Work Text:
“It’s alright, love.” Martin suppresses a physical wince at the painful squealing of a magnetic tape scream ripped from a throat filling with spools and rollers and reel.
Jon isn’t aware, can’t be, of the eyes struggling to open in his skin, rippling under scars and coalescing in a crown of abhorrent translucent green about his head in sick imitation of an angel’s halo. They’re everywhere as the change crests over him strong as an earthquake through asphalt, seeing, knowing, the weight of each just another stone threatening to crush them both.
It’s worse than it was at the safe house, more drastic, more violent.
More.
More.
More.
Martin comforts Jon’s shifting body and prays he can hear it as he mutters, moans, in snippets of statement and static, those they’d never heard or read or encountered, multitudinous wide eyes fluorescent green and so, so beautiful set like living jewels in their flesh and blood findings.
But it was Jon, not the Beholding, gazing upon him in fear and sorrow and shame, tireless to watch omnipresent day and night and fixed on his one and only constant and when Martin embraced him more than two eyes snapped shut while still others yawned full as moons.
When they rush in, armed to the teeth, their animus lye caustic and searing hot, the distorted whimper resonates in staticky terror, the accompanying hiccup belonging to someone they would never know and Martin’s steel will is cold forged into a bulwark.
“Martin!” And Jon’s mortification manifests into a physical stoneheavy ache in Martin that chokes and strangles and stifles and he coils like a dragon defending his precious horde. He belongs with him and he’ll be damned if anyone threatens to take what is his. The smell of yellowed paper and dry ink and Jon, Jon, Jon and he breathes and he challenges and hedares, murmuring into sweat damp skin between kisses pressed next to where scars used to rest.
“You’re safe with me.”