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I. Corruptun, Year 47,698.
Martin is doing his best to stay out of the way.
He isn’t sure if pacing or staring is worse. They’re both bad. Neither is a suitable option. Pacing would put him more in the line of possibly knocking more things over, but staring could make the Archivist more irritated than he already is. Martin doesn’t know what to do with his hands, is the thing. He wrings them together, then chews on a cuticle, then opts to shove them into his too-shallow pockets. This doesn’t, in the end, end up keeping his mouth shut.
“Archivist—”
“Don’t,” comes the voice from under the control panel. At this point, Martin can only see his well-worn shoes and the edge of his left trouser leg, but the steady clanking of metal-on-metal lets him know that he’s hard at work. Fixing yet another one of Martin’s fuck ups.
Martin sighs as he steps a bit closer. “I just— I’m—”
“Martin, I don’t want to hear it.”
“I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t mean to break it.”
A heavy sigh meets Martin’s ears, and then the Archivist is rolling himself out from under his workspace, face smudged in oil and dark hair struggling to stay in its braid. Damnably pretty, is what Martin’s traitorous brain supplies, but he quickly shoves the thought aside, because no, Martin, you’re in the dog house right now. No swooning over what must be the epitome of alien beauty allowed.
The Archivist gives him an “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed” look straight out of a grade-school teacher’s handbook. It’s somehow worse than any reprimand he’d ever gotten from his mother about dropping out of school. “I know,” he says flatly, tiredly, “which is why you shouldn’t be apologizing for it. Monkey wrench, please.”
“I just— oh, right.”
Martin fishes the tool out of the bag on the console and passes it down. The Archivist snatches it away before disappearing back out of sight.
For the near-year that Martin has been traveling with the Archivist, you’d think that he’d have a better grip on the man’s rapidly fluctuating moods. One minute, he’d be babbling on about menoptra artistic revolutions, and the next he’d be swearing at some part of his ship in languages Martin could never hope to understand, and Martin knew at that point it was simply best to stay out of the way. He didn’t have to speak Gallifreyan to recognize words that you could never say in front of your mother. In fact, the Archivist’s ongoing, one-sided battle with his ship could only quantifiably be rivaled by the one he had with the catkind woman they’d met on New Earth — apparently, there’d been something relating to a surgery and a stabbing in the past, but neither of them wanted to explain it coherently in between the lulls of their shouting match.
(For the record, Martin didn’t think Melanie was all that bad, nor did he think the Archivist thought so either. He did, however, know for a fact that she had some wickedly sharp claws.)
“Can I ask something?” Martin says finally, once he’s sure whatever annoyance the Archivist is stewing on has been thoroughly redirected into his repairs.
The archivist sighs. “If you must.”
“Where are we parked, exactly?”
“Um.” Something clatters to the floor. A bolt rolls out past the Archivist’s leg, and Martin stops it with his foot before it can disappear into the bowels of the ship. “Corruptun, I believe.”
“Oh,” Martin nods as if that means anything to him. “Is it nice?”
The Archivist barks out a humorless laugh. “Depends.”
“On...?”
“If you find, um...” His train of thought wanders as his hand gropes blindly for the runaway bolt. Martin does him the favor of placing it in his palm when it gets close. And no, he absolutely does not still get flustered when their hands touch, even accidentally. Don’t be ridiculous. “If you find worms nice.”
“Er.” Martin steps forward, unsure if he heard him correctly. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Worms.”
“Worms...?”
The Archivist rolls himself out once more, those hypnotically green eyes staring up at Martin — okay, so if he’s less in the dog house now, is he allowed to go back to finding him pretty? It’s kind of hard, when the man seems to be an exact carbon copy straight out of Martin’s dreams. Then he pushes up his sleeve and points to the pockmarked, discolored part of his skin.
“Worms,” the Archivist repeats flatly.
And then something clicks in Martin’s mind.
It’s not that Martin hasn’t seen the Archivist’s arms before. He’s seen him with his sleeves rolled up plenty of times, noticed the smattering of markings along his forearms, up the sides of his neck, framing his face where the soft silver shows through in his hair, and it’s not that Martin hasn’t wondered about them. He wonders a good many things about the Archivist. How he could stand to drink cold tea. How he knew Martin didn’t have a middle name without Martin disclosing this. He’d just never concluded that it could be anything other than one of those strange alien things that marked the vast and yet almost imperceivable differences between the very mortal humans and the seemingly immortal time lords.
(Martin hasn’t, by some bizarre flight of fancy, ever seen the Archivist without a sweater vest, however. It’d been something that Martin had always assumed was common fashion amongst his species until they’d encountered a long-defunct time lord outpost, filled with depictions of people in flowing robes and intricate headdresses. Martin had asked him after they’d left if there was a reason why he opted against such dress, and the Archivist had answered simply that he found sweater vests “classier.” Whatever that meant.)
Martin gawks helplessly as the Archivist pushes his sleeve down and rolls back underneath the paneling.
“S-s-s-sorry,” Martin stutters as he takes a step closer, straining to see whatever work is going on behind the wall of levers and lights. “Th-those came from worms? ”
“Yes,” the Archivist answers, “you didn’t think London was my first time dealing with them, did you?”
“They’re the same worms that tried to eat me?!”
The Archivist snorts as he pushes himself out from his nook before rising and heading over to the adjacent wall of switchboards. Martin follows stiffly.
“Sorry,” Martin says yet again, even if he’s not, “sorry, I’m just trying to wrap my head around the fact that you didn’t think to mention that we’re currently on the man-eating worm planet — not to mention, the ones that tried to eat me!”
“Well, I didn’t want you to freak out,” the Archivist says, reaching up to turn a few dials. Martin doesn’t pretend to know half the things that he does to pilot the Tardis, but the tube above them lights up a bright, fluorescent purple, which...is probably good? At least it’s not red, he thinks. It’d probably be bad if it was red. “And,” the Archivist adds, “it’s not like they can get inside. Just don’t go out there and you’ll be fine.”
“Gee, that makes me feel a million times better.”
“Martin—”
“Jon.”
The Archivist’s shoulders slump in exasperation as he gives Martin his most unamused look. Good, Martin thinks. Serves him right. Maybe using pet names in the middle of an argument is a low blow, but Martin has worked enough years in customer service to know that sometimes it’s the only kind that will land.
The Archivist takes a deep breath, dusts his hands on his pants, and says, “Look, I promise to get us off of here, I-I’ll even take you wherever the hell you want, if—” he points to Martin accusatorily, “you keep out of the way and let me fix this. Now, get ready to flip that switch.”
He points to the large lever on the wall behind Martin, and Martin, long-suffering, begrudgingly puts his hand on it.
The Archivist scurries to the other side of the room. He turns a crank, he presses a sequence of buttons. He finds what can only be related closely enough to a wheel, and sets his hand upon it before looking up, looking over to Martin with that stupid face and those stupid eyes and that stupid voice he can never seem to deny. Was Martin supposed to be mad at him? He doesn’t remember anymore. His mind has turned to worm food, apparently.
“Ready?” the Archivist says.
Against his better judgment, Martin nods.
“Now.”
The wheel goes spinning, and Martin throws the lever. Lights flash, steam spouts, an oddly melodious cacophony of alarms sound out in quick succession, rapidly forming patterns that Martin can’t determine whether are good or bad.
And then...
And then—
II. Earth, Year 2016.
The thing is, Martin wouldn’t say that he ever expected to meet a space alien in his lifetime.
Honestly, at the time he’d met the Archivist — or Jon, as he’d introduced himself in a feeble, uncertain tone, as if he were unsure whether the name would jump around and bite him — Martin can’t say that he really had any expectations of his life at all. He’d been working a dead-end job that he’d lied his way into, renting a run-down flat that was still somehow out of his budget; and it wasn’t like he expected all that to turn around by the appearance of one man looking oddly uncomfortable and very out of place.
It wasn’t like it was that unusual for someone to walk into the shop and announce their name (well, not real name, but still) on a sunday evening. Martin had worked in customer service for enough years to be used to the typical run-of-the-mill whackjobs off the street. Sometimes they were just drunk. Other times, they were drugged. One rare occasion saw a woman with a ballpoint pen sticking out of her shoulder, who put up a hell of a fight while Martin’s coworker called an ambulance. Martin usually got the short end of the deal, being the biggest man on shift, but it wasn’t like he was truly scared of any of them; they were just people, after all.
Of course, that’s what he’d thought the Archivist — Jon — was when he’d come in in his overly formal sweater vest and asked if they had any fire extinguishers. Martin had told him no, not for sale, but if there was a fire nearby they could call the department, and would he be alright waiting a moment? The Archivist had only grumbled something inaudible, nodded while looking the most irritated a person could at something he agreed with, and then left. That should have been the end of it. That should have been where Martin’s life continued on the trail of mediocrity until he ultimately was fired or homeless. Or both. It would probably be both.
The thing is, Martin hadn’t expected to be crammed in a closet with the same man only a handful of hours later after fleeing for his life from...something. Something he couldn’t quite put into words. A huge mass of wriggling, maggot-like creatures that were fast, and vicious, and definitely not from earth.
“S-s-sorry,” Martin had stuttered, trying very hard not to hyperventilate in the tight confines of the closet as he stood pressed up to a practical stranger, “you said they’re from space? Like outer space?”
“Um,” the strange man had said, shifting as he searched through his pockets. “Y-yes. A planet in the WASP-47 system, originally, but um. They ate their way through the core of that planet, and now they’ve been...scouting out others, so to speak. Ones that have more resources to um. Eat. Basically.”
“So they’re not human. O-or animal, or anything like that.”
“Not in the sense you understand, no,” the Archivist answered. Then, all his fiddling paying off, he retrieved something from the deep recesses of his pockets and flipped it on. At the time, Martin had thought it looked like a pen with a green light on the tip. Later, he’d learn that it was more akin to a screwdriver — albeit, not any sort that he’d ever encountered in his life.
“Are...are you human then?” Martin asked after a moment, watching the strange man use his strange screwdriver-not-pen against the vent in the storage closet.
“Um,” the Archivist said neutrally, “depends.”
“On what?”
“On how much you’ll freak out if I say no.” Martin watched as the man wedged a foot between a box and the wall to give himself better leverage. “Most humans don’t take the news all that well.”
That answer was enough to punch a laugh out of Martin, high-pitched and bordering on hysterical. “Great,” he said, “just great. I’m trapped in a storage closet with an alien. Bloody fantastic.”
“Better this alien than those,” the Archivist muttered. The metal of the vent whined under his strange tool’s scrutiny, followed by the clatter of screws to the floor, one by one.
“Can I ask you something?” Martin had said.
“That would depend on the question.”
“If you’re alien, like, proper space alien, not of this world and all that, then how come you sound so...so posh ?”
The Archivist paused his work. He looked back over his shoulder, and in the low light of the swinging closet bulb, Martin was struck with just how very green the man’s eyes were. Nearly the same shade as the light on his tool, but rather than push light out, they seemed to pull it in. Swallow it whole and everything else in their path. Martin could get lost in them quite easily, he realized with a nervous sort of giddiness.
“Excuse me?”
“Y-your accent?” Martin clarified, making a needless gesture towards his own mouth. “I mean...you’re southern, aren’t you?”
Now, Martin wouldn’t say that he knew much about manners outside of the realm of “please” and “thank you” and “hold the door for the person behind you.” But with the withering look the Archivist shot him, he had to wonder if he’d breached some sort of unspoken, cross-cultural rule. Perhaps polite conversation wasn’t as readily accepted in space. Or maybe accents discussion was some sort of taboo? How strange, Martin had thought. Americans always seemed to like when he asked where they were from.
“I do not sound posh,” the Archivist had answered, mouth curling around the “o” in a way that directly contradicted his statement. “And lots of places have a south.”
Martin had frowned, opened his mouth to argue, but whatever rebuttal brewing was quickly cut off by the clatter of the vent to the floor. The Archivist stepped down from his makeshift perch and sighed as he dusted his hands on his trousers.
“Right then,” he said, looking up at their escape. “One of us is going to have to crawl through and reroute the Hive with a diversion. Practically speaking, I think—”
Martin cut him off with a look. One that he traded between the small opening just above eye level and his own self; now, Martin wouldn’t call the Archivist scrawny in comparison, but he wouldn’t hesitate to argue that he could fit at least two of him in one of his own trouser legs. Though the “little green men” legend wasn’t wholly accurate for the Archivist, he did at least partially fit the description.
“Er,” the Archivist redirected, looking back up at the vent. “I guess that will be me then. Boost me up?”
III. Andromeda Galaxy, Just a Smidge Past Midnight Tardis Standard Time.
Martin’s standing in the doorway, rubbing his arms with very little success.
“Jon.”
“Hm?”
The Archivist’s head pops into view, but he’s not looking at him. Too focused on whatever reading the screen in front of him is spitting out, hundreds of thousands of symbols a second that Martin can’t say he’s ever seen in his life. There’s a streak of black oil running up from his left eyebrow to his hairline that he hasn’t seemed to notice, and Martin doubts that he will any time soon. Not unless he tells him. And well, why would he go do that?
“Come to bed,” Martin says, smiling. “I’m cold.”
The Archivist raises an eyebrow at him. “You can turn the heat on.”
“It’s still broken.”
“Really? I thought for sure I fixed that last week— er, no, wait. That was the hot water.”
Martin snorts as he strolls up the ramp, over to see whatever the Archivist is doing with his too fast hands. Not as fast as usual, mind you, because Martin can tell he’s running on the brink of passing out. He’d explained once, in some vague, hand-wavey way, that Time Lords didn’t need much sleep, not like humans, at least. “Much” was the keyword that Martin had snagged in that conversation though, and he wondered just how often the Archivist actually let himself sleep before he came around. Probably ran himself ragged until he collapsed right on the hard grated floor. Maybe dragged himself along until his body had had quite enough and up and regenerated on him. The Archivist isn’t very old by Time Lord standards, from what Martin understands, but he has had his fair share of regenerations over the years. Martin wonders if he ever had anyone with him, in those lifetimes. If he’s the first, or if he’s just another in a long line of heartbreak. Either thought makes him sad if he thinks about it too hard, so he doesn’t.
“Come on, I can tell you’re tired,” Martin tells him. “You’re starting to lose your posh-ness.”
“I do not sound posh,” the Archivist argues, accent much softer than usual around the “o” sound, “and someone has to pilot this ship.”
“Well, put the damn thing in stationary mode or something!”
“It is not a thing, and that’s a lot easier said than done. First, I’d have to—”
Martin walks up to the control panel and flips the large red lever in the center of it. The Tardis gives a low, satisfied hum in response, and he watches as the core’s green pulse slows to a peaceful halt.
The Archivist looks up and over to Martin. His face is pinched in something between bewilderment and displeasure, eyebrows scrunched, lips downturned; Martin used to think that he was always upset with him for something or another, but nowadays he thinks that the Archivist’s face is just more comfortable in a frown. Nothing personal. He’s got a little wrinkle between his eyebrows, just at the top of his nose, and it’s infuriatingly adorable in the most human of senses.
“How’d you learn to do that?” he finally asks, studying Martin head to toe.
Martin shoots him a sly smile. “Easy. I just do the opposite of whatever you do. Now come on.”
And with that (and maybe a handful of grumbling, but Martin’s not listening to that part) he drags the Archivist off to their bedroom for the night. Digs out one of his old t-shirts a soft pair of pajama pants to wear, and curls into bed as the Archivist gets to changing. Martin had his own bedroom once, when they first started traveling together. It’d been a nice, empty space that he’d spent their early days resting in, away from snoring Time Lords or the hum of the Tardis’s engine. At least, until they’d had that leak in the ceiling, and then Martin couldn’t do much sleeping there anymore. They could have fixed it by now, of course; popped over to New Earth, or called up the Archivist’s more engineering-savvy friend Georgie, but really, what did they even need that extra room for? It wasn’t like they had guests on their travels, and the Archivist’s bed was already much too big for him all on his own. It was simply the most efficient solution.
The Archivist tugs out his braid before he climbs into bed, and then he tugs Martin’s arm over him like a human-meat blanket. Martin doesn’t complain as he scoots into position, slotting his knees just behind the Archivist’s and his chin into the crown of his head.
“Goodnight, Martin,” the Archivist mutters with a yawn before he clicks the bedside lamp off.
“Goodnight, Jon,” Martin answers in return, and wraps his arms tight around the Archivist’s chest. If he listens close, if he focuses, then he just might be lucky enough to let himself fall asleep to the syncopated, double beat of his two hearts.
IV. Panoptorius, Year 57/429Δ
“And another thing— I wasn’t trying to get us stranded on another planet.”
“Oh, but you just had to go and press the button, didn’t you?”
The thing is—
There’s a line within him that Martin might call his breaking point. He’s always been good at taking a beating, you see, ducking his head and letting whatever insults and attacks roll off his back. It’d been a prerequisite for living with his mother for twenty-some years — god, he wondered what she would say if she could see him now — and he’d managed to make it all the way until her funeral before saying how he really felt.
And maybe it was just the fact that he’d had an eight-hour shift that day before worms tried to strip him flesh from bone, or maybe it was that he just didn’t have as much sympathy for condescending space aliens that had the power to whisk him away to other galaxies in the blink of an eye. But he found himself reaching that breaking part a lot quicker with his strange kidnapper-companion. In fact, he barely made it two minutes outside of that unfathomable blue box — and into a world that was apparently the intersection of stone and cold — before he’d lit into him.
“How the fuck was I supposed to know that bumping a button would get me stuck here?” Martin snapped back, hands waving about wildly with each word. “You know, you haven’t said a single helpful thing since I’ve met you. It’s all just— just cryptic bullshit and non-answers.”
“Well, I’m sorry that I didn’t have time to explain flesh-eating worms that were actively trying to eat us—”
“No! And you still haven’t! Nor did you bother to tell me why you decided to drag me into this whole mess, because I’m just some stupid human.”
The Archivist had winced at this, just barely, as he leaned up against the wall, and Martin had taken this as a victory before continuing.
“Well, you know what?” he said, arms crossed and unflinching. “I’ll live up to your stereotypes for you. Fix your damn ship yourself.”
And then he’d left — turned around and walked off into the tunnels of whatever cavern they’d crash-landed in, not bothering to listen for anyone calling after him, if they did. They didn’t, of course, but it’s not that Martin would know. He was too busy walking, and walking, and walking even further, until he’d found a good nook in the cavern and screamed himself hoarse in frustration. In retrospect, he thinks he understands why he didn’t see any of the natives on that trip. He can’t blame them — living your whole life underground, only to have that chilly, mineral peace shattered to pieces by an enraged fleshy thing with only two eyes.
It’d taken a good lot of yelling, of kicking things, of breathing heavy before Martin found it in himself to wander back toward the strange blue box. To be honest, he hadn’t really expected it to still be there. Martin knows now that the Archivist wouldn’t leave him alone in a horrible, all-seeing place like that, but back then? Back then, he’d been nearly eaten by worms and lost in the stars. Back then, he hadn’t known the Archivist as Jon.
Back then, he hadn’t expected the strange twist in his chest when he’d returned to the scene he’d stomped off from in a fit of hazy anger.
The Archivist was still where Martin had left him up against the wall, but he’d slumped down to the floor and propped his bloody, battered leg up. He’d pushed Martin into the Tardis first, you see, yelling obscenities and untranslatables all the same as the worms squirmed after them; Martin had seen them rear up like a wave and crash over his too slow footing before he’d gotten the door closed, but he’d been too bloody focused on trying not to die that he hadn’t really taken the time to get a good look at his companion. Just too much adrenaline pumping through his system, is what he tells himself.
He’d watched as the man bit his tongue, steeled himself, then pressed his bloodied fingers into the divots in his leg.
“You’re not going to get them out like that.”
The Archivist looked up in a way that Martin might call tired, no bite left in the frown on his face, no snappy reply at hand. Maybe he just didn’t have it in him anymore. There’d been so much blood, you see, a dark, glowering crimson that soaked into the tattered remains of his trouser leg, under the beds of his nails, across the small pile of worm carcasses he’d been building up next to him as he picked through his own skin with his fingernails.
“Don’t exactly have any alternatives,” he’d answered eventually, voice so soft it was nearly a whisper. And well, curse Martin’s poor bleeding heart, but he wasn’t about to have that.
The corkscrew wasn’t exactly something that he kept on his keychain for any practical reason. He’d bought it at a gas station on a whim, years back, with the innocent thought that perhaps one day he’d go out to drinks with coworkers, and it’d come in handy. If Martin ever got invited out for drinks, he’d have learned that bars usually carried their own corkscrews. Martin didn’t go out for drinks with his coworkers though, or anyone, really, so it stayed unused on his beaten mess of keys until then. Until now.
Martin crouched down, took the Archivist’s poor mangled leg in his lap, and said, “Sorry, but this might hurt a bit.”
And then he’d gotten to work, digging out each little wriggling abomination with a satisfactory squelch.
To the Archivist’s credit, he hadn’t cried as much as Martin might have assumed. He’d gritted his teeth and kept his whimpers pressed into the back of his palm, unwilling to admit anything other than a focused, impersonal scowl, and maybe Martin had understood that, just a bit. Maybe Martin knew what it was like to rather sooner swallow his own tongue than let everything out in front of another. It wasn’t until Martin had caught him wiping his eyes, sniffing just a little after he’d pulled out a particularly long one that had nested just below the knee, that those old nursing instincts kicked back into gear, and he’d said:
“So, I take it ‘Jon Sims’ isn’t really your name then, is it?”
Maybe it’d been the suddenness of the question, but the Archivist had barely flinched for that extraction. He’d just looked at Martin, eyes wide and confused, like he’d forgotten that humans could speak at all. Maybe he had. Martin wouldn’t put it past him.
“Er, what?”
Martin couldn’t hold back his amusement at the man’s bewilderment. “Your name? I mean, I may not know much about aliens, but it just seems a bit odd to assume they’d all be english?”
“Oh,” the Archivist had said at that, lamely. And then he’d yelped as Martin pulled out another worm, bit his lip, and said, “It’s um. It’s not. My name, that is. I’m— well, most call me the Archivist.”
Martin shook the worm carcass off into the pile with his siblings as he had waited for a further explanation. And when none had come, when they’d fallen back into that suffocating silence, he’d said, “And?”
“...And?”
“What, that’s it? Just ‘the Archivist’?”
The Archivist hadn't seemed to expect this response. His face contorted, mouth curling into a tight knot and brows sliding into the single little wrinkle between them, and Martin’s traitorous mind had thought oh, he's rather cute. Just a single, gratuitous notion. Just a brainless, stupid, ridiculous thought that took him a minute of staring to realize that he'd even thought it at all — after which, he'd kicked himself over, because jesus Martin, you just met the guy, what are you thinking?
The Archivist has spoken up a moment later, giving Martin’s rogue thoughts just enough time to soar out of coherence completely. “Um,” he said, mouth still pinched in that sweet little frown. “Well. Yes...?”
“But it’s just a title.”
“Says the one from a species full of hunters and smiths,” the Archivist replied with a snort, “and it's not my full name. It's just...the easiest for most people to say.”
That had gotten Martin’s attention. He sat the corkscrew down, having fully made a mess of the Archivist’s poor leg, and said, “Well, try me.”
The Archivist blinked. “Pardon?”
“Your full name. What is it?”
“You...I don’t think you’ll be able to, well with human speech—”
“Hey, speak for yourself, I’m good with languages.”
The Archivist had rolled his eyes at this, shifted from his horribly contorted position, and replied, “If you insist...”
And then he’d...he’d opened his mouth.
Martin could at least say that much.
The Archivist opened his mouth and made some sort of sound. A series of sounds that he could barely even repeat back in his own head, because Martin was quite certain most of them lay just on the cusp of human hearing to begin with. And then he’d closed his mouth. He’d looked at Martin.
And Martin, for all his trying, had opened, and closed, and opened his mouth again in motion to repeat whatever the Archivist had just said (screamed? bellowed?) at him.
“Huh,” Martin had said, after clicking his jaw enough times to make the hinges sore, “I guess...I guess I’m not as good at languages as I thought.”
The Archivist gave him a sympathetic smile. “It’s hardly your fault,” he’d replied, “humans hardly have the vocal range without dermal chords, and I doubt that—”
“I’m sorry, dermal what? ”
Maybe it’d just been Martin’s tone of voice. Maybe it’d been the bewildered, wide-eyed look on his face, as he sat there with a bloody corkscrew, a sweaty work uniform, a name tag that read “hello, I’m Martin!” in case anyone on this corner of the galaxy was wondering.
But the Archivist had looked him in the eye, blinked twice, and then started laughing , and— oh, he had such a wonderful laugh. One that was just the slightest bit rough around the edges, that split his face in such a pleasant way that Martin couldn’t help himself from blushing. The Archivist, Martin concluded, had a very nice face when he wasn’t scowling like someone had broken his favorite toy. He had a sharp nose, a precise jaw softened by scruff, a pair of wide, wandering eyes that had probably seen the whole universe, and yet Martin could only feel them looking at him, in that moment. Maybe he was just imagining how they tracked over his face. Maybe he was just hoping they’d never look away.
“If it’s too strange,” the Archivist said after he’d brought himself down from his fit, wiping his eyes for a different reason this time, “then Jon will be fine.”
And well, that was just about the best thing Martin had heard all day.
He stuck out his hand amicably. “Martin Blackwood, then. Pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
“Pleasure is all mine,” the Archivist — Jon — had replied, and shook his hand.
“So then, Jon the Archivist,” Martin continued — stop smiling like that, Martin — “how do we go about fixing this ship of yours?”
“Well, er...” the Archivist began, “we’ll need a new flux replicator, at least, a-and a couple of capacitors? And some motor oil, probably, though I may have that somewhere in the ship.”
Martin couldn’t help the snort that escaped his lips. “Is that all?”
“...Maybe a hand up as well?”
Well, that at least Martin could do.
V. Right Here, Right Now.
It’s nearly eleven by the time the Archivist rolls his way out of bed, and the tea Martin has made him has long since run cold. He drinks it anyway, of course, because he doesn’t like to waste things, even if Martin offers to make him another as opposed to warming his mug on one of the cathode tubes. They really need to bite the bullet and just get a microwave.
“So where are we off to today?” Martin asks once they’ve swapped places at the controls. The lights on the panel blink rapidly, as if mourning the change of hands, and the Archivist gives them a betrayed scowl to snap them back into place.
“I thought I told you,” the Archivist replies. Pushes up his sleeves and fiddles with one of the knobs that isn’t actively battling him. “You get to pick this time.”
Martin’s only half listening as he watches the Archivist move. He’s mostly thinking about how much he wants to run his fingers through his hair. How lucky he is to have been shot across the stars and landed here. His single heart flutters contentedly in his chest.
“Martin?”
Martin looks up. Blinks, hazily, unable to fully pull himself out of the warm cloud of affection that has descended upon his cognition. “Hm?”
“Location?” the Archivist asks. “Of where you wanted to go?”
“Oh,” Martin says. “Oh. Oh! Yes. Um, I was thinking...Margate? 1816, specifically.”
“Margate,” the Archivist repeats to himself as his fingers flip through a series of switches. Then he nods to himself. Half-shrugs, compliantly. “Alright,” he says finally, “I reckon we could do that. Any particular reason?”
“Just, ah...thought we could see some good ol’ georgian England?”
“I mean, sure, but there’s plenty of...”
The Archivist trails off, and Martin knows that look in his eye. The look he gets when he’s realizing something big, putting together imperceptibly minute details like stringing together puzzle pieces — sometimes, it’s the chemical composition of the nebula they’re passing through, and others, it’s the remembrance that they’d forgotten to do laundry.
Now, however — that look has Martin’s name all over it.
“Martin,” he says slowly, tone forcefully neutral.
“...yes?”
“Keats, Martin? Really?”
Martin splutters out a rapidly failing defense. “H-hey! I could be wanting to go for a different reason!”
“To a two-mile wide town in the middle of— Martin, you cannot be serious—”
“You said anywhere, Jon. You said!”
“I know what I said, but— but—” The Archivist’s argument fails him. Falls clean out of his mouth and runs the opposite direction. He just looks at Martin, full of indignance and betrayal and helplessness, like Martin can save him from his own grave he’s currently digging. His nose wiggles, irritably, like a rabbit’s. Martin thinks about how he’d very much like to kiss him.
The Archivist presses his palms to his eyes and heaves a sigh. “Fine,” he says, sounding the exact opposite. “Fine. Fine. You will get... one hour—”
“Two.”
“Wh— Martin!”
“Three,” Martin counters in retaliation.
The Archivist’s shoulders droop comedically. “Fine— three hours and that is it. And I better not be hearing any poetry before then.”
“Deal,” Martin says, then grabs his stupid face and kisses it. Kissing the Archivist just always feels right like that — kissing Jon feels right. Kissing his boyfriend. All the same but so wonderfully different. Martin has imagined many scenarios of sending postcards to all who have ever wronged him with the tagline “Hey, guess what, I have a boyfriend now, and he can time travel. Can yours? ” across the top. Not that he’s ever actually done so. But he could.
He can feel the Archivist smiling against his mouth as he bats him away, which means the plan was a success. He’s awfully cute when he smiles. “Yes, yes,” says as he shakes Martin off, “now let me actually pilot the damn thing...”
Martin watches as the Archivist slots into place. Flips his switches and turns his dials. The pulse of the central chamber starts up with a low, sonorous hum and bathes the whole room in green. Martin never liked green much before. Martin hadn’t learned to like it until he found it in everything he loved, just like here. Just like now.
“Jon?” Martin says, and oh, the way he looks at him makes his heart squeeze between his ribs.
“Hm?” the Archivist says, smiling back.
“When you say ‘no poetry before we get there,’” he begins, “what do you think about after?”
The smile drops from his face in an instant as the whistle of the engine picks up.
“Martin Blackwood, I swear to—”