Expecting a response, the nightingale chirps a half-annoyed sound.

“What about this then?”

The bird transfers to his chest and fixes him with a beady, challenging stare. Martin stares back, though it makes him grin cross-eyed

The weight on his chest increases, and bigger rounded eyes look out of a furred face.

“Ergh – you're getting hair everywhere!” Martin complains, pushing petulant against the bulk of the huge rabbit. “Mum'll get mad!”

“I'm fluffy,” the rabbit says almost defensively. “How'd you like that – me being soft?”

“You are really soft,” Martin concedes, running his fingers through the dense tufts.

“Right, what about this?” The rabbit repeats insistently, shifting on his haunches, getting hair absolutely all over Martin's school trousers. He'll have to clean them before Mum notices.

Suddenly the face has lengthened to a snout, the teeth have sharpened vulpine.

“What you think? Better in a fight than a rabbit or a mouse.”

“Are you planning to get into fights?”

“Someone needs to protect you,” the fox says simply, the colours of his fur pulling his face into a natural frown.

“Well, you don't like being bigger animals anyway, so it doesn't matter,” Martin replies. He rubs the silky fur through his fingers like trailing river water.

The fox growls and whines in the way he does when Martin's just not listening.

The grasshopper mouse comes back, snuffling his small pink nose.

“You really wouldn't mind?” Aron says slowly. His words more precise now, considered. “Even if I'm not big, or soft, or fast, or strong?”

Martin shakes his head and thinks mournfully that he really ought to get a start on his homework.

“We've got ages yet,” Martin replies, scooping the mouse up under his chin. “Ages 'n ages. And I know I'll like whatever you end up being, so why do I need to worry?”

“That's 'case I do the worrying for the both of us,” says Aron, but he nuzzles up against Martin's throat anyway.  

–

The first day of the summer holidays finds him blearily squinting in the dawn-wash glow of his room.  Its grasping fingers illuminate bookshelves and posters and a pile of clothes that's slipped off his desk chair; it cuts a slice across his bed, over his pillow.

He wonders, too woozy for irritation, blinking deeply, why he's awake so early.

“Martin!”

Something nips at the skin of his hand.

“Mart – wake up.”

“Wossit?”

He garbles a sound that barely makes landfall at language, strains his neck up to look around for Aron.

He sees the crouching, cringing shape sat unfamiliar against the back of his hand, near the fin of skin between thumb and forefinger. Legs folded tight against each other, the spokes of the form folded neatly back into itself so that it squats like a bobbly pebble, eyes catching the room light and reflecting it back like the precisely set stones in a crown.

“I can't change back!” Aron moans. “Martin, I don't know what to do, I – ”

“Ok,” Martin whispers roughly, sitting up and wincing as it sets the bed off in a snapping creak. His hands hover because he wants to pet and stroke and reassure, but he doesn't know where he can touch. “Ok, it's, it's alright, it's – try something easier? Come on, it's alright.”

Jointed legs tufted with monochromatic hairs flail, propelling themselves to scuttle over skin, off his hand, unsteadily tumbling onto the bedclothes, clambering back up on the duvet slung messy over Martin's knees. There is a sensation of a headache that barks with a sudden ferocity behind his eyes even as Aron gasps, strained.

“I'm trying,” he replies, miserable, and that headache rips and snarls up in Martin's head, the ache distracting from everything else but Aron's panic. “I'm trying, I can't, I can't, a-and I don't know what to do, what should we – ?”

“Shh,” Martin says, near tears himself, clearing his throat. “Sh, it's – stop, stop for a minute.”

Aron stops. The headache subsides. Martin feels clammy and overheated, and his small soul is churning out enough terror to blanket them both insensate.

Martin forces himself to take a very long, very troubled breath.

“It's – it's ok,” he whispers finally. “We'll just. Let's just – let's breathe, yeah. We'll – we'll sort this.”

“I'm sorry,” Aron garbles, “I'm sorry – I'll – I'll try something else, something bigger, something with teeth or a tail or wings, I'll be better, give me a minute.”

Aron's tried on the shape of dogs and lizards and snakes and horses, and even – once, when he was younger and Mum took him to the seaside, a fish.

Martin's never seen his soul in the dressing of a spider before.

“Aron,” Martin says slowly. He keeps his hands folded on his lap but his fingers twitch to reach out. “This is – we've settled, haven't we?”

Aron can't nod. His form can't allow for such an expression. But he brings his legs in closer, pebbles up and won't look at Martin, and that's answer enough.

“Please,” Martin says, holding out his palm. Flat, fingers docked against fingers. “Come here, please.”

It takes a moment before Aron creeps shamefaced onto his hand. Martin adds his other hand so he can cup the small shape like he's holding a weakly burning candle flame out of the wind.

Martin studies him now the panic has subsided. Admiring the greenish-blue of the chelicerae at the front of his face, the way they ripple with colour as the light catches them like fish scales, like an oil spill. The downy white tufts and lines like tree rings along his abdomen that break up the coarse run of  black hair.

“Aron,” Martin whispers, “I think you're great. Look at you. You're amazing!”

“But I'm not – ” Aron begins tentatively, but Martin interrupts him by clumsily reaching out with a pawing touch, stroking the upstruck wired fur against where he thinks his neck probably is.

“Ow.”

“Shit. What?”

“.... you poked me in the eye,” comes the response, tinted with a ghost of amusement.

“Sorry!”

Martin pauses, and then leans in eagerly to see, holding up his hand to get a better look.

“I am not an art exhibit Martin,” comes the huffy reply.

“Sit there and be admired for a minute,” Martin snarks back, and he feels Aron's fleeting smile in return.

“I can and will bite you.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Martin replies, not really listening, turning his cupped hands this way and that. “How many do you have? Eyes, I mean?”

“Eight. Duh.”

“Woah,” Martin replies, ignoring the snide aside. He casts out a finger again, moving it over the abdomen a bit more carefully, his bitten nail trailing along the curving round to the small protrusion at the back where he supposes webbing must come from.

“I think you're cool,” he whispers again.

“What about Mum?” Aron asks. He's grown bolder, crawls up to the ends of Martin's fingertips where he sits like a lord surveying his kingdom.

“We just, we just won't tell Mum yet.” Martin worries at his lip. “She'll... she'll worry, she doesn't need to know right now, does she?”

They keep their secret for four days. An advantage of how small Aron has grown.

Until his Mum catches sight of him, half-burrowed under the lip of his t-shirt collar while Martin is finishing drying the dishes. He's had a growth spurt recently, and barely going on tip-toe, he reaches up the higher cupboard where the glasses are kept.

“Change into something else,” she says briskly. It's been a bad day, her face washed out and lined with sleeplessness, pale-lipped and shivery. Martin watches as she finishes swallowing the last of her tablets with a blank expression, clipping her pill box closed.

Martin stiffens. Feels Aron crouch and bristle against his collarbone. He sees Kacper perk his ears up, his yellowish eyes snagged on Martin's throat. His bushy tail tipped with white flicks distracted.

“I can't,” Martin replies, feeling his face heat up with the suddenness of attention being paid to him. His voice cracks in the middle, and he flushes at how squeaky it comes across.

“Something else, Martin,” she insists sharply, her eyebrows pulled down.

Kacper, who has been sat on his hunches near her leg, stands. Glances up at her.

“Lena, calm down,” he warns, but his Mum takes a step forward. Martin blunders back the same distance, nearly elbowing a plate off the counter. Their kitchen is pokey, and he's crowded back against the washing machine.

“Mum, I- I can't,” he repeats. His words are thick and clogging in his throat, his body feels too unwieldy, too big for the suddenly very cramped space. “Aron's, he's settled, Mum, and – ”

“Don't be stupid, Martin, you can't have – ”

“He's settled, Lena,” Kacper's voice is grumbling terse at the back of his throat. “Being upset about it isn't going to help anyone.”

“He's not settled. Not as that!” she barks, and Martin's not sure who she's snapping at, but she takes another step and  grabs against his wrist, and it's tight as a manacle and her nails dig into the pasty skin there, and Kacper's protestations become a vocalized growl. “He's not settling like that.”

Martin does start crying then, hot tears leaking down his cheeks, his free hand cupped protectively over the fragile, unwanted shape his soul has taken. His mum's lip curls upwards when she sees his tears but still she doesn't let go, and her grip is bony and harsh and it hurts.

“Lena!” Kacper snarls, and his teeth catch and yank backwards at the fabric of her trousers,  “Enough, Lena, leave it!”

“Mum?” Martin asks faintly with his squeaking, crumbling voice. He doesn't pull away. There's nowhere to pull away to.

His mum sniffs. Sets her shoulders high again, and rips her hand back, and leaves the room without another word. Kacper glances over at Martin, and Martin desperately wants to bury his face in the soft orangey fur like he used to when he was younger, wants to feel it under his fingers.

But Kacper leaves too, and Martin and Aron are suddenly very alone.

They don't say anything for a long time. Martin puts the last of the plates away, and he goes upstairs and locks the door of his room, sits heavily on the side of the bed.

“Aron...” he begins.

“I don't want to talk about it,” comes the cloth-muffled response.

“I – ”

“I mean it,” Aron snaps. “I don't want to talk about it. Leave it be, yeah?”

“Oh,” Martin replies. He wipes at his eyes, stares at his feet.  “Oh. Ok.”

The entire incident is never spoken about again.

Aron takes to lurking under Martin's clothes whenever they're in the house.

–

“All you have to do is look in a mirror.”

The world rings wrong in his ears. His in-gasping weed-choked breaths  are scraping and disjointed as he parses them as noise. He can hear the slide of his own fingers curling against his damp palms. The room is at once so loud and crushingly far away like a distant crashing storm tide, and yet right up against his ear, like a dropped glass in an empty room, Elias' voice, cut-sharp and close and the slivers sliding into him as splinters as he listens.

“The resemblance is quite uncanny. You even have a spider, you know, just like he did.  Not the same species of course, but then she never looks close enough to check, does she? The face of the man she hates, who destroyed her life, watching over her...”

“Shut. Up.” Martin hears himself push the sound out as a feeble whistle between his teeth, and it gets lost in the groaning rigging of sound in the room. The weight of being so splayed open has him bow-backed and trembling.

It's hard to remember why he's doing this. It's hard to focus on anything other than how much she despises him. How much he's always known it.

Through blistering tears, he watches Aron scuttle down his trouser leg, over his shoelaces, a tear-blurred shape moving at surprising speed over the foot-worn and un-swept floor. He thinks he might be planning on biting Elias. He can feel the pulsing reckless fury that is the only thing breaking up the solid mass of despair cementing and expanding in the hollow of his chest, the rage that even the satisfaction of burning statements hasn't appeased. At everything this man has done – but he's not a man, he's not a person – , at everything he's sat back and watched and done nothing to prevent, and as Martin chokes airless on his own drowning grief, his anger has found motion, enough room to lash out amidst the agony.

Elias looks down at Aron, almost bored.

And brings down his foot.

Martin drops.

There isn't an expression to describe the sensation. His knees send a pained recoil down his legs as he slams against the floor, a shock up his spine, but Martin can't feel that, can't feel anything but alight, burning, illuminated down to the bones of him. He retches on a shell-shocked wail as Elias idly watches the panicked body squirming under the vicious pressure of his shoe, as  Aron cries out as his body is pressed squashed against the floor, and Martin can do nothing.

There's a curve to Elias' smile now.

He shouldn't be touching him, Martin's brain is scream-sobbing, he shouldn't, he can't, he shouldn't be touching...

“You want to know what she sees when she looks at you?”

Martin thought he didn't have room for any more, but Elias pushes his mother's hatred into him anyway.

There's a harder, painful pressure, and he hears Aron squeal. He thinks his own voice mouths a  pleading 'stop' that goes unheeded.

Elias' voice is tight and biting and cold.

“Don't burn any more statements.”

Even when the pressure lifts, there are steps walking away, the door closing on this pitiful tableau, Martin cannot move, awash in the flotsam of wrong, smudged and tarnished and beheld in the cruellest violent light, knotted in the weeds of a revelation that is no less choking for how little of a surprise it was.

Half-blinded by tears, he inches forward on his knees, feeling around, finding the furred body quivering where it was made to stay.

“I've – I've got you,” he slurs desperately, scooping the shape up against his face, feeling for anything broken, anything fractured, feeling his front legs twitch feebly against his cheeks. “He – he's gone, he shouldn't have, he – he....”

“She hates us,” Aron finally speaks. The loudest thing in the room, Martin almost wincing from the suddenness – where Martin's grief has already begun to settle into the cracks of him, Aron's is an outpouring, a final barrier broken. “She hates us so much, Martin, a-and we did nothing and she – god, he left so we got everything she reserved for him for no better reason than we were there to hate and he wasn't, a-and she...”

Aron's words are lost in a babbling wail, and Martin can do nothing but clutch him desperately, shushing, every excuse and reasoning and childish hope he's ever entertained that she'd ever be proud of him laid bare as the dessicated husk it always was, already striped by life's disappointments long before.

Aron climbs under the collar of his shirt when Melanie comes in. He will not crawl out for a very long time.

–

He discusses it with Aron while Jon is in the shower. Jon uses up all the hot water from the immersion heater, his showers long, aimless and scalding, even with his hair now hacked back from its tangles. Sometimes Martin even thinks he catches a hum, a snatch of tune, though it's always faint, muddied by the bathroom acoustics, close-lipped and idle. He thinks Jon's happy here. Hopes he is.

There's the slow wash of steam trickling from under the bathroom door onto the landing, into the sitting room. Martin tries not to be reminded of other, colder mists.

“It seems unnecessary...” Martin is responding, chewing the nail of his thumb.

“We don't know who could come here!” Aron replies dogged. He keeps rubbing his front legs together anxiously, like Martin does with his hands, but he stays on the sofa arm so all his front-facing eyes are fixed on Martin. “One of us needs to be here to keep watch. Who knows who could come? Daisy – ”

“Daisy's Jon's friend.”

“She's tried to kill him before,” says Aron dismissively. “We don't know her, Martin, we don't know she can be trusted.”

“Jon does – ”

“And it's never helped him,” Aron snaps. He untenses, and the bristles coating his back soften. “OK. Maybe Daisy isn't a problem. But what if Elias finds him? While we're out getting food or walking down to the village, it's not safe for him to be alone.”

Martin nods worriedly. He rubs the cold-cracked skin of his palms over his thighs and tugs at his lip with his teeth.

“We don't even know if it will stretch that...”

“We do, don't lie,” Aron retorts. It's not unkind. It's just harsher. More direct. Everything about them has had all the edges taken off. “You know it will stretch that far.”

It will. Martin doesn't know how far it was, from his office to the Panopticon, but he'd stretched it and stetched it until he'd stopped feeling Aron's terror, until it had boiled down from a fire-brand mutilation to a wincing sunburn of feeling. And once Peter cast him into the Lonely. Well. He hadn't felt anything at all then.

“We shouldn't be able to do this,” Martin says miserably. He rubs his hands over his face. “Be so far apart from each other.”

“Well, we can,” Aron replies simply,  “so we should use it to make sure they stay safe.”

Martin lets out a breath too heavy for his lungs to hold.

“You're right,” he says finally. “I know you're right, s'just... it's not – it's not natural. Being able to – it's not, it's not right.”

“No.” Aron says and he crawls onto Martin's arm, up onto his shoulder. “No, it's – it's not. But it's what we've got now.”

Martin wipes at his eyes, takes another more pronounced inhale.

“Hey. Hey, it might heal one day. Don't make that face.”

“'m not making a face.” Martin replies, feeling belligerent and childish in his response.

Aron rears up and sets both front legs on the spot on Martin's chin he can reach.  

“Your sulky face,” he says, and his voice is warm. Everything about him feels warm these days.  Martin is mummified in five layers of clothing and still has goosebumps.  

“I missed you,” Aron continues, simply. He has never found honesty easy, but he looks at Martin, taps against his chin with the stunted pedipalps at the front of his body and repeats: “I missed you.”

“I missed you too,” Martin croaks out, and he has no more words to express what he wants to stay.

After a moment, Aron makes a decisive 'clearing throat' noise, and continues.

“I've told Emer. The plan.”

“How'd she take it?”

“She's practical. She can see the benefit.”

“Is she going to be the one to tell Jon?”

“You don't want to do the honours then?”

“You know I don't.”

“Chicken.”

“Sod off.”

“I'm right though.”

“Yeah, don't get used to it.”

Aron hums in reply, and then returns his gaze to Martin.

“You really want to get back into the habit of keeping secrets from him?”

“No, I.... No. You're right.

“Twice in one day.”

“It's a miracle.”

“If you're going to be this insufferable with him, he'll hand you back.”

“I'll hide in his sleeve cuffs. Jump out at him.”

“Don't.”

“I won't. Relax.”

Martin carefully traces a finger over the bristles of Aron's abdomen, scratching lightly with a nail near the back, rewarded with a contented chitter.

“Then it's agreed,” he says, and they sit, quiet and sedate in each other's company until Jon and Emer come out.

–

Martin frets, so as he tramps down the uneven and rain-boggy hill, muttering and grumbling about the state of his boots, he throws out little questioning checks through the wide net their thread has become.

Aron, secure in the safehouse and out of the spitting rain, responses momentarily with reassuring pulses, wordless and rudimentary but implying safe – warm – dry.

Martin gets these placid reassurances three times in a row when he sends a hand-wringing anxious ?, before he's eventually gifted with a spikier snatch of mild frustration. The wave of safe – warm – alive – annoyed is speckled with the impression that whatever Jon, Emer and Aron are now doing, Martin's frequent checks are now disruptive.

A pause, and then a kinder wash that implies that Martin should hurry up and get back.

Martin leaves it at that and keeps his queries minimal.

It's while he's in the little shop that the humming connection shifts, a new harmony billowing into the background melody, and he's treated to a rising ball of crunched and cosy heat blooming and pulsing at his breastbone.

Martin knows what causes such a fireplace in him. He's been feeling it a lot recently. His hands suddenly  don't feel as cold-nipped. He has to try and keep the smile off his face to avoid looking foolish as he peers at the 'two for three pound' offer on grapes, ticks vegetables off the shopping list, impulsively throws in some strawberries on the off-chance Jon might like them.

Another pulse, not three minutes later: a glint through his spine, like a cloud shifting and exposing a sun trap as he stares non-plussed at the spice isle, trying to decipher Jon's deplorable handwriting.

The steady sensation comes upon him with the regularity of waves upon a beach.

He has a pins-and-needles buzz at his fingertips as he makes the walk back, the bag handles digging into his palms, and even the rain, pouring hard from burdened storm clouds, does not dampen his mood.

He hears Jon's rumbling tumbling speech as he shoulders open the front door, hefting the bags into the entranceway.

“... and it's actually a common misapprehension, easily done by rudimentary scholars in the field, when in fact, a  rather simplistic way of rectifying such an error is to...”

Martin watches and allows the smile to claim him utterly.

Jon is ironing. A little pile of ordered clothes on the sofa, precisely folded. Chattering away to his audience: Martin's spider soul, settled comfortable on Jon's shoulder. Martin waits long enough, and Jon, thoughtless and undisrupted in his lecture, reaches up to run his finger all the way from Aron's front section, poking one of his eyes more likely than not though Aron doesn't say a word, all the way down to his stubby spinnerets, doing this two or three times in a rhythmic gesture before he returns to his chore.

Martin feels bathed in an undemanding tenderness.

Emer has noticed his arrival where Jon hasn't. She flutters over to him, lands in his coarse briar bush of hair before alighting again and setting down on his shoulder, the position more to her satisfaction.

“You've missed a treat,” she says drolly, using her front legs to clean her long, feathery antennae.  “He's been on a roll for about twenty minutes.”

“That's our Jon,” Martin murmurs. His eyes crinkle as she snorts a laugh.

They watch him for a minute.

“He irons his socks?” Martin continues, Jon using the steam function to neatly flatten the fabric over the toes obliviously.

“Even the socks,” Emer replies, ever so fond.

Another pause.

“Never thought I'd see the day when Jon would like spiders,” Martin says.

“Not any spiders,” Emer says, and she flutters her gossamer-white wings at him affectionately. “Just yours.”

Jon notices him then. His face breaking into softness. Helps him unload the shopping into their neatly categorised cupboards and newly cleaned fridge, makes them both tea though he steeps it too long and adds too much milk, sits up against him, folded up and knobbly-limbed as they channel-hop through the rubbish on TV.

First they were frowned at by their parents and the entire village for not wanting to get a job, which is why they were labeled "the nitwit" (although to be fair Nil did pretend to be stupid a lot to avoid work). And although they didn't hold a grudge against anyone there, most of the village felt like Nil didn't like them, because they were always so distant. So basically they had no friends and didn't get along super well with their parents.

Then some stuff happened which doesn't fit under "deserved better" (Steve began visiting the village, Nil trapped a pillager in a barn for a day then let him go), but THEN:

So you know that thing when you wake up in Minecraft and the entire village you used to frequent is suddenly empty? Yeah... Nil's village fell under a zombie raid. Everyone either died or was turned except for him. He saw one of his parents burn in the sunlight before his very own eyes. I'm pretty sure the entire fandom agrees it was the worst day of his life.

Then - remember that pillager she met? Well basically she's already been having doubts about what she is doing and right before the zombie raid she defected and is no longer "bad" so to say. And she came back just in time to rescue Nil from the raid alongside Steve. Her name is Polly btw and she's amazing I love her sm :')

Nil didn't have ANYTHING left after that, and neither did Polly, so they set out to travel together... somewhere. Mostly it's just soul-searching. Polly hopes to take her to a mushroom island one day though.

Now come a bunch of details that don't have to do with the poll, but let's just say the zombie raid wasn't the end of Nil's traumas. Some highlights:

this vindicator named Johnny, Polly's old friend and comrade, brutally attacked them and almost killed Polly. He was taken out by a polar bear, but Nil had to drag away an unconsious bleeding Polly (mind you she was lighty injured herself. That's where the scar on her head is from), was almost killed by a group of zombies and lost a finger to them, until eventually being rescued by a witch

they miss their parents SO MUCH oh my god, and regret not being closer to them and helping more...

in the current arc of the story them and Polly ended up in the NETHER and while there Nil has been kidnapped twice: first by Piglins who wanted to use them for trades (they dunno how nitwits work and are strapped for resources)

then by a raid party (one captain, two pillagers, three vindicators, a witch who really doesn't wanna be there (Wirt. I've polled him too) and a bloodthirsty evoker, Eve. Eve wasn't there when that happened though). The raiders turned out to be kinda stupid (except for Wirt but she's a good guy, and Eve but like I said she was out exploring), so Nil lied and pretended to be a librarian so they wouldn't kill them. Surprisingly it worked for a while, but uhm...

So this Eve, she wants to charge her totem of undying (In the AU, you need to kill a v/illager to do so.) And when she returned and saw Nil among the raiders, she knew immediately they were no librarian. They beat Nil up bad, and tied them up as a prisoner until Eve gets her totem. And now Nil doesn't know what to do (Polly has been trapped too) and feels like a failure in life and they'll kill them if a miracle doesn't happen. I NEED TO HUG THEM SO BAD OH MY GOD-

Reasoning: She lost her own job, house and was assaulted by men at her house.