Jon hating being wrong.
His hands are all wrong. No scars, no burns. Only a paper cut on the inside of his middle finger.
There’s a knock at the door and Jon stills because despite the many things that Jon is, he is no stranger to knocking.
“Wasn’t sure if you were sleeping in here,” a voice confides.
In pokes a head of sandy hair, a shoulder draped in knitwear, steam and a sliver of ceramic.
“Martin,” Jon says, the breath knocked out of him. “You’re alive.”
“Am I…not supposed to be?” Martin is watching him, puzzled, his eyebrows drifting upward.
“I’m so, so sorry. I couldn’t doom them, I—” Jon’s voice begins to break. “You weren’t supposed to be there. I shouldn’t have forced you to be strong enough for the both of us, but it was always going to end like this. You were right about me being a bastard. It was too late.”
“Jon—”
“Look, we’re safe, we’re together, like we promised. It’s over, really over,” Jon interrupts, desperate. He almost reaches out for Martin’s hand, but stops himself at the strange, flighty expression on Martin’s face.
Still balancing the tray with the tea against his hip, Martin offers him a polite, embarrassed smile.
“Can you rewind a bit? I’m a little—a little lost.”
Jon, who has not relied on observation, in the conventional sense, for so long now, stutters and comes to a stand-still as the horrific realisation dawns.
This is not the Martin who had seen Jon, who had honeymooned with Jon in the apocalypse, who had kissed him as the tape unspooled. This is the Martin Blackwood of 2016: the restless poet, the lacking employee, perpetually sleep-rumpled, all his things packed away in boxes in the back of document storage.
He’s so young, Jon can’t help but think. And then, look how he braces for my words.
Jon tries for a reassuring smile. “Never mind, it’s—erm. It’s nothing to worry about. Just something I read.”
Martin, still unsettled, nods. “Oh, uh, alright.”
A moment of awkward silence passes between them. Jon can hardly recall the last time a silence had torn at him like this, not after that night in Daisy’s safehouse, when Jon had sat next to Martin on the sofa and threaded their fingers together, scared, so scared that Martin would want to let go.
This Martin’s eyes fix to the blanket, abandoned on Jon’s chair.
Martin coughs. “Well, I probably should…”
“Yeah,” Jon says.
The mug clinks as Martin sets the tray on the desk. He backs out of the office, mumbling a quick good morning. Before Jon can remember to stop openly staring, Martin has disappeared out into the hallway.
Jon wanders over to the desk, curious about the date that his laptop screen will show, but mostly hoping that a few sips of Martin’s tea will help put him back together again, as it always has done. Jon drags his finger across the trackpad and the screen awakens at his touch. There in the upper righthand corner. 29th July.
On the desk is a statement—a statement Jon knows to belong to Andre Ramao.
Jon knows this day. This day dug holes beneath his skin, gouged him, one of many marks much deeper than the outline of a paper clip against his cheek. Not yet, it hasn’t . A glimmer of hope: not yet.
But why here? Why now? There are few days that Jon would voluntarily stumble through a second time, and 29th July is not one of them. So, who chose this?
Is it some odd ripple of spacetime? One last trick spun by the Mother of Puppets? The hallucinatory flickering of synapses sputtering out? Or, most terrifying of all, a second chance, another opportunity for Jon to doom them all again?
Jon folds himself into his office chair and sifts for a memory, anything that might patch the gap between his last words and the ones spoken after. He sits there for what feels like hours, not daring to touch the statement on the desk.
And perhaps it really has been hours because when the door to his office swings open, Jon has the sinking feeling that the minutes have just slipped through the cracks between his fingers. He’s not quite sure how to re-exist in 2016, not quite sure he even can.
“Jon? Still there?”
“Sorry, what was that?” Jon stammers, slamming back into time with a vicious thud.
Tim is leaning against the door jamb, head cocked in that obnoxious, teasing way of his. Jon’s chest aches at the sight of him.
“I’m grabbing lunch at the Korean place on the corner,” Tim repeats. “Want anything?”
Jon looks at him—the amused quirk of his mouth, the relaxed set of his shoulders, the unfurrowed space between his eyebrows. Tim had hated Jon, by the end.
Jon supposes that, by the end, he had deserved it a little more each day.
“No, no thank you,” Jon says, business-like.
Tim shrugs. “Whatever you say, boss.” Jon watches as he steps out from the doorway.
“Tim,” Jon calls.
Tim spins back around. “Changed your mind about Korean?”
Jon nearly warns him, almost says, What would you say to taking the rest of the day off? You’ve earned it. In fact, you ought to quit now, while there’s still a chance that you can.
Instead, he says, “Sasha told me you managed to find a copy of Mr. Ramao’s marriage licence?”
“It’s not there? I left it on your desk, paper-clipped to the notes on Salesa.”
Right, the paper clip.
Jon flips through the stack of documents, not quite registering their words. “Never mind, I must have missed it on my first look-through,” he corrects. “Thank you, Tim.”
“No problem.” Tim grins. “All in a day’s work for your favourite archival assistant, right?”
“Sure.”
Tim spreads his hands, a self-congratulatory gesture. “Oh, and Rosie wanted to talk to you about the CO2 canisters we ordered, something about justifying our expenditures.”
Jon feels almost nauseous enough to laugh. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Jon remembers this jaunty mood, remembers watching Tim vanish into the hallway with long strides. He watches it replay now, frozen.
Jon blinks and suddenly the time on his laptop has jumped ahead by fourteen minutes. His neck twitches, stiff, and he rubs at the sore muscles. How can he fix this? How can he turn his shadowy limbs solid? How can he cut through this inertia that leaves him nothing more than an echo, a bystander in his own memories?
His desk drawer is open, though he doesn’t recall opening it. Jon is holding the lighter, unable to remember reaching for it. Almost as if in a trance, he pushes its lid back, watching the flame dance. Any closer and he might as well singe the tip of his nose.
Can I have a cigarette? The words tumble out of some far recess of Jon’s mind, tasting of smoke, and Jon drops the lighter, letting it clatter to his desk.
Suddenly, a dark, spindly blur draws Jon’s attention. There, the spider crawls along a shelf, skirting around the protruding edges of files. It’s the same one, Jon knows. The same eight beady eyes guiding him, moulding him. Images of Martin, bound in webs, flash through Jon’s head, and Jon shoots out of his chair, crosses the room in the space of a second, and crashes his hand into the shelf, aiming blindly.
The shelf shudders pathetically and collapses, scattering documents in a dejected pile at Jon’s feet. Someone should probably pick that up, Jon thinks, detached. The spider has disappeared, unscathed if Jon is to judge by the lack of haemolymph spattered on his palms.
“Alright?”
Jon glances over his shoulder to find Sasha, one hand still on the doorknob.
“A spider,” Jon hears himself say.
“Only a spider?” Sasha gives him a pitying look. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
Try two , Jon amends.
“The, er—the shelf collapsed when I tried to kill it.”
Sasha steps forward to inspect the misshapen remnants of what still stands of the shelf, eyes wide with that mix of determination and curiosity that means not even Tim’s distractions are going to get between her and whatever secure database’s login screen she has pulled up on her computer for the next few hours.
Jon remembers Sasha, the real Sasha, in bits and pieces. Her voice on the tapes in the cabin, the vague glimpses of her face that he’d managed to know, her steady hands on a corkscrew, spearing the writhing thing buried in Jon’s leg. But the other, the thing that was not Sasha, had enmeshed itself in these memories, replacing her smiles, her strong opinions on pronunciation, her brutally honest advice, her immaculately stapled reports.
And that was the worst thing of all. Not to end, but to end and be forgotten.
“I didn’t forget,” Jon tells her.
Sasha tears her eyes away from the shelf. “Forget what?”
Jon falters under her scrutiny. “Er, Martin’s birthday.”
“I should hope not,” Sasha says, giving him an odd look. “It’s not until October.”
“Right, October.”
“Why? Are you planning something special?” Sasha’s grin is slow-spreading and knowing. “I don’t think he’s the biggest fan of surprise parties. You saw how he reacted last year.”
“I’m not—I was just thinking it might be wise to be aware. In—in terms of workplace morale,” Jon stammers.
Sasha nods thoughtfully, returning to her inspection. “Well, if it’s Martin’s morale you’re worried about, you’d probably be better off not leaving a trail of arachnid corpses behind.”
Jon pauses. What were his lines for this part again? Something, something, ecosystem?
“They’re a predatory keystone species.”
“Let me guess, another one of his lectures?” Sasha gives Jon a sympathetic smile.
It had been a nature documentary, actually, the only thing on telly that night. Martin had called it exposure therapy.
Sasha runs her hands over the cracked plasterboard, humming in approval. “You must have hit it pretty hard to dent the wall like that.”
She prods the fracture with her fingertips experimentally. “I thought this was an exterior wall.”
Jon is stuck, feet rooted to the floor. Cold regret floods through him at the thought of what came—what comes next.
“Do you hear that?” Sasha asks. “Sounds like—what is that?”
Jon can hear them too now. A mass of squirming bodies, waiting, waking as Sasha peels at the hole in the hall.
“Sasha,” Jon says carefully. Again: “Sasha.”
Squirming, silver things begin to seep from the wall and Sasha reels back, nearly tripping over a stack of files.
“Run,” Jon begs. The word breaks on his lips.
With worms pounding against the door to the document storage room, Jon makes a list. Lists are for when things get bad. When making it through without bullet points just isn’t an option. And, hey, turns out things are very bad at the moment.
Item One: Sasha is not going to die today.
Item Two: Tim is not going to learn what it feels like to be burrowed into this time.
Item Three: No one is stumbling across dead bodies under any circumstances.
“Jon?”
Jon pinches the bridge of his nose. He’s not sure if it’s the time travel or the mortal terror but Christ, his skull is pounding.
“Jon?” Martin repeats.
“Let me think,” Jon snaps because for an instant he is Jonathan Sims at twenty-nine, willing to lash out at anyone if it means he can tamp down the fear and keep pretending.
Martin’s mouth slides shut.
Jon softens. “Sorry, I’m—I just need to—” He sighs, frustrated. “I’m sorry.”
God damn, his head is throbbing. “What were you saying?”
Martin draws in a sharp, cautious breath. “Do you think we’ll be alright in here? I told Sasha the room’s sealed. Soundproof.”
“They could get in through the air con,” Sasha points out.
“No, they won’t,” Jon says, and this time it isn’t just an optimistic assumption. “We’ll be safe if we stay in here. This time, no one leaves, okay?”
Martin gives him a puzzled look, lips tucked into a thin frown. “This time?”
“I can’t see Prentiss anymore,” Sasha interrupts, face pressed against the small, square window set into the door.
Through the window, Jon can see that the worms have stopped, resting patiently in one silver, pulsing heap. Slowly the throng begins to dissipate, creeping off to the edges of the room, vanishing through the floor, crawling back into the office.
“What are they doing?” Martin asks in Jon’s ear. He’s standing so close that Jon can hear how his exhales tremble.
“Waiting,” Jon answers.
“Where’s Tim?” Sasha mutters. “Oh God, he hasn’t—”
“He went out to lunch,” Jon says, hardly noticing that he’s spoken at all.
“He—he doesn’t know,” Martin says quietly.
“Well, call him!” Sasha insists.
“There’s no reception,” Jon says distantly. “No cameras either.”
He stands motionless, listening as Sasha rambles about the fire suppression system, watching as Martin’s fingers travel to his pocket, checking for the corkscrew. From somewhere outside of himself, Jon witnesses his second chance slipping away, watching as he makes the same mistakes all over again.
He watches as Tim walks into view, and slumps in his desk chair, feet propped up against the edge of Sasha’s desk, oblivious to Martin and Sasha’s shouts of warning.
“Tim!” Sasha screams. “Get out!”
“Tim!” Martin yells, banging against the door.
“Soundproofed,” Jon reminds them.
“She’s there! She’s—” Martin gasps.
“There’s nothing I can do,” Jon mumbles, more to himself than to the others.
“Turn around!” Sasha reaches for the door handle, almost in slow-motion. Jon grabs at her wrist, but she’s already out the door, crushing worms underfoot, hollering Tim’s name.
Jon is solid once more, his limbs his own. “Sasha, wait!” He rushes after her but Martin has already shut the door, barricading his way.
Martin looks at him, pleading. “It’s really bad out there.”
“I know,” Jon breathes.
Jon thinks he just might need another list. Turns out, things are worse than very bad.
“Sasha’s made it out,” Martin observes, his voice heavy relief.
Something foul and rotted is leaking out of Prentiss’ mouth and all over the files scattered across Martin’s desk. His snow globe collection is, regretfully, not being spared either.
Jon, already feeling helpless enough, can’t quite bring himself to look out the window. Sasha could be headed for Artefact storage any minute now, but until Tim bursts through the wall and guides them down into the tunnels, there’s no hope of reaching her in one piece.
“And Tim?” he asks despite knowing the answer.
“I think I saw him run into your office, where all the—” Martin swallows. “You know.”
“He’ll have the spare CO2 that you hid in there,” Jon says in what he hopes is a comforting tone.
Martin’s jaw drops, staring. “You knew about that?”
Jon shrugs, scrambling for an explanation. “It’s slightly difficult not to notice when you go to grab a file from one of the boxes and end up with a fire extinguisher in your hand.”
“Oh, erm, sorry about that.” Martin drops his gaze, embarrassed. “I just—well, I thought the worms wouldn’t think to look there.”
They’re sitting, backs up against the door. Jon wants to reach out and clasp Martin’s hand, run his fingers over the freckle on Martin’s knuckles like he did so long ago on the sofa in Daisy’s safehouse. But that moment of trust, that leap, is years to come.
“It’s stupid, isn’t it?” Martin is saying, waiting for Jon to say yes, yes it is, like he always does, always used to.
“No, not really,” Jon disagrees. “You’ve saved his life.”
Martin looks at him with that quiet surprise he’d worn after Jon had tacked on an “I love you” to the end of a sentence for the first time, casual as anything.
They’re alone, Jon realises. No one listening in, no audience. No whir of the tape recorder. He hadn’t risked himself to retrieve it from his office this time, hadn’t earned a scar on his leg for his trouble either. Perhaps, this time he’s less focused on the not dying a mystery part, and more focused on the not dying.
Jon reviews his list, and adds a fourth item for consideration.
“Martin, I owe you an apology. Several, actually.”
“Not to be ungrateful, but I’m not sure this is the right time for—”
“Please,” Jon cuts in. He needs to make something right.
“Okay,” Martin nods, his voice small.
“You are not incompetent,” Jon says, although admittedly, it’s not the best opener he could have gone with.
“Uh…thanks?”
Jon shifts so he’s facing Martin. “What I mean is, I’ve been much too quick to criticise you. I’ve been hostile and unprofessional and immature.” Jon coughs. He can’t read the expression on Martin’s face. “To tell you the truth, Martin, I’ve projected my own inadequacies onto you. I’ve endangered all of you because I thought that if I could just ignore it long enough, the fear would go away.”
Martin’s eyes slowly narrow, as he processes Jon’s words.
“So, the whole sceptic was, what, an act? This whole time, while you were rolling your eyes at me for worrying about ghost stories, you knew it was real?” Martin’s words are hollow with disbelief and sharp with betrayal.
“Well, I wouldn’t call them ghost stories. ”
“But you did,” Martin accuses. “You have.”
“No, no you’re right,” Jon says softly. “I’m sorry.”
The wet writhing on the other side of the door fills the silence.
“You’re not inadequate,” Martin finally says, firm. “And this is not your fault.”
Before Jon can reply, the wail of the fire alarm starts up, a low whine at first, and then building as it rises in pitch.
“Sasha,” Jon whispers. She must be on her way to Elias’ office by now.
Come on, Tim, he urges. We’re running out of time.
“You think she’s—well, she wouldn’t just leave us, right?” Martin asks, voice teetering dangerously.
Jon shakes his head. “No, not Sasha.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Martin intones under his breath, trying to convince himself of this.
Right then, there’s a bang that vibrates through the room, setting the hairs on Jon’s arms on end.
Martin leaps to his feet. “What. Was that.” He shoots Jon a wide-eyed, cornered look that says, so much for “we’ll be safe if we stay in here.”
Bang. The wall heaves.
Martin spares a panicked glance out the window. “Jon—”
“It’s not Prentiss,” Jon assures him.
“Then what is it?” Martin hisses.
Bang. Bang. Bang. And the plasterboard splinters.
Martin brandishes his corkscrew, prepared to fight the whole damn world with that twisted piece of metal. God, Jon loves him.
The wall explodes outwards, the burst of noise not exactly doing any favours for Jon’s headache.
When the dust clears, Tim is standing there, triumphant, a canister of CO2 tucked under each arm. “Hi guys!”
“Tim?” Martin gapes. “But you were in the office, how did—”
Jon steps forward urgently. “Listen, Tim, we need to get to Artefact Storage. Sasha needs us there.”
Tim’s eyes are unfocused, his expression blank and dizzy from all the gas. “Sasha? But she got out. I helped her get out.”
“Right, but she came back.”
“Wait. Sasha hates Artefact Storage,” Martin says.
Jon drags a hand through his hair, jittery. “Just…trust me on this one.”
Martin nods warily.
“We’ll take the tunnels,” Jon suggests. “There’s less worms anyway.”
“Tunnels?” Martin glances between Jon and Tim.
“I’m—erm, I’m assuming. It’s the only way that explains how Tim got here unscathed,” Jon adds hastily.
Martin looks as if about a dozen questions are budding on his tongue, but settles for fixing Jon with a perplexed stare, lips just parted slightly.
“It’s a maze in there,” Tim warns, still out of breath.
Jon is a man too full of memories; he might as well put that to use. “I know the way,” he says.
The air is thin, stale down in the tunnels, and the prickle behind Jon’s eyes has faded into a wispy sort of agony. The three of them walk side by side although the tunnel is barely wide enough to allow it. When Jon’s arm swings, his elbow brushes the cool skin of Martin’s forearm.
“Erm, Jon?” Martin whispers, the words still bouncing off of the stone walls. “Are you sure this is the right direction?”
“Yes.”
Tim, marching along on Jon’s left, fire extinguisher at the ready, remarks, “I think I recognise this corridor.”
Jon scoffs. “There’s nothing to recognise. It all looks the same down here.”
Martin and Tim share an uncertain look.
“I mean—only, the ground’s been sloping downward for a while,” Martin tries again. “And Artefact Storage is upstairs.”
“There’s an exit that lets out just down the hall from Artefact Storage. I’m sure of it.”
“Yeah, well that’s the part I don’t understand,” Tim jumps in. “No one even knew these tunnels existed. ”
A laugh escapes out from between Jon’s teeth, low and delirious. “Trust me, there are many parts you don’t understand.”
Tim halts. “What is that supposed to mean?”
Jon is sunken and transparent all at once. Jon is not supposed to be here. Jon does not deserve a re-do after everything. He can’t. He can’t fix this, can’t find the middle ground between making ripples and drowning beneath the tidal wave. Maybe there’s no point even trying.
Jon, at twenty-nine, is already the Archivist, has already tethered his voice to the tapes, has already been marked, destined, chosen.
This is not a rewrite; this is a cruel, cruel joke, and Jon is the battered, bloody punchline.
That’s when he hears the scream. It’s not Prentiss’ scream, not the one echoed by thousands of small, silver mouths. No, this scream is shrill and human and terrified.
Jon is running before he even notices his feet slapping, beating out a rhythm against the rough-hewn floor.
Sasha is not going to die today.
Sasha is not going to die today.
Sasha is not going to die today.
“We’re close,” Jon promises, not really sure to whom. “We’re—”
The tunnel comes to an abrupt stop, and Martin’s fingers close around Jon’s wrist, yanking him backward. Jon tugs impatiently, but Martin has gone pale beside him.
“Sasha, we need to…” Jon trails off.
They’re in a square room, coated in such a thick layer of dust that Jon can hardly inhale. A wooden chair is positioned at its center, facing the opposite wall. There is someone sitting in the chair, dull, gray hair pulled into a severe bun.
“Shit,” Tim mutters. “Is that—”
“Yes,” Jon confirms. “I believe so.”
So much for Item Three.
Martin is so silent that Jon wonders if he’s still breathing.
“I, uh, don’t think this is the way to Artefact Storage,” Tim says.
Jon floats back down the tunnel the way they came, the stone, and then wood, and then cement all one interminable haze. Time shoves him off balance, trips him, catches him by the shoulder and pulls, but Jon holds Martin’s hand as they run, Tim close behind.
Jon doesn’t exactly know when they paused, but when next he blinks, Martin is watching him with concern etched on his brow.
“What?” Jon asks.
“No, you, er—you seemed sort of gone for a while back there,” Martin says, suddenly very interested in his shoes.
“I think,” Jon frowns. “I think I was.”
“I’m guessing this is a trapdoor,” Tim calls.
Jon squints into the dim light of the tunnel, turning to see Tim running his hands over grooves set into a low wall.
“Wait,” Jon murmurs. “Tim.”
But Tim is already prying the door open, light flooding in through the growing crack.
Jon hears the wails of the fire alarm first, hears the slithering, and smells damp earth, rotted soil, and filth.
Jon wonders if there’s enough time for him to make another list.
“Archivist,” comes Prentiss’ hoarse, delighted rasp.
Probably not, Jon decides.
The worms surge forward, one wriggling, swarming mass.
Jon watches them rise up to greet him, and remembers that glimmer of hope, just a small, naive, nascent thing. He sees it for what it is now—not hope, but delusion, because swapping out a couple sentences doesn’t change the story, not when the characters don’t have much of a say in their fates to begin with.
Jon will wake up this afternoon in quarantine, bandaged head to toe. Jon will live it all again, and then Jon supposes, that will be it. One last ride on the carousel.
He hears the hiss of the fire suppression system, and the first worm breaks through his skin.
That’s funny, Jon thinks as his vision swims, murky. I remember it hurting more the first time around.
Somewhere, a kettle whistles.
And Jon wakes up to his second second chance, a paper clip digging into his cheek.