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“Right,” Martin says, on what he thinks is their third day walking without a break. He’s probably underestimating, too. “I don’t care if the natural laws of the universe have been re-written. It can’t be good to keep going like this.”
It takes Jon a moment to surface out of his reverie. “Hm? Oh. We could stop for... I was going to say ‘the night,’ but, well.”
They come to a halt anyway, after struggling out of a field of tall grass that seems oddly reluctant to let them go. Which is a little sinister, even in a world where the sky looks back at you. For good measure, they climb a nearby hillock, all the while brushing bits of vegetation off their clothes.
Martin stands at the top and squints at what used to be the horizon. He doesn’t do that a lot. Now, when he tries to find the points where the sun used to rise and set, his eyes tend to be drawn to the Panopticon instead.
Also, one time he’d seen something in the distance that looked alarmingly like livestock falling out of a glowing cloud. He’s not eager to witness any other such phenomena.
Jon’s elbow brushes his arm as he comes to stand next to Martin. “Do you feel tired?” he asks, also staring out across the landscape.
I feel like I should be. Even as Martin thinks this, his mind snags on the tentative, almost brittle note in Jon’s voice, and the way he placed a faint emphasis on you. Jon always sounds cautious when he asks Martin a question, from the effort of trying not to compel him, but this is different. “Oh, don’t do that,” Martin says, turning to look at Jon disapprovingly.
Jon blinks. “I’d say I have good reason to enquire after your wellbeing in the middle of a dystopian hellscape.”
“You always use more polysyllabic words when you’re uncomfortable, I don’t know if you’ve noticed. Anyway, I wasn’t talking about you fussing.” Martin flicks Jon gently on the forehead. “I was talking about you spending the last hundred eldritch-kilometres moping about being a monster.”
“Actually, even though London is a little over four hundred miles from the Scottish Highlands, we’ve walked about five hundred miles so far,” Jon says helpfully. “You know, insofar as distance has any meaning anymore. We’re like that song by The Proclaimers.”
“Stop trying to distract me with pop culture references, you... post-apocalyptic pedometer.”
They stare at each other for a long second, then burst out laughing. It slightly eases the tension that’s been building up in Martin’s chest.
As Jon’s laughter peters out, he sighs and looks at Martin, still smiling. “Alright, yes. I admit, I may have spent the last while thinking about how, unlike you, I’m no longer human enough to get tired. Or apparently, take a shortcut through a Distortion corridor. I wouldn’t call it moping—”
“Yet he supposedly knows everything.”
“—but,” Jon pauses to give Martin a flat look, “I can’t imagine how you got all that from four words.”
“What can I say? I’m well-versed in Jonathan Sims-ese.”
Martin’s small smile falters before he even realises he’s going to continue. “And, well. Worrying about you gives me something else to do, besides feel terrified and angry all the time. That’s what I’m really sick of, I think; not the walking.”
“Angry?” Jon repeats quietly.
Martin just shrugs. “Magnus used you. Of course I’m angry.”
His hand has clenched into a fist unconsciously. He only notices when Jon reaches out to take it. “I think I can help with the other thing,” Jon muses. It’s not quite an offer.
“How?” Martin stares at where Jon is slowly unfurling his fingers.
“By showing you something. If you’ll let me. I — I know you didn’t have the best experience of this, with... Elias, as we knew him at the time.”
Your mother simply hates you. You want to know what she sees when she looks at you?
Martin shudders despite himself.
Then he whispers, “Okay.”
Because it’s Jon, whose scarred skin is so familiar against his. Because some part of him knows that all the pain in the world couldn’t make Jon’s touch ungentle.
“This is what I see,” Jon tells him, “when I look at you.”
Distantly, he hears the static that accompanies Jon using his Beholding powers. It drowns out the noises of the apocalypse — the unnatural wind, the cries, the wet slip of flesh. The distant bagpipes and gunfire and buzzing of flies that Martin still hasn’t left behind, not really.
He’s no longer standing under an acid-trip sky. He does a double-take before he figures out what he’s looking at: himself, or at least the top of his head, pillowed on Jon’s belly. He recognises their bedroom in the cottage, even if he doesn’t remember this moment. They’re dozing, insouciant, even breathing in tandem. Light spills from the window and pools over them, golden and heavy.
“I promise, this is the only time I watched you sleep,” Jon says, but not the Jon whose eyes he is seeing through. “Before the world ended, at least. While slumber was still peaceful.”
Martin has the absurd, intuitive impression that his voice arrives directly in his mind, bypassing his ears. This doesn’t freak him out as much as he thinks it should.
“It’s not like you haven’t done creepier things around me,” he points out, instinctively speaking in hushed tones.
Dream-Martin huffs and snuggles even closer to Jon. Martin frowns. “Hang on — isn’t that where you’re missing a rib? Aren’t I hurting you?”
“I thought it was sort of poetic,” Jon says ruefully. “You, in the place of something vital that protected me.”
They both watch as Dream-Jon lifts a hand from the duvet and cards his fingers ever so lightly through Martin’s hair.
“Armour and anchor,” Jon muses, almost to himself.
It doesn’t escape Martin’s notice that he hasn’t actually said no to his question. The sentiment still makes his breath catch in his throat.
With a slight effort of will, and little idea beyond that of how exactly he does it, Martin separates his perspective from Dream-Jon’s. Instead of gazing down at himself, he finds himself standing off to one side, feeling even more of a voyeur to his own past happiness. He’s suddenly very conscious of the grime that has accumulated on his trousers and boots, from wading through various bogs filled with nasty surprises.
Martin turns to his right, knowing before he sees him that he’ll find Jon standing there. This Jon looks wary and travel-worn, his hair hanging raggedly around his sharp, angular face. He offers Martin a faint smile.
“Maybe you should try writing some sappy poetry,” Martin says at last, but too softly for it to come across as teasing.
Jon seems to hear what he means underneath the words. “I thought this might help,” he murmurs, pleased.
Martin steps closer, close enough to tuck the grey locks behind Jon’s ears. “You know,” he says slowly, “you said this is a world where we can’t trust comfort.” Jon’s face begins to harden with old guilt. Martin quickly continues, “But I trust you. So... so maybe think about that, the next time you need to stop being all mopey.”
Jon’s shoulders sag. “Oh,” he says. “Alright.”
A dreadful thought occurs to Martin. “This — this is real, though. Right? Where we are, this is a real memory.”
“Yes.”
“So we’re... in your mind, somehow?”
“You wouldn’t want to be in my mind right now,” Jon says, his tone matter-of-fact. His eyes flick briefly to the bedroom door. His expression darkens, perhaps at the thought of what lies beyond it. “This is where I come for some quiet from — from everything, when it feels like I know too much. You might say it’s the... eye of the storm.”
A beat. “Can I smack you metaphysically for that joke?”
“Rude.” Jon manages to make the word sound impossibly fond. He grips Martin’s arm, and eases them out of the memory with another wave of static. Or perhaps he lets it fade away from them. In any case, Martin blinks, and they are back in the end of the world.
It’s still pretty dire. But the tension, the feeling of being perpetually braced for worse — that’s mostly subsided. At least for now.
“Better?” Jon asks. He scuffs his shoe against the ground, almost shy.
Martin smiles fully for what feels like the first time in ages, cups Jon’s cheek, and kisses him. Thank you, he thinks, and I love you, and You could never be a monster in my eyes.
Jon hums as they pull apart, then presses their foreheads together for a moment. His breaths break warm and soft on Martin’s skin. Martin kisses his forehead, too, before holding out his hand for Jon’s.
Once more, they look out at the long way they have left to go. Then, holding tight to each other, they start walking again.