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Martin Blackwood has never been the best student. It’s not entirely his fault, he thinks—it’s hard to get his homework done when he spends nearly all his time outside of class either stocking shelves or caring for his mother, and it’s hard to keep up in class when he’s barely even looked at the homework—but he could probably bring his grades up if he applied himself more. He’s not entirely sure what that means, but all of his teachers say it, so it must be true.
He’s passable at maths, as long as someone explains the rules to him; they may be confusing and arcane, sometimes, but at least they’re consistent. He’s actually good at English; he’s always been mesmerized by the way that sentences can mean so much more than their component words, and it’s easier to make clever observations and coherent arguments when he actually cares about what’s happening. (Plus, his knack for figuring out what people want to hear and then telling it to them serves him well on the more boring essays.)
The other subjects, though—history, the endless awful parade of sciences—those are where he really struggles. When there are rules, they’re complicated and have loopholes. Worse, the rest is rote memorization, which is time-consuming and hard.
So he’s rather surprised when an otherwise confusing and dull biology lesson suddenly catches his attention.
They’re studying the human nervous system, and there’s a diagram in his textbook of a neuron, with the dendrites splayed out like tiny trees, the axon reaching out to almost-touch another neuron. And between them, a cloud of tiny blue bubbles, labeled neurotransmitters.
“All your thoughts, all your emotions—they’re caused by the cells in your brain talking to each other,” the teacher is saying. “And the way that your brain cells talk to each other is by passing these molecules around.”
Martin stares at the diagram, even long after the class has moved on. He’d never thought, never even considered, that feelings might be, in some way, physical. Sure, on some level, he’d known that brains were real, corporeal things. But it somehow feels different, looking at a picture of a thought in motion, bubbling across the gap between one cell and the next, in tiny bits that he could see if he only had a microscope powerful enough.
He imagines being able to see, not the frustratingly hard-to-pin-down evidence of his mother’s love, but the feeling itself, and shivers with a mixture of awe and longing. (Not that he doubts that she loves him, of course! It’s just that she’s not exactly the most demonstrative person in the world, and sometimes he just wishes he had a little more in the way of reassurance, that’s all.)
After skimming a series of increasingly incomprehensible books from the library, Martin is forced to admit that it isn’t quite that simple. There isn’t a microscope that could let him see just one molecule, for one thing, and for another, there doesn’t seem to be one kind of neurotransmitter—or even one hormone—for each emotion, the way he’d imagined. But the idea is still alluring enough to stick with him for a good long time.
He attempts to write a poem on the subject, once or twice, but they never come out right. So, eventually, he relegates the notion to the back of his mind, stored away but not quite forgotten.
Many years later, while he’s waiting for Jon—and the others, too—to come back from stopping the Unknowing, Martin remembers that painfully naïve idea of his. For the first time, he’s glad he lost the notebook where he’d written all of his secondary-school poetry.
The strangest thing about the Lonely, Martin thinks, is the way it twists his desires around until they scarcely feel like desires anymore.
Back before he started down this road, back before he took Peter Lukas up on his offer, it had seemed like such a simple thing. Well, all right—it hadn’t, not really, but it had been simpler than this. He had wanted things, and he usually didn’t get them, and that was fine. Most of the time.
He’d used to try and be gentle with himself; cloud the reality of his situation in equivocation and comforting self-delusion. When his mother glared daggers, turned her face away, refused his calls and visits, he’d told himself, maybe next time. When Tim had been angry and “Sasha” had been distant, he’d told himself, just give them some space. When Jon had, every once in a while, shown some promising hint of real care, even just real friendship, only for circumstance to snatch it away again, he’d told himself, maybe someday, if you’re very, very lucky.
He doesn’t bother with that anymore.
Now, when he feels the tell-tale swell of longing for things that are beyond his reach, he pierces it with as much clinical cruelty as he can muster. She’s dead. He’s dead. She’s not coming back. He’s gone. And the ones who are left have no warmth to spare for you.
He can’t have the affection he longs for, because it isn’t real. Cannot, will not ever be real. Forget his ridiculous microscope idea, once and for all—there’s nothing to see, and never was. What he wants does not exist.
It doesn’t stop him wanting those things. But that’s not the point, exactly. The point is that it hurts, even as he continues to twist the knife.
But it hurts a little less every day. One day, he knows, he’ll slide fully into the Lonely’s grasp, and the pain will be gone entirely. Then, it won’t matter whether or not he still wants things he can’t have. Nobody, not even him, will be able to tell the difference.
“I really loved you, you know,” says Martin, almost conversationally. And the thing is, it’s true.
Love is a quirk of matter—nothing but an ephemeral dance of molecules and electrical signals through the brain. It exists only in the real world; without a physical body to inhabit, it can’t be.
Martin had loved Jon, once. But here in the Lonely, the laws that normally govern reality don’t apply. Martin isn’t made of flesh and blood and bone, not anymore. All that’s left of him is an echo, a chill in the air. A gentle, pulsing fear, softer than any heartbeat. There’s no place left within his body—such as it is—for the messy, chaotic, physical reality of love.
Except.
Except that, for all he’s been avoiding and ignoring him, Martin has never been particularly good at not caring about what Jon wants. And Jon does, after all, have the full power of the Beholding backing him up. And so, when Jon tells him to look, Martin does.
Light, reflecting off of skin and fabric, slides through the cornea, slips through the pupil. Bends through the lens and the vitreous body, and impacts the retina. A flurry of electrical signals travel the length of the optic nerve, bound for the visual cortex, where they finally assemble into a form that his mind—that collection of nerve impulses that makes up everything he’s ever been or will be—can interpret. Or, rather, this is what Martin assumes must have happened, when he researches the subject, much later. But maybe it was nothing of the sort. The Lonely doesn’t concern itself with petty physics, after all.
The only thing he can be certain of is the glorious irony of this one, perfect moment. It’s only in this forsaken place, where love should be, by its very nature, impossible—
It’s here that he finally gets to see it.
When Martin wakes up, a handful of mornings later, Jon is curled up beside him, head resting on Martin’s shoulder.
It’s not a new occurrence, by now. But the experience of drifting up out of sleep to find Jon asleep next to him—on him, even—stubbornly refuses to get old.
Martin just looks at him for a few minutes, trying to fix every detail in his memory. Jon’s face is relaxed, neutral. His eyelashes cast tiny shadows across his cheekbones in the morning light. His lips are parted, very slightly, and Martin can hear the sound of his breaths whispering through the gap. His hair is a deep iron-gray rather than the raven-black it used to be, and the streaks of silver lighten it further. It’s getting long. He probably hasn’t cut it since before the coma.
He’s beautiful, of course. But that’s not the point. The important part is that he’s here, and whatever else he might be, he’s still gloriously, achingly human. His body is tucked, bird-boned, sleeping, against Martin’s body. If Martin wanted, he could brush his fingertips over one of those cheekbones, interrupt the delicate shadows playing across them. He could run his hand through Jon’s hair. He could put an ear to Jon’s chest and hear the beating of his heart.
And he would hear it, if he did. Jon’s heart—his actual, physical, beating heart, freed from its long silence—is in this room. Less than a foot from his right hand, in fact.
Martin wonders, vaguely, if this is what it feels like to be drunk with power. He certainly feels intoxicated. Just the idea of listening to the sound of Jon’s heart and lungs—the vibrations of their movement passing through muscle and bone and skin; in a very real sense, Jon’s life itself—is heady enough. The fact that he could do it is making him dizzy.
When Jon stirs, a few minutes later, he makes a tiny inquisitive noise at finding Martin’s face smushed up against his chest, Martin’s arm draped protectively over the abrupt end of his ribcage.
“Good morning,” Martin murmurs, not moving an inch.
He can hear the muffled thudding of Jon’s heart speed up, ever so slightly, as he blinks fully awake. He can hear the buzz of Jon’s voice resonate through his chest when he asks. It's still low and rough from sleep. “Everything all right?”
Martin nods. The motion makes his face rub against the soft fabric of Jon’s shirt, and Martin weathers another rush of dizziness at the thought that Jon, too, will be able to feel the movement.
Jon’s hand comes up to touch the place where Martin’s neck joins his back, fingers resting lightly between the bumps of his vertebrae. Martin imagines, for a moment, what it would feel like to have Jon press down hard in that spot. Not hard enough to hurt—certainly not hard enough to cause him difficulty breathing—but enough to satisfy the itchy, hungry ache that lingers just beneath his skin.
“I’m not… I’m not going anywhere,” says Jon quietly. “I’m safe. I’m not likely to… to get hurt, anytime soon.”
Why—? Oh. “I know,” Martin says back. “I didn’t think you were. I just wanted to… to hear it.” There’s a moment of quiet, and then worry wins out over reluctance, and Martin lifts his head. “Is that okay? I can stop if—”
“No! No,” says Jon hastily, pulling on Martin’s shoulder, resettling his ear against his chest. (The pressure is good, but not enough.) “It’s quite all right. I just… I just wanted to be sure you… knew.”
“I do,” Martin says. He reaches up and catches Jon’s hand, silently marveling at the feeling of muscle and bone beneath the scarred skin. He squeezes it gently, once, before pressing the palm against his own jaw, more forceful than the feather-light touch Jon had bestowed on him before. When he loosens his grip, Jon’s hand continues to press tightly against his face, and the ache subsides, a little. “I do.”
“I’m glad,” Martin says, abruptly, as he and Jon walk down a dirt track towards the cabin, nearing the end of their morning walk.
“Hmmm?” Jon turns to look at him, but Martin keeps facing ahead. He’ll lose his nerve if he looks anywhere but straight ahead.
“I’m just—I’m glad,” he says. “That I—um. That I got to… be. To be here, and to be me, and to know you.”
“Oh,” says Jon softly. Then, quickly, “You’re not—”
“I’m all right,” says Martin. “I’m not going anywhere. I just—I have to tell you that—” He reaches up to wipe his face, and continues, voice still unsteady. “It’s not some—intangible, metaphysical thing, you know? Not like a lot of the—of the nonsense we’ve been dealing with. Love, I mean, and all the other things that people feel. That I feel. They’re part of the world, because—because they’re part of us, they exist in our bodies, and we’re part of the world, and—I’m just glad, is all. That we got to be part of the same little corner of the universe, together.”
“Martin,” says Jon.
“Sorry,” says Martin. He’s well and truly lost the battle against the tears by now. “I’m not explaining it well, I—I just—I felt like I couldn’t go another second without trying.”
Jon wraps his arms around Martin so tightly that he can feel the pressure against his ribs as they refuse to allow further constriction. “I don’t think I quite follow,” says Jon, the sound of his words vibrating through the air they both breathe, the ground they both stand on, the bodies they both inhabit. “But I want to. I’ll listen, if you want to try again?”
Martin returns Jon’s embrace as best he can, and focuses on breathing. A fierce adoration for the man in his arms and an animal joy at being alive dance through his brain, chasing out everything else.
When the neurochemical storm has calmed enough that he no longer feels dizzy enough to fall over, Martin releases Jon except for one hand. “I will,” he says. “Whenever you like.”