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The birds are too loud. That’s Jon’s first critique of the garden that Hopworth left behind-- beyond the obvious, of course, the twisting, tortured creations that groan with the sickly breeze. But the birds were supposed to be nice , and instead their music just grates, jarring as ice-water on a summer day. The sound of it sits askew just below his collarbone, and he wishes they would stop.
They do.
Somehow he likes that even less.
Martin is uncomfortable in an entirely different way, all quick hands and averted eyes as if not looking at the garden will make its suffering any less. For all he knows, in this new world, maybe it will. It’s eyes all the way down.
“I know you said that people can’t die here,” Martins starts. “But Jared was-- was he tending to them? Or just torturing them?” He purses his lips, face strained. “I suppose I’m asking what’s going to happen to them, now that their, um, gardener is gone.”
“Jared said it himself,” Jon replies. The knowledge does not appear; it simply is-- like a lesson from his childhood, an inexorable knowing. “The Garden takes care of itself, if it has to.”
“Why is that an ‘if’?”
Jon shrugs. “I can’t see the future. Another avatar might come to fill the gap.”
“Right.”
The two of them stand for a long few moments, Jon gazing out equanimously and Martin doing his best to pretend that his discomfort isn’t worth addressing. Jon knows he shouldn’t encourage that, but-- he needs a moment.
“Of course,” Jon starts again. “Even if there’s no avatar to prune them, they can’t go back. And they can’t die, either.”
“What does that mean for them?”
“This,” Jon gestures at a sagging red bloom, its petals laced with spidering veins. “Forever. Some of them will collapse under their own weight, grow into more sustainable variations on the same-- but I suspect that as long as their roots are set here, that’s it for them.”
Martin shoves his hands in his pockets. “Christ, that’s dreadful. The Flesh-- I hadn’t thought it could be like this.”
“Miss the meat?”
“Never thought I’d say it.” They share a weak smile, but it’s still only a moment before Martin’s turned back towards the garden path, his eyes tracing where it wanders into the horizon. “We should get moving, though. Lots of smiting to do before we sleep and all.”
Jon takes a step towards London.
Jon does not take a step towards London.
He feels the anchor in the place where he always felt these things, and that place is nowhere good.
“Oh,” Jon murmurs. “Excuse me a moment.”
And with Martin watching, confused and reaching out after him, Jon staggers into the bone-spur bushes to puke.
He didn’t know he could still do that-- hasn’t eaten anything in so long he isn’t sure how the mechanisms of the body still move. Whatever’s going on in there, it’s enough that the bile rising up his throat burns and his eyes fill with tears as he dry heaves between two suffering souls, his knees digging ruts into the earth.
It’s only fitting, in some ways, that this would happen-- a world fed on secrets would eventually take some from its host. The Eye does not love him. It has not chosen him-- and it will not spare him.
Jon wretches again and aches at the hollowness it leaves. The familiarity.
“What’s going on?” Martin’s voice floats through the air, a note of fear twining ivy-like round his words.
“I don’t--” Jon feels it coming up again but he pushes it down and wipes the tears from his eyes. It’s just a physical reaction, and he doesn’t want Martin to think he ran away to sob like an adolescent. He’s past that sort of thing, now-- all he’s got left is the low dread sitting in his stomach and the taste of bile in his mouth. “I’m not sure.”
A lie.
“I thought you knew everything,” Martin objects, pushing past branches of lean muscle and blue skin to get to where Jon is still crouched. He grimaces at the touch, but it doesn’t stop him. Jon shakes his head.
“Not where the Eye doesn’t want me to.”
“What’s the Eye doing here? Was it the smiting? If you think it’s a bad idea, we’ll stop doing it. Especially if it’s making you sick,” Martin says.
“That’s nothing new.”
“I sort of thought that smiting would be...I don’t know-- good for you? Like how you seemed to be sustained by the statements, before.”
Jon lets out a slow breath. His traitorous body doesn’t feel likely to try anything, but he won’t take any chances. “It’s different. The Eye doesn’t like to lose Watchers.”
“And we’re all Watchers now, is that it?”
Jon nods.
“I know I say this a lot but-- that is egregiously unfair.” Martin huffs. “I never signed up for this, and whatever he was doing on Earth--”
“We’re still on Earth.”
“Normal Earth,” Martin corrects. “Whatever he was doing before, he didn’t sign up for it either.”
Neither did I, Jon wants to say, but he can’t, because he’s said it before and no one’s ever believed him. And in the Garden, he’s not sure he does either. “Forgive me if my sympathies are somewhat lacking.”
“Yeah, no, fair enough.” Martin watches Jon struggle to his feet, a mixture of wariness and worry on his face. “Are you alright?”
“That bears to be seen.”
And what was there to be said to that? A bird alights on a nearby branch, sending pale brown leaves scattering to the earth. Jon can’t tell what part of themself that person has just lost, but with so little left on its branches, each one must be dear. He could know. He doesn’t want to. He looks anyway.
He’s not any better for it.
“Can I help?” Martin offers a hand for Jon to steady himself with, and Jon takes it gratefully, putting more of his weight on it than he’d normally consider. Martin grunts at the effort and Jon tries unsuccessfully to cover up his flinch.
“I--” Jon doesn’t know how to explain. It’s rare that he doesn’t know, but of course this is where it deserts him. “I think we should stay here a while longer.”
“Okay. I don’t like it, but I trust you. Can you tell me why?”
Jon’s silence is an answer in itself.
It’s not that he doesn’t know. It’s that he can’t say it. He has always been precise with his words, often quiet and always careful. Whether that was a result of the multiplicitous misunderstandings of his youth or the nest of secrets woven tight around his ribs, it’s hard to say.
It seems Martin cannot abide the silence, though, since it leaves him with nothing to do but witness the tragedy surrounding them.
“When you were speaking, you mentioned that this place was beautiful, you know.” Martin watches the birds. “Twice.”
“Eye of the beholder,” Jon says with a shrug. “Although if this world has an objective truth, I’m as close to it as there is. So.”
“But it’s just-- it’s horrible.”
“Yes,” Jon breathes. “It is.” His mind races to find an explanation, an out. “Maybe it’s the Eye. Everything in this new world has a touch of the Eye about it, but here more than most.”
“But no one’s looking at anyone here,” Martin objected. “There’s no cameras, no people walking round. Only Jared was watching.”
“The people here don’t need watchers to feel that particular burn. It’s actually fascinating, from a certain perspective-- there are very few domains that function entirely self-sufficiently, no avatar or interpersonal interference needed,” Jon hears himself, clinical, distant. “But these flowers need no eyes but their own.”
“I feel like that shouldn’t work.”
“I’m sorry it doesn’t feel right to you, Martin.” And he snaps it, feels himself come crashing back into his body like a rock-bound wave, all awash with the same shame he always feels when Martin looks like this, all hurt and blank.
“Sorry,” Martin starts.
“Don’t be. I shouldn’t have snapped.”
“But I’m asking too many questions, and I know that it’s--”
“It’s fine,” Jon assures him. “I’m sorry. I’m just on edge.”
Martin blinks. “I thought you liked this place? I mean, not liked , but more than the others.”
And the laugh that grates out of Jon’s throat is rough as rusted steel. “Is that so,” he says.
Sometimes Jon wishes Martin could just know things the way he does. It would make it so much easier than having to explain. But he owes Martin this much-- should have told him anyways. Never had the guts, when things were real and worry wasn’t an ‘always’-- but now, with the sky blinking shutter-quick at the path of their heavy feet, what’s one more burden to lay on the man he loves?
Jon tries. He does.
As the words get caught in his throat, a wind rustles through the garden, and it feels like the world has turned to listen. Ragged petal, twisted vine, delicate greens and bloody, triumphant red-- they all want the same thing he does, the thing that they had preened for in the statement.
Jon has an idea.
“Martin, you read statements, right?”
The thought catches Martin off guard. “A few, yeah. Why?”
“Have you ever tried to compel someone?”
“No?” He says. “I mean, not consciously-- I don’t think I can .”
Jon’s hands are shaking, so he shoves them in his pockets. It’s not the first time and it won’t be the last, but he doesn’t miss this feeling, familiar and distinctly tied to another time in his life, another Jon . Uni was a long time ago, but he’d felt the same the way he’d had this conversation with Georgie. She’d taken it as well as she could.
“Would you try?”
“I suppose-- but why?” Martin’s brow furrows. “Are you sure you’re alright? You’re being--”
“Strange. I know. I’m sorry.” His shoulders creep up, a hard line of tension to mark his silhouette. “Will you try?”
“Next time we come across an avatar or something, yeah, I can give it a go,” Martin says. “But I don’t see why I need to, if you’re going to be around.” Uncertainty flickers across his face. “You’re not going anywhere, are you? Because I would strongly object.”
Jon shakes his head too quickly. “I’m asking because-- I can’t. Ask, that is,” he manages. “I’m asking because I can’t ask myself. And I need to be compelled.”
“Hey, slow down, what? Doesn’t compulsion hurt?”
“Only if you don’t cooperate.”
Martin’s face scrunches and Jon just knows, in a way unconnected to his knowing, that Martin is absolutely bursting with questions. But instead of asking them, this time, he just nods. “I’ll try. But I can’t promise anything,” He warns. “What do you want me to, you know…?”
“Just ask me what my secret is.” Jon’s stomach twists tighter and tighter at the thought. It might not work. He might be safe. He doesn’t want to be. “To do it-- I mean, it’ll probably be different for you, but I’ve always imagined to be asking with hooks, sort of dragging the truth out of people.”
“Okay. I’ve seen you do it a lot, so I’ll just sort of--”
Martin’s voice has always sounded sweet to Jon, higher than most and tinged with a softness at the edges that reminds him of honey. It is not this voice that comes from Martin’s mouth when he speaks.
Where there is honey, there is hive, and the incantory draw of his words buzzes with the force of the swarm.
“Tell me, Jon,” Martin says. “What you cannot say.”
And what starts as static in his hands turns to prickling, then to shock, and Jon falls to his knees once again, his legs buckling beneath him at the sudden overwhelming lash of question that ricochets through his veins.
He wants to say.
His body spasms and he wretches again.
He wants to say.
"Tell me your secret. That which rises and falls in your chest, but never makes it to your tongue-- give it to me,” Martin croons.
Jon knows that rhythm, those words, and he knows that they are not Martin’s.
He wants to say.
Jon lets out a noise of strangled frustration and pain, clutching at his stomach like that will get rid of the block planted so deep in him that even compulsion cannot rip it out-- and he thinks of the Lily, how Hopworth had delighted in the depth of its roots. No matter what the Eye seems to think, he will not bloom for it, will not suffer like this. Jon digs his fingers into the earth and lets the electricity crackling through his limbs tear the words from his throat.
“I always wondered why the Eye picked me,” Jon starts, meting out his bitterness in the roundabout way of statements. He will get to his truth in time. It lets him breathe, shuddering, between one sentence and the next. “I’ve always liked to know things, always liked to read, but, really, pick an undersocalized clever boy out of a hat and see what you find. I was never unique in my inclination-- not enough to become one of the Eye’s own, let alone the Archivist.
“When this all started and I became what I am, I figured it out-- knew it in that way that I cannot stand and from which I cannot tear my eyes away. I have always been a creature of questions, but it is not enough that you embody your entity-- in the end, it is still essential that you fear it.
“I learned to truly abhor the tensions of the Eye when I was young. It doesn’t matter how old, because I can’t remember a time when the seed wasn’t in me, waiting to make its way to heady, intoxicating bloom. Always words, always eyes, always opinions on what I am-- and most importantly, what I am not.
“I won’t deny that I fed it. I talked myself up out of the soil with words like strength and willpower, with a future imagined in rose-petal red shades of adoration. It never made me any better, but it made me feel lighter, like whatever was within me would rest easier on bones tempered by my own pain.
“All this is to say that I am no better than the Garden. In another world I was a little less curious, a little more bound to the world, I am certain that I would be here.”
The pressure eases up for a moment, and Jon risks a glance at Martin’s face. His expression is careful-- they always are. The wrong word and everything spirals, they think. They don’t want to make it worse.
But he still has not answered the question like the Eye wants him to-- like he wants to, and so he cannot stop for long.
“And so I ploughed my failures into the earth and let them feed me, instead of-- instead of anything, some days. When I lived alone it was worse. If you’d believe it, some eyes were helpful, in the end, in making me cave to the pressures of living like a person instead of the half-shadow thing I craved to be. But even with Georgie-- there was no good, only better. For a long time.
“You don’t need to know the details of what I did or didn’t eat, the rules that I wrote into my body and how I can still feel them, sometimes, even when I am good. It was just-- constant. Checking and double checking and ensuring that I was neat and small and tucked away, so that nothing of me spilled into the real world where eyes lived, and nobody would see.
“And that’s the crux of it. There was no power in what I was doing to myself. Just fear. And we were so afraid. You become the eye inside yourself, and you cannot escape.”
Jon’s eyes stray to the bushes around them and he swears he can feel them sigh.
“I went from rose to lily to blushing pomegranate flower-- it didn’t matter what form I moved into-- but it was less than it used to be. I knew that I was better, and most days I could let myself be.
“And then the Eye found me, and told me that I could live on cigarettes and fear, and letting myself fall into that was a relief that you could not understand. I got bad after Prentiss. It felt good. To give in to the thing that claws at your door, even when you know what it will do when you open it-- of course I found it beautiful. I was the one clawing at the door; I was the one keeping it shut. To give in is respite, uncomplicated next to the mire of, well, everything.”
“But the relief never lasts long-- it’s like being a ghost in your own body, sometimes, a distance that you gouge out between the strong mind and the weak body. Because you are the first, you must keep watching; the second that you allow yourself to slip, you will wither, you will become nothing but flesh.
“I feel like I must communicate something of its attraction to you, something of the elation I used to feel at my infinitesimal, poisonous success. How do I wrap up years of conversations wound round my brain like cobwebs, only twice as sticky, of decisions made and made again and agonized over--because to starve oneself is slow, and it is not something that you do, but a way that you live-- and the absolute astounding dullness of it all as I circle back, time and time again, to habits that used to be so difficult, and are now so intoxicatingly easy. You learn to enjoy hunger because it makes you feel powerful.
“In this world I am a glutton, and I am helpless.
“The Eye has decided for me-- as it always does, that this place is to be--” here is the hardest part; his own truths are scarred and well scabbed. This is new. “It’s mine. When we tried to leave, it would not let me go. And the thought-- of being stuck here--” Jon’s voice shakes. His hands shake. His whole self quivers with the question but he is kept upright by the cold spear of confession. The words come out easy, but the holes they left fill almost immediately with regret. “And I’m stuck here again, and I know what that means. I’ve worked so hard, Martin.”
“Jon,” Martin starts.
“Please don’t say anything. I need to--” He can’t bring himself to look at Martin’s face or bear the words he knows will come. Will it be pity, this time? Accusation? The stolid confusion of the people who had never felt its pull, who had tried for a day and jarred themselves out of it because it was hard?
No. It’ll be love. But that’s not any better. Because it will still be something and the words will dig into him and stay there, and he will never be not be careful around Jon again.
Martin’s eyes are on him, and Jon’s lungs feel oil-slick and cold in his chest. He wishes he had a cigarette.
The quality of the light shifts and suddenly Jon can feel it on him, the slavering thirst of the Eye. It drinks him in, his hollow body and his aching words-- and that’s all he really is in this moment, as he is seen more than any shy thing was ever meant to show.
“Do you want a hand?” Martin asks.
Jon shakes his head. Slowly, painfully, he gets up to his feet. It is only a few seconds before his spinning head sends him stumbling into Martin anyway, whose warm arms catch him without a second thought.
“Sorry-- I,” Jon clears his throat, backs away. He’s swaying slightly, but it’s fine. He’s an adult. “The compulsion. You didn’t need to hear all that.” But I needed to say it. “I just knew you’d keep asking why we couldn’t go on, and, well,” his shrug utterly fails at nonchalance. “It seems that I’m not being given a choice.”
“I hate this world.” The anger in Martin’s voice gives Jon pause. It’s-- not what he expected. Martin’s head whips around, his curls moving slightly out of time with the rest of him. His eyes fix on the wheelbarrow where Hopworth kept his shears. “I know it’s made for fear but it’s just--” he gives the barrow a solid kick that sends it tumbling onto its side. Jon winces at the sound it makes. “It’s all so wildly unfair. There’s no winners, there’s nobody who’s okay -- it’s just cruelty after cruelty for cruelty’s fucking sake.”
“It’s the way things are,” he demurs.
“That doesn’t mean it isn’t awful --” Martin takes a quick, sharp breath. “You’re not staying here. Come on.” Martin reaches out to grab Jon’s hand, but Jon pulls back.
“Anger can’t move the immovable. Trust me, I’ve tried.” Tim’s eyes flash in Jon’s head.
“We have to try, Jon-- Christ, we’ve barely tried anything,” Martin insists.
“Sorry, I’ve been a bit busy reliving one of my most visceral and sustained traumas to problem-shoot.” The bitterness in his own voice shocks him. “And I’ve tried before. I’ll try again. It doesn’t matter to the Eye.”
“I’d burn this garden down rather than let you rot in it.” Martin turns his face towards the sky. “How’s that?” He calls up. “A bit of Desolation for you? Can’t watch over ashes!”
Jon is tempted to point out that it very much could, but there doesn’t seem like a point. Let Martin wear himself out. He’ll figure it out eventually.
Martin starts down the path again. He stops when Jon doesn’t move. “Aren’t you coming?”
“It wouldn’t let me before. What’s changed?”
“Everything. Something. I don’t know-- the placement of the stars, the time elapsed since Hopworth’s smiting, a million little things! One of them has got to be enough.”
“And if it’s not?” Jon asks softly.
“Then we’ll change something else and try again. I’m not going on without you.”
“A romantic thought.”
Martin offers out his hand. “No, it’s not. It’s basic human decency, and if I’m the only person in the god-forsaken hellscape that remembers it, then so be it.” He keeps his hand extended, and all Jon has to do is take it. “I’ve been left behind before. I won’t do that to you.”
And that’s what does it. The thought of Martin ending up in a house of the lonely, all blue and white and wondering if he had ever been loved by a man who chose to stay behind-- Jon reaches for his hand; he knows it's doomed, and he knows the rules, and he reaches for his hand.
Their fingers find each other. They tangle, briars in the thicket, and Martin starts walking. Jon stumbles after. They will make it to the edge-- and then they’ll see.
The roots rumble under the earth-- they are not angry, though. They sing.
Jon does his best not to hear them.
How lovely we could be, they whisper, and Martin cannot hear them. Set down amongst us and sing. You haven’t forgotten the words. You could be so fine, so keen, so sharp.
Jon tips his head back and looks at the sky.
Be precarious with us, empty and clean. We will make you up again, and this time everything that is broken in you will be right.
He issues a challenge with his eyes as Martin half-drags him through the twisted plots.
If you leave, you’ll have failed again.
You’ve failed so many times.
You will only come back.
“We’re almost there,” Martin says. Jon does not respond; nor does he blink. He keeps his gaze focused and clear at the great Eye looking down upon them all and asks what he must give to be allowed to leave.
It is with the memory of a rough laugh that the Eye responds, with knowledge that Jon has always known.
Jon steps out of the Garden, into the inbetween that harbors nothing and everything in this horrid world.
“You made it,” Martin breathes. “You won.”
“The Eye got what it wanted,” Jon swallows around the knowledge. He catches his own reflection in Martin’s glasses and almost freezes at the ragged animal he sees there-- himself, his eyes bloodshot and skin stained with earth. “It let me go.”
“What did it..?”
“What it’s always wanted,” Jon spits. “My suffering. My secrets. It just couldn’t let me go without making me spill one more part of myself.”
“I’m sorry, Jon.”
“It’s not your fault. It runs deeper than any one person, trust me.”
“Not about the eating disorder--” And Jon flinches to hear it said in so many words-- “though that’s also horrible, don’t get me wrong. But I’m sorry you had to tell me like that. I’m sorry we’re stuck in a world that hates us, and I’m sorry that you’ve ended up so entrenched in it all.”
Jon makes a noise of acknowledgement. Appreciation, maybe. “Me too,” he says, finally. “It’s a bit of a pisser.”
“If you need to-- want to talk about anything, on a purely non-compulsion basis, I am here. If you want to deal with this later, or by yourself, or whatever, just-- I’m here for whatever. I love you,” Martin says.
“I just wish it hadn’t been-- even with the compulsion, I cannot convey how hard it was to speak. I’m not good with secrets. Too good with them, I guess.”
“Do you want to be pushed for them?”
Jon shakes his head. “No. But I think-- I have to try and push myself, sometimes. Because it’s important. I know that.”
“I love you,” Martin says again.
Jon smiles a little, and realizes he can no longer hear the birds. “I love you too.”
“On the plus side, we did find out that I can absolutely compulsion people. Do you think I get smiting powers too?”
“I like to imagine that’s an Archivist privilege.”
“We’ll see, Sims.”
They keep walking, and the Garden is farther away with every step. When the world is different, it’ll be time to talk again. For now they just walk.