There's something off about the school, Jon decides. It takes him until his second-to-last year to decide it, but the question of how long he's known it is a different one.

Only as long as he's admitted it to himself, maybe. Or perhaps since the moment he set foot inside these walls; eleven years old and freshly facing down the loss of his grandmother on top of the parents he'd lost before he could remember, admitted on a scholarship that there had been no mention before her death of her ever submitting him for. It wasn't as though he'd been able to refuse. What other options would he have had, under the circumstances?

So maybe he'd known, then, from the start. Maybe he'd sensed something larger than himself as he stepped past the threshold; maybe he'd known, somewhere inside of himself that looks far too deeply and knows more than he ought to, that something in this place was looking back at him; maybe he'd felt the thread that had pulled him in, nominally weaved from mundane circumstance alone but in truth something far beyond it, some inexorable web that calls to mind the waiting creature behind a door he's never seen and at the end of a book he's never read.

He hadn't used to think like this. But Magnus Hall seems to call it out of him, great spools of thought like unwound tape, and the walls seem to drink it in and there is something like a pride in him - at him, never from him - when he lets it happen.

There is something like a pride in Elias Bouchard, when Jon lets it happen, though the other ought to have no way of knowing the thoughts that run through Jon's mind, overwrought and ridiculous and still running ever faster through his head like some great beast on the hunt.

Elias is… an oddity in himself. The year above Jon, top of his class and perfectly put-together at all times, and he'd never once given Jon a second glance until Jon had become a prefect in his fifth year. And then he'd watched him constantly whenever they occupied the same places, always looking away when Jon looked too closely - he'd say Elias had been watching when he thought Jon wasn't looking, except that he knows, has known, had known that somehow Elias knew full well that Jon was entirely aware of it. Still, he'd not actually spoken to Jon beyond generic pleasantries in prefect meetings.

And then had come this year, Jon's penultimate and Elias' final, and Elias had shifted once again. Now he - head boy, still top of his class, still perfectly put-together - seems to spend every free moment focused on Jon and Jon alone. He speaks to him constantly, asks him questions about his life and seems to devour Jon's every clipped, abrupt answer.

He tells him, Jon notes, nothing about himself that isn't either immediately evident or verifiably untrue.

Jon doesn't understand it, and it eats at him. Not the lack of truth - let Elias lie to him, it's not as though he'd be the first schoolmate to do so and the only difference is that his lies ring like truths to a boy who usually feels the breath of a lie before it's even spoken - but the attention. The eyes on him, he had been able to deal with, used to the sensation of watchfulness that permeates these walls. The interactions are different, though. The involvement. It feels out of place from Elias, and it niggles at Jon like a loose tooth until he feels as though he thinks of little else.

(He asks, once, whether Elias is trying to make up for lost time, trying to squeeze seven years' worth of interactions into the final year before he'll be gone. The words feel like they're buzzing against his teeth and Elias only stares at him, eyes too bright and pupils too wide like some great hunting predator, and then says, "Don't be ridiculous, Jon. I'm not leaving Magnus Hall. Headmaster Wright is going to hire me to be his assistant next year, it's all decided."

He laughs, then, as though he's told some great joke. And then he simply returns to attacking Jon's most recent essay draft with a red pen as though he can't feel Jon's eyes fixed on him, can't feel Jon watching him as though, if he stares deeply enough, he might be able to dig an actual fucking answer out of Elias Bouchard.)

"Jon," Elias says to him one day out of the blue as they sit together on Elias' bed, his voice low and urgent in that way he gets sometimes. As though they're on some sort of deadline, despite the fact that they're not doing anything. As though nothing could possibly be more important than what he's about to say, what he's about to ask, although it's never been more than questions about Jon's childhood or about what he's feeling in this moment or, more rarely, what he thinks of a particular classmate or member of staff.

(He remembers, suddenly, Elias asking him what he thought of Professor Leitner, their English teacher at the time. He remembers, three days later, walking into Leitner's office to hand in an extra assignment and finding the insides of the man's head spread halfway across the room.

He sees a flash, unbidden, of Elias' perfectly pressed uniform rumpled and spattered with blood and his chest heaving with exertion. Of a few perfect flecks of blood sprayed above his lip, close enough that if he were to extend his tongue, he'd be able to lick them away.

It's an awfully detailed mental image. He can feel Elias' eyes on him, bright and focused.)

"Jon," Elias says again, and Jon's eyes snap to his. His throat has gone dry, and so he only nods.

"Jon, I want you to tell me everything you've ever noticed about Magnus Hall."

It's meaningless. Jon has been here nearly six years. There are thousands of things he's noticed about the school, more than he could ever list or remember, and Elias has to know that his question is impossible and meaningless.

Except that it isn't, because Jon knows exactly what he's asking. What's wrong with the school. What Jon has seen, what Jon hasn't seen, what Jon could never possibly have known and yet, nonetheless, does. There's still more there than Jon could truly list, but Elias settles back against the wall beside the bed as if he's in it for the long haul and only watches him. Waits.

Jon hunches up against the pillows. He doesn't want to answer. Doesn't want to make real the things that rattle around inside his head. Doesn't want to make real the things that walk around this school, as if by hiding under the blankets like a child he could fix this place or, perhaps, make it something that has never needed fixing.

You know better than that, Jon, Elias doesn't say, because Jon hasn't put words to his thoughts and so how could Elias possibly have a response to them? But he watches Jon with those wide and pale green eyes that Jon could swear ought to be brown - for all that they've been green for as long as Jon has ever known him - and the voice that chastises him inside of his head for his hesitance sounds so perfectly like Elias that he might as well have actually said it.

And so, though he hesitates another moment with his breath hovering trapped behind his teeth, Jon gives in.

He doesn't so much pick what to tell Elias as he lets it pour from him like some great torrent of dark water, in meandering sentences that Elias hangs onto with rapt attention. That Elias listens to with his head cocked, eyes wide and unblinking for longer than ought to be possible. Surely at some point he must actually blink without Jon's notice.

(Surely.)

He tells Elias about the girl who so frequently wanders about the grounds, picking her way through the fog of a bright summer's day and finding her way back only by the stones of the graveyard that the school chapel does not have. About the overly-attentive classmates in his biology class, the ones who ask questions about the human body that ought to be self-evident and then laugh with horrible, childish delight at the answers.

He goes on for a while about the identical twins with different faces and different surnames, who sit in the back of his classes and carve spiralling patterns into their desks with the soft pads of their fingers, and who never once leave through the same door as their classmates. Who were not twins, Jon is certain, when he first started at Magnus Hall.

There's the janitor who deals with the not-infrequent insect infestations in one of the dorms, and the scent of burning, sickly flesh that follows behind him. The girl who sits alone in the computer labs for hours and hours to watch videos on disconnected monitors, whose blood has left so many of the keys tacky and sticky where they're not missing entirely.

He hardly spares a breath for the girl who trails dust behind her and smiles with dirt in her teeth. She offers nothing to the beast inside of him, and so he turns his mind away.

His old friend is no improvement, though. He stumbles over his words for the first time, then, telling Elias of the disappointment in her eyes when they meet his own in the hallways. It isn't fair, he insists, his breath hitching on something like a sob, because she is an old and dear friend who Jon has never once known.

He fares little better on the two who roam the halls at night. Jon has never broken curfew in his life, never heard more than their footsteps past his door, but his heart still thumps in his chest like some desperate running thing when he speaks of them, and he ends up leaned forward and clutching at Elias' shirt desperately with his breath coming in ragged gasps.

Elias only lifts one hand to card his fingers through Jon's hair, silent. The touch all but undoes Jon, and he practically collapses into it, the hands against Elias' shirt uncurling slowly.

There are so many more things he could tell Elias about. The girl who was his friend until she was someone else entirely. The boy who was the most popular boy in class until he started smelling like the cloves his brother is full of. The boy who had followed Jon around until he met Peter Lukas, and then only showed up in classes out of the corner of Jon's eye.

The words fail him, though, and he ends up just staring desperately up at Elias' face, into those wide and pale eyes. There's a moment that feels as though it could stretch into forever, Jon trembling on the edge of some great and yawning abyss; and then Elias smiles down at him, slow and indulgent, and something tips inside of him.

(Jon could not truthfully say whether he's been pulled back from that abyss or pushed into it. He could not truthfully say he cares.)

(There are so many things Jon knows in this moment, has always known and will always know and had only closed his eyes against for a years-long moment; for respite from their horrors, to savor their taste, to better know them with eyes wide open. There are so many things he could say to Elias, so many points of before-and-after that he could single out. Himself. Elias. The world.

But the befores are long gone - no matter the blood that runs in Jon's veins here instead of the ink that could fill them, no matter Elias' little jokes about the headmaster, no matter the borrowed words that Jon can still taste the shape of on his teeth if he stretches his mind back far enough into the murk of what once was and is no longer - and the afters are well-established. Comfortable.

Perhaps it means he's a monster, that he only tilts his head and lets Elias' fingers go back to carding through his hair, to face this knowledge and know that he would not change it. Perhaps it means, simply, that he is only a boy. And should he not be, in this place?

"Oh, Jon," Elias murmurs above him, his voice soft and amused and so very, very fond.

He doesn't say anything more. Neither of them need him to.)