Work Text:
4:39 PM exactly, October 31st, 2018.
It usually took Jon about half an hour to read a Statement, long enough for Martin to take a leisurely stroll down the gravel path that led to the little grocery at the edge of the village. The route went by a pasture, and if Martin was lucky a few shaggy Highland cows would be out grazing yet. The sun sat on the horizon, a ruddy disk obscured by low clouds. He stopped at the bottom of the hill to listen to the wind in the grass.
There wasn’t any wind. It died abruptly just after he reached the bottom of the hill, and now the air was completely still. It settled around him, cold and heavy, smelling like the hour before a storm. The prickle rising on his arms made him look around for lightning, but the clouds were blank and pale gray.
“Right,” Martin said to himself. “This is not good. Not at all.” He started back up the hill as briskly as he could. He ought to have stayed nearby, kept watch. Daisy’s safe house might have protected them from natural enemies--but from supernatural ones? Who was it? Had Elias found them? Or was it another Entity they had made an enemy of?
He tried to look around, to see if he could pick out the shape of the Not-Sasha or the Distortion’s yellow door, but he found himself transfixed, pinned under a familiar piercing gaze that was stripped bare of the fondness that made it bearable. He couldn’t even let out the breath he had taken. Then, all at once, everything around him, from the fog-shrouded cows on the hillside to the blades of grass on the verge, to the stones that contained the pasture, screamed.
The hill grew steeper and the ground unstable beneath his feet. Martin slipped on loose pebbles and fell to his knees. The earth sank under his weight, his hands sinking unnaturally into soil gone foul and sticky. He felt his knees squishing down into it, threatening to become trapped. He struggled upright, then forward along the path, each step sinking deeper into ground that hadn’t even been damp when he’d started his walk. Before the Buried could drag him under, he reached the side of the road to walk on the verge, which seemed more stable, even if it was overrun by insects and worms frantically trying to escape the path.
He found the remnant of a stone wall on which he could perch a moment to get his bearings and catch his breath. The thought of a grounding exercise he’d been taught a long time ago crossed his mind and he laughed bitterly. Five things he could see, was it? Fine. A sky gone sickly green that, if you looked at it too long, seemed to grow eyes. The grass of the verge winding itself into tighter and tighter spirals. A spider cowering on his shoe. A cow—but not a good cow—not at all. A very not-good cow. Martin hopped off the boulder and ran a few steps uphill until he was sure the cow-thing could no longer see him.
Curls of fog, rising up from the suddenly muddy ground, too opaque to be natural. That made five. He persisted with the grim grounding task while picking his way from one relatively stable bit of ground to another. Four things he could hear. The wind had returned to tear through the grass as though it could wound the blades. The howling of the not-good cows sinking into the liquefying pasture behind him. The slap of his feet on fallen leaves as he ran. His breath hissing in his ears.
Three things he could feel. The hill was steepest here, and his lungs ached with the effort of the climb. His jumper, soft at his throat and wrists, wet with sweat and mud where he’d nearly been sucked into the road. The pricking of nascent tears. Two things to smell. His nose twinged at the scent of smoke from the safe house fireplace as the ground began to level out beneath him, then he caught a whiff of the curry they’d shared for lunch as he burst through the door.
Jon lay curled on the floor with his eyes wide open. Ink-spattered papers were crumpled in his hands. Martin knelt beside him to pull them out and found weeping crescents in Jon’s palms from where his fingernails had dug into them. He tasted ash in his mouth and sat down hard, too desolate to breathe air that felt too heavy to take into his lungs. He supposed he was grounded now, for a particular value of grounded.
It took some time for his voice to return and his limbs to respond to his commands. “Wake up,” he said, his voice cracking. “Wake up!” At least the second time he could hear his own voice. He pulled Jon into his lap, but his partner was as stiff and unresponsive as a body dead for hours. Had it been hours?
“Wait,” he told himself after catching his fingers reaching for the pulse point in Jon’s wrist. Jon hadn’t had a proper pulse in a long time, so Martin wouldn’t know that way. “Jon.” No response. Martin shook him harder. “Jon.” He shouted the last into Jon’s ear and finally, finally he was rewarded by a faint twitch. But no more. “Jon!” He reached out to slap Jon’s cheek, regretting it almost as soon as he did so, but this time, Jon turned his face toward him, and the eyes that had been staring past him focused.
Jon stuttered, then said, “Oh God. What happened?” From the tone of his voice, Martin could tell he already Knew.