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Martin wants something. It’s not a problem.
Not long ago, it would have been. Shame and self-doubt were never far from desire, though sometimes they would trail behind at just the right distance that Martin would want something— a new job, a day off, a harmless crush on his unavailable boss— and think maybe, just maybe, he could want something and it would be ok, but then that distance would close up. Did he really need that pint of ice cream? Was it really necessary to call the landlord over the mold in the kitchen? Couldn’t he just be happy that he had a flat at all? Why was he always so greedy for more?
At first, those had been in his mother’s derisive tone, but he repeated them to himself so often that over time, they lost the shape of her accent and intonation. It took even more time for a new voice to form, or perhaps it had been there ever since his mother had gone away and it took Martin far too long to realize, but that the inner voice repeating those same words was his own.
As an adult, he didn’t expect that voice to ever change but almost as soon as Martin accepted Peter Lukas’s protection, it was his voice, always so unflappable and even, that Martin heard in his own head. The thought he’d give credence to anything Peter said was laughable, truly laughable. In fact, the first time post-Lonely that doubt had crept into Martin’s mind he’d had to laugh out loud with such a sudden ferocity it shocked Jon. It has been too hard to explain through the great, shuddering laughs that made way to sobs after some time, but Martin had been able to eventually assure Jon he was quite alright. He never thought he’d be thankful for anything Peter Lukas had done, but Martin will take the win as it was.
So he wants something. It’s not a problem.
The problem is, Martin doesn’t know what he wants.
Ever since Upton House, there’s been this desire humming through him, ever-present in his nerves and his mind, but completely eluding his attempts to see or grasp it. No matter how hard he tries to unravel it, it stays firmly hidden, though it steers Martin’s actions. It has something to do with Jon, Martin can tell that much, and even after days of spending nothing but basking in each other’s company at the house, all he wants to do is spend every moment memorizing the lines on Jon’s face or watching him the muscles in his arm shift as he gestures wildly while talking about something he finds interesting and other such sappy nonsense.
Currently, they are in a small cave in a wooded area outside of a small village. The forest looks positively wicked, like “Snow White being torn at by the trees” wicked, but Jon’s assured Martin, in his best “I’m the authority on spookiness” voice that it’s a safer choice than the seemingly fine looking village past the tree line. The cave is more accurately a little den under an outcropping of rock, no deeper than a meter, the barest bit of shelter from the outside.
There’s a bundle of twigs, bark, and tinder Jon collected and he is lighting them with the flint Martin had only really packed on a lark. He’d known nothing of wilderness survival aside from what he’d seen in shows and movies, but he could hardly conceive of walking to London without the basics. He didn’t really think they’d be put to use, but there Jon is, scraping the flint along the steel.
Martin watches his hands, his thin, long fingers, the waxy scar tissue on his left hand, as he works. Jon isn’t very strong, but he’s nimble and capable and Martin is awash with emotion and attraction. He had never known capability was his type, but he hadn’t known much of the particularities of his attractions until Jon. He hadn’t known much about himself at all until Jon.
“I want you to remember me.” Martin says. It’s not quite right, but it’s almost there. Martin feels like he’s finally tugging the right thread, like he might finally find the end if he keeps traveling along.
“I— Of course, I will.” Jon sets down the flint next to the unlit fire bundle and moves over to where Martin is sitting. From the distant and harsh man Martin had first known Jon as, he never would have expected how tactile he is now. There’s a language all it’s own to his touches, and right now he folds both his hands over Martin’s and grips on to him, not tightly, but firmly. “It was only the camera lens at— “
“I know. It’s not that. It’s, it’s… I want you to remember me, but not just you. Or maybe you and maybe it’s remembered that isn’t right. I want…”
Martin could just ask Jon to ask, it would be easier that way, but Martin knows he’s so close. “When I used to think about dying, I was always… All my descendants, generation after generation, they were born and they toiled and they died, and they all did it so it could one day get to me, and when I thought about it, it just seemed like some big mistake or cosmic joke.”
“And now?” Jon asks carefully.
“I don’t… I want to be remembered for being here. Not here as in part of the apocalypse, but… I lived and loved. My personhood wasn’t a waste of space.”
Jon doesn’t have to tell Martin that was never true; they both know that. It only took the apocalypse to become a person, but Martin’s not sorry for it.
“I think, I think that’s why people have kids. I thought of my ancestors and thought it was biology or society, or I don’t know, that selfish need to pass on your progeny. But I think when you love someone, I mean, really truly love someone, you’ve found something so rare and so precious that you know you can make something bigger than yourselves together. You don’t just want to make something more than yourself or think you can, you Know you can.”
Jon’s pulled his hands away to let Martin think but Martin snatches them back, needing more than words to try to portray this truth. He holds onto Jon as hard as he can.
“I want kids,” Martin says without any shame or doubt.
“Martin,” There’s a long pause. “I don’t think I need to tell you that adoption agencies aren’t exactly operational right now.”
Martin looks at Jon but he doesn’t need the Eye to tell him that Jon is doubtful, or to tell him why. It hurts, deep down where Martin keeps all the sorrow over just how lonely Jon’s life has been, how the little love he received in his life is highly disparate without how much he deserved.
“You would be a good dad Jon.”
Jon just looks at him skeptically.
“You would! You would read to them, every night, and you’d do the voices and then you’d explain the moral or the symbolism. You’d be involved in… in whatever they were into, theater or… bugs, or, god help us, sports. You would learn everything you could.”
“Well, I don’t think I’d have much of a choice about it,” Jon says with a tight lipped grimace.
“But you’d want to. That’s--that’s all that matters. It doesn’t matter whether you have an encyclopedia in your head, we both know you aren’t Knowing it all the time. You would consciously know everything you could.”
Jon doesn’t quite agree, but he doesn’t protest and Martin lets him go, barely an arm’s reach away, to finish lighting the fire and they don’t talk about it the rest of the night.
Martin doesn’t let himself imagine the what-ifs and could-have-beens, not now in this world. There’s nothing to gain from that. But he lets himself now, imaging Jon awkwardly holding a baby, or sat with a school aged child at the kitchen table, their kitchen table, heads bent over homework. Jon would help them, calmly explaining whatever concept they were stuck on, patient no matter how many different approaches it has to take.
Martin wants it so badly he feels sick with it, all this desire and want and somewhere in it, the faintest sliver of hope. He wants something he can’t have and it’s not a problem, but it does have the making of a tragedy if Martin lets it.
So he doesn’t.
When they lay down, Martin to try to force his body into a few hours of sleep and Jon to achieve whatever form of rest he can, Martin curls up behind Jon, his front pressed up tight against Jon’s, one leg slipped between his. Their entwined hands rest over Jon’s chest where there’s the barest flicker of a heartbeat, irregular, faint, but there.
In the quiet stillness they’ve created of this fear destroyed world, Martin whispers it all to Jon, the dreams and what-ifs, everything he wants for them. Of everything Jonah Magnus has robbed them of, Martin refuses to let this be one.