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It takes the Lonely a while to relinquish Martin. Tendrils of fog curl around him like shackles, and one particularly tenuous strand of mist circles his neck in a collar of complete isolation. Fatigue and numbness weigh him down; the apathy of a dreamless sleep sounds pretty good right now.
No. Jon told him not to sleep. Jon told him. Jon is here.
Well, no. Jon is on the other side of the Panopticon, talking to Elias. Martin is lying on the floor, waiting for feeling to return to his limbs. Everything seems very far away. The soundless quality of Forsaken still clings to the air, making Martin feel as though his ears are stuffed with cotton wool. He can see Jon and Elias talking, he can hear the up and down tones of their voices, but Martin’s brain can’t process the words. Just another type of distance, he supposes.
The rhythm of the conversation is at least familiar. Jon, tired and angry; Elias, self-satisfied and smug. They go back and forth with each other for a few moments, and Jon looks more and more exhausted with every word they exchange. Elias’ expression seems to soften as he gestures in Martin’s direction, though he doesn’t dignify Martin with a passing glance.
When Jon looks at Martin, his expression is full of resignation. It feels like the expression Martin has seen when looking in the mirror over the past few months, unhappy yet determined.
Jon turns back to Elias, saying something undoubtedly scathing, but following it with something quiet and vulnerable. Elias responds with an expression of overwhelming affection, devotion like gravity, so intense that it becomes terrifying. He steps closer to Jon, murmuring— comfort?
Elias reaches out to Jon. Jon doesn’t flinch away. For a moment, it looks as though Elias is about to caress Jon’s cheek — Martin feels a wave of jealousy he’d thought long-since vanished — but then Elias’ hand moves higher. His thumb presses gently to the curve of Jon’s lower eyelid. Jon shivers but doesn’t push it away.
As Jon’s hand raises to Elias’ wrist, he glances towards Martin once more. I’m sorry, he mouths. Then he swallows, sighs, and presses Elias’ thumb into his eye socket.
All at once, Martin feels free again — or rather, the Lonely has left him, only for him to be caught in a very different fear. Something holds his gaze in place as gore spills down Jon’s face. Elias seems entirely unruffled, plucking Jon’s eye from its socket without any fanfare or resistance.
Jon is terrifyingly quiet, though his breaths shake with pain.
Martin half-expects Elias to pull out Jon’s other eye and pour the spirit of Jonah Magnus in through the bloodied sockets. That terror grows bone-deep as Elias guides Jon’s shaking hand to his own eye, barely reacting to the pain as he helps Jon to extract it. Second by excruciating second passes, and then each of them is holding a bloodied eye that still seems to watch.
(Martin desperately wants to interfere, but he can feel Beholding holding him in place. The pressure of its gaze is cold and callous, the icy prickling at his neck barely distinguishable from the collar of mist still clinging to him.)
Elias smiles, and in this one moment, he looks strangely human. He grasps Jon’s wrist with his free hand and begins guiding his own eye towards Jon’s empty eye socket. After a moment’s hesitation, Jon echoes Elias’ actions, something ritualistic to their shared movements. The look on Elias’ face can only be described as worship.
“Jon,” Martin manages, barely more than a whisper. There isn’t even a flicker of response, as if Martin were still in the Lonely, a bystander to a world he can’t interact with. Fitting, really.
There are sounds of viscera as they slide the wrong eyes into the wrong sockets, and then—
Both Jon and Elias cry out, staggering backwards on wavering legs. Jon, particularly, seems to be having a hard time staying standing; he clutches his head, laboured breathing laced with the sound of static. Even Elias looks pained, mismatched eyes wide and unfocused even as he stares and stares at Jon. Their chests rise and fall rapidly, a synchronised clawing panic.
All at once, they fall silent.
"Jon," Martin calls again. His voice comes easier to him as the Eye's presence begins to fade from the air — faint, but not entirely vanished. "Jon."
Jon swallows, his head turning towards Martin like it takes great effort to move. A moment later, Elias turns his head as well, and they both watch Martin, unblinking and intense. Their eyes are very wrong: one so dark it seems to consume all light that touches it, and one so pale and piercing that Martin feels pinned in place, known to the core of his being. He’s certain they can see the grief blooming under his skin, filling the spaces the Lonely left hollow.
"Well then," they say in unison, "this is strange."
It isn’t as easy as Elias had expected — in as much as he’d had any preconceptions going in. Historically speaking, he’s always found the transferral of consciousness to be a straightforward process. Out with the old eyes, in with the new, so to speak. His first attempt was rather clumsy, but since then, he’s refined his selection to an art form. Poor Mr Bouchard was subsumed easily, and there was barely even an adjustment period to get used to the new body.
Well, they’re certainly going to need an adjustment period this time, to put it lightly.
Jon, of course, had not been expecting anything but the broad strokes of total inhumanity; the loss of selfhood, a complete and irreversible change into something terrible and powerful. In hindsight, his assessment might have been more accurate than Elias’.
“Christ,” one of them mutters— or both of them do. It’s hard to tell which mouth is which.
They raise a hand — Jon’s, judging by the twisted handprint of scarring that marks the flesh — and examine it. It is familiar yet alien, comforting and jarring. Experimentally, they raise it to his temples, trying to massage away the headache that lingers on the edge of their consciousness.
It would be easy, they reflect, for Elias to subsume Jon in turn. Their trade was as equal as it could be, but Elias has been alive for a very long time. There are two centuries of recollections in the halls of his mind, and Jon could lose himself in the exploration of those long-kept secrets — though, strictly speaking, ‘himself’ is no longer a concept that applies.
It will take patience to find a stable equilibrium. But if there’s one thing they’ve always had in common, it’s a strong will. They will survive, and they will thrive.
“Jon,” Martin says for a fourth time, as though the repetition will somehow change things.
“Yes,” they agree, except it comes out of the wrong mouth. Martin flinches.
“Jonah.” Martin’s voice has hardened to a low tone of warning.
They take a moment to examine their own contradictory emotions. It is hard to parse what belongs to who; already, the notion of individuality is beginning to fade, as if they have always been this. As they look at Martin, they feel… fondness, certainly, though they’d be hard-pressed to identify the nature of the affection. It colours everything else — the irritation, the amusement, the grief, all layered over with a softness that is almost infuriating.
It is nice to look at Martin from two different angles, they think. It is nice to look at him at all.
“Yes,” they agree again, forcing it out through Jon’s mouth just to make a point of it.
“Right.” Martin is tragically beautiful with his expression cold and unsparing. “So that’s it, then. Jon climbs into the Lonely to get me, and when he gets out, you body-snatch him.”
Martin knows it isn’t as clear-cut as he says — it’s obvious in the conflicted ebb and flow of his thoughts. But it’s so much easier for him to believe that Jon is gone and Elias killed him.
They click Elias’ tongue at Martin’s attempted denial. A muscle in his jaw clenches tighter, but he doesn’t throw the punch they know he wants to. Hm, would the pain matter as much, spread across two minds, or would it be amplified? They are abruptly rather glad that Peter took his knife with him.
“That isn’t exactly how it happened.” The soft regret in the tones of Jon’s voice is barely an affectation. His legs are unsteady as they walk forward, reaching a hand towards Martin.
“No?” Martin steps back — not out of fear, but defiance.
“We were curious.” Martin’s expression only sharpens at this. The wrong thing to say, then. “I— I thought it might help, somehow. The Watcher’s Crown, and Elias— … We were curious. That’s always the downfall of acolytes of the Eye sooner or later.” Sentence to sentence, voice to voice — control is something they will have to work on, clearly.
“Funny, I thought Gertrude got shot,” Martin comments, with the dull neutrality he’d had in the clutches of the Lonely. His eyes stay locked on Elias. “What now, then? World domination?”
“Perhaps,” they concede, because given their component parts, they can hardly rule it out.
Martin laughs, as disbelieving as when Jon had offered to run away together.
“Great. Just when I thought that things could maybe end up okay.”
The journey from the Panopticon is long and dark, and honestly? Pretty awkward.
By the time they reach the trapdoor to the Archives and climb up into the dusty air, Martin’s anger has simmered down into a tired sort of fury. Behind him, Jonah Magnus sighs. He closes the trapdoor, and Jon— No. Jon’s body locks it.
It can’t be Jon. Martin keeps telling himself that, though the denial feels weaker and weaker every time. He can’t accept that Jon would choose the Eye — choose Elias — no matter how he thought it might help the cause of humanity. Jon has always been foolhardy, but— surely not this much?
“Where is everyone?” Martin asks, because he feels like he ought to.
Two heads tilt, the detached curiosity of CCTV cameras focusing their lenses.
“The hunters are dead,” Jon’s mouth says with grim satisfaction. “The Not-Them is, ah, elsewhere. Daisy—” Their expressions collapse in perfect synchrony. “Daisy is gone.”
“Oh. I’m sorry?”
The smile that crosses their faces is very Elias, all cold amusement at Martin’s uncertainty. Yet there’s grief smudging the edges, desperation and resignation all at once.
“Don’t strain yourself, Martin,” Jonah says, like he thinks saying those scathing words through his own mouth will inspire some sort of nostalgia. Martin doesn’t plan on rising to his bait.
“And— And Basira?”
“Escaped.” Martin feels an impression of relief. He never got on well with Basira, but it’s good that she’s alive. “She’ll probably come back here in a few hours, once the dust has settled.”
“Great.”
It’s like the magnitude of everything that’s happened is setting in. Martin feels suddenly lost; he expected to die today, or near enough, and yet he’s here in a mess of an office, Jonah Magnus standing a little too close for comfort. Jonah presses his hands together in a nervous gesture that reminds Martin viciously of Jon, and Martin wants to scream at him.
“You have to understand,” Jon’s voice says, “I’m not just Jonah. You know that.”
“I don’t care,” Martin snaps, well-aware he’s close to crying and hating himself for it.
“Martin…”
“Don’t— Don’t talk to me like you’re Jon, okay. Just… don’t.”
There’s a brief silence, and a dull surprise that his protests seem to have worked, and then—
“This will hurt,” Jonah says, tone even, “and I’m sorry. But you have to understand.”
Martin opens his mouth, scepticism light on his lips, but there’s an insistent pressure against his mind. He resists, but he is little more than human, and Jonah breaks down his walls with ease.
It isn’t pain or trauma like Martin expects it to be. It’s fixation, obsession. It’s love.
Through the eyes of the being that is both Jon and Elias, Martin is beautiful. He has a willow-soft heart that bends but never fully breaks, and a pragmatic streak that could almost be mistaken for ruthlessness. He has agency and power beyond what most have in this world of monsters. He believed in Jon when no one else would, removed Elias from his place of power despite any personal cost, and he makes very good tea.
Martin is important, and Martin is wanted.
When he comes back to himself, tears are spilling down his face.
Jon’s scarred hands are pressed to Martin’s cheeks, rough-skinned and reverent. He murmurs indistinct words of comfort in a desperate voice, and his face is very close. The dual tones of his eyes seem like the stuff of unwritten poetry, a metaphor about balancing so much weight that everything collapses anyway. Martin finds himself itching for a pen for the first time in months.
Elias is a warm presence behind him. He has one hand pressed to the shuddering rise and fall of Martin’s chest, while the other cards gently through Martin’s hair. It’s overwhelming, it’s horrifying, it’s— it’s nice. It’s just… nice.
“Stay with me,” their two voices whisper, low and resonant.
It can’t be that simple. Point of fact, it isn’t that simple; the Ceaseless Watcher’s threat hangs over everything, and Martin is deathly aware that he is being held in the arms of a monster designed to serve it.
But maybe he can make it that simple. Maybe he can let himself have this. Just for a little while.