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There are, Martin has come to realise, a few distinct types of Jon Think.
There are Little Thinks, which tend to nestle in the tight spaces between one autopilot movement and the next. Little Thinks have a crease between their brow, a stilling of their fingers, and if they were to speak, would say something like, the microwave probably heats things up quicker if you actually turn it on.
There are also Medium Thinks. These last a little longer, and drag his gaze to the ceiling, and if they are feeling theatrical (they often are) his hand to his chin to stroke pensively across the jawbone. These tilt his head left like a curious sparrow, reach for his phone, and if they were to speak, would say something like 25th of March, 1821 (in answer to the question, unbidden, I wonder when Greece became a nation state?).
Then, of course there are Big Thinks. Big Thinks draw his knees into his chest and his arms around his ankles. These bring his brows down to squash against the rim of his glasses, his lips out into the slightest of pouts, and his jaw creaking into a vice-like set. These must be carefully pottered around, as acknowledgement makes them clam up and make a hasty retreat from his brain to his chest, where they fester and spawn until they explode days later onto the bathroom floor, wet and gasping and red-eyed. Once they reach this point, they say sorry quite a lot, and take a bit of mopping up. So it’s best to allow them to speak only when they are ready, and this is usually after minutes that turn diligently to hours, and when they do, they often stop Martin right in his tracks – feather duster in hand, as necessary and somewhat kitsch prop for aforementioned performative pottering.
Like, for example, one mid-typically-dreary Tuesday afternoon in the highlands, when Jon breaks the post-only-picked-at-lunch prolonged silence.
“On a scale of one to ten…” he says, very slowly. “How unreasonable of me would it be to use our forced seclusion to have a gender crisis?”
Martin lowers the feather duster, and the painting of a windmill laments its abandonment.
“I’m hovering around an eight-point-five,” Jon continues, gravely. “Possibly climbing to a nine.”
Martin turns, and Jon is peering at him wincingly over his knees, nigh-on biologically impossible whiteness creeping out from the edges of his fingers from how tightly he is gripping his own wrists around his knees. Martin abandons the feather duster on the armchair.
Jon shudders in a breath, and begins shaking his head.
“Nope, final answer, definite ten,” his voice climbs, and Martin springs into action as his buffering brain realise it should probably say something.
And luckily, just in time, that crikey, how bored are you? probably isn’t that thing.
“No no, I’d say that’d be a very productive use of your time, actually,” he goes for instead, as bits of his brain mutter, okay, okay, calibration time, this is a thing, engage, engage, concentration time, “Hypothetically of course.”
He drops down next to Jon on the sofa and doesn’t touch, then leans forward to peer around his knees and meet his eyes.
“Hypothetically?” he asks softly.
Jon averts his gaze, and shakes his head slowly.
“Okay,” Martin nods, and shifts to close the space a little more, still offering closeness, still not touching. “Would you like to let me in on your highly productive use of time?”
Jon, impossibly, tightens his grip on his own wrists, and this time Martin does touch, just a gentle tap on the most fragile of the pressure points under his thumb.
“Hey. Steady with that. Come on. Room for two in that thinktank, I’m sure there is.” The grip loosens a little, and with it, Jon, in the minutest of sags. “Talk to me, what’s wrong?”
The tiniest rock back and forth, and Jon sighs.
“I’ve been… thinking, about change,” he begins, and runs his tongue across his lip. “A-about all the ways we’ve changed. And it’s wrong, obviously, so much of it is wrong, and bad, I mean –” he wafts a vaguely disapproving hand across the sweep of his body, finally releasing from its coil. “Welcome to the scar tissue community notice board, all welcome to contribute, the sharper the pins the better -” Martin winces, but doesn’t interrupt, “But some of it…”
His wafting hand raises, and catches on a strand of his hair. He brings it round to his eyeline and examines it with an expression that’s a frayed imitation of reverence. Then, he laughs a little.
“It’s just hair. Hair that’s only this long because of neglect and trauma and frankly, a systematic chiselling away of things I can be bothered to care about. But regardless, it’s… it wasn’t something I could catch, or hold onto, but there was… there was something there.” He pauses to take a breath, and Martin tentatively extends a hand. Jon, equally tentatively, takes it. “And then, this morning, it finally formed. It finally made itself into words, when I got out of the shower, and I looked in the mirror and I thought thank god my hair is long now. A-and then… the thought kept going. It made more words, Martin, and loud and clear I heard them and they said…”
He takes in a breath, and pauses.
Martin squeezes his hand.
He whispers, “Thank god I don’t look like a man anymore.”
The words hang for a moment, buzzing like the stilling of a church bell.
“I’m not a woman, I don’t think,” he speaks slowly into the aftershock molecules, “But… I might not be a man either.”
Jon looks up at Martin.
And Jon, who has been hit and stabbed and snatched and punched and sliced and battered and burned and has literally died –
Looks so, so scared.
Oh no.
Oh no, that won’t do at all.
Not at all.
“Okay,” Martin begins, and darts forward to kiss his cheek gently. Jon leans into it, gratefulness leeching like he might have expected something else, God - “Okay, first of all Jon, thank you. Thank you so much for trusting me with that. Thank you for that privilege. Now – not that it matters, in the slightest, in terms of like… validity of feeling, validity of thought, whatever, just purely so that I can try and understand – can I ask, is… is this entirely a new thing, or…”
“Well, that’s the thing. I started… I started remembering…” he closes his eyes, and turns to Martin, in one of those great absurd contradictions that are beginning to gather themselves into something meaningful in Martin’s mind, even as he diligently hangs on every word. “I dressed more androgynously at university – it sort of came with the territory of being Georgie’s tag-along. I’m sure you can imagine, she was fairly visible, fairly vocal in all the queer spaces and I sort of had to look the part to some extent.” He snorts self-consciously and his eyes open and turn to his lap on the familiar ground of blasé self-flagellation. “You know what I’m like for playing up to parts – why nobody ever told me glasses on a chain were playing it up a bit too much I’ll never know, but anyway. I never… went quite as far as skirts and dresses, but – well. Let’s just say that the trousers I wore at nineteen were trying about as hard as they possibly could to be skirts. Great… voluminous things, I probably looked more like I was going for circus acrobat than true androgyny… But it was… so much better than what I wore before. What I’ve worn since. Even comfort wise, unambiguously so. It was all so much less restrictive, less seams bunching up, less wrinkles, more breathing room. But more than that, I…” he trails off, and his hands fan out into a little shrug. He drops them defeatedly, so Martin carefully takes the reigns.
“Okay,” he nods carefully. “I’m going to play… not quite devil’s advocate, but maybe like… mildly argumentative trickster elf’s advocate here for a minute, and I don’t want you to hear it as invalidating your conclusion or anything, I’m not, I’m just raising, in the service of understanding, that… clothes and hair and presentation and stuff… and gender… they aren’t the same thing -”
Jon snorts, a vaguely encouraging sound to Martin’s ears.
“Paging Dr Johnson,” he mumbles, “With important insights for his dictionary project.”
Martin flicks his ear.
“Yes, alright, prick, but you know it’s true. There’s a difference between liking wearing roomier clothes and you know… gender stuff.”
Jon nods slowly.
“And just because a label says something is women’s clothing, and you happen to want to wear it, doesn’t necessarily mean you need to examine anything about yourself…”
Jon nods, even slower. Then he drags his top teeth across the curve of his bottom lip, and winces cautiously. The nodding becomes a shake of the head, as Martin had predicted it might.
“No, I… I’m pretty sure it is… gender stuff. Actually.”
He removes his hand from Martin’s and buries his face in his hands to groan.
“Christ, I can never be bloody satisfied, can I? I’ve just got to go for the hattrick of identity crises?”
Martin sighs under his breath, careful to make it as inaudible as he can, and buries his fingers in his hair.
“Only hattrick?” he teases cautiously.
“I’m only counting the bi one and the ace one,” Jon croaks into his palms. “The undead monster subsiding on fear one didn’t belong to me.”
Martin’s fingertips still.
Oh, there’s…
If this is wrapped up in -
“Maybe that’s it…” Jon continues, whisperingly, dragging his hands down his face until his fingertips come to rest in a prayer position at his lips, “Maybe this is petty rebellion against that… that lack of agency. Against all those voices that greeted me as Archivist. Think about it. The… the beast in the woods, the demon that looms, the… the… shadow that won’t leave you alone, everything that lurks and roams and follows and bites and… those things, they don’t have an identity beyond what they can do to you. The Archivist… doesn’t have an identity, beyond what it can do to you. A-and maybe what I’m doing is… trying to slap some sort of humanity back over the Archivist. Trying to… claw back some personhood by stomping my feet at the insinuation that all I am is the ways I can harm… Maybe… maybe it’s that I’m protesting, not the notion of manhood, o-or maybe I’m just too twisted up now, for it to even matter –”
No.
No, Martin isn’t having that.
Martin isn’t having him think that identity is something he must deny himself.
Martin isn’t having him think he is worth so little.
Martin isn’t having him think that self-expression is another thing he can torture himself with.
Martin takes a steadying breath.
“Okay, let’s… let’s go with that logic for now. That you’re having a bit of a gender struggle because of the lack of agency of being assigned Archivist. If that were the case… and it was purely about – how did you put it – slapping some humanity back on… why wouldn’t you just go straight for male?”
Jon looks up. His knees curl inward. His brow drops. Big Think.
“You see what I’m getting at?” Martin continues cautiously. “If it were just a case of wanting to prove that there was some humanity left there… wouldn’t you be asserting that you were still a he. Not a beast in the woods, or a shadow in the… shadow or whatever it was you said? Surely other stuff wouldn’t get a look in?”
“I…”
Jon’s eyes mist over, and he retreats into his mind, lips pouting out, knees drawing up..
Big Big Think.
Martin takes the opportunity to do the same.
He thinks about the poetry he wrote.
His stupid moonlit worm-shielding poetry, and his stupid paranoia-starving poetry, and his stupid transatlantic-pining poetry, and his stupid back-of-napkin-while-Jon-has-a-wee-and-picks-up-wine-gums-at-the-services poetry. All those waxings-lyrical had him as this great unquantifiable thing, an abundance of being itself straining against its too restrictive skin, rushing through veins for an exit and finding instead a huge, thrumming heart. Feeding it, and making it ever larger, ever warmer, ever more desperately beating with its cocktail of contradiction and complexity.
Martin had thought, and thinks it still, so picturesque, the bits of him that defy themselves. His unique physicality, both elegant and fumbling, the way he can part crowds like a silk ribbon gliding through hair, then stumble on a final step that doesn’t exist at the bottom of a stairwell. His sharp tongue that melts to butter at the extremes of the day, meaning and pronunciation alike softening as jibes and consonants lay strewn on the path from bed to kitchen, from kitchen to bed. His brash confidence, room-filling and head-turning, that curls up petal-like into blushing shyness if the eyes in those heads give him a look that isn’t quite challenging – challenging he can deal with, he can enjoy, he can win – but is instead amused.
Okay, that last one Martin doesn’t like quite so much.
But it illustrates at least, that Jonathan Sims is not somebody that can be easily quantified.
Can be easily labelled.
And in retrospect, Martin thinks, it is obvious that nobody should try.
Martin sinks back into lumpy cushions, and feels a puzzle piece slide into place.
Huh, he thinks.
Beside him, Jon shakes himself out of his mind – rather abruptly.
“Can you try they for a bit?” he blurts, gripping one of Martin’s hands in two of his. “Just… sprinkle it in. Please. Not exclusive. Just… sometimes and I’ll… I’ll pay attention to… how I feel about the… the ratio… of it.”
The bloody ratio. I like them so much. The ratio.
“Plot a graph?” Martin asks, perhaps too breezily, but a little overcome with endearment, honestly.
Jon rolls his eyes and pokes him, bouncing a bit adrenaline-wired he turns to face Martin head-on.
“Shut up. Maybe I will. Yes. Just to spite you.” They pause, and a flush rises at their jawbone. “But uh… please?”
“Of course I will,” Martin tucks a strand of hair behind his ear, and kisses his cheek again. “Just that for now? No… you’re alright with your name? She a little much?”
Jon (Medium) thinks for a moment, then nods.
“Yes please. Just that for now. But if… if the option could stay…”
Martin smiles.
“Of course. Always.”
Jon bites their lip, and the forehead crease reappears. They squeeze Martin’s hand, still encased in both of theirs.
“And this won’t… your identity, if… if it turned out I wasn’t… quite a man… o-or anything like a man -”
“Jonathan, dearest, you can explode people with your mind. I think if I was personally bothered about things like labels, I’d have to get all bespoke about it anyway,” he pecks their cheek, one more time. “It’s you I love, in all your weirdness and all your excess, and in however you want to be seen.”
Jon blinks, looking for a lie, looking for a placation, looking for something to be wrong. Martin notes and relishes in the moment he does not find it.
They instead blow out a very long breath, and drop their head onto Martin’s shoulder.
“How did I manage to get you,” Jon mumbles into the folds of Martin’s jumper.
Martin kisses his temple.
“Horrors.”
Jon huffs. “Not this bit though.”
“No. Definitely not this bit.”