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Jon reaches out, and Martin flinches back.
“Martin?” Jon asks, soft – caring, considerate, kind, like he is, like he has been ever since the world made a monster of him and he stood and said no – and Martin presses a smile to his face and makes himself move forward again, nodding assertively as though he has anything left to assert.
“Sorry,” he says; an instinct, old habit. The words are as comfortable as a time-flecked duvet. He’s flinching even before the words have left his mouth.
“Please don’t,” Jon asks, soft still. The creases around his eyes and pinched turn to his mouth is worry, all worry. “What’s wrong, Martin?”
“It’s just,” Martin says, and sees the frown furrow deeper, can see Jon thinking about the word just and how the dictionaries define it, about its translations into a dozen languages and the connotations of each, can see the moment Jon snaps out of Beholding and into Jon Sims, the Jonathan Sims who hates to hear Martin debase himself with words like just. Jon’s asked – pleaded, quietly, when the sun was long vanished and the sky stuffed with fog and the moon nothing more than a faint silver glow. No more of that. No more of the words that make the man Jon loves seem less important. No more words that make him seem less.
He’s trying. He really is.
But now –
“It’s just that the last time someone did this, it was….”
Knowledge – not the sort that is Beheld – lights in Jon’s eyes, and his whole face shrinks in anger. It would be terrifying, if it did not make Martin feel utterly safe. “He showed you, then,” Jon says quietly, sort-of-soft-but-not-quite, the sort of soft like the sky goes gray before a storm, the sort of soft that the wind whispers before a hurricane. “He showed you what your mother saw.”
“Yeah,” Martin says, and then, for lack of anything better to say: “he did.”
Jon’s hand, the scarred one, twitches in a jerked approximation of violence. Jon has never been a violent man, but Martin has little doubt that if Jonah Magnus were to show his face in that moment, Jon would use his fists before his voice. He knows, intimately, that Jon’s rage would never be aimed at Martin. And it is a warming sort of thing, to know that his rage would only ever be used to keep Martin safe.
“I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” Martin says, old habit.
“Still,” Jon says. “He was – I should have been there.”
Martin laughs. “And, what, let the ritual go off? You didn’t know, Jon, none of us knew it wouldn’t matter. We all made our sacrifices.”
“You more than any of us.”
“Less than you.”
Jon lets out a little tch of irritation. He reaches out again, not for Martin’s face but for his shoulders, slowly, leaving him time to pull away. He does not.
“We can do this later,” he says. “Or never, if you’d like. I’m not so eloquent as you, Martin, but I can use words well enough.” He smiles. It’s a small and unguarded little thing, and the sight of it is a treasure Martin keeps very close to his chest, for the days the fog of the Lonely tries to chill his heart again. Only he ever gets to see that smile. “I’ve found that three of them do pretty well.”
“No,” Martin says. Jon’s hands find his shoulders, and Martin relaxes. He tucks his hands in the crooks of Jon’s elbows, a habitual pang of worry shooting through him at how thin the skin seems to stretch around his bones. “No. I want to see.” He smiles at Jon, feeling his cheeks flush a little hotter. “I trust you.”
Jon lets out a little laugh. “Thank you,” he says, utterly sincere. One of his hands raises from Martin’s shoulder to his cheek, and Martin presses a kiss to one palm, and then the next. He takes a deep, steeling breath, and closes his eyes.
Jon’s fingertips brush gently against his ears. Martin shivers. “Are you certain about this, Martin?”
“Absolutely,” Martin says, because Jon isn’t Jonah Magnus and Jon isn’t a monster and Jon would not hurt him. “I want to see, Jon. As you do.”
“As I do,” Jon repeats, with a quiet intensity that borders on fervor, then takes a deep breath of his own. Martin can almost see it: how Jon’s shoulders hike and relax when he breathes deep, the trickling way his eyes close.
For a long moment, all he sees is the dark. It’s nondescript, the darkness. He can’t truly tell which pair of eyes it comes from.
And then; and then –
Light. A bright and burnished gold, filtering in through the windows of the kitchen of their safehouse (their house, theirs, theirs, the thought and possessive are distinct but in this in-between place Martin has no way of knowing if the thought is his, or Jon’s, or both).
And it is strange to look at himself through another’s eyes, but what is stranger still is the rush of affection that the sight brings, warm and solid in the space behind his sternum, and what is perhaps strangest of all is that he is sleeping; he is not singing, he is not handing Jon a cup of tea, he is not cooking, he is not doing much of anything, really, except lying sturdy against Jon’s chest and breathing slow. He is just…there.
Jon’s book is bookmarked and tucked away, Martin knows. His own pocketbook of poetry rests on the table too, rescued from where it had fallen as he drifted to sleep on the couch, nestled and content against Jon’s side. The blanket covering both of their forms is the tartan quilt that keeps them even warmer than the old stone hearth.
Martin waits. He expects something to happen; a cow to nose its way through the window, perhaps, or for this recollection of himself to wake, but nothing happens, and nothing continues to happen. Jon traces nonsense patterns on Martin’s sleeping back, that slow fizzling warmth never abating, and once, twice, presses a kiss to his forehead. It is a long golden moment that Jon has chosen to show him, and Martin does not quite understand why.
Jon shifts, securing his hold on Martin’s form. He stops tracing, letting his hand rest in the small of Martin’s back, and tucks his cheek against Martin’s temple. His eyes slip closed, but Martin does not need to see through Jon’s eyes to feel the small smile that spreads along his lips.
I love you, Jon thinks, or whispers perhaps; Martin can feel his-their lips moving, but can’t hear the words. All he knows is that Jon means it, utterly, sincerely, genuinely, that he means it more than anything else he has said in his life. He means it so much that it sends Martin staggering, a little bit, in this space where he has no form.
There is no well and pop of the fizz in Jon’s chest. There is no sting of tears in his eyes. (There is a sting in Martin’s.) Martin is sleeping on his chest, Jon’s hand draped over his back, the other beginning to play with his hair, and contentment spreads through Jon-and-Martin like an ache. Rooted and deep.
It is love.
It is love.
For the second time Martin emerges from the space-between-minds crying. Jon’s eyes are fluttering open, slightly winded from the effort of conveying the memory and the weight it carried in stillness and detail, and he startles when he notices the tears.
“Martin?” he asks, worry clear in the creases of his voice.
I’m okay, Martin means to say, or, don’t worry, you didn’t hurt me, but all he manages is, a little desperately, “I love you too.”
“Oh,” Jon says, the ridiculous man, and turns as red as he does every single time Martin tells him so. He reaches out, then pulls back, hesitant, clearly trying to know without Knowing, so Martin laughs at him and reaches out and tucks Jon into his chest.
“I wasn’t even doing anything,” Martin says, because it’s all he can think. He wasn’t doing anything. He was just sleeping.
“You weren’t,” Jon agrees.
“You were taking care of me,” Martin says, instead of saying what he means to say, which is and I was not taking care of you.
“I was,” Jon replies, and Martin knows that he was understood perfectly. His hold on Martin tightens. Protective; fierce. “There’s no…expiration date, Martin.” He’s clumsy again. Jon has never been the best with words. Martin buries his face in Jon’s hair and holds him even closer and smothers a laugh with the best of intentions. “No, listen. I’m not here to be taken care of. I mean, I certainly don’t mind, Lord knows I’ve missed your – your tea for long enough, and I think it counts as a deprivation at this point if I go too long without having it,” he says, all in one breath, “but the point is, even if…Martin. Even if you couldn’t ever make tea again. I would still….”
He trails off. An echo of the rooted warmth pangs in Martin’s chest, where it has flourished and grown for the past two weeks, in the Scottish Highlands with a man who loves him.
It is not easy to accept. He thinks it will be a long time before he can truly understand love as given, instead of earned. But he thinks of Jon, planning for days to show him just what he felt, encapsulating it all in the perfect moment; and how he had picked, deliberate and conscious, a moment in which Martin was not cooking for him, was not making him tea, but was instead simply existing.
And that was enough.