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“Oh shit .”
Martin’s voice was stark, quiet but sharp as it rang out from the dim light of the bathroom. Jon shot to attention, heart racing as he waited for the moment to fall. The danger to alert itself, something to crash, some other voice to cry out and inform him of the cause of the exclamation. Every hair on his arms stood on end, but there was no more noise, beside the soft echoes of Martin’s breath.
“Alright, Martin?”
Jon’s voice was quiet, hanging in the silence of the room for a second too long before an unconvincing affirming hum came from the other side of the door. Then, a small shuffle of movement, barely perceptible, and Martin’s voice came again. Steady, low, and now without that mildly panicked tone.
“Yeah, it’s alright. Just, uh, got kinda spooked.” He laughed, the tone not carrying any sort of joy.
It didn’t feel right.
Jon sat, still, arching his mind to try and grasp any sound, any note of danger. There was nothing - just the quiet, mundane air of a nighttime routine in a rickety old cabin. Just the sounds he’d grown so used to, a tap being run and the swoosh swoosh of a toothbrush being used. Just Martin in his routine, but halted. Stopped, suddenly, and without reason.
Clearly something was wrong, though. There had to be a reason.
If it weren’t, Martin would have been more clear. Wouldn’t have pedaled back on his original exclamation. He would’ve just explained, instead of trying to divert .
“Can I come in?” Jon called lightly, voice ringing out as he shuffled out of bed, limbs still feeling too sleep-addled to be properly moved, but getting the job done. Even going as slow and clumsy as he did, he already had his hand on the knob by the time Martin responded.
“Sure. It’s alright, Jon, I promise -”
He pushed open the door without waiting for the end of the sentence, taking in the scene before him with a hyperfocused eye, every detail scanned. The Eye shot out slivers of information to him - the mouthwash on the top of the vanity was nearing its expiration date, the water from the faucet was running at precisely 17.3 degrees Celsius, Martin was -
No. No. No knowing about Martin. Not unless there was danger. And the danger was living in his expectations, right now - not nearly an excuse to cross that boundary.
He had to look. With his normal human eyes. Martin was right in front of him, and he would tell him anything he actually wanted Jon to know.
And as much as didn't feel like it, the scene before him was entirely mundane. Martin stood, his eyes a tad too wide and face drawn ever so slightly taut, but otherwise completely fine. His night clothes were all on and without any damage, entirely normal. There was no blood or fear or incongruity from what the scene should have been. His toothbrush just hung idle in his right hand, the foam on it dangerously close to dripping off as Jon looked on.
It shook in his grasp, ever so slightly.
Hm.
“What was it?”
Martin looked at him, long-suffering, and just shook his head.
“Really, it’s nothing, Jon. Just, uh, my reflection.”
He stood fully then, spine going rod straight as the jolt of electricity ran down it.
“What do you mean your reflection? What’s wrong with it?”
Could it be the Stranger? The Spiral? Had Helen come to accost them, here in their little corner of the universe? Could something have happened, some entity that wormed its way into their home, into their routine, purely by chance?
He pulled in a sharp breath, staring intently as he waited for the answers to come. Martin just looked at him and offered a sad, slight smile.
“Nothing’s wrong with it, Jon. I can just…see it.”
“What?”
“I haven’t, um, seen it in a while. That’s all.”
A beat, the air between them feeling too dense to breathe.
Okay, something was very wrong .
“Martin, I feel like I’m missing a very important part of this conversation. What on earth do you mean, you haven’t seen your reflection in a while?”
He looked away bashfully, eyes flicking over to the mirror and then away again, all quick movements and avoidance. Jon moved forward, joining him in the center of the bathroom, and looked into the mirror himself. Everything was normal - his own reflection was fine, and Martin’s looked entirely as expected. Accurate. He’d seen Martin’s reflection before now, hadn’t he? In the safehouse? On the train ride up, in the windows?
He had seen it. Hadn’t he?
The images were hazy in his mind’s eye, the details evasive and curling in on themselves, withering as he tried to focus on them.
Maybe…maybe he hadn’t? And he hadn’t even really noticed .
Something had stopped him from noticing.
His stomach dropped.
“...I suppose I didn’t tell you about that, did I? It didn’t really…come up? I don’t know how , honestly, ha. You’d think it’d be a bit more obvious, but maybe I’m just - maybe I’m not -”
His face twisted into a grimace, eyes far away as the words drawled on. Jon turned to lay a hand on his cheek, gentle, directing his flickering gaze away from the bathroom scenery and down to him. Breaking the words off and forcing him to focus. Martin met his eye with a pass of something close to despair, but it evened out into a distant, joyless neutrality quickly.
No.
No, a spiral wouldn’t do. This wasn’t an emergency, apparently, but it was important. It was something they needed to figure out. Something Jon would help him figure out. The way Martin’s face was going neutral, the fading in his eyes, the pull back to that numbness - they’d face this, together. Whatever it was.
“Tell me what, love?”
It was soft, now. The urgency was gone, but the concern was welling deep and pitted in his gut. Martin just took in a stuttering breath, that sad smile stretching across taut lips again. It made Jon’s heart stutter. At least it was something other than deadpan.
His voice was quiet as it came back, not quite dead but not near alive.
“I lost my reflection, after a while. With Peter.”
He started, giving a moment to breathe as he felt Jon go a little rigid at the name. When the tension ebbed, after a moment, he pressed on.
“It just…stopped showing up. Lost it just a little while after I started being able to hide myself. Everyone else stopped being able to see me, and it, uh…I guess it extended to myself. I couldn’t see what I looked like. Not that it really mattered.”
He’d almost totally forgotten what he’d looked like, after a while. A general idea had persisted, yes, but all the details were lost. Even to himself, he’d just been a vague mass of features, some impression of a person he could barely put together. It was a sliver of the Lonely, so thoroughly shrouding who he was, just like how he’d forgotten his name, his whole being, when fully immersed in it. Outside, even in the world of the living, he must have been fading so completely…
God.
It was just the start of losing himself completely, he guessed.
Ha.
He started again, the words feeling foreign as he pushed them out across an unwieldy tongue, unfamiliar lips.
“I got used to it, I suppose. Wasn’t much more than a mild annoyance. Kind of a blessing in disguise, depending on how you look at it. Ha. So it just, uh, it was a bit of a shock to see…myself again. That’s all.”
His voice was edging into something close to bitter then, the neutral tone veering hard into something Jon didn’t like the sound of. He took in a deep breath, closing his eyes and shaking his head slightly. Under his touch, Jon could feel the muscles tense as Martin frowned.
“Did I look this bad when you first came back?” he asked, quietly.
His eyes came open again quickly, but he couldn’t look at Jon.
Instead, he stared incredulously, almost hatefully, at his own reflection.
There was a sick satisfaction in it - seeing the changes he’d felt, the trauma he’d endured. But it still stung, to be so different, so alien to himself. And as Jon laid a gentle touch on this just-wrong face, this person who seemed just a few steps to the left of whatever was him , it felt so off. He’d imagined so many times, him and Jon together. And now seeing it, right here in front of him, it was so disparate from any sense of self. It was still hardly more than an image in his imagination. This image in the mirror, with Jon’s comfort so desperately trying to reach out, wasn’t even him.
It felt wrong , in a way even the Stranger couldn’t touch.
Jon started, quietly, his voice breaking into the thoughts.
“Worse, I suppose. If by ‘bad’ you mean ‘traumatized and exhausted’.”
A breath, something that could almost be a laugh. It was too sour for that.
“If by ‘bad’ you mean unappealing, though, then I’m afraid I disagree with that sentiment wholly enough to refuse it an answer at all.”
The joke didn’t land, save for a small scoff from Martin. He slowly forced himself to avert his eyes from the stranger in the glass, his gaze searching over Jon’s face quietly instead. This, he knew. He could trust this image, this version of connection and self. He knew who he was, in those minute expressions Jon sent to him.
The man’s features were set, twinged with sadness but mostly cloaked in that morose seriousness he so often took on when conversations turned like this.
His stomach twisted at the thought, the care.
It still felt wrong, now. Not for him. Especially not the him who apparently looked like a haggard, broken shell. He couldn’t put the image out of his mind, even as he studied Jon’s features.
“Really? I…can’t imagine it being much worse.” He laughed, dry.
He felt almost like he was choking, the air too thick to breathe properly. It would be so easy to just shrink away from it all, let things fade enough to not have to think about them. But Jon was there, still holding onto him, staring up with those sad, grief-addled eyes.
He couldn’t do that to him. He wouldn’t.
But the image in the mirror was so thoroughly not him, it felt impossible to distance it any further. Maybe he’d just grown used to being so fully imperceptible, or maybe having a physical body was just too foreign of an idea by now, but it was dizzying to try and imagine this form, belonging to him. Being him. Being something that others could see . Something others would associate with his name. And even that felt unfamiliar, now, too distant from him to mean anything real. It was just a call for him to respond to - it wasn’t his. None of it was.
The body was just…
He tried to focus in on it, reconcile it with the physical experiences of the everyday.
The skin was too pale, the face too gaunt, the eyes all hollowed out and darkened underneath. He’d seen the pallor in his hands, his arms, but it looked sharper on his face. His clothes hung looser on his form than he’d ever seen them, even though the broad shoulders and general roundness remained. Had he even noticed that they’d grown too big? Had he noticed how much less space he felt he was taking up? But overall, he just looked… dead . Even his hair was different - streaks of white ran through, and he could swear that the coppery tone had been much more vibrant before. When he looked long enough into that stranger’s gaze, those movements that mimicked his own so perfectly, he could even see his eyes were dim, the color gone from deep cornflower to a monotonous slate. All he was was a walking incongruity.
He didn’t look like himself. At all.
How could it have been worse than this?
Jon’s voice came, finally, breaking the staring contest he’d fallen into with the mirror.
“It really was, Martin.”
At that, Martin turned to look at him fully. Eyebrows raised, questioning, as he took in Jon’s muted expression. It was sad, almost… hopeless. It made his chest feel tight, seeing that look there, knowing he was responsible for it in some way. The feelings started to rush back in at that, the dissociative haze of the Lonely pulling away a little. It was all crashing, slowly, completely. The corners of his eyes pricked with the threat of tears.
Jon just offered him a small smile back.
Maybe it was meant to be comforting, but it just made his stomach sink a little farther.
“How?”
His voice was soft, quiet, as if he was afraid speaking too loudly would break whatever this moment is. His bitterness, the anger, was melting away into something so much closer to grief. He kept ahold of it, barely, just begging it to not spill over and make this moment even worse. It was too much, facing it all at once.
Jon considered for a moment, his fingers twitching ever so slightly over Martin’s cheek as he remembered those moments. The touch almost fell, but he just resituated when he noticed, migrating his grasp to loop around Martin’s neck and pull him into a close hug. Neither of them had to look at the other this way, and maybe that was a little easier. Just for a moment. Jon didn’t think he wanted Martin to see whatever expressions he’d make, when he thought about it.
“You were…more muted, I suppose?” A long breath, trying to put it into words. “There was more white in your hair and, I…god, Martin. I thought…I thought you were someone else, at first.”
He tensed, the knot in his throat sudden and choking.
Oh.
Ha. So bad that he didn’t even recognize him?
Jon felt the tension rise in his body, muscles going taut under the embrace, and quickly backpedaled.
“No! No. Not like that. I promise. I just…you looked so, so dead, and when you looked at me it was like you couldn’t even see me, and it seemed like every part of you that made you you was just gone. You looked like you hadn’t slept or eaten in months.”
Jon’s voice was too quiet against his chest, but he almost didn’t want to hear the words anyway. It was too much. All too much, spinning around in his mind as he tried to pull himself into something presentable enough to speak, to keep this conversation from entirely going up in flames. It felt like it could shatter, combust, at any moment.
“...so a little like you, then, eh?” He joked, trying to lighten the mood with a sad smile he knew Jon couldn’t see. Jon just shook his head into Martin’s chest, pulling in tighter.
“Worse, Martin. I was so scared that, that whatever had happened, it’d…gotten rid of you, then just stuck around and…”
“Like Sasha.”
“...A little. It didn’t feel like the Stranger, but it just looked like there was nothing left of you. Like you’d been shelled out, and -”
God, he sounded close to sobbing. Fuck.
Martin pulled him in as close as he could, begging the physical touch to ground him and Jon both, quell that shaking of his limbs that threatened to break into something more at any second.
He breathed.
Respond, Martin. Keep yourself present. Speak.
Even if the truth was shit.
“I guess I…sort of was, wasn’t I?” He forced out, making sure to avoid looking at the mirror image as he did. The grout of the tiling was awfully interesting, all of a sudden. “I’m surprised it was…that visible, though. I mean, I could feel it, but nobody ever mentioned anything, so I figured I was still keeping up appearances. If a little more distantly.”
Jon shook his head into the fabric of Martin’s chest again.
“They knew you were going through a lot, Martin. They didn’t want to push you. It…with everything with Peter, with your mother, with…me. They knew it took its toll on you and they didn’t want to just…”
“Just walk up and go “Oi bastard, you look like shit?””
Jon actually laughed then, a small little thing that almost threatened to turn to a full sob, and then he hummed a quiet sound of agreement.
“Yeah, basically.”
A long silence stretched between them, Martin turning his gaze back to the mirror and taking in all the changes. Trying to reconcile this mass of flesh and bone and pallid hair in front of him with the person he felt ambling about inside himself. He breathed in, watched his chest rise with the motion, Jon’s form shifting minutely against it, and felt suddenly nauseous.
God.
This was…all wrong.
Every bit of it.
It had been, for so long.
It was going to choke him.
A long moment stretched, the world swimming as he tried to focus in. The pressure of Jon’s embrace didn’t do enough to keep him in himself, keep the world from spinning. He breathed through it, begging the slow, steady breaths to stay as constant as they could. To not break into sobs.
“I’m sorry, Jon.”
“...Martin. You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”
“You…shouldn’t have to have seen me like that. You shouldn’t have to see me like this, now. I don’t…want to be a reminder of that, every time you look at me.”
A gasp, a shaking realization of it all.
“I didn’t want to make things harder for you. I thought I was doing what I needed to do and if I just did it right , nobody else would get hurt.”
Nobody should have gotten hurt. If he’d just done things better, nobody would’ve! Maybe nobody would’ve seen him like this, a corpse walking, and he wouldn’t have made anyone worry.
“I didn’t think just existing like that would make it so visible, would make it hurt you too, I -”
He could feel his breaths coming far too quickly, see the quick pace mirrored in the glass visage in front of him, couldn’t reconcile the thought of him. Of having been like this for months and not even having known -
“Hey. Hey. No. Martin, I don’t just see that when I look at you. I don’t see that at all, honestly, except for the fact that it’s hurt you.”
There were hands on his face, the hug gone but a new pressure, warmth, holding him in place. The shaking didn’t stop, but the world had narrowed down to a familiar face, close to his. Dark skin, dark hair, vivid eyes. Concerned, warm, looking straight at him.
“What I see is the person I fell in love with, in every iteration. I wish, more than anything, that you’d never had to have gone through that. But you don’t need to apologize for it, Martin. You did everything you could. You’re still you, Martin. And I love you.”
He breathed, the words sinking in as much as he could let them.
“I…thank you, Jon.”
Jon’s voice came back after a long moment, an edge to it that made the whole world feel so much much more open in a second. From claustrophobic and overwhelming to utterly mundane, free, buried in a mischievous tone he knew all too well.
“Besides, it’d be a bit hypocritical of me to look at you and just see your rapidly aging hair…”
“HEY !”
He smiled into the exclamation, no heat behind it.
Maybe…it’d be okay.
He’d learn to live with this - if he could live without a reflection, surely he could live with one that didn’t quite match. It wasn’t so different, even if the grief that came with it was something he’d have to unpack. Even if the thought of having been walking around like that, looking like a corpse, made him shake.
God, this was too much.
But...he’d live with it, because this was still the body that held Jon’s hand, kissed him in the sunlight over cozy mornings, let him sleep with Jon’s form curled up against his.
Maybe...this would be alright.
In the glass, the stranger smiled, ever so slightly.