#post 160

They’ve stopped for a few days to gather themselves. They’ve made it as far south as Melrose on the borders, and it would have been a pretty market town, antique fairs and village fetes and a eye-catching ruin of a fourteenth century monastery, if the Hunt hadn’t passed this way, maybe the Spiral too. There isn’t much left here in the way of civilisation, and little to nothing in the way of humanity. There are shadows like the imprints on wall after the outpouring shock of a bomb, but their limbs do not concede to the shape of limbs. They sway as leaves on a branch, like they’re hanging from where their feet are stuck to the ground, and Martin tugs them clear of their gathering places.

They’ve managed to let themselves into the half-unhinged door of a little high street shop that used to sell fancy card and stationary. They had tried an art gallery further up the road, but the Dark had started to take root there like black mould, and it’d eaten away the ground floor to yawning inky nothing.

Martin asks Jon if they’ll be safe here, and Jon rallies himself  wearily, Looks. He replies that nothing will come for them, and that’s as much as they can ask for these days.

Above the shop, accessed via a back-room still plugged up and packed with unopened boxes, up carpeted stairs on which bundles of unopened notebooks and special occasion cards balance committedly against the will of gravity, there’s a small flat.  The decoration in the flat is… interesting. It’s more something one of Tim’s friends would have had, the few times Tim got Martin to go out with him for one of his ‘de-stress Friday’ sessions.  Martin would laugh at the wall-hangings like indoor curtains, the posters of the zodiac and some tie-dye hippy representation of chakras, the bong even still on the coffee table in the poky living room, except his attention is slightly more taken up by Jon at the moment. Leant against him like a downed tree, his eyes drooping closed and his legs fast failing him, shuddering from the effort of taking the stairs.

The way here was treacherous. There’s a town further north about forty miles swallowed by the Vast.  Jon tries to avoid Seeing as much as possible, of course he does, and Martin will never ask that of him outright, never, but they’ve had to check if the way is safe a number of times. And each time he opens the door or whatever metaphor Jon uses to understand it, it drains something from him it takes a long time to claw back.

Martin drops his backpack by the entrance. Divests Jon of his. Jon sways and blinks with lidded eyes, and his gestures are sloppy, poorly formed. Martin ends up carrying him to single bed off to the right of the staircase, the room still wreathed in the old stale smell of tobacco and weed.

Once Jon’s out for the count, Martin checks the doors, the windows, their rations and supplies with the religious militancy of a man who knows what happens when they don’t. He counts out rations, makes careful notations in his notebook with a stubby pencil sharpened by his pen-knife. The cupboards of the flat are mostly a bust, but there’s a few cans of baked beans, tinned peaches, and the delight of finding a single can of tinned custard, which Martin stashes to surprise Jon with later.

There’s a billy bookcase next to the non-functioning TV, crowded full of precarious piles of console game boxes and disordered books and back issues of the Fortean Times. Martin peruses through a number of books on mysticism, the paranormal and how one can access their inner self before he finds a glossy hardback on origami to entertain himself.

The sky outside is dark and scratched with an ugly bruising colour,  but it’s likely to be only mid afternoon. Martin ventures back down the staircase and grabs some coloured card before he settles back into the spring-less corner of a battered settee draped with a brightly adorned throw blanket. There’s another, equally obnoxiously shaded blanket of clashing colours, and he places it over himself and gets comfortable.

It’s a few hours later when he hears the bed squeak.  A clearing of a throat, the unsteady padded steps of someone who hasn’t found their equilibrium just yet.

Jon pushes the door open with a sighing squeak and peers blearily around.

The nap hasn’t helped at all by the look of it. Martin turns mid-fold and gets to see a crime scene of disturbed sleep evidenced on Jon’s body. One of Martin’s long-sleeve t-shirts rucked up, the under arms and ring around his neck patched damp. His skin rippled with a thick sweat, hair coming wildly and carelessly from the band he’d tied it back in. He’s rocking on the balls of his feet like he’s still following the motion of running, and his eyes as he stares at Martin are unnaturally dilated, unnervingly steady even as he scrubs his face with his hand.  

“Hey,” Martin says carefully. Knowing to keep his voice pitched low, calmer than Jon feels right now. “Are you… everything ok?”

Jon pauses, blinks just too slowly to seem natural, and shakes his head.

“What’s wrong?” Martin asks. “If you can… if you want to say, that it.”

Jon pauses. It’s habit now. A nervous tic. Mulling over what he wants to say and how he’ll say it.

He has to be so careful with how he says things.

Martin’s expecting a truncated gesture or two. A stumbling sign that Martin will have to parse, backed up by a thousand other signifiers of meaning in their home-spun language. But unusually, Jon clears his throat, bites his top lip anxiously before he opens his mouth.

Like tuning in a radio station mid-programme, someone else’s words ring out.

“I allowed myself some brief hope,” Jon’s voice sloshes out of his mouth with a South American cadence. “that maybe he’d just left me, maybe he’d escaped with just a divorce. But no. One call to the housing association confirmed that, as far as they were concerned, I’d always lived alone.”

Most of the statements Martin doesn’t recognise. He’s not been cursed with an encyclopaedic knowledge of them after all, a forced and unwilling archive now capable of speaking in every voice but his own. They’re all the same anyway. The recycling of other people’s tragedies and miseries, their worst days committed for posterity and recited dutifully by the archive Jonah Magnus created to house them.

Jon usually doesn’t share the content of his dreams.

“Nightmare?” Martin says, deliberately lightly. He puts down his truly butchered attempt to make a swan and watches as Jon swallows, brings a hand to his mouth to gnaw at a nail.

He wonders if that’s the right word, knows in his heart it isn’t, not really. Because nightmares are a twisting of things that both are and aren’t, a plaited deceitful recollection of an unkind brain. Jon’s dreams are a hideous witnessing, with no hope of challenge of change.

Jon jerkily nods, before he says in that awful ventriloquism:

“… regarding a series of misplaced objects lost over the course of three months.”

Jon’s started to rub his arms. His lips firmly closed again, as though embarrassed he’s shared the history he’s been watching in his dreams. But he did share it. And that’s notable.

Martin holds up a corner of the blanket on the settee, and chides “Get in here, or you’ll catch your death”, and Jon’s crossing the distance as though he was waiting for the signal.

They don’t say anything for the while. Jon folds himself up against Martin’s side like a gangly greetings card, like one of his obviously failed origami projects. Martin puts an arm around his shoulder and consigns himself to the rather shocking robbery of body heat that’s rapidly occurring. Jon accepts the arm, but the tension is still wound through his marrow, and he doesn’t calm like he usually does.

“This one really bothered you, didn’t it?” Martin says.

A twitchy up-down motion.

“How come?” Martin asks, before:  “If you want to talk about it. If not, well, I can tell you all about my grand adventures in paper folding. A wild ride, I can promise.”

Jon raises an eyebrow at the truly dazzling menagerie of wobbly animals, and huffs a stale laugh.

He brings out his hands from where he’d buried them in the furnace of Martin’s space, and makes a sign, a twisting hooked hand motion  - Spiral. And then, shakier, flatter, his fingers closed like shutters – Lonely.

“As far as they were concerned,” he repeats with a mournful and stolen tongue, “I’d always lived alone.”

He makes a sign again, and meets Martin’s eye like he’s been trying not to – Lonely.

Jon reaches out, and like setting fingers to the board of a violin, delicately fits his hand against Martin’s. Like he’s memorised exactly the places where they go, the coves and shorelines where their islands can align.

Martin’s grip has never been as careful. His fingers engulf Jon’s smaller size, cushioning them in a sturdy grip.

“You’ve not lost me,” Martin says, reading in between the lines of Jon’s gestures. “I’m here, yeah? Alright. And we’re together. I’m not lost.”

Jon makes a grunt of acknowledgement, inclining his head in agreement, impatiently, as though he knows all this, like he begrudges being reminded. But clearly this knowledge hasn’t stained every part of his waking yet, because there are tears slipping unwanted from his eyes and his hand grips Martin harder.

His gaze flickers like a camera shutter from the floor and its foot-scuffed rug to Martin, back and forth. Martin wishes, not for the first time, that Jon could just ask for what he wants. Could stop feeling like he needs to justify every out-reaching motion to himself, approaching physical affection like he’s trying to do the cryptic bloody crossword.

He’s learning. They both are.

“What do you want me to do?” Martin asks instead.

Jon’s eyes finally linger on him. Cheeks damp, eyes red. He removes his hand from Martin’s grip like he’s unmooring a ship from port. His next movements being planned behind his eyes. A methodical consideration of angle, of intent, of reciprocation that’s as much caution as it is overthinking. Martin wonders sometimes whether this is the Jon he always was, or the Jon that’s been made by this world and all that’s been laid against him. Maybe it’s one or the other or both, or maybe it doesn’t matter much any more. This is Martin’s Jon, the Jon that is, the one that is thinking about how he’s going to place his limbs as though there’s a wrong way to it, who will steady himself before he’ll reach out. But who always does, eventually, in his own time.

His arms encircle Martin’s neck now. A pause, a release of air, before he’s pulling back, fretting like something hasn’t worked. But he clearly wants something, enough to push through his dissatisfaction, face folded in on itself unhappily before it sets in determination and then he goes for around Martin’s chest, fingers steadying, finding their own bony handholds in the material of Martin’s jumper. The right angles of his elbows, the washboard of his ribs felt under his shirt, they don’t have any give and Martin shifts a little to ease the hard sensation of it, try and reorient them better. Jon picks up on this, already trying to shift again or perhaps even move away, and if his tongue could still form apologies, he’d be making them.

Martin’s arms come round decisively, closing the circuit of them.

“Stop fussing,” he murmurs, and Jon quietens. Face against the round of Martin’s chest, the hand that’s not still gripped vice-like carefully combining through his damp hair.

“This ok?” Martin says finally, wanting to know, wanting Jon to feel like he can tell him.

Jon lifts his head. Nods, brings their lips together for a skimming kiss, like he’s sealing the sentiment.

He shuffles his body so he’s wedged next to Martin, taking up any crevice he finds. After a moment, pulling and positioning Martin’s arm back over his shoulder, so it drapes heavy and solid and present. A lightness on his face that sleep couldn’t achieve but a victory Martin likes to claim as his own every time.