Chapter Text
By the time they got to the safehouse, they had been on the road for nearly ten hours and the sight of the tiny, quaint old cottage in the middle of nowhere was a blessed relief.
Jon insisted on driving for most of it- his first thought had been to catch the train up but Basira had warned him off of public transport during the brief and hushed phonecall they had shared before they got on the road.
“Too easy to track. Police might not even come looking for you,” She had muttered, “But at least make it difficult for them.”
Of course, it wasn’t really the police Jon was worried about.
His head felt heavy, the drive from London finally catching up with him as he pulled the car to a stop and shut off the engine. His hands ached from gripping the wheel as tightly as he had and his back would make him pay for how hunched over he was.
He leaned back in his seat, wincing at the cracking sound his neck made, and looked over to Martin.
He had taken the wheel during their first pit stop even though he hadn’t driven in a number of years, and it was only after the third stop when his eyelids were drooping and his yawns seemed to split his jaw in two that he reluctantly let Jon take over again.
Martin had dozed through the night but never fully slept, always dragging himself out of slumber just before falling too deeply into it. He needed rest, they both did, but Jon found himself quietly grateful that Martin was trying to keep himself awake. It helped soothe his shredded nerves every time he saw him shake his head, glance out the window or turn his face slightly to watch him as he focused on the road. Jon felt his eyes on him and every blink was a reminder that Martin was beside him, with him, alive and free of the titanic grip of the Lonely.
They had only talked a little during the trip, exhaustion and the heaviness of the last day weighing down their tongues.
Jon had told him about Trevor Herbert and Julia Montauk, about the not-Sasha that had somehow gotten loose at exactly the wrong moment. When Martin murmured that Peter had set it free on purpose, Jon’s hold on his wheel turned tight.
Conversation trailed after that, falling in drips and drops from their mouths about where they were going, what they had left behind, their co-workers, what few friends they had left. Jon told Martin that Melanie and Georgie were together and he almost smiled, his face softening with the news.
Jon ached to see that look on his face and wished he had more simple, easy things to talk about. It felt so good to just talk. To have a conversation that wasn’t marked with desperation or fear or biting coldness. To hear Martin’s soft voice so close to his side and know that he wouldn’t have to horde the sound of it, not knowing when he would hear it again.
Neither of them mentioned the harder things, things they both knew they would need to talk about, preparations that would have to be arranged, plans that would have to be made.
Feelings that would have to be clarified.
That kind of talk needed to happen but, Jon decided, not tonight. Those words could wait until the morning. If the tired look on Martin’s face as he ducked his head down to stare at the safehouse through the windshield was any clue, he felt much the same.
“Huh.”
“Not what you were expecting?” Jon asked, unbuckling his seat belt.
Martin shook his head.
“When you said it was Daisy’s, I thought it would be something a bit more The Hills Have Eyes.”
He stepped out of the car and reached up to the sky to stretch his back out. When he turned, Jon was staring at him from the other side of the car, nonplussed.
“It’s a horror film.”
“Ah,” Jon pushed his glasses up his nose, “Right…”
Martin felt the corners of his mouth turn up and turned his face away.
“Shall we?”
“Y-Yes…”
Martin headed to the boot to grab the hastily-packed bags they had brought with them, while Jon stepped off of the short gravel path to root around in the bushes that lined the front of the house. Martin paused with a duffel bag hanging off of each arm and watched him dig through the shrubbery. Jon stuck his arm into a tiny gap between a plant and the generator tucked into the side of the house and began to rummage around. After a moment, he withdrew it with a triumphant huff, holding a small, dirt-covered box aloft.
“Spare key,” He explained as he turned back to Martin.
“Oh. She couldn’t get one of those fake rock things?”
“Too cliche.”
Martin huffed in amusement as Jon opened the box and pulled out the key, wrapped firmly in clingfilm. He wrestled with it for a moment before finally unwrapping it and getting the door open.
It creaked in protest and the musty smell of an unlived-in space hit them as they stepped over the threshold. Jon moved further into the short corridor heading for the next doorway while Martin tried the lightswitch by the front door. He flipped it up and down a few times to no avail.
“No electricity… Don’t suppose you know how to start the generator outside?”
Jon turned back and through the dim light coming through the open door, Martin could see his slight frown.
“No, no I’m afraid I don’t-”
He stopped speaking suddenly and his gaze drifted for a moment before his attention snapped back to Martin and his frown deepened.
“Oh. Wonderful. Now I know exactly how a generator works…”
With a cluck of his tongue, he brushed past Martin and stomped back outside to start fiddling with the machine. After a moment, Martin heard a low hum reverberate through the building. The hallway light started to glow a soft, dull orange.
Jon came back inside, shutting the door after himself.
“I’ve, uh, I’ve been thinking…” He shrugged off his jacket and hung it on one of the hooks attached to the wall, “I should stop trying to, um, See things, if, if we are going to keep a low profile. I don’t know if it will actually help but…”
He shrugged.
“But it’s not a bad idea,” Martin said, “It’ll probably help.”
“That’s… that’s the hope,” Jon sighed.
Martin hung up his own coat, gesturing for Jon to lead on.
The cottage seemed even smaller on the inside then it had looked on the outside. The kitchen and living room were one, bleeding into each other, and they began their exploration there. The furniture consisted of flat-pack shelves and a second-hand couch that had clearly been well-loved before it had been hidden away in this house.
Jon leaned over to examine the small fireplace built into the wall. The flue had been bricked up and any means or mechanisms to start a proper fire had long been removed. The fire poker remained however, hanging from its dusty wrought-iron holder. Jon tried very hard to not think about what use Daisy had had for it.
In the kitchen, Martin fiddled with the sink and made a satisfied hum as a cool, clear stream came out of the tap.
“Water seems fine.”
“Good, good…” Jon had wandered over to the bookcase to examine the limited offerings.
Martin inspected the cupboards. There was a small stockpile of dried goods and non-perishables, although he couldn’t help but shudder at the sight of so much canned food. He had had enough of that to last him a lifetime.
“Might be a good idea to pop back down to the village we passed through tomorrow?” He suggested, “Get the lay of the land, pick up some proper food?”
Jon nodded vaguely as he ran a finger along the mantlepiece. He sneered at the amount of dust.
“Ugh. We should clean too.”
“Tomorrow,” Martin agreed.
“Tomorrow.”
They looked over the bedroom together, a tiny narrow space with only a chest of drawers and a single bed wedged under a window with a blackout curtain. The bathroom led off of it- hosting a toilet, a cracked mirror, a sink, and what could charitably be called a shower unit.
Bedsheets were discovered in the bottom drawer and Martin made up the bed as Jon wrestled with the pillow covers.
There was a moment of silence after it was done, as they both stood and stared down at the bed. The blackout curtains hadn’t been fully drawn and a crack of moonlight slashed across the cream duvet, highlighting just how small it was.
Clearing his throat, Jon shifted in place, leaning away.
“I have a, uh, a sleeping bag, I brought… You should take the bed.”
Martin glanced over at him, the light from outside catching on his glasses for a second. His jaw twitched and he took a long slow breath.
“...Sure.”
He leaned down to grab his bag from where he had dropped it and headed into the bathroom to change.
Jon heaved a great sigh as the door shut behind him, a feeling similar to missing the last step on a staircase swooping in his stomach. He kneeled to pull the sleeping bag and his own pajamas out of his bag.
Without the buffer of the car engine rumbling, the thrill of their flight from England, or the numb shock of fresh trauma, Jon was becoming keenly aware of all the unsaid things that were wedged between Martin and himself.
The silence of the night crept in and over him like choking, blinding fog. He shook his head fiercely, rubbing the soft, worn cotton of his sleeping shirt to try and ground himself.
Some conversation had to happen, but not tonight. His mind was fried, thoughts tumbling around it and falling to pieces when he looked too hard at them. What he had to say was too important to get jumbled up by his mealy mouth.
He retreated to the bathroom when Martin left it and changed quickly, avoiding his own eye in the mirror. By the time he got out, Martin was already lying on his back on the bed. He had already put his glasses on the bedside table but he stared up at the ceiling as if he was about to be quizzed on it.
Jon lay down in the sleeping bag, trying to make as little noise as possible, only reaching up to put his own glasses on the table and wincing at the clatter.
He lay with his back to the bed, the solid frame a comfort, and pulled the cover up to his neck.
The smell of the dusty carpet crept over him and the sound of his own breath seemed too loud for the tiny room.
“...night,” Martin croaked softly from above.
“Night,” Jon sighed.
It was a long time before he even tried to close his eyes.
~~
Martin read once when he was young that people dream every night, but they only remember their dreams occasionally.
He was certain he hadn’t dreamt in a long time. Whenever he shut his eyes in the last few months to steal some sleep, his subconscious was covered and crammed with nothing but an echoing silence that he had been slowly embracing. Freedom from his own mind had seemed like a blessing at the time.
When he had his first nightmare for the first time in nearly a year, he remembered why he had felt that way.
It’s about Jane Prentiss, of all people. About her noises; her incessant knocking and her constant squelching.
More than Prentiss herself however, he dreamt about the mundane aspects of being held hostage in his own home. Eating from the same can of peaches that never seemed to empty, pacing his living room until he wore a thread in the carpet, not knowing how to count the hours or the days as they crawled on, knowing with a bitter, heavy certainty, that no-one was going to come looking for him.
His mother was happier in the nursing home, she would be thrilled to never hear from him again.
His co-workers would only care enough that his absence would force them to cover his work. They would feel annoyed at the most, if they even thought to feel anything about him.
Even Jane wouldn’t come for him. She wouldn’t have the decency to kill him quickly. She would just sit and stare and knock, knock, knock until isolation consumed him from the inside-out and he disappeared from a world that did not and never really had cared about him.
He could almost feel it, the numb tingle that would start in his fingers. That would work its way through his body until it ate his heart. Until there was nothing left of him but poor circulation and dull horror. Until all the awful things and cruel, cold people were far, far away from him, and he was finally left alone.
Until there was peace.
Martin didn’t wake up with a start, but groggy and disoriented, with the feeling of acid in the back of his throat.
It took him a moment of wondering why the shape of the bed beneath him was so unfamiliar to remember where he was, but as soon as he did, the disorientation was washed out of him in a wave of anger.
He grappled with the covers that he was tangled up in, casting them off before flopping onto his back to seethe.
The almost-familiar nightmare of Prentiss was a horror he could handle but to have it invaded and twisted by Loneliness was too much for him.
He pinched his arm, twisting the pale tab of skin between his fingers to remind himself that he was awake.
He was awake and he was out. The Lonely did not have him anymore; it was not allowed to have him anymore. Not when he had so blatantly rejected it, not when he had been led out of it’s very heart by his own two feet and the warmth of another hand holding onto his.
He had known that leaving the Lonely behind wouldn’t be as simple as just walking out of it, but he hadn’t expected it to play so dirty. He thought when it tried to come for him again, it would at least come when he was awake and braced for it.
Instead it was insidious, creeping into his subconscious under the guise of another fear, hissing at him that it was buried deeper into him than anything else, that no matter what else marked him, Forsaken had claimed him first.
It sold itself as cowardly comfort, granting him just enough distance to stop caring about the fearful routine of his life, letting him slip into numbness and parading as puffed-up peace.
That was not peace, he thought ferociously at nothing, glaring at the ceiling of the safehouse.
He let the anger flare hot in his cheeks and buzz in his head. Anger was good; anger was feeling something and he wanted to get used to that again, instead of the sensation that he had become accustomed to, of all his thoughts and emotions being echoes of something that had been very far away from him.
Eventually, scowling at nothing started to give way to a headache and he settled for letting it simmer down to annoyance, too tired to keep up the boiling roil of anger.
He would get some water, pace around the cold kitchen floor until his heartbeat calmed and try to steal some more sleep before the morning came.
It was only after he put his glasses on that he saw the bedside table was empty and the door to the bedroom had been cracked open. A thin beam of light sliced through into the darkness and landed on the empty sleeping bag that lay at the side of the bed.
Drawn from his own thoughts, Martin quietly sat up and pulled back the covers. Swinging his feet down to avoid the sleeping bag, he stood and began to make his way over to the door.
The lingering tendrils of his nightmare kept him from calling out but any fear that might have come over him at being alone in the room was waylaid by the sound of a bare foot tapping on a wooden floor that he could hear just past the door.
Pulling it open soundlessly, he stood in the doorway and looked towards the noise.
Jon stood at the kitchen sink, half leaning over it, with one elbow propped above it on the windowsill and the narrow window open just a crack. It let the night air in, thick with the smell of the countryside.
There was a lit cigarette hanging from Jon’s hand and Martin watched in silence as he took a drag from it and blew the smoke out of the window in a long, blossoming plume. His eyes stared out into nothing. Wherever his head was at, it was very far away from the safehouse.
Martin took a moment to drink in the scene, to just look at him.
He had wasted a lot of time over the last few years trying not to look at Jon.
Ever since he started at the archives and realised that the handsome stranger he had asked to help him wrangle a lost spaniel was his new boss, he had kept his head down and avoided his eye. First from embarrassment, which had faded to be replaced by a silly office crush, that in turn gave way to a deep and genuine love.
If he didn’t look, he wouldn’t have to see Jon glare or frown or be afraid. If he didn’t look, maybe Jon wouldn’t look back, wouldn’t see right through him in that way that he did that had nothing to do with being an avatar of an eldritch embodiment of watching.
After the Unknowing, he could barely look at his face as he lay in the hospital bed. It was washed-out against stiff white sheets, grey and corpse-like. Every time he glanced at his sunken eyes, he couldn’t help but beg for them to open, his own tearing up as he tried to hold back on the tide of grief that crashed over him.
Then after the hospital.
He wasn’t allowed to look.
Peter hadn’t explicitly forbidden it, but Martin knew his own heart well enough that just looking at Jon would be dangerous. That the careful walls that he was slowly building around himself would crumble as soon as he saw his eyes again. He thought it would be easier than it was, he thought he would just have to tamp down on his own desires. Instead, he had to deal with Jon practically ambushing him at every chance he got, forcing him to look.
His eyes were as rich and deep and alive as they had ever been.
He hadn’t even let himself look in the Lonely, he had had to be asked what he saw, wasn’t even sure that he was even seeing before the words trickled into his ears.
But when he did look- oh, when he saw.
Jon was too real for the Lonely, too solid, too present, some emotion so bare and blatant on his face that Martin wasn’t sure if he could put a name to it even if he had been compelled to.
He only knew that he had been right about looking at Jon. In an instant, he felt all the defenses he had built over the last couple of years crumbling into nothing, and he hadn’t looked away even once as he took his hand and let himself be led out of the broken and decimated isolation he had nearly given himself over to.
The thought chased away the aftershocks of his nightmare, replacing his anger with something akin to awe and leaving him with only a solid doorframe to lean on and nothing really left to lose.
So he watched Jon.
He didn’t look great.
The dark circles under his eyes made his gaunt face seem even more sunken, making Martin wonder if he had slept at all over the last few hours. His chin was covered in neglected stubble and his hair hung loosely around his face, grown long enough to brush against his shoulders in unwashed knots. His pajamas consisted of a faded t-shirt and old tracksuit bottoms, both baggy enough to drip off of his painfully-thin body.
Martin winced a little as he looked up and down his frame. Jon had always been slim but in the stark light streaming from the window, the edges and angles of his body stuck out sharply. Martin had no idea if he had been eating properly, or if he was still eating real food at all. He had heard through the grapevine that Jon had been surviving on statements, and as much he knew that abstaining from live statements was the right thing to do, he couldn’t help the flutter of pity in his chest to see him so clearly diminished.
One foot bounced rapidly up and down on the kitchen floor, Jon’s restlessness clear in every inch of him and Martin surprised himself by recognising it.
This was no show of repressed supernatural hunger or keen, fear-fueled desperation. This was the poorly-contained fidgeting Martin knew from his first days as an archival assistant. He had noticed it back then, how Jon never seemed to stay still, always pacing or shifting from foot to foot when he stood, and bouncing his knee or constantly rearranging his position when he sat.
Martin remembered afternoons when he would knock at the door of Jon’s office and find him hunched over his laptop with his legs folded under him on his chair, or striding back and forth with his nose buried in a sheaf of paper. Back then he had found it hopelessly endearing and now, in the stillness of the safehouse, he found it even more so. One of Jon’s unnoticed little habits had slipped through the net of trauma and change that they had all been caught in over the last few years and Martin felt a huge swell of relief that something so small and undeniably Jon hadn’t been taken from him.
He was so caught up in the feeling that he almost startled when Jon suddenly took another drag from the cigarette, the shift in the tableau bringing Martin back to the present.
Despite Jon’s best efforts, the smell of cigarette smoke was starting to leak into the kitchen, and Martin would prefer it didn’t reach the bedroom. Jon still seemed to be a million miles away so, shifting his weight away from the doorframe, Martin cleared his throat and knocked a knuckle on the door as quietly as he dared.
“Jon?”
Jon jumped a foot in the air, as if the knock had been a gunshot, and whirled around to face Martin, eyes as wide as saucers.
“Jesus!” He pressed his free hand to his chest, “Martin, you scared the life out of me, you-! Ah!”
As if he had just remembered where he was, he turned slightly to the sink again and stubbed out the cigarette with a hiss. Shifting so his back was to the sink and the still smoking butt crushed into it, he waved a hand through the air as if that could dismiss the lingering smell.
“What- What are you-? Are you-? E-Everything alright?” He stammered, still breathless with surprise.
All Martin could do was blink, bemused at his sudden panic. He didn’t think he had been that loud.
Watching Jon’s eyes rapidly dart from him to the open window, he tried to pin down what had him so startled. His hand still flapped at the puffs of stale smoke in the air.
“I-I was just-” Jon fished for an excuse, “I didn’t mean to- Thought you were- A-Are you laughing at me?”
Martin wasn’t laughing, but he felt a smile trying to fight its way onto his face.
If Jon was flustered about what he thought he was, he couldn’t help but find it funny. It seemed so silly, after everything.
“Jon,” He softly voiced his guess, “You know I don’t mind if you smoke, right?”
When Jon winced, mortification clear on his face, he knew his hunch had been right.
“I, um, I’m trying to quit- I mean I did quit, technically, after uni, but sometimes when I’m uh, stressed, it… It’s no excuse, just a- a bad habit…” He mumbled.
“Not your worst one,” Martin joked, still amused.
Jon’s face went blank and for an awful instant Martin thought he had crossed a line, until a slight, shy smile wound its way over Jon’s face and he let out a huff that was almost a laugh.
“No,” He rubbed the back of his neck, “No, I suppose not.”
Chuckling again, Martin made his way over to the sink and pulled a glass out of one of the cupboards.
Jon didn’t move away as he came closer, only turned so they were facing the same way. He did make a face however as Martin flicked on the tap and the butt of his cigarette swirled down the drain, leaving a streak of wet ash as it went.
“Sorry.”
“You’re fine.”
Martin filled his glass and sipped carefully. Jon leaned slightly over the sink and looked him over.
“I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“Hmm, oh no, no, just… don’t sleep great these days.”
It wasn’t exactly a lie, but he didn’t really feel like picking through his dreams right now. If Jon picked up on the half-truth, he didn’t show it, only nodded slightly.
“Mmm, same for me. Hence the…” He gestured to the ash stain before reaching up to close the kitchen window.
“Suppose we’ll just have to get used to it, yeah?” Martin said, just to say something.
“I suppose so.”
Martin chugged the rest of the glass and set it on the draining board to drip-dry. The weight of drowsiness was settling back over his shoulders and he was keen to try sleeping again.
“Right,” He rolled his head back to stretch out his neck, before looking to Jon, “Will we give it another go?”
“Ah, sure.”
Jon’s shuffling footsteps followed him back into the bedroom and as they both took off their glasses and lay down in their respective beds, they did so facing each other.
Jon looked up at Martin, his face half-pressed into his pillow.
“I hope you sleep…” Jon sighed, “Well, I just hope you sleep.”
Martin huffed.
“You too, Jon.”
Neither of them even tried to close their eyes. Instead they just looked at each other. In the darkness, Martin felt the weight on Jon’s eyes on him like another duvet. They ate up and reflected what little light there was in the room, making Jon look like an overgrown cat.
Jon had never held back from looking at Martin- a mirror image of his own habits. Even before the Eye had dug its way into his brain, even though Martin had hunched his shoulders and lightened his footsteps and did his best to not be noticed, Jon had always seen him.
He saw every mistake he made and expected better each time he chastised him. He saw the fear in him when he crashed into his office to babble about Prentiss and instantly believed it. He saw every extended hand and soft word that he offered to try and hold things together when their world as they knew it crumbled around their heads.
He didn’t always acknowledge it -there were times when he didn’t even seem aware of it- but Jon had never let Martin go unseen.
It became more obvious after the coma; the ever-growing influence of Beholding on Jon’s mind and body extending his senses, in junction with his desperation for Martin to know that he was back and alive, made it difficult to hide from his sight, even with the veil of Loneliness draped over his shoulders.
In the stillness of the safehouse, being seen felt like safety.
Some small part of his brain knew that his sense of what was safe and what wasn’t had been twisted over the years. The memory of Jess Terrell’s pale terror-struck face as she told him of her own tale of being watched would stay with him for a long time, and he was no fool to think that all the times he caught Jon watching him was solely of his own volition.
A bigger part of his brain knew that the Eye’s scrutiny wouldn’t cause him any direct harm; knew that if he had to be regarded by any of the terrible, unknowable things that dictated the course of his life, he would be safest with the one that paid his salary.
Most of his mind however, was soothed simply by the comfort of having another person close to him, by having Jon close to him. He met his gaze in the dark of the bedroom, blinking slowly as his eyelids grew heavier. Jon merely watched and the strength of his stare was enough to drive off the last few clinging threads of the Lonely that Martin’s nightmare had wound around his thoughts. He shut his eyes, ready to let sleep take him again, and let the knowledge that he would not wake up alone sink into his bones.
“G’night Jon,” He murmured into the sheets.
The silence of the countryside bled into his own breaths, broken only by a hoarse whisper.
“Night.”