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Martin still dreams about Prentiss. He thinks it’s silly, tells himself that nothing bad really happened to him throughout the whole ordeal, that it’s inconsequential compared to everything else, that waking up with his skin itching and crawling and writhing is just his overactive imagination making mountains of molehills. Jon disagrees.
He can always tell when Martin has dreamt of her again, even if the nightmares aren’t usually so violent as to pull either of them from slumber. He gets mindful of his nails, rubs carefully at his arms with the pads of his fingers, nothing more, as though if he lets himself begin to scratch, he won’t stop until he’s scraped himself raw, torn flesh down to the bone.
Sometimes, he’ll push the sleeves of his jumper up to expose the soft, pale skin at the insides of his elbows. After a night of syrupy, peach-filled dreams, his skin will bear faint red lines reminiscent of furrows in fresh tilled soil. Little starbursts of purple and red and slow fading yellow will be smattered along his veins, ruptured capillaries like lights on a string.
Jon knows they’ll line his neck, climb up his jaw, spread across his hips and thighs and crawl over the sides of his ribs, a creeping carpet of clinging pain that Martin tries, desperately, to ignore.
A fortnight into their forced Scottish holiday, Jon becomes aware of this particular facet of Martin’s life. In the dead of night. Which is startling because, despite the best efforts of his dreams and the events of the past three years, Jon has never been a particularly light sleeper.
When they were together, Georgie had gently mocked him for it, her teasing doing little to mask her concern when she remarked that he’d have no trouble sleeping through a house fire, no matter how loud the alarms wailed, said it reminded her of sleeping next to a heat-seeking corpse. She always did say that last bit with a strange twist to her mouth.
So, Jon finds himself thoroughly disconcerted when he wakes to nothing but the soft shadow of night, apparently unprompted. A quiet sniffling comes from his right, accompanied by the rhythmic rustling of fabric.
“Martin?” Jon croaks, squinting into the gloom as he forces himself upright. Martin’s silhouette is perched on the edge of the bed, back-lit by the pale square of the window, moonlight turning the curtains to a screen of dying grey. He immediately goes rigid, reminiscent of a child caught doing something naughty.
“Oh, Jon, sorry,” he says, tremulous voice cracking, “did I wake you?”
Jon merely grunts and reaches for the bedside lamp. It turns on after a muted double click, bathing the room in its thin light, bulb buzzing in the quiet. Eyes protesting the change, Jon blinks against the sudden brightness.
The lamp illuminates Martin’s back, pyjama shirt stretched over his broad shoulders, slumped in an attempt to make himself small. His hair is pressed flat against his skull, but the top is a wild mess; Jon can imagine his shaking hands running through it, the repetitious motion an attempt to soothe some squirming anxiety. There’s the dry, scraping sound of skin rubbing at skin, and Jon’s eyes are keen enough to spot the wave of goosebumps that ripples across Martin’s neck.
“What’s wrong?” Jon asks. This isn’t… unusual, necessarily—not the interrupted sleep or the sagged bow to Martin’s spine that carries the unmistakable weight of nightmares—but they have a, a routine for when this happens. Typically, Martin will wake him, cold hands seeking out the comfort of something tangible, hot, and alive to chase away the suffocating fog and Jon will fold him in close, press his nose to Martin’s hair and whisper quiet nothings against his skin. Here, now, he shies away when Jon instinctively reaches for him, sliding the rest of the way out from the bed. Jon has been awake for less than two minutes, yet already his slow, sleep-stupid grip on the situation has slipped, teetering sideways over a chasm whose depth he does not know.
“Everything’s fine,” Martin says. He won’t look at Jon, and he’s got his arms wrapped around himself, fingers working at the sides of his shirt as he skirts around the bed. “Go back to sleep.”
“Martin.” Jon throws the covers off himself. Worry thrums below his skin, tying knots around his throat that make it difficult to swallow. The air is dry and the lamplight doesn’t slide through him, but Martin is… he’s acting strange. A sudden, terrible thought occurs to Jon, and he remembers the way Martin had slipped from between his fingers in the Lonely: there and then not, simply vanishing in the space between panicked breaths. He’s certain that if Martin steps through the doorway and into the hall, he’ll never see him again. Jon scrambles off the bed and across the room. “Martin, wait.”
Panic robs him of all forethought and Jon latches onto his wrist; in the half-second of contact before Martin wrenches his arm free, his skin is perfectly warm and solid. Still, Martin dutifully pauses, face turned away to study the wall, eyes shrouded in shadow.
“What, Jon?” His tone is clipped. Polite, yet impatient; the same exact inflection he’d used every time he brushed Jon off while under Lukas’ tutelage—deliberately distant.
Jon clasps his hand around his own wrist, tucked close to his belly, to keep himself from reaching out again. “I just—you alright?”
Martin softens. There’s no hesitation when he says, “Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay.”
“Then… come back to bed?”
He sighs lightly and it’s as inviting as a neatly trimmed, thorny hedge, meant to keep out prying eyes. “Not right now, just. Please. Go back to sleep.”
A month ago, Jon would have backed off, chagrined, but here he stands his ground. Nothing about this is right— Martin still won’t look at him, voice now quiet, tired, pleading, off. He won’t allow himself to be pushed away when Martin is obviously hurting. Never again. “Not without you. Clearly there’s something wrong.”
“There’s not, though!” Martin snaps, throwing his hands up in exasperation as the last strands of his patience fray and break, and the lamplight washes over his arms, casting its pale yellow fingers over small, scattered bruises that mottle his skin.
Concern takes over and Jon’s hands dart out to catch Martin’s, turning them back and forth to examine the bruising, speckled and splattered over his forearms in long, regular lines. “Christ, Martin, what happened?”
Martin snatches his hands away and finally meets Jon’s gaze, a look in his eyes like a cornered animal. “Nothing happened, can we—will you just—” He makes a frustrated sound, folds his arms, and there’s a wet sheen to his eyes that scares Jon. If he cries— “I don’t want to talk about it.”
The thing about Beholding and its dubious boon of compulsion is that it’s fueled by Jon’s terror, which makes holding his tongue difficult, especially when self-control matters most. Fear mixed with morbid, all-consuming curiosity is a heady cocktail for his patron, of course, but it’s truly amazing just how many emotions are merely fear masquerading as something else.
Worry, for example, is its own kind of fear, and Jon can feel the way his lips want to form the words to ask: the now-tacky quality to his palate, tongue gone dry and sticky. As though summoned by withheld knowledge, the Eye bears down on them, lids peeling wide and pupils dilating. It is with great effort that Jon says, “O-okay, that’s—fine, you, you don’t have to. Just… stay?” The need to ask-take-know will pass. It will pass and he won’t give in to its siren song.
In this moment in time, he cannot bear to let Martin go.
Martin chews at his lip, looking torn, even as he presses his fingers to his elbows and rubs cruelly.
“We don’t have to talk,” Jon promises, words bleeding together, tinged with desperation. The Eye’s baleful glare is heavy atop his head—it’s likely best they don’t. “Please.”
He can pinpoint the exact moment Martin caves. If he weren’t biting his tongue and shoving back the worry-fear, Jon would marvel at how such a small plea can cause him to bend as a willow in the wind.
“Fine. Go on, then.”
Jon climbs back into bed, the fading heat from their bodies now inexplicably stifling. Martin looks the bedclothes over nervously, then tugs them crisp and tight before settling down outside of them. He smooths sweeping lines over the handmade quilt that lays on top, pressing out imperceptible wrinkles, looking terribly uneasy.
Jon would like, very much, to ask.
There’s almost certainly no chance of falling back asleep; not when the compulsion rises up his throat and sits heavy in his mouth, like stick upon stick of chewing gum, sticky-sweet. Jon plucks at the ties on the quilt, twists them together into short, matted ropes that unravel when he lets go. Twist, hold, release. Choke down the words. Twist, hold, release.
Martin runs his hands over the bedspread, his own bare legs. Then his arms, his hair, the back of his neck. The process repeats. Each time, it grows slightly more frantic, until he is swiping at the quilt ties nearly obsessively, forcing them flat only for them to pop right back up.
And Jon is trying not to watch, to give him some modicum of privacy, but the rasp of movement draws his attention and the worry bubbles and boils and the gum in his mouth swells to prise his jaws apart and—
“Martin,” Jon says, then snaps his teeth down on the rest of the question. It feels a bit like biting through his own finger, severed clean and crisp like a carrot. The fear of hurting the man he adores—of ripping out this information neither wants known—must be a delectable treat for the Eye, bacon held just out of reach of a slathering dog.
It does the trick, though, and Martin blinks as he flattens down the ties one last time, then heaves a great, shuddering laugh. “S-sorry.”
It’s alright, Jon wants to say, but knows what will come out is, Tell me what’s bothering you, so instead he flashes a smile at Martin and offers his hand to hold.
And tries not to feel hurt when Martin shakes his head.
“Sorry,” Martin says, again, and he truly sounds it, words watery, warped at the edges, “just… Not right now, okay?”
Jon nods, takes his hand back, and folds it deep into his lap so he doesn’t have to see the offensive appendage. Hopefully Martin won’t mistake his silence for having upset him.
Which, of course, he does.
“Look, Jon, I really am sorry, but I just can’t, everything I touch, it’s all—” he breaks off, exhales harshly. Jon aches for him, longs to reach out to him, but it’s clearly not what he needs right now. How cruel it is, to sit here, next to him, completely useless and incapable of offering any sort of comfort.
Helplessness has never sat well with Jon.
Martin takes a few measured breaths. More deliberate, he pets the quilt like one would a cat in times of great stress. “It’s… Sometimes I still, um.”
Stop, Jon thinks, begs within the confines of his mind, curling his hands into fists so his nails dig into the tender heart line of his palms. His eyes are riveted to the wrinkle between Martin’s brows, the tight pinch to his lips. He doesn’t need to know. Yet Martin carries on, apparently compelled to speak, the words spilling from him even though Jon never asked, and that wad of sticky, clinging gum now glues his teeth together.
Or is it just him, the Archivist, two steps left of human and holding his breath at the promise of a story that doesn’t want to be told?
“It’s so—stupid. I didn’t even…” Martin huffs. Closes his eyes. Grinds his teeth so Jon can see the way the muscles in his jaw work as he gathers himself. “You know, after everything, it’s ridiculous, that she still gets to me. Prentiss, I mean.” The air leaves Jon’s lungs in a punched-out breath; the gum starts to melt, drip down his teeth, saliva-slick. “I had a dream about her, okay? That’s all.”
Tell me more, the Archivist wants to croon, trapped just below Jon’s skin. He scrubs at the stubble on his cheek, surreptitiously massaging his jaw loose.
The silence doesn’t last long as Martin caves under it. “It’s—she—I still get the dreams where she’s knocking. Just. Tap-tap-tap, polite as you like, a-and the worms cover my windows, their shadows huge and, and squirming, and I’m sat in the dark checking for worms in every corner and inch of skin. Sometimes the door to my flat rots clean through and they come pouring in. And I’ll… choke, on them, as they eat—” He passes his hand over the bedspread again. In the weak moonlight, the white yarn looks silvery and nearly alive. He does it once, twice, as he says, “Sometimes I hear you, screaming.”
Apparently sated—him or the Eye, the distinction hardly matters anymore—the hold on Jon’s tongue loosens enough for him to breathe out Martin’s name. Martin just shakes his head, the momentum building, careening the two of them towards something Jon isn’t sure he cares to witness but is powerless to stop.
“So, you wanted to know what happened to me? Nothing happened, and that’s what’s wrong. Nothing happened, but it still—gets to me, even after everything else! It’s so—bloody— stupid that I still have nightmares about Prentiss and I wasn’t even the one eaten by worms!”
Jon swallows, thickly, to chase away the cloying, saccharine taste in his mouth. “Y-you’re allowed—”
“I’m not, though! I was just stuck in my flat for thirteen days and it was awful but you had the things burrow into you, and your, what, ‘crimson fate’ hang over your head for months, but you’ve moved past it! I know you don’t get the dreams because you never wake up looking like, like this.” He thrusts his arms forward for examination, and the tiny bruises glare accusations up at Jon, flecks of dried blood lining the creases of his elbows from where he’d scratched too hard in his sleep. Jon feels ill.
“May I?” Jon asks after a moment’s hesitation, taking Martin’s hands in his own when he reluctantly nods. Jon runs his fingers along the raised red lines scored down the insides of his arms, causing Martin to shudder. Violets burst violent and berry-dark against Martin’s Lonely paled skin, faintly accented by yellowed green, a sickly contrast to the smaller bruises that have already started to heal. They’re scattered in uneven clusters—a mimicry of Jon’s scars.
“If my dreams were my own,” Jon says, slowly, rubbing his thumb over the branching blue veins at Martin’s wrist, “I’m certain she’d haunt me, too. As it is, I can barely stand to look in the mirror.” Jon has never been a particularly self-conscious man; before everything he could have been described as striking, but only if one were feeling particularly generous. For his own skin to be turned into a tableau of misery that dogs his every step and broadcasts his mistakes to all the world… well. That makes his reflection a bit more difficult to stomach, even though he knows there’s far more at stake than his own body image.
Martin makes a wounded noise in the back of his throat and tugs his hands out of Jon’s grip. He grinds the heels of his palms against his eyes. “I’m so—sorry. I’ve made this all about me, when—”
“Hey, no, that’s not. That’s not what I meant.” Jon looks down at the backs of his hands, the zig-zagging scars from where the worms had meandered when they hadn’t managed to eat through bone. “I’m not as… unaffected as I seem. That’s all.”
“That makes it even worse,” Martin moans and his chin wobbles even as he keeps his eyes hidden, fingers cupped over the sockets. “I’ve spent all this time o-obsessing over being upset by Prentiss and not noticing that it still gets you, too.”
“How could you have known?” Martin shakes his head, opens his mouth to respond, but Jon presses on, “You couldn’t have, Martin. You couldn’t have; I don’t exactly talk about it.” The seams of Martin’s fingers are shiny with moisture and he sucks in an unsteady breath. “This isn’t your fault, and it’s not something to, to punish yourself over. Traumas stick. It’s… it’s not a competition.”
Martin’s fingers slide apart, framing his brown eyes, liquid in the dark and shining with tears. The skin below each is smeared slick from crying, half-moon shadows the reflective color of an oil spill.
“I know it’s not. Logically, I know. But it’s, after everything we’ve been through, you’ve been through, it just seems… silly. And I hate that I’ve put this on you, when I should be,” he closes his eyes, sighs, drags his hands down his face to trail harsh white lines across his splotchy cheeks, “you know.”
“I’m afraid I don’t, Martin.” He looks so utterly miserable: tear streaked and hunched small, lips pressed thin to keep them from trembling. Martin has always been an ugly crier—his words, ones that Jon had hated to hear—has always endeavored to keep his tears secret, two aspects that have never meshed well with his sensitive disposition. Jon wishes he could gather him close, let Martin hide his face against the crook of his neck so he doesn’t need to feel embarrassed about this, along with everything else. “But that’s alright. You’ve told me enough, and I… I’m so sorry.”
“You didn’t compel me,” he mutters, “if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Oh.” The tangled snarl of guilty regret that resides in Jon’s chest unwinds, unspools, just the smallest bit. “Regardless. I’m sorry for all… this, a-and that I didn’t realize you were, ah, struggling, either.”
“That’s typical for you, though.” Jon winces, Martin grimaces. “Sorry, I mean—”
“No, no, that’s fair. I’m not always the most… observant, ironic as that may be.”
“Mm. That’s okay, though.” Jon shakes his head. They’re getting off topic, and Jon has the sneaking suspicion that Martin knows exactly what he's doing.
“Yes, well. Then this is okay, too. I know you don't… enjoy asking for help, but I’d like for you to feel, ah, c-comfortable, leaning on me. I want to help, i-if you’ll let me.” Silence drips between them, like honey gathering at the end of a spoon, viscous and painfully slow in its coalescence. Martin hides behind his hands again; Jon begins to fidget, certainty that he's pushed too far brewing low in his gut.
At last, muffled, Martin mumbles, “Christ, Jon,” and the tension between them eases.
“I-is… is that a good ‘Christ, Jon,’ or…?”
“Yeah, it’s—you’re amazing, you know that?” Jon scoffs while Martin pulls himself from his palms, looking at least superficially composed. He sniffs, heavily. “No, seriously. You… I don’t deserve you.”
It would be rude to laugh outright, but Jon has never heard something so ludicrous in his life. “I know a number of people who would rather disagree, Martin. Myself and all of our—friends included.”
“Well, they don’t see you how I see you.” He runs his fingers over the swollen scratches on his arms. It seems exploratory—for now—and Martin looks at Jon with such fragile tenderness that he has to turn away to pluck at the quilt ties again. “Thank you, Jon. I mean it.”
“Of course, Martin.” Any other night, this is where they’d typically kiss, or hold hands, or something. The abused, unfortunate bits of yarn get wrapped around Jon’s finger instead.
“I wish hugging you wouldn’t make me want to, y’know, claw my skin off,” Martin says, painfully light, and Jon laughs quietly, exhausted, perhaps a bit more pleased than he should be at them following the same line of thought. “Anyway, I think I’ll… be okay, at least for a bit, but I probably won’t fall asleep again.” He swipes at his nose, the unfallen tears gathered at his lash line. “You?”
Jon shakes his head. “No, I don’t believe I will, either.”
“Hm. We’ve got a few hours until the sun comes up, but I might—probably best we keep our distance. Puts snogging right off the table, unfortunately.”
Jon blushes. They have, possibly, whiled away multiple nights trading kisses, or even just cuddling, but that doesn’t mean Martin has to bring it up so, so brazenly. And in a transparent attempt to shift the conversation away from himself, nonetheless. “Shut up, Martin,” Jon mutters. If it helps anchor them in reality, then it helps. Both of them are certainly enthusiastic enough, anyways. “I don’t believe we finished yesterday’s allotted crossword? I can fetch the book, if you like.”
“... Might as well. Take my mind off things.” Martin slides off the bed as Jon does, frowning as he follows him from the room. “Um. Why didn’t we finish it? I genuinely can’t remember.”
“Ah, the duchesses were making their rounds—”
“—And we had to pay our respects, right. That reminds me: we need to put apples on the grocery list. Wouldn’t want to upset our bovine rulers.” He pauses in the hall while Jon continues into the living room. “It alright if we change out the quilt?”
“I shudder to think what may befall us should our offerings fail to meet their exacting standards,” Jon calls over his shoulder, “and ye—ah, there you are.” The cheap book of crossword puzzles—purchased from the town’s lone convenience store—is kicked halfway under the sofa, its flimsy front cover irreparably creased. Jon picks it up and smooths out the fold as best he can, fingers lingering on the exposed front page where Martin has doodled a shaky, childish J.S. + M.B. and surrounded it with an explosion of cartoon hearts. It’s a relic of one of their late night conversations, one where they’d both admitted to never dating in secondary school, the air heavy with the aching realization that they’d each grown up far too fast.
Sometimes, the similarities between them seem to pile up, in the worst possible ways.
“Jon? The quilt?”
He blinks himself out of his stupor. Below his fingers, a graphite heart has smudged. “Hm? Oh, of course. Whatever you need, Martin.”
They reconvene in the bedroom, where he helps Martin bundle up the quilt—hiding the ties—and spreads out the cottage’s only duvet, the kitschy paisley fabric silky to the touch. Jon drops the quilt on the floor of his side of the room while Martin tucks the edges of the duvet under the mattress, turning the bed into a smooth plane of riotous pinks and yellows.
“I hate crosswords,” Martin informs Jon for perhaps the hundredth time as they each fold themselves down on the bed, book balanced atop Jon’s knee.
“So you’ve said,” Jon agrees mildly as he scans over the clues for where they left off. “You can pick next time.”
“Mm… Logic puzzles could be fun.”
Jon taps the pencil against his thigh and peers up at Martin. He’s smiling, small and in that too-innocent way he has even as he scrapes, indelicately, using the side of his thumb, at his bicep. “Do you want to tear our relationship apart?”
“I just thought it might be nice to have a game I could actually help with.”
“You know plenty of answers to our crosswords. Granted, that’s usually after I’ve done most of the work—”
“Hey, you cheat—”
“—But I think you’ll find logic puzzles with me are, to put it delicately, a nightmare.”
Martin scoffs and rubs roughly at the soft underside of his jaw with his knuckles. “What, because you’re so good at those, too?”
“No—well, yes, but also because I hate being wrong.”
“Is that supposed to be news to me?” Martin flaps a dismissive hand. “What’s our first clue that I won’t get?”
Jon clears his throat and turns his attention down to the book, although he has to forcibly drag his gaze from the patch of burst blood vessels that smears its way across Martin’s thigh, a ruinous path that stretches to his knee. “Ah, ‘Army base in New Mexico and Texas,’” he reads and Martin lets out a truly unattractive snort that makes Jon smile at him, all too fond, given the circumstances.
“See? Why would I know anything about American army bases?”
“Does it help if I tell you it’s seven letters?”
“Fuck off,” Martin says without any heat. “Next clue.”
Jon rattles off clue after clue and Martin tosses out his flippant answers, although there is a brief moment of loud, unnecessary celebration when his guess of, “Um, Gobi?” fits. Eventually, Martin’s fidgeting carries him off the bed and out the room to check the cottage for worms, turning down Jon’s offer of company. While he’s gone, Jon pencils in some of the squares he hadn’t been able to help Knowing, and discovers that the infamous army base in the American Southwest is FTBLISS.
It doesn’t fit, exactly, and, to be honest, the concept of an entire town centered around a military outpost makes Jon deeply uncomfortable, but the name feels apt, somehow.
Martin returns, and Jon puts the pencil down. He looks a little more at ease—posture looser and eyes softer, less vigilant. He shrugs at Jon’s, “Okay?”
“Bit better,” he responds, tucking his feet below himself as he sits, cross-legged. “Wish I didn’t have to do this, though.”
Jon hums. “I can imagine.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess you can.” He gestures to the crossword, held limp in Jon’s hand. “What’s next?”
They do not kiss. They do not hold each other. They stay firmly on their respective sides of the bed, tossing insults back and forth at the deliberately obscure clues, and it’s as intimate as sharing the same breath. Jon fancies he can see the bruises that mock them fade into nothing under his watchful gaze.
It’s far from perfect—Martin still rubs vigorously at his wrists and ankles, and Jon knows the nights they wake screaming will always outnumber the ones that pass in quiet slumber—but it is, perhaps, as close to okay as they may ever get. And Jon finds that, despite the ghosts of their pasts wriggling their way under the door, he is content to cling to this moment of happiness they’ve managed to carve out from the dark, for however long it may last.