Sometimes family is an inflatable tube avatar of the spiral capable of murder, a chaotic, deeply depressed scraggly cat who is an avatar of the desolation, and their equally chaotic researcher friend that will call blowing up other fears rituals as "a trip out"
So I saw that one reference photo [x] and the heights matched up in perfectly in my head, all of my synapses fired up because one thing about me- I'm first and foremost a Jonmartim truther.
This did not specify whether or not it ought to be kinky, so I went not for a change!
I feel like I fell a little short of what I was trying to do here, but oh, well. Have the inherent romanticism of someone who does not want you to die by any hand but theirs. And I think Tim deserves to be a monster for once.
(I could've gone cooler with his design, but let's say it's early in his transformation.)
Paper burns and magnetic tape melts, and Jon feels as if he is only ever inches from both, pinioned by the searing blade of Tim’s attention.
Love and hate are not opposites, but two sides of the same coin. Jon does not believe he has ever understood that, not all the way down to the bones of the meaning, until now.
More of a spectrum, really, than a coin. Or perhaps a horseshoe. It doesn’t make a difference, Jon knows where they lie no matter the model.
The first time Tim kissed him, after the explosion at the waxworks, after Jon woke, it raised blisters from lips to uvula. The taste of the heat was familiar. Jon wonders if Tim kissed him while he was in his coma.
“I’m glad you’re awake.” The first thing Tim said to Jon, before the kiss. And then after: “Don’t want anyone else to try and kill you.” The Because I’m not ready yet that sharpened the meaning of the statement went unsaid, but Jon Heard it anyway, with no effort on his part.
Jon drinks ice water to soothe his much-burnt mouth and does not point out that if he had died it would still have been Tim. He Knows he pressed the detonator, and he Knows what he said before he did so. (And he Knows that he decided, in that moment, he cared more about surviving to see the end than he did remaining human, which is the crack through which the Desolation poured into him.) But he supposes Tim wants something more intimate.
And isn’t that closer to love, of a sort, than anything else?
These are strange times they move through together. Even in comparison to the times that came before. If any employee of the Institute had any lingering doubts about the veracity of the statements they collect or the nature of their workplace, even after the worms, the attack by the Flesh, and what the interim director did to the library staff, Jon imagines Tim has dispelled them. There was no coma, not for him. No miraculous preservation or healing…Jon still isn’t quite sure which one happened to him. No, Tim was burned. The explosion he triggered caught him full on one side and he is blackened, charred. Nikola or something else must have been nearby; melted plastic beads the charcoal wounds.
The destructive force of the fire is caught in the hollows of him, come home to roost behind his bones. It smolders in his empty eye socket, his exposed teeth, his vertebrae, the spaces between his metacarpals and the cobblestone bones of his wrist. Jon assumes it also flickers in his ribcage, next to organs wet and roasted dry both, but hasn’t seen him shirtless. Something in him wants to.
Tim’s other half is wholly unmarred, soft lips and dark eye and worm scars. The dividing line is sharp and stark. Jon would call it impossible if he were a year or so younger, if Tim were not here in front of him every single day. He brings to mind Norse mythology. Hela. A god of the underworld, half-living and half-dead.
“He can look normal, when he wants,” Basira tells Jon. “I’ve seen him do it. Sort of…pulls the skin over to cover up the rest of him, and it all runs into place. Like wax.” She mimes. “It’s not like he can ride the Tube, looking like that.”
“Hm. Suppose not.”
“The whole corpse thing’s just for here. Guess he wants the reminder.”
“Wants to remind me, you mean,” Jon mutters, and Basira shrugs.
“Not sure he actually blames you for what happened at the waxworks. For what it’s worth. Everything else, but that…that was his.”
In terms of ownership, Jon is aware. Not fault. He Knows Tim does not feel guilty. Why should he? He stopped the Unknowing, destroyed the Circus and its vile ringmistress, and while he did not come out the other side human, at least he became what he is now out of desperation. Which is much more than Jon can say.
He sees Tim in his dreams. Fire and silk and melting red smiles. Jon hasn’t told him. Tim knows. He always looks right back at him, the only denizen to meet every one of Jon’s eyes. One of only a handful who aren’t afraid.
Jon wondered why he stayed at the Institute, when he first returned to work. Surely by now Tim was lashed securely enough to the Desolation to survive leaving, especially with Elias absent. The answer was not long coming. Jon didn’t even need the benefit of Knowing.
Tim cannot touch statements without burning them. The ash blackens the gray in Jon’s hair, and his face and throat and clothing are forever darkened with a revolving pattern of smudged handprints.
“You know, if he has his druthers - which I suspect he will eventually - he’s going to burn this place to the ground with you inside,” Peter says pleasantly, to which Jon can only shrug.
He is a book, monstrous in his eye-studded cover and with its bloody ink, and Tim is a match. It would be naive to think a creature of destruction and one of accumulation could love each other any way but violently. Perhaps they ought to be grateful they can love each other any way at all, whether they want to or not, whether or not they both realize it’s love.
“If I blinded myself,” Jon tells Tim quietly in the archives, neither of the girls around and Martin still perpetually absent, “it would sever my connection. To - the Eye, this place, everything.” He waits a beat. “We could leave.”
Tim looks at him. With human eye and hollow pit both. And it is a look that tells Jon everything he has any consideration for will eventually be ash under Tim’s hands no matter what. That he does not know how to change that, nor does he care to. There is only burning, or falling completely out of his world.
And Jon finds himself desperately wanting to burn.
