Not all compulsions manifest in a physical way. Mental (hidden) compulsions aren't rare and they can be just as debilitating. Examples of mental compulsions include counting, suppressing thoughts, repeating words in your head, hoarding memories, neutralizing thoughts, replaying memories, questioning, praying, ruminating, rehearsing actions, reassuring yourself and many many more.
You can actually have just mental compulsions and no physical ones and still have obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Content warnings: First-person depiction of compulsions/behavioral tics; food mention; brash discussion of death/murder; implied drug use and excessive swearing.
POV: Nimbus
In which Nimbus struggles to adjust to the ways of the Lell.
Jett spins idly back and forth in their chair while they twist a toothpick between their fangs, eyes glued to the holoscreens thrown haphazardly across the wall as I find myself once again tapping the long-gone passcode to Beta’s workshop into the door of a cabinet before I open it. A brief glance inside yields none of the things I was hoping for--maple candies, jerky, dried fruits, anything to chew over and over--and my fingers, again, slip into the locking code when I close the door, and dance across the next in the same pattern.
Goddesses, why can’t I open anything without a reminder?
The legs of the stool beyond the nearest archway scrape against the floor as Beta returns from his venture into the foyer of the bunker, a pipe in hand. Somewhere beyond that, the door to the canyon hisses open for the twelfth time today, a gust of wind sending a pitter-patter of sand over the floor as Xiv shakes her helmet out and cusses just low enough for me to get the gist without understanding a word.
Nothing here, either. Tap again, swipe the invisible dismissal. Drum out the shape of a crow in flight, forget that there’s no knobs on the door, drum it again just to be sure. Open it, greet my own disappointment in the reflections of metal cans.
“Councillor Andor’s dead,” Jett tosses over their shoulder, still spinning, the toothpick abandoned on the desk before them.
Beta coughs. “That fuck was still on the Consul?”
“His kid,” Jett corrects, rubbing a knuckle into their gums from over their lips. “Got challenged, got cocky, got a hole in their head.”
“They find who did it?” I ask, finally reaping the reward of my impulse-led fingers in the form of a tree-gum candy from the first cabinet I searched and that I knew I hadn’t put the code into quite right.
“Hm?” Jett lets their chair’s momentum spin them around to face me as I finally tuck the little distraction between my teeth and as Xiv tracks red dust in on her shoes. “Find who?”
“The killer.”
Xiv snorts, blue-lensed goggles still obscuring her eyes as she shakes the dust out of her dual-toned hair. “Why? Andor lost. That’s that.”
My gaze drifts back to Jett, who’s also now looking at me like I’ve grown a second head or blurted an obviously wrong answer in front of the class or dared to entertain the thought of turning a rebel in for a bounty and suddenly I’m wondering what, exactly, has gone wrong. Where the disconnect happened, where the comma was misplaced in the code, where I switched the order of operations.
But Beta butts in, hand waving towards the other two with a dismissive laziness. “Senator Andor was challenged to a duel. If they didn’t agree, it’d be murder, but they did. They knew they could die, and some sort of honor made that worth it to them. Nothing to persecute in there.”
My mind stutters, blinking back to his story of adultery and vengeance. “But... didn’t you do the same thing and get banished?”
Jett cackles. “Fuck, no! Murder wouldn’t get ‘im banished, either, but he dug up the shit list for every goddamn senator on Gyr’s Consul and aired it across the city on hijacked speakers. We had to elect a whole new fuckin’ Consul from scratch after it hit the air, and their first action was gettin’ his ass as far away as possible so he couldn’t do it again. Kickin’ him out was easier ‘n keeping him locked up.”
“... Oh.”
Xiv smirks, and with a flourish of her floating prosthetic wrist, tosses her helmet onto the table behind me. “Told you. Ol’ Prick’s an off-flavor madman.”
I was going to write this for the Aspec Archives week, but I got overexcited, so here we are.
AU: Mythical creatures. OG Archive team.
Some CWs apply, see tags.
The sea is more than water, her elder brethren taught her, warned her, chided her. It is home and harm and hungry, and you should not face it alone. Her siblings were older, ever knowing better, boisterous and boasting braver, but even they worried, scolded and fretted when she swam out too far alone into deep waters.
It will love you, but it will not always be kind, her eldest sibling bit out, snapped to mask their anxiety. There can be no bearings, in the deep-deep down, no anchors to denote where the sky lies.
When her people sleep, they rest wedged into some secure rock or crevice, tails looped around tails so no one is lost while dreaming.
You cannot be a shoal of one, my dearest, my youngest and bravest, the oldest of their shoal had said, when she told her she was planning on taking the rising when the waters warmed. Ascending landward on the tide swell, letting the shimmering scales of her tail split into skin.
She had not used the name Sasha at that time because that was a landward name she chose with care. Her folk gather names like a garland of pearls, to be constantly strung longer through life as age advances them; names for qualities, for momentous events, for hopes and desires. Her first name, gifted by her shoal, was guttural. It starts at the back of her throat, trails off into a susurration through gills. Mer is a difficult language to learn, though not impossible.
Tim tried. There is no one singular language of those who skirt the deepwaters, so he attempts to mimic her dialect. His pronunciation stumbling, he makes tentative sentences with the butchered grammar of fry. Martin’s grammar is even worse, though he picks up the eddies and waves of the sounds easier.
Jon, like most things in life, takes it as a challenge. One day, almost stubborn with nerves, to perform his task to perfection, he pushes out a juvenile approximation of her first name. Clipped and textbook and the stress in the wrong places, but Sasha smiles, showing her sharpest teeth in delight. Instructs him where to hold the hum at the back of his throat, how to roll the third phoneme upwards like an air bubble. Jon repeats it and repeats it, quietly smug and pleased at his achievement, and the sea in her soul rocks fondly at the sight.
She broached landward in the rising two moons after her age of maturation. She was one of a handful to come to shore. A sibling in Brighton who she phones every week, another two in Holyhead. Her first shoal traverses to warmer waters when the season shifts, and she would feel the rock-hollow absence of them if it was not for Tim, inviting her to participate in a hundred-and-one inane activities that keep her from feeling swept out; Jon, with his libraries of questions and intrigues, his quick-silver tongue; Martin, who sometimes swims a little further out from them but who finds her small knick-knacks in charity shops and craft markets and leaves them on her desk for no reason other than he has thought of her.
She makes three necklaces, plain with a strong chain, a single pearl attached. And on a day where her folk traditionally string garlands of seaweed and mangrove roots and colourful plants from coral reefs in a celebration of family – there is no one word in her language for this idea; it poorly translates into hierarchies like sibling and brethren and elders, but these are not concepts that fit it exactly – she gifts them to the shoal that will anchor her in the depths of the sea, and bestows upon them names. Most Mer names are wishes for quick fins, calm waters, safe shores, and so she wishes these for them in a language they are not quite proficient in yet.
Her landward shoal is smaller than is traditional. But she loves them as treasures of her heart, and thinks she understands what her siblings told her, about anchors.
--
His parents, both harpies from local nests, are perplexed when his wings start coming in.
Must be a colouring from your mum’s side, his dad hums thoughtfully when Tim’s primaries grow in long and shining like struck bronze. He runs a careful finger down the central line of the rachis, and the wing shudders and jumps, the feathers still sensitive, and Tim complains that it’s ticklish. His wings are too small to fly away as his dad dives in, captures him in careful arms, corkscrewing upwards a little off the ground with Tim squirming and squealing and squawking in play, but they flutter and flap nonetheless.
The wing span’s from your dad’s side, no-one from my nest ever went more than five foot, his mother says, rubbing at the dark brown of his downy secondaries. Tim stretches them out wide, eager to boast at their length, the tips of his longest feathers reaching past his arms held out wide.
Danny’s wings are smaller. Magpie like, bold lines of white broken up by blue and black, the same as his parents. Tim’s wings, broader, a colour like beaten brass that tips into gold at the ends, draws attention, but he’s never been embarrassed. His family never treated him differently, so he didn’t dwell on it.
He can fly, though he doesn’t often. After his parents died, and after… after Danny, he moved to London, where there’s tighter airspace regulations and permits involved, so he mostly doesn’t bother. This doesn’t mean never, however. He has learned, while working in the Archives, that from the ground, his wings have enough lift to pick up both Jon and Sasha by at least a foot. He thinks he could probably manage Martin as well, if it wasn’t for the unfortunate fact that Martin is mildly allergic to a whole host of things, including feather dander, meaning he gets a bit watery eyed whenever he gets too close to Tim’s wings, and he’s a sniffing, red-eyed mess come moulting season.
Anyway, he can always fly when he leaves the city. When it’s been too long since Sasha’s scales touched seawater, she invites him out to the coast. Jon apparently has had enough of the coast to last a lifetime, and Martin gets funny about large bodies of water, so it’s often the two of them. She swims out, the greenish scales of her tail catching the sun-struck water, and he, above, feeling the breeze brush through his cramped wings, follows her wake. When she breaches the surface in a playful arc, he swoops down, trying to catch her at the same time as she tries to splash him.
“You never thought to look into it?” Jon asks. Always brewing with questions. Tim is obligingly holding out one of his wings, and Jon, who takes everything like a project, has books out and webpages up but with no further clue as to why his colouration and span differ so from his parents.
Tim shrugs. “Doesn’t matter really, does it?”
Jon hums, clearly not agreeing, and Sasha rolls her eyes fondly, and that is the end of that.
-
Marysia had hoped her child would not take after her husband. She’d lit candles and attended masses during her pregnancy, worn the beads of her rosary smooth. Her child had been born on land, miles from shore, and her husband had been a grounded man, who had folded up his pelt on their wedding night for her and swore to wear no other soul than his human one.
But then her husband leaves, the box where he kept his second soul empty, and Martin is eight years old, and he wakes up one morning glassy-eyed and complaining of nausea, his lip bleeding from where his sharpening teeth have ripped the skin, and she knows her prayers were not answered.
It is not unknown, for the second soul of some folk to flourish later. But it is a rough awakening, to have one’s body grow a new skin out of itself, and Martin is off school for over a week, riddled with fever and fervour, constantly parched, crying and sweating out salt-water.
She watches his skin prickle with grey and black fur, blotching with white over his stomach as he coils up under his covers, throws them off only for his limbs to reduce to shivering. His brown eyes have gone black-shot, his cries a mix of language and barks, and Marysia fears she will lose her only child to the sea.
It will be hard for him to fit in, she tells herself. It would be best to choose one, and he has his friends and family and her on land, and who knows where his father is now, and surely it would be cruel, an unnecessary agony for him to endure some other foreign pull away from all he knows.
She does what she thinks is a kindness, though that is neither excuse nor forgiveness. After nine days, his fur has come through, sleek and soft, his whiskers twitching, and she helps him peel it off as one would do clothes, revealing sweat-sheened limbs, his eyes slipped back into brown again. His gaze still distant and feverish, he tries to cuddle into her, and she soothes him while she finishes stripping off his pelt and folding it neatly.
While he sleeps, she burns it in a fire in the back yard.
When he comes back to himself, she lies and tells him that he’s been sick with a bad fever. And he trusts her, and never questions it. He doesn’t understand that she’s burnt a part of him up, scattered the ashes to the winds, but it was for the right reasons. To keep him safe, and happy, and with her.
He grows up human-limbed and cloven-souled, and she never tells him the truth.
--
Sasha floats in an ever-dark, stolen away and hidden. There is a knot, a cage-trap around her legs, which have fused into her tail although there is no water. The sea, far away, like the wail in a conch shell, throbs in her soul as she strains and shouts and snarls in the wrapping of spider’s webs.
The sea is the only thing with her in the dark.
Sound has a particular quality, underwater. She hears it first, an echo that shivers through her, like being thrummed on the backdraft of some shallow wave. And then it is a wash of insistence. A command.
The compulsion uses her names, landward and seaward and it pulls and demands her attention, and she shrieks and cries back, struggling in the depths. She is being called home, up up up to breach the surface, and she cannot help but answer.
There is a crack and the sea splits, and she is choking on cold and dusty air.
“Sasha!” someone is saying. “God, is she – she’s not – ?”
“Get that stuff off her, come on. Sasha. Sash, love, can you hear us?”
A series of thuds as she splutters. A twisting, gnarling screech, and several swear words.
“Jesus!”
“Shit – shit, get her out of the way.”
“Boss, move, give me the – ”
The screech degrades into a glitching, warping scream. There is the multi-layered sound of compressed air, and crackling fire,the woosh and stench of something burning.
In time, she cracks her eyes open to the punch of light. Her tail flaps weakly. Someone is pulling great strands of silk that has clumped like poorly soldered iron around her limbs, making visceral noises of disgust. She’s cold-stream shivering, surrounded by broken wood and chippings.
“Hey, hey, we got you. We got you. You with us, Sash?”
The faint scratch of feathers against her cheek. Furnace-warm arms are holding her.
Jon is kneeling down in front of her. Holding an axe and stinking of smoke, and she knows, she knows, that it was his voice she heard, although she doesn’t yet understand why.
Martin throws a blanket over her as she shivers, her tail shrivelling and bisecting into legs. He has silk in his hair, and his fingers are trembling, but his face is broken with a look of such relief.
“It’s you,” he says, and his hand touches at his throat, at the necklace she made for him. “It’s you. It’s really you.”
It’s Martin in the end that carries her out of the tunnels, tucking the blanket completely around her. He is talking in the scatter-gun way he does when he is anxious, babbling, and she can’t bring herself to listen. He smells of soot and saltwater, and she’s never noticed that before.
She falls asleep, curled up into his hold, drained and shaken, but feeling utterly safe.
--
Jon is human. Completely, one hundred percent, although Sasha had joked once that way way back there must have been some Spinx in the family. Tim’s long suspected that Martin’s not quite human, no matter how he presents, but that’s Martin’s business, not his. Some folks have lineages that are rare, or mistrusted, or misunderstood, and Tim’s not one to pry.
Jon, though. Human through and through. Which is why he’s so worried.
“I shouldn’t have been able to do that,” Jon says. Martin’s with Sasha, making sure there’s no nasty side effects to her imprisonment in the table. Jon’s had a face on him for a while which means he’s Worrying with a capital W, and it’s taken hours for him to untangle himself into a blustered declaration to the rest of the class, spiked with nerves. “That place, it had her. It shouldn’t have… I don’t know what I did, but I told her to leave, a-and she could. And she shouldn’t have been able to.”
“And you think that you did that?”
“I – I know I did that, Tim, I felt it, o-or. I mean, I felt something!”
“Ok, alright. Alright. Let’s, let’s calm down and look at this logically.”
Jon goes over what he said while they struggled to rescue Sasha from the deep. It was something he said, he’s sure of it, which is why he is sitting cross-legged on the floor of the main archive office space with Tim, his trousers getting dusty and his temper scraping frayed, getting increasingly frustrated when he tries recreating exactly what he did with his voice, going through questions and commands and instructions and inquiries. And while Tim answers, it’s clearly not what Jon’s looking for, and he’s rubbing the hair at the back of his head in the way he does when he’s getting increasingly frustrated and is too bull-headed to walk away.
Then Jon, rolling his eyes and seething in annoyance, asks him a throwaway question, one of many he’s been trying – what’s your favourite colour? (seriously, Jon, that’s what you’re going with?!); What did you do at the weekend? (you know what I did, you and Martin were with me!).
“Why did you join the Magnus Institute?”
They both sit, frozen and horrified as Tim’s mouth opens and his words trip over his tongue in their eagerness to leave his mouth. As his eyes grow wide and water with tears as he cannot stop speaking about Danny, about the Covent Garden circus and Joseph Grimaldi. As Jon sits, ramrod-backed and cannot stop listening, a muscle jumping in his jaw. His expression wars between frantic and panicking and hungry.
Tim feels wrung out and hollow once he’s finished. Jon’s manic with apologies. It takes both of them a long time to calm down.
“Maybe… maybe you’re a siren or something?” Tim suggests, but Jon is shaking his head.
“It’s this place, Tim. It’s those statements, when I read them. It’s … I – I think they’re doing something to me.”
Tim looks at Jon and the light strikes off his eyes in a way that it shouldn’t on a human.
He touches Jon’s arm.
“We’ll sort this,” he promises. “We got Sasha out, didn’t we? The four of us, we can get to the bottom of this, yeah?”
Jon nods, and gives a small fragile thanks, and that’s human enough for Tim.
--
Marysia told herself she was not a bad mother. That her son was simply a hard child to love, that he had all the worst trappings of his father, his brown eyes perpetually caught with a far-away look that doesn’t know where to place its longing. But even as she sickened, and he sloughed off every facet of himself in a pathetic attempt to please her, she couldn’t find anything but sorrow in her heart to look upon the man grown over familiar in face, a growth that grew deep-set and fungal into contempt.
She almost spat the truth out to him. Once or twice, with the thought that confessing might bring them closer. She wished he’d chosen the sea instead, so she wouldn’t have to look upon her amputated, half-formed child who would always be lost.
But she never did.
And Martin finds out alone, cornered in an unlocked office, his hands dropping the lighter as a thousand eyes open and watch satisfied as they pour his mother’s choices down his throat to choke him.
--
It starts when Martin starts sleeping in archive storage. When Tim watches worms burrow into Jon’s skin at the same time as they latch and gnaw and wriggle under his own. When they get Sasha back, and find Gertrude’s corpse and Jon leaves and gets hurt and hurt and hurt again, and the world around them gets smaller and meaner and there is nothing Tim can do.
He takes to storing food in their desk drawers. Nothing that will go off, or won’t keep. Tins and dried goods and non-perishables. He lines the walls of Martin’s storage room with fire extinguishers of different types, fire blankets, and spare first aid kits bulging with plasters and bandages and antiseptic wipes. He buys blankets and pillows and rope and penknives. He stress-moults constantly, and tucks his feathers out of sight, irritated and embarrassed at the sight of them, and it occurs to him that nesting is not a healthy way to deal with this.
He wants his family safe. He used to think it was such a small thing to ask for.
He thinks about that when the bomb goes off.
He burns, and he is dying.
His rage and fear burn off into a different fury. That it has come to this, his family so threatened, that all he has to his name is his sorrow and trauma and frustration and vengeance.
Tim wants nothing more than to live. To see them safe. To rail and rage against what seeks to harm them. So he burns and he burns and burns, his wings aflame and his mouth twisted in a scream, and does not die.
They dig him out breathing from the rubble. His skin stained grey with ash and soot.
Hey! How are you? Some more OCD headcanons would be greatly appreciated.
-Personwholovesyourblog
Hi hello!
I think kaminari's compulsions are more mental like "if i dont think about a lamp for 3 minutes im going to die"
kirishima's compulsions are normally more of "if i don't take my shoes off, lock the door, and run into the house in five seconds, a murderer is going to be in the house."
For midoriya, i think they'd be more physical. compulsions like "if i dont run around the building and touch every wall, that tree is going to die."
Ooo jonmartin prompts ya say? 👀 If you're still taking requests, I'm really feeling some Supportive Monster Boyfriends angst rn. Either jon being Very Eye and martin calming him down, or martin being Very Lonely and Jon pulling him back, whichever....😁 --@screaming-introvertedly
Here you are! Supportive Martin and the Eye-based horror his boyfriend sometimes turns into like some sort of shitty superpower
(some content warnings for violent imagery and graphic hurt/comfort, I’ll add more detail to the tags.
Jon rocks him awake violently, his nails leaving reddened half-moons in the skin of Martin’s arm, clamping his other hand vice-tight over his mouth. He is panicked and panicking and Martin’s pulling his beaten, aching body up out of muddy awakening, dredging together the scraps of energy he has left.
Jon releases him, and makes sloppy gestures, their meaning imperfectly delivered with how rushed he’s being; Up. Leave. Corruption. Now. Leave. Now. Now.
His mouth and hands make a terrified picture of desperation, and Martin’s staggering to standing, steadying himself on the rust-mossed bannister of the car park stairwell they’ve been sheltering in, trying to shuck exhaustion from his limbs to paw around for his backpack.
It’s too late anyway.
Martin can hear the skittering, scraping tumult approaching up the floors below, and Jon must know something he doesn’t, because he’s grabbing Martin’s hand and tugging him manically up, pushing him when he thinks Martin’s going too slow, and their feet are tripping on the concrete stairwell and still Jon is trying to pull them both upwards with nothing but his will and shaky legs. Their thumping, irregular steps echo in the boxy space, and still they aren’t fast enough.
They come as a mass. A roiling, compacted sea of matted, boil-plagued fur and knotted tails. Mouths frothing rapid cry out a hideous rending song that scampers and squeals, and they pour up the steps like a wave and break against them as they run.
Martin fights hard as they’re blocked in at a higher landing. He’s getting good at fighting these days. He scythes with a home-made weapon of brute force and nails while Jon burrows into their backpack, and then he’s being handed a flare as Jon casts down a glugging spill of petrol, and that when illuminates in a fetid barbecue stench takes out a good few of them. Yet they are legion and there are only two of them, and they were shattered and wasting before even this assault, and Martin is not fast enough.
He remembers hearing Jon holler in agony, his body turning in a pirouette of violent motion and intended impact and private terror, and he doesn’t even manage to complete his turn. A rat-king, made of up dozens of writhing furry bodies latches into his leg, using the leverage to claw savagely at his chest with a dozen back legs, a mauling amalgamation of impossible, flesh-rot limbs.
Something chomps into the meat of his arm and dangles there. He screams himself, the sound too big in the stairwell, a return cry of a dozen distant howling Martins, and his body shudders felled as he’s pulled down, and he keeps on screaming. He’s lost sight of Jon. There’s blood and matted fur over his eyes. His lungs expanding with a breathless terror, he tries to batter them away like midges in a summer heat as they swarm over him and take him for food.
The patter of their nailed feet over his cheeks, the paper-cut, dig-drag sensation of the onslaught, the decisive and brutal splitting bite and rip of the skin of his throat.
“Stop.”
The rats stop. So does Martin. The scream bubbles un-made and unvoiced in his chest and he can’t blink the blood out of his eyes. He can’t see Jon, but he doesn’t expect to. It’s not Jon that’s here with them any more.
“Tell me,” whisper-demands-croons-sings the thing that is no longer Jon, voice crashing on the rocks of them with with a wave-foam aftertaste of static and Martin’s mouth fills with the saliva of every shameful story he’s ever kept secret, every unkind thought, every mistake, every evidence of his fragile humanity laid bare.
“Tell me your story, Tangled Hoarde of Many Claws,” compells the voice of the Archive. “Let me rip your song from your spines.”
Martin pays hideous witnessing to the rats’ screaming. He sees when they start rocking their mismatched, desecrated bodies, moaning and keening, when they start dying with all the violent grace that was probably afforded to Peter Lukas. The infected bodies that survive turn delirious, wailing in confusion, lost from their hive, dragging their broken-backed, broken-brained bodies from the battleground, and the Watcher drinks it all in.
Martin feels the compulsion flicker and falter like a loss of pressure. His mouth remembers the agony of his body.
The thing that is not Jon watches him for a steady moment. The edging of its eyes stretches, retracts like the bodies of jellyfish, and pupils bloom into existence like opening flowers with a sucking, popping sound. Still the thing stares and Martin wails at the torn places of his skin, and the flayed torn places in his head that the thing is calmly perusing through as his movements get weaker.
He wants Jon here. He is trembling, and blood-loss woozy and he wants Jon to tell him it’ll be ok.
It is a body in all the ways something can be technically a body, and it moves in all the ways something can mechanically move. The hands that touch him are not the thin-spindle fingers that are deceptively calloused, they are not hands he knows, hands that have held him with a cherishing softness. There is nothing soft in this gaze, like being the only thing in the sights of some predator on a desolate, wind-scoured moor, nothing soft in its hold as it observes the violence done to Martin’s body.
Martin gasps and thrashes faintly, gargles blood through the weeping gash in his throat, and the thing makes a sound like a snarl of tape being wound back.
“Breathe,” his body is commanded. It doesn’t even have a mouth any more. It sounds its demand in the fibres of his skin, in the tendrils of his slipping-away consciousness, and Martin almost weeps at the meat-hook immoveable yank of it as he’s made to persist.
It is unendurable to continue. And the thing, that flexes the outline of a face that could have been Jon’s, whose eyes have lost all colour, replaced by the shock-wide black of pupils like the unblinking gaze of owls, will not permit him to drop into unconsciousness. Martin is instructed to live and breathe and survive in this blood-soaked, echoing stairwell, and his abused body does as instructed. It is efficient, this brutality of meatball surgery, but there is nothing human in it, and Martin’s throat gags on a wail as a tourniquet is applied to his leg.
Finally, eyes that could be eyes he knows boil down to the front of the thing’s face.
“Sleep. Long and dreamless,” comes the final command. Martin has no choice in the matter.
He awakes in a different place. There was a multi-level shopping centre running off one of the floors of the car park, and he opens his eyes in the plush-carpeted, desolate foyer of a multiscreen cinema. His body an anguish, aching and bruised to the bones of him. He blearily looks at the patch on his arm, the neatly sewn stitches and tape marking his skin, manages to move his arm with a pained wince to touch at the padding of gauze at his throat, his upper leg.
Around him like the elements of a summoning circle; medical gear, antiseptic and needle driver, tissue forceps, blood-heavy bindings discarded along with make-shift compressions. Martin wonders how much of his body needed mending. How much of it was commanded to.
Jon is there. His face ashen and smeared with Martin’s blood, the horrifying vista of his face returned to almost normal. Martin watches an eyeball roll back and into the scar tissue of Jon’s throat. He has his back against a circular plinth, body collapsed and folded uncomfortably like he’s lying where he fell.
He’s not looking at Martin. His eyes – his own dark pupils returned to him – staring off at a distance Martin cannot reach, a horizon he cannot venture to.
There are the drying trails of tears down Jon’s cheeks. His mouth is moving but it is not his voice that spools out but a testament of horror bestowed by some other poor soul using a mimicry of their voice.
Jon has the expression on his face of a man who has spent a long time drowning.
Martin wonders if he’s too late to bring him back to shore.
Martin reaches out, fumbling, his motions jerky, imprecise. His reach limited by the bindings of his wounds, he flails his hand to touch Jon’s leg, the bare skin revealed below the line of the trouser leg, the only part of him he can reach.
“Jon, come back,” he pleads hoarsely, and stares at him as if hoping to snag his gaze away. “Come on, you can do it, come back to me.”
Jon’s eyes blink slowly, like a lizard. His mouth doesn’t stop moving. His body has started shivering, though it’s warm enough here.
Martin wets his lips and wishes for water.
“I broke my wrist when I was six,” he says, the words scraping up the side of his throat. Jon’s eyes flick to him, and there are still the embers of a hungry light there. He has stopped talking. He is paying attention. “I used to play rugby, though I was never any good at it. There was a fight in the changing rooms when I was thirteen, and I stopped playing after that.” Martin sucks in more air and Jon’s gaze doesn’t leave him. He’s stopped shivering.
The Eye likes the tales of minor tragedies, of fears and hurts and heartaches and so Martin feeds it like a praying man might light votive candles to try and lead his loved ones home.
“The first boy I loved, it-it was, we were at uni, but he was so ashamed of who he was he kept me a secret too,” he continues. “I am frightened that one day I’ll become my dad. I miss Tim and Sasha. I knew I had a crush on you when you told me I could stay in the Archives, and even then, I wished it gone because I didn’t want to be hurt again and I thought you’d be the sort of man who’d tear me down to build himself up.” He clenches his fingers around Jon’s ankle. “I am scared that one day you’ll drown. Come back, Jon. It can’t have you, come back to me.”
Jon sways and blinks woozy. He looks at Martin, seeing again, and his gaze is thready and human and terrified.
He’s stumbling, crawling on hands and knees to Martin’s side. Stuffed in his mouth are all the sorries and regrets and pains Martin can see writ large over his face; his hands span bird-flighty over Martin’s healing, shattered places.
“Jon, I’m ok, you saved me, Jon, we’re alive.”
Martin uses his arm to pull him close. Jon’s hands are beginning to scatter in explanation, in apology, but Martin shushes him with a croaky, relieved sound and holds him, a known quantity cradled in his hands, rocking his creaking, bruised painfully human body as tight as his battered limbs can bear.
you think of rashes--itches you cant stratch; bugs on your skin you can't swat, your focus narrowed to the crawling, the prick of the tiny pedipalps, the glint of a golden watch. all around you are people who have never starved a day in their life, and you scarcely enter an ordinary gala without keeping one eye on the easy marks: the man in the silver tuxedo, face red with intoxication; the giggling senator who always loses her way to the ballroom; the bespectacled assistant constantly checking his watch. your legs skitter you over to his side, and your fingers are still fast, fast enough to snatch a handkerchief; a loose bracelet; a matched set of gloves; and only then can you breathe. just in case. you've still got it, just in case.
