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“It is terrifying. And yet, you knew what you were getting into. You know that to love is both to swim and to drown. You know to love is to be a whole, partial, a joint, a fracture, a heart, a bone. It is to bleed and heal. It is to be in the world, honest. It is to place someone next to your beating heart, in the absolute darkness of your inner, and trust they will hold you close.”
— Caleb Azumah Nelson, from Open Water
-
Time in the Lonely passes differently.
It might be more accurate to say it doesn’t pass at all, forever suspended in the grey light just after dawn breaks, when the world is coldest and most silent, the fog rolling in to curl around his ankles.
Martin knows he must have spent less than two hours on the beach. He knows a great many things — he knows the phone number of his mother’s care home by heart, despite it being as utterly useless before as it is now, and he knows Jon likes his tea just this side of too sweet even if it’s been over a year since he last made a cup for him. And so he knows that the stretch of time between Peter Lukas discarding him in the Lonely and Jon dragging him out of it was not possibly longer than one hundred and forty minutes at most, and even if he doesn’t Know it doesn’t matter, thank you, Jon, I’m aware of how time works.
Knowing doesn’t help, is the point.
It doesn’t stop him from flailing awake in the middle of the night, the darkness and silence of the countryside clawing at his throat, his fingertips numb and his hair smelling like dead things left to rot on the shore. It doesn’t stop Jon from worrying, either, torn from his own nightmares so abruptly his breathing stops for too long at a time.
(Martin traces the red, desperate marks his blunt nails leave behind in the morning light, and relishes the sting of them, the tiny half-moons carved in his skin like words of a love confession.
You can never be found if no one is looking for you. But there is someone – someone who held him tight enough to hurt, who had wanted him to stay no matter the cost.
Jon doesn’t question it.
He covers his wandering hand with his own scarred palm, and hums quietly when he bends down to kiss his fingers.)
So, knowing doesn’t help, and the dreams — or the dream, rather, because it’s always the same, the endless expanse of Forsaken swallowing him whole, the crooning ocean in his ears drowning out the faint echo of Jon’s voice — leave him staring at the ceiling with his sweat cooling too quickly on his forehead and down his neck, condensation dripping down the window glass.
The room is always ten degrees colder than it should be. Martin refuses to subject Jon to supernaturally-induced pneumonia, no matter whether he can actually even get sick at this point. It’s the principle of the thing.
Instead, he disentangles himself from the sheets and the quilt and the additional blanket as carefully as he can, and goes to the kitchen.
Leaving without explanation hadn’t gone well the first time.
It had ended with the fog draping itself across his back, coiling around his wrists, beckoning as his tea grew bitter and dark. He had stared at it, unable to move. He had wanted to — had been trying to will himself to — for what had felt like hours, his fingers resting inert on the smooth ceramic of the mug. It hadn’t been hours, Jon had told him after, but a scant twenty minutes.
And yet his hands hadn’t quite felt like his own, and by the time Jon had burst in, socked feet skittering across the linoleum, he could make out the handle through the curve of his thumb.
Jon had almost brained himself against the table, stumbling in his haste to get to him. He had been sleep-warm and soft, the weight of him against Martin’s back nothing short of a miracle.
Instead of the concerned scolding he’d opened his mouth to give, Martin had started crying. The heaving, keening sobs hadn’t subsided for almost an hour, even as Jon had tried to soothe him, pressing Martin’s head to his chest with both hands.
Very romantic, if he says so himself.
(He had told him, at the end, tear-tracks drying and sticky on his cheeks, the tender skin under his eyes painfully swollen.
Jon had laughed, and kissed the top of his head, right where his hair was snagging in a knot, and then each of his puffy eyes in turn.
«You’re here. Of course it’s romantic,» he had answered, smiling at him, eyes crinkling at the corners with something other than apprehension at last. Martin hadn’t yet been aware of the fact Jon is physically incapable of going longer than half a day without saying something so unbelievably earnest his heartbeat stutters and sputters in his chest like a faulty engine — he barely realises he’s doing it, too, murmuring into his neck while they’re dozing on the couch or coming up behind him as he’s washing up after dinner, casual as anything.
Martin has broken a lot of Daisy’s dishes.)
So now they have a method for leaving the bed in the middle of the night.
It involves leaving the door ajar, and a notepad on Jon’s bedside table with a pen tied to it so there’s always one nearby for Martin to leave a note of the hour and a message. Jon had wanted to be woken up, in the beginning, but he sleeps so little already — this way, he can still make sure Martin hasn’t been gone too long, even if he does wake up before he’s back to bed, checking the time against the digital clock on his nightstand.
Tonight is no different. 3:23 am, read the green blinking numbers on the display, comfortingly bright in the darkness — he adds a little heart and a lopsided smile at the end of the note, just because he can. Or maybe because Jon shuffles over to his side of the bed as he leaves, frowning in his sleep, his face slipping in the gap between their pillows.
The sight of him like this, leaving himself wide open and vulnerable and not hesitating once, makes spun glass of Martin’s heart. He can’t do anything about it. He’s not trying especially hard to do anything about it — it seems fitting, that the first feelings to make a home in the hollowed out parts of him would be the aching tenderness of meeting Jon’s gaze over a shared joke, making out the shape of his laughter from the familiar twist of his mouth.
A light waits for him in the kitchen.
Leaving the kitchen hood light on is a habit of Jon’s — he could never quite shake the phantom of his mother’s voice, the frantic calculations following him into fitful sleep at the end of the month and small things like that will probably be forever beyond him. It helped, when I got home late after work, but I haven’t really done it in years, Jon had said, and Martin had known then he had never needed to cut open toothpaste tubes to make them last just one more week and he had been glad of it. He is glad of it.
He’s glad of it even when his first reaction is to lash out, the words familiar to his ears even if the shape of them is disgusting in his mouth.
«That’s a waste,» he had said, the third morning he had found it still on, once he couldn’t chalk it up to forgetfulness anymore. Irritation had bubbled hot in his chest over how thoughtless it was, how pointless, and he hadn’t spared a thought for comfort, though the pang of sympathy in his chest had been second nature once. Jon had flinched like he’d cut him, shoulders hunching over in response as if he expected to be struck, and the annoyance had died down to smoking embers and guilt.
Martin had wondered if he had looked the same, eleven and terrified the day he had forgotten to turn off his bedroom light before leaving for school at six in the morning, and he hates what it says about him that he couldn’t stop it from happening.
He used to be able to do it — count to ten, and breathe in, and breathe out, and ignore the frustration making his teeth itch because it was easier to turn it inside than let it slip. Disregarding his own reactions had been years in the making, and other people always seemed more real than he was, anyway. More present, in a way.
Now it burns whenever he tries. He doesn’t know what to do with the words scalding the roof of his mouth anymore, if not spit them out, half-chewed and rapidly cooling in the silence thinly stretched between him and Jon.
Jon, who had righted himself, hands nervously smoothing down non-existent wrinkles in his jeans, and smiled weakly, eyes darting restlessly from one side of the room to the other.
«It’s alright. I understand,» he had said, and Martin had had to bite his tongue to stop more vitriol from coming out, biting and bitter. He really couldn’t understand, and it had taken a moment to remind himself it was a good thing.
«It– I’m sorry. It wasn’t okay to snap at you,» he had forced himself to murmur, and he had meant it with everything in him even as he swallowed down a retort. Jon hadn’t touched him, but his gaze had been warm when it had finally settled on him.
«I’ve had worse.» Not a joke, he had thought, but Jon had been laughing anyway.
The promise to never do it again is one he makes himself every single time, and one he breaks more often than he likes to admit.
They adjust. Or they’re getting there, at least.
Being alone… helps.
It seems awfully selfish to even think of it that way, especially when it’s clear Jon is struggling exactly as much as he is, if in the very opposite direction. Jon hadn’t wanted to be alone — he’s never been good at it, some part of him still reaching out even when he was trying to push all of them away. Martin can’t remember a time he was anything other than alone.
He hadn’t quite had time to prepare for how difficult it would be to go from having a full conversation with someone maybe once every three weeks to running away to the Scottish highlands with the man he loves.
Talking takes a lot out of him. Physical contact is worse, even as he can’t help but crave it desperately — some days he clings to Jon like a lifeline, unable to let go, and others he can barely stand him brushing his shoulder in passing, let alone holding hands or kissing or anything else. His emotions are all over the place, coming back in bursts from whatever cold, unfeeling place to which he’d relegated them, scattered and messy like a shattered mug of hot chocolate — scalding and sharp and sweet and very hard to deal with.
He hates it.
He especially hates that he can’t really do anything about it except wait.
Part of him — the rational, pragmatic side that tries to keep them together even when it’s clear their situation is beyond saving — knows that it’ll get better. It’s only been a couple of weeks.
If he gets tetchy more often on the days Jon can barely stand to let him out of his sight, too much too much too much buzzing angrily under his skin and nails and tickling his throat with the urge to scream, it’s practically expected. He usually leaves for a while to clear his head — when he comes back, Jon is reading on the couch, or in the kitchen getting started on dinner, and though Martin can see the way his fingers shake neither of them ever mentions it.
It makes his heart ache with some nameless, immense feeling, tender and swollen as a fresh bruise.
Jon never asks him to, but Martin sits near him nonetheless, telling him about the foxes and the sparrows and the thistle just starting to bloom on the path to the village. Jon hums as he listens, and his shoulders drop slightly at the sound of his voice. He sways a little on the spot as he cooks, letting go of the tension curled tight in his spine.
Martin has never been happier in his entire life.
He cries a lot about that, too. Of course.
The perfect, lingering silence of the highlands is comforting, broken only by his own quiet breathing and the low call of a nocturnal bird outside the darkened windows. It’s too early to turn on the overhead lights — the narrow circle of golden light at the stove is an island of warmth, gentle and safe, and the brief sting of loneliness becomes manageable again as he breathes in and out slowly.
Then, he fills a small saucepan with water and checks the cupboard while he waits for it to boil.
They’re running low on flour, but he has wanted to make drożdżówki for Jon for a while, and there should be just enough left for a batch. Besides, they bought the farmer’s cheese fresh just the other day, and it wouldn’t do to let it go to waste.
He pulls the flour and the sugar out of the pantry, along with a packet of dry yeast from the open box on the shelf. The smell is familiar, even through the paper, if not quite the same as he remembers.
His grandfather always used fresh yeast to bake. Scoffing under his breath that with the instant stuff, Marcinek, things don’t taste right, he’d hand him the small red and white package of Drożdże Domowe to put into their basket at the grocery store. Martin used to hold it tight, the packet growing warm and yielding in his grip, the wrapping sinking under his fingertips, and his hands would always retain that sour, almost unpleasant smell for an hour or two after.
It’s been a long time since he last thought about those afternoons.
He must have been maybe ten or eleven when his mother had become too ill to make the trip north with any regularity, and Grandpa died when he was thirteen and already too swamped with responsibility to call as often as he should have. The baking stayed, though.
These days it helps him keep track of time.
Jon had suggested it, timidly, not even a week after they arrived at the safehouse.
They had been idly browsing the shelves of the small village corner shop, blessedly empty save for a tired-looking older man. Neither of them does great around crowds anymore. Even with only one person, Jon had squeezed his hand as tight as he could without hurting him, his posture stiff, and Martin had gripped him back just as tightly, nervously glancing at the little selection of flours without really seeing them and willing himself not to vanish.
If the man had noticed anything amiss, he hadn’t said anything. Jon, however, had.
«I– that is, I remember you… bake? U–used to, at least, back—» he cleared his throat, pointedly not looking at him, «You know. Did– do you, still?» he asked, and Martin hadn’t quite known how to answer.
«I used to bake after bad days, and in the Archives we rarely had anything but.»
«Tim always had two helpings of my chocolate cake and I’ll never know if Sasha really didn’t like it, or if the thing that took her just wanted to hurt me.»
«I haven’t had anyone to bake for in almost a year.»
None of those had seemed like the right answer.
Instead, he had thought about the cluttered, sunny kitchen where his grandfather had taught him to knead the dough for chałka z kruszonką. About the hot air from the oven blowing in his face as he placed the loaf inside, all by himself for the first time. About how he used to sit in front of the oven door to watch the bread grow golden and rise, and about the smell of butter and vanilla filling the whole house, warming him up from the inside out.
«I could start again,» he had said, and Jon had smiled, brittle but genuine, and added too much flour to their basket.
For now, he takes the water off the fire, pouring it into the waiting cup and filling the saucepan with milk. He rummages for a bowl in the overhead cabinet, discarding all the shallow ones — there are… a lot, metal and ceramic, not deep enough to mix anything in, and Martin doesn’t like to think about what Daisy could have used them for — to find the medium-sized one he can actually work with.
Then, he transfers the milk from the pan, adding the sugar and the yeast, stirring the flour in carefully. He sets it aside somewhere he isn’t likely to knock it over, and then checks the time — 3:35 am, the clock near the fridge says. Which means he has half an hour to kill.
He melts the butter first, humming quietly to himself as he swirls the pan around to avoid it bubbling up — or burning, worse still — before setting that aside to cool as well.
Then, he sits at the kitchen table, just outside the warm boundary of the light, both hands curled around a cup of Earl Grey stronger than he’d usually make for himself, and waits.
It’s something between an exercise in patience and a test.
He hasn’t lost time yet, this week. It’s comforting, being able to pinpoint a day and everything that happened in it — to remember the cadence of Jon’s voice as he talked about traditional cheese-making techniques and every step of the walk they took on Sunday morning, rare sunlight shining too bright in his eyes.
There are whole stretches of his life Martin doesn’t remember at all.
He wonders if there are any good moments hidden in the dirty grey wool of time he can’t recall the details of. Whether he could find the last time his mother actually smiled at him, if he passed a comb through its worn fibres, or maybe one day of those first two months with Melanie and Basira that didn’t end in viciousness or tears.
All he can remember clearly is the unrelenting ticking of the clock in Jon’s hospital room, and the awful persistence of his heart monitor. He had alway thought it weird he had one at all, but there it was — as constant as the deafening lack of another person’s breath in the room.
He clutches the mug so tightly the ceramic almost cracks. His tea has grown cold, and his palms are sticky with condensation.
When he glances at the clock, it reads 3:58. Good enough.
The only big bowl they have is really big — enough that he could probably knead in it, without having to dirty the table, but the heavy glass clinks a little against the tile on the counter when he puts it down, and he doesn’t want to risk waking Jon.
So in goes the flour, and the sugar, and the salt, along with butter and milk and eggs and rather more vanilla than the recipe calls for because he likes the flavour of it. He’s sticking to recipes he knows by heart, made so many times he recognises the right amounts by sight alone, because they keep forgetting to buy kitchen scales. But he likes feeling the flour against his skin, measuring milk in a glass like his grandfather used to do.
Kneading is the part he enjoys the most. The rhythmic, unthinking motion of it is soothing, satisfying the anxious thing crying in his chest.
The dough comes together quickly enough, supple and smooth, sticking in between his fingers until he rubs flour into his skin and works the scraps into the rest of it. Once it feels right under his hands, he places it back in its container, a clean, damp dish towel over it to keep it moist.
The clock informs him it’s now 4:14.
The filling doesn’t take as long — only the cheese and the sugar and the eggs, half the raisins there should be because neither of them likes them very much.
When everything is combined and resting in the fridge, it’s 4:23.
He found leaving the clean-up for last keeps him occupied still, even while the dough rises. It gives him something to do, soaking spoons and bowls and wiping down the wooden table with warm water, scraping it down to get every bit of dough sticking to the rough surface.
Mum used to hate it when he left a mess.
He had tried not to, but she had an uncanny habit to show up just as he started tidying up, rolling her eyes at the pans in the sink and the sugar stuck in the spaces between the tiles.
She hadn’t had much of a sweet tooth. Even when he had learned how to make kołaczki for her birthday, fifteen and eager with black poppy seed filling sticky under his nails, baking them late at night because he couldn’t afford to carve the time out of his schoolwork or the part-time job of that month, she had refused to try any. Complained about the noise, instead, despite how careful he had been.
It doesn’t sting anymore.
(Or he tells himself it doesn’t.
His heart is still heavy with longing for something she could never be, a person that maybe she couldn’t have been no matter the circumstances.
Sometimes it actually doesn’t hurt anymore.)
He still takes care to be quiet as he moves around the kitchen, keeping his steps light, careful not to let the saucepans clatter. He scrubs bits of dough from his skin under a slow, warm stream of water from the sink.
By the time he’s done, he can start shaping the rolls.
It’s quick work even though it’s been years since he last made these, cut fill twist and on to the next one until he has a neat row of drożdżówki waiting on their parchment paper bed.
It’s early, still, but light is already trickling in, subdued in hues of grey and rose and pale yellow.
The sky is overcast, but the clouds are thin and white — it’ll clear up as the morning sun climbs over the hills and the pastures and the walls of the house, growing golden over the ivy clinging to the front door, thick and long enough to almost reach inside the bedroom window.
Jon will wake soon, to his own immense displeasure, which he makes sure to vocalise every single day without fail. He likes to start his mornings mithering about how the curtains are too thin to block out the light and we need better ones, Martin, we really do and whining until Martin gives in and kisses the top of his head, shushing him for good.
It’s... frighteningly endearing, how little of a morning person he is.
It also paints a very different picture of all those times he showed up at the Archives before dawn, exhaustedly dragging his feet and grumbling almost incoherently under his breath well past the time they all got to work.
Martin had thought it was cute already. Now it’s unbearable.
As if to prove a point, Jon chooses that moment to emerge from the bedroom, blanket wrapped around his shoulders like a cape.
He’s squinting against the weak sunlight, clearly fighting off a yawn as he makes it into the kitchen, shuffling his feet a bit. He manages not to hit any corners on his way over to Martin, despite his eyes being mostly closed as far as he can tell, and he stops in front of him with a considering frown.
«May I?» he mumbles. Martin doesn’t bother answering, drawing him in for a hug — relishing the feeling of Jon going relaxed and heavy against him, letting him take most of his weight.
«We need better curtains, Martin,» he says, right on cue. He looks up at him, his hair tangled and frizzy with sleep, red creases from his pillow criss-crossing his left cheek, and Martin’s heart skips one two three beats and starts up again all of a sudden, sputtering in his chest.
«Is that my jumper?» he says, because the only other thing he can think — to the exclusion of everything else — is I love you and he isn’t sure he could stop saying that if he started.
It fills all those hollow parts, the hidden, secret empty places — behind his teeth, under his tongue, and it weaves along his ribs like wreaths of flowers. It wants to overflow, and if he let it Martin is certain he would drown in it. So he doesn’t. For now.
Jon pulls a face.
It’s a face Martin has come to know quite well — he glances away and back at him and away again, both his eyebrows raised, the way he does when he’s trying to be nonchalant and failing. Martin’s cheeks hurt with how much he’s trying not to smile, the corners of his mouth pulling upwards without his permission.
«I’m– I’m going to go wash my face,» he says. He flees for the bathroom with one last nuzzle to the slightly ticklish spot under Martin’s chin, the fiend.
He huffs in feigned irritation, watching him go, something warm and delicate blooming in the centre of his chest.
Jon is easy with his affection these days. He had never thought that would be the case, before, and yet here he is — giving it freely, patiently letting Martin soak in it until his bones shed the awful cold they have been carrying bit by bit.
It makes his throat close up with tenderness. Or more tears, maybe.
He shakes his head, deciding he might as well get a head start while Jon is in the bathroom.
He brushes the rolls with egg yolk — or, rather, he dabs them gently with a piece of kitchen paper — and then places them in the oven.
After, he sits down on the floor, hugging his knees to his chest while leaning against one of the table legs.
This has always been his favourite part.
Drożdżówki don’t have to bake long. They rise beautifully as he watches, the coating of egg yolk giving them a lovely shade of brown in a matter of minutes. One is a little lopsided, not quite closing right in the middle.
He almost doesn’t notice when Jon comes back.
He sits down carefully, sliding next to him on the floor without saying anything even though Martin is sure his knee will give him grief later. Their shoulders and arms and thighs are pressed together, safe but undemanding — Jon’s elbow is surprisingly pointy, poking him a bit in the side as he tries to make himself comfortable.
Martin glances his way, taking in the alertness in his expression, the brightness in his eyes. Distinctly more awake than before, Jon is already looking back at him, nudging him a little in greeting when their eyes meet.
5:12, the clock reads. But he can’t hear it ticking, and Jon’s breathing is steady and sure next to him, pressing him closer with every inhale.
Sometimes Martin wishes he could let Jon burrow in his chest, curl up in the narrow space between his stomach and the first of his ribs, to keep him safe from anything that wants to hurt him. He settles for guiding his head to rest on his shoulder, smiling when he feels his jaw working as he yawns again, the weight of it already as familiar as the smell of butter and vanilla. The carving of flowers on the tiles behind the sink look starker in sunshine, daisies and roses and tulips catching his wandering gaze.
He hopes Jon will like his grandfather’s recipe. That he’ll appreciate the slight tang of the cottage cheese, softened with sugar, the comfort of biting into them. He’s quite curious to know if his favourite part will be the thicker piece in the middle, where the pastry twists on itself, or something else entirely.
And through it all he thinks I love you I love you I love you, as loudly as he can — resting his cheek on top of Jon’s head, burying a kiss in his hair, his heart and lungs and mouth feel tender and bruised with it.
«I love you,» he says. He feels Jon exhaling abruptly more than he hears him, a brief gasp of breathless surprise.
Maybe he won’t be able to stop saying it, now, but it doesn’t scare him quite as much anymore.