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The door rattles in its frame as it opens. Peter doesn’t look up from the lantern, and drags another mouthful of smoke from his pipe. Rather a silly affectation, but he’s always enjoyed the built-in excuse to step outside a moment that the nicotine gives him.
“You.” Martin hardly sounds surprised. He sounds, in fact, like he knew exactly what he would find in here. He steps forward, and the door swings shut behind him..
“Me indeed,” Peter smiles around the stem of his pipe, and finally inclines his head toward Martin. The boy’s got a new pallor to him and the wind of the beach must have tossed his hair into a cloudy disarray. Lovely. “I trust you found the place alright.”
“How long have I been here?” Martin says. No fight in his voice whatsoever. Lovely.
“Oh, who knows. Months, maybe. Long enough for anyone to give up searching, surely.” He sets the pipe down in its tray and waves Martin into the other chair. Martin sits. He’s pleasantly fuzzy around the edges and all the color has bled out of his eyes. “No need to worry about anyone tracking you down.”
“Oh.” Martin’s seaglassed eyes affix on the flame bobbing in the lamp. Peter recrosses his legs and smiles blandly at his guest.
“How did I find this place?” Martin asks in a dull whisper. “I thought there was nothing here.”
“Just because we’re all alone doesn’t require us to part with every amenity. And I enjoy being self-sufficient.” The lighthouse is small, more of a pretension than anything, but there’s a little sitting room for Peter to be alone with his thoughts, and a bed on a landing above the spiralling stairway, big enough to really spread out and feel the emptiness. At the very top, the light stabs bleakly into the fog at all hours.
“So you built this place.”
“Had it built, don’t be ridiculous. Sometimes a man just needs to get away from it all. My responsibilities can be...oppressive.” Peter drags his thumb over the shape of his lower lip, as if on the brink of getting lost in thought. Martin’s lips look waxen from the cold, like they’d be chilly and soft under his touch. Martin hadn’t seemed to notice at first, but now he’s shivering ever so slightly as his body adjusts to the stiflingly warm inside.
“Then why am I here?” Martin says.
“Well. That’s an excellent question. I suppose it depends on you.”
“Stop that.”
“Stop what?”
“Stop the vague bullshit answers,” Martin says, voice perilously flat. Peter contemplates picking up his pipe again, giving himself an excuse to take his time answering, but Martin at last tears his eyes away from the lantern and instead fixes Peter in his seat with a stare. For a moment, Peter feels the metaphorical boat rock under his feet and his stomach lurches. It almost felt as though the Ceaseless Watcher were - well. Beholding can look all it likes. Perhaps it does still have its fingers in Martin, but Peter has a whole hell of a lot more than that.
He clears his throat and picks the pipe back up after all. Martin looks annoyed, growing more intense by the minute, and Peter indulges in a moment of nostalgia for those first few weeks running the Institute when Martin stopped flinching quite so often and started biting back.
“If that’s the case. To tell you the truth, you’re still a bit of a work in progress. Don’t get me wrong, I’m so proud of how far you’ve come; truly remarkable what a little distance can do for you. You couldn’t get that kind of clarity back at the Institute. You understand; it’s for your own good I brought you here,” a broad gesture to encompass all of the beach, the stretching ocean and the salt-spray outside, “and then here,” a tighter gesture at the lighthouse proper.
Martin glances at the door, solid and shut but not enough to entirely muffle the wind and cold outside. His clothes are damp; he’s shuddering now, like it’s finally starting to affect him.
“I thought you were angry.”
Peter pulls on his pipe and enjoys the heavy taste of the smoke on his tongue for a moment. “Mm. I suppose I was. But I’ve had some time to reflect, now, and I think I know where we went wrong. It was all too much, too fast. I think we’d better go slower, make sure we’re really sanding all the edges off, if we’re going to do it right. Don’t you agree?” He leans forward in his chair to prop his elbows on his knees.
“I don’t see what that has to do with here,” Martin says.
“It’s as I said; sometimes I need a break. Perhaps you do, too. Someone once told me there’s no point to being alone, if you don’t know how alone you are. He was a damned fool, but I suppose he might have been right about a few things.”
In the low light Martin looks faint, only partly present, but his hands on his knees are steady and his breaths cloud in the air in front of him. Peter relaxes back into his seat and waits for Martin to step in.
“Yes,” Martin says at the last, in a voice so lonely it echoes. Peter feels it in his chest, and beams.
The stairs are narrow, only fit for one person to walk up at a time. Peter follows Martin and bears him down onto the bed at the top. Martin shudders under his touch, shies away from Peter’s hands on his skin, but he sinks into the mattress all the same, and his head rolls to the side to expose the thin skin over his throat. He gasps and lets his eyes slide shut as Peter pulls him under.
In the morning, Martin wakes up under the cold covers. His hips ache and his throat stings with the sense-memory of Peter’s beard. When he sits up, the blankets drop away from his shoulders and the cold bites through him. The lighthouse is empty, but the smell of saltwater and smoke lingers on his skin.