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The knife slid into Jon’s chest with all the slick ease of cutting through butter. Martin thought it should have been harder, should have been a struggle to push through sinew and muscle and bone. But Jon’s body wrapped around the knife like an embrace.
Jon slumped against him as the knife pushed in, his trembling breath hot on the skin of Martin’s neck. Martin could feel sickly sweet blood on his hands, the scent of it mingled with the static in the air, and a sob wrenched out of him. Martin released the hilt of the knife as if burned, his shaking hands cradling Jon’s head, wrapping around him. Martin buried his face in Jon’s hair, wrenching his eyes shut at the hot flood of tears and the light of the panopticon that seemed to grow brighter and brighter with each moment, rising with the volume of static and whipping wind.
Something was pulling at the core of him, digging its claws in, aching to drag him away.
“I’m sorry,” Martin choked out, clutching Jon tighter, feeling the hot, viscous blood seep between them. The panopticon grew blindingly bright. The sound of static coming from the sky above them sounded almost like a bloodcurdling scream. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m--”
“Sorry,” he breathed, like a gasp, into whipping wind that felt...new. And so familiar. It rustled his hair, his clothes. It tasted, vaguely, of salt and smelled of dew damp fields. He heard the sound of birds, a sound he hadn't heard in what felt like years. There was a warmth on his face that didn’t feel like the piercing heat of the panopticon, with its foundations burning away.
Martin opened his eyes to bright, vivid greens of wildgrass, and the distant, sparkling blue of a lake just beyond the hill. For a moment, he could only stare, his mind a lovely, blank slate in the utter confusion.
The long grass bounced against him at the nudges of the wind. A breath tore out of him, finally, a shocked, trembling thing, and in the lingering chill of the early morning he could just barely see it clouded over in front of him.
Was it early morning? Martin stared at the lake in the distance, at the swathes of movement in the fields from blades moving in the wind that looked themselves like the roiling of waves, like distant green oceans. He could see the sun peaking through the clouds above. He was unused to the sun like this, to the hints of blue sky peeking out from beyond the grey. It seemed, all at once, so unreal, too beautiful to exist. His breath caught in his throat, tears flooding his vision.
Because he realized, he’d had that thought before. Ages ago, when he’d thought it was all through. When he’d thought it was all over.
He and Jon had wandered over the fields behind the cabin and found the crest of a hill, the hint of a lake, in the early morning. Jon’s hand had been in his, a warm, comforting weight--not familiar, not yet, they were too new after all. But that had made it all the more momentous. He’d known then, so clearly, that he’d have time enough to commit the feeling to memory. The whorls of Jon’s scars, the temperature of his skin, the delicate tendons under Martin’s fingertips. He’d know it all.
They’d found this hill together. And they’d stopped, and stared, and Jon’s hand had been in his, his profile lit by the gentle morning light, and Martin had thought him the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
Martin had looked at him and thought, how strange. How...unlikely. He’d never thought he’d have anything like it. The peace that settled in him in the moment, as the wind blew and the sunk crested over the hills, as Jon’s thumb had brushed over the back of his hand.
Back then, Jon hadn’t let go of his hand since they’d left the Lonely.
Martin let out a sob now, looking out onto the lake, tears blurring his vision. He looked down at his hand and saw it stained red. Sorrow clouded his throat, choking him, threatening to drown him. He was alone, where he was meant to be held.
His fingers curled into his palm and he brought his hand to his chest, pressing it above his heart like if he just placed enough pressure, he could ease the awful ache building in him, the hollowing realization that wherever he was, Jon had not made it with him.
He was alone, so alone, in this place where he was supposed to be with him. Another sob escaped him, wracking and aching in the emptying hollows of his chest, as if something was tearing out of him. They were meant to be together, wherever they went, and Jon had left him. Jon was gone.
Distantly, he heard something over the wind that was too clear to be a birdsong, too intentional. But it was a barely there thing.
He sat there, aching, remembering the phantom memory of Jon’s hand in his, as they looked over the water on that morning, when they’d thought they were finally free.
“...artin!”
Martin’s head jerked, his eyes wide, scanning over the crest of the hill. He...he’d thought he’d heard...
“Martin!”
Martin’s breath left him in a rush. He stood on trembling legs, looking over the slope of the hill.
He saw Jon. Jon, in his tattered, dirty clothing and his untamed hair, wide eyed, glancing around, searching. At Martin’s movement, Jon’s head whipped to look, and the relief that washed over his face was visible, palpable in the drop of his shoulders and the sudden sheen in his eyes.
His eyes were brown, Martin realized. That lovely, warm brown that Martin hadn’t seen in a long time, not since before the Unknowing.
“Martin,” Jon gasped out, taking a stumbling step toward him.
Martin took a step without thinking, and then another, and another, and suddenly he was stumbling too, his feet not nearly fast or coordinated enough to cross the distance quickly enough. When he finally reached him, their arms wrapped around each other, slotting into those familiar spaces, Jon’s face into the curve of his neck and shoulder, Martin’s turned into Jon’s hair. He wasn’t sure who was shaking, or if it was the both of them.
“I...I couldn’t See you,” Jon whispered, “o-or know if you were here, I--I thought you weren’t...”
Martin clutched him closer, gasping around a painful intake of breath. “I thought I was alone,” he breathed, “I thought you’d left me alone. I thought I h-had--”
“No,” Jon said fervently, so close he practically pressed the words into Martin’s skin. “No, never.”
“You broke your promise,” Martin whispered.
The motion of Jon’s hand trailing over his back paused. He went still. “I know.”
Martin swallowed around the thickness of his throat, the disappointment and the sorrow and the worry that clawed up in him. “Are they here?” he asked, his voice barely audible, pressed against Jon’s hair. “The fears?”
He heard Jon take a trembling breath. “I...I don’t know,” he said, almost disbelieving. “I can’t feel the Eye anymore. Maybe...maybe they’re back where they started. A-at the outskirts.”
“So...for now,” Martin asked, “they’re gone?”
“I don’t know,” Jon said. Then, with a breathy, shaky disbelief, “I don’t know.”
Martin pulled back to look at him, searching his face, his gaze catching on Jon’s eyes, soft and wide and brown, like before, like it was before the Eye. Even the last time they’d been at the cabin, Jon hadn’t looked so much himself. “A-are you alright?”
“I...” Jon swallowed, the line of his throat bobbing up and down. His expression, for a moment, crumpled in on itself. “I’m sorry, Martin.”
“I know,” Martin breathed. And he did. Jon only ever tore himself apart to do what he thought was right.
Jon’s hand trembled as it came up to brush the side of his face, his thumb brushing away a tear. “You knew I would.”
“I thought you might,” Martin confirmed quietly. He looked up, past Jon, at the cabin and the oak tree with the branches that sometimes scraped at the window. “Was this right?” He looked back at Jon. “Did we choose right?”
Jon looked back at him, the look in his eyes soft and sad and tired. “I don’t know, Martin,” Jon admitted, after a moment.
Martin placed a hand over Jon’s. It was, as he remembered it. The whorls of scars. The temperature of his skin. The delicate tendons at the back of his hand. Whatever this was, wherever they were, he was not alone.
“I thought you hadn’t come with me,” Martin admitted, shakily, on an exhale. “I thought you’d--I thought I’d--” his voice cut out. But he could see, in Jon’s expression, that he’d understood. “But you’re here.”
“I’m here,” Jon repeated, bringing his other hand up to cradle Martin’s face. “I’m here, love.”
Martin nodded, blinking back tears. “Do you think...for a bit, it--it could be like before? When...when we were here before?”
Jon’s expression crumpled. He nodded. “I’d like that,” he choked out.
They folded into each other again, after that, desperate hands clutching at fabric and fingertips brushing the warmth of exposed skin. The winds of the Scottish highlands blew at them, running through their hair like a caress of its own.
Maybe, Martin thought, maybe it would be like before. Maybe they could have a life they’d never got to live.
Whatever this was. Wherever they were. They were together.
One way or another.
Together.