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Jake was pressure. A shifting in the corners of his eyes, an urge to hold his shoulders slightly hunched, a lightness at his hip like some familiar weight was missing - his faint presence just beyond front, and Marc was bitterly familiar with it. He would like to say he felt guilty about lying to Steven, but he’d done it before and he’d do it again - it was for the best.
“You didn’t have to take that fucking hit,” he muttered, burying his eyes in the heels of his palms, thinking of an unquiet endless desert and the pale khaki of sand. “I thought -”
There was a swell of soft gold defensiveness, one that started in their chest and bubbled up through Marc like a living being. He supposed it was. When Steven spoke, it was through words - Jake was these more abstract sensations, like pressure and heat and colour, a gut-punch of emotion and intention and protectiveness that briefly convinced Marc they were his own. (Back before, when he and Jake had been - closer together, they had been. Then the anger had gotten too much for him, and their brain had cordoned it off into a softer place who, for all his sharp edges, held it better and more kindly than Marc had ever managed.)
“I know you think it was for the best,” Marc mumbles. “But Steve’s -” he doesn’t know when they started using the nickname, but Steven had a tendency to be pulled to front if they (or anyone) mentioned his name, and he hadn’t been this far back for a while - “got all these ideas about communication, ey, taking votes and shit. I know it’s a bit - New Age for you. But I promised him we’d try.”
Jake never promised, comes the swell. Marc’s sigh shudders through their chest, and Jake is a pressure at his side, a hand on his shoulder, a weight against them. It’s reassuring. I know it’s overwhelming, hermano, comes the not-quite-words - not like Steven, whose accent is so brittle and sharp it almost convinces Marc it’s audible on their bad days, Jake is a train of thought parallel to Marc’s own. A train of thought which could pull his own off their tracks and grasp the handle of a gun and send a bullet through Harrow’s head quick-sharp in a blackout switch the likes of which Marc thought they had gotten over, sure, but -
That deep soothing ache in his chest: I’m sorry. Their chest. Marc’s still getting used to that.
“It’s over now,” he says gruffly, half-mumbled, still muffled by his own hands. He swipes one over his jaw, wincing at the stubble there - it’s bad for them, in sensory terms, but shaving’s worse, and normally he grins and bears it so that Steven doesn’t have to. (Seriously, how the fuck did he go through life for months not wondering how his stubble kept shaving itself?) “So - that’s neat. Fuck. Right?”
It’s faintly overwhelming, having Jake so close to front - like if Marc only took a too-deep breath, he might go falling into the dark beyond their body. (Their death had been his first experience with their so-called inner world, and he hasn’t found his way back there since. Doesn’t really want to. When they leave front, it’s just - a gradient of darkness. Rest. Time blurs together.)
“You’ll never have to worry about them again,” Jake promises through their lips - Marc has never been this close to front while someone else is using the body, has sat in co-con, sure, but never felt the sensation of his lips moving of their own accord, encountered the roughness of their voice and the thickness of Jake’s accent as though they were foreign things. As though they were his own. Marc scrubs his other hand over his eyes again, Jake nudges him in a way that would be a shoulder-bump if it were in any way physical - and fuck, Marc’s exhausted.
“You rest, friend,” Jake says, his words faintly clumsy - he’s the silent type, Marc knows. “Let me take it for a bit.”
Thank you, Marc thinks-says-hopes, too broken for this, too dirty to deserve it, and lets himself fade into the heady dark that waits beyond their body.