"I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake at night alone." Jonmartin post 160 angst. Bonus for jon assuming martin couldn't love him anymore.
32. I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake at night alone. (Jonathan Sims/Martin Blackwood)
“I really loved you, you know.”
Loved, past tense. And for a little while, a breath, a blink, Jon had let himself hope that the past could become present, and even future.
Stupid, really. To believe that he could have a future.
He lay beside Martin on the bed that they had learned how to share and watched him, twitching and writhing in his sleep. More than once, Jon had tried to wake him, crying with second-hand anguish as Martin’s nightmares clawed at both of their brains, but it was useless.
Perhaps he would never wake now. Jon didn’t know, and the Eye was silent on the matter. Its attention was very firmly elsewhere.
All he could do was sit there, alone, through the thick red haze that passed for both day and night, his mind full of grief and Martin.
Eventually, he went into the living room, back to the table with the recorder and the tapes. Out here, at least, he could stop seeing someone else’s dreams, could stop being scared that Martin would never wake up. Out here, he had only the fears of everyone else in the world to contend with.
When Martin did finally wake, there was barely room within Jon for relief. He had the tapes, with the voices of people he had loved, and people he had hated, and people he had never understood or even met but who had somehow led him to this place, and he mourned for them all.
“I love you, I just… I need more time…”
Unsure of why it had switched on in the first place, Jon turned the tape recorder off. He felt… like he ought to be curious about it. But there didn’t seem to be a point, anymore.
Martin sighed. He sounded so tired, and Jon’s heart bled a little more. Martin put his hand over Jon’s on the tape recorder. “I love you.”
Jon froze. “Y… why?”
“Dunno, really. Always have.”
He stared in despair at Martin’s small, crooked grin. “No, I mean… after all this, why… Why?”
Martin dropped his eyes to their joined hands. “Some things, there just aren’t answers for,” he said softly. His thumb stroked hesitantly at the delicate skin of Jon’s wrist. “Some things just… are.”
Martin shivers, a whole body shudder that gallops through his system as the sleeping bag is unzipped. The backdraught is ungodly and he groans vocally as the movement allows a Baltic gust of air to infiltrate the confines previously occupied by the muggy sleep-thick warmth he's been slathered in.
“Christ, Jon,” he complains, trying to yank the material back around him, giving it a bit of a petty tug on his quest to return to the dozy weight of almost sleep he was happily bubbled in.
“Oh hush. It's not that bad,” Jon replies in a grumbling rhythm, showing no remorse, the arse, and Martin winces and hisses like he's been caught by spitting oil as Jon's frigid ice-cherished body curls around him like a bracket. He snuggles in like he's trying to unsuccessfully burgle his body heat, knees pressing into his back. Martin kicks him with a double-socked foot to complain at this flagrant abuse of privileges.
“Nothing out there?” he mumbles into the angled pillow of his own arm. Thought Jon would be up for a while yet with his thoughts, on his usual pretence of 'checking the perimeter'.
“All quiet,” says the stiflingly-close bundle breathing into the back of his neck, making the skin feel sweaty with condensation. Martin stretches out a little before coiling up again, feeling bony fingers clench at his hips before encircling his waist like a particular committed lock.
Martin doesn't say anything else. The warmth wreathes about his limbs. The small fire they're letting die for the night is still warm enough to throw out a mild corona of heat.
Jon is apparently in a restless mood. His long hands and fingers tracing little idle circles like an spirograph at the skin he can reach. Martin's stomach, his pyjama-covered thighs, his hips, like he's trying to smooth the skin out.
“Would you settle down?” Martin says, mumbling, mildly grumpy. “Keep your hands to yourself.”
Jon's lips are at the curve of his neck, mouthing softly. Not even kissing, maybe he's too tired for it, just motioning his lips over the skin. He's a looming question-mark shaped man, towering over Martin by half a foot, poor posture giving him a natural stoop, and his hold makes Martin feel enclosed, bound up in the intimacy of the space.
“Sorry,” he says, without sounding sorry in the slightest, almost cheeky. He bestows another kiss that is not a kiss to Martin's neck, scraping a little with his teeth.
“Sleep,” Martin repeats, groggy but firm, and traps the soft, unblemished skin of Jon's hands in his own.
“Fine,” Jon still sounds inordinately pleased with himself, but he seems to calm. Burrowing himself so close Martin's running out of room. Arms grip around him, winching tighter.
“Sleep,” he parrots Martin.
Martin tries. Really he does.
Something is stopping him. Some sensation of calm let out when the cool air swept in. There's a prickling at the seat of his spine.
He fidgets a little, before he turns over, extricating himself from Jon's vice with difficulty, thinking that the change in position will improve things.
Jon's staring at him with a considering smile that curls the edges of his lips like the end of a spiral. They've a solar-powered camping light set up nearby, shaped like a lantern, stolen from a gutted B&Q, and the illumination begun to dim hours ago. Martin watches the artificial light highlights Jon's pale white skin, the upshot of scrubby blonde hair like sun-dried grass already sticking up at the back in a cowlick.
They're so close that Jon's eyes are crossing a little to look at him.
“They'll get stuck like that,” Martin chides roughly.
“Hmm?” Jon asks. He doesn't blink.
“Your eyes,” Martin repeats. “You keep them like that and they'll get stuck.”
There's a pause, and then Jon's eyes snap up to normal like they're elasticated, seated dead-centre as bullseyes. His face beams in a wide smile that rips up to the same level as his ears.
“You're so funny, Martin,” he breathes. Delighted, a childish light ringing in his big green eyes. “Tell me another joke.”
Something fizzes at the bottom of Martin's chest. He wonders if he's eaten something off.
“Errr,” he starts, and it's harder when he's just so close, so crowded up against him. “Jon?”
“Yes, Martin?” Jon replies. He says his name as though he likes how it feels in his mouth, the flavour of the sound, the way it travels down his throat. It's the same way he said it on their first date, when he introduced Martin to his parents, when they got married.
“Can you...” Martin tries to clear his throat of the stifling air. “In my wallet. There's something... something I found earlier. I want to show you.”
“A surprise?”
“It's your birthday soon,” Martin says – August, his brain supplies with a dull clunking mechanism of recollection – and Jon pauses a beat before his lips curl back four-fold like petals and he says happily, like he's touched Martin's remembered.
“Yeah. Yeah, it is soon, isn't it. I'd almost forgot what with everything.”
The cold air siphons in as Jon clambers out. Raking through the bags with his long bony fingers, before he gives a triumphant here we are! and bounds back into the warmth of their cocoon, shivering from the chill, making an exaggerated brrr noise. He passes Martin the worn-down wallet before burrowing up against his side, heated like a furnace as Martin flicks it open.
“It's a surprise,” Martin reminds him, and Jon whines good-naturedly, spoilsport, but moves his head from where it lay on Martin's shoulder. Studies him unblinkingly with those eyes.
“Have it your way then.”
In the wallet section where he might have kept notes if paper currency still existed, Martin pulls out a folded paper. It crackles as he rights it into the bent photograph it is. Studies the fixed and frozen memory there; himself bundled up in two fleeces topped off with a cagoule slitted and damaged by unnatural rains, a slightly fire-singed bobble hat pulled down to smother hair that's been left alone to grow out into a frizzy unkempt afro, holding out the Polaroid camera at arms length to fit them both in frame. The thin-lipped but genuine smile of the man next to him, short, dark stubble maturing into the promises of a beard. Brown eyes faintly sunken, tired but happy, his arm anchored against Martin's. They took two pictures like this one, assurances, Jon had called them, and Martin knows Jon won't have it with him now if he asks to check.
Martin's hand doesn't shake. Doesn't look at Jon, at the man he went on a first date with to a pub where they had the football on too loud and someone was being rowdy at the fruit machine, and Jon ordered a whisky even though he told Martin later he hated the stuff, just wanted to impress him; at blonde hair he knows, has loved, has combed between his fingers while they've watched Jon's pretentious BBC Four documentaries; at green eyes he's seen sleepy and happy and angry and thrilled. Jon who is tapping his elongated fingers against the fabric of the sleeping bag almost impatiently, whose eyes are too yawning, too flattened for the well-boned structure of his face.
Martin has a knife in his pocket. He always has a knife in his pocket these days.
“Did you kill him?” he asks, almost breathless, more silent than sound.
“Hmm?” Jon replies, and Martin stabs him in the throat.
Jon skitters backwards out of the sleeping bag on legs that are fast becoming not. Cradling his throat, gargling out a confused 'Martin?' even as his eyes slide further down and off his face.
Martin's staggering up too, wondering if he has time to go for the cricket bat on Jon's side, the one he's abraded with roofing nails, the cross heads of screwdrivers. The knife feels too small in his fist and Jon looms, spine splaying out of his skin like a tent pole pushed through canvas, and he asks Martin? even as he stretches as though rolling out dough.
“Did you kill him?” he repeats, and his voice does not, will not, tremble.
Martin, the voice strings out like a melted chewy sweet. The bars of confectionery that stuck in Martin's teeth when he was a child; the sound drags and droops and pulls and echoes and it is not kind any more.
It reaches out again, and he thinks manically that it might be going to hug him when something hard and solid and remarkably identical to what a cricket bat decorated in roofing nails and screwdrivers might look like if someone swung it into marshmallow.
Jon screams and the sound cuts and it swings around with a freakish rotating of its legs in time to be struck across the cheek, sending its nose and freckles and one side of its mouth slopping off to one side like a ship near cap-sizing.
“Get down,” Martin is told and he feels his body submit, drop and hunker down despite itself, and so he does not see what makes the thing that is not Jon howl like wind scratching at a windowpane, like a sound trapped between stations, doesn't listen to whatever wordless command is shouted that undoes it loudly and aggressively from its mockery of life.
“I – Martin,” comes the voice again. Unsure now. Braided through with worry and exhaustion. “Please, I'm sor- ….Y-you – you can get up now.”
Martin's body can move again. He stands, legs shaky, feeling like a nerves been trapped somewhere under the skin. The cold is pimpling the flesh of his arms. He observes the dark-skinned, dark-eyed man in front of him. Cricket bat painted with gore along with the front of his coat. Martin doesn't let go of the knife, and the man doesn't ask him to.
Martin holds up the picture. Compares the awkward smiling man of his photo, lower half of his face almost lost to a thick scarf, pock-mark scars trailing over his cheek and up to edge onto his forehead, to this midnight terror decked in the aftermath of violence. Panting, a large slash across his forehead like he's been attacked, the wound which even now is sucking closed.
The man doesn't move. Waits for Martin to bridge the gap. There are two sets of memories wedged and warring in his head, and both of them are so real and it hurts, rifling through stuffed in remembrances of weddings and birthdays and picnics, Jon drunk off cider and his serenading more like caterwauling; Jon ashen, a machine breathing for him, his skin splintered with the ricochet of masonry and plasterboard and foundation stone; arguing over money and house prices and their cramped flat in Dagenham; Jon, his trousers soaked and stiff with sea-salt as they tramp across an desolate beach; sleepily swaying against one another like tired skittles in a game of ninepins at their station as they wait for the early morning commuter train.
And it's not, it's so real but they aren’t, not all of them can be, not when the corpse of their architect is hollowed out and ripped up, the air of it hissing out underfoot.
Jon – Jon whose scars decorate him like medals, Jon who is holding himself like he's hurt, Jon who drops his bat in a heartbeat when Martin closes the gap and grabs him, trying to shake off the false memories like water droplets – Jon shivers like he's frozen, and his hold is a grasping gripping panicked action. Martin, he says as though a placeholder to a hundred different things. His voice is low and raspy and ever so soft.
Jon, who is the realest thing Martin knows.
Martin holds him until he can trust in that again.
The moment the door out of the Lonely snaps blessedly shut behind them, Jon presses himself up against Martin and kisses him. He's staking his claim while he has the chance.
Kissing Martin isn't actually any more pleasant than he vaguely recalls it being with Georgie, of course: lips and tongues are still uncomfortably squishy, Jon's beaky nose is predictably in the way, and the smell of human saliva is one of the most unpleasant Jon knows even after four years of grappling with eldritch abominations. But he can feel Martin's warmth against his chest as he leans up, and Jon takes the chance to pull himself up Martin's wide frame and bask in the unfamiliar sensation of being allowed to touch. He'd put up with worse for that, and Martin is here here here, and if he misses his opportunity he might drift away again.
Jon is not about to allow that to happen.
But--hold on, hold on, why is Martin pushing him away, has Jon misread this situation, has Martin changed his mind, what is--
Belatedly, Jon realizes that Martin is saying something and tries to quiet the pounding in his ears long enough to listen. It's just that--is that even English?
"Jon--Jon, slow down, hold on, Jon--Jon, I thought you were--" and then a word Jon doesn't quite catch. "Hm?" he enquires, and Martin repeats himself but Jon clearly hasn't heard him right. Eiz, maybe? Gay--no, that one makes no sense at all. Age? What is that?
It's very annoying to have to ask Martin to repeat himself again. Jon considers ignoring it and kissing him again, but the perplexed look on Martin's face suggests that he isn't likely to just shut up and let Jon make the point he wants to. "Sorry?"
Martin takes a deep breath, and Jon is mildly gratified to note that he looks out of breath and distracted. "Jon," he says slowly and loudly, "I thought you were ace."
Is that a compliment? Where would he have heard--What the hell is he saying?
Jon squints up at him. "I'm great, yes. Come back here."
Martin keeps his hands where they are, enforcing that horrible distance. It's the worst thing he's ever done. "I'm sorry--Jon, I thought you were asexual? Like. The orientation?" He sounds approximately as confused as Jon feels.
hello, I am weak and self-indulging myself this morning
Jon is unable to read statements alone anymore, not without terror choking his throat, his heart going haywire, his hands shaking, feeling unnaturally cold. He knows, rationally, the worst has already happened, but nothing that’s happened to him was rational. Martin keeps telling him how he feels is completely normal, PTSD and all that, but he hates it. He hates that Elias even took this measure of freedom from him. They find out though, through trial and error, that he just needs someone with him, someone to be there if -- if the worst happens again, to make sure he doesn’t lose control. He can’t feel that again, he just can’t.
So every time he picks up a statement, Martin is there, a solid, warm presence in the room. Sometimes Jon is sitting between his legs, Martin’s arms around his waist. Sometimes Jon’s head rests in Martin’s lap, Martin’s fingers in his hair. Other times, Martin lays in his lap, Jon’s palm on Martin’s cheek, fingers curled around his jaw, fingers on his pulse. Sometimes they’re just sitting side-by-side and hold hands. Others, Martin’s simply in the corner of the room, reading, knitting, or writing.
As long as Martin’s there, the panic is lessened, and Jon can go on. He helps Jon breathe, calms his pulse, comforts him. Martin’s his protector, his ballast to keep him stable, to let him know its safe to keep going, that they can fight this and win. He chases the specter of Elias out of the room, and Jon feels, at least in the moment, safe.
