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"Happy five years."
Jon was greeted by the words - sounding soft and groggy, and a little emotional in a few different ways - as he yawned, slowly waking. He rolled around to the sight of the already-awake Martin, and the Ambassador sprawled contentedly across his chest, enjoying half-conscious scratches.
"He came here over half an hour ago and kept waking me up until I started paying attention to him," Martin explained.
"We need to teach him how to read the calendar," Jon replied, half-amused and half-sympathetic. Then, saying hello to the Ambassador with some pets of his own, he added, softly, "You could have woken me up, too."
"No, I know." It was Martin's turn to yawn. "You looked pretty tired last night, though. I thought I'd leave you be."
Jon sent him a soft, grateful smile. Finally, answering the first words he had heard from Martin this morning, he whispered, "Happy five years to you, too."
Martin nodded in reply; his expression was moulded into something warm and vulnerable and heavy and peaceful all at once. He let go of the Ambassador to roll to his side, closer to Jon, and then curled and shifted around until he was able to press his cheek to Jon's chest - to feel and hear his uninterruptedly beating heart. He always did that at some point during the day on those anniversaries; Jon couldn't say he didn't understand.
Just a moment later, though, before Jon even got to slot his arms around him, Martin was lifting his head again and craning his neck up.
"You know… I think I just did that more out of a habit than a need," he said, quietly.
A small, soft noise escaped Jon's lips in reply. He held Martin a little closer, pressed his palms to him a little harder - not even sure which of the things he was feeling made him do that.
Somewhere within the past year they had healed some more, yet again.
He gave Martin's arms a gentle tug, and Martin followed, letting himself be pulled into a still, lingering kiss.
"I really couldn't imagine not needing to do it again," Martin said when they parted, as he settled next to Jon again.
Jon simply nodded; he understood. They both did, having encountered the feeling on multiple occasions already, just as astonished each time it happened. He rolled over, letting his hand rest between Martin's shoulder blades, and his eyes on his face. A moment later, Martin's fingers began to press light caresses into his cheek.
Nothing more needed to be happening, Jon thought. He only started fidgeting for a while when he felt a soft, whiskered head stubbornly trying to slip into his pyjama bottoms' leg, earning a snort of laughter from Martin. Still, it was shaping up to be a slightly quieter day, as usual. Filled with thoughts and feelings which had spent a year on the back burner, aging and changing; which Jon and Martin were now turning their attention to while realising yet again how far they'd come.
…And they truly had come far.
The first anniversary of their arrival to this world had been a mess of emotions, both happy and sad - only amplified by their being able to finally see their traumas and hurts from lasting, growing distance.
The distance kept growing; and with it, their everyday life together continued to be safe and quiet. Continued to be delightfully average. By the second anniversary, they had been engaged; by the third - a few months into their marriage. On the fourth, Jon had realised that half of the time they'd known each other had been spent in this new world.
Now, five years after they'd come here, Jon was once again finding himself in a place where he hadn't always believed he would ever be.
By now, their flat was a little crowded with the simplest of things. Clothes. Documents. New treasured possessions. Evidence of their presence stretching further and further into the past with each passing day; their ever-deepening, ever-branching, ever-strengthening roots. The world they were living in was - slowly, in more and more parts - starting to feel theirs.
It was the strangest thing.
Jon's eyes refocused on Martin, who seemed equally as far away as Jon himself had just been - even if Jon had never stopped feeling the careful fingertips tracing his cheek.
"I can hear you think from here," he said, softly.
Martin took a moment to reemerge from his thoughts as his eyes turned to Jon's once more.
"I just wonder if they still think about us, sometimes," he said, eventually. "Basira, Melanie and Georgie, I mean."
A familiar pang of sadness tugged at Jon's heart at the words.
"We think about them," he noticed, quietly.
Martin hummed in agreement, still turning some thought over in his mind. "...You know, I still forget, sometimes, that to them, we just vanished. No bodies, no way to know what happened, nothing."
…Jon did, too; though from their conversations about it, it seemed he still forgot it a little less frequently than Martin. His eyes roamed Martin's face as he wondered where the thought was coming from in this particular moment.
"What I mean is…" Martin continued, slowly. "Here is where our life is, and where I feel at home. But I… I hope we still have some anchors there as well. That used to be our world, too."
Jon nodded; his thumb pressed slow, gentle arcs into Martin's back.
"You know, if it helps… I really do think that they think about us."
"Of course it does," Martin whispered, sending Jon a small smile which Jon immediately mirrored. After a while of silence, apropos of nothing in particular, he added, "...I hope they're okay."
"Me too."
Both separately and - in Georgie and Melanie's case - as a couple. Jon knew what kind of strain the apocalypse had put on him and Martin; how much more effortful it had been to actively be with each other while all sorts of fears and worries had constantly dragged them down, deep into their own minds.
They had tried to make that effort, always, both during the apocalypse and in its aftermath; and so now, here they were, unchangingly together. Whatever that aftermath looked for Georgie and Melanie - with them being two of the only people who actually understood what had happened to their world - he hoped, every time he thought about them, that they had got through it together, too.
His thoughts turned towards Martin once again, then. Towards the person he had gone through truly unspeakable things with; who had outlived him twice, and loved him across multiple worlds. The person who was the reason he was here, because five years ago, Jon hadn't been able to imagine grieving him even for a moment.
(He still couldn't, not really - but the feeling had changed along with their circumstances. The thought of possibly having to grieve Martin at an old age, after a long, quiet life, was certainly easier to come to terms with. And Jon would gladly spare Martin from losing him yet again.)
"I love you," Jon said, then, for no reason other than he thought it.
"I love you too," Martin replied.
And before they finally got up, he kissed Jon again.