#cw dread

                                                                  He follows Peter's bloody map to the forbidding centre of the Panopticon. The mouths of empty cells, their bars like bared teeth, all facing dead centre, the stage of this horrible show.

The throne has a newly crowned king.

They've taken Jon's eyes. The blood tracking like warpaint scratched down his cheeks, and what they plucked out, they replaced improperly, with eyes that are not eyes, wide gaping chasm things like the backs of moth's wings.

The magnetic tape of all those statements, those carefully archived reels, they've been unspooled and it gathers like it's clogged in Jon's mouth, down his throat. The black lines of it spilling out like the straw of some macabre scarecrow, and Martin's hands are shaking and he prays, ill-worded little invocations to an almighty scraped together from school assemblies, that Jon wasn't taken like that, choking on fear, overwhelmed and airless, fingers scrabbling at a winched-in throat as he tried to breathe around the morass of other people's terrors.

Martin's prayers are that Jon felt nothing at all.

His ribcage has been splayed open, pivoted neatly with hinges like the top of a musical box. Weirdly bloodless for all it is a gory butchery of a human body, sand-white ribs that Martin finds himself counting. The heart is still there, shrivelling, wrinkled by strain and abuse. The rest of his chest, where other lungs and organs and the mechanisms of life should be harboured, is compacted as though with stuffing, the brutal gavage of some farm-reared delicacy. The eyes that expand and swell in this space roll in their vitreous parcels like twitching frogspawn. And then they all swivel with the fluid grace of owl necks, look at Martin, a thousand bobbing pupils staring out of the meat of Jon's chest, and that's the moment Martin realises Jon isn't dead.

'M-martin! Martin!'

A harsh insistence poorly cloaking distress, hands against his shoulders, moving in aborted rocking shakes.

'I – er, what, fuck – was I...?' Returning does not sweep away the agitation, the shaking like an earth tremor through him, the branding recollection of those fathomless eyes.

'You were shouting.' Hair being wiped from his forehead, two eyes, two normal, worried, crow-footed eyes staring down at him.

'W-what time is it?' he asks, but it's not an answer he wants or needs, he's just making sounds, fronting calm he doesn't feel. Runs clammy fingers over the bony column of a throat, the round of an adam's apple, a shirtless chest unmutilated and breathing shallowly.

He feels the question form there, at the centre, the tentative journey it traverses before he hears 'Can I.... I mean, do you want to...?'

The question isn't fully born before he's heaving great waves of sobs into the chest he's pillowed on.

Like clockwork, the arms come round, always an inch too tight a grip, and somehow that makes this easier to bear.

There are no monsters. In the dream that is not a dream, more a memory played out to its worst extremities, Martin walks, meandering and careless, along a beach. The sand is greyer, colour-sapped, and the waves are choppy, over-touched with foaming white like a poorly rendered oil landscape painting. There are ships out to the distance, but they're too far away, dirt flecks on the windscreen of horizon.

After a while, he sits down on the sand. Soaking the seat of his trousers, the backs of his legs. He watches the immutable horizon, blank like a lost opportunity, like a canvas where something meaningful could have been painted, anything at all really other than nothing. There are no clouds, no birds, and around him the day happens, unfolding in undemanding hours and minutes that leave no footprints, ruffle no waves.

He didn't bring any gloves and his hands cramp, the skin of his cheeks pinched with the tweaking chill. There are the marks of hoar-frost, sparkling and spiking, beginning to carpet the hairs on his arm, the skin of his exposed ankles.

The temperature drops, though the sky doesn't change. His fingers are gripped into numb claws now, and he wonders without much of a sense at all if he'll lose them to the cold. The frost is curdling in his lungs and it's hard to breathe. It has become a sensation like all the rest of them, like hunger and fright and panic, it is something happening to him so far away, to the him before, the one burdening himself with feeling like a pack-mule and wondering why he never moved forward.

The light refracts snow-blind off the white of the waves, and soon it is easier to close his eyes. He is not tired, but maybe he could lie down for a moment. It would be so simple to –

Arms wrapped around chest from behind, a twinge as his ribs protest, his mouth forming a confused, displeased sound.

'Jon. W- are you ok? You having a nightmare?'

A voice night-rough and dry rumbled against the dip between his shoulder blades: 'You were going away again'.

'Oh'.

The taste of chill is still enchanted and twisted up in the marrow of him, but it thaws in the near-ache of such a grip. Threading fingers together, palm union with palm, the soft rucks of scar tissue sliding against dry skin. He is held and beheld so tightly he lies there for a moment, his skin prickling with newly rediscovered heat.

'Do you want to talk about it?'

An offer. Given and given and given, no thought to retraction. It is hard to be Lonely when that holds such a lantern to the dark of the forest beyond.

'I'm, I'm ok, Jon,' he says, meaning it. Pulling arms  slot around his stomach tighter. 'Thank you'.

A grunting 'don't mention it', already sweetened by a doziness. The weight against his back closer, the arms flung around him like  a mooring line.