Work Text:
Time and space unspool around them. There is still blood on Martin’s hands. There is still a knife in Jon’s heart, and Martin’s hand is still upon it, ice and horror and the edges of black crawling into his vision. The Archivist unravels along the threads of a tape. Martin can’t think; he is memory and record. And it is:
First, he is alone. The scent of heavy fog and the teeth-grinding roar of waves blinds all else. He is shattered, pulled apart into the many atoms that have once formed the thing that was him. He is—no. Not this. Not yet.
Second, he is on a bridge overlooking the dark water of the Thames. There are buildings towering around him, too tall; it doesn’t feel right. But he can’t seem to bring them into focus when he looks. There is a person-shaped shadow on the other end of the bridge. He is small and faded. Somehow, Martin knows if he takes a step forward, the person will disappear. So he does not move. There is nothing besides this.
Third, there is shouting. His name. The low, long hiss of disapproval. The lights of a television set flickering in an otherwise dark room, familiar for its unease. The whistle of a tea kettle, an agonized warning cry unheeded. A yank at his collar; he stumbles. Don’t walk away, Martin. Don’t walk away from me. Stay. Stay and listen to me—
Fourth, a tunnel that goes on towards nothing, and a memory of echoing footsteps. He is a cord pulled too tightly over its load, threads withering away with every second. He knows before it happens; he has already snapped, already worked his fury into a tight ball of hatred and longing to throw into the face of a man who will be dead soon. You. You don’t have the cornerstone on suffering, Tim, and—no, don’t stay here. It hurts.
Fifth, it is the stare of a man with eyes like a knife. Long, silent moments. The clock on the office wall clicks, monotonous, like a scalpel in his skull. The shelves around them are filled with loosely bundled papers, empty books. An enormous desk sits between them. It shouldn’t be this big. It fills up the room. It’s too much. He stands on one side; the man sits on the other. He should know this man with eyes like a knife. He should know this disapproval. He should not be here.
Sixth—he keeps count, he has to keep count or he might forget where he is—there is a frail hand in his threaded through with an IV line and he can’t remember what they are feeding into this hand. But it isn’t working. It isn’t what he needs. He looks up into the face of a dead man. The thin brown skin shifts like sand away from gaunt cheekbones and hollowed eyes. The roar of an ocean wave rises up, crashes, pulls away; all that is left is bone, a skeleton, dead in a hospital bed. And Martin remembers. He loves the dead man. He still loves his bones.
Seventh, or tenth, or seventeenth, there is a picture in a frame on his desk. The desk is small, gets smaller around his knees until he is trapped. The picture has three men and a woman. The woman’s eyes are scratched out with pen. Did he do that? Was that him?
Item #21, he thinks, is a safehouse and it’s uncomfortable, or it should be, but he likes it here. Sheafs of fine blonde hair fall over the large, seeing eyes of cows; Martin dips his bare feet into freezing dark water. The skies are dusky gray, and then gold, and then cyan, and then amber, and then black. Nighttime falls all around them like a heavy curtain filled with dusty memories. Martin sleeps, a steady rise and fall of his chest. His arms are full. His heart is filling.
Exhibit X, the ground is hot and dry. He walks. The horizon moves further and further away. There is no beginning. There is no end. There is just him, and he walks.
Martin is forgetting.
Are you sure?
No. But I love you.
The threads of time and memory and tape pull him in vivid colors, bright and fast, too hot for him to touch, but he can’t lose this. He can’t lose him. Martin forces himself to look and feels his eyes burn and bleed trying to find—ah, There you are, Jon.
He curls his hand around the heart of it, and it’s:
“What do you want from me, Martin?”
“To stop making everything about you, for once in your—”
“I’m not. I’m trying to protect you.”
“Well, it’s too late for that, isn’t it? You love me. Don’t you?”
Jon blows his bangs out of his eyes and takes a breath. “Yes.” Then, weaker, “But do you? Love me—still?”
“Of course I love you, Jon; I just wish loving you didn’t feel so fucking lonely.”
Jon is staring back at him, eyes wide like a hunted thing. The dim yellow light of the kitchen casts a pallid glow on his skin, distorted with the fragments of nightmares that have hurt him—pockmarked face, slash of tough crimson against his neck, pale pink burns on a hand that has reached halfway to Martin and fallen. His breath comes hard and fast, his thin chest heaving, unprotected by two fewer ribs.
Martin’s eyes are bee-stung with furious tears.
“I—” Jon clears his throat, licks dry lips. He brings the burned hand to his mouth. “I’m so sorry,” he whispers.
Daisy’s small kitchen table, with only one chair, sits between them. Martin is leaning against the stove, mugs of tea forgotten on the counter. Jon collapses back against the wall opposite him, his eyes running blindly over everything and nothing like he’s trying to find a place to hide. Martin feels like he’s broken something irreplaceable.
Jon straightens. “Right, then. I’ll just… give you some space.” Before Martin can say anything, Jon is out the front door of the safehouse.
Here? It’s a layered echo in Martin’s mind, not subconscious, but above; he’s watching himself go through the motions. I chose this place for us to land?
He knows in just a short uncountable time that he will run a knife through Jon’s heart, but it feels like this place is where he started killing him.
Martin thinks back—no, that’s not right. Forward. But we wouldn’t have, would we? Been together, I mean, and, Face it, Jon, it took almost two years of crisis and trauma to make us compatible, and, I don’t want it to be for nothing.
Later, he will find Jon by the freezing pond and lay an afghan over his narrow shoulders. The sun is setting and the chill creeps up on them both. Martin will place a hand on Jon’s knee. He will say, “I’m sorry.” It feels like they will both say that a thousand more times before the end.
And Jon will say, “This will hurt. This isn’t a happy ending.”
And Martin will think, Have you seen it too? And he will say, “I know. But I still choose you.”
Jon’s eyes are large and haunted on his. Martin scoots close and lets his head fall on Jon’s shoulder, and Jon tentatively snakes an arm around Martin. The cold starts to bite, but they let it. They are too fragile, and if they break apart, Martin is not certain they will come back together.
The tape continues to unspool around him. His bloody hand smears the memories as he tries to grab onto them, hold them close, not let go. Under his other arm, Jon is dying. The earth shakes and moves, and Martin knows he will fall into the void underneath. When the tape runs out, that’s it. That’s all they have. There is no more.
There—he catches one, pulls it close; it’s Jon, and his hands are on Martin’s chin, and he’s staring into Martin’s eyes as if he might have found the secrets of starlight in them.
Tell me what you see.
I see you, Jon.
They are standing in the ocean of the Lonely, the memory of waves lapping at their ankles, and Jon pulls Martin close to him and shudders; he says, rough and a little bit choked, “Martin. Thank God.” Then he gasps, and Martin looks down. The Lonely is a faded place, all pale blues and grays, but there’s sharp red leaking from Jon’s stomach and dripping off of Martin’s hands. There is a knife in between them.
Jon looks up at him and it’s not with surprise. It’s the Lonely. It’s the Lonely, and Jon can’t be here in the Lonely; it’s impossible. How did Jon find him? He trembles where he has fisted the hilt of the knife, and Jon slides his warm hands over Martin’s, helps him dig the knife in just that bit further. Tilts his head forward and kisses Martin’s cheek, whispers in his ear, “I love you, Martin Blackwood. I love you.”
Oh, God, no, this isn’t right—
Beneath the sounds of the waves there is still the crumbling of the Panopticon. As the tape whines and bleeds through the ruined memory, Martin gropes blindly for something else, and it is:
“I’m so sorry, Martin.” The woman with the blonde hair hugs him with one arm while her other hand is wrapped around the handle of her umbrella; nevertheless, it is a satisfactory embrace of condolence. He wonders if she’s taken classes. Are there classes about how to give hugs at funerals? “I know we haven’t seen each other in a while, but I remember you as a child. You were always the sweetest boy. I know your mother appreciated having you by her side for so many years.”
Martin nods. “Thank you,” he says automatically.
The woman looks at him for a moment longer; there is so much sympathy there in her bright blue eyes. She pats his cheek. “If you need anything, please let me know.” Then she is gone.
His eyes slide from her as soon as she leaves, and he looks back out over the graveyard, the wet grass, the gray skies peeling open with buckets of rain. Behind him, underneath a temporary tent with wrinkled blue plastic, stands a generic wooden casket with his mother tucked safely inside. He nearly didn’t recognize her face when he first saw it cleaned up and peaceful, rather than twisted and angry.
Still, he can feel her eyes on him. It’s silly. He doesn’t want to turn back and confirm it though.
It has been a small funeral. He didn’t recognize many of people who showed up—distant relatives who had long since given up checking on his mother and him, a friend or two his mother never let him around in case he embarrassed her.
Martin doesn’t want to be here. That’s another sign he is a terrible son, but she can just chalk it up as one more in the infinite supply of reasons she regretted giving birth to him. It’s not that he isn’t sad, though. He is. He loved her, even if she didn’t—
He just wishes he were alone to grieve, to allow the complicated pain to wash over him until he is numb, the tips of his fingers and toes prickling, the ring of silence in his ear, stale taste on his tongue. There is no one for him anymore. He is alone. Tim and Daisy dead, Jon in a coma, likely not to wake up, the doctors say. No one is here to help him mourn his mother.
Wait. Jon. No. Jon wakes up; he’s—
This one. This memory; he’s losing the thread again. He can’t go in blind. He has to find something that’s them.
The thunder of stone falling all around him, Martin flees all the way back into the Panopticon. There are creaks as the building splinters; screams he can’t define or place; light illuminating places that don’t exist. Jon pants in shallow, slowing breaths, his neck propped up on Martin’s knee and arm. Martin’s other hand comes up and haplessly attempts to shield his eyes from the raining stone and brightness. It’s coming too fast, too quick; it hurts to look, but he scissors two fingers open and screams and searches and it is:
“God, Jon, you’re injured, let me—”
Jon waves Martin away and stumbles to his desk, clutching his stomach where it’s been haphazardly bandaged and is now leaking through the material of his button-down. He sits heavily, looks too pained, too thin. “I’ll be fine; I just need to sit down.”
“Don’t give me that; you’re bleeding, for Christ’s sake, Jon! And it’s not a new injury—what happened? Why didn’t you tell anyone? Why do you never tell anyone?”
Martin has turned the corner of Jon’s desk, and Jon is glaring at him, the beginnings of a cutting reply on his tongue, and then he closes his mouth. Slides back in the chair. Stares, like he recognizes something.
“I don’t know,” Jon says quietly.
This isn’t right, Martin thinks. This isn’t how it goes.
“You do know,” Martin says. “It’s because you don’t trust us. You think one of us murdered Gertrude, and that means you’re next.”
Jon is still staring as Martin reaches out to cup Jon’s cheek. “That’s… yes,” Jon replies.
“I didn’t, though,” Martin says. “I didn’t murder Gertrude, but—” Martin chokes and he remembers there’s a knife in his hand and Jon is bleeding.
He goes back, away from that place, and he’s sobbing, holding the bloodied body of his boss, his friend, his partner, and it was him. All along, he knew Jon would get himself killed, but Martin can’t—he can’t live—no, he can’t die—and know that he was the one who killed Jon. His cries are near-hysterical, mania lacing the edges; he hiccups and laughs and sobs again. It’s all so bright. His chest hurts. He can’t breathe. His eyes hurt. He can’t see to find the tape anymore.
But Jon’s hand lifts. Martin thought he was unconscious. Jon’s eyes are still closed and he doesn’t speak, but he takes one of Martin’s hands in his, and then reaches out for the unwinding tape with the other. He doesn’t even look, but finds exactly what he wants, and it is:
“I’m scared,” Jon says.
Martin looks around them. They are in Jon’s office again, sitting on the floor, backs up against the wall. One of Jon’s legs is tucked underneath him; the other stretched out and bleeding where they used the corkscrew to yank out the worm that had burrowed underneath Jon’s skin.
Outside, something wails and whistles, like wind dipping and scooping up dead leaves to dance again. Martin doesn’t remember that part. He doesn’t remember his next line.
Jon is staring at him. His eyes are wide. He reaches out for Martin’s hand, and Martin lets him take it.
“Why are we here?” Martin whispers.
“I wanted to say something,” Jon says, “but I couldn’t. In there. So here is best.”
“What—” Martin coughs a laugh— “the place where we almost got eaten by worms?”
“The place where I fell in love with you.”
A noise emerges from Martin’s throat, wet and pained.
“I won’t say I’m sorry,” Jon continues. “It’s too late for that. But I will say of all my many, many regrets, you are not one of them.” He twists and reaches out to dance his fingers underneath Martin’s chin. Martin feels wet heat spill over and down his cheeks. “You are—” Jon laughs a little— “so stubborn, a bit petulant, and brave, so brave, Martin, and filled with such love and gentleness, and it was mine, for a brief time. And I loved it all. I felt you even in all the anger and pain, and it held me together when I thought I might break. You were all my best moments. You were my favorite part of being alive.”
Martin gasps a sob; there is no room to contain Jon’s love within him, and it hurts. Jon’s eyes are full and shining. Martin grasps Jon’s hand under his chin and holds it too tightly. “I’m not ready, Jon, I’m not ready for this—”
Both his hands still held prisoner in Martin’s panicked grip, Jon leans close and brushes his lips against Martin’s. It’s the ghost of a caress, already fading. “It will be all right,” he murmurs. “We go together.”
The wind picks up outside the door, creeps into the cracks, sweeps them up, and Martin wants to stay here. It’s all happening too fast. Their time was so short. Back in the falling Panopticon, Jon is now smiling underneath his arm, blood all around him. His chest no longer moves with life, and Martin leans over Jon’s body and fruitlessly protects it from the crumbling walls with his own. The whine and creak of a tape recorder reaches its end. Even now with shut-tight eyes, the glare of the light is so hard and hot his eyelids feel like they’re burning at the edges.
The tape runs out, and Martin feels a yank on his collar as he’s pulled somewhere else. He doesn’t know what happens after this, but he holds to Jon tight because they go together.
This was the life they got. It was often unfair and unkind, but it was theirs.
And it was:
The Archives are always a little dim and Martin hates the fluorescents that struggle to illuminate the dull brown hallways, but he rushes up to the door of Jon’s office, shut tight, and slams it open. He is all smiles, and Jon peers at him over his glasses like he’s a million years old. Martin feels the first timid flutter in his heart, but he also feels something else, steeped in time and trauma and soft timid smiles that have yet to happen.
“Okay,” Martin says. “The dog is out and reunited with his owner. She wanted to give me a reward, but I said, no, no, but if I can give him a few treats, maybe? So I did and all’s well on that end, you’ll be glad to know! Crisis averted.”
“Good,” Jon says. “Don’t let it happen again.” He does not look any more pleased than he did before Martin said anything, so Martin holds out his hand to the grim man on the other side of the desk.
“Maybe we can try this again? Hi, I’m Martin Blackwood. Mr. Bouchard wanted you to have an additional assistant, so he transferred me from the library to your archives.”
Jon obstinately refuses the hand. Instead, he takes a deep breath and puffs himself up. Martin should probably be preparing himself for the worst, or at least an onslaught of harsh words, but he doesn’t feel it. He’s only awash in the soft light of affection for a man burying a fragile heart underneath layers of sternness and acerbity. He doesn’t know how where the knowledge comes from; it only beats through Martin like butterfly wings caught in the wind.
Oh, Jon, he thinks, you don’t believe you’re good enough. You don’t think we can be any good for each other. But we can be.
“I suppose it was too much to ask of Elias to give me any discretion on such matters,” Jon snaps. “I didn’t choose you.”
“No,” Martin says. “But you will.”