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When Jon blinks his eyes open, stares blankly at Martin, and says, “Wh… what?” Martin can tell it’s going to be a rough day.
When Jon scrambles up into a sitting position and then retreats across the bed away from him so fast that he falls off the other side onto the floor, then reverses all the way across the carpet until he’s got his back against the wall, and stares at Martin with wide, panicked eyes, Martin knows it’s going to be a really rough day.
And when Jon gets to his feet, picks up a pair of scissors from on top of the chest of drawers, and brandishes it at Martin with a shaking hand, then demands, “Where’s Tim?” Martin can only brace himself and try to come up with a halfway decent response. The next few hours are not going to be fun.
They’ve been here, in this new universe, although it’s not so new any more, for almost a decade, but this still happens sometimes. Not as often as it used to, thank god. They don’t know what happened to the fears when Martin stabbed Jon and cut the tether, whether they’re in some new universe or left behind in the old one, even whether this is the only one they’re not in. All they know is that they’re not here. Martin stabbed Jon and Jon died and the Beholding was ripped out of him and then… and then they were here. Jon had been saved, somehow, even though they both knew he’d been dead, and they’d stayed together, somehow, even though there had been a few times in that first year or so when they almost hadn’t. But they worked through it all, and now things are good.
Mostly.
They both have nightmares, though fewer as time goes on, and Jon still has terrible panic attacks, and sometimes Martin has to leave and be alone for a few days or become unmanageably overwhelmed, but these are all things they know how to deal with, even if they’re not fun.
They know how to deal with this, too. It’ll be all right. Jon’s memory will return in dribs and drabs throughout the day, and by the time they go to bed, he’ll be more or less back to normal, though probably rather shaken and quiet. It’s even a Saturday today, so Martin doesn’t need to worry about calling either of them out from work.
“Where’s Tim?” Jon demands again, in a wavering voice. “Who are you?”
Right. Things will be better soon enough, but for now, Martin has a terrified, memory-impaired Jon to soothe and comfort as best he can.
“Tim’s not here right now,” he says gently. He gets out of bed, but doesn’t come round it to approach Jon. His instinct when Jon is in distress is always to wrap him up safely in his arms, but this is the one and only situation where that will make things worse instead of better. “I’m Martin. I work at the Magnus Institute?”
He’s guessing this will be at least vaguely reassuring. Jon knows Tim, but not Martin, which means his mind must be somewhere between Tim starting at the Institute and all of them transferring to the archives. Martin can work with that, although this is always a lot easier if Jon at least remembers who he is. Most of the time he does.
Jon gives a shrill, slightly hysterical laugh. “And that’s supposed to make me feel better about waking up in bed with you, is it?” he says, which, fair.
“No, sorry,” Martin says. It goes better when he can keep his cool. Once, right at the beginning, before they’d figured out the best way to handle it, he’d scared Jon so badly that he’d fled the house. They’d still been living in London at the time, and Jon had got himself lost enough that even when his memories had come back he hadn’t been able to find his way home until after midnight.
No matter how badly today goes, Martin reminds himself, he knows how to calm Jon, now. He’ll be able to keep him safe, if not happy, until his memories start to return. It’ll never be as bad as that first time.
“Sorry,” he says again. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Um, how much do you remember?” Being direct with Jon usually works best. His scissors-wielding hand doesn’t drop, but he does pull it closer in to his body and blink for a moment, considering.
“Remember of what?” he says at last. He’s still trembling, still eyeing Martin with fear, but at least he’s talking. That’s always the first step.
“Let’s start with last night,” Martin says. “Do you remember how we got here?”
Jon scowls at him, lifting the scissors again. Martin doesn’t react. Jon’s never actually tried to hurt him, even at his most disorientated.
“No,” Jon says flatly. “Did you drug me?”
Martin keeps his face carefully serious, though the idea is laughable.
“No,” he says quietly. “I didn’t. I never would. What’s the last thing you do remember?”
Jon’s face scrunches up in a way Martin can’t help but find helplessly endearing, even after all these years. He shakes his head, frustrated.
“I don’t…” he starts, and uses his non-scissors-wielding hand to rub at his face. “It’s all blurry. Tim and I went out for dinner, but I’m not sure if that was last night, or…” He shakes his head again. Then he gives Martin a pleading look. “Is Tim all right?”
Martin’s stomach sinks. Jon and Tim dated for a few months back in their research days, before Jon had broken it off. They’d stayed friends, though, until Prentiss had attacked the Institute and Sasha had been replaced and everything had gone… bad. He doesn’t know what to tell Jon. It soothes him in the moment if Martin goes along with pretending it’s whatever year his mind has taken him to, but it makes it much harder when he starts getting memories back. They’ve tried it both ways and settled, a long time ago, on Martin telling Jon the truth. Greater distress in the short term, but much less in the longer.
So Martin scrubs wearily at his own face and says, “I’m sorry, Jon, but he’s actually not.”
The scissors shake for a moment, and then drop to Jon’s side. “Is that why I’m here?” he says. “Is… did something happen to us both?”
“Kind of,” Martin admits. “Jon, what I’m about to tell you is the truth, okay? There’s some stuff you’ve forgotten. You actually seem to be missing a few years of time, right now.”
Jon stares at him. “You mean like… like amnesia?”
“Yeah, something like that. It’s not the first time this has happened.”
“Why should I believe you?” Jon demands, but he does, Martin can tell. A little of his own anxiety settles down. Jon always does believe him, trust him, far more quickly than he objectively ought to at waking up in a stranger’s bed, far more than he would if it was anyone else. They think it’s because even though his memories are gone, all his instincts still remain, and the instinct to trust Martin is one of the deepest he has.
He doesn’t point this out, though. It doesn’t tend to go down well. Instead, he gives Jon a rather wan smile and says, “You don’t have to believe me, that’s your choice. But I’m telling the truth. We’ve been together for a while now. That’s why we were in bed like that.”
Jon frowns at him, puzzled more than angry. “But what about Tim?” he says. “Me and Tim, we’re together. What happened?”
“That’s…” Martin hesitates. “That’s a complicated story. I can tell you if you really want me to, but your memories usually start coming back within a few hours, and I think it might be less upsetting to just let that happen. You’ll get the feelings and the context that way, instead of just me telling you.”
“I want to know,” Jon insists. Of course he does. He can’t help himself.
“Okay,” Martin says, with fond resignation. “You’re probably not going to like it, though. You broke up with him.”
“What? Why would I do that?”
“Because you thought you’d be better off as friends. You were still only just working out your feelings about being asexual, and you felt that being in a relationship just then was too much for you.”
For several long moments, Jon is silent. Then he says, in a very small voice, “How did you know that?”
“Because you told me. We’ve talked about it quite a few times.” Martin gives him a careful smile. “You’re a lot better at talking about stuff than you used to be.”
“Oh.” Jon doesn’t seem to know what to say to this. Martin’s heart twists with sympathy. At least Jon is calm now, and believing what he’s saying, but there’s no way to make this easy for him.
“You stayed friends,” he adds gently. “You were really close for a long time after that.” He pauses, wondering whether he ought to mention how it ended. There’s being honest and then there’s just being cruel. But Jon, of course, has already picked up on the fact that he isn’t saying everything.
“And then what happened?” he says sharply. “You keep saying were and was. Aren’t we friends any more?”
Martin shuts his eyes for a moment. What happened between Prentiss attacking the Institute and Jon pulling him out of the Lonely is still the period of his life he most hates thinking or talking about. He’s not as bad at it as he was, thanks to the last few years of therapy, but still. It’s not exactly fun.
He opens his eyes again and grabs a fidget toy off his bedside table, twirling it between his fingers. Jon’s eyes follow his movements, but he doesn’t comment. Even if he doesn’t say so, Martin knows this is something he understands.
“Some stuff happened,” he says. “Bad stuff. And it… it drove you apart. And then Tim died. I’m so sorry, Jon.”
Quietly, Jon puts the scissors down on top of the chest of drawers, his hand going to cover his mouth.
“He’s dead?” he says, and he sounds small and lost and afraid. “Tim’s dead?”
Martin swallows against the lump in his throat. Tim’s funeral had been a quiet affair. He’d exchanged a few words with Tim’s parents, but they hadn’t known about any of what had happened, and hadn’t seemed interested in talking to one of Tim’s friends. Tim hadn’t been close to them, not for a long time. Melanie and Basira hadn’t gone, and Martin couldn’t blame them. They’d only ever known Tim at his worst.
He pulls his mind away from the memory. Jon needs him right now. It’s his turn to be the strong one.
“Yeah,” he says. “He… yeah.” And again, helplessly, “I’m sorry.”
Jon shakes his head. He takes his hand away from his mouth, shakes his head again. Then he looks back up at Martin. “Was it my fault?”
“No,” Martin says. “It wasn’t.”
“Are you sure?” Jon is frowning again. He can’t be remembering, not properly. He never remembers this quickly. But, Martin supposes, the instinct to assume that everything terrible that happens is his own fault, or will be blamed on him, still exists, just like the instinct to trust Martin. It doesn’t come as often or as intensely as it used to, but it tends to rear its head in moments of high stress. He wishes he could hug Jon.
“Yes,” he says steadily. “I’m absolutely sure. I’m not going to pretend you always made good choices. None of us did, back then. We were all just a… a huge mess. But Tim dying wasn’t your fault. It was the fault of some very, very shitty people. He died stopping them.” It isn’t perfectly true; the ritual would have failed whether any of them had been there or not. But they didn’t know that at the time, and that makes it true enough.
Jon lets out a long, tired sigh. He comes forward and sits down on the edge of the bed. Some of the heavy anxiety lifts from Martin’s shoulders. Jon might not know why he trusts Martin, but he does. They’re going to be okay, even if this is awful right now. In all the years they’ve been coping with Jon’s sporadic memory lapses together, Jon’s mind has never taken him back to those few months when he and Tim dated before. Martin hadn’t realised quite how painful it would be.
“Do you want to get dressed?” he says, hoping to steer them gently away from the topic. “I’ll get us some breakfast and we can talk more, if you want to, or just sit and read or something. Whatever you want.”
“All right,” Jon says, still quiet and subdued. Then he seems to stir himself a little. “Do you have something I can wear?”
Despite himself, Martin has to smile. “Your clothes are in the left hand side of the wardrobe,” he says, pointing. “And the third drawer down in the chest of drawers.”
“Oh.” Jon turns his head to look at Martin. “We… we really do live together?”
“Yep.” Martin watches him carefully for signs of distress, but Jon mostly just looks thoughtful and a bit sad. He grabs the clothes he laid out for himself last night. “I’ll go and change in the bathroom, okay?”
Jon nods, and Martin hurries to shut himself in the bathroom and the lock the door. He leans against it, letting out a gusty sigh. Christ. It’s not that he minds helping Jon when he’s like this. It’s just that… well, that had been a lot, especially for first thing in the morning. It’s a relief to have a couple of minutes to himself, just to catch his breath and get his head on straight.
Still, he doesn’t linger. He never likes leaving Jon alone for too long when he’s like this. There are so many things that could happen. Someone could call Jon and confuse him even further. He could find the knitting he’s halfway through and grow unaccountably upset at the idea that he knits, which sounds ridiculous, but it wouldn’t be the first time. There could be a spider.
But when he gets back to the bedroom everything’s normal. Jon has changed into a pair of exceptionally neat black jeans that he only cracks out when he wants to appear more in control than he feels, and a t-shirt paired with what’s obviously the least slouchy cardigan he was able to find in the wardrobe. Martin doesn’t comment, although it hurts him a little to see Jon choose defensiveness over comfort. Sometimes he forgets how much Jon has changed, how much more comfortable he is with simply being himself these days.
Jon looks up as he comes in, and holds something out.
“Martin,” he says, a slight tremor in his voice. “This is…”
Martin takes the framed picture, which usually stands in pride of place on Jon’s bedside table.
“One of our wedding pictures,” he says. He gives Jon a small, careful smile. “It’s your favourite one, that’s why you keep it there. You always say that you photograph terribly and this is the only picture from the whole day where you can tell that you’re actually happy to be marrying me.”
Jon scrunches his nose up. “I do photograph terribly,” he says. He takes the picture back from Martin. The photographer had caught them in a rare quiet moment, and they’re gazing into each other’s faces, Jon’s tilted up towards Martin’s. A ray of sunshine catches his skin, making it glow softly, and his face is filled with wonder. “I look very happy,” he says quietly.
“You were. So was I. It was an amazing day. And, for the record, I think you look happy in all the pictures. It’s only you who doesn’t.”
For the first time since waking up, Jon smiles. It’s fleeting and a little fragile, but it’s a smile. He replaces the picture on the bedside table.
“It feels… strange,” he says. “I don’t even know you, but I have this whole life with you, and Tim’s just…”
“I know,” Martin says quietly. He refrains from reaching out to take Jon’s hand, as he normally would.
“I want to make it work between us,” Jon says. “Wanted, I mean.” He shakes his head. “That feels wrong. It feels like want. Like it’s still happening.”
“I know,” Martin says again. “It’s okay. You can say want.”
“It doesn’t seem very fair to you.”
“Honestly, it’s fine,” Martin says, and he means it from the bottom of his heart. “Tim was… he was amazing. And for what it’s worth, I think it did work between you, even if it ended up not being romantic. I used to be so envious of how close you were.”
Jon nods. He still looks sad, though. Martin can’t really blame him for that. He can try to imagine what it’s like for Jon, suddenly being told that he’s missed a whole chunk of time and that his entire life went to shit during that time, but no matter how vivid his imaginings, he can never entirely comprehend how it must feel.
“Do you want to use the bathroom?” he says gently, hoping to steer them away from difficult topics, at least for a while. “Your stuff’s in the left hand side of the cabinet, and the yellow toothbrush, but obviously feel free to use anything in there.”
“Thank you,” Jon says, politely, as though he’s talking to a stranger, which of course he is, and slips out of the room. Martin sighs again.
Some ten minutes later, the bathroom door opens and he hears Jon pad back out of the bathroom, go into the bedroom for a minute, and then descend the stairs. A moment later, he appears in the kitchen doorway, where Martin’s just put the kettle on and started scrambling some eggs, his sharp brown eyes darting around the room, taking in every detail.
“This is a nice house,” he says, a bit abruptly.
“Yeah,” Martin says. “We got pretty lucky, although moving away from London helped a lot with finding somewhere nicer that we could actually afford.”
“Where…” Jon makes a face. “This seems like a ridiculous question, but where are we?”
“It’s not ridiculous,” Martin tells him. “We’re in North Yorkshire, a village a few miles outside of Whitby. We wanted to move somewhere quiet, with countryside around. And you like living near the sea again. Public transport’s a bit shite, but I’ve learned to drive. You did quite a bit of the teaching, actually.”
Jon blinks at him for a moment, digesting all of this.
“I looked in the mirror,” he says, which is enough of a non sequitur that for a moment Martin isn’t quite sure how to answer. “I’m older. A lot older.”
“Yeah,” Martin says cautiously. “I think you’re missing about fourteen years.”
Jon pulls one of the kitchen chairs out from the table and sits down, resting his head in his hands for a moment. It’s the chair he always sits in, Martin thinks in the corner of his mind that’s cataloguing every clue about Jon’s state. That’s good. He may not consciously remember, but everything’s still there.
“I just,” he says, and stops again. At last he shrugs and mumbles, “It’s like another life.”
Martin doesn’t say that it very literally is another life, given that they’re in a whole other universe from the one Jon is remembering. That will entail more explanation than he really wants to get into, and anyway, it’s so intrinsically unbelievable that the two times he has tried it, it almost scared Jon into fleeing the house again. It wouldn’t be so bad here in the village, where everybody knows them and would be able to get him home again, as it was in London, but it wouldn’t exactly be ideal.
So he just says, “Yeah,” again, and, “A lot’s happened.”
Jon nods, and they both fall silent, at least until Miss Kitty Bennet, their little black cat, comes trotting in through the cat flap and makes her urgent need for a very large breakfast vociferously known. Jon, completely unsurprisingly, flings himself out of his chair to kneel on the floor beside her and is thrilled when she rubs her head up against his hands, purring noisily.
“You’re her favourite,” Martin tells him, amused. “It’s only because you’re constantly sneaking her treats and letting her into the bedroom, but you’re unbelievably smug about it.”
Jon grins up at him. Smugly. Martin shakes his head, tells him where the cat food is, and lets him feed and fuss over Miss Kitty Bennet while Martin finishes making breakfast for the humans. He has to laugh a little at Jon’s surprise when he finds that Martin has made both his scrambled eggs and his tea in exactly the way he likes best.
“Tim always does the eggs too soft,” he says, wrinkling his nose. “He likes them like that.” He doesn’t correct the present tense this time, although he does scowl fretfully down at his eggs before taking a bite.
“Tell me about him,” Martin says impulsively, as he sits down opposite Jon and starts on his own eggs. Jon looks up, eyes rather wide.
“What?”
“Tim,” Martin says. “Tell me about him. What’s it like dating him? He and I never… I mean, we did a sort of friends with benefits thing for a while, while I was going through a rough time, but we never properly dated.”
“You… did?” Jon says a bit faintly, and Martin grimaces.
“Sorry, not relevant. Long after you broke up, obviously. I didn’t even know him when you guys were together. Um. Christ, shut up Martin. I just mean, I’d like to know what he was like back then. What he is like, you know, to you.”
Jon nods. His eyebrows scrunch together, but not in an anxious way, just a thoughtful one. He eats a mouthful of eggs, and then a second one.
Then he looks across the table at Martin and says, “He’s nice.”
Martin can’t help but smile. “Yeah,” he agrees.
“He’s kind,” Jon says. He takes another bite of eggs, chews, and swallows. “He’s… he notices things about me. He always takes spiders away for me. He noticed that I…” he fidgets for a moment with his fork, then says, in a rush, “That I don’t like eye contact, but he doesn’t mind. He doesn’t think it’s weird. He told me it was fine if I didn’t try to make eye contact with him and he’d rather I was comfortable. He makes things seem easy, you know? Like… like being me is all right.”
There’s a painful lump in Martin’s throat. It’s not that any of this is new information. He’s experienced Tim’s easy acceptance of people and their quirks and idiosyncracies for himself. He remembers Tim gentling his usual brash manner into something quieter and more careful, during their first few months in the archives, so as not to intimidate him.
But it’s different, somehow, hearing it like this. Jon’s simple, straightforward appreciation of Tim’s kindness feels different without the weight of guilt and grief that inevitably, comes along with any discussion of him. He isn’t agonising over the way he pushed Tim away after Jane Prentiss. There’s none of the usual desperate tension in his body as he remembers Tim’s last moments. He isn’t even confessing, shamefaced, how much it hurt that Tim blamed him for Sasha’s death. He’s just… happy.
“And he’s funny,” Jon says. “I’m not always very good at seeing the… the…” He hesitates.
“The lighter side of things?” Martin suggests.
Jon flashes him an ephemeral little smile. “Yes,” he says. “Exactly. It’s nice to have someone who reminds me that that exists.”
He’s said the same thing of Martin before, in almost exactly those words. Something about that little thread of connection between them makes the lump in Martin’s throat grow even more painful.
“Are you all right?” Jon says, and that’s when Martin realises that his eyes have filled with tears.
“Sorry, yeah, I’m fine,” he says, quickly dashing them away with the back of his hand. Jon is looking at him with concern. “Seriously. It’s just… I miss him. That’s all.”
Jon’s face clouds over. “I suppose I must, too,” he says.
“You do.”
They both fall silent after that. Once they’ve finished their breakfast, Jon insists on doing the washing up, as if he’s a guest in Martin’s home. Martin doesn’t object, even though his instinct is to cosset and coddle Jon as much as possible. Most of the time Jon quite likes that, but not when he’s feeling this vulnerable. Right now it would only make him bristle and snap.
Instead, Martin stands around rather awkwardly with a tea towel to dry the things as Jon washes them, and then offers Jon This is How You Lose the Time War to read, taking care to phrase the suggestion in a way that won’t make him scowl and decide to do something else just out of contrariness. With its rich writing style and deep well of references, it’s the sort of book Jon tends to gravitate towards, but it’s the love story at the heart of it all that gets him sobbing every time. It’s even short enough that Jon can race through it in two or three hours, depending on how hard he’s concentrating, which makes it the ideal book to give him on a day like today. This will be the fourth time he’s read it for the first time.
As predicted, Jon is sniffling quietly into his cardigan sleeve by the time he finishes the book a while after lunch. He’s been rather distracted, keeps getting up to wander around the house, poking into odd corners and demanding Martin explain various things he finds, so it takes him rather longer than usual. Martin wonders whether this is because he’s lost so much time. It’d make sense, usually he remembers at least some of their time together, even if it’s just the very beginning. This time, pretty much every single thing is new to him.
“Enjoy the book?” Martin says as Jon puts it down on the arm of the armchair and scrubs roughly at his face with his sleeves.
“It was… fine,” Jon says, his head ducked right down as though he thinks Martin might not have noticed his tears. Martin grins to himself.
“Need a tissue?” he says, crossing the room to hold the box out to Jon, who lets out a gusty sigh.
“Yes, yes, thank you, darling,” he says.
And then he freezes, hand hovering just above the tissue box, a stray tear trickling down his cheek.
“I… I don’t know why I said that,” he says. He grabs at a tissue and blows his nose with highly unnecessary vigour.
Outwardly, Martin remains calm. He merely shrugs and says, “It’s fine. Not the first time,” which makes Jon go all silent and wide-eyed. Inwardly, though, he’s doing a wild, ungainly dance of relief. Jon’s memories always do return, but Martin can’t help being afraid, every time, that they won’t.
An hour or so after that, over another cup of tea, Jon frowns suddenly at Martin, asks him if they ever went on holiday, and proceeds to describe Daisy’s safe house in the Highlands with an impressive level of detail. A while later, when the cat flap clunks to let Miss Kitty Bennet out, he cries,
“The Admiral!” and Martin, caught by surprise, bursts out laughing.
Even so, it isn’t until several hours later that it all comes back properly. Jon retreats to the bedroom after dinner to lie down for a while, exhausted by being buffetted back and forth by his own mind, and it’s as Martin’s in the kitchen, making them each yet another cup of tea, that he hears Jon’s footsteps once again on the stairs. This time, when he appears in the kitchen doorway, the quiet devastation on his face has Martin dropping the tea bags on the counter and crossing the room quickly.
“He’s really dead,” Jon says, and lunges forward to bury his face in Martin’s shoulder, his body shaking with sobs.
“Oh,” Martin says. He wraps his arms tightly around Jon. “Yeah, he is. I’m sorry.”
“I can’t believe I…” Jon’s breath hitches. “I forgot.”
“It’s not your fault,” Martin says, rubbing little circles into Jon’s back and swaying him slightly from side to side, which he always finds soothing. “It happens sometimes, remember? Everything always comes back, though.”
“I know,” Jon says, his voice muffled by Martin’s shoulder. A few minutes pass. Jon’s sobs die into sniffles, and eventually he pulls back and wipes his eyes and nose with the tissue Martin hands him. “I almost wish I hadn’t remembered.”
“Oh, Jon.” Martin’s stomach twists sharply with sympathy.
“Not… I don’t mean you,” Jon adds quickly. “I’m glad I remembered you. I’m…” he gives a slightly wet little laugh. “I can’t believe I forgot you completely. I just mean Tim.”
“I know, my love,” Martin says. He gives Jon another quick hug and drops a kiss on the top of his head. “I know what you meant.”
“I was so happy,” Jon says forlornly.
“I know,” Martin says yet again. “I’m sorry. What can I do?”
Jon sighs and rubs at his eyes. He looks tired and miserable, and Martin can’t blame him.
Behind him, on the counter, the kettle boils and clicks itself off.
“A cup of tea would be nice,” Jon says.
So Martin makes the tea and they go and sit on the sofa together, Jon cuddled as close as possible to Martin without actually being in his lap. Martin puts his arm around Jon’s shoulders and holds him, and they drink their tea in silence.
“I miss him,” Jon says at last. “It’s been so long that I’ve… I haven’t forgotten, but it’s not as… it doesn’t hurt as much, mostly. Now it’s all…” He sighs, lays his head on Martin’s shoulder, brushes his fingers absently over the soft wool of Martin’s jumper. “It’s all sharp.”
“I bet it is,” Martin says softly. He can’t understand, not entirely, what these days are like for Jon, but Tim has been brought back into sharp relief for him, too. For a moment he hesitates, not sure whether it’ll be comforting to Jon or not, and then he says, “It was nice to hear you talk about him, though. You two were good for each other for much longer than you weren’t.”
Jon smiles faintly. “I suppose we were,” he says.
There’s another long silence. Miss Kitty Bennet returns through the cat flap and trots briskly into the room to jump onto the sofa and sprawl herself across both their laps. Martin rubs her behind the ears and Jon, the only one permitted the privilege, scratches gently at her belly. He turns, tired but more peaceful than he’s been all day, to look at Martin.
“I am sorry about threatening you with the scissors, though,” he says.
And Martin laughs.
They’re okay.