Chapter Text
The rain was the first thing he noticed. It didn’t rain, before. Or, even if it did, it passed through skin like through thin canvas, barely slowing in its fall. The waves hadn’t felt like much, either. The sand, barely there. All there had been was the chill. Not cold, not enough to make you shiver, but just a subtle enough drop in temperature for it to be felt like a numbing layer over your skin.
It hadn’t mattered. Not really.
This was the sort of London rain that came in a spray, rather than droplets, so that before you even heard it, your face was drenched, fingers cold and clammy. Martin saw it on his glasses, the way they went from dark and clear, as they stepped out of the fog, to filled with bursts of blooming light: streetlights, cars and shop windows. Diffuse and distant.
He didn’t feel it, aside from that. Then it got too heavy on his lenses, and it dripped down, falling down his face like tears. He felt the drops reach his lips, slipping in. He could not quite close his mouth fully. He felt the rain on Jon’s fingers too, holding his tightly. It dripped down his face again and he took a shaky breath. Smelled the rain, and gas, and a stranger’s cigarette as they walked past.
“I…” He tried to say they were out, but the rain got stuck in his throat.
He hadn’t even felt the air pass his lips. It must not have, because it was a couple vendors later that Jon squeezed his hand and drew him in the dark alcove of a narrow street, eyes scanning each of the few people that passed them by.
Martin thought of anglerfishes, of folding bodies retracting in the dark. But this was London, not Edinburgh, and their nightmare was of a different flavour this time.
“Alright,” Jon sighed and pulled out his phone.
The screen was bright in that dark corner. It burst in white and blue over Martin’s wet glasses, making him blink, making his eyes hurt to the back of his skull. When he opened them again, Jon had the phone to his ear, glancing carefully over his shoulder, past the street corner.
It rang for a long time, or so Martin assumed. He wasn’t sure whether it was night or morning. Looking up, he only saw the slightly reddish, dark sky, pollution and street lamps colouring it the same every night.
He couldn’t quite look down. He stared at the sky, peeking over the dark brick building before them, and felt his throat close, his lip tremble. Like a spasm, his hand pressed harder on Jon’s, for only a moment. Jon squeezed it for longer, pulled on it ever so slightly.
Their shoulders touched, and wrists, and elbows, and Jon leant his head back against the equally dark brick building behind them, and they listened to the dial tone.
Then it clicked, and Jon seemed to sag even deeper against the wall.
“Basira,” he said, and Martin heard her voice, a sliver of familiar sound drifting close, then away in the rain. “What happened?”
She talked for what seemed like a long time, as Martin tried to count the bricks he saw before him, somehow his count never making it past four, when he had to start again.
“How’s… oh. What about… ah, maybe for the better.”
There was a tremor in Jon’s hand, but it wasn’t a shiver. It was more like a nervous movement, as if, had he been at a desk, he would have tapped his fingers on the wood, or on a cassette.
“No, no, we got out a bit farther, I think we’re close to Waterloo.”
Martin remembered, like from a long time ago or from an old movie, how often Jon’s leg used to bounce when he was sat down in the office. He’d always assumed it was from impatience, rather than nervousness.
He kept his hand very still, his chest stiller, breaths careful and shallow. A table, a shelf, to drum and tap one’s worries away on. It used to drive him mad, whenever he remembered his own breathing, it took so long for it to become involuntary once more.
“Martin…”
He didn’t even realise it was addressed to him, at first. It didn’t sound the way his name ought to sound. It sounded like how he’d heard Jon say it, this year, since — since when? — since he came back from the hospital, since Martin hadn’t heard it for months, since so many things went wrong. Since somewhere in between all of that. It didn’t sound like his name.
“How’s Daisy?” he asked instead, the string of words out before he could worry that they wouldn’t. Thank God.
“She’s…” Jon wavered, tried to run a hand through his hair while still holding the phone, not achieving much. “...she’s not there. She chased Trevor and Julia off or… something. She’s fine. She has to be. Basira said the police are already there.”
“Is she okay?”
“I mean,” Jon let out a small, hollow laugh, “are any of us?”
Martin just looked at him. The smile dripped away like the rain.
“She’ll be fine,” Jon said. “We’ll be fine.”
“Okay.”
Jon kept looking at him. Unlike Martin’s counted, meticulous breaths, his were still short, running in and out of his chest. A police car passed, lights on, no sound. Jon glanced after it as it rushed towards Embarkment, then he looked the other way, his face wet with the rain, hair sticking to his temples, coming slowly undone as it got wetter.
“I don’t know where to go,” he said, quietly.
For a moment, he looked so lost that Martin drew in a shaky breath, louder than he’d intended. Jon turned worriedly back to him.
“I… we can go to mine,” Martin said quickly, before he could hear his name again, because that would have been a bit too much. “I think I still have my keys.”
He patted all his pockets with the one hand he had free. Found them in his trousers’ pocket. He couldn’t help a single, helpless chuckle. Who got lost forever in the Lonely with his house keys still in his pockets, the charm he’d had since secondary school still attached?
Jon stared at the keys in nothing short of wonder. Then seemed to remember himself, for he nodded, laced his fingers through Martin’s, wet and cold and colder, and started walking towards Temple Station.
It was a long ride, and a long walk, for Chelsea was nowhere near the places Martin could afford to live in, but it was quiet in the less alarming way, and not crowded enough for him to feel swallowed by the world. Along the way, he also found it was just night, nowhere close to morning.
The rain had picked up somewhere in between the seventeen stops they’d spent underground, and they reached Martin’s door nearly soaked through, and cold, but at least the shivering made him remember his body more. They stepped inside, and turned on the lights, and the world tilted a bit.
But Martin realised that had only been Jon, merely letting go of his hand. He nodded, as if it made sense, and turned to lock and bolt the front door, the security measures a reminder of who he’d been a couple years before. He wasn’t even sure he’d locked his door at all, in the past year.
Jon was dripping water in his small hallway. Not much, just a little, from his hair and sleeves. He kept checking his phone, fingers tapping on its edges. There was never anything on the screen.
“Is she still there?” Martin asked.
A shrug more like a twitch. “She said she’d call when she gets away.”
Martin nodded, like that helped anyone. “Then she will.”
He didn’t really know how to account for the certainty in those words, but Jon looked at him with something akin to hope, so Martin wasn’t about to take them back. Instead, he gestured a bit shakily in the air between them.
“You could, uh, take off your coat.”
Jon looked down, as if only now becoming aware of the rain they’d walked through.
“Oh,” he said. “Right. Of course.”
“I’ll…” Martin gestured again, for no one at all. “I’ll… turn on the heat.”
He ran his hand over Jon’s arm as he went, not sure why, wincing a bit at the sogginess of his clothes, yet it helped tilt the world back on its axis a little.
Then he went deeper in, working the heat with jerky motions, hands numbed by the cold, abandoning his own soaked jacket on a chair. He only faintly registered the rest of the apartment, the faint dust that had settled over every surface, the unfamiliar, neat way in which he himself had arranged everything in it, from the couch pillows to the shelves, somewhere in the past few months.
Like the home of someone recently dead, Martin thought, and although the sadness still felt far away, he felt his breath shuddering again, and turned his eyes away.
He’d expected to see Jon still standing in the same place, helplessly checking his phone for news of Basira, but he found him reading an inscription on one of Martin’s mugs. He’d already set tea bags in two of them.
“I didn’t know you liked The Cranberries,” he said, glancing at Martin with an uncertain smile.
“Yeah, well…”
Not really. Perhaps he had, once. It wasn’t like he remembered having time to like anything much, over the past few years. But he just shrugged. It wasn’t important now.
Jon set down the mug and went to pick up the gently bubbling electric kettle.
Martin hovered. Beside the table, beside the mugs Jon had set out, beside the cheap box of tea he must have bought a year ago. He must have been staring at his own home way longer than he’d thought, if Jon had had time to find them all in his cupboards. The rain was icy cold, when it dripped down his neck.
The water steamed its way into the mugs, dragged the string of one tea bag after it, and just about managed to do the same with the second. Jon's hair was falling into his eyes. He stirred both mugs with a combination of milk and sugar only known to himself. Steady and careful, like a louder click of the teaspoon against the sugar bowl would shatter them both to pieces.
His hands were shaking a little. Martin ached.
Then Jon gently pushed one mug towards him, with the back of his fingers, careful so as not to spill a drop.
Martin cupped his hands around it. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Jon said, eyes still lowered.
Martin had once read somewhere that simply holding something warm in your hands helped ground you, merely for the fact that it resembled human contact. He’d found it interesting when he was young, sadder when he was older, and bittersweetly true after he started working at the Institute.
He couldn’t stop staring at Jon’s hands, burnt and scarred and nicked in a hundred different ways. Human contact, he thought. Martin suddenly thought of how strange it was, for two people to talk only to themselves, and still manage to lay themselves bare to each other. A conversation with no cues.
A faint thought, like something heard while asleep, came whispering at the back of his mind. What are you seeking? The image you’ve each created of the other?
He’d thought of that so often, the past few months, alone and lonely in his office, taking solace in the solitude, at least, but still not understanding why. Why it had to be now that Jon—. He’d almost wished he could have denied it, told himself that he was imagining it.
Yet, not understanding something was not reason enough to refute it. He’d learnt at least that, working where he did.
It’s just ironic, that’s all.
Martin put his face in his hands. His palms were warm now. He tried to breathe, tried not to press too hard on his eyelids. Tried to think, to remember his own skin.
“Martin. ”
Again, that tone.
“I need to take a shower,” Martin said.
When he drew his hands away, he tried not to look too hard at Jon, not to see everything etched so clearly on his face. Jon had raised his hand, as if to touch him. Another moment, and he might have. Would that have been better?
Martin couldn’t get out of that room fast enough.
He kept the water lukewarm and close to dripping, wanting to avoid both the steam and the rushing sound. By the end, he could almost feel his chest working more steadily on its own. He got dressed, dried his hair and looked in the mirror, and thought he could almost recognise himself.
When he stepped out of the bathroom, wary and more than a bit ashamed at leaving Jon alone, he found him on the edge of his sofa, tapping an erratic rhythm on his knee and watching the news, volume near the minimum. Martin saw the shape of the Institute on the screen, the headlines changing from false to ridiculous as he got closer. Then he sat down beside Jon.
“Any sign from her?”
Jon’s phone was on the coffee table, dark and foreboding.
“Not yet,” he said, with faux lightness. His gaze turned to Martin, and his hands stilled. “Better?”
“A bit?” Martin tried, and didn’t know what to do with the smile he got for it. “You should take one too.”
Jon’s hair had come almost completely undone, although it had started drying in the time since they’d stepped inside. He glanced from Martin to the phone, then to the news, and seemed to weigh all of them in turn, see how he could best balance them.
“I’ll be here if she calls,” Martin said.
Jon blinked, as if the possibility hadn’t occurred to him, then embarrassment took over at the fact that it hadn’t. Martin didn’t find it particularly surprising.
“Alright,” Jon said. He stood up.
“There’s a change of clothes in the cupboard,” Martin said after him.
“Alright,” he said again, and disappeared into the bathroom.
Martin wondered whether his own departure had seemed just as rushed, before. He guessed it must have.
There were two new cups of tea on the table beside Jon’s phone, one half-empty. Martin took the other, and tried and not tried to lose himself in the drone of the live news, showering him with a scatter of disconnected images of the Institute, of the police cars gathered there, of various jumbled, witness statements.
He almost dropped the mug when Jon’s phone started buzzing.
He set it down, shakily, and picked the phone with even more tremulous fingers, reading Basira’s name on the screen several times before actually remembering how to answer.
“Hi, Basira,” he said, tone too light, but all he could manage.
“Martin,” she said, and she actually sounded sort of relieved, which he hadn’t expected. “Oh, you’re good. Is Jon…?”
“Showering,” Martin said, glancing at the bathroom door. “Did you get out?”
“Just about,” she said. “They tried to go for more questioning, but I told them I was just manning the library, and they let me go until tomorrow. You got home alright, then?”
“Yeah,” Martin breathed out. “We’re at my place. No—no collapsing Buried train tried to eat us or anything.”
“Good?” she tried. “And are you…”
“We’re fine.”
Apparently, that wasn’t what she wanted. Or Martin had answered too quickly. Most likely.
“How are you, Martin?” Basira asked.
Martin swallowed. “I’m fine too.” The bathroom door opened, and Jon stepped out, wearing Martin’s probably only dark clothes. “It was… there’s a lot to say.”
Jon’s eyebrows lifted when he realised he was on the phone.
“I’m sure,” Basira said. “I can’t get there until I’m done with the police tomorrow, but we do need to talk. All of us.”
Martin’s eyes followed Jon as he quietly came closer, then ran a hand over Martin’s back as he seated himself next to him, close enough to listen to Basira on the other end too. He was slightly flushed from the shower, warmer than what his body would have achieved on its own, and he only swam a little in his clothes. Martin’s fingers curled a bit around the phone.
“I need to pick something up first,” Basira went on. “Then we can—”
“Jon’s here!” Martin said, startling everyone, including himself, and passed the phone to Jon with an apologetic grimace.
“Hey, Basira,” Jon said, picking up the conversation more seamlessly than it had been interrupted.
He sounded calmer now, too. Looked it a bit, even. His hair was still damp, and he’d tied it back again, but messily enough that a few greyish strands still managed to slip out.
“Yes, I think that should be… No, it’s alright, we’ll wait,” he said, focused on a random spot on Martin’s carpet.
He was still close, close enough that Martin didn’t even have to lean in to push some of those strands behind his ear, feeling a bit light, and jittery, and not like himself as he did so. What he didn’t expect was for Jon to close his eyes and lean a bit into his touch when he did so, just for a moment, before Martin pulled his hand back and Basira finished talking on the other end.
“Right,” Jon said, tone unchanged. “We’ll talk tomorrow, then… Yeah, you too.”
He closed the call and set the phone beside their half-drunk tea, then let out the deepest sigh Martin had heard from him in a while. Which wasn’t saying much, past months considered, but it still seemed like one weight had been lifted off his shoulders. All that remained was the mountain.
Yet, Jon just kept his eyes closed and pressed his face to Martin’s shoulder, the residual warmth of his cheeks seeping through the sweatshirt. He had to lean a little, which couldn’t have been too comfortable, but he didn’t seem to mind. A little while later, he let out a softer sigh.
Martin tentatively laced their fingers together.
“She seemed alright,” he said.
“Not sure. She’s very good at compartmentalising,” Jon said into his shoulder.
“You should sleep.”
“You should sleep.”
Martin stared a bit longer at the telly, news unchanged. “I don’t think I can.”
He was so tired. Bone-deep, like his skin was canvas and his insides lead. He was ready to sink to the bottom of a lake, never to surface again. The thought terrified him, along with all that waited for him once he closed his eyes.
It was too soon. He couldn’t risk it, and wake up with mist in his numb lungs, everything empty and quiet and forgotten around him. Could he even stop it, if he didn’t feel it coming?
“Alright,” Jon said.
He leant back. Pushed himself against the back of the couch, their clasped hands urging Martin to do the same, instead of sitting on the very edge, ready to bolt at the first sound, like they’d been doing. He leant his head back and closed his eyes for a moment.
"You don't have to," Martin said, even as he truly, urgently wanted him to.
Jon held his hand more tightly, like he knew it too. "I don’t mind."
When he turned his face to Martin, his eyes were not riddled with sleep or exhaustion, but clear. Clear, and focused, and looking at Martin not like he was trying to pry anything out of him, but just — looking. There was a softness to his features that was hardly ever there.
Martin bit his lip. “What?”
Jon shook his head, helplessly, like he didn’t know what either.
Then he just settled for, “I missed you.”
Somewhere, deep inside him, Martin had been feeling like crying for hours. Now he felt like crying harder. He didn’t, for the same reason he couldn’t sleep. He feared he would never stop.
“I missed you too,” he said, though, breath catching on the very last word.
Jon smiled, a slow, deep thing. He ran his thumb over Martin’s, and Martin pressed his fingertips between his knuckles. Here, here, here, every touch seemed to sigh.
What are you seeking? He didn’t know. God, he did not care. He just knew it was right here.
It was such a strange feeling, to see your feelings reflected in someone else’s eyes, and still have no idea what to do.
Martin had not been in love enough, not like this, to figure out if, sometimes, having your feelings returned was just as hard as not. If this was normal. From the way Jon had looked at him these past few months, neither had he.
Martin thought about how the knowledge had first settled in his chest, subtle yet immovable. How it had burnt at times, and numbed at times. He remembered thinking that it should've felt different. Not so lonely. He’d almost been relieved knowing the best he could do was nothing.
There are more important things than feelings right now, he'd told Daisy, one last sour attempt at purging everything left in himself out, so that what came next would hurt less.
It had echoed not only bitterly, but also oddly in his chest, and only later did he realise that was because he’d been thinking of both his and Jon’s feelings at the time. Requitement was not something he’d expected to ever assimilate so coldly.
God, he hoped Daisy was okay.
He hoped everyone would be okay.
They’d turned off the lights in the end, left just the telly and the kitchen light and the blurry street lamp outside the window do their trick for them. And sat there, feet up on the couch, listening to the ever so quiet drone of midnight reruns and taking comfort in how little of consequence they heard.
Martin didn’t even realise when they started talking. Just became aware, at one moment, of Jon recounting something from way back in Research, funny and yet banal, and safe. And, as soon as he did, Martin remembered something else.
“What were you doing, giving your ribs away to whoever asked for them?”
There was a moment of surprise, which might have been because Martin had talked right over him. But then Jon laughed, and laughed, cheek pressed to the back of Martin’s couch.
“If you know enough to ask, you know the answer already,” he said.
He had laughter lines at the corner of his eyes, Martin saw. They must have been there from before, way before, but he was glad to see them anyway. Glad they’d got to leave a mark, before all this mess.
“You’re impossible,” Martin said, indignant and then helpless, insides soft as mush, when Jon just laughed a bit more. “I can’t remember the last week that passed without you endangering yourself in some way.”
Jon pressed the back of his hand to his, then turned it around so he could grasp Martin’s fingers in an easy, reassuring grip.
“Hopefully, the next,” he said.
“Yeah,” Martin breathed out. “Hopefully.”
“At least I didn’t go around fondling explosives,” Jon said, smile half-hidden against the couch.
And Martin narrowed his eyes at him. “Didn’t you, now.”
But in truth he wanted nothing more than to pick up a pen. Grab a piece of paper. Hide this memory in words, impossible for anyone but them to find, yet there, safely locked away. He hadn’t felt like that in a long time.
The television turned to mostly nonsense, in the very early hours of the morning, no more than a shifting point of light at the corner of his eye. And sometimes Jon recalled some absurd course he’d taken in college, and sometimes Martin brought up an equally absurd part-time job he’d had, to even things out, but it was all just normal, normal. He could practically see the circles they were walking on, dotted lines giving a wide berth to everything too big, too important, nightmares and monsters.
But that was alright. Had to be alright. Christ, it had been such a long day, month, year. It was alright for them to behave as if the world wasn’t ending, for one night. They were both growing quieter, anyway, pauses lengthening by the moment, exhaustion weighing every word down.
Martin didn’t know which of them leant forward first, when soft words and smiles turned to gentle hands and kisses, something so calm and unhurried that it barely even registered for a while. He just slowly became aware that his eyes were closed, that he was not quite sleeping, and that Jon’s fingers left fleeting touches over his cheeks and jaw. His mouth seemed to be moving of its own accord.
At one point, their noses bumped just messily enough for them to pull back a bit, and Martin felt Jon’s breath of laughter against his lips, mixing with his own. The lamplight was warm as it touched Jon’s face, his eyes. Focused, yet not wary, for a change. Martin’s mind and skin and lungs felt like cotton, but it was pleasant, like the world was a soundproof room with just enough ambience not to feel empty.
Then Jon kissed him again.
Not being caught unawares this time, Martin had a moment to feel his breath stutter in his chest, a moment to worry, out of sheer habit, that he didn’t know what to do, but it was just that. A moment. The rest was like hitting your elbow on the doorframe and the pain spreading lightning-fast all the way to your fingers, only — pleasant. Nice. His skin tingled.
Martin hadn’t even known Jon cared that much for kissing. He’d never seemed like the kind of person who would be interested in anything of the sort, and Martin had never really questioned it. Never wondered if there were layers to that too, specifics that didn’t really surface as much as met you if you delved deep enough.
Another reason why this had all been so confusing.
But it was not confusing now. It was just this — Martin, curling his fingers around Jon’s wrist, letting his other hand linger on his cheek, before threading slowly through his hair, a soft string of small kisses as the telly droned on, and just the reassurance that they were here, they were out, they were alive, and neither of them was alone.
You’re here, you’re here, you’re here, Martin thought fervently. Then, almost in wonder, I’m here.
And felt like crying, but didn’t, and felt like falling asleep, and thought he just might. Soon, perhaps. Perhaps, he would even wake up.