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After Jon’s explained he is not, no matter how Martin asks, killing Oliver Banks unprovoked, and Martin’s gotten his sulk out his system, and they’re almost out the other side of the Corpse Routes, Jon asks, careful to keep the compulsion out his voice, “You do know why Oliver woke me up and you didn’t, right?”
Martin raises his eyebrows. “Uh, no? You’re the one who knows things.”
Which is what Jon thought, and for a moment he’s caught up in the idea of not knowing something, of having a gap in his knowledge, of— But he shakes it off. This is about Martin’s feelings, not his.
“Well,” He starts, “He… I don’t know how—” The Eye chimes in, ‘helpfully’. He wrinkles his nose, “—I didn’t, until just now, know how true it is that people in comas can hear you, that talking to them helps, but. I wasn’t in a coma. I was… You know the dreams?”
“The ones people have after giving you a statement?”
Jon nods. “I was there. The whole time, I was…” He’s not tried to describe this to anyone before. It’s difficult. There’s an echo, of a ‘statement’ Elias gave, that he pushes away. “They were all connected, all blurred into each other, and I walked through them, over and over.” There’s another echo, of the feeling, the timelessness and the wandering and the watching, seeing— He pushes that away, too. “I didn’t know if I was— asleep, and the dreams were just particularly bad, or if I was dead, and my connection to the Eye was too strong for death to free me entirely, or if it was something else. I couldn’t remember how I got there, I couldn’t remember the Unknowing — In that place, the statements were all I knew. It…”
The Eye, sensing he doesn’t want to relive being trapped in one of its domains, tries to draw his attention to Oliver Bank’s roots, instead. The closest one, if he were to follow it, would lead to—
He rubs at his eyes with the palms of his hands, until the Eye gets the hint.
“We don’t have to talk about this,” Martin says, gently.
Jon shakes his head, takes a deep breath. “No, we do, you need to know.” He takes another breath, then says, as sincere as he can, “I couldn’t hear you, Martin. I couldn’t even remember your name. I only knew you visited me at all when you told me. I, ah, kind of assumed you hadn’t, actually—”
“What,” Martin exclaims, incredulous. “Why wouldn’t I have visited you!”
“You went out your way to avoid me, once I got back.”
“…Okay, yes, I did do that. But, uh, the first week I sort of… slept in your hospital room. Only stopped after the attack, actually, because Peter— You know.”
A moment of silence to give their hatred of Peter its due.
“Yes,” Jon says. “I do appreciate it, anyway.”
“Even though I stopped months before you woke up?”
“I’m reasonably certain you no longer visiting was a rather key step in everyone’s various plans, so yes, even though you stopped.”
Martin blinks at him. “You think you were trapped that long on purpose?”
“Oliver Banks explicitly told me Annabelle asked him to talk to me. He didn’t know it would wake me, but I’m sure she did. And would you have gone along with Peter, if I’d been around?”
“N—” Martin cuts himself off, furrows his brow. “Maybe? But I would have talked to you about it.”
Jon nods. “Things might have still played out the same, but keeping me out the picture until the Lonely had a decent hold on you made Peter’s plan far more of a sure thing.”
Unsurprisingly, Martin doesn’t look pleased about that. “Mmmm…”
“Anyway, that isn’t my point,” Jon says, and reaches out to take Martin’s hand and lace their fingers together. “I heard Oliver because he made a statement — And a statement about his own moment of… rebirth, no less. He told me I had a choice — I could renounce the eye, and die, or I could embrace it, and… continue.”
Martin huffs, but fondly. “I knew it wasn’t true love’s kiss that woke you, Jon.”
“No,” Jon agrees, “because you didn’t kiss me.”
That makes Martin grin, even as he says, “That is— so cheesy, oh my God!”
“You wanted me to murder the man who robbed you of your chance to try,” Jon points out, trying to suppress his own grin. “You write me poems—”
“That you do not know about!”
“—The substance of which I am entirely clueless of, but still. Poems.”
Martin’s smile is one of the best things Jon has ever seen. “Aren’t you meant to be reassuring me?”
Right, yes.
“I will not leave you for Oliver Banks, Martin,” Jon says, his tone shifting back to serious, “Because he woke me up unintentionally on the whim of someone else, and you sat at my bedside and read me Terry Prachett’s Feet of Clay, because it’s your favourite Discworld book and you think it’s a crime I’ve never read them.”
Martin’s grip on Jon’s hand tightens, but his tone stays closer to teasing. “Thought you didn’t hear me.”
“The… The Eye is very forthcoming, about you,” Jon admits.
“I don’t know how I feel about that.”
“I try not to think about it. The time for musing on if the entities themselves can feel emotion in any way we would recognise has passed, I think.”
“Yeah.” They’re quiet for a beat, still walking between the dark, twisting things Jon is not thinking about the path of. “Still haven’t read any Discworld, then?”
“No, Martin, I didn’t make time during my final transformation to read fiction novels.”
“Well,” Martin says, as always far better at sidestepping tension before it has a chance to bloom, “I have read them a lot.”
“And now you’re going to explain the plot of the entire series, in great detail?”
“And you’re going to listen attentively, because that’s what love is.”
Jon could spend every moment until all moments cease telling Martin he loves him, and he still wouldn’t have said it enough. God, he loves him.
“I do love to hear you infodump, yes,” he says, and God, Martin’s smile.
“Good,” Martin says, and lifts Jon’s hand up to press a kiss to his knuckles, before his gaze drifts to the middle distance as he organizes his thoughts. “Okay, so, Feet of Clay is one of the Watch books, but it’s not the first Watch book, and also the Watch books aren’t the first books, though you shouldn’t really…”