Chapter Text
It wasn’t the weirdest thing that was going to happen.
It wasn’t even going to be the most dangerous, not by far. There were a lot of points you could pin the beginning on, but this one stuck out to him. It felt momentous in a way not entirely earned, not like the moment when things actually begin to go wrong, but when you realize that something isn't right.
For Jon, that moment came in first period on an unassuming mid-October Tuesday, about two or three minutes before the bell rang.
“Alright, hand me your papers,” said Jon. Everyone was packing up by now. He caught Tim right before he unthinkingly shoved it into the black hole he called a backpack, plucking the sheet out of his grip easily and, gathering up Martin’s work as well, took them into the back of the classroom and waited his turn to file them away.
When he did so, however, he opened their group’s file to find it already occupied by a single sheet of paper.
“I think somebody misplaced theirs,” Jon directed to Martin, who always hung back to wait for him. “There’s another person’s work in our file.” He took it out to examine. “No name, messy handwriting. Think I should just toss it out?”
“What do you mean, misplaced?” Martin asked, and Jon paused. “Jon, really, come on. Guy misses one day and you immediately forget all about him?”
This was the dawning moment. Their class did not have an even number of students in it. When they were divided up into groups at the beginning of the year, their group came up short, with only three members-- himself, Tim and Martin.
He had tried to explain as much to Martin, who just looked at him peculiarly, like he was trying to convince him of something particularly daft.
“There is no fourth person in our group, Martin. Stop messing around,” he said as the bell rang and students began filing out of the room.
Martin sighed. “I swear, Jon, I can’t tell if you’re being serious sometimes. Michael has been in our group from the start.”
That was the beginning.
The next day was the first time Jon ever laid eyes on him, despite everyone else’s claims to the contrary. Of course, the instant he did look upon him, he received a completely unshocking revelation: not human, said the little voice of his subconscious, as it was wont to do.
This ‘Michael’ certainly appeared human enough, if a bit eccentric: he simply waltzed into the room ten seconds shy of being late, slung his backpack down and sat in the seat beside Jon like it was a well-rehearsed routine.
He had long, curly blonde hair cascading most of the way down his back and a sort of round face, with eyes whose exact color he found difficult to determine at first glance. He wore faded jeans with a few patches around the knees where they had apparently once been torn, and what appeared to be a white button up shirt under the most hideously neon jacket imaginable. It was one of those vintage windbreaker types with irregular blocks of eye-searing colors. His hands, his fingers, Jon noticed, were covered in places by an array of colorful band-aids; there were enough of them to make him wonder what on earth the thing had been doing to require quite so many.
If anyone else noticed anything was amiss, they did not react. Only Jon knew that ‘Michael’ was not what he appeared.
“Can I have a sheet of notebook paper?” Michael asked him partway through class, idly clicking his pen-- an odd sort, filled with swirling, glittery ink of a wide array of colors, such that writing with it would over time produce a shifting hue.
“Of course,” Jon said with tremendous reluctance. Get your own, impostor, is what he was thinking, but he imagined that jumping up out of his seat and declaring Michael a monster in front of the whole class would not go very well. Adding insult to injury, upon accepting the paper, he did not even use it to take notes. He just started doodling away for the rest of class. When he ran out of room on the front, he drew on the back. When he ran out of room on the back, he started drawing on his own arms. This filled Jon with a particular brand of petty annoyance, but there was not much to be done about it.
The next day, heading to lunch with Martin, he decided to bring it up.
“So, that… Michael kid,” Jon started apprehensively.
“What… what about him?”
“I was just wondering if you ever noticed anything… weird about him.”
“Why? Should I have?” Martin asked.
Jon considered carefully. “I… Martin, listen. I swear I haven’t met him before. You might think I’m joking, but I’m being perfectly serious. He just showed up the other day for the first time in, so far as I can tell, ever, and no one thinks it’s even a little bit weird? Something’s not right.”
Martin paused for a moment.
Jon was, of course, hoping in vain that his pointing it out would bring some sudden revelation, and that Martin would gasp dramatically in shock as he realized he’d been fooled, and then the two would set out with some half-brained scheme to Expose Michael For What He Really Was. They would go and tell Tim, who would tell Sasha, and it would be rather like old times: the four of them charging recklessly into something bigger than they understood, and coming away with some wild memory of their recent escapade, or something new and terrible and grand to ponder, or the truth, or whatever it was they went looking for.
But Martin just said, “Jon, are you sure you’re feeling alright?”
Jon sighed.
“You can’t be serious, Jon, you know Michael,” Martin insisted falsely. “You have the same homeroom. We went to book club together last year, remember? And he would always say something you didn’t agree with, and you’d get rather worked up about it, and you would spend the rest of it arguing about how wrong and stupid he was. But, I mean, I think he was just doing it on purpose, you know, for attention.”
“That’s…” Surprisingly elaborate? False, of course, because none of it had ever happened-- he was absolutely sure that he had never, ever seen or heard of him before.
“I rather thought you were friends, to be honest,” Martin laughed awkwardly. “I guess, er… I guess not?”
“...Never mind,” Jon said at length. “Forget I said anything. Let’s just go, before the cafeteria lines get too much longer.”
So they did. Before long, Jon was picking at the limp, slimy leaves of a salad with no intention of actually eating any; Sasha was the last to arrive as usual, taking her place next to Tim and across from Jon at their usual table. He was pretty sure his three companions were rapidly involving themselves in a heated debate about whether the word niche was pronounced to rhyme with leash or with itch at the moment, but Jon’s mind was elsewhere.
Scanning the cafeteria, Michael was nowhere to be seen. That, in and of itself, was harmless-- lots of students took their lunch somewhere more secluded to eat or skipped it entirely-- but not reassuring to Jon, who knew better not to let his guard down so quickly. It was rarely quite that simple with ‘atrocities masquerading as people’ types, which was a lesson a lifetime of seeing them had instilled in him.
It wasn’t really the most interesting of weird, supernatural abilities to be born with, but it was the one he had always had nonetheless.
The first sighting was the only one that would work-- when his eyes first fell upon a monstrous creature trying to pass itself off as normal, that little voice of his mind would speak up: not human, it would say, once and only once. What he did with that knowledge, once obtained, was up to him. It would never elaborate. It would never direct. God forbid he forgot what single insights it bestowed upon him, no-- if that being meant him harm, or meant someone else harm, then only under his own power would he manage to intervene or walk away alive, but it was still an edge, and a valuable one nonetheless.
The only people that knew of it, he was sure-- Tim, Martin, Sasha and so on-- didn’t exactly understand it. There was something… upsetting about the idea of trying to sit someone down and explain exactly how he came up with all the premonitions and insights he had, a feeling like eyes crawling on the back of his neck whenever he went to open his mouth and speak about it. Even then, he wasn’t sure what exactly that would accomplish, them knowing. As he knew, it really was rarely that simple.
Because to every rule there were exceptions. Because to every dozen malicious horrors wearing human faces he cast his eyes upon, there was one more-or-less benign, something that had, for whatever reason, decided its true happiness lie in playing pretend and acting human, or that chose to deny its destructive nature in exchange for peace, or whatever. Take, for example, Agnes Montague, a student in the same grade as him, runaway daughter of an apparently horrific cult. He had been going to school with her for several years, and knew she was not, strictly speaking, fully human. But he also knew in some way that she wanted to be, and in all the time she’d been at this school, she seemed fully focused on throwing herself into the regular mundanities of everyday life she had been so long denied while living under… whatever surely horrible circumstances her upbringing had imposed. It was her singular passion: being normal, or maybe reclaiming normal, and so far Jon had never been given reason to suspect she was the root of any sinister happenings or harm to others.
So no, he couldn’t just accept the untruth that Michael had always been there such as everyone else appeared to believe it. First of all, whatever spell had been cast upon the others had not, apparently, touched his memories in the same way. Second, if he had ever seen Michael before, that little ability of his would not have been able to activate, as it was only inclined to work upon the first encounter at all.
But it was too early to jump to conclusions. Maybe Michael would turn out to be just another unfortunate twisted soul who found happiness in playing high school with everyone else, or maybe he was here with a malevolent agenda for chaos or personal gain. Only time would tell. Until the moment was right, if it would come at all-- and if it did, he knew Tim, Sasha and Martin had his back-- until then, Jon would watch.
By now, lost in his thoughts so long, the bell had rung again, and Sasha was gently tapping his arm to alert him to the crowd of exiting students.
Whatever this was going to amount to, it was going to have to wait until another day, at another time.