Chapter Text
The next day, they decide to go on a walk around the countryside. There is little else in the way of entertainment in the cabin, so they decide to visit their surroundings a little.
There are cows in the fields, and Martin can barely contain his excitement. He walks to the fence like he’s dancing and jumping at the same time. He feels a little silly, and tramples down the shame that inevitably rises, reminding him of his mother’s disapproval at the way he moved. His mother is dead, he almost died rather recently, he is therefore allowed to walk weirdly if he so wishes.
He turns back to see Jon joining him, his own walking reminiscent of that of a penguin, with his hands buried in the overlarge sleeves of his raincoat, sauntering forward while trying to put the least pressure on his knees. He smiles at Martin, moving his arms gently at his sides, and Martin smiles back. He feels safe.
The cows do not acknowledge their presence. Martin decides he will make it a challenge to befriend them before they have to leave.
They go on walks most days, after that.
They meet Mr. Milne, owner of the fields around the cabin. He’s a solitary man, who seems to be profoundly displeased by the idea of having to talk to them. Martin is a bit disappointed, at first, but after Jon says he can feel there's a statement Milne could make, they make sure to avoid him with little regret.
There is plenty of space to go around. The fields stretch on for what could be hundreds of miles, separated by rows of low stone walls, handfuls of trees sprouting in places and a few farms and cottages in places.
Milne has not informed them of any of the cow’s names, so Jon decides they should give them names themselves. Martin ends up choosing most of them. Jon is happy enough watching him excitedly name cows that all look the same and pretend he can remember which is which.
After a week, Jon starts teaching Martin how to drive. He is very bad at explaining how it works, but Martin has become rather skilled at learning how to do things with insufficient explanations.
“You’re releasing the pedal too fast,” Jon grumbles, “you have to wait until the car does the thing.”
“What thing, Jon”
“You know!”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“It just kind of,” Jon makes a weird movement that frankly clarifies nothing, “jumps a bit. Well, it doesn’t jump, it’s more gentle. It’s a- look. Start the car, release the clutch thing pedal very slowly while pressing the gas gently and then, feel it.”
“That doesn’t make any sense, Jon,” Martin groans.
He tries it and yeah, render unto caesar what belongs to caesar, or however the saying goes: he does feel it. Not quite a jump, but a movement of some sort.
“What now?”
“When you feel it, you can fully release the left pedal and step on the gas, and in theory it won’t jump.”
It works. Martin feels like he has discovered the secrets of the universe. Jon is giving him that smug stupid smile of his.
After a few hours, he is able to drive more or less fluently, which was not a given. He does not yet know how to parallel park, but he hopes he never has to. The process sounds daunting.
Martin drives to town once a week to talk to Basira on the phone and get their mail at the post office. He asked Jon if he would like to do it, but he just shook his head with a small frown. Basira wasn’t exactly a dear friend of his.
There are boxes of statements in the mail every week or so. Jon rations them, careful not to run out. Basira hasn’t checked which record on laptop and which don’t, so a lot of them end up being fake. Martin can see the way they leave Jon hungry, with a stale taste in the back of his throat. He does not have the luxury to complain.
Meanwhile, Martin tries not to fall back into the Lonely and other such related habits and mindsets. The first day had been easy enough with how busy they’d been, but as the days go by, the fog comes back to the back of his mind.
It’s obvious Jon wants to help. Martin is grateful for it, but they both know there is little to do apart from just existing in the same space. There is only so much time two people can spend alone together in the same room with such a small amount of pastimes before it gets annoying.
Martin has taken the habit of sitting on an old moss-covered tree stump outside behind the cabin.
All of his old notebooks were tucked into his bags by Basira, along with the entire content of his desk. He’s kept every single one he’s had since he was a teenager. Out of nostalgia, maybe. Disproportionate attachment to physical objects, most likely.
He reads through all of them and finds that he was, apparently, more lonely at 13 than he was while working with Peter. It must have had something to do with the knowledge that working with him had a goal, and most importantly, an end. He did not, at 15 years old, even think to hope for friendship and true connection.
Still, the last few months were much worse than how he perceived them while they were happening.
The abnormality of his situation feels jarring in hindsight. It had never felt normal per se, but the descent had been so slow, so gentle. Giving in one thing after the other had felt like the next logical step, especially after he’d given up on the idea of Jon waking up. It’s only now that he’s on the other side of that he realises how deep he has buried himself.
Nevertheless, he finishes reading everything about two weeks after they’ve arrived, and he overall feels mostly embarrassed, vaguely sad, and a little proud of the progress he’s made in terms of style, pace and vocabulary.
He certainly wouldn’t consider his most recent poems especially good, but they are nevertheless better than one of the oldest ones, which reads, in red ink, next to what he believes to be a drawing of himself crying: “I like the word LONELINESS/It’s comfortable on my tongue/It slips out/It’s a beautiful word/I love all the letters/Why do beautiful words always describe/Bad things?”
He must have been 12 or 13 when he wrote it. He does not have the heart to feel embarrassed about it, no matter how ridiculous it sounds. He is mostly just a bit sad on behalf of his teenage self. It is one of the first poems he ever wrote in English, after he’d started forcing himself to journal in English to practise. There is little Polish after that point.
It’s strange, navigating his new situation, trying to process everything that happened. He still hasn’t fully regained the ability to feel emotions. He doesn’t think about it that much. Instead, he goes through each day as they come, fitting in his old routines and creating new ones. He and Jon reconnect, enjoy each other’s presence, cook nice meals and go on nice walks.
Sometimes, Martin realises the enormity of their situation and chokes on emotions he does not feel. Emotions he wants to feel, should feel, but can’t. He wishes he could feel desperate and scared and agonisingly pained about it all, but instead he feels nothing. He just sits there, willing himself to feel something, anything.
He writes poems about it. About nothing, and how vast and precise and allconsuming the nothingness is. He reads them over and feels nothing.
Without either of them really noticing, the weeks go by.
It’s obvious Jon hasn’t truly forgotten Peter’s words about them not knowing each other. When Martin points it out, Jon admits to his concern, almost reluctantly.
“I keep thinking about all the things I don’t know about you,” he says, “and when I try to think about all the things I do know, there’s nothing coherent. I just have the feeling of knowing, the emotion of caring, and then I can’t think of anything concrete.”
They’re sitting on the couch. Jon on one side with his feet propped up on the coffee table, Martin sitting sideways, his feet almost reaching Jon’s legs.
“Let’s play twenty questions then,” Martin answers, because he frankly doesn’t know what else to say, “or truth or drink or whatever you want. Learn useless trivia about each other.”
“Alright then,” Jon huffs, as if the idea of playing a game is frivolous to some extent, “what’s your favourite colour then.”
Martin groans lightly, half a smile already pulling at the corners of his mouth.
“I don’t know, probably turquoise or something,” he replies.
Jon nods thoughtfully.
“I pictured you more as a yellow or light orange person,” he says then, “it’s very sweet and summery.”
“Jonathan Sims, making up words by adding a Y at the end,” Martin grins, playfully nudging Jon’s thigh with his toes, “I never thought I’d live to see the day.”
Jon scowls at him, although his smile is noticeable in the corners of his eyes.
“I think my favourite colour is turquoise as well,” he says, “I never thought about it before, but now it feels right, I imagine.”
Martin lets out a little laugh.
“You can’t just make all your favourite things things I love,” he teases lightly, “you already stole my tea routine back when we started working in the Archives.”
Jon frowns slightly, huffs, squirms in his seat.
“I didn’t just pick turquoise because you said it was your favourite,” he mutters awkwardly, but it just serves to make Martin believe that it is the case.
“I pictured you liking deep, calm colours,” he says, to change the topic a little, because he doesn't know how to feel about this, “like olive, dark purple, royal blue, and the likes.”
Jon nods.
“I do like them.”
“Alright then, next question,” Martin says.
“What would you say to your fourteen year old self,” Jon asks in a humorously monotonous voice, like he’s heard this question at too many team bonding activities he had desperately tried to avoid.
Martin breathes in deeply, sighs.
“I don’t know, probably ‘are you okay’ or something.”
Jon’s eyebrows do that thing Martin loves, where they frantically move for a few seconds when he hesitates between showing his concern and hiding it.
“Why?”
“I found some poetry I wrote when I was a teen. A lot of it is just kind of embarrassing but there’s also so much sadness. I don’t remember being that sad. I remember being kind of lonely but not that-” Martin sighs, “-that profoundly sad.”
Jon hums sympathetically.
“I don’t remember being a teen much either,” he says.
He pauses, unsure whether he should start talking about himself, but Martin gives him an encouraging nod, resting his head on his head, looking intently at him. So Jon continues.
“I didn’t have anything resembling a friend until I got to university, but I don’t think I minded much. I just revised and read books and helped with house chores a lot, I didn’t pay attention to other people much. I can’t remember if I really was fine with being alone or if I convinced myself of it so vehemently that now I can’t remember what it really felt like.”
“You always did push the self-reliant bit a tad too far,” Martin comments, trying for a light and playful tone.
“I’m trying to get better at avoiding that,” Jon mutters, “it hasn’t exactly been the easiest over the past few months.”
Martin thinks of Jon, alone after waking up from a six-month coma, inhuman in a way he couldn’t understand nor control and never got the opportunity to see as alright. Jon who tried to starve himself to avoid hurting people but ultimately couldn’t keep it in, who got blamed for being a monster by people who pushed away the last bits of his humanity. Jon who had lost his only friends, Jon who didn’t have Martin to help him the way he had, to the extent he could, after Prentiss.
“I’m sorry,” Martin murmurs, “I should have been there.”
“It’s not your fault,” Jon says, “I did miss you, but it would have been better if the others didn’t hate me so vehemently. I understand Melanie, but I don’t see why Basira and Daisy hate me so much. I never hurt them personally.”
“Yeah,” Martin huffs, “a bit rich of Basira to be so harsh on you about trust and all, when she literally worked for Elias the whole time.”
Jon sighs in frustration.
“She kept badgering me about how I was hiding too much and should tell her everything about my plans while she disappeared for weeks at a time and refused to explain anything. When I found out about her working with Elias she turned the conversation to make it look like that was my fault too!”
“You literally sacrificed yourself to save her friend who had tried to murder you and had been nothing but an arse to you before!” Martin exclaims, “and she just kept being rude to you.”
Jon huffs his agreement.
“Every week I have to listen to her complain about how hard it is to navigate the Institute to get you these statements when she lost her friend,” Martin says in frustration, “and I have to act all sympathetic when all I’m thinking is- well. Basira, what if you hadn’t worked for the bad guy the whole time. What if you hadn’t put Jon in danger. What if you had helped him manage the statements thing from the start instead of driving him to the stage where he is now, you know? I know I should have been there to help as well but-”
“You had other plans,” Jon interrupts him, “you were busy with Peter Lukas and you couldn’t talk to me, I understand. It’s alright. Basira had no excuse.”
“Yeah!”
“Yeah.”
“What does she even have a right to blame you for?” Martin asks after a while, “I can’t think of a single thing you did that could even begin to justify the way she treated you.”
They stay in silence, trying to come up with reasons and explanations, until Jon hesitantly shrugs.
“I think it had something to do with her having to save herself during the Unknowing.”
“Well,” Martin says, affronted, “you were a bit busy actually trying to stop it and dying in the process. Not much time to help a girl out, is there?”
“Indeed,” Jon says gravely. His amused smile is audible in his voice.
Martin huffs. He is getting a bit too emotionally involved in the conversation. He’s not sure what to do about it, unused to emotions after all this time.
“You know,” Jon mutters, “I spent the last few months hating myself and thinking I was responsible for everything bad that happened, but the more I think about it, the more I realise that not that many events were a result of my own actions, and even these were often out of my control.”
“That’s the spirit!” Martin exclaims, frankly much too loudly, but it makes Jon smile a bit.
It’s clear that Jon is using somewhat formal language to distance himself from the conversation, but Martin allows it. He tends to be relatively more self-indulgent in these moments.
“A lot of that is still my fault,’ Jon frowns, “but- not as much as I originally thought.”
Martin hums.
“I think there are a lot of conversations to have about fault and blame and forgiveness, in relation to the things you did, the things you could feasibly have done, the things that are your fault, the things you should be blamed for, and the things other people can choose not to forgive you for without it affecting the way you learn and grow. I thought about it often these last few months.”
Jon nods slowly.
“It’s a bit much for a Tuesday evening, I don’t think I’m quite awake enough to have these conversations now.”
Martin nods. He asks him a question about books instead, and listens to Jon explain to him the plot of War and Peace in great detail. He feels content.