Chapter Text
This isn’t going to work out the way Martin planned it.
It’s not the first time he’s realised it. He knew the moment he saw he and Tim saw Jurgen’s corpse, and again, when they learnt that Sasha had been dead for over a year without him ever noticing, and then again after Tim had died while Martin was busy patting himself on the back for being clever enough to outplay Elias. Each time, he managed to bury the thought shortly afterwards, convincing himself that if he kept trying, he might be able to build something worthwhile from the wreckage.
In the end, even working with Peter had accomplished less than nothing, and maybe Martin should have taken that as his cue that he just isn't cut out for this. He can't keep track of the bigger picture, and his best laid plans always came too little too late to actually make a difference.
If not that, then he definitely should have given up hope when the world ended. It's the worst things have ever been, the worst they could possibly be, all because of the choices Martin had made, thinking he knew better. But no, he kept on trying and it led him here, to the top of the panopticon—too late.
Martin has failed hundreds of times in hundreds of little ways. This time is only different in its finality. He has never been able to save anyone, and soon he's going to be denied the opportunity to even try. There won't be anyone left to save.
In a twisted way it's almost a relief.
Who was he kidding when he told himself he’d be able to fix anything? When Peter told him that he was special enough to save the world, it was an obvious lie, but it’s a lie Martin had been digging his teeth into since long before Peter ever came around, as though faith alone might be able to make it true. At long last, he can relax and let delusion slip through his fingers.
This specific set of circumstances, coincidentally, is also the most upsetting thing to have ever happened to him, managing to out-do a very long and impressive list of upsetting things.
Jon says, "If you stay, you'll die."
Martin has no idea at all what Jon had previously been expecting to happen. Of course Martin is going to die. Jon is trying to kill everyone in the entire world, and Martin is one of the people in the world.
There's billions more out there, suffering even now, and every one of them is as dear to someone as Martin and Jon are to each other. It doesn't make sense to hold Martin up as uniquely valuable.
"Then I'll die!" Martin shouts back. He wishes he could muster surprise but somewhere deep down, that's how he'd always expected it to go, though he'd always hoped that the world itself would outlive him.
"No!" Jon retorts. A piece of the crumbling sky falls and hits Martin hard on the shoulder. He cries out in pain, but doesn't budge from where he's stubbornly planted his feet against the floor, "Martin, please, I can't lose you. Not like this."
Martin won't lose Jon either, won't stick around to watch the world's carcass slowly macerate while Jon is too busy playing god and killing everyone to ever hold his hand again, "Tough! Okay? Where you go, I go."
"That's the deal." Jon holds both his hands up, palms facing Martin, less like a gesture of surrender than like an attempt to close distance with a skittish cat, "Okay."
"What?"
"Do it! The Knife's just there. Let them go."
Martin realises what Jon is implying. He realises that it would probably work.
"I'm not going to kill you." Martin says, even so, voice straining with tears at even the mere suggestion of it.
Jon, never one to hesitate once he's made up his mind, stoops down to pick up the knife and shoves into Martin's grip "Cut the tether. Send them away. Maybe we both die. Probably- but maybe not. Maybe, maybe everything works out fine, and we end up somewhere else."
"Together?" Jon's face is close to Martin's own, and it's so unfair that it keeps ending up like this. Martin could run so that they'd both survive the night, but where would he go? He can't leave Jon here.
He's going to leave Jon here, if not because he runs then because he dies, and everything left of Jon, mortal, human, wonderful Jon won't be long behind. Neither of them is willing to accept that the other might be the first to go.
"One way or another," Jon promises "Together."
The idea of 'somewhere else' wouldn't be so horrid if Jon made the trip alongside him.
The knife in Martin's hand has a sturdy handle and a long blade that's jagged along the back. It looks like a hunting knife, perhaps something Jurgen Leitner stored in the tunnels for self defence if it ever came down to it.
It gleams red with a thick coating of Jonah Magnus's still-wet blood. The thought of mixing that blood into Jon's makes Martin sick to the stomach.
"I don't think I can." He says, while the panopticon screeches ever louder around them. There isn't much time left now.
"It has to be you. The eye won't let me do it." Those are the words of someone who's tried.
Martin wipes the tears from his face with the back of the hand not holding the knife. He knows now that he's going to do it.
There's nothing left for him in this world, no happy ending waiting on the other side. It's Martin's fault at least as much as it is Jon's. They were both used in a scheme they didn't understand and wouldn't have chosen. Still, even for all his power, Jon has no idea what would have happened if he'd chosen differently. Martin is the one who made the entire world suffer by taking a horrible but known ending and personally rewriting it into something far worse. Taking this one last chance to set it right is the least he owes as penance for his arrogance.
There are billions of people suffering even now. Each of them is just as dear to someone as he and Jon are to each other. Why should Martin get to value Jon's life more than all of theirs?
He feels the weight of the knife, and wonders how he's supposed to wield it. He's killed before, but not like this. Now all Martin can think about is how to minimise the pain. A slit throat, a stab wound; What is the least terrible way to die? The task had been so much less daunting when he'd thought it would be Elias on the other side of the knife.
"Are you sure about this?" Martin asks one last time, stalling. He doesn't want to do this, and more importantly, even for all the world he doesn't think he could ever kill Jon in cold blood.
"No. But I love you."
"I love you too." Martin leans down to kiss Jon softly, full of love and compassion, and for a moment it's as though none of the grief and guilt can touch them. The feeling of Jon in his arms and against his lips is enough to make the world feel perfect.
It can't last.
When they part, Martin's hand moves with a grace he hasn't possessed in years as he plunges the knife into Jon's chest. On anyone else, it would have hit bone, but instead it slides softly into the soft tissue underneath.
Jon lets out a ragged sound of pain, and Martin cringes with guilt, wondering if it would be the greater mercy to move the knife again, causing more damage for a swifter end.
It's the same dilemma that got them into this mess, and Martin finds that his answer hasn't changed. It's terrible. Jon is already dying in his arms, and Martin knows there is no kindness in the act of drawing it out. Jon got that right, at least—Annabelle, too— but even so Martin can’t bring himself to move.
Jon reaches his hand up to cradle Martin's face, and Martin lets go of the knife and the burden of choice alongside it, and grabs Jon's hand instead, squeezinging it like a lifeline. Martin can feel himself sob, but he can't hear it over the screeching the panopticon makes as it crumbles.
He doesn't need to hear, and he squeezes his eyes shut, afraid. If this is the end, if he and Jon just die here instead of going somewhere else, Martin doesn't want to know. Without sight or sound, Jon's warmth is the only thing to exist in the entire world, and the way Jon still clings to him lets him know in each passing moment that they are both still alive.
Martin is dreading the moment that Jon's hand goes limp in his, and is completely taken off guard when he experiences physical pain instead.
Rubble, he's just barely able to process, falling from above and crushing them.
Warmth and pain both fade to nothing, stolen by the soothing embrace of death.
The last sensation he's aware of is the noise, still screeching and wailing ever louder before it, too, goes to silence. He couldn't pinpoint the minute in which it happens —as deaf in the quiet as he was amongst the noise— nor can he pinpoint the moment in which he becomes aware of his own existence.
He has thoughts, sluggish but undoubtedly occurring, and this fact takes a while to occur to him as strange. Once it does, more things become apparent; The gentle percussion of light rain, chilled air brushing over his exposed cheek, the feeling of his lungs as they expand and contract.
He's not a mind floating in the void but a body existing in a space. That shouldn't be a shock. Most people have bodies.
Groggily, Martin tries to remember where he is or how he got there. Sleep is such a rare luxury. Is he at Salesa's, or travelling with Annabelle? But no, he left those places. He remembers that. He left those places and then...
Martin remembers dying, or at least that what he thought had happened. It had felt like dying, until it didn't. He searches through his newly rediscovered senses for any sign of pain or injury, but nothing makes itself apparent.
A shrill noise pierces through the fog in his mind, and all at once he is fully and truly awake. Out of old and nearly atrophied habit,both his arms reach out from with his cocoon of blankets. With one hand, he grabs his glasses from his nightstand and inelegantly shoves them onto his face, only barely managing to avoid stabbing himself in the eye, and with the other he grabs his phone and turns on the screen, squinting against the sudden light.
As it turns out, it is now eight o'clock in the morning. Martin turns off the alarm as he tries and fails to place the significance of that. Then, in the light let off by his phone, he begins to take in the room around him.
There are blackout curtains obscuring a window to his left. The light isn't good enough to make out the colour, but he still knows that they are dark blue. The nightstand beside them has three half-drunk water bottles on top of it, and Martin has no doubt that there are several more in the drawer. In the corner of the room there is an old rocking chair with a pile of unfolded laundry on it.
Martin's stomach sinks. He's in his old flat; the one he lived in before Peter convinced him to move somewhere bigger and emptier.
It's technically still possible that he got here a normal way, for a given value of normal. Maybe he and Jon made their way into an alternate universe, decided to recreate verbatim the apartment he lived in when he was twenty-eight, and then for unknown reasons, Martin lost all memory of the events that brought him here.
That wouldn't be ideal, but he could work with it. Martin could work with anything if it meant Jon, his Jon, either of his was still with him, and briefly he's even tempted to pretend like he believes it to be true. There is nothing to be gained from drawing this out, however. The scene before him is unmistakable in its familiarity, and delaying this pain won't do anything at all to diminish it.
Just to be sure, he opens his phone again to check the date. November 27th, 2015, his first day of work as an archival assistant. Again. For the third time.
Martin throws his elbow over his eyes and laughs- or maybe he's crying. It's hard to tell.
It really is one hell of a joke.
Experience doesn't make waking up in the past any less surreal. If anything, it just makes it worse. Going back once is fine at first. Despite the disorientation, he'd been fairly excited, even, at the prospect of talking to people he thought he'd lost forever. It took time for grief to set in as it slowly dawned on him just how much he'd lost in the process.
Doing it a second time prompts the realisation that he might be stuck here, reliving these same few years for centuries, maybe even forever.
He doesn't know how to process the idea of forever. He can't even begin to imagine it.
Martin updates his previous assessment. Discovering that it was too late to stop Jon from killing everyone is no longer the single worst thing to ever happen to him.
A familiar set of rationalisations reawaken in his mind.
Perhaps it was all just an unusually vivid dream. That had been his first assumption last time. He was nervous about starting a new job that he definitely wasn't qualified for, and he spent the night conjuring strange and upsetting worst case scenarios.
Of course, when he feels out his current emotional state, he can find none of that long forgotten nervousness. It's been years since the last time he worked in the library, and his memory of that time has grown fuzzy around the edges.
It's an easy test. If his information about the future is damningly accurate, then he'll know that there's something more going on here—as though he doesn't know that already.
If it's not a natural dream, then maybe it's a supernatural one. Who's to say that he ever woke up at all? It's a bit extreme of a conclusion, even given what the Fears tend to do to people, but not any more so that the idea that one of the Fears really did send him into the past.
The Web's plan worked. It got everything it wanted, so why would it have done this? And if not the Web, which among the Fears would even have the capacity for something like time travel? What would be the point?
Martin only knows about the fears as a result of memories he's now trying very hard to cast doubt on. Maybe his information of the future is damningly accurate, except for when it pertains to the fears themselves. But no, there's no way he would have overlooked that when traversing a world remade in the image of fear.
Assuming any of that actually even happened.
He can't prove it. He'll never be able to prove it, because the simple fact of the matter is that none of it happened, not yet, and depending on his actions, none of it ever well.
Martin isn't unique in this dilemma. No one can prove the past. Time itself could have begun a mere three minutes ago, and no one would ever be able to tell the difference. And yet, the world at large doesn't halt in the face of that grand uncertainty. Left with no other options, people trust their senses and their memories and pray that it's the right call to make.
Everything that happened to Martin was real, for no greater reason than that he doesn't have the faintest clue what he'd do about it if it wasn't.
Committed to that premise, Martin wonders what the hell he's supposed to do now.
Last time, he'd thought the answer was obvious: Fix things, make them better, try to keep so many people from dying.
It didn't work out the way he'd planned it.
At most, Melanie and Sonja might have made it out alive, but even that thought is cold comfort when juxtaposed against the memory of the entire world howling in pain.
He could probably avert that particular outcome now that he's aware of the risk, but even before anything goes horrifically wrong, these first first few months are bad to relive; Jon hating him again, Tim and Sasha looking at him like a near total stranger, Hannah slowly drifting away as she realises how little he resembles the person who used to be her friend.
It's no wonder that the Lonely made such an easy victim out of Martin, and he is immensely grateful that his connections to various Powers get severed each time the clock turns back. It’s been at least a year since the last time he could feel sad without picturing fog rising from the ground to finish the job that Peter started. Now, Martin relishes in the ability to wallow in his loneliness and still know for a fact that there won't be any supernatural consequences for it.
If he doesn't want to do it all again, Martin could always gouge out his eyes and run for the hills. He can't prevent every tragedy, especially not if he's stuck in an endless timeloop, but he can just leave and let the tragedy unfold where he doesn't have to see it.
This plan has the same problem that it's always had. Where would he go? The only tether he has to the world outside the Magnus Institute is his responsibility to pay for the care of his ageing mother until she dies, and he can't exactly do that blind.
It doesn't feel right anyway. He has friends in the Institute. Martin doesn't mean anything to most of them right now, but they mean something to him, and if he tried to run he'd spend the rest of his life imagining how each of them might have died.
Still, he can't keep doing this forever. There's only so much his mind can take before it shatters, and isolation was already weighing heavy on him a couple of years ago. He's tried being a Magnus Institute employee, and each time it just brought him back here. If he keeps trying and the results don't change, eventually he's going to have to accept that if he wants out of this, he's going to have to do something else instead.
He remembers how Sasha's voice rang out in an old recording, which is the only way he's permitted to remember her at all. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.
Just because he's ended up in the past upon death twice now doesn't necessarily guarantee that it'll happen again. It's still just coincidence.
He'll give it one more try.
Martin sinks his teeth back into delusion. He messed up last time, but that doesn't matter anymore, because it proved that he is capable of changing the fate of the world on a grand scale. He has more information now than he did then, so he just has to do better this time.
If it doesn't work and he wakes up on the 27th of November again, he'll still have the rest of eternity to make increasingly desperate attempts to escape the timeloop. He could explain the situation to the others on day one, consequences be damned, or even go to Jonah or Annabelle and hope that amnesia runs counter to the immortality they seek.
If none of that works, there is always the option of flinging himself into the Buried. He can't get sent back in time each time he dies if he can never die.
Martin is glad that he's going with a plan that involves doing none of those things. Hopefully he'll never have to. He's feeling lucky this morning, like everything might just work out for the best. After all, they say the third time's the charm.
With his mind made up, Martin resolves himself to waiting for a more stable state of mind before he opens his eyes. It wouldn't do for Elias to peer through him and get too many clues this early.
The task is made somewhat productive when, in the absence of any pressing decisions, Martin is left sitting in silence with all that had happened.
Jon died in his arms. He killed Jon.
He'll never get to know whether or not Melanie, Basira, and Georgie survived. He'll never even get to know they even got the chance to die, or if whatever force is unwinding time erases the potential futures that it rips him out of. He doesn't want to believe that it works like that. It's just too terrible to imagine that he killed Jon to save a world that was always going to die with him anyway.
Something has to have survived to give all the tragedy meaning, so he imagines that everyone he didn't personally watch die is alive somewhere in an alternate dimension, happy.
Tears fall hot down Martin's cheeks.
He needs to calm down so that he can open his eyes and go to work. He won't calm down as long as he's thinking about nothing in particular. There are too many things he misses and regrets and mourns. He could lie there all day and never run out of material to torment himself with.
That energy would be put to better use planning, so he begins to make a list of everything that needs done, everything he's capable of doing, and everything that went wrong last time. It's a painful task to tally up his mistakes, but at least it's productive. He always did have a clearer head when working towards a clearly defined goal.
By the time he's calmed down enough to risk cracking his eyes open and leaving his cocoon of blankets, he's already more than an hour late for work.
Jon won't be happy with him, but it's not as though there was ever any chance to the contrary.
Martin does his best to hurry his way through getting dressed and out the door, but he can't help but lose a bit more time when he catches sight of his face in the bathroom mirror, younger and softer than he's come to expect.
He looks for any trace of the years he's lived. Elias, at least, had eyes to match his age. It feels strange in comparison for Martin to have lived so far beyond his years with nothing to show for it—none of his wrinkles or streaks of grey.
No matter how long he stares, he can't find himself in the mirror. The reflection that moves in time with him is that of a twenty-eight year old ex-librarian without a single clue what fate has in store for him.
Good. Martin summons up his old anxieties, his old hopes, and his old determination, letting them seep into his expression to reinforce the mask. If he can't find a single flaw in the performance, no one else should be able to either.
He's heading through the living room to get to the front door when he spots a folding pocket knife lying on the coffee table.
"Right," he mutters to himself, "this old thing."
He'd bought it for himself when he first got to this flat, primarily for the sake of cutting through the tape on his moving boxes. It's seen various other uses since then, from acting as a cooking knife when he was too tired to do the dishes, to a makeshift screwdriver when his actual screwdriver went missing. With how practical it is, he used to carry it with him everywhere.
During his first life, it came into contact with the supernatural enough times that he's fairly certain it deserved a spot in Artefact Storage by the end. There wasn't a single event that he could unambiguously prove occurred as a result of the knife being cursed in some manner, but there were certainly times where it felt a bit too alive in his grasp to write of the possibility altogether.
During his second life, he'd had half a mind to blame it for his unexpected arrival in the past and threw it away within the first few months of being back for fear that holding on to it would land him in the exact situation he's in now.
He picks it up to feel its weight in his hand, so very unlike the knife he killed Jon with. Small and compact, the polished red wood is home to three separate blades. None of them have any real locking mechanism, so it's fairly difficult to use in a fight.
Clearly, it either wasn't responsible for sending him back in time, or else even a small amount of contact with it is enough to doom him. If it isn't at fault, its history has been erased alongside everything else. More likely than not, it's a simple and mundane object again.
Holding it, though, sure does bring back memories. Martin is as far from the world he once called home as he's ever been, but this knife was there through everything that happened to him back then. It's not the same knife, in the same way that he'll never get to talk to his first Jon again, but it's so easy to displace his emotions from one to the other when everything about them is identical.
The idea of having some sort of physical memento to cling to soothes a pain In his soul that he doubts will ever fully heal.
He shoves the knife into the pocket of his trousers, and bangs his shin against the coffee table as he heads out the door.
A quick trip on the underground later, Martin's standing in front of the Magnus Institute. A camera mounted above the door follows his movements as he approaches, and the back of his neck prickles with the sensation of being watched.
He doesn't mind it anymore. After an apocalypse dedicated to the Ceaseless Watcher, the scrutiny of a mere camera hardly even registers as background noise. It only hurts because of how profoundly it reminds him of Jon.
The Archives are in the basement of the institute, and only accessible through a long, ominous staircase that is far wider than it needs to be and dimly lit besides, as though he's descending into some old dungeon.
The door to Jon's office is already open when he gets there, and Jon is furiously sorting through a pile of papers on his desk, alive again, and as safe as he'll ever be. His hair is shorn short, that stupid style that Jon always hated but used to get cut again every two weeks on the dot because he thought it made him look more professional.
"Hello," Martin says to get his attention, "I'm Martin Blackwood. I uh. I work here now?"
Jon looks up, turning the glare he was previously levelling against the papers on Martin. The eyes are so different now, and Martin hadn’t even noticed until that moment, with how gradual the change had been. Jon's eyes are a flat amber. They aren’t yellow like a cat’s, or golden like a god’s, and they don’t seem to glow where they catch the light. That’s how it always should have been.
Martin looks away, staring at the bookshelf beside Jon's head instead, just so that he doesn't have to see it even a moment longer. As different as they are, it's hard not to take the disdain personally when looking into the eyes of a man he killed not three hours ago.
"Yes. Elias did warn me to be expecting you." Jon makes a show of checking the time on his wrist watch, "at nine."
"Sorry, It was something of a rough morning." It isn't a lie, and nor is it the complete truth. Martin's found that this is by far the safest and most reliable way to keep secrets from Beholding.
"Well then, I'd hate for being on time for your first day of work to get in the way of your morning." Jon says icily, and then turns his attention back to his papers.
Martin stands there, apparently dismissed with no task to do for the day, and manages, just barely, to stop himself from smiling. Even now, with Jon at his most spiteful and showing no hints towards the brave and compassionate man Martin knows he is deep down inside, Martin could sooner stop the tides than stop himself from being unbearably fond of Jon.
"Look," he says," holding back grief, aggravation and joy in equal measure, "I'm here now, and ready to work if you just tell me what needs to be done."
Jon blinks up at him, as though confused that Martin hasn't had the courtesy to disappear and never come back yet, "I'd hardly bother. Tim and Sasha are already doing a preliminary sweep of the Archives, and there isn't much else to do until they return with their report."
"Fine. In that case I'll go ask 'Tim and Sasha' " he annunciates their names as though he has no idea who they are. It's a lie twice over, since Martin had already been hearing about them for a while by the time they were properly introduced, "if they need my help with anything."
"If you insist. Just see to it that you don't get in their way." Jon sighs and once again turns his attention back to the stack of papers on his desk.
This time, Martin accepts the dismissal for what it is, not wanting to draw Jon's ire a third time this morning.
He looks around the Archives and heads off in the general direction he thinks Tim and Sasha started their organisation projects the past two times.
When he's most of the way there, he spots a familiar face coming towards him.
"Oh hey," Tim calls, "I thought I heard someone come in. Martin was it? Have you checked in with Jon yet?"
"Yeah," Martin says, "Unfortunately." Together, they wander deeper into the stacks.
Tim winces in sympathy, "That bad, huh?"
"He couldn't stand to look at me for long enough to tell me how useless he expects me to be, but the message came through regardless."
"Usually he's at least a bit better than he is right now. I think it's the stress of the new job and everything. He should calm down within a week or two.”
"If you say so." Martin says, knowing full well that Jon does not, in fact, calm down within a week or two.
Tim stops suddenly and hollers at a nearby bookshelf, "Come check out what I found."
The face that pops out from behind the shelf isn't one that Martin recognises. Her dark hair is long enough that even though a significant portion of it is tied up in a bun at the back of her head, the section that is loose still falls all the way to her waist. As more of her appears from behind the stacks, Martin is most surprised by how broad her shoulders are. The way he remembers it, his other coworker was an unusually narrow woman.
Her pear green eyes shine with mirth from behind round glasses, "You must be Martin, right?"
Her voice is more recognisable than the rest of her, if only barely.
Martin had forgotten to expect this. Amidst his racing thoughts, he only just barely retains the presence of mind to nod his head.
"I'm Sasha James," She holds out her hand, "It's nice to meet you."
On bad nights when he couldn't quite manage to force out of his mind the possibility that he might time travel a second time, Martin had sometimes wondered if seeing the real Sasha in the flesh would let him remember her properly.
He tries to overlay her face on top of his memories of the thing that wasn't her, but nothing about them is similar enough for the comparison to make any sense at all. They don't even move the same.
Martin can look at her as she truly was back then and still have no idea what she looked like when she gave him an animated impromptu lecture about the nature of science, or any guesses as to what words she used the first time he visited her in the hospital.
Even though Martin still knows more facts about her than she currently has cause to suspect, this introduction is just as real to him as it is to her. After only slightly too long of a delay, he reaches out to shake her offered hand, tensing up for just a second as he does so. It had been a while since anyone but Jon had touched him kindly.
"Yeah," He says, utterly sincere, "It's nice to meet you too."
"And I'm Tim Stoker." Tim says, smoothing over any potential awkwardness caused by Martin's floundering. "I don't think I said so earlier."
"Where are your manners?" she asks, "You can't just walk up to someone like 'Hello Martin, we've been expecting you' and not elaborate."
Tim smirks at her. She laughs and lightly swats his arm with the back of her hand. "You didn't!" She says, only pretending to be aghast.
Martin can do one better. He widens his eyes with play-pretend hurt, hunches his shoulders, and says in a voice as small as he can make it and still be heard, "You don't remember me?"
Martin knows he's guessed right by the way she looks at him with dawning panic, like a pop quiz she hadn't studied for, "Um." She says, tilting her head to test whether or not she recognises him sideways, "I really don't. Sorry."
The apocalypse must have ruined Martin’s sense of humour, because he finds it remarkably funny that she’s forgotten him as well.
"I'm from the library." He explains, "I'm not sure that you ever once managed to return a book on time."
"Oh! Well, I like to be thorough with my reading."
Tim says, "I'd recognise you better if your friend didn't shove you out of the way every time I walked in."
"She tends to be better at keeping track of individual patrons than I am." Says Martin, "Anyway, I came here to help the two of you with what you are doing, so if you could fill me in on the details?"
Sasha —it's weird to think of her with that name, but Martin promises himself that he's going to get used to it —looks at him with open scepticism, "Is that what Jon said to do?"
Martin realises that Jon might have spent the past few hours grumbling at length about what he'd do if the unexpected new hire ever did decide to show up. "Actually," he says, "I think he basically just told me to sit around and look pretty, but I can be a bit of an overachiever at times."
Tim and Sasha look to each other in some silent conversation that Martin is entirely incapable of deciphering.
After three long seconds, Sasha shrugs, "Good enough for me. We're trying to figure out the organisation system. Don't move any of the boxes from where they are or mix statements from one box with those from another, but go through as many boxes as you can, and put a sticky note on it explaining the theme if you can find one. Topics, people, dates, validity; anything that explains why statements got put into that box as opposed to any other."
"Don't feel bad if you can't find anything, though." Tim tacks on, "We've been having terrible luck so far."
Martin hasn't decided how much effort he's going to put in to pretending like he's still bad at his job this time around. On one hand, Jon is physically incapable of firing him, and it would be odd for a library worker with no previous archival experience to adapt perfectly to the job on day one. More than that, one of his biggest mistakes last time was underestimating the way that even small changes could compound over time to send the future hurtling off in wildly different directions.
On the other hand, there is definitely such a thing as taking too few risks. He'd played it safe with his secrets last time, never once even whispering them into the world for fear of what might be listening. He'd had a perfectly plausible excuse for every action he took, and managed to navigate years of existing in close proximity to the schemes of the Web and multiple avatars of the Eye without any of them catching wise to just how much he was hiding.
That's just about the only thing he ever managed to accomplish. It didn't save anyone. He played it safe, and spent every day deceiving the very people who might have been able to help him. Isolated and unable to move as freely as he would have liked, Martin was careful with his secrets time and time again, right up until the end of the world.
Even after that, he still never told anyone. He'd had very little left to lose at that point, but that's exactly why he couldn't open up about it. If Jon had left him, horrified by just how many times Martin had lied to him over the years, Martin wouldn't have had anyone else in the entire world to talk to. At a certain point, it just felt better to keep lying.
He's still not certain that he was wrong to be cautious. Martin did the best he could with the information he had, and was continuously blindsided by things he simply didn't know to expect. Even if he had told someone else about his unique situation, they would have been just as lost as he was.
However, Martin knows now more than he knew then, and he's already seen how things go when he plays it safe at every opportunity. If he wants to accomplish anything at all with the dubious miracle of a third chance, he needs to be ready to take a calculated risk.
If he's good at his job, maybe he'll have access to more information, or maybe the trust of his peers will afford him the opportunity to steer them away from situations that are likely to get them killed.
If he's good at his job, maybe Jon will like him sooner.
It's not a decision Martin has to make right away. The results of trying to find some method to Gertrude's madness will be the exact same whether he's feigning incompetence or not.
My life closed twice before its close—
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me
So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
~Emily Dickinson