Chapter Text
Jon is… okay.
He is.
Really, he is, and even if he wasn’t, that would also be –
Okay.
Fine.
Not a problem in the world, just -
It’s just all a bit much.
He doesn’t really have the right to find it all a bit much, does he?
After all, Daisy was in there for eight months, and he only endured three measly days of everything looking the same, and feeling the same, and that same feeling awful, dreadful, too close, too rough, too cloying, too dense, too full, too populated, with the calls of those he could neither find nor save, too damp-smelling, too moisture-sucking, too heavy, too tight, too many many particles, too many individual things, too many tiny buzzing complexities, too many bits and pieces, up his nose, under his fingernails, on his skin, beyond his skin, getting in, surely getting in, bypassing his muscles, sandpapering his bones, everywhere, everywhere, everywhere –
Still.
He may not have the right, but the fact remains that it’s all a bit much.
His usual instinct, when it’s all just a bit much, is to run away. That doesn’t appear to be available to him presently. He seems, instead, to be lying on his office floor, watching one singular, fat fly buzz around the fluorescent light, and aching like he’s one big bruise. Bruises don’t tend to have heartbeats though, and he does, and it’s rattling rather insistently in what’s left of his ribcage, and for all that everything is a bit much, one thing he’d like rather a lot more of is oxygen. He remembers vaguely that the lungs have something to do with that, and tries to locate them for the purpose, but it seems that when all of you is a bruise, trying to locate any specific part is rather difficult. So – oxygen rations it is then, which brings with it a blurring of focus on the fly, his one tether to material reality, and he feels himself begin to drif…
“Hey. Jon. Breathe.”
Well that’s rather silly, isn’t it?
What does Martin think he’d been trying to –
Wait.
Martin?
For a second he thinks he must be hallucinating, but then there are hands snaking around his back and pulling him upright, and he couldn’t have done that by himself so they must be real. Now, initially, the Martin oh god Martin it’s Martin of it all doesn’t help the whole hyperventilation thing, but then he manages to compile the noise that’s happening on the other side of his too-fast breaths into words, and they are saying –
“Come on Jon, you have to breathe, breathe for me…”
And god, if there’s one person in the world he’d try for, if there’s one person he wants to make happy, if there’s one person in the world he trusts to tell him what to do, it’s –
Martin.
Martin.
Martin.
He braces over his bowed knees and manages to shudder in a more passable breath, bruises on his fingers meeting bruises on his thighs and melting into a new, cohesive soreness. One of Martin’s hands is still on his back and what on Earth to do with that, other than to feel it, and to thank it, and to hope it stays there forever.
God.
God.
“Well done Jon,” Martin says quietly. The hand falls away. God. God. “Good… good breathing.”
He tries to feel patronised, really he does. But the ache of expended energy and the tightness in his chest are suggestive of a bigger feat than that which he has achieved. It is this as well as the gaping expanse of time since anyone has told him he’d done something for the better, that make him simply nod and whisper, “Thank you.”
He looks up tentatively. Martin is kneeling beside him, slate suit jacket pinching oddly into the crease of his torso, hands braced stiffly on his thighs, line stark in the centre of his forehead. Eroded, is the word that comes to mind, with all of grey rock that it evokes. Something gradually worn away, misted from view by dust that used to be a part of it – now suspended, midair, adrift. He is reminded of a plaque that had caught his attention as a child, drilled into the West Cliff of Bournemouth beach. It had a name on it once, but the gradual lapping of the waves had worn it away, obscuring the person once immortalised there. And isn’t that the long and short of this thing that has taken Martin from him – or worse, that Martin has taken himself to. Still, what a miracle, what an incomprehensible miracle that today, now, in this moment, he is here.
“I’m not here, by the way,” Martin says, looking at his hands.
The crash back down to Earth is violent, shocking Jon temple to toe. His bones shudder and vibrate with the impact, replicating cruelly the chest-rattles of laughter, as he thinks, of course, of course, of course. Miracles are not things that happen to people like him, or whatevers like him, though facsimiles line up to dance for his approval in droves. He’s alive despite it all, following tens, hundreds, thousands of false miracles, and here is another, near yet far, here yet not, belonging to no-one but certainly not to him.
He swallows.
“Of course,” he croaks. “Of course not.”
“If I were,” Martin continues, gaze remaining fixed on his own thighs. “I’d be telling you that you’re an idiot. A stupid, reckless, impulsive idiot. I’d be telling you that you make me so scared, so worried when you hurl yourself into danger without a second thought, like you mean absolutely nothing at all.”
Jon sucks in a breath.
“I - ”
“Telling you how doubly, triply, quadruply stupid you are, for putting everything I’m doing in jeopardy. Telling you that it all might be for nothing now, because your stupidity is enough to have dragged me down here, and made me bloody feel something, which is not good, Jon – but.” His jaw snaps shut abruptly. It shouldn’t be that sharp. It’s wrong. “None of that matters, does it? Because I’m… not here.”
“Right.” Jon says faintly, head bowed and matted hair clumping against his cheek like Velcro. He’s made Martin feel something. Feel something. “Well. If you were here, I suppose I’d be saying – sorry. You’re right. It was idiotic, it was impulsive, it was stupid. There are a million ways in which it could and ought to have gone wrong, and in fact, may still. But I cannot bring myself to regret it. I think I might actually have done something good for once, and – neither can I regret that my stupidity brought you here. That, I am separately sorry for but – that’s the way it is.”
He raises his shoulders, in something that would be a shrug if he had the energy. Beside him, Martin is still, and tense, and watching the ground. The clock ticks above his head. There had been no time in The Buried, and Jon has not been free from it long enough to adjust to a world where it works. He cannot, therefore, parse how many journeys around the face the second hand makes, before Martin whispers -
“It was brave. It was stupid, but it was brave, and it was kind. I’d forgotten a bit what that looked like, so...”
Martin, in contrast, has the energy to shrug, and does, pulling the ill-fitting suit further off-kilter. How dare he, Jon thinks, through a dizzying daze. How dare he make such a dismissive gesture, whilst saying such an earth-shattering thing. How dare he shrug away such a patently wrong assessment, which makes him feel sick and sad with guilt, at how Martin can have been so deceived by him, so misled by him, so cheated by him. He must correct this, he must fix it, he must admit -
“I’m not brave, Martin,” he says quietly. “I’m just stubborn. And as for kind – ha. I don’t think anyone who’s ever spoken to me would agree with that.”
He smiles flatly. He doesn’t meet Martin’s eyes – like a coward.
“Well then, people aren’t looking hard enough. Sure, you’re not particularly nice, but that’s different to being kind. You’re… you are that.” Martin shrugs again, and half-moons appear in Jon’s palms. “It was the first thing that made me…”
Jon’s breath catches. The unspoken words join the Martin-dust floating in the space between them – fine, hazy, unreal yet stiflingly present. Jon’s eyes snap up, cowardice in rare and temporary retreat. He peers through the dust, almost hopefully, mostly desperately.
“Made you..?” he breathes.
“Nothing.” Martin whispers, then straightens up to brace against his knees. “Nothing, just – God, Jon, look at you.”
Jon’s mouth has fallen open of its own accord. He judders out a couple more breaths, then closes it and shakes his head wincingly.
“I -”
“Are you hurt? I mean – obviously you… you can’t be exactly comfortable but, broken bones, concussion, actual, you know like – A&E demanding stuff?”
He shakes his head. Anything on that scale would have been uh - sorted out by now. Besides, The Buried works on experiential terror, on stasis and persistence, not on anything so fleeting and finite as the snap of a bone. No, Buried and Eye can war as they please over his cuts and bruises, but the bones still inside him remain brittle and complete.
“I uh… no, no nothing like that. Nothing that uh – well. Anything A&E could do wouldn’t help.”
“Right. Right, okay, that’s good I suppose.” He flicks his eyes up and down Jon’s body, and it does not escape Jon’s notice that his eyes linger on his head, where his hair swings around his cheekbones in clumps. “So, we should… you need to get clean, right, o-or some of the smaller cuts and stuff will get infected, we need -”
“There’s no ‘we’ about it Martin, it’s okay.” Jon says quickly through a sharp breath, holding up a hand. “I can handle it myself. You don’t need to – It’s okay. I can breathe again now, so it’s… I panicked, and you stopped that, and that’s… that’s enough. I can’t ask any more of you.”
His hand remains hovering in the air.
He does not want Martin to take it.
He does not want Martin to gently guide that hand down and hold it like it is something – well. If not precious, like something at least worth keeping. He does not want Martin to take the other hand too, the one splattered and changed by scar tissue, and recontextualise the whole gnarled pain of it by rubbing his thumb gently along the most prominent of the knots. He does not want Martin to say screw it all, let’s go, let’s run, nor even, neither of us are alone.
It is a good job that Jon does not want these things, because they do not happen, and instead Martin gives him a withering look, which sends his hand dropping slowly into his lap.
“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing,” he says flatly. “If you really wanted me gone, you’d compel me out of here. You want me to argue with you, you want to be able to tell yourself that you gave me an out, and you want me not to use it.”
Jon swallows thickly. “I -”
“It’s not fair of you to make me argue for staying just to make a point.”
“I’m not -”
“What point are you even trying to make, what else do you want Jon?”
He shakes his head. It’s beginning to fill with static, undercut with a sharp ringing. He winces. “I don’t know.”
“What else do you want, Jon?” Martin repeats, and that’s it, that’s fucking it yeah, sure, fine, he’s being unfair, he’s making it all and everything oh so very difficult, but god Martin, god Martin, for goodness sake, just look, properly look at the fucking state of me -
“I don’t know Martin, I don’t – I actually don’t know, just – God, can’t you see I’m -” he gestures vaguely up and down his body with his mouth opening and closing like a goldfish. “I’m…”
He trails off, spent once again, and buries his head in his hands. The groan that escapes his lips has a violence to it that he wasn’t sure he was capable of. He’s glad it is an inward thing; violence in earnest is a rare vice he has managed thus far to keep at bay. And at bay manifests, it seems, in pointing the tip of the blade toward himself.
“Okay…” Martin sighs, “Okay, okay, I’m sorry, that was – that was a bit cruel. Obviously you’re… a bit mixed up right now, I shouldn’t salt the wound. But still, just – just stop arguing, okay. Let me help you clean up, you’re too…” he repeats the vague gesture Jon had used on himself, and despite himself, peering between his fingers, Jon huffs the shade of a laugh. “…to do it yourself.”
Jon drags his hands down his face. They land back in his lap.
“That would be… highly appreciated,” he says slowly. “Thank you.”
Martin nods, and the left side of his mouth quirks up for a fleeting second.
“Um…” Jon swallows, then threads his fingers together and squeezes. “It’s my hair that’s bothering me the most, if we could… focussing on that would be… good.”
“Ah.” Martin’s mouth flattens apologetically. “I was thinking about that. Jon, I’m… I’m sorry, I’m not actually sure it’s salvageable.”
Abruptly, Jon goes very very cold, and the grip on his fingers becomes very very tight.
“It is.” He says calmly. “It has to be.”
Martin sighs, and his face unfolds into a soft, sympathetic smile. And sure, brilliant, how wonderful to see such depth of emotion on that thus far impassive face, but must it be – that’s the wrong one. Jon closes his eyes and begins to shake his head as placating and soothing, Martin says -
“I’m sorry. It’s like a forest floor Jon, it’s all… solid, and matted a-and sort of fused together, I -”
“It. Has to be,” he repeats. He knows he’s being contrarian again, contradictory even – deeply annoying. See: mere moments ago, when he’d been professing his determination not to make a fuss, not to argue, not to revert to form and be such a bloody bother. It’s such a pathetic hill to die on, when dying in its literal sense has become such a prevalent concept, but –
He can’t lose that too.
Take an organ, take a limb, please for goodness sake take a cut of his stupid loud brain.
But not his hair.
“I’m sure you can pull off a short cut,” Martin says, tentatively trying out levity. “You’ve definitely got the cheekbones for it, I mean –”
“It’s not about that.”
He stares at his hands.
Martin sighs, and it isn’t absent of frustration. It is so familiar, yet incongruent with the sounds that are meant to come out of Martin’s mouth. Jon bristles, screwing up his nose as he shakes his head.
“Don’t, Martin. I – I realise this looks like I’m being difficult for the sake of it, but just – I have my reasons, alright. Trust me.”
“Like you’re trusting me, hm? With Peter and… everything?”
“Come on, that’s not fair,” Jon says wearily.
Martin sighs again, and drags a hand down his face.
“No. No, you’re right, it’s not. Not without giving you a chance to - explain it to me then. Why is the hair such a big deal?”
Jon stares at his clasped hands. Their divots and their scars, their tension and their shake. He thinks of Martin’s hands, bigger, softer, less scarred, more freckled, warm once, and perhaps cold now. He imagines one, in its ignorance, closing around the ruin of his hair. He imagines the other, holding a pair of scissors. He imagines the union of these things, and winces, and bites the inside of his cheek.
He can’t, can he?
He can’t possibly reveal himself in this way.
To do so would be to manipulate, to trick, to trap.
A thing he has already been accused of, and which he agreed to cleave.
And yet, to avoid the –
Snap.
And the –
Gone.
Well.
Needs must, he concedes wearily.
He swallows, then opens his mouth.
“My gran was rather - traditional. I was brought up adhering to a lot of rather fussy standards, as you may have…” He wafts a hand. “Picked up on. But my hair, it was – it was a bit of an exception. I was allowed to keep it long, since visits to the barber were… shall we say something of an ordeal. She was faced with a trade-off, I suppose, between the infrequent but somewhat dramatic inconvenience of that, and the lesser, more frequent inconvenience of trying to get a brush through it before school. For goodness sake Jonathan, why did you have to inherit your mother’s beautiful hair?”
He almost-smiles, the almost customary with all he remembers of his gran. She was almost kind to him, she almost cared for him, she almost loved him. It was a result of that great paradox – the thing that made it so that she could try so hard yet fall so short. Her feeling was too much, the energy of it two-fold, feeling for him and feeling for his father a potent compound, bubbling through her with a violent intensity that in hindsight – must be hereditary. And when she, running full-pelt as the energy demanded, collided with the brick wall of grief too soon, too suddenly, she was sent careening backwards, dazed and stumbling, and landed heavily, substantially short of the line. Almost there, but she was old, and hurt, and instead of reaching from the ground to where her grandson stood, adrift and confused and achingly young, her fingers instead curled neatly into her palm, and remained there, closed and cold. Almost was better than most in his situation get, almost was more than his deeply annoying self could have hoped for and yet –
Case in point, he’s getting side-tracked.
Concentrate, Jonathan.
He shrugs himself back to relevance.
“That’s how compliments were with her, always a bit barbed, always a bit backhanded, but honest, you know, she – she wouldn’t say something was beautiful if it wasn’t.”
Martin is looking at him with a complicated expression on his face. It isn’t quite pity, it isn’t quite sadness, and it certainly isn’t understanding. He’s said enough already, said too much already, but –
Martin deserves more.
Martin deserves understanding.
He swallows.
“I’ve always had some trouble with… knowing what I look like. I can’t really – I can’t seem to get my head around it in the same way that others can, I can’t… make the bits of myself join together and make up a cohesive image. It’s all just… a question, like – you know, when you read the news and there’s something grisly that they don’t want you to see? They blur it, so that you aren’t immediately startled or scared by... by whatever’s under there. That blur, it’s… that’s sort of what I see? When I look at myself. So logically, beneath my blur there must be something… unpleasant. That just… that makes sense, I think.”
A pause. He chances another look at Martin’s face and - a nauseatingly familiar sensation swoops through his stomach.
Damn, he’s –
He’s got the balance wrong again.
Information has given way to overindulgence, sharing has become oversharing, he has been strange, and off-putting, and flayed himself in a way that helps no-one, that advances nothing, that simply isn’t productive. Words are not things that can be taken back, this he knows intimately, so there is little to do but press on, but –
Damn.
Martin is looking at him, sadder still, and –
Damn.
He clears his throat and shakes his head, wafting a hand that he hopes looks dismissive in front of his face.
“Getting wildly off track. My hair is… Gran said it was beautiful. She wouldn’t have lied about that, she didn’t tolerate lying. She said it was beautiful, and she said it was my mother’s. It was the only thing allowed to be both. Gran, she – she didn’t talk about my mother much. At all, ever. She didn’t know how, I don’t think. She was so… well. She was different, from… from the life, and the family she had anticipated for my father and by extension for herself. I –”
He huffs an almost laugh.
“I found out my middle name when I was eighteen. It’s my grandfather’s name, on my mother’s side. I didn’t know it until all my legal documents became my responsibility. It’s Maaran, by the way, it means, uh… it means ‘brave’, ironically. Gran hadn’t… she hadn’t wanted me to know that. But my hair… I was allowed to know that was Amma’s. I was allowed to be proud of it. She was allowed to be tied to it, just –”
He purses his lips and presses his fist to them.
“Good lord.” He mutters into it, then lets it fall and sighs. “I did not mean to say all that. I – I’m sorry Martin, I’m so sorry. But please. Please don’t cut it. I know it’s in a sorry state but…” He shrugs, very small. “I don’t want to lose that too.”
He bows his head, closing his eyes. When a warm weight lands gently on his shoulder, he keeps them closed, so that if he is imagining it, there is no image to collapse.
“I won’t cut it,” Martin whispers. “I’m sorry for even – Christ. I won’t cut it.”
“Don’t apologise,” Jon says quietly. “It’s stupid, a stupid thing to retain vanity in all this. I know it is, I know I’m being difficult but –”
“You’re not. It’s not stupid at all. You’re not being difficult, you – heh – you’ve made far more convincing efforts on that front, let me tell you.”
Jon snorts, wet and startled, and the weight on his shoulder disappears. He glances up through damp eyelashes and says as drily as he can, “Watch the cheek, you’re still technically on my payroll.”
Martin makes a strange little half chuckling sound and smirks awkwardly.
“I’m uh…” he fidgets, hand migrating to the back of his neck. “I’m not, actually.”
“Oh.” Oh yes. Of course. Martin Blackwood, Assistant to Peter Lucas, Interim Head Prick of The Magnus Institute, London. Ugh. “Oh yes, uh – of course. Well. Makes HR a bit easier, I suppose.”
Wait.
He wasn’t meant to say that bit.
That bit isn’t even meant to exist.
Um.
“In uh…” Martin’s voice climbs rather a lot higher. “In what way?”
Bugger.
Shit.
Damn, bugger and shit.
“Nothing.” Jon clears his throat. “None. Nothing.”
The two of them come to the abrupt agreement that the floorboards are terribly interesting.
“Right.” The damn clock ticks again, far too many times. “I won’t cut your hair. But something does need to happen with it. I don’t really know how to, um…” he sighs, and rakes a hand through his own hair, wincing sympathetically. “It might hurt, Jon. It might hurt a lot, it’s really -”
“I can handle it,” Jon says, with the sudden assured air of one slipping back into a familiar role. “I don’t mind pain with a purpose.”
“Jon…”
“Let me have that,” he says firmly. “Pain is… I’m past the point of pretending that it’s not something inextricably tied to me. I need – I need to be able to frame some of it as good, Martin, that’s – it’s my choice, alright. Pain that gets things done is – good. Well, maybe not good but… better. It’s better.”
Martin’s breath makes a funny little hitching sound.
“No,” he says, shaking his head slowly. “No, you don’t know that. This could be – this might be the last time you ever have to hurt.”
Jon smirks and chuckles flatly.
“It won’t. Even with all the optimism in the world, even if nothing ever tries to harm me again, even if Beholding extends its powers so that I never so much as stub my damn toe again – I will still have pain. I just… do now.” He lifts his shoulders in another limp attempt at a shrug. “There’s nothing to be done. So just allow me at least the agency of letting some of it have a point, alright.”
Martin starts to shake his head again, but halts himself.
“I don’t… can you explain more what you mean by that? I don’t like the implication that… I want to understand what you mean.”
Jon sighs heavily.
“Okay. What I mean is… so take, for example, the stab from Melanie. I know you’ve heard the tape, so you can glean from that pathetic noise I made that yes, it hurt. It hurt quite acutely, but it was fine, because it meant she no longer had the bullet in her. Whether that turned out to be good or not in hindsight is – that’s not important. The important thing is, that then, then that pain was worth something. It marked me as making some damn progress for once.” He feels his own frown deepen, resembling starkly the holes he digs for himself, the mistakes he cannot climb out from. “But now, the damn thing twinges in the rain. It snags on my shirts, it makes reaching the bloody custard creams an ordeal and – what’s the point of that, Martin? What’s the point of lingering, recurrent pain that doesn’t even achieve anything? It’s worse than the pain that’s bad, because – alright, let’s face it, some of it probably feeds things, doesn’t it? Things we don’t want to get fed. Because I admit readily, it’s scary, you know, it frightens me that I can’t run away now, it frightens me that I can’t punch with any weight behind it, it frightens me that my inner-ear might decide I’m on a damn boat and flip me sideways at any moment, it – it scares me, quite a lot, and therein we have a nutritious meal for The Hunt, The Slaughter and The Vast respectively. It’s awful, it’s terrible, it’s actively working against us, but at least it’s not fucking pointless.”
He blows out a breath and sags, exhausted.
He hadn’t meant to say any of that either but – well.
Martin had asked.
And he knows, theoretically, from years of observation and documentation, that people generally don’t really want to know when they ask, certainly not in detail, often not the truth, but –
Well, he’s deeply annoying, isn’t he?
“Jon,” Martin says lowly. “You are more than the ways you can hurt.”
Jon chuckles sadly, at how funny everything isn’t.
“Maybe once. Maybe once that was true, but now – look Martin, I’m… People like me, avatars, like me. They keep feeding the beast, or… they get used up. It would appear, however, that I am in the unique position that I do both in parallel. I use a bit of myself up, and then the Eye fixes it, and the fixing may not be perfect, and perhaps I change, and maybe it hurts, but – look. What pain is, what it’s meant to be… is a signal that you ought to stop doing the thing that hurts, because something is going to break if you carry on, yes? But for me, now… that’s not how it works. The actual break won’t stick anymore. So the pain in itself is – it only has to mean something if I let it. And I won’t let it, I – I can’t let it stop me.”
“B-but… but you’re hurting Jon,” Martin pleads. “That’s… that’s awful, and – it does mean something, in itself, it shouldn’t have to happen, it shouldn’t be happening - ”
“None of this should be happening,” Jon says breezily, gesturing vaguely around the dour little room. “But it is. And in the grand scheme of things, an ache or two in the body of a monster is – it’s fine. I can take it.”
“You shouldn’t have to.”
“I can take it,” he repeats quietly.
Martin’s lips flatten determinedly.
“No.” He shakes his head. “No, we can talk about the generalisations of why that’s fucked up some other time, but this – no. No, I’m not letting this hurt you. We will get your hair right, and we will do it in a way that doesn’t hurt.”
Jon sighs.
“Martin, I’ve told you, it’s fine, and anyway, you said it yourself, it’s probably not possible –”
“Okay,” Martin interrupts. “First off what I think I need to do, is get a lot of warm water on it. Hopefully then some of the more solid stuff will disintegrate a bit, and we’ll be dealing with sludge instead of chunks.”
Jon barks a dazed laugh.
“Huzzah, sludge instead of chunks,” he manages drily.
“Yeah. Low bar for celebration, but I’d take it if I were you. After that, I guess just try for a normal wash routine? Shampoo and conditioner, have you got one of those um… wide-tooth comb things?”
Jon nods slowly.
“Great, just… just have a good go with that then, I guess? Slowly, really slowly and carefully. I’m… I can be gentle, alright, I’m well-practiced in stuff like this. It might take more than one round of shampooing – no, it will, it absolutely will, but – we’ll try okay. I… I can’t promise Jon, I won’t do that. But I promise I’ll do everything I possibly can to salvage as much as possible, okay?”
Jon blinks.
“I… okay. Thank you.”
Martin huffs.
“Might not be thanking me when -”
“I will. Regardless of…” he lowers his head. “I will.”
“Well.” Martin very nearly smiles at the floor. “Okay then.”