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Jon stares. Or it does. There’s not much distinction these days. Somewhere, a woman is screaming. Jon can feel the ghost of her pain in his own chest, the awareness of fear without the agitated nerves, a heady rush in his stomach, as her assailant draws closer.
It doesn’t feel bad at all.
She’s being killed in the city of Olomouc in the Czech Republic, Jon knows, though the unimportant details sweep through his consciousness like smoke from a chimney. More interested, now, in the how than in the what. He watches her right knee pop as the almost human thing in front of her rips into the leg, sizing up its meal. Every inch of the dying woman’s mind is gripped in desperate fear, thinking of her daughter asleep in the next room, trying to conjure up escape routes, traps, survival strategies, but she can’t think properly. Sharp teeth glint in the beam of her flashlight, as she starts to hyperventilate.
The all-consuming panic seizes Jon like a rosy cloud.
A door slams near his body, and he snaps out of that particular place. The vision has him feeling sated, refreshed. He thinks Martin must be back from wherever he went to. He doesn’t look, promised not to, but he still Knows, of course. He knows Martin was phoning Basira, though their conversation isn’t as interesting as some of the other things that are trying to grab at Jon’s attention, so the knowledge slips easily out of focus, as he and the thing inside him (the one that might also be him, now) start looking for their next meal together.
The part of Jon that still has the capacity to feel moral outrage wants to kill himself. The other, newer part of him wants to lie in bed and ride the high forever. His awareness is a grey fog for other people to get lost in.
In the world Before, Jon had never fit in anywhere, not really. It’s hard to remember now, but he sort of recalls the sense of wrongness that used to follow him wherever he went. He said the wrong things, understood other people the wrong way, looked all wrong, constantly breaking unknowable rules, only accepted for the few odd traits here and there that might endear him to others. Here, in the After, he understands everything perfectly. The After embraces him in an over-powering cacophony of knowing and understanding. All across the world, he feels at home. All those interesting new ways humans have found to feel afraid. There hasn’t been hunger in him since the world ended, not even a little. He’s a glutton of other people’s living nightmares, pours them down his throat like wine.
Martin catches Jon on day three of the After with a kitchen knife lodged in his stomach. He screams, tears the knife from Jon’s hands with shocking force, his whole body becoming a vibrating mess of wet panic. Jon stands there frozen for a moment, frowning. Takes in Martin’s face, his agitated words that Jon can’t make out right now, not properly.
And it feels good.
Because Martin is afraid.
It - Jon? - breathes it all in. Martin watches a contented smile creep onto Jon’s face, as he slams the bloody knife into the sink, a waterfall of “sorry, sorry, sorry,” cascading from Jon’s twisting mouth, knees buckling underneath him before he falls to the kitchen floor.
The wound heals almost instantly, of course. It was a useless exercise, but Jon had to at least try. He’d been deep in the eyes of a thirteen year old boy in Kaduna, Nigeria, watching his best friend being digested alive. The knife had just been right there.
It had seemed the only correct choice at the time, Jon remembers dimly afterwards. Physical pain might very well have been the thing to bring him back to his own reality, distract him from the never-ending barrage of visions and anxieties.
It’d achieved the opposite effect, which had come as a surprise, though it makes sense in hindsight.
He hadn’t anticipated the sweet, hot taste of Martin’s fear calcifying, so close and potent, so very personally invested. It had kept Jon feeling ecstatic for days after, an indescribable high. He’d wanted to be distracted, but part of him wonders now if Martin’s mouth-watering response was all he’d really been after, the staggering relief washing through him the moment he’d heard him scream. Jon’s own motivations are a guessing game these days, intertwined as they are with his new survival instincts.
The worst part is Martin’s unyielding kindness. How understanding he’s trying to be. The gentle, non-stop terror he feels at Jon’s state, especially at his improved well-being, which only exacerbates it, of course. The way Jon’s eye-bags disappear, his skin glowing, clean and fresh. He looks well-fed, looks strong, in a way he never did Before.
The quiet manic desperation in all of their interactions wraps itself in a cozy healing blanket around Jon, and it grows thicker with every tense word they share, every concerned look Martin sends him.
Jon remembers wanting Martin in another way than he does now, in the Before, but the memory is distant, belonging to that man he used to be, rather than whatever thing he is now. Jon’s physical body, now seemingly immortal, its nerves suffused in the terror of everyone on Earth, doesn’t seem like something that was ever capable of wanting anything outside of the pure animalistic instinct for observing and cataloguing fear and trauma.
The thought of wanting, needing anything as human as food or intimacy… any pleasure at all, makes the shrunken remnant of Jon’s soul feel sick to its stomach. He wants Martin desperately, still.
A week after the kitchen incident, Jon asks him to leave. He’s in the bed, laying flat on top of the blanket, as he’s been most of the time in the After, and tells Martin in no uncertain terms, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, not seeing.
Martin scoffs. “No. No, of course I’m not going to do that. You need someone to take care of you right now, might as well be me.” He’s on the bed with Jon, sitting cross-legged, drinking water from a mug. The part of Jon that still feels his own body makes him edge his leg closer to Martin, towards the heat of him. He never realizes he’s freezing these days unless Martin touches him.
Martin just got done helping him eat a meager lunch, cobbled together from the canned goods they still have left, insistent on getting some calories in him, some water. Jon can’t taste anything anyway (“Oh, heh, lucky for you!” Martin had joked earlier, and they’d both looked away). They need to find another food source soon, Martin knows, but that’s a problem for another day. He strokes a line down Jon’s pant leg, not sure if he feels it.
Jon’s voice, still a domain of his humanity - somehow more in contact with his former self than his thoughts are - shakes and wobbles through the words:
“I don’t... Martin, I don’t trust... I’m not myself... I don’t know what I might do to you...” His human eyes well up, as the breath of each word rises to the ceiling.
Somewhere, someone is afraid of the dark, lost in an endless underground cave, hands bruised and bloody from scrambling across the rocky floors.
Somewhere, a man has lost everyone he’s ever known, can’t seem to find anyone anywhere, can barely remember their faces, sprints along from house to house to house.
Somewhere, a child hides from a swarm of flesh-eating wasps in an upside down cardboard box, their stingers poking holes in the surface, wings vibrating loudly.
Martin clears his throat, and Jon is vaguely back in the bed.
“Jon, this, this right here, that’s you. You’re still in there, I can… I can feel you. I can see you. Clear as day.”
Jon wants to protest, because Martin isn’t making sense at all. Jon can feel the anxiety streaming out from him, like blood from an open wound, every single day. Jon shakes his head, eyes looking up.
“Your fear,” Jon pauses, frowns, his mouth briefly hanging open, tongue moving up and down, licking the air, finally, finally, turns his face towards Martin, who flinches at the eye contact. “I feel it, taste it, all the time, and it feels-”
“Jon.” Martin’s voice is so quiet.
“It feels so good,” Jon whimpers, his face twisting into a strange grin. “Better than everyone else’s, too, don’t ask me why.” He puts a hand over the grinning mouth, like a kid laughing in class, sobs racking through him. “I don’t want to hurt you, and I can’t, I don’t trust myself, I’m hardly even myself anymore...”
Martin reaches out a hand, cups Jon’s cheek ever so carefully.
The smile stays etched into Jon’s face, a foreign invader. He never used to smile like that before, Martin thinks. He barely used to smile at all.
“I trust you,” Martin says gently, and all of a sudden feels the intensity of Jon’s concentration on him, all his neck hairs standing up. He looks into Jon’s eyes, takes in the confusion that lives there. “Of course I’m afraid, I’m worried sick about you. All the time, every single day.” He glances away, sips water from the mug. “But I think if I leave, you… you won’t remember who you are at all. I remember,” he adds, smiling to himself, stroking Jon’s cheek. “And I don’t think you’d hurt me. You love me, Jon.”
Martin says it like there’s no doubt. Like he knows for certain.
A window creaks open in Jon’s soul, shines a patch of light into a dark, dusty corner.
Oh, yeah, he remembers, curiously. I’m Jon. I love you. The room, the bed, the two people in it, it all snaps into focus.
The memory of love, or… the, the feeling is there inside him, Jon realizes with a start, bringing it into the forefront. It’s like searching for the voice of a lost loved one in a crowded mall, hearing it.
The strange grin fades away, and for a moment, Jon’s self takes priority in his own mind, on his own face.
A stark happiness fills his chest. Briefly.
Then his own terror starts slipping through the cracks, the one he’s been damming away for weeks, refused to feel.
“I don’t want this,” he whispers hoarsely, sits himself upright with a jolt. Grabs Martin’s hand from his own face, clutches it hard. “I don’t, I can’t, I can’t get rid of it.” Jon’s not sure what he means, can’t find heads or tails in his own desires. He doesn’t want this.
Martin clutches Jon’s hand back, tightly. Eyes him over. Hesitates.
He leans in to kiss Jon’s cheek, which is cold and coated in a sheen of sweat. Leans back away.
Jon sends him another confused look, the creeping terror briefly forgotten. Huh?
Martin moves in close again, presses the side of his head to Jon’s. He sighs gently, and Jon can feel the vibration of breath and hum in his ear. More confusion bubbles up in his worn-out mind. Martin just kissed me? Why?
Something in Jon offers up the knowledge, easy as anything. It’s something he used to know on his own, and yet...
He moves away to look up at Martin in shock. “Still?” he says. “You still, you-” Jon’s right hand is flailing softly, or gesturing. Trying to find the words and failing.
“What?” Martin says, quickly understands. “What?! Of course,” he admonishes, then smiles, incredulous. He presses another kiss to Jon’s brow, before pulling back to look at him properly. Unspeakably relieved to have him back, if only for a little while. If only a little bit. “Of course I still love you. I thought that’d be obvious. Thought you were supposed to know everything,” he teases, the familiarity of it shaking both of them to the core.
Jon gapes up at Martin and the expression is so quintessentially him, that Martin has to laugh despite himself, smile like a sunrise. He gives Jon another small kiss, this time pressed against the side of his mouth, a sharp pain of longing lodging its way into his chest. He’s missed Jon, he really has.
Jon blinks his wet eyes shut, and kisses back. Tender, closed-mouth kisses, bringing heat to his face for the first time in weeks. Tears are streaming from the pair of them, Martin and him. Jon turns that concept over in his mind for a moment.
Jon and Martin, he thinks. Martin and Jon.
Something about it feels good. Feels right.
For a few bright shining minutes, Jon knows who and where he is, the clarity of love coursing through him. The truth of the two of them, together on the bed sheets, illuminated.
I remember, Jon thinks. I remember you, too.