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“Maybe it’s the flu?” says Martin, anxiously, as Jon vomits into the toilet for the third night in a row.
“Maybe,” says Jon, drawing a shaking hand across his mouth, “the human body wasn’t intended to hold a god for this long.” His lips are bloody, and his voice is raw, like he’s been screaming for hours. Maybe he has. Martin’s only just gotten back, only just found him hunched over the toilet and heaving up the contents of his stomach once again.
Martin’s fingers curl into fists, release. “You’re not a god, Jon.”
“Look me in the eye, and say that again,” says Jon, quietly.
His tone isn’t cruel, but his words hit like knives. Martin hasn’t been able to look him in the eye in weeks – it hurts, too much, too sharp, the back-of-the-neck prickle it used to induce turning to the sensation of his skin being slowly flayed away. There’s too much knowing there. Jon sees enough to hurt those he beholds, now.
Martin grits his teeth, and looks Jon in the eyes. The two on his face, at least, the ones still where human eyes should be. “You’re not a god, Jon. Don’t– don’t be arrogant.”
When he finally, finally lets his gaze slide off to the side, it feels like someone’s set needles through his bones. His hands are shaking. He feels seen, down to his intestines, his marrow, the awful, rotten pits of his soul.
Jon laughs, or makes a sound that’s trying to be laughter. One of the two. He spits into the toilet, and rests his forehead against the cold plastic of the seat. Martin doesn’t need to look into the bowl to know what’s there – bile, and blood, and dinner, and vile, thumb-sized chunks of gore in amidst it all.
Stomach lining, Jon had said, the first night. Martin hadn’t questioned him. Hadn’t asked him how he knew.
“That’s… kind of you,” says Jon, softly – and for a moment, he sounds almost like himself. Almost the way he was, before his god sank the last of its hooks into him. And then, casually– “I have eyeballs on my liver, you know. My kidneys, my bowels. My heart. If you cut me open, Martin, I’d blink at you.”
“And heal pretty much immediately,” blurts Martin, though there’s a cold sinking deep into his guts. He thinks of the stomach lining still sitting in the toilet bowl, and wonders for the first time what it’s being replaced with.
“And heal,” agrees Jon, and there’s that careful, constrained flatness to his voice that means he’s on the edge of hysteria. Martin can’t look him in the eye, but he can see him out the corner of his vision, still curled over the toilet as though it might offer salvation. “…I think.”
“How do you know?” asks Martin. “About the eyes, I mean. Maybe it was just a, a dream, or a nightmare, or something–”
Jon snorts in bleak amusement, and then gags, and then vomits wet and choking into the toilet again. Martin drops to his knees, and strokes Jon’s back, and wishes he could do more than just hold his boyfriend’s fucking hair out the way as he pukes up his own body to make way for more damn eyes.
“I can… can see out of them,” says Jon, eventually. He’s panting, and there’s a string of bloody drool stretching from his lower lip to the porcelain below. He doesn’t seem to have noticed. “The eyes, I can– see. I can see inside myself, Martin.” He barks out a harsh, humourless noise, and spits a mouthful of blood. “Do you know what that’s like? How could you. I hope you never do. But– god. I can see myself. Every swallow, every– every contraction, every heartbeat.”
He reaches out, with unerring aim for someone whose head is still half in a toilet bowl – he’s getting better at using his other eyes, thinks Martin, and the thought fills him with dread for reasons he cannot fully explain. When his hand closes around Martin’s wrist, Martin can feel the eyelashes on Jon’s palm flutter against his skin as the eye there closes against the contact.
When he presses Martin’s hand to his stomach, dangerously flat and heaving with every breath, there are bumps there. That’s expected, eyes hidden beneath ill-fitting knitwear, coiling around his torso and up, up in some awful, organic spiral. But then he presses harder, his hand over Martin’s, and there are bumps below. Eyes upon eyes, lurking beneath like awful, clustered tumours, bulging out from the depths of Jon’s viscera and blinking hungrily beneath flesh and muscle.
“Oh god,” says Martin, faintly – because he can’t think of anything else to say, because what the fuck else can he say. “Jon…”
“Maybe,” says Jon, spitting again, swallowing audibly against another heave. Martin can’t look him in the eye – it’s killing him, but he can’t – but he can still see Jon’s crooked grin in his peripheral vision. It’s a mad sort of expression, made madder still by the blood on his lips. “Maybe you should cut me open, Martin, and look me in the eyes, and tell me I’m not a god then.”
He taps fingers, gently, over his heart. The triplet of small, watery eyes on the back of his left hand flutter with every touch.
Then his body jerks, a roll of nauseated motion that starts at his stomach and rolls its way up to his mouth. His throat works, but nothing comes up, other than a thick sliver of slick-red flesh. He gasps, in the aftermath, like there isn’t enough air in his lungs.
Martin wonders if it’s still just stomach lining in the toilet bowl.
“Stop,” says Martin, and the strength of his voice, the way it shakes, surprised even him. “Just– stop, Jon, don’t… don’t say that. God, don’t say that.”
He reaches out, both hands curled into Jon’s sweater, and drags him into his arms, risk of being puked on be damned. Jon smells of sweat, and vomit, and sour fear, and Martin still buries his face in his hair and holds him. As though holding him will fix this. As though holding him tight enough will squeeze the poison from Jon’s body.
“Don’t say stuff like that,” he says, again, quieter, his nose full of the rank smell of sick, unwashed human. Human. “This is– it’s a lot. I know it’s a lot. And I’m so, so sorry. But… you’re a person. You’re a person, Jon. It’s not right.”
Jon laughs, and then sobs, and then heaves up a trickle of bile-or-blood-or-both against Martin’s front. “Am I, though?” he asks, and his voice is cracked, mad, his fingers curling against Martin’s chest hard enough to bruise. “Is that really what I am?”
“Yes,” says Martin, firmly, though he believes himself less with every passing day. When he rubs Jon’s back, he feels every node of his spine, and every bump of the eyes wound around it. “Yes. That’s what you are. A person, Jon. Not a god. A person.”
They sit there – on the floor of the bathroom, surrounded by the stench of sickness and ascension – until Jon stops throwing up, and until Martin stops crying. By the time they leave, the sun is rising, and Jon is too weak to walk unaided, and Martin cannot stop thinking about the knife in the kitchen and the eyes on Jon’s heart.