Work Text:
“I don’t understand why you can’t just tell him.”
“He’ll take it better if he hears it from you.”
“No, no way. You’re not pinning this one on me.”
“Is a little emotional maturity too much to ask, Timothy?”
Jon, breezing past the break room on his way to talk to Rosie about another shipment of fire extinguishers for the Archives, faltered and came to a halt a few steps from the door, listening for hushed voices.
“It was your gift, Sasha.”
A frustrated sigh. “ Our gift, and, by the way, it was your idea.”
Jon frowned, leaning forward to better hear the ongoing argument. It wasn’t exactly polite to eavesdrop, but Tim and Sasha knew Jon’s policy regarding office gossip, and Jon had perfectly legitimate business standing out in the hallway anyway, right?
“My hands are clean.”
“You wrote your name on the card!”
“Well, I didn’t know he’d take it this far. If I had, I—”
Jon knocked lightly on the door frame. “Sorry to interrupt.”
At the sound of his voice, Sasha whirled around, lips still pinched tightly in a show of exasperation. She was standing by the hob, one hand on the Archives’ only teapot—or what Jon assumed to be their teapot. With some imagination, the object in Sasha’s grip looked about the right shape for it, but it was covered in a layer of mangled yarn and Jon could swear that there were at least two holes through which a spout could protrude, nevermind the trivial fact that their teapot (like many of the other teapots Jon had encountered) had but one spout.
Sasha looked just about as perplexed about this as Jon felt, her eyebrows drawn together with careful, concerned precision.
Tim, on the other hand, was leaning against the counter, trying to strike what Jon reasoned to be a nonchalant pose. Normally, Tim was very good at this sort of thing, but now he was hindered by the bulbous half-jumper-half-straitjacket item he was wearing. Jon counted three sleeves, wondering if he had somehow failed to notice an extra arm in Tim’s possession over the past few years of working together.
“Hey, boss,” Tim said, raising his hand to wave or shoot Jon with finger guns, but his arm got lost somewhere along the way in the sagging folds of his jumper.
Jon watched him struggle for a couple of seconds before settling into silent surrender. Tim scratched idly at his collar, the outline of his arm jerking up and down below the fabric.
Jon cleared his throat. “I usually have no issue with, er, workplace attire so long as it’s sufficiently professional and does not prevent you from—from completing your duties to the best of your ability.” He eyed Tim’s jumper meaningfully.
Sasha coughed, the noise sounding suspiciously like I told you so, and Tim shot her an agitated look, eyes narrowed. She raised her eyebrows at him. He rolled his eyes, shaking his head lightly as he turned back to Jon, who was (not very successfully) trying to understand the meaning behind this wordless exchange.
“It won’t be a problem,” Tim promised. “It’s—well, I have to wear it.”
Sasha released the disfigured teapot and drifted over to Tim’s side, giving him a gentle yet insistent nudge with her elbow. “You don’t have to wear it,” she reminded him, almost sing-song. “You could just tell him.”
Tim fixed her with a dark look. “If it’s so simple, why don’t you do it?”
“Because I’m not the one who’s going to have to make it through the work day in an itchy jumper.”
“And what happens when he knits a matching one for you tomorrow?”
Sasha frowned, working the problem, gears turning. Jon had never seen her this stumped before. It was deeply unsettling.
“Tell…whom?” Jon had fallen a few lines behind in the conversation and now was hopelessly lost.
Tim sighed, defeated. “Martin. Sasha gave him this sort of housewarming gift, a beginner’s knitting kit, when he moved into the Archives back in March—”
“ We gave it to him,” Sasha cut in. “We thought he had forgotten about it, but then this week he—”
She gestured vaguely at the break room. Jon looked, really looked, and started to notice all the patches of bright-coloured yarn that had twined itself, strangling and cluttered, around every surface, every utensil, seemingly overnight. The hilts of butter knives stuffed into tight blue sleeves, the knobs on the cabinets wrapped in dangling yellow thread. Hexagonal coasters, more puckered stitches than soft wool, sat untouched on the table.
“If he’s disrupting the work environment, why haven’t you confronted him about it?” Jon glanced between Tim and Sasha. Both his colleagues ducked their heads, ashamed.
At this rate, Jon doubted that there’d be any object or person in the Archives safe from Martin’s cursed art project. Revolted, Jon imagined finding file folders with decorative woven covers. This was enough to jar him into decisiveness.
Jon tilted his chin upward. “I’ll have a talk with him.”
Sasha’s head shot up abruptly, eyes wide with alarm. “No, Jon. You can’t do that.”
“What—why not?” Jon asked, trying not to sound offended. He was the Head Archivist and even though things were, putting it lightly, a mess at the moment, that didn’t mean that Jon would let his assistants run around knitting horrid jumpers and disobeying his authority.
“You have a tendency to…be very you about these kinds of things,” Tim said slowly.
“Very me ,” Jon repeated flatly.
“Too harsh,” Tim elaborated. “Abrasive.”
Jon scoffed. “I hardly think he’s as fragile as you make him seem.”
Tim shot Sasha a furtive glance.
“He’s been going through a lot lately,” Sasha added.
“Yes, I’m aware.”
Jon had been there on late nights when Martin brought him tea at one in the morning, laughing it off when Jon asked him if he couldn’t sleep either, like insomnia and nightmares were just an inside joke of theirs. He had seen the flash of Martin’s torch swinging back and forth across the hallway, slicing in shaky beams through the dark, returning to shadowy corners for a second inspection because you never knew. Jon supposed it helped Martin to think he was watching just as vigilantly as whatever watched him on those nights. He had heard the clink of metal, Martin setting down fire extinguishers like landmines around the document storage room, CO2 always in reach from his cot in case those worms got any ideas.
Jon had told him that unidentified parasites didn’t “get ideas.” Martin hadn’t looked convinced, nodding along in that way of his that Jon had begun to realise meant resignation but not agreement.
Sometimes, Martin would knock on Jon’s door when it was much too late for sleep, hardly a brush of his knuckles against the wood. He would hesitate on the threshold, a stack of files balanced in his arms, his hair sticking up in tufts, his eyes droopy and underlined in dark semicircles. He’d say some variation of do you mind or can I or sorry to bother you.
And Jon would glance at him, disinterested, and say something along the lines of fine or yes, alright or on occasion, of course. Martin would sit in the chair meant for statement givers, and Jon would not admit that it was a relief. Jon would not admit that sometimes, he too was not entirely convinced that the worms couldn’t get ideas.
“If this is how he’s coping, we don’t want to deal too much damage to his confidence,” Sasha said, twirling a stray pale grey thread around her index finger. “We just want him to dial it back a little.”
“So, you don’t want me to tell Martin?” Jon asked.
“Look, just go easy on him,” Tim said. “He really needs friends right now.”
Jon wrinkled his nose, but relented. “I’ll try not to hurt his feelings.”
Sasha gave him a grateful smile, some of the tension easing from her shoulders.
Tim clapped him on the back, grinning. “We really owe you, boss.”
“Yes,” Jon said. “You do.”
Really, he’d dared to imagine that his transfer to the Archives would have meant more dusty texts and yellowed pages, somewhere to hide from petty conflicts between colleagues. Jon hadn’t been prepared for the worms either, but at least they made sense in a basement that already smelled damp and earthy every time it rained.
The knitting, however—Jon had not seen that one coming.
As a rule, Jon had an entirely utilitarian relationship with tea. He wasn’t entirely concerned with how it appeared on his desk—really, it could have sprouted wings and flapped into his office or simply blinked into existence with a hologram-like shimmer, and he wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference so long as it did appear up on his desk. He wasn’t too particular about the temperature, or the ratio of sugar to milk to cream to honey to whatever, or the mug it was served in (barring the exception of those that bore the sort of repugnant slogans that you might find splashed across graphic t-shirts in a gift shop, the kind destined to end up as a last minute Christmas gift for someone’s least favourite nephew).
Jon considered himself morally above drinking out of a mug that insisted don’t talk to me before my coffee or I hate mondays or living the dream.
But other than that, he wasn’t picky when it came to tea.
So, if one morning, when Jon’s fingers surely should have met smooth ceramic where he held his cup, but met lumpy wool instead, he was definitely not going to make the effort to comment on this.
“What do you think?”
Jon jolted in his chair, nearly sloshing tea all over the case files scattered across his desk. He hadn’t noticed Martin still hovering in the doorway. Usually, this part of their routine was perfectly transactional. Martin would come in with Jon’s tea, mumble a good morning, Jon, and in return, Jon would ignore him, most of the time unintentionally.
Martin had been doing a lot more hovering lately. He did live in the Archives now, so there was that. But Jon could not fathom what Martin could possibly want from him now.
Only he was staring expectantly at the mug clutched tightly in Jon’s hands.
“Er, the tea’s very good,” Jon said.
“No, I mean the—” Martin pointed at the cup. “The cosy.”
For the first time, Jon looked down, confused, at the mound of tangled yarn beneath his fingertips. It seemed as if Martin had bundled Jon’s cup in a jumper, and not a very good jumper at that. The stitch pattern changed every few centimeters, with no apparent regularity or reason. The cosy bulged in some places around the cup’s circumference, left threadbare in others.
“I knitted it myself,” Martin explained, brightening with pride.
A snide I can see that was perched behind Jon’s teeth, but remembering Sasha’s urgent caution, Jon caught the words before they slipped out, instead staring dumbly at the cosy. The longer he stared, the harder it became to think of something positive to say about it.
“It’s—erm, it’s nice,” he said finally.
Martin blinked at him, stunned, and then beamed as if this were high, high praise.
“Thanks.” He shifted his weight, awkward, hands clasped behind his back. “I think it’s good for me to have a hobby,” he confided. “Something to keep my mind off of—well, you know.”
“Yes, that’s—” Jon paused, not sure how to phrase this delicately. It really wasn't difficult at all to picture Martin's kicked puppy look, chin tucked down, lips pressed thin, eyes lowered like he'd been expecting the rejection or lecture or general scorn. It was a face Jon realised that he was uncomfortably familiar with, and with a swell of dismay, he started to wonder if Tim was right about Jon being too Jon for this.
"In moderation, I do think that it's a good use of time, healthy actually,” Jon said, trying for something between sympathetic and objective, and landing somewhere that made his throat stiff, constricting around the words. “But, you understand, we can’t let our hobbies and personal pursuits interfere with our professional lives.”
Martin nodded, and this was dangerous because Jon could never tell these days which of Martin’s nods meant yeah, sure, and which meant a deceptively sarcastic version of yeah, sure, the more accurate translation for the latter being a weary if you say so.
“Yeah, of course,” Martin said. “I only really knit to fill the time after work, when everyone else goes home—uh, mostly everyone else goes home, I mean.” He looked up at Jon through his lashes, almost shy.
In response, guilt pounded in Jon’s chest, painful and almost…not. Jon had lots of experience with guilt and it had never felt so fluttery before.
He coughed, giving himself a second or two to think.
“You seem to be a fast learner, Martin. It’s very well-done,” he blurted, the words hurtling out of his mouth like a train wreck, no survivors.
The compliment directly contradicted many of their prior conversations in which Jon had made it clear that Martin was, in fact, not a fast learner, but quite the opposite.
Jon knew he had dug himself in too deep when Martin, his shock metamorphosing into delight, leaned forward and offered, “I could make you something else, if you like.”
“No, really, that’s fine,” Jon said, hoping Martin would mistake his abject panic for humility. “I couldn’t ask you to do that for me.”
“Seriously, I’m knitting them faster than I can give them away at this point,” Martin laughed, the sound stretched taut.
He wanted to refuse, but Martin's eyes were lighting up again and Christ this was so much harder than it looked.
“Okay—erm, alright then,” Jon mumbled.
“Perfect.” Martin smiled. “Oh, and I’ll have that report on your desk before lunch. I’m just waiting for Sasha to check on some housing records for me.”
Jon nodded weakly. He watched Martin shuffle out into the corridor, his stomach churning and as tangled as one of Martin’s knitted monstrosities.
It’s not that Jon wasn’t expecting an ambush, it’s just that he hadn’t imagined that it would come when he was in the middle of shoveling mashed potatoes onto his tray in the canteen. Not to mention, Tim was a frightening thing in that jumper, so it really wasn’t Jon’s fault that Tim was now wiping mash from his cheek, his vestigial third sleeve spattered with the stuff.
“God, Tim, don’t sneak up on me like that,” Jon hissed, handing him a crumpled napkin that he had been clenching in his fist far too tightly and would probably not be much help.
Everyone else in the queue was watching them, some trying to wrap their minds around the thing Tim was wearing, some trying to identify the source of the mashed potato explosion.
Jon gave the woman ahead of him a small, apologetic nod.
“Did you tell him? What did he say? He didn’t cry, did he? Jon, please tell me you didn’t make Martin cry.” The interrogation came in a flurry of whispers, nearly incomprehensible.
“I—erm, I ran into some difficulty,” Jon confessed to his tray, unable to look Tim in the eye.
Tim crossed his arms, an impressive feat in that jumper. “What difficulty?”
“I was trying to be tactful, so I—well, he asked me what I thought about this cup cosy that he’d made and I had to say something— ”
“And you told him you hated it?”
“No, I said it was…nice.”
Tim gaped at him. “You what? ”
“It was supposed to be a neutral compliment,” Jon said defensively. “I mean, you said I wasn’t allowed to hurt his feelings.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t say to encourage him either.” Tim pinned him with a desperate look. “I don’t know how much longer we can take this.”
“It won’t happen again,” Jon promised. “He caught me off guard, that’s all.”
Tim frowned, disbelieving, and Jon snatched up his tray, eager to escape.
The next morning when Martin brought in Jon’s tea, there was something knotted and thoroughly confusing in forest green, stitches coming undone, slung across his left arm. Martin presented it to Jon, mouth stretched wide, laying it out gingerly on Jon’s desk, and Jon had to take a grounding swig of tea before he could even begin to strategise.
It would be quick, efficient, painless. Like ripping off a plaster. Jon had many stern talks with Martin to draw inspiration from, and there was no need for this one to be any different.
The steady tone, the firm but not unkind words were already piecing themselves together in his head.
While, I do appreciate your efforts, Martin—
See, that wasn’t too bad of a start, was it? Jon ran his tongue over his teeth, ready to recite his lines.
“Thank you, Martin.” Well, that hadn’t been exactly what he’d meant to say, but there was always room to bounce back.
“It’s a lovely sock.” Oh. That wasn’t right either.
Martin chuckled nervously. “Scarf.”
“Yes, my mistake. A lovely scarf.”
Martin watched him uncertainly. “You really think so?”
“Yeah, of course, it’s—” Jon swallowed. “Very green.”
Martin smiled at him, slightly perplexed, and Jon decided that nothing about this was quick or efficient or painless.
“Thanks,” Martin said hesitantly.
Sorry, now that I think about it, please, please stop. Everyone in the Archives is drowning in loose threads, and somehow it’s my responsibility to break the news to you without actually breaking you, so—
“No problem,” Jon said, although it was turning out to be a very big problem. “Keep up the good work.”
If Jon hadn’t known any better, he would have assumed that the Institute was preparing for some freak snowstorm, no matter the fact that it was an uncharacteristically mild May.
Evidence of Martin’s knitting spread like some sort of arts and crafts plague. When Jon stopped by Research to borrow some coloured ink for the printer in his office, he found about half of the Department decked out in ill-fitting beanies that sagged across their foreheads. On an errand to Artefact Storage, he couldn’t help but notice the addition to Sonja’s clipboard, a crisscross pattern of thread that made Jon dizzy just looking at it. Even the Library, the place Jon widely considered to be the Institute’s most sacred location, was not safe. As Diana scolded him for his overdue books, Jon’s gaze latched onto the sock-scarf-thing draped around her neck, an almost exact replica of the one that Martin had given him.
There was even one terrifying moment when Jon had brushed by Elias in the lobby and could have sworn that something bulging and suspiciously yarn-shaped was stuffed into one of his pockets, but certainly the paranoid delusions were getting to him at that point.
It was Jon himself who received the majority of Martin’s creations. Fingerless gloves that were missing a finger, blankets that easily qualified as safety hazards, shapeless clumps of wool that Jon was not creative enough to assign a practical use for or find aesthetic value in. It sort of reminded Jon of a cat dragging in dead birds and rodents to dump at its owner’s feet—thoughtful and well-intentioned but ultimately highly unpleasant.
Every time Martin approached with that sheepish smile, Jon had himself convinced that this would be the time the words came out as rehearsed. Every time, he would remember Martin’s torch sweeping the hallway, Martin padding into his office because there was nothing lonelier than lying awake in the dark, and every time, Jon couldn’t bring himself to tell Martin the truth.
Still, Jon had it under control. Sure, it had been a week, and sure, out of hundreds of the Institute’s other employees, not a single one had the heart to confront Martin, and sure, Jon could never seem to do this right. Really, he was starting to think that maybe he wasn’t Jon enough to do this anymore.
And maybe it wasn’t as awful as Jon had initially assumed. Martin’s manic knitting was a healthier coping mechanism than a lot of the other ones out there, and while his handiwork wasn’t very good, it was still halfway to functional and undeniably warm and often smelled like Martin (which was definitely not oddly comforting).
Oh, God.
Suddenly, it was all getting to be a bit much for Jon.
It was one of those late nights, Jon knew, bracing for the knock before it fell in a soft patter against his door.
Martin poked his head inside Jon’s office, eyes darting apprehensively as if he were doing something wrong, a trespasser caught red-handed.
Impatience coiled in Jon’s chest, just below that lump in his throat, clogged with lies and procrastinated truths and that strange guilt, the one with wings and thorns. Something wrathful was wrapped there too, although its anger was trained on Jon, not Martin. Seizing at this feeling, Jon gestured at Martin, granting permission to enter before he could even think to ask.
“I could use the company,” Jon said as Martin pulled out the chair and sat across for him.
It was a vulnerable admission, and Martin looked surprised to have heard it, but they were both tired and it was safe in here, just the two of them, so Jon decided that it was okay.
“Me too,” Martin said, his voice shaped by a smile and raspy from sleep or lack of it.
This was when Jon realised that it was not a stack of files that Martin had brought with him, but a ball of yarn and his knitting needles, already enmeshed in another project.
Jon tried to focus on his laptop screen, tried to prevent his eyes from wandering away from the interview transcript he was supposed to be proofreading, but with Martin sitting beside him, stitching together some garment of doom, Jon couldn’t help feeling like he was complicit. An accessory to whatever knitting-related crimes Martin was committing.
There was also the annoyance of the knitting needles clacking together clumsily as Martin channeled his nervous energy into the tools, stabbing holes in Jon’s already threadbare tolerance.
It was too late, in all senses of the word, for Jon not to be perilously honest. “Martin, we need to talk.”
Martin’s hands froze instantly.
Jon sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose between his fingers. “About your knitting.”
Martin set the needles down, and they were hardly fearsome weapons but the surge of relief that swept through Jon just then didn’t seem to know that.
“Look, I know they’re bad,” Martin said.
Jon stared at him, not sure whether to argue or agree with this statement. “You—you do?”
Martin laughed, delirious and sleep-deprived. “Yeah, I thought it would be simple, you know? Doing something with my hands, making myself useful, creating from scratch, but they all come out just wrong. ” He motioned at the half-finished blob of snarled thread abandoned on Jon’s desk. “I didn’t have it in me to unravel them and start over, so they started piling up in document storage, like—like these fuzzy trophies of failure, and they made me feel like—”
Martin shook his head, eyes downcast, forehead creased.
“Like you can’t do anything right?” Jon supplied. He knew the feeling intimately.
Martin nodded, no pretense, no hidden sarcasm.
“That’s why I started giving them away,” he confessed. “I thought it would be easier if I didn’t have to look at them. I was expecting—I don’t know, a few gentle rejections? I didn’t think everyone would tiptoe around me like this.”
Martin glanced at Jon, his face flushing. “God, I know it’s pathetic but it does almost make me feel better. Not the collective suffering, just the fact that they care enough to wear a jumper with three sleeves or a sock-scarf for me.”
Jon snorted at this. “I don’t think Tim’s taken that jumper off all week.”
Martin shrugged, a giggle bubbling up from his chest.
Jon pointed an accusing finger at him. “I think you do like the suffering.”
“No, I—” Martin protested half-heartedly. “Well, maybe a little.”
Martin grinned, first a small twitch of his lips, then all encompassing and fierce in a way that made Jon feel warm all over and slightly itchy even though he was no longer bundled in Martin’s knitwear. He scratched at his neck distractedly, wondering if this was something to worry about.
“You could always try out another hobby,” Jon suggested. “Preferably one with less needles.”
Martin pouted in mock disappointment. “Aw, really? I was thinking crochet next.”
“Perhaps it would be best if you stuck with poetry for now.”
Martin hummed in agreement, and stood, gathering up the needles and the yarn. “Thank you, Jon,” he said. “For the honesty.”
“Erm, no problem,” Jon said because in the end it hadn’t been such a big deal.
Martin slipped out of Jon’s office, presumably on his way back to document storage to pick apart his remaining work into harmless yarn.
Jon spun lazily in his chair, waiting until Martin’s footsteps faded down the corridor to check his desk drawer and confirm that the sock-scarf thing was still there.
It was tangled and hideous and lovely, and it earned him a few odd looks in the weeks after the Institute’s purge of all items wrought by Martin’s knitting needles, but Jon continued to wear it when he remembered to. After all, it was very green and it still smelled like Martin—like cryptic nods and chamomile and confessions. Martin would smile at him like a secret when Jon wore it, at once conspiratorial and pleased and mortified. Most of the time, Jon could convince himself that the rash it gave him was worth it.