“ what do you see ? ” martin murmurs into the dim light between them , knowing jon won’t elaborate without prompting , yet not sure even as he does , that he wants to hear the answer ; martin can admit , he’s fearful of truth or gentle lie in equal measure. but every word between them , rumbled into his skin wearily with jon curled in next to him , familiar weight and the itch of old , inherited wool blankets — it keeps martin here. tethered.
and perhaps it’s martin’s particular fear of it which keeps him open to such fickle frailty as feeling alone , when outside the world slowly ends , and ends , and ends. like a sheet of ice on the window pane on a chilly morning , back when day was distinguishable from night , the frost is there whenever martin opens his eyes from unremembered nightmare , chill set deeper than his bones , and even the slow decay just behind these ice-capped walls can seem worlds and worlds away.
over again , jon melts the frost back. the heat of his cheek against the back of his hand , slow blink of eyelashes against the top of his knuckles and the flutter of jon’s breath as he speaks — he pours like hot water over the gathering frost of martin’s skin — that swelling feeling of love , one of martin’s few , sacred , respites from the fear he wears now in place of routine feelings like hunger , weariness , boredom.
he doesn’t quite want to tell martin what he’s watching — it would be so easy to not say it, to pretend all is still as it was for only a moment. ( that they could lay here, hands entwined, without the world ending around them. who could ask for more? ) but denying martin anything feels like a crime, and jon — jon owes him answers to anything he wants to know, because it is jon’s fault they are here, here in this cabin and here in this aftermath of a world.
‘ they’d holed up in the back room of the bookstore in town, the one we went to the second week here when we’d read every book on daisy’s shelves three times over. ’ his voice is low, stays quiet, as if narrating his collection of horrors won’t automatically ruin the silence. ‘ there were about a dozen of them, the only people left in the village. but they could not evade a hunter’s senses, no matter how many planks of wood they sealed over the windows, and no matter how many weapons they’d brought into their sanctuary it’s no match for sharpened teeth. ’
he closes his eyes. his breath trembles its way out from his lungs, and he tries not to think about what he isn’t telling martin : that the group had had two children with them, that they’d huddled together and trembled, that a few of them had run but would almost certainly fall to another fear sooner or later, for nothing remains untouched for long in this new world. that the whole scene reminded him more of gravedirt and another hand in his own, and now he cannot stop thinking about daisy, likely-dead a ten hours’ drive away. that the two of them, in their lonely safehouse, are the last people for kilometers around. ( if jon even still counts as a person — perhaps martin is the only one left whole and unmonstrous. ) ‘ a few escaped for now, though the hunter seems to be following — they so enjoy the chase. but most of them are gone. the village is empty, now. ’