Work Text:
before
“They’re called changelings, Jonathan. Not-quite human things, who snatch away normal children and take their place.”
Her wrinkled finger tapped twice on an age-mottled watercolour image of a sharp-toothed cherubic child, its small fist strangling the stem of a tulip.
“They are often clever and watchful, but small and strange. They eat little and smile less, though when alone, they perform lively and unsightly dances. Like there is something living under their skin.”
Jon was still beneath the thin arm that kept him pressed to her side, blotchy hand holding his forearm in place. Still, and as always, thrumming with silent unspent energy.
“Our world isn’t like theirs so they do not understand it. People think them odd and people are right, for they are born of chaos, and sow it wherever they tread.”
She twisted away from him in the small bed, and pressed two fingers to the mug of warm milk cooling on the bedside table. Satisfied, she passed it to Jon, who wordlessly took a small sip. She smiled softly, a flat and thoughtful thing.
“I almost feel sorry for them. They can hardly help what they are.”
She turned the page. The watercolour on this page showed a withered child with hungry, bulging eyes, clawing at the side of its crib with twisted claws. She chuckled grimly.
“Almost.”
As soon as he was able, Jon began to do his bedtime reading alone.
His grandmother’s story choices always seemed rather pointed.
***
after
For all the violence of the apocalypse’s crescendo, the loss of connection with the Eye really ought to have been an abrupt and final thing. A rip, a tear, a slash, to match the jagged line on Jon’s sternum that ached in the rain and has felt the words I’m sorry formed against it by lamplight.
But it wasn’t that. When Jon awoke in the hospital, it had the crystal sharpness of fine and broken crockery. Martin’s guilt-stricken face nauseated him as he begged for sedatives, but he couldn’t think straight to explain that it wasn’t the pain that caused the wetness on his cheeks or the incoherent whispering or the sheets balled up in clenched fists. It was the bell-tolls of knowledge sounding like a summons for Sunday service, ricocheting from the walls of a building whose sole foundation was pain.
bp of the keira houndslow is 83/50 and she’s just vomited over the side of her bed while gregory peters doesn’t know that his son’s phone is with the curry’s repair service and it’s not that he hates him and isla montgomery will never walk again but he doctor won’t say that and freya adams has just been born at three pounds and four ounces and her lungs are ever so ever so small she is too young to understand fear but she knows it she knows it and everything is so bright and so new and she’s not even allowed to lay on her mother’s chest yet her mother all she has ever known all she has ever been protected by –
“Please just let him sleep. He’s been through so much. Please.”
If that had been Jon’s new reality, he’s not sure he could have stood it. This wasn’t the assured omnipotence of the apocalypse, but red-hot brands of insight on the back of his eyelids that scorched with every jab. But as the days and the weeks went by, the connection began to slowly peter out. The knowledge, once the sharp hi-definition of a deluxe cinema screen, was slowly being dulled to the staticky ambiguity of a 1950s set in the eye of a storm. Taking statements did nothing to affect the connection, discovered during a tentative, consensual exploration of Martin’s time in the Lonely. It was simply fading.
But it was still there, occasionally sharpening into perfect focus. And when it did, he clawed desperately for it, taunting though it was, straining through the fog until he was rendered limp and delirious on the sofa, heels of his hands pressed into his eye sockets.
“You will not keep doing this, Jon,” Martin spat, once he had recovered by degrees. His face was flushed and his eyes were red, the bile in his voice a sickening contrast to the caretaker’s relics strewn around him. The cold compress, the water, the balled-up blanket. “I am not having you destroy yourself because you’re too stubborn to accept that you don’t know the world inside out anymore. You keep following paths to your own grave, even now that you can’t possibly tell yourself that it’s only you you’re hurting. That’s bloody selfish and frankly, it’s annoying as well, so just,” he not too gently took hold of his jaw, and pointed it square with his own. “Stop.”
Even after everything, it was the “annoying” that made him flinch. The word he used about himself, before anyone else could get in there first. The word that justified turned backs and torment. The word that conjured images of not-quite-human-things and their unsightly dances.
Jon swallowed hard, and raised his hand to join Martin’s at his jaw.
“It isn’t that. Well – not entirely. I’m not going to pretend that I hated being sure about things.”
Because I never was before. I was clever and watchful, but small and strange. I had to be watchful to understand the things that came so easily to others. I had to be small, else there would have been no space for me. The Eye made me sure in a way I had yearned for my whole life. It told me terrible things. It nurtured me. It completed me.
“What is it then?”
Jon shut his eyes, and brought his and Martin’s hands down from his face, into his lap.
“If I cannot see you, I cannot keep you safe.”
Martin sighed heavily. He brought their hands up to his lips.
“Oh, Jon,” he breathed into the back of his own.
***
before
Those last days in the archives, when Martin was Lonely and Basira cold, Melanie gone, Daisy changed and those unspoken of returned to the ashes – the Eye was often all Jon had for company. Some days it was almost a comfort, chattering away mundanities about the type of tree his desk was carved from or the technical name for the hue of his chair.
Some days, it was not.
It had been in a cruel mood since daybreak, offering macabre statistics of commuters’ road traffic accidents and the grim fates of local missing cats. Jon’s statement-sifting had proven fruitless owing to the frequency of these interjections. He was seated at his desk, waspish and miserable, and trying to ignore it, when it tried a new tact to gain his attention.
Aisha Sims died on the 22nd of February 1991. Cause of death was complications following a planned operation.
“I already know that,” he snapped, breaking a biro in half for something to do with his hands.
Aisha Sims died on the 22nd of February 1991. Cause of death was complications following a planned operation. Surgery recorded was a routine hysterectomy.
“Yes, thank you. How about the cricket scores instead? I’ve never been a sportsman but what’s one more reinvention when one’s already changed species?”
Aisha Sims died on the 22nd of February 1991. Cause of death was complications following a planned operation. Surgery recorded was a routine hysterectomy, carried out to alleviate long-term pelvic pain which began during her pregnancy.
Jon shut his eyes. He snapped another biro.
Aisha Sims died on the 22nd of February 1991. Cause of death was complications following a planned operation. Surgery recorded was a routine hysterectomy, carried out to alleviate long-term pelvic pain which began during her pregnancy. While a radical procedure, her doctor agreed that it was the best course of action, since she made it abundantly clear that she did not want any more children.
Jon swallowed.
Jon knew death. He knew death by replacement, one life for another, eight-legged and blood splattered and marking. He knew death by acceleration, an old heart nudged towards a ceasing before its time by a changeling with too much energy and too little normalcy. He knew death by ignorance, by one slipping out of his view just for a second and staying there, while another slipped quietly into place. He knew death by fire, death by martyrdom, except not really because tim didn’t go out in a noble blaze of glory, jon, he just. fucking. died.
Jon knew guilt. He knew the guilt of replacement, one life for another, eight-legged and blood splattered and marking. He knew the guilt of acceleration, an old heart nudged towards a ceasing before its time by a changeling with too much energy and too little normalcy. He knew the guilt of ignorance, of one slipping out of his view just for a second and staying there, while another slipped quietly into place. He knew the guilt of fire, guilt of martyrdom, except not really because tim didn’t go out in a noble blaze of glory, jon, he just. fucking. died.
they all.
just.
fucking.
died.
His parents, however, he had been able to grieve uniquely. Guiltlessly.
The Eye had taken many, many things from him.
Abundantly clear.
Jon thought, in a flash of watercolour, of not-quite human things, who snatch away normal children and take their place.
Then he curled up in the corner of a scream and clamped his hands over his ears, as its walls collapsed and buried him alive.
***
after
Jon and Martin decided that it would be good for them to spend some time apart. Not in separate flats, separate beds, separate lives, Lonely sorts of ways. In small ways. In unaccompanied grocery shops and afternoons at the library. Walks in the park and trips to the cinema to see films where I really don’t see how removing his shirt that many times will help him to save the world, Martin.
It tended to be Martin making these ventures, with Jon waiting by the window like a lost puppy, skittish fingers winding a trailing thread from his jumper around and around his finger. While it was unfortunately, adorable, it didn’t sit at all right with Martin. As a net movement, the situation was progress, but it was one-sided, and kept the both of them in a state of surviving rather than living.
They deserved to live, Martin had decided.
They deserved to live.
“Why don’t you take yourself out to eat somewhere fancy that’s wasted on me,” Martin suggested one night, rubbing a strand of Jon’s hair between his forefinger and thumb. “Lightly bleed some of Lucas’ bank account on whatever a quenelle is.”
Jon huffed into Martin’s chest, but didn’t reply.
Martin kissed the top of his head, silently booked a table for one at the closest three-pound-sign Google reviewed restaurant for the following night, and kissed the top of his head again.
Jon groaned.
It did not go well. On the short walk to the restaurant, Jon found himself cringing away from birds that landed on the ground and turned their tiny innocent heads towards him. I’m sorry. I turned you inside out for a while. Your beaks were wrong. Your feathers fell out. You didn’t know where the sky was. You forgot how to fly. I’m sorry.
He ended up gasping over the bathroom sink before the first course arrived because his wine glass felt too fragile. His mind conjured images of himself squeezing it a fraction too hard, and he watched it become shards in his palm, tracked the path of syrupy Sauvignon down his wrist. All he could do was destroy. All he could do was destroy.
He stumbled out of the restaurant, then stumbled back in to dazedly tap his card to the contactless machine, then stumbled out again into the crisp air. He bent double and flapped his hands around his thighs in a lively and unsightly dance.
He needed to get home, he needed to get home now.
He staggered home drunk on that familiar terror, living in it, breathing in it, drowning in it. He was in plastic hands and writhing worms and discordant music and swirling, swirling fog. He was in flames and blood, in impossible corridors, in relentless dirt and relentless slaughter and and and -
No.
No, this wasn’t like those times at all.
He was…
Nobody was…
Martin opened the door, took one look at him, and felt his face crumble with regret. He was shaking like the last leaf on a winter-struck tree, pale as the snow that had stifled the rest. His hair was dishevelled and knotted, having visibly been yanked on. He pulled him inside by the wrists, and immediately crushed him in a strong hug.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, this was too much, I should have let you take it slower, eased in with a walk or something, and now you’re going to be afraid to ever go out again, oh god I’m –“
“No no, Martin this is good, this is good.”
Martin loosened his grip slightly, puzzled. He pulled away and looked at Jon, pendulum heart swinging in nanosecond intervals between concern and optimism. Jon was –
It was small and wet and strange but –
He was smiling
“Yeah?”
“I was petrified. And nobody was going to die.”
A laugh should be an expulsion of a thing but Jon sucked it inwards, feeling its impossible warmth probe his lungs like a headlamp in a sunless cave. It found a sob cowering there, nestled at the bottom, uncoiling itself and beginning to claw desperately for the light. It joined scrabbling hands with the laugh and the two left his mouth as something hysterical and full-bodied, directly into Martin’s soft and waiting chest.
There was a moment of still before Jon was encased once again in strong arms, as whispers of, you’re right… you’re right… sounded warm and certain in his ear.
What a privilege it is, he thought through his hysteria, to be so scared, and so safe.
***
While Jon was brushing his teeth that night, the Eye spoke up loud and clear.
He did not know it in the moment, but it turned out to be a parting gift.
Aisha Sims died on the 22nd of February 1991. Cause of death was complications following a planned operation. Surgery recorded was a routine hysterectomy, carried out to alleviate long-term pelvic pain which began during her pregnancy. While a radical procedure, her doctor agreed that it was the best course of action, since she made it abundantly clear that she did not want any more children.
She did not want to marry again. The son she already had was half her deceased husband, and everything she could possibly have wanted.
She loved him with everything she had, and would not be the last to do so.