Work Text:
It is a strange, tense peace. Jon sits on the grass in the sun and he isn’t sure if he feels the weight of the eye on him or not. He curls up on the couch and drinks tea and he isn’t sure if it has a metallic aftertaste like a spool of magnetic tape or not. He holds Martin’s hand and he isn’t sure if it clings to his own palm just slightly, as if it has been covered in a thin film of glue, if it moves sometimes with jerky little motions that are not entirely its own, if its warmth conceals a great hunger, or not. But they are safer than they have been in a long time, in the small house, and happier too, and so it isn’t hard for Jon to put these things out of his mind, even if he has to sort of stomp on them to do it.
It is much harder for Jon to stop thinking about the statements, and less than a week has gone by before Martin asks him about them. “Are you ever, you know...hungry?” Martin talks with his hands. Jon hasn’t noticed before, or if he has he attributed it to anxiety. But now when Martin speaks his hands make wide, sweeping arcs out from his body, his fingers dance like he is playing a series of very small pianos. It is charming but, occasionally, confusing.
“What do you mean, am I hungry?” Jon says, mirroring Martin’s last gesture, a wriggling movement something like a salmon swimming upstream. “We’re eating right now.” They have about a half-dozen half-opened packets of snacks from the convenience store in town spread out in front of them on the table, and several more bags of them stuffed into the cabinets. Home cooking would probably fit more with the idyllic mood that seems to be building, but they really are both very tired.
“Oh, no, not all this,” says Martin. He pokes a finger into something incredibly orange. “I mean, you know…” He leans forward, just a bit. “Statements.”
“Statements,” Jon repeats. Even hearing the word does something funny to his head, like saliva is pooling in the base of his skull. “No. Not yet, anyway. I’m hoping that, well, now that we’re out of the Institute, maybe I won’t need them.”
“But when you went to the States—”
“I know, Martin.” Across the table from him, Martin gives a little huff of breath, and Jon bites down hard on his own tongue. “I— I’m sorry.” They are apologizing so much to each other these days that there is almost a rhythm to it. Jon waits a beat, and then Martin nods.
“It’s alright.” He’s begun to systematically pick apart the orange thing. “I know you don’t want to need them.”
“I really don’t,” says Jon.
“But what about when- What about if you do need them?” Martin says. “What will we do then?”
Jon’s tea has grown cold in front of him, but he picks it up and takes a sip of it anyway, just to prove that he still wants to. That he still can. “We don’t need to worry about that yet,” he says, and Martin sighs, and nods, and passes him the rest of the orange thing.
…
They spend a lot of time touching nowadays. Not with any particular intent — they aren’t necking like teenagers, they aren’t necking at all for that matter — but just sort of staying connected, a hand on a shoulder or a hip pressed up against a hip or Martin’s arms wrapped around Jon’s chest. Sometimes Jon will forget they’re even doing it. Martin will stand up and walk to the kitchen and Jon will just follow him, his fingers still caught in the crook of Martin’s elbow and his nose in his book, not registering the change until he feels cold tile beneath his feet. Today Martin takes advantage of this and leads Jon to a secluded spot not too far from the cabin. (Jon notices as soon as they’re out the door, but Martin hasn’t laughed like this in a long time, so he keeps his eyes on his book, reading the same line over and over.) Martin snaps his fingers under Jon’s nose and Jon gives him a couple of exaggerated blinks before the two of them settle down under a very nice, very old-looking tree. Its bark is pitted and scarred, and there’s a hollow in its trunk just large enough for the two of them to lean into. “This was here years before the house was even built,” says Jon, as Martin begins to unpack the knapsack he’s started wearing in lieu of, or maybe in addition to, shoving corkscrews through his belt loops. “Years before there was anything here, really. No, wait—”
“Jon, don’t worry about it.” Martin hands him a thermos that Jon knows contains Earl Grey without needing to call on any kind of supernatural force. “I like hearing about things you...learn.”
“It doesn’t, I don’t know, freak you out?”
Martin grins at him. “Would you like it to? ‘Oh, the spooooky Archivist and his terrible powers, knowing things about trees.’”
Jon laughs in spite of himself. “I wouldn’t mind being a bit more intimidating. But not to you, of course. Never to you.”
Martin smiles at that, but turns away, and begins rummaging around for his poetry notebook. Jon has the vague impression that he has said something wrong. The Eye, for all its omniscience, has never given him any kind of insight into social interaction. And he has asked. The best he’s ever gotten was, for some reason, the uncontrollable urge to begin reciting from a rhyming children’s picture book about dealing with divorce. Apparently Tim’s parents had experienced some marital difficulties following the birth of their second son. This knowledge had not helped the situation.
Now, he turns back to his book. Martin will talk when he’s ready, he thinks. That’s usually the way these things go.
And really, he’s enjoying himself. The day is warm, and he feels the sun on his face like he hasn’t in years, with the way the chill of the Institute seems to stick to him. And the air is thick with the smell of grass and the buzzing of insects, and for a moment Jon lets himself think that all of it, the pain and the loss and the death and the hunger, was worth it for leading him to this.
“It’s strange, isn’t it,” says Martin. “How close we’ve gotten to each other.” Jon looks over at him. His notebook has fallen open in his lap, and there are no words on the page, only dozens and dozens of little squares, as uniform as a field of headstones. “I did find you intimidating, when I first met you. Not for any supernatural reasons,” he says over the noise Jon makes in his throat. “Just...you were smart and you were, you were good-looking and you always acted like you knew exactly what you were doing and you were, well, you could be a bit brusque sometimes, but.” He draws another square. “But then I spent more time with you, and I saw that you could really be quite sweet when you wanted to.” He glances up, and Jon tries his best to keep his face from doing something terrible, like blushing. Martin looks back down. “But even with all that, with everything… We don’t really know each other at all, do we?”
With a rush like falling, hunger blinds Jon. To Know Martin — to tear him open and scoop out everything that he is, like eating an orange whole, sticky and pulpy and dripping with every shade of feeling, every half-remembered dream — he jerks backwards, bashes his head against the tree trunk, and when he opens his eyes Martin is still talking. “I mean, we’ve never spent time together outside of work, for one thing. Not before this. Although I guess we have, well, expanded the definition of ‘work’ a bit. Blowing up a warehouse full of mannequins and all. And we could have gotten to know each other better after that, but you were—”
His voice breaks off into a sob. The air has grown lighter somehow, no longer enough to hold them to the earth. It smells of the sea. “No,” says Jon. “Martin, no.”
Martin lets out a sigh. It is the same color as the fog that now surrounds them, a wispy grey that blurs everything into abstraction. Jon lunges forward and grabs the sides of Martin’s face. But even as he digs his fingers in, willing himself an anchor, he can’t think of anything to say, any kind of refutation. Martin is right.
But then Martin, his voice still faint, smoke still pouring from his mouth, puts his hand over one of Jon’s and says, “Can I please kiss you?”
Jon blinks, and swallows down the fog he feels rising in his own throat. “Yes,” he says. “I would like it if you did.”
They kiss for a long time. Not deeply, not hungrily with spit and hot breath, but slowly, steadily, leaning against each other’s foreheads, trading exhalations. Jon can taste it when Martin starts crying, the tears dribbling down both of their faces, and he can feel it when Martin starts laughing instead.
“Now that I think about it,” says Martin, not moving his mouth from Jon’s, “we have plenty of time to get to know each other now.”
“We’re certainly making a good attempt at it,” says Jon, and he barely has a chance to taste the warm, clear air before Martin is kissing him again.
…
They spend a lot of time kissing, after that. Carefully, at first, sitting on the couch and touching only at their lips and their bent knees, and then with abandon. Jon kisses Martin when Martin first wakes up next to him, hair rumpled, face streaked with drool, eyes soft in the morning light. Martin kisses Jon when he’s halfway through a sentence, and by the time they’re done Jon’s forgotten the end of it. Jon kisses Martin on the back of his hand, on each of his knuckles, on the cheek and on the join between his neck and shoulder. Martin kisses Jon on his closed eyelids, so gentle that Jon can barely feel it but he still sees stars. Sometimes they both go in for a kiss at the same time, Jon turning his head only to be brought up short by Martin’s mouth. There’s a rhythm to this too, one Jon’s not sure how he learned, and when Jon kisses Martin he can feel it thrumming in his chest like a second heart.
Jon had never been much for kissing, before now. All damp, slobbery heat, like sticking your face into a bowl of oatmeal. But Martin, besides being Martin and therefore the exception to lots of things where Jon is concerned, has a nice mouth, dry and not too warm. Martin finds this hilarious, when Jon tells him. “Sounds like something you’d read on the back of a wine bottle.” But he sweeps Jon up into a kiss anyway, and so Jon is able to ignore the way his mind jumps from wine to cigarettes to cravings to statements and, well. He’s had worse distractions.
...
Jon’s not surprised to find himself in the kitchen at 3 a.m., on his knees in front of the cabinets and digging through the bags from the convenience store. He hasn’t been sleeping much lately, he thinks. The dark blurs the edges between his own restlessness and someone else’s nightmares, the whispers of the Eye twist his thoughts until he feels sick with disorientation. So he wants a damn cigarette. It’s better than a lot of other things he could want.
“Jon?” Martin walks more quietly than he used to, a side effect of his encounter with the Lonely or his own cautiousness, and Jon knocks his head against the bottom of the countertop. “Are you alright, Jon?”
“I’m fine. Go back to bed.” Jon rubs the sore spot on his scalp. The pain is clarifying, and for a wild moment Jon thinks he won’t need the cigarettes at all, just the lighter. Martin puts a hand on his shoulder, and Jon forces the thought out of his mind.
“Are you sure? What are you looking for?”
“I just— did you get any cigarettes, when you went to the shop?”
“You— You said you’d quit.”
“I said I was trying to— Never mind.” He leans back into Martin’s hand, tries to find comfort in the weight of it. “I couldn’t sleep. That’s all.”
“Right.” Martin sits down next to him. “Do you always smoke when you can’t sleep?”
“That or hot milk,” Jon says dryly. “Depends on how much I’ve decided to care about my lungs.”
Martin gives something between a sigh and a laugh. “I guess it won’t hurt them now, anyway.”
“I guess it won’t.”
“Do you...want me to buy you cigarettes?”
Jon chews on the inside of his lip. Weighs the ecstasy of satisfying a craving against the humiliation of giving in. “No,” he says finally. “I probably shouldn’t start again. Took me long enough to quit them the first time.”
“Right,” says Martin. He takes a breath, and then says all in a rush, “Do you want me to get you statements?”
Jon bites the inside of his cheek. Makes himself focus on the logistics of Martin’s idea, rather than the sudden longing it inspires. “Where would you get statements? Can’t exactly pop down to the shop and grab a six-pack of trauma.”
“No,” says Martin. “But, well, I have plenty of—”
“No.”
“Jon, listen.”
Jon stands up, letting Martin’s hand fall from his shoulder. “Absolutely not. I’ve already— You’ve given me enough.”
Martin stands up as well, and he’s a good deal taller than Jon, so it actually feels like he’s making a point. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I—” Jon can’t look at him. “Everything bad that’s happened to you is because of me! I practically made your life — everyone’s lives — into a feast for the Beholding, and now I get to, what, suck the marrow out of the bones?”
Martin draws in a breath, and Jon thinks he might be about to cry but when he can finally bring himself to make eye contact he realizes that Martin is actually, astonishingly, furious. “Believe it or not, Jon,” he says, in a sort of strangled whisper-yell even though there’s no one else to hear them, “I made my own decisions! I didn’t just stand there and wet myself while you threw nightmares at me. I chose to help stop the Unknowing. I chose to work with Lucas.”
“Oh, then I suppose I was only incidental to all of this,” Jon spits back. “Just turning into a monster, nothing to see there.” Jon readies himself for a fight, figures it’ll take the edge off for tonight at least, give him something else to think about, but at his last words something in Martin’s face breaks.
“Oh, Jon,” he says. “You’re not a monster.”
Jon isn’t sure how to respond to that. “I’m not human,” he manages.
“It’s not the same thing,” says Martin. “Look, I, I’m not saying that you’ve never hurt me. I’m not saying that having someone’s bad day for lunch isn’t a bit strange. But you’re not— You’re still you, Jon. Nothing you can turn into will change that.”
“I think you’re being a tad optimistic,” says Jon, but it’s weak. He’s weak. He holds out his hands, and Martin takes them, and Jon closes his eyes and tries to feel loved.
“Now then,” Martin says. “Statement of—”
Jon’s eyes pop open. “No!”
“But—”
“I don’t,” Jon takes a breath. “I’m not—” The scent of Martin’s almost-confession hangs in the air like the hum before lightning. Jon has to swallow several times before he can speak properly. “I’m not disagreeing with anything you said. But I can’t take them anymore. I can’t need them.”
“But you do need them,” says Martin.
“But I don’t want to need them,” says Jon, and his voice cracks.
“Alright.” Martin wraps his arms around Jon, settles his chin atop Jon’s head. “I guess you can at least try, can’t you?”
“I can do it,” says Jon. “I have to. No statements.”
“No statements,” Martin agrees, and Jon doesn’t let himself Know if he means it or not.
…
They have a good couple of days. They do. They describe the plots of their favorite movies to each other, because the only piece of technology in the cabin is some kind of satellite radio, and they agree that while Jon’s remembrances are flawlessly accurate, Martin’s have a poetry to them that is more than worth the glaring continuity errors. (“I still can’t believe I made you cry with Sharknado,” Martin says. “The sharks didn’t want to be in the tornado!” Jon says. “I was being sympathetic.”) One night they do decide to cook, buy superfluous amounts of lentils and flour and a dozen other ingredients from one of the shops in town and teach each other to make their favorite foods. Jon hasn’t really cooked since things at the Institute got bad, but he still remembers those slow, warm evenings making dhal with his grandmother, remembers the air suffused with the scent of cumin and chillies simmering in oil, the exact consistency of a perfectly cooked lentil crushed between his fingertips, and the steps come back to him with the ease of breath. (Martin, when pressed, says that he remembers googling ‘how to make kugel’ and setting off his smoke alarm.) Anyway, Jon can Know anything they forget, and he ignores the way Knowing is beginning to feel like drinking cold water after being thirsty for a very long time, how it seems to relieve some kind of growing ache in his body that only comes back stronger when he stops. They eat sitting on the floor, slumped up against the cabinets, and they don’t do the dishes until the next day. They catch each other up on everything that’s happened to them in the past couple of years, pointedly ignoring anything that involves the Institute. Jon tells Martin about the time he lost his glasses and had to pretend he’d gotten contacts for a week. Martin tells Jon about the time he bought and then killed five houseplants in increasingly quick succession, and how when he’d gone back the sixth time, the clerk had laid a hand on his shoulder and said “Maybe some people just aren’t meant to have succulents.” Jon tells Martin about the time he stayed up three nights in a row, just to see if he could, and briefly forgot how faucets worked. Martin tells Jon about the time he was home alone, and it was late, and he heard a knock at his door, three taps, firm and strident, and Jon says “No, no, no, no, no,” before he even realizes words are coming out of his mouth.
“Jon. Jon?” Martin’s voice is coming from far away. He puts a hand on the small of Jon’s back, holding him (anchoring him), and Jon forces himself to breathe, to pull his own hands down from over his ears. Somehow they’ve moved to the floor, leaning up against the couch. “Jon?” Martin says again. “It was a vacuum salesman. I don’t know why he showed up at one in the morning but he was just a— a really weird vacuum salesman.”
“Right,” says Jon. “Right.” He takes another breath, tries for a laugh. “Sorry. You were just sounding a bit statement-y, and, well, I, I’d really like to— To not—”
“I’m sorry,” says Martin. “I should have thought—”
“You shouldn’t have to think about that,” says Jon. “It’s— Finish your story.”
Martin gives an uneasy little chuckle. He’s rubbing stuttering circles onto Jon’s back, and Jon can tell — Jon can tell, he doesn’t Know — that he wants to inquire further. But Jon doesn’t feel like explaining anything else, especially concerning the specific entity he’d thought Martin had been about to encounter, so he just nods his head, and Martin says, “Well, that was, that was pretty much the whole thing. He asked me if I was busy, I said I was, he asked me what I could possibly be busy with at one in the morning, I said ‘Your mum’ and shut the door in his face.”
“You— “ Jon snorts, loudly, and Martin gives a relieved sigh. “You told him you were busy with his mum?”
“In my defense, I was very tired.”
“Can’t have been too tired, though.”
“Jon.”
Jon laughs again, just to see Martin smile. “Speaking of being tired, do you want to turn in soon?”
“Fine by me,” Martin says. “Are you sure you’re alright?”
There’s no point in dragging this out any longer than he already has. “I’m fine.”
“Jon…” Worn-out, familiar, exasperated but somehow fond. Jon knows he shouldn’t enjoy being worried about, but occasionally he does, just a bit. When it’s Martin.
“I’ll be fine after I get some sleep,” he amends, and wills himself not to be lying.
…
Jon starts picking his lip again. He’s grateful, at first, for his body’s recall of this action, the specific little motion that quiets his brain when it’s yelling for more more more now now now. He was a prolific skin-picker when he first quit smoking; had forced himself to walk with his hands shoved deep into his pockets, had taped a towel over his bathroom mirror so that he wouldn’t be able to see any tempting blemishes. This time he doesn’t bother with any of that. He has bigger problems, bigger scars. And anyway, every other nightmare this side of the Atlantic has gotten a chance to tear something off of him; it’s his turn now.
“Aren’t you—” Martin is watching him intently, his mouth twisted up. “Don’t you think— Should it really be bleeding like that?”
Jon scrubs the back of his hand over his mouth. “I’m sorry, but it’s the only thing that— that works. You don’t have to stare.”
“No, no, not that,” says Martin quickly. “But you told me, when you were trying, to, erm, cut off your finger, that it didn’t really…”
“Huh.” Jon looks down at his pinky, which doesn’t even twinge any more, and then runs his tongue across his lower lip, which very much does. “Maybe that’s a good sign?”
Martin buys him a chapstick.
…
Martin decides to teach Jon to write poetry, and although he won’t admit it Jon knows it’s because he wants him to have something else to do with his hands. “I hope you don’t expect me to sit and write about my feelings all day,” says Jon, adding a bit of extra poshness to his voice so that Martin will think he’s joking.
“Hush up and pick a place,” Martin says.
“Anywhere but here?”
“A specific place,” says Martin, sounding entirely too patient. “That’s what I always start with.”
“Oh?” Jon sits up a bit, and winces as the rough wood of the fencepost he’s leaning on scrapes the back of his neck. They’re avoiding the tree, in spite of what Jon imagines is its suitably picturesque beauty, for mutually unspoken reasons. This is nice enough. Big, wide-open field, the occasional cow. “Why do you start with a place?”
“Well, places tend to have a lot of really concrete memories tied to them, you know? I mean, so do smells, but you try writing from a smell.” He wrinkles his nose. “It’s just that you want to be very specific and focused when you’re writing a poem, or it comes out cliche.”
“I didn’t know you put that much thought into your poems,” Jon says, and then realizes that this is an insult. “But, I, I read them very quickly,” he adds. “Skimmed them, more like.”
Martin leans towards him. “You read my poems?”
“I might have— I’m going to write about an airplane,” Jon says. “The one I took to the States when I— when I went to the States.”
“Good choice.” Martin sits back, but Jon can tell he’s only delaying the question. “What was it like? How would you describe it?”
“Um. Bad.”
Martin lifts an eyebrow. “Bad.”
“It was. Gave me a headache.”
“A headache! That’s good. I mean, not good, but—” Martin scribbles something down in his notebook. “It’s a good sensory detail. And it can symbolize a lot of things.”
“Versatile,” says Jon, but now that he’s thinking about it he didn’t get the headache from the plane, did he? Even then he must have been going into withdrawal, the lack of statements a gaping hole in his mind, pulling everything towards its center like some dying star. And then when he’d finally gotten a statement it had felt like—
“Jon?” Martin nudges his arm, gives a sharp little laugh. “You were zoning out for a minute there. What other details can you give me?”
“Right, right,” says Jon. “Well, it smelled bad. The air was kind of dry. It was pretty cold. I had to, um, I had to ask for a blanket. It was a red blanket, I think.” Martin does not write a word of this down, and Jon, sensing that he has not quite hit the mark, says, “You wrote some nice poems about the cold, didn’t you?”
Martin’s face breaks into a smile. “I did! You remembered! Which one was your favorite?”
“Um—” Jon goes for flattering. “The one about you.”
Martin taps a finger against his notebook. “The one about...me?”
“You know,” says Jon, wondering frantically why the otherworldly being that cursed him with knowledge has chosen this exact moment to leave his head. “The one about the boy in the snow.”
“Oh, that one. That’s not about me, Jon.”
“But it’s in first person. ‘I am walking—’”
“No, Jon,” says Martin, sounding less annoyed than he is overjoyed to explain the intricacies of the craft. “The ‘I’ is the speaker of a poem. The narrator. You can’t just assume that every first-person poem is autobiographical.”
“Then who is the poem about?”
“The boy that’s lost in the snow.”
Jon takes this in. “I’m not sure if I... get poetry.”
Martin laughs. “Guess you’re more for literary nonfiction.”
“Nonfiction, I’ll agree with,” says Jon. “Literary, on the other hand…”
“Oh, come on.” Martin closes his notebook, apparently having given up on introducing Jon to the fine art of stringing nice-sounding words together. “You have to admit they were well-written. I mean, it felt like you were there, for some of them. And not just because it...felt like you were there.”
Jon snorts, but acknowledges, silently, that Martin is right. There is a smoothness to the statements, like the way thoughts before sleeping flow into dreams, dragging you inexorably deeper into unconsciousness. A pull, like an undertow, like he’s drowning as he’s reading them, in the way that drowning turns to bliss the moment before you die. There’s nothing like that in Jon’s mind now, no knowledge, nothing to drink. He’s trapped in the raw bottom of a drained lake, digging and digging and finding nothing to quench his thirst.
“Stop!” The word is so loud it hurts, and Jon tries to get away, but something is holding him there. “Jon, stop. You need to stop now.” Martin. That’s Martin. And Jon — no — Jon is hurting him, he’s tearing him apart.
He opens his eyes. His hands are up in front of his face, so that he can’t see anything beyond them, blood smeared across his fingers in dull red streaks. “Oh god,” he says, as if whatever is watching him needs to be called. “No. No.”
“Jon.” Martin says again, and, well, it doesn’t sound like he’s bleeding out. He’s also got his hands around Jon’s wrists, squeezing so tightly that Jon can see his own fingernails starting to pale. Slowly, he pulls Jon’s hands down into his lap, and he lets them rest there but he doesn’t let go. “I’m alright,” he says softly. Something twists in Jon’s heart at that, that Martin just knows. “See? Not a scratch on me.”
“Right,” says Jon.
“You, on the other hand…” Martin looks down, and Jon follows his gaze to his own arms. His sleeves are shredded, and the skin underneath that is scored with long cuts, deeper than he would have expected. A few of them are sort of wobbly at the end; Martin must have had some trouble getting him to stop.
“I did this to myself?” Jon says.
“You did,” says Martin, his voice breaking a little. Jon moves to comfort him, but his hands are still trapped and his arms hurt like hell when he tries to pull out of Martin’s grasp.
“Shit. Martin, please—”
Martin drops his hands, but doesn’t look happy about it. “What just happened, Jon?”
“I got hungry. I mean—” He holds his arms out from his body, palms up, in what he hopes looks like a gesture of surrender but is mostly an attempt to avoid his skin touching anything heavier than air. “Not, not hungry for a sandwich, but—”
“I know,” says Martin, his voice heavy.
“Are you—” Jon doesn’t know why he asks. “Are you angry at me?”
“I’m scared.”
“Of me?”
“I wish. Here.” Martin stands up, then grabs Jon around the ribcage and heaves him to his feet.
“Wh— I’m not mortally wounded,” says Jon.
“Yet,” says Martin, and it doesn’t sound at all like a joke. “Come on, I’ve got antiseptic and things back in the cabin.”
Jon is about to protest that he doesn’t really need antiseptic, but then he remembers his lip, which is in all honesty healing more slowly than it did before he had supernaturally-augmented indestructible tissue. And besides, he’s well aware that Martin likes taking care of people. Maybe a miserable half-hour of hydrogen peroxide and bandages will calm him down a bit.
But as they stumble back to the cabin (Jon does most of the stumbling), he can’t stop thinking about the last thing that Martin said.
…
And now Jon can’t stop thinking about statements. The phrase “All roads lead to Rome” comes to mind. Whatever thought he has, no matter how distantly related, will twist and leap and loop back to that want. He sits in front of one of the cabin’s small windows and thinks about what a beautiful day it is outside. Nothing like the Archives, with all their temperature-controlled chill to protect those precious statements. The fine, brittle paper of them, light as crepe and just as sweet. He changes scenery. Curls up in front of the electric fireplace with Martin and thinks of how warm they are, how close. Not as warm as the Knowing a statement pumps in his veins, of course, not as close as the bile of someone else’s fear on his lips. He tells himself reasonable things, like stop and don’t and no and I don’t care if you can do this, you will. He thinks about how long it’s been since he’s had a statement, tells himself how well he’s doing. He used to need a statement nearly every other day, didn’t he? Used to crave them until they became the absence of pain more than pleasure. And now look how long it’s been, since he’s gotten drunk off someone else’s suffering, since he’s slipped out of his own skin as easily as pulling off a glove and taken in the view from a new set of eyes. God, he wants—
He peels his lips until it hurts to talk. He paces until he’s almost too tired to think. He tries writing the damn poem about the damn airplane.
The sky is blue and clear. You can see all the way through it,
To where the distant clouds are swallowing up the horizon.
The twisted engine is loud and angry,
Like the roar of a wild animal.
The seatbelt is wrapped around my neck,
And the earth is calling me to come back.
He looks up at Martin. “Do you think it would make more sense to compare the plane to a knife, or to a worm?”
“I’m not sure if this is helping,” says Martin.
“I’m not sure if anything is helping,” says Jon.
He imagines stumbling across a statement. Just happening to find one, fresh and waiting to be told. Maybe one day he’ll go into town to do the shopping instead of Martin, and the clerk will be one of those lonely old men who likes to tell stories, and before Jon even thinks to ask — to ask him to stop — he’ll be drinking in some wretched tale of misery and woe. Maybe someone will drop off a newspaper on their doorstep with breaking news about a horrible serial murderer who’s just been captured, and Jon will skim the headlines and take in every bloody detail without even realizing what he’s doing. Maybe fear-filled tape recorders will start falling from the sky and a play button will click to a start against Jon’s thick skull before he has time to find an umbrella.
“It’s never going to stop, is it?”
Martin looks up from the book he’s reading. They’re sitting on the couch together, feet tangled up, ostensibly relaxing, except that Jon’s just tossed his own novel down on the floor with a thump. “Jon?”
“It never stopped with cigarettes. I want a cigarette every day of my life. Even after — I quit after Uni, and even when I’d been quit for two years I’d reach into my pocket sometimes, and then I’d stop and realize what I was doing. Two years and I was trying to light up again because it never goes away.” Jon laughs. “Don’t even know why I bothered quitting this time. Don’t even know why I bothered—” He sucks a breath in through his teeth. His head is pounding, with frustration or something worse he doesn’t know. “I should have just stayed in the— in the fucking Archives. Would have been fine there. All the fear I could want. Should have just shut me in and sealed the door behind me. The world is safe and the monster is happy. Perfect ending.”
“Jon,” Martin puts his book down, leans forward and puts a hand on Jon’s calf. “Jon, I’ve told you, you’re not a monster.”
“Well then I’m worse!” Jon yells. “Because I know that what I’m doing hurts people and I can stop but I don’t want to!” Martin freezes, his fingers digging into Jon’s leg. Jon stares at him, his breath coming in gasps now. “You don’t need to touch me,” he hisses.
“I want to,” says Martin, still fixed in place. “Just please don’t shout.”
“I—” Jon makes his voice so soft that it comes out more of a whisper than anything. “I’m sorry.”
Martin’s drawn shoulders slump a bit, and his grip loosens. “Thank you,” he says. “But, um, you can, you know,” he half-smiles, “find a happy medium. Vocally, I mean.”
“Right,” says Jon. “Right, right, of course, I—” It seems wrong to say sorry again, like he’s begging for something Martin shouldn’t have to give him, so he shuts his mouth and hugs his arms up to his chest, ignoring the sting. He would still very much like to yell, or even break something, but he knows that won’t help. He’s almost sick with how much that won’t help. He’d have to claw out of his own skin for any of this to end, and he’s tried that, and he can’t. He tells himself that he should calm down, then whacks a closed fist against his forehead for good measure. Maybe that will shut his brain up.
“Jon?” Martin’s voice pitches high.
Jon draws a big snorting breath in through his nose. “I’m fine,” he says, with difficulty. “I’m here. I’m not thinking about— I’m just—” He’s on the verge of tears. He hasn’t cried in front of anyone since he was a child. It’s embarrassing.
“Can I hug you?” says Martin.
“Go ahead,” says Jon, still somehow trying for brusque, but then Martin leans forward and pulls him against his chest and puts an arm on his back and a hand on the nape of his neck and Jon starts sobbing so hard he thinks he might actually throw up.
“Okay,” says Martin. “It’s okay,” and then he keeps on like that, a long stream of murmuring that doesn’t really mean anything but has the effect of making Jon burst into fresh tears every time he thinks he might stop. When he’s finally finished, he feels like a wet rag.
“Any better?” Martin asks. His fingers are tangled in Jon’s hair.
“Yes, actually,” says Jon. “I should cry more often.”
Martin laughs quietly. “You really should. That was, like, a decade’s worth of tears, I think.”
“Good thing your jumper’s so absorbent. Ugh.” He presses a hand against his forehead. “I forgot how dizzy crying makes you.”
“I don’t think—” Martin starts. “Um. Maybe you’re dehydrated. Would you like some water?”
“I’d like to kiss you,” says Jon, and does.
…
Jon never really stops being dizzy, once it starts. The world tilts and shifts in a way that reminds him of the Tundra, as if something is wrong with the ground rather than his own stumbling feet. There are several times he thinks that some part of the world is out to get him, when he slams his hands over his mouth because the Buried is about to open a great gaping hole beneath him and he doesn’t want to breathe in the dirt, when he clutches onto something solid, digging in with his fingernails, before the Vast can catch him unaware. It’s less cold than the Tundra, at least, and then it’s not. He wears layers and he drinks endless cups of tea and he curls up against Martin, who is always a little cold himself but is much warmer than Jon now. Martin lays a hand on his cheek, tells him he’s burning up. “Matter of perspective,” says Jon.
He’s not surprised when things get worse. His head starts hurting in a way that feels unnatural somehow, an oddly sharp pain that emanates from behind his eyes and seems to scour his brain. Paracetamol doesn’t help, and he feels stupid for having expected it to. In fact, it makes things worse; he thinks he can hear the whispers of the Eye in the way the blood pounds in his head, scolding him for trying to circumvent his destiny. He jams a few fingers down his throat and brings the medicine back up, and tells Martin that he was just feeling nauseous. His body generously decides not to make a liar out of him; from then on he can barely keep water down.
Martin is holding Jon’s hair back in the bathroom, rubbing circles on his shoulder with his free hand, and when Jon’s vomiting gives way to quieter retching he says, “I wouldn’t be disappointed in you, you know.”
Jon scrubs a hand across his mouth. His wrecked lips sting with stomach acid and somehow that is worse than everything else that is happening at the moment. “What do you mean?” he asks, flat enough that it’s not really a question.
“If you wanted to take a statement. No one would be,” he adds quickly. “Not if they saw what you’ve been going through, how you’ve been— You’ve been trying so hard, Jon.”
“And now it’s time to give up?” says Jon.
“It’s not giving up. It’s— There are other ways to do this.”
Jon is about to argue, but when he opens his mouth he starts throwing up again, and by the time he’s finished he’s too weak for anything but honesty. “I can’t— I won’t be able to stop again, I don’t think,” he says. “If I start.”
“You don’t know that,” says Martin. “Er. Do you?”
Jon thinks. The Eye’s beam has always shone weakly inside his own head — self-reflection has never been his strong suit, and in any case the entity can Know anything it wants about him and not have to tell Jon a word — and now it gives him nothing but a dull buzzing like an old fluorescent lightbulb. It’s still hard for him to surface. The hunger is so much greater than the vessel that contains it. “I don’t,” he says finally. “I just— I just really, really think so.”
Martin is silent. When Jon starts coughing again, although there isn’t anything left to heave up, he starts as though just remembering he’s there. He pats Jon’s shoulder again, but absently, like he’s half-awake and fumbling for something in the dark. “This happened to Gertrude, didn’t it?” he says.
Jon spits into the toilet. “Guess it did. I think Gerry— I think Gerard Keay might’ve said something about it. She just read statements out into thin air.”
“And did she ever stop?”
“Well she got shot three times in the chest, didn’t she? Think that stopped her.”
“Before that. I mean, she figured out so many things — how to stop the rituals, how to leave the Institute, how to get one over on Elias sometimes — don’t you think she might have figured out how to stop needing statements too?”
“I don’t doubt she could have if she’d wanted to.” Jon still doesn’t know how he feels about his predecessor. He’s sure she would have been disappointed in him, anyway. “I just don’t think she wanted to.”
Martin gives a sigh that could be agreement. “Too busy saving the world?”
“Lucky for us.”
Martin gives a sigh that is not agreement. “She could have at least left you some— some helpful hints. Or advice. She had to have known someone would be Archivist after her.”
Jon imagines Gertrude Robinson sitting down across from him in a cafe, thumping a can of lighter fluid down on the table and telling him matter-of-factly that his life is about to go to shit. It should be funny, but somehow it just makes him want to cry. Martin catches on.
“We don’t have to talk about it anymore,” he says. “Do you want to go lie down?”
Jon nods, but his legs give out when he tries to stand. “I think—” He licks his lips. “I don’t think I— Could you carry me?” he asks, and Martin, lovely, doesn’t say anything other than “Sure” as he lifts Jon up.
…
The street is always quiet at this time of night, or at least quiet in the way Jon has come to define it: the car horns are faint, the chatter distant, and his footsteps echo in a way that has always brought him satisfaction. It’s raining, but only lightly, and the fine mist of water feels cool and wonderful on the back of his neck. He stops under a street lamp and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. He’ll make his excuses later; right now he’s just in too good of a mood to care about being sober.
It takes him a minute to get his cigarette lit in the rain, though the click-hiss-poof of the little gold lighter is a rhythm he could set his heartbeat to. He draws his first breath slowly, savoring the smoothness of the smoke as it slides down his throat, the warm beginnings of a buzz. It’s times like these he wonders why he ever quit.
Has he quit? Or was he only planning to? Something to worry about tomorrow. He watches the cabs go by, slow like starving animals. He ashes his cigarette, lights another, inhales as a clock somewhere chimes midnight.
“Can I have a cigarette?” Jon only just manages not to drop his lighter. The man in front of him sways in the flickering streetlight, and when he reaches a hand out, it’s as pale as a dressmaker’s dummy. “Can I have a cigarette?” he asks again.
“Oh,” says Jon. “These aren’t— These aren’t mine.” A stupid lie, and obvious. He takes a step backward, and the man takes a step forward.
“Can I have a cigarette?”
“Listen,” Jon says, already in for pound. “These really aren’t— You’ll have to ask Elias Bouchard.”
“Jon!” The voice comes from behind him, sudden but not a surprise, and Jon turns to look without any urgency. Elias Bouchard’s suit is immaculate, as always, but his eyes are rimmed in a dull red grime. “Don’t tell me you aren’t going to share,” he says.
“First time I’ve ever seen you have morals,” Jon mutters, but the words stick in his throat and don’t reach the air.
“Come now,” Elias says. Is that his name? “We all have our vices, don’t we?” His hands are on Jon’s shoulders and, slowly, he turns him so that he’s facing the thing asking for a cigarette again. “I know yours.”
The thing crouches on the ground, plastic body now bare and glistening in the streetlight. If Jon didn’t know better, he would think it was crying.
“You’re hungry,” says Elias in his ear. “From one monster to another, the Anglerfish will understand.”
“I shouldn’t.” Jon’s mouth is dry. “I, I can’t.”
“No?” says Jonah. “And what’s stopping you?”
The question has a pull to it. Every protest he can think to make slips off the sides of his tongue like he’s drooling them, leaving only, “Nothing. Nothing.”
Jonah pushes down on his shoulders until he’s kneeling on the wet ground, eye level with the thing — level with where its eyes should be. But he isn’t one to judge. There are eyes all over his body; he can feel lashes shifting under the folds of his clothes, lids blinking at the back of his neck. “Statement of the entity known as the Anglerfish,” he says, the words liquid and delicious in his mouth. “Regarding...consumption.”
The silence hangs so thick Jon can taste it, and he almost screams with the thought that something has gone wrong, that he’s lost his powers for lack of use, trapped himself in unending hunger. But then the thing opens its mouth. Except it’s not a mouth, not really. Just a great gaping hole in the center of the thing’s face, deep as a well and cracked at the edges. Jon’s not sure if he leans forward or if the thing does, but suddenly he is inside that mouth, or the mouth is inside him, spreading over his brain like spilled ink. He tries to drink it down, take it in. It’s been too long.
It’s been too long. It’s been much, much too long. Because how does he absorb it, feel it, without becoming? How— A young man, not too drunk but still unsteady. He reaches out to Jon, promised cigarette proffered, and Jon takes his hand and tears him apart. No, no, that’s not him. He’s in the street, talking to a monster. He’s in an alley, talking to an older woman, and when she asks him how he feels about the weather he grabs her face and pulls until he hears it rip. It hurts to be like this. It hurts to be given names by the people who give him their bodies, who call him pal or creep or drunkenly mistake him for someone else. He wants them to stop. But no, no no, that’s not what he wants, he only wants to know what he wants. Except that’s not quite right because he is himself so he must know, but he doesn’t know so he can’t be himself so he must be someone else so he must want them to stop so he must want to hurt them but he doesn’t want to hurt them he only wants he only wants he only wants.
“Oh, Jon,” Jonah laughs, faint but smug. “Just look what you’ve done to yourself.” And Jon looks, with eyes that roll like beads in his head, and he screams with a mouth that will not open—
“Jon!” Someone is grabbing Jon’s arm and shaking it, and in the moment it takes for him to remember how his body works he’s able to realize that it is, in fact, his body, and that he’s in his bed with Martin, and that Martin is holding his arm and now, as Jon watches, leaning over him to shine the flashlight from his phone in Jon’s eyes like he’s just had a concussion.
“I’m alright,” Jon says, squinting and swatting at the phone. It’s doubtful that Martin believes him, but he mumbles something, shuts off his flashlight and reaches for the lamp instead.
His hand still clutches Jon’s arm. “You were screaming,” he says. “And thrashing.”
“Could have been a good dream,” says Jon.
Martin doesn’t even smile. “But it wasn’t.”
“It wasn’t,” Jon agrees. He rubs a thumb over his sternum. His heart is beating so fast that it hurts to breathe, but, oddly, the strongest thing he feels is relief. He didn’t take a statement. It was only a nightmare. Of course it was only a nightmare.
Although it does get hard to tell.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Martin says. He sounds bleary, but Jon knows he’d gladly stay up talking all night if he thought Jon needed it. He loves Martin. It’s not a startling thing to realize, which is good, because Jon doubts his heart could take much more strain.
“It’s alright,” he says. He sits up, suppresses a gasp of pain, and turns the lamp back off. “Everything will be alright. Go back to sleep.”
Martin starts to argue, but then Jon wraps an arm around him and buries his face in his chest, and whatever he was going to say trails off into a long sigh. He falls asleep, and Jon listens to his breathing slow, and it’s almost the same thing.
…
Jon lets himself believe that everything will be alright. He really does. He imagines his pain like a fever that will someday break, if he can only withstand it. He stops eating, stops vomiting, starts feeling like he’s been held to a lightbulb and burned until he’s almost translucent, thin and fragile as paper but still whole, and that is a kind of peace in itself. He stops moving around more than is necessary, sits always with his head slumped against Martin’s shoulder so that it won’t get dizzy atop his own wobbly neck. He thinks he might be dying, and he thinks he might finally have found a fair price for his humanity.
“Do you know what you’re going to do after this?” he asks Martin. They’re back under the tree. He doesn’t know why they’re back under the tree.
“What do you mean, after this?” says Martin. He’s got his notebook open in his lap, but everything he’s written so far has been crossed out.
I’m sitting under a tree with someone I love
I’m sitting
I’m with someone I love
Someone I love is
I’m scared of
“All of this,” says Jon, gesturing at the countryside around them, so bright and idyllic that he’s only half-sure it’s real. “You’ll have to leave here sometime, won’t you? Go back home.”
“Where is home for you, Jon?” Martin’s voice is quiet and toneless. A challenge, somehow.
“I’m asking you,” Jon says.
“I don’t know where home is,” says Martin. “I guess we’ll have to find one, won’t we?” He pauses, but Jon doesn’t fill the silence. “We will. New jobs, too.”
“At least you’ll finally have something for your CV.”
Martin laughs. “You too. I mean, Head Archivist, that’s impressive.”
“I’m not exactly qualified to keep being one,” says Jon.
“Fair enough,” says Martin. “We’ll have to find something different. Actually, something very, very different would be nice.”
“Mm.” Jon closes his eyes. “You could be a poet.”
Martin laughs again. Jon wishes, with a sudden pain in his chest, that he could take that laugh as a statement. Carve it into his head so that he dreams about it with perfect clarity. So that they both do. “If we’re really making wild plans now, you could be my editor. ‘Mah-tin, that is not how you use a semicolon.’”
“I’m not qualified for that either.”
“Fine,” says Martin. “Then what do you want to do?”
“I really haven’t thought about it,” Jon lies.
“Please,” says Martin. He picks up one of Jon’s hands from where it’s lying limp on the grass, smooths his thumb over it like he’s trying to get the blood flowing. “Just tell me?”
“I can’t,” says Jon. “I don’t know.”
“Please,” Martin says again. “I just— Don’t you want— Jon, come on. Don’t you want a, a life?” He looks down, squeezes Jon’s hand, and adds, very quietly, “With me?”
Jon opens his mouth, then closes it. He tries to think. To put into order the many, many things he should have said over the last few years, every apology, every entreaty, everything he should have told Martin, everything he should have asked him. Whatever words he can muster harden in his throat. For all the people he’s lost over the last few years, he’s never actually had to say goodbye. “Don’t ask me to do this, Martin,” he says finally. “Please.”
“Do what?”
“Stay.” Martin starts to speak, but Jon interrupts him. “You know what I mean. And I can’t. Just— Tell me you’ll be alright.”
Tears prick up in the corners of Martin’s eyes, pearly white and opaque. “Jon.” Martin says his name like it means something. Jon wishes he could figure out what.
“You— you’re better off without me,” he says instead of asking. “Can’t you see that?”
“That’s not true,” Martin says, flat, faint.
“You’re scared of me!” Jon says.
“I—? No! How could you think— ” The tears forming in Martin’s eyes spill over, and too late Jon realizes that they’re not just white but filled with fog, that mist is rising off Martin’s cheeks. “I’m not scared of you, Jon. I— I’ve never been scared of you, never. I’m scared of—” Martin goes quiet, and when his voice comes back it’s an echo with no source. “I’m scared of losing you.”
The mist thickens, the world pales and grows colder. Jon lunges for Martin as best he can and tries to think of the words that will make him stay, tries to think of something to say that isn’t a promise. But he’s tired, and words have never helped him, not really, and he’s sick, and he’s dizzy, and when Martin suddenly isn’t there for him to lean on he just closes his eyes and falls.
…
Jon wakes up when his face hits the floor of the cabin, and he wakes up further when cold water hits his face. There’s someone bent over him, breathing hard and jamming two fingers against the pulse in his neck, and when he cracks an eye open and sees it’s Martin the first thing he can think to say is, “Am I dead?”
“Not yet.” Martin’s face is blurry — Jon can faintly make out the shape of his own glasses hooked on the collar of Martin’s shirt — but visibly grim, his mouth a hard line with too many teeth. “Sorry for the drop. You’re kind of slippery when you’re unconscious.”
Jon worms his tongue around his mouth. “You were— you were gone.”
“And now I’m back.” He sits down next to Jon with a thump. “And I’m going to tell you a story.”
Jon tries to shake his head, but he’s so weak it’s more like he’s nuzzling the floorboards with his cheek. He scrapes out a whimper. “Martin…”
“Come on.” Martin’s voice softens. “You can’t honestly tell me you’d rather die than...than…” But he can’t finish his sentence. Neither of them know what comes next for Jon. What he might become. Martin hesitates. “Statement— S-statement of—”
“Martin,” Jon says again. “Martin, please.” And, too late, feels the Compulsion arc up his throat. After this long it is like vomiting shards of glass. And Martin knows what he means, but the Eye has never asked anyone to be quiet, and even as Martin brings a hand up to his mouth his words come out as smoothly as if they’d been tied to a string and pulled.
“Even before my mum got sick, she was always cold. You know, she’d wear jumpers all the time, and she’d always be holding a mug of tea right up to her chest, and she’d sit all hunched over, like she was trying to hold in every bit of heat her body could make. And that was just in the summer. In the winter she’d turn up the heat in our flat until the mirrors started to steam over. Always got angry letters from the landlord about how much gas we were using. And me, I would just be boiling. Sweating through my shirt and choking up when it got too humid. That’s kind of why I never worried about getting what she had, actually. I just knew our bodies were too different.
“So anyway, whatever chance I got I’d sneak up to my room and open my window. Probably didn’t help with the gas bill. She didn’t like it, in any case. She told me— She thought I was doing it hurt her. To make her feel worse. But it wasn’t that at all, it was just— I’d be leaning on the frame, splinters stabbing into my elbows, my sweat freezing like I had needles in my armpits, and it felt— It was pain but it felt like relief. I don’t know if that means anything.
“Anyway, one day we’d had a row. I don’t remember what it was about, exactly. I think I’d forgotten to pick something up from the shop, and now she wouldn’t be able to make supper, and, well, I tended to do that a lot, so she had plenty to say about it. So we fought, and she told me to go to my room, and I went, and I opened my window, and then I don’t know how but I just...fell. I must have leaned forward, or, or slipped, and there I was, three meters below my bedroom window.
“It didn’t hurt. That’s the first thing I remember thinking. That it should have hurt more. I mean, I didn’t even make a mark in the snow when I landed. And when I looked behind me, I couldn’t see my house anymore. I couldn’t see anything. The whole world felt like that Ella Wheeler Wilcox poem. ‘Let it be hidden wholly from our view/ By pure white flakes, all trackless and untrodden.’ Not that I had read that, back then. But I had read all sorts of wilderness survival guides, just for fun, and they told me that I had to keep moving if I was going to stay warm. So I did. I remember later I realized that I started walking away from my house. Or where my house should have been. I don’t know why I did that.
“I walked for a really long time. I didn’t know what else to do, and I was hoping that I would turn a corner eventually, and see some people. I chanted my home phone number to myself, so that I could call my mum when I found a phonebox and tell her I was alright. But there weren’t any corners in that place, and there certainly weren’t any phoneboxes. So I walked...and walked...and walked...and then I got tired. I don’t mean tired of walking. I think I could have kept walking forever. I was just tired of being alive.
“I sat down. I knew I wasn’t supposed to. Every ‘Boy’s Guide to the Arctic’ I had ever read was blaring in my head, telling me I was going to get frostbite or hypothermia or whatever else you get when you’re too cold for too long. And I was so cold. I remember thinking this must be how my mum felt all the time, that this was why she was always angry. Because when I opened my window and froze myself for a few minutes, the pain felt good, but this...this just hurt.
“And then it stopped hurting. I looked that up later, why it stopped. Turns out it’s another part of hypothermia. You’re so cold that the part of your body that regulates temperature gets screwed up, and you start to feel warm again. A lot of people who die of hypothermia, they’ll find them stripped naked, because they got so hot. Paradoxical undressing.
“But I didn’t do that, of course. I just laid down in the snow. It was the first time in a while that I’d felt comfortable being warm. I felt like I was falling asleep. And I guess I was, only, you know, permanently. I closed my eyes, sort of snuggled down, dragged some of the snow on top of me for a blanket. I didn’t have to worry I was going to kick it off in my sleep, like usual. It really was… I’ve laid down in the snow a couple times since then, just to try and remember how it felt, and I’ve never found any snow that was as soft as this was. I guess that’s probably good, though, since it put me to sleep pretty quickly, and, well.
“I said I fell asleep, but it wasn’t quite like that. I just started dreaming. Half-dreams, where you can feel the real world around you but you can hear people talking that aren’t there. I heard my mother. She was asking me where I’d put something. Her bank card, I think. Yeah, she was asking me where I’d put her bank card after I got back from the store, and I remembered that I’d left it in my coat pocket, and that now she wouldn’t know where to find it. She needed me to help her find it. She needed me. And she was going to think I’d abandoned her. Had I abandoned her? My brain felt slow. I couldn’t make my thoughts go in the right direction anymore. I just kept thinking that I couldn’t hurt her. I couldn’t hurt her any more than I already had.
“I stood up. Or I tried to. My ankle sent a big jab of pain up my leg and I fell right back down. I was still in the snow, but I was back in front of my bedroom now. My mum was at the window, looking down at me. She should have been angry, but her face… She just looked really, really scared. I called up to her and said I could go back to the store, if she needed, and she told me not to be an idiot. We went to the hospital, and I got a cast put on my broken ankle. Told the doctors I’d fallen down the stairs. As soon as we got back home she nailed my window shut. I’m still not sure if I’m glad she did. But I guess it doesn’t matter. I’ve never really been warm properly, since then.”
The first breath Jon takes feels like he’s just burst free from being held underwater. He sits up, retches, his chest burning, and then Martin’s hands are on his face, his shoulders, his back, grabbing Jon and lowering him back down to the floor. He’s saying something over and over, and it takes a minute before Jon’s ears stop ringing and he can make out what it is. “I’m sorry, Jon, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
“Martin.” Jon’s mouth feels loose and imprecise. “Calm down. It’s alright.”
“No, it’s not!”
“Well, calm down anyway.” Jon takes a deep breath. Closes his eyes, then opens them again. The light coming through the cabin’s windows is soft and orange. In the time it’s taken Martin to give his statement, Jon’s managed to sweat through his shirt. He plucks at the damp fabric, watches it settle back down. “The boy lost in the snow,” he says slowly.
“Right. That.” Martin opens his mouth, huffs out a laugh, then a sigh. “Funny. I always figured that was...not. Somehow. I wasn’t even going to talk about that, I had—” He shakes his head. “How— how are you feeling?”
Jon stretches against the floorboards. “Like I came and got hit by a truck at the same time. Good,” he amends. “But tired.”
“Good,” says Martin slowly.
“Fucking amazing,” says Jon. “Do we have anything to eat? Food, I mean.”
“Oh! Sure, sure.” Martin stands up quickly and scrambles off towards the kitchen. Jon cranes his neck to watch him go, suddenly fascinated by the way the edges of his shadow seem to blur in the early evening light. He thinks he should be very upset right now, and he’s not, and he’s not sure if he’s really not upset or if he’s just not upset yet, and he can’t quite bring himself to care.
He sits up again, more slowly this time, and takes stock. Bodily, he doesn’t feel all that much better. His arms shake when he pushes himself off the ground; he’s light-headed and too cold. But mentally— mentally, he has to admit that he feels the way he always does after satisfying a craving, for cigarettes or for knowledge or for a damn chocolate bar. Like his brain is humming. Like someone’s dipped his nerve endings in sugar water. It concerns him, how much he needs some things, but then when he gets those things—
Martin shuffles back into the room, carrying what would be, in any other circumstances, an unreasonable amount of food. He smiles, briefly, when he sees that Jon is sitting up, then walks over and sets a mug of tea by his elbow before plopping down next to him.
They eat in silence. Jon can’t tell if it’s comfortable or not. It’s hard to process much, honestly, over the information his newly-nourished Sight is eagerly giving him. (The lightbulb in their bedroom lamp is going to burn out in four hours and there’s a man walking his dog five and a half miles away from them and a 200-year-old horse skeleton is rotting under the foundation and) He forgot how much he enjoyed this. He forgot how much it scared him. “You should take some deep breaths,” he tells Martin. His mouth is getting away from him, but joyfully, like a child set loose in an amusement park. “Your heart rate is very high right now.”
“I...I’m aware of that,” says Martin.
“Of course.” Jon takes his own advice, sucks in air through his nose until what he finally recognizes as a mild anxiety attack subsides. Martin watches him, but doesn’t react beyond looking pained. “I don’t know what to do now,” Jon says finally, and he still isn’t sure if it’s nonsense or not but at least it comes out steadily.
“I’m sorry,” Martin says again. “I didn’t mean to— I was going to stop, when you said— But I shouldn’t even have started.”
Jon isn’t sure how to convey anger and thankfulness at the same time, so he just shakes his head. “I’m sorry. You’re going to get the, the nightmares now. That I’m in.”
“There’s worse nightmares to have,” says Martin. “This is just a snowy day. Like Keats wrote about.”
“Wrong Keats,” says Jon.
“You don’t know which Keats I was thinking about,” says Martin.
“Yes I do,” says Jon.
“Oh. Right.”
“It doesn’t matter, anyway,” says Jon. “Whether you meant to or not. I should have been stronger. Tried harder. I mean,” He makes a choking sound that could almost pass as a laugh. “In the end, I still Asked.”
“The Eye Asked,” says Martin, and Jon shrugs his shoulders and rolls his eyes because sure, fine, that’s an excuse they can live with. “I mean it,” says Martin. “It’s not your fault that you need statements. And I don’t know how strong you can expect yourself to be when you’re dying, Jon! Because you were dying.”
“So it’s either dying,” says Jon, “or living like this.” Which has always been the choice. But now, sitting here with Martin, Martin who wants to make a home with him, Martin who wants him to live, Martin whom he wants to live with, it all seems so suddenly, starkly unfair. He swallows back a lump in his throat, wishes he could enjoy not being dead for more than five minutes.
“Actually,” says Martin, “I’ve been having an idea about that. About maybe a third option.” Historically, the Entities haven’t really seemed to appreciate third options, and Jon knows he shouldn’t get his hopes up, but he leans forward anyway, and takes Martin’s hand. “So the last thing you quit was cigarettes, right?” Martin starts. “And you quit them cold turkey.”
“Put every one I had in a pile and burned them,” says Jon. “Which was a horrible idea, actually.”
Martin’s mouth falls open into a smile. “That’s a hilariously horrible idea, Jon—”
“We’re getting off the subject.”
“Sorry,” says Martin, looking no less delighted. “Well, cold turkey works great for cigarettes — um, I assume — but it can be really, really bad if you’re trying to stop drinking. Because—”
“Because if the body has developed a dependence on it, symptoms of alcohol withdrawal can include headaches, nausea, sweating, seizures, confusion, and delirium tremens, which describes— mm. Sorry, I’m—” Jon clamps his mouth shut, tries to picture himself turning a knob down in his brain. It doesn’t really work and now he knows all sorts of things about amplifiers. “I’m kind of, ah, getting a lot of...everything.”
“It’s alright.” Martin scoots closer and lays a hand on Jon’s back, and Jon tries to focus on that instead. There’re a lot of things to know about hands as well, but the particularities of Martin’s just about outweigh them.
“Go on,” he says.
“Right,” says Martin. “Well, that’s pretty much what I was going to say. Quitting drinking cold turkey can be really dangerous and, well, if it’s the same for statements, maybe that’s why this didn’t, um, didn’t work.”
“So I should taper off,” says Jon. “But how am I going to do that?”
“Basira,” says Martin instantly. “She’s still at the Institute, right? She can send us some things, and we can, I don’t know, portion them out? It’s just—” He grips Jon’s hand so hard the knuckles crack. “I know you said you didn’t think you could quit them again, if you had one, and I don’t want to hurt you, but—”
“But I can try.”
“You can try as many times as you need.”
“I will,” says Jon. “Every day.” And then, the words strange in his mouth, but true, but right , “for the rest of our lives.”
Martin nods, and then he tries to say something, and then Jon tries to say something, and then they both just give up and kiss. Jon doesn’t think kissing is a very good substitute for words, as nonverbal communications go, but this one seems to be saying one thing quite effectively, over and over and over: I love you. I love you. I love you.
EPILOGUE
“So what’ll this be,” says Jon. “The fourteen steps?”
“Maybe fifteen,” says Martin.
“God, I hope not. I don’t know how people can even do twelve.”
“At least you won’t have a problem accepting that there’s a power greater than yourself.”
“Sure. I just don’t think it wants to restore me to sanity.”
Martin laughs softly, but Jon can still hear it from the next room, along with the rustle of Martin stripping off his coat and the twin thunks of his shoes as he drops them to the floor. He is himself sitting at the kitchen table, nursing a lukewarm cup of tea and the faint but unmistakable beginnings of a headache. Apparently even direct-from-subject statements have a pretty short half-life now.
Martin enters the room, his arms overloaded with grocery bags and newly-purchased blankets for the both of them. They’ve both woken up shivering more than once now, and blinking at each other with shocked recognition. “You really are all eyes,” Martin had said the first time, although Jon had quickly — and unintentionally — dissolved that mood by saying, in a tone of equal awe, “I saw your mother in a tube station once.”
Now he gets up to help Martin with the things, taking the blankets from him — gorgeous patchwork monstrosities — and trying not to seem like he’s looking for anything else. “How was she?” he asks.
Martin shrugs. “Oh, same as last week.” Which is about as much information as he gave last week. Jon can only imagine that things aren’t very good. What that means for her access to statements—
He puts the blankets down on a chair, fully aware that he will completely forget about them until he’s already falling asleep, and tries to ask without asking. “Institute still crawling with police?”
“I mean, they’ve finished with the interviews?” Martin says. Jon lets himself believe that the burst of excitement at the thought of all that fear in one place is not entirely his own. “Apparently they’re calling it a ‘terror attack.’”
“Doesn’t surprise me.” Jon laughs. “Appropriate, in a way.”
Martin gives him a look like he’s making sure Jon’s gallows humor hasn’t started tying any knots. “Mm.”
“Does she know who they’re looking to blame?” Jon asks. Hard to believe it could be him, since he was in the Lonely for the worst of it, but Elias has been known to find a way.
Martin shrugs again, removes a truly astounding stack of egg cartons from the bag he’s still holding. “They’re not really talking to her about it? Sectioned or not, I guess ex- police only gets you so far.”
“Mm.” Jon watches Martin unpack the next bag. No statements in that one either. He feels like a child, trying to stop himself from peering over Martin’s shoulder. Why do these things always make him pathetic? “Does she know if they found the old prison yet?” he asks instead. “The Panopticon, Eli— Magnus’s body.”
“I don’t know how hard they’re looking, to be honest?” Martin finally sets the rest of the bags down on the table, and Jon immediately moves to help him unpack. He grabs the first bag that looks safely grocery-ish, so that he seems thoughtful rather than desperate. “Basira said a few of them got lost in the tunnels for over a day—” Jon laughs; Martin gives him a look that perfectly fails to be stern. “And— it’s not like the promise of an old man’s corpse is much of a motivator.”
“Mm.”
“Still, she did manage to talk them out of burning the whole place to the ground? – and, ooh, actually, that reminds me, um –” He stuffs his hand into the pocket of his trousers; Jon wills himself not to stare.
“Ah,” he says. “These, these are the statements.”
“Yes.” Martin hands him a large, lumpy package. It seems to spark against his fingertips. “Basira said last week she’d send some up as soon as the Archives weren’t a crime scene.”
“Yes.” He can’t make himself acknowledge aloud the timeline this implies, that Martin must have asked — pleaded? He’s not sure how easy it would have been for Basira to get her hands on them — for statements while he was still in the thick of it. Of course Martin had always had a plan. Of course he’d never given up. Only Jon had.
“And she wasn’t sure which ones you’ve read already, so she, she just said she’d send a bunch.”
Jon nods, already tearing open the package. He can feel Martin’s eyes on him — not an unfamiliar sensation, on the whole, but he does wish it wasn’t happening right now. “There – There are tapes in here, as well.” He pulls one out, glances at the label on the side. “D-Did she say anything about tapes?”
“She didn’t mention it?” Martin reaches for a tape, hesitates, pulls his hand back. “But I didn’t check it until after the call.”
“Mm.” Jon tosses aside the first tape, then the second. There’s a decent amount of paper in there, but he can still feel the tension building in his stomach. How much will be enough? What if it’s never enough?
Martin puts a hand on his shoulder. “I assume it’s her attempt at a- a, a varied diet?” He grins, and Jon tries to smile back. “Eating your greens, you know?”
“Probably.” Martin squeezes his shoulder, and Jon takes a long breath. He has these because he’s quitting them. He’s quitting them. “I’m sure it will work fine.”
“Cool.” Martin plants a kiss on the back of his neck, light but reassuring. “Well, as fun as listening to you monologue is—“
“Hm.” Jon rather liked listening to Martin, but he supposes it’s different for him.
“—I will give you some privacy.” He nods towards the window. “Go for a walk.”
Jon nods, tries for a smile. “Let me know if you see any good cows.”
Martin grins. “Obviously I’m going to tell you if I see any good cows.”
He shuffles off. Jon watches him leave, wishing suddenly and unaccountably that he would stay. He doesn’t want Martin to see him like this, of course. Ravenous, bloodthirsty almost, made into something he still can’t quite believe by his hunger. But he doesn’t want to be alone either.
But then he isn’t alone, is he? Not just because the Eye is watching him, waiting to drink in his helplessness. Because Martin is waiting for him. And neither of them ever have to be alone again.
Jon stretches, sighs. Grabs a statement out of the bag and sets it down. When he glances at the table, there’s a tape recorder already there, and he wonders how long it’s been listening, recording this new beginning.
“Right,” he says, breathing in, breathing out. “Statement of Hazel Rutter, regarding a fire in her childhood home…”