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It’s early in the morning, far earlier than Martin’s normal waking time back in the days before the world ended. But they both seem to need less sleep these days, and the chill of the early morning air tends to wake Martin up early.
And Martin can’t stop staring at Jon.
That’s not exactly an uncommon occurrence-- he can never get enough of seeing Jon’s face relaxed, unmarred by a scowl or a clenched jaw. But Jon has him captivated for an entirely different reason this time.
Namely, the two enormous feathered wings that have appeared on Jon’s back, seemingly overnight.
The small downy feathers at the top of his wing, where it folds over, flutter in the breeze, moving with the rhythm of Jon’s breathing. They’re speckled brown and tawny, with streaks of white peeking out beneath some of the feathers. They look soft as anything, and it’s all Martin can do to resist running his hands through them. He’s so busy staring, cataloging every inch of them, that he almost doesn’t notice Jon stirring. Before Martin can say anything to warn him-- not that he even knows what he would say-- Jon shifts, rolling over and onto his folded wings. He yelps, eyes flying open. Martin reaches out a hand-- to do what, he’s not entirely sure-- but Jon is already pushing himself to a sitting position, frantically craning his neck to look at himself.
Jon is not the best at handling his feelings, and even less so when it comes to his powers in this new world. Martin knows this well-- both from indirect experience, watching Jon wrestle with his hunger for statements back in the Archives, and from hearing Jon talk (on rare occasions) about his own feelings. Sometimes, albeit rarely, Jon can accept his feelings, with the exasperated air of someone resigned to their fate. Other times, he withdraws into himself, pulling away from the world, and only time-- along with gentle reassurances from Martin-- can convince him that he’s not a monster.
This time, he flinches when his eyes meet the feathers, shoulders tensing.
“Okay, Jon,” Martin says, with a calm he doesn’t entirely feel. “There’s been a sort of-- development--”
“That’s one way to phrase it,” Jon murmurs.
“It-- look, it’s not a bad thing,” Martin says. “They’re-- they’re really b--”
“Please don’t say they’re beautiful,” Jon says, not looking at him.
Martin sighs. “Don’t do this. Don’t-- this is so much nicer than what could’ve happened-- than what has happened. You could’ve, I dunno, grown extra eyes or gotten dropped out of a sixty-storey building again.”
Jon doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to; Martin can almost hear the words running through his head, as though Martin is the one connected to an evil voyeuristic god of knowledge. It doesn’t matter. I’m a monster, and I’ll always be one. This is just the universe showing you what I am on the inside.
“They could be useful,” Martin tries, then immediately wants to slap himself. As though the only reason to appreciate Jon is for his beauty or his usefulness. What a terrible way to think. “I mean--”
“I know what you meant, Martin,” says Jon, tired.
He stands, and Martin rises after him. It’s a good thing, too, because Jon nearly trips as he rises, unused to the weight of the new muscles and feathers sprouting from his back. Martin catches him before he can hit the ground, his hand sliding through thick feathers to rest at Jon’s hip.
They stand there together for a minute. Martin wants so badly to draw Jon to him, to fold their bodies together in comfort, but the last thing Jon needs is to feel pressured.
Jon breaks the embrace, sighing. “Let’s keep moving.”
Martin stares at him. “Er. We’re not going to talk about the fact that you’ve got great big wi--”
“I know, Martin,” Jon says shortly. “It’s hard to miss them. I’d like to move on. Can we do that now, please?”
Okay, ouch. It’s hard to look at the man Jon is now and connect him with the man he was two years ago, but that snap in his voice sends Martin right back to his first days in the Archives with a boss who was way out of his depth and wound as tight as a cat.
Jon rubs a hand over his face. “I’m sorry, Martin. I just want a break. I want just-- a day, or a week, where nothing happens. No new developments, no new powers, no physical proof of how-- of what I am.” He rubs a hand over his face. “I don’t know why I thought I could ever expect that. Even if that was ever remotely a possibility, I certainly don’t deserve a respite of any kind...”
This again. Martin swallows a sigh; it was, perhaps, foolish to think they would ever get past this particular anxiety. “We’ve been over this, Jon. Which argument are you going to pull out this time? The one where you say it’s actually your fault and not Elias’ for reading that statement? Or are you going to tell me it’s your fault for being in that coma as long as you were, or for choosing the Eye over a guaranteed death? Or are you going to blame yourself for being too weak to resist a statement, or whatever-- in which case you might as well blame me for being too scared to confront you on my own, or too weak to escape the Lonely--”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Jon says quietly, but Martin cuts him off.
“I’ve heard it all, Jon, and I’m not going to sit here and let you beat yourself up again. So why don’t you just drop whatever it is that you’re about to argue, because I can guarantee that I’ve got a counter-argument.”
Jon presses his lips together, and looks away. Not for the first time, Martin reflects on how odd it is that someone so connected to a god of watching is so averse to eye contact.
He sighs. He’s spent enough time with Jon to know that Jon thinks of himself as a fundamentally broken and unfixable person, and only time and love will be able to convince him otherwise.
“I’m sorry,” he says, stroking Jon’s shoulder, careful not to touch the wings this time. “That wasn’t fair. It’s just-- I can’t let you keep beating yourself up. I can’t watch that.”
“I know,” says Jon softly. “I’m sorry. I’ll stop.”
He still won’t look at Martin. So Martin takes Jon’s face in his hands and gently turns it towards him, meeting his eyes, so that Jon can’t look away this time.
“I love you,” he tells Jon. “You know that, right? You’re beautiful, amazing, and I love you.”
Jon swallows, and puts a hand on Martin’s face in turn. “I know,” he murmurs. “I love you too.”
-----------------------------
“Why the Vast, anyway?” Martin asks, half an hour later. “None of the other domains gave you anything like this.”
“Simon Fairchild’s idea of a joke,” Jon says wearily. “Elias and the Eye technically rule over most of the world at this point, so he wanted to make a point that he’s still plenty powerful. He says he’s always wanted to know what a flying Archivist would look like.”
“He said that?”
“Well, not in so many words,” Jon said dryly, gesturing at his temple.
“Oh.” Martin thinks for a moment. “Can you?”
Jon gives him a quizzical look. “Can I what?”
“Fly?”
The familiar static rises in the background as Jon furrows his brow. “I...think so? Yes, I can-- I don’t know how-- it makes no sense, there’s no way a pair of bird wings should be able to lift a full-grown human off the ground, it’s not like I have hollow bones…” He trails off, frowning at Martin, who’s grinning.
“Sorry,” Martin says. “It’s just-- for a moment there, you sounded like you. The old Jon. A normal person would’ve immediately tried to fly if they got that ability, but instead you just got crabby that the way you can fly is, I dunno, illogical...”
“I have absolutely no desire to fly,” Jon says shortly. “Even if I trusted Simon Fairchild, which I don’t, any appreciation I may have once had for high places was completely eliminated after my first encounter with the Vast. Which, you may remember, involved Mike Crew pushing me off a building.”
Martin chuckled. “Yeah, I can see why. I was just thinking maybe you could, I dunno, fly us through the apocalypse or something…”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Jon says. “Dream--”
“Dream logic, I know,” Martin finishes. “Yeah. I figured it was something like that. Just-- figured I’d ask, that’s all.”
“We’re supposed to experience each of them,” Jon says. “Live through them. Flying would be like-- cheating, I suppose.”
“Bit hard to cheat when you’re up against an all-powerful fear god,” Martin mutters. “Being able to fly feels like the only way to play fair, if you ask me.”
Jon snorts. “I wouldn’t even know how to fly. I mean-- I could Know, but my body wouldn’t really know. I’d probably drop you or something.”
Martin doubts that very much. Whether he’s after a piece of knowledge or protecting a loved one, Jon has the most stubborn grip of anyone Martin has ever met. But he lets it go. “Fair enough.”
----------------------------------
Jon’s scouting ahead, just for a few minutes, like normal. Being caught off guard by the Hunt and the Lonely’s domains had made them even more antsy than usual. It was too risky to trust the Eye to warn them of whatever the next field of horrors had in store for them; by the time the information landed in Jon’s mind, they barely had enough time to prepare. So they’d decided that as soon as Jon gets a sense that they’re about to enter the next domain, it’s safer for him to scout ahead and gather as much information as possible, even if it means separating briefly.
He can tell it’s the Buried, but isn’t quite sure exactly what form it will take. The usual sense of claustrophobia and suffocation, of course, but beyond that, Jon can’t tell. He pushes into it, losing himself for a couple of minutes, but emerges with nothing but the aftermath of a nasty sinus headache.
“It’s the Buried, but I don’t know much more than that,” he says aloud, turning around to look at the top of the hill with a gnarled, dead tree where he’d last seen Martin. “Suppose we’ll just have to prepare for whatever--”
Martin isn’t there.
Jon tries not to panic. It’s happened before, Martin disappearing. One time he’d wandered a bit far when Jon had been giving a particularly intense statement; another time he’d twisted his ankle while Jon had been scouting.
The other time--
Jon shoves away the memories of a grey house filled with fog, damp, and loneliness, and makes his way back to the hill with the tree. “Martin? Martin!”
No response.
The panic rises again. “Martin?”
He concentrates. Static creeps in as he Beholds the landscape, hears the cries of people trapped in various domains, feels the Buried creeping into the edges of his mind. He pushes it aside, searching for Martin.
Martin isn’t anywhere nearby. He’s always on the outskirts of Jon’s awareness, and never more so when Jon taps into Beholding. Nothing. It’s like he’s cut off from Martin entirely, like Martin no longer exists. It feels almost like when he’d gotten trapped in the Lonely-- except then, Jon had gotten a vague sense of fog and mist that he could search through. This time, there’s nothing.
He pushes, harder, forcing his awareness across the dry and cracked lands, feeling pain pulsing into his sinuses. Martin’s nowhere to be found above ground. But they’re near the Buried, and the last time Martin disappeared for any length of time was near another, similar domain. Jon ignores the pain in his head and brings his attention to below the surface of the earth.
Immediately, he coughs; his throat feels like it’s coated in dust, and his mouth has a bitter, gritty taste. It feels like there’s a film being pulled over his connection to the Beholding, making it feel slow and trickling. He focuses anyway, searching, searching--
There.
It’s a fleeting sensation, but Jon would know the feeling of Martin anywhere. Deep underground, in the crushing weight of the Buried, Martin is trapped.
Jon’s fury rises in him like a tide. The ground opens before him, beckoning him, and he doesn’t hesitate before striding in.
In the ruined world of the Ceaseless Watcher, Jon’s tie to Beholding is usually enough to keep him safe. Even deep in the domain of the Stranger, he’d never really been worried about dying or losing himself to another entity. But this is different. By its very nature, the Buried is able to encircle and ensnare its victims, binding them more closely than almost any other entity. It doesn’t take long for the crushing weight of the earth for Jon to realize he’s well and truly trapped.
He hadn’t thought the Buried could possibly be any worse than it was during his time in it with Daisy. But it’s so much more awful this time around. The mud clings to his wings like a miasma, caging him, coating his feathers in mud and dragging him further into its depths. He fights the instinct to call out for Martin; if he opens his mouth, dirt will undoubtedly pour in. Instead, he pushes, mentally and physically, against the endless dirt entombing him, feeling around desperately for Martin.
Barely a day after sprouting wings and he’s already encased in the living embodiment of claustrophobia. The universe hasn’t lost its sense of irony, apparently. Jon grits his teeth, grunting as something-- a tree root, or a rock-- cuts into his left wing, bending back one of his primaries. The sensation is deeply unpleasant, like bending back a fingernail too far.
The pain distracts him just enough for the Buried to begin pressing in on him again. The weight is crushing, pressing on him from all sides, bringing back horrible memories of being entombed in the coffin with only the tip of Daisy’s finger crooked around his own to remind him that he wasn’t alone. The dirt weighs heavier on his wings, caging him, trapping him. With a shove that makes both his head and his arms ache from the strain, Jon pushes the memories-- and the Buried-- away. Focus. Martin. Martin. Martin--
Martin.
There’s a faint sensation in his mind, a feeling so familiar that it has to be him. It’s somewhere ahead, but distance is meaningless in this place, so all Jon can do is follow it as best he can, clinging to the thread of Martin.
It’s been hours, or maybe only minutes, when his hand pushes through another layer of dirt into emptiness, the rest of his body following shortly afterwards.
Jon falls to his knees on the cold vinyl floor, choking and spluttering. He doesn’t technically need to breathe, but his body won’t stop sucking in great heaving breaths anyway, as if to flush his lungs clear of the mud of the Buried. His wings ache,
Finally, he looks up.
It’s a room-- four walls, ceiling, a floor, with no dirt in sight other than what’s still coating Jon. At the front of the room there’s a blackboard and a slide projector, with wooden desks arranged in rows throughout the room in tidy lines. The walls are lined with an assortment of posters about math-- one has the quadratic formula, another lists various geometric theorems.
Martin sits at one of the desks, alone in the room.
“Martin!”
Jon’s voice is hoarse with dust. He clambers to his feet, staggering as his wings-- still caked with mud-- throw him off balance. “Martin, I’m here! It’s Jon--”
Thud.
He crashes face-first into empty air.
“What--”
There’s nothing in front of him, but as he gingerly extends his hand, it hits what feels like a solid glass wall. No amount of pushing or shoving can get through. He yells again, but Martin doesn’t respond, just sits facing the front of the classroom, hands clenched tightly together.
Just then, the door at the front of the classroom opens, and a man strides in. He’s stocky, wearing an oxford shirt and well-tailored trousers, and carrying a sheaf of papers in his arms.
“Well, Martin,” he says, closing the door firmly behind him, “I had hoped you’d manage not to disappoint this time, but clearly that was just another misplaced expectation.”
The man’s voice has a crisp RP accent, practically oozing poshness. Jon’s hackles go up immediately.
“But,” the man says, plopping the sheaf of papers down in front of Martin, making Martin jump and sit up straighter at his desk. “I suppose it was my own fault for being foolish enough to hope you’d amount to anything. This school has first-years who are better at geometry than you. With these A-levels you’d be lucky if any university bothered to give you the time of day. Even the trade schools probably won’t look twice at you.” He sighs. “Even with all the money your poor mother poured into your tutoring, and all the work this school put in trying to hammer this information into your head, you still couldn’t be bothered to learn.”
Martin takes the paper with trembling hands. Jon sees red. He feels around for something, an opening, anything to let him into the space where Martin is, beating his hands against the force field as the man continues to talk.
When he looks up again, panting, the room has shifted. The classroom has become a living room, with a chintz armchair and a water-stained table, and dusty windows looking out into darkness. The man is gone. In his place is an older woman wearing a crisp button-up cardigan and thick glasses. Her features look vaguely familiar, but Jon can’t quite place them until she opens her mouth.
“I just keep telling you, if you applied yourself a little more, you could’ve done it,” she says. “I don’t know where you got that laziness from, but it certainly wasn’t from my side of the family. I don’t know how you plan to pay off the bills, Martin, but you’d better figure it out--”
Jon blinks, and a new man has taken her place, wearing a well-tailored suit and tie. Jon can’t quite read the name on the metal name tag, but he can clearly see the outline of the Barclays eagle logo. The room shifts again; the walls become drab and gray, like a corporate office, the walls lined with filing cabinets and generic paintings.
“--before these loans come due,” the man says. “We’ve already given you a six-month extension. Every month you delay means another ten percent increase in interest. I know you failed your A-levels, Martin, but even you should be able to figure out the problem there.”
Is it Jon’s imagination, or is the room getting smaller?
Martin says something, but Jon can’t make it out. The room is getting smaller, he’s sure of it. Some of the pictures have disappeared off the walls, and the bookcase is half the size it was before. And the man-- the banker-- seems to have grown...taller, somehow.
The panic rises in his throat again. The weight of the banker’s gaze and the smallness of the room feels just as claustrophobic as the dirt and mud.
He swallows it down. There’s no time for panicking-- he has no idea how long he’ll be able to stay down here, in this strange liminal space between his version of the Buried and Martin’s, but it’s clear that he’s not getting anywhere with brute force.
The man disappears. The walls continue to shrink, and Martin is shaking. Jon grits his teeth, letting the anger rise up in his stomach again.
The Eye turns its attention to him, distantly curious at what could be angering its Archivist so. Jon breathes it in, feeling the familiar static prickling through his body. As always, the raw power is both terrifying and delightful, urging him to allow it to consume him. And rarely has the temptation been so strong as it is now as he attempts to rescue the man he loves most in the world from the clutches of a rival god.
But again, as always, he pushes that urge aside. His wings flare out to their full length; he’d almost forgotten they were there. He can feel his feathers bristling as he turns his and the Eye’s full attention on the banker and the tiny room.
This time, when he presses against the invisible barrier, he’s crackling with power. The barrier dissolves, sparking against his feathers like an electric shock. The banker looks up, frowning briefly before a look of recognition-- and fear-- crosses his face.
Jon plucks his name from his mind like fruit from a tree: Leo Taylor. The manager of a payday loan company, pre-apocalypse, and a man who relishes his new status as an avatar.
Taylor opens his mouth. Jon is tempted to let him speak, to see if he can make the man plead and beg for his life, but he doesn’t want to keep Martin here any longer than he has to.
He focuses on Taylor, and the static rises.
“Feel it,” Jon says. The fear, roiling and thick, floods into Taylor, making him stagger. “The crushing weight of disappointment, the thick black muck of responsibilities weighing you down. You were a financier, in the old world. Now, creditor, your debts come due.”
The static rises, squeaking and shrill, as Jon focuses his power towards Taylor. The lights flicker, and with a pop, a crack splits across the ceiling and dirt begins to rain into the room. Taylor screams, long and loud, fighting Jon tooth and nail, but it’s no use. He dissolves, fuzzing into static, and blinks out of existence.
Jon staggers, letting out a long breath as the power leaves him, the Eye no longer interested.
He looks back at Martin, who’s blinking in shock. “Jon? Where are we?”
“The Buried,” Jon says, kicking aside a chair and making his way towards Martin. “You-- we got stuck in its domain. It trapped you, and I, well--”
“--did your smiting thing, yeah, I saw that part,” Martin says, running a hand through his hair. “Do you--”
He’s interrupted by another popping noise. The crack in the ceiling splits wider, running down the walls, as more dirt and dust begins raining from the ceiling.
“I don’t think it liked that you did that,” Martin says, spitting dirt out of his mouth. “Let’s get out of here.”
He grabs Jon’s hand as a chunk of the ceiling crashes down a few feet away. There’s no exit in sight-- the wall Jon came through is closed up, a seemingly ordinary wall aside from the small hairline cracks spreading through it. The door that Taylor came through has vanished as well. Jon spins in place for a minute, trying to Know, but the Buried is blocking him; all he can see are unending tunnels of dirt
With one final, resounding crack, the ceiling finally splits open. Jon makes a split-second decision and grabs Martin by the waist, wrapping his fingers around a belt loop.
“Wh-- Jon--”
“Hold on,” Jon says. Tightening his arms around Martin, he stretches his wings and flaps, hard, launching them into the collapsing ceiling of the Buried.
Clumps of dirt, mud, and dust rain down around them as the two of them shoot up into the air. Jon’s not sure what’s beyond the room-- aside from more mud-- but the possibility of escape far outweighs the guarantee of being buried alive if they remain in the room.
It’s a veritable obstacle course of falling debris as Jon carries them further into the void. Muscles he didn’t even know he had twinge as he dodges out of the way of rebar and ceiling tiles. Their exit is getting smaller and smaller-- the walls are closing in again as he strains his wings, grunting with the effort of holding on to Martin and preventing his wings from striking the walls as they flap.
The climb goes on for what feels like forever. Martin is silent except for the occasional “oh fuck, oh Jesus” that slips out. Jon’s wings are coated in dirt and grime and he still can’t See, blinded by the Buried that claws at him as he slips out of its grasp once more--
--and they burst out of the ground in a shower of dirt.
The momentum of Jon’s wings carries them through the opening and into the air until Jon gets his wings under control, hovering nearly twenty feet off the ground.
“Holy shit,” Martin wheezes.
Jon is too busy sucking in clean air to speak.
After a minute or two of them both getting their breathing back under control, Martin finally looks around. “Wow. I thought you said you wouldn’t know how to fly, if you tried.”
Jon huffs. “Well-- you were-- I couldn’t just leave you there!”
“I’m not complaining!” Martin says quickly. “It’s just-- sweet. You, holding me in your arms in the sky, like Superman.”
Jon hmphs. “Suppose that makes you Lois Lane, then.”
“Wouldn’t mind that,” says Martin, smiling. “A crack investigative journalist with a handsome, powerful boyfriend-- what’s not to love?”
They stay there for a minute, enjoying the feeling of the slight breeze in the sky, before Jon’s wings start to ache. “Gonna bring us down now, okay, love?” he asks, and Martin nods.
The landing is...less than perfect, but at the end of it they’re only a little bruised. Martin dusts himself off, wincing slightly, and makes to dust off Jon’s wing as well.
Jon yanks it back, surprising himself. Martin blinks.
“Er,” says Jon. “I don’t-- it’s fine. I can fix them myself. They’re just a little disheveled, they’ll be fine in a bit.”
This is a baldfaced lie; he can feel every feather barb that’s out of place, every bit of dirt that’s worked its way into his down. But after what they’ve been through in the past hour, he can’t bear to stomach the thought of something else touching them, of being even slightly pinned down, even by Martin. So he shoulders onward, trying and failing to ignore his wings and the dirt dragging them down once more.
---------------------------------------------
Three hours later, Jon is miserable. He’d never been able to tolerate dirt, as a child. The other kids had always loved playing in sandboxes, and chasing each other around on the playground, tripping and falling in the mulch and woodchips. He wasn’t worried about germs-- he’d read enough books to know that it was important for children to get adequate exposure to a variety of microbes to strengthen their immune systems. It was simply the knowledge that, were he to get dirty, he would have to wait several hours before being able to take a proper shower and clean the dirt off himself.
Having grit and soil all over everything, contaminating all that he touched, was unbearable. Even as he grew older, and various friends and the occasional partner dragged him out to various camping trips or hiking excursions, he could never fully relax knowing that he would be unable to wash for an extended period of time.
And since their expedition into the Buried, every step over the uneven ground made his wings rustle, bringing every part of his multifaceted awareness towards the sensation of the sandy grit lining his feathers. Jon grinds his teeth, puffing his feathers and shaking his wings out yet again. The movement brings no real relief, just like the last four times he’d done it, but he can’t seem to stop.
“Jon,” Martin says exasperatedly. “Every time you do that, you send a big puff of dust into my face. Could you give it a break?”
Jon stops, wincing. “Sorry.”
He leans in to brush the dirt from Martin’s hair, and Martin tips his face down to plant a small kiss on Jon’s nose. Jon screws up his eyes, smiling, and wipes some of the dirt from Martin’s cheek.
Despite the grime, despite the dust and dirt, they still have this. He lets Martin pull him close, fingers threading into Jon’s feathers.
Jon’s mind is drifting pleasantly, only vaguely aware of the dirt and grime, as Martin runs his hands gently through Jon’s feathers, until a twinge of pain makes him flinch. Martin draws his hand back immediately. “Everything okay?”
“Ah, it’s just--” Jon cranes his neck around to look at himself. “I don’t know. It hurt for a moment, but-- I don’t know why--”
Martin chuckles as Jon twists his head back, lifting his arm, trying to get a better look at the spot on his wing that Martin had touched. “Just stretch it out, gently, let me take a look at it. You’ll tie yourself in a knot doing that.”
Jon sighs, gently stretching out the offending wing, wincing again as the injury rubs against his feathers. Martin gently turns his wing towards the light, probing through the feathers. The sensation makes Jon twitch, fighting the urge to shake out his wings again.
Suddenly, Martin laughs, making Jon twist around again. “What? What’s so funny?”
“Jon, you’re moulting,” Martin tells him, releasing his wing. “On the other side. My aunt’s budgie did this once...you’ve shed your-- the little feathers up near the top of the wing--”
“Coverts,” Jon says automatically, then, “what do you mean, I’m-- moulting?”
“Yeah, those. You’ve got little prickly bits coming out-- can’t you, y’know, See them?”
The image presents itself without being asked: Jon’s wing, speckled white and black and brown and draping nearly to the ground, with small waxy quills emerging from the soft feathers of his marginal coverts. Pin feathers, the Beholding supplies helpfully.
“You just got those wings,” Martin says curiously. “How come you’re moulting already?”
Jon concentrates. “Birds moult to replace worn or damaged feathers,” he says aloud. “I guess enough of my feathers got damaged in our flight that my body decided to replace them. At an accelerated rate.”
Seeing the pin feathers make his skin crawl with a strange mix of aching and fierce itching. He reaches up to scratch blindly, hissing in pain as his hands bend the feathers. “Shit.”
Martin gently takes his han, pulling it down from his wing. “I don’t think that’s the best way to do it. Don’t wild birds usually, you know, have someone else to help?” He gives Jon a small smile. “A mate?”
Jon tenses. “You want to, what, preen me?”
“You don’t have to look so shocked,” Martin says, eyes crinkling.
Jon huffs, looking away. The prickly patch of new feathers ache fiercely, but Martin’s gentle hands slide through soft down and into the pin feathers. The first touch makes Jon wince, expecting pain; instinctively, he Looks, grasping for any sense of control over the situation until he can See Martin gently working the first small feather free of its sheath. The itching subsides very slightly, and Jon lets out an involuntary sigh.
“Let’s sit down before I do the rest,” Martin murmurs, releasing Jon’s wing. “My arm’s getting sore like this.”
Jon frowns. “Are you sure? It’s really-- it’s okay, it’s not a big deal, and you said you wanted to get through this area quickly--”
Martin gives him a flat look. “Am I okay with fixing my very attractive boyfriend’s very attractive wings? Funnily enough, yes, I am. I think a better question is, are you okay with letting yourself feel good for once?”
Monsters don’t get to feel good. Jon looks away, gritting his teeth.
Martin runs his fingers through the dark secondary feathers, smoothing their edges together. “We’ve been over this, Jon. Even if this was your fault-- which it’s not-- making yourself suffer isn’t going to magically make the rest of the world’s suffering go away.” He reaches up to free another pin feather. “We’re already miserable. We’re walking through a horrible patchwork of human fear in the literal apocalypse. Let me make you feel a little bit better, just for a little while.”
It’s a familiar feeling, this internal war of Jon’s: the iron-clad sense of personal responsibility for everything he’s done, directly or indirectly, to contribute to the apocalypse, fighting against the desperate, ragged need to let it go, to release some of the horrible guilt that’s roiled within him since they first left Daisy’s cabin.
“If you can’t let yourself feel good,” Martin tells him, as if reading Jon’s thoughts, “then do it for me. Let me have this nice thing where I can make you feel better. Let me have the power to be a good thing in this world.”
Jon blinks. Looks at Martin. “I, er. I guess I never thought of it like that.”
Martin gives him a small smile.
They move to a fallen tree, the trunk of which lay rotting on the ground. Jon brushes the ground in front of it clean as best as he can, while Martin sits on the log with his elbows on his thighs, leaning forward to peer at Jon’s wings.
Martin’s hands are gentle as always, but it still takes Jon immense willpower to keep his wing from twitching every time Martin touches a pin feather. The first few touches make Jon flinch, and then hiss in pain as the resulting movement causes Martin’s hands to brush against the other pin feathers. After that, Martin begins using his other hand to hold Jon’s wing firmly in place, allowing his other hand to gently work through each pin feather, carefully dislodging the old sheaths. As if sensing the intense itchiness, he gives the underlying skin a gentle scratching after every few feathers.
The pain has been so constant and subtle, and present for so long, that it had nearly faded into the background of Jon’s consciousness. Now, the slow cessation of it is nearly overwhelming, drowning out the ever-present voice of guilt that constantly reminded him of his monstrous nature. Allowing himself to feel good was not something Jon is particularly experienced at, even before he’d inadvertently started the apocalypse, but this is beginning to feel less like a choice and more like an overwhelming sensation that he isn’t sure he can stop.
But Martin is here. Martin, who had proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that if Jon asked him to stop, he would, no questions asked. They could move on, and the pain would resume, and Jon would keep himself up at night trying and failing to preen the spots that only Martin could reach.
Or, Jon could sit here, and allow himself to feel good, for once. It wasn’t like anyone was around to judge him. Martin would sooner cut off his own hand than judge Jon for being vulnerable.
Well, there was the matter of the all-seeing Eye that loomed over everything, soaking up fear and horror and shame like a sponge. And, of course, its servant, watching from the Panopticon, drinking it all in and savoring it--
Jon shakes himself mentally. Fuck Elias, he decides. Before he can change his mind, he leans back into Martin’s touch, letting the blissful relief of pain carry him away. He dozes, drifting awake on occasion when Martin shifts to a new spot, or gives the skin underneath more gentle scratches, sending sparks skittering down to Jon’s bones.
Time is somewhat meaningless in the Fear domains; without the passage of the sun, Jon has no idea how much time had passed when he surfaces, blinking open an eye blearily at Martin.
“Hello, love,” Martin murmurs. “How are you feeling?”
Jon gently stretches a wing, and nearly sighs with relief. His feathers are back in place, even the slightly bent ones. The skin under his feathers feels damp; the Beholding informed him that somehow, Martin had found clean water and a washcloth, and had managed to wipe most of the dirt from his wings.
“Marvelous,” Jon says, stretching his other wing, and then his whole body. “I should’ve let you do that ages ago.”
“Yes, well, I’ll refrain from saying I told you so,” Martin says, smiling. “The Buried really did a number on you-- on us. I’ve never seen anyone that dirty before.”
“Don’t remind me,” Jon says, shuddering. “I’m still getting used to the feeling of being clean again. I don’t want to ruin it.”
“Sorry,” Martin says, putting his hand on Jon and leaning in to kiss him.
This time, when he reaches around to thread his fingers into Jon’s wings, Jon lets him.