Work Text:
There is a child in the Lonely.
Jon doesn’t notice, at first - he’s focused entirely on Seeing Martin, Knowing Martin, so that he doesn’t slip away into the fog. It’s Martin who first notices the child. Who stops Jon with a jolt.
Jon can’t Know too much about the child, not in the Lonely, not without letting go of Martin, but at a glance he appears to be around ten years old, buried up to his knees in sand, watching Jon and Martin pass him with unbridled, heartbreaking longing shining in his eyes. Jon and Martin stand there for a moment. Looking. Wondering what, possibly, could bring a child into the Lonely.
He knows, from the Buried, that you can’t save everyone. That you can’t go back for anyone. But this is a child . The kind of child who ends up in the Lonely desperately needs love and attention, and Jon and Martin share a glance and Jon knows instantly that Martin agrees - they can’t just leave this child there.
Jon holds Martin with one hand and, with the other, reaches down to the boy. He takes Jon’s hands and, just like that, he’s out of the sand, no longer trapped, no longer alone.
It’s exhausting, to Know them both as much as he can, but somehow Jon does it, and brings them home in not much time.
The moment they’re in the real world once again, Jon collapses in the hallway of his apartment (they’re in his apartment?).
The boy looks confused.
“Your name is Michael,” Jon exhales, the words coming easy as breathing. “You are nine years old. Don’t worry, we aren’t going to send you away.”
He has to force himself to keep his mouth shut after that (mostly because the next words out of his mouth were going to be something like, another Michael? Really? ). Packing is a blur and Martin does most of it - Jon’s contributions were spilling out the plan to go to a safehouse, and Knowing the two of them enough to keep them from fading again.
This child-Michael seems confused, but content to follow Martin around and put things in bags and feel useful. He’s from Brighton , Jon’s brain volunteers. His mother’s name was Jirina .
A child. Well. At least Daisy’s safehouse has two bedrooms, he Knows.
~
They take the train, and Jon insists that he sit in the middle, that he might put an arm around them both.
Martin is terrified of having a child to care for. He worries he’ll be a bad parent .
Jon knows that Martin would be a wonderful father, and tells the Eye to shut up.
~
The safehouse is two tiny bedrooms, an even tinier bathroom, a gray couch, and a surprisingly spacious kitchen. Jon takes a moment to wonder why Daisy would have wanted two bedrooms, and then abruptly does not need to wonder anymore, and tries his best to put his mind off the matter because the answer makes him want to sob.
The room with the twin bed is maybe half the size of the student-housing single room Jon lived in his first year at uni. There is a bed, and a sloping ceiling, and a plastic bin under the bed containing sheets and blankets. Making the bed with the ceiling as it is is a task, especially considering Jon’s always been terrible with fitted sheets, but he does it anyway, because he’s shorter than Martin and if Martin tried to do anything in that room he’d smack his head on the ceiling far too many times for Jon to let him in good conscience.
There’s a moment that Jon thinks, maybe none of us should be left alone right now, maybe we should all sleep in the room with the double bed, but then he reasons that that would overwhelm everyone involved. Him and Martin sharing the space will require significant processing from both of that is. The physical reminder of the child now in their care would make sleep impossible, and while Jon doesn’t need to sleep anymore, Martin certainly does.
So he simply tells Michael, “wake us if you need anything,” and leaves the door ajar.
~
Of course, they have to talk about the Entities eventually. It comes a week in, after Martin becomes incorporeal while carrying in some groceries and the bag full of canned beans goes crashing to the floor.
It’s a surprisingly easy conversation. Nine year olds are smarter than Jon conceptualizes them as being.
And the conversation ends with Martin hugging them both and then finding a showing of The Sound of Music on the rabbit-ears TV. So that’s nice.
~
“I’m kind of glad that you have your… evil knowing powers, or whatever.”
Michael says it to Jon out of the blue. Martin’s in the other room, writing poetry (it makes Jon smile to think about the soft and introspective things he’s writing), and it’s just the two of them, taking up opposite ends of the couch, which is not the most comfortable place to be sitting, but they’re making do.
Jon blinks. “Well. You’re the… the second person to be thankful for that, I suppose.” The first was probably Elias, because while Martin was definitely grateful for Jon finding him in the Lonely, he hates it when Jon Knows him accidentally. Michael, Jon Knows, doesn’t actually mind much.
“I don’t know…” he tells Jon. “If you hadn’t said anything, I’m not sure I would have remembered my own name.”
It strikes Jon speechless. Would Martin have forgotten that, if Jon’d left him there long enough? If he hadn’t been quick enough?
Yes .
Jon has to sit with that knowledge for a moment. Process it.
The more he learns about the Lonely, the more he fears it. The Eye is powerful and terrifying. So is the Hunt, the Slaughter, the Stranger, the Web, all the others. But the Lonely had seemed the least dangerous of the fears, for a while.
Jon had underestimated it. It makes a sick feeling come to settle into his stomach - what if Martin hadn’t noticed Michael stuck in the sand? What if they’d moved on and left him there, like everyone else had ?
“May I hug you?” Jon asks, with a stiffness in his voice that hasn’t been there since his first weeks at the Archives.
Michael doesn’t even respond, he just dives across the couch to hug Jon himself. At a glance, it wouldn’t seem to be a very satisfying hug, considering how skinny both of them are. But Michael fits into Jon’s arms the same way Martin does, with the precision of a piece of a 1000-set puzzle.
It’s warm, and they’re both bony and tired and insecure, and they’re each other’s, and Martin is theirs too, just down the hall.
~
Jon completes the incantation, and then he hears the front door slam open, and then he blacks out, and then the next thing he knows is Martin and Michael, worried above him, and beyond them the Watcher Watching them through the window.
“At least we’re together,” he catches Martin mouthing to himself, more than once. He catches Martin thinking it, too. He catches Michael thinking it. He catches himself thinking it.
He sits awake while they both sleep - all in one room, now, the awkwardness having evaporated in the six weeks they’d lived there and the need for comfort now superceding it - and when the dreams stop and one or the other jerks awake, Jon is ready with open arms, frantically staving off Knowledge of the nightmares.
He refuses to feed off them. He won’t - he can’t . He can’t feed off his family .
God, what a fucked up family they are, hiding in a cabin from the end of the world.
But that is what they are, aren’t they.
Jon doesn’t know when he’d started to think of them as a family unit - was it before the Change? After? On the bus to Scotland (no, that’s too early)? Tonight? Is tonight the first time?
~
They pass the walks from place to place reminiscing about the Archives. About Tim, mostly, even though Tim hurts to talk about, just because Tim hurts the least to talk about. Neither of them can remember the real Sasha - and Jon’s tried Beholding those memories, it just doesn’t work - and memories of Daisy and Basira are tainted by the Hunt, memories of Melanie by what she’d done, memories of Georgie… well, those aren’t memories Martin shares.
So they talk about Tim. About Tim’s Vine account, and they have to explain what Vine is to Michael not because he’s too young to remember Vine but because he’d gone into the Lonely before it had existed in the first place. About everyone he’d charmed, including the very irate law student who’d gone so far as marching into Research to yell at him in front of four other staff members and a very bewildered patron who’d wandered back there by mistake. About his cooking, which he’d only brought in for the Archives staff once, but which was delicious nonetheless. About him showing Martin the ropes of a job he was woefully underqualified for.
They also talk a little bit about Jon’s college band, much to the amusement of both Martin and Michael. For some reason, the idea of Jon in eyeliner causes the two of them to laugh outright, hard enough that they pause for a few minutes.
“I looked good in eyeliner,” Jon sputters, trying to be heard over them before they reach the Buried’s domain. “If our phones still worked I’d show you. Our Facebook page is still up.”
He treasures that moment of levity. Holds onto it in the back of his mind as tightly as he holds their hands.
~
Jon loses them both in the Lonely.
He thought they were behind him. He’d only turned away for a second and then they’d both turned to mist, gone.
He freezes for a moment. His stomach drops. His mind goes to the people in the Desolation’s domain - is this how they feel, when they see the first lick of flames under the crack of their door?
He allows himself one breath to panic. Two. Three.
He knows Michael won’t mind if he Knows where he is, so that’s where Jon focuses his attention first. Jon will give Martin time to find himself first. Knowing Martin is a last resort.
Concentrating the Beholding is always a significant task. Jon focuses, hard, on a small voice - a hand turning out the lights - the way his body feels draped across Jon’s on Daisy’s couch - and he lets his feet take him to a room.
Jon only watches from the doorway for a moment, but it’s enough to see Michael curled up in an uncomfortable chair like one you’d find in a hospital waiting room, arms wrapped around his legs, biting back sobs.
He feels - well, Jon doesn’t feel like he’s been stabbed, because he’s been stabbed, and that honestly didn’t affect him nearly as much as this sight does. He runs. He wraps his arms around Michael - around - around his son? Is that what he is now? Is Jon a father?
Yes, he is. And he allows them a few moments of holding each other in the fog, his hand rubbing soft circles on Michael’s back, before he gently coaxes him upwards. “We have to find Martin,” he informs him softly.
~
Jon does have to resort to Knowing, in the end, but it doesn’t take them as long to get to Martin really, not as much effort on Jon’s part. Martin must have found himself the same moment Jon found him.
“I thought… I thought you’d left me…” Martin gets out, struggling to string words together through his relief.
“No, never, we’d never.” Jon doesn’t even have to say it because Michael says it first.
“I thought you were behind me,” Jon says instead. “I thought you both were behind me. I’m so sorry.”
“We’re all here now,” Martin reassures him, and then they’re hugging again.
~
Martin plays him the tape later.
“No. I am Martin Blackwood. I am loved. I am - I am in love . I love Jon, I - I have a family, and I deserve them, and I love them and they love me, and I am not my mother - I am Martin Blackwood and I am not lonely anymore- ”
Jon does not try to hide his tears.
~
There are children in the Dark.
The moment Jon knows that it’s children in the dark, that it’s a child hurting other children, he grips Michael’s hand tight enough that the boy looks up at Jon, worried, and wincing a little.
Martin wants to know. “No,” Jon reassures him darkly, “no, you do not.”
They make him tell anyway.
When he’s done he looks up at them and he seems Martin clinging to Michael with a ferocity Jon hasn’t seen in him before.
“You can’t get them out,” Michael says. It’s not a question.
“Not anymore,” Jon replies. He lets his head hang. “Not now.”
“Then - then no point in staying much longer.” Martin is clearly trying to just stay afloat, he hadn’t thought about what had happened to the other kids, he feels terrible, he hates that this is what their world has become- . Martin is also right.
Their family moves forward.