Chapter Text
He wakes up on the ground. Oddly, there's a pillow under his head, and a scratchy afghan tucked up to his chin. He keeps his eyes closed, ever-vigilant for kidnappings, trying to gauge his surroundings without demonstrating his awareness.
The air smells like grass, ginger, and fear. That tang unsettles him, makes his stomach roil, but the source is.
Martin, snoring softly from a few feet away. He cracks open his (blessedly normal) eyes, unsticking his eyelids from sleep, to see Martin, leaning against the wall, with two mugs of tea by his side. His eyebrows crinkle together briefly, before smoothing again with a dreamborne sigh, and Jon smiles. He tries to sit up, and he tries to remember what happened.
He has a vague impression of eyes and terror and loneliness and darkness, but for once his beholding does not press into his mind. His eyes don't need scrabble for scraps at the edges of knowing. Now they lurk, like contented leeches, providing their Archivist some reprieve.
The Archivist becomes aware of a sated hunger, and it unnerves him.
Propped up on an elbow he reaches a hand to brush Martin's knee. "Martin, wake up," he whispers into the blue-grey evening, love laced through his words.
Martin groans, shifts, nearly tips over the mugs, and blinks into Jon's face. Into the Archivist's eyes. Jon watches his partner's pupils contract into dots, watches him take a sharp breath and a scuttle back into the wall. He watches this, and he sees Martin's fear of him.
"Jon...?"
They're transfixed for a moment too long. Jon wrenches his gaze away, studying the pattern of wood grain on the floorboards. He remembers how often to blink and to breathe.
"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. I- I don't know how that happened, how it, how I could have-" he scrunches his eyes shut, even as the dots on his white knuckles threaten to split open.
His gasping breaths are met by an embrace. Martin grasps his arms around Jon's shoulders, at a rather awkward angle and with a general confusion of where to put the rest of him, but Jon collapses into the warmth.
"You're alright. Thank goodness you're alright." Sobs intersperse Martin's words, "You slept for so long, Jon, you scared me to death!"
They both laugh desperately and pull far enough back from each other to give that eye contact thing another shot. Fog-dulled brown melts acid green, and they exchange tearful, blubbering smiles.