Chapter Text
There was more. Jon knew without wanting to there was more. There was the next time they found castaways and brought them aboard, and Martin stared at the slow spread of blood against the deck, minute by minute diluted by the rain, as Lukas’ arm wrapped around him with fingers that bruised, as Martin thought surely he was supposed to feel...something. And then there was later, when Lukas brought him to a room that must have been his with a grip around his wrist that Martin supposed should have hurt, but felt like barely anything at all through the cloud.
Fingers digging into pale flesh—
Roiling fog—
The creak of bed springs—
The Eye wanted to hear it all, but the part of him that was still Jonathan Sims wanted anything but.
“Stop,” he managed to gasp out, his eyes screwed shut.
Martin’s voice went quiet. The statement finished.
Jon blindly cast a hand out to steady himself on the desk, his legs shaking, his hands shaking, the whole of his body shaking with anger and sorrow and disgust at himself, that he felt full, sated.
When he opened his eyes, Martin was staring at him, a crease in his brow. Jon thought he looked a little paler, but for all it was worth, Martin looked no different than he had before he’d started to speak. “Are you alright?” Martin asked him, and it was so ridiculous Jon barked out a laugh that had Martin’s expression furrowing further.
How could Martin ask if he was alright? When Martin had...
When Lukas had—
Jon felt, abruptly, sick. Dizzy with horror.
He didn’t know when he’d ended up on the floor by the desk, but suddenly Martin was there, a familiar presence at his side, smelling like the sea.
He hadn’t always smelled like that, the Eye delighted in informing him. Martin had liked lavender scented things, citrus-y things, before Peter Lukas had found him and molded him and made him anew. He’d liked oversized sweaters and peach tea and warm blankets and poetry—
Jon was crying. He didn’t know when it had started. Hot tears carved their way down his cheeks, and Martin’s arms were wrapped around him, trying to comfort, but Jon wasn’t the one who should be taking comfort, he wasn’t the one who—
Who had been—
“I’m sorry,” Jon managed, his throat thick with tears, muffled in the curve of Martin’s neck and shoulder.
He felt Martin shake his head, his arms tightening around him.
Neither of them said anything more for a long while. Jon’s fingers tangled in the holes of Martin’s knit sweater. He forced himself to focus only on the feeling of Martin’s arms around him,—one around his middle and his other hand absently running over his hair—the feeling of Martin’s shoulders rising ever so slightly with each breath, the jump of his heartbeat at the base of his throat. And yet, he couldn’t banish that guilt for finding comfort in it, even though he felt shaky, sick, in the wake of Martin’s statement.
“Are you alright?” Jon asked him, the words sticking in his throat.
Martin was silent for a long beat, but his fingers didn’t stop their gentle motion through Jon’s hair.
Finally he said, as if on a sigh, “I don’t really know how to answer that, Jon.”
Jon’s grip around him, unconsciously, tightened. As if, if he didn’t hold on hard enough, the fog would take him back—Lukas would take him back. It was a ridiculous thought. A futile one. That had already happened, after all.
“Of course not,” Jon murmured, looking up, his nose brushing the soft skin under Martin’s jaw. “Of course, I-I’m sorry—”
“Stop apologizing, love,” Martin said, tiredly.
Jon swallowed another useless I’m sorry that instinctively welled up in his throat. He let the silence linger, sure it wasn’t his right to fill it if Martin didn’t want to. He took in the small comfort of the rise and fall of Martin’s chest, the slow, subtle sounds of his breath in the silence.
“I’m not upset,” Martin said finally, his voice so even and abrupt it shocked Jon out of his stupor, “if that’s what you’re asking.”
Jon pulled back to look at him, and saw Martin’s eyes locked on the wall opposite. “Okay,” Jon said, softly, when it didn’t seem like anything else was forthcoming.
Jon could tell that that wasn’t the end of it though, could see Martin’s throat work and the way his brow was furrowed as he stared at the wall opposite. “I should feel like that,” Martin said abruptly, after a moment of tense silence, “shouldn’t I?”
Jon frowned, something in Martin’s tone innately worrying, a kind bland disappointment. He tried and failed to catch his eye. “It’s alright if you don’t—“
“But it’s not—it’s not right, is it?” Martin muttered, still not quite looking at him.
Jon blinked at him, confused, searching for something to say, but floundering, falling flat.
“Someone does you wrong, you’re supposed to feel angry. Someone hurts you, and you’re supposed to feel upset. That’s how it works.” Martin looked down at his hands in his lap, the skin pale against the brown of his trousers, his nail beds blue.
Jon’s breath caught in his throat, as he began to understand. “Martin...” he murmured softly, slowly moving to take Martin’s left hand in his own. His skin was freezing, but Jon didn’t balk at the temperature difference. Just entwined his fingers with Martin’s, letting his thumb brush over his knuckles.
Martin sucked in an audible breath, staring down at their hands. Slowly, Martin mirrored the movement of Jon’s thumb with his own. They simply sat there for a few moments, focused on the single point of contact.
“I’m sorry,” Martin suddenly said, hushed, “if I’ve not...if I’ve ever said the wrong thing, or—or been too harsh, or been too cold. It’s...hard for me to–to know what I’m expected to...say, or feel, especially right after I’ve...fed.”
Jon’s heart weighed heavy in his chest. “Martin,” he murmured, “You don’t have to apologize. For any of that.”
Martin swallowed, the pale line of his throat bobbing up and down, and met his eyes. That little furrow in his brow remained, as he, for a moment, searched Jon’s expression. “I upset you, though,” Martin said, “with what I told you.”
Jon realized, then, how he must have looked—dried tear tracks on his cheeks, eyes red rimmed, face pale. “I’m not upset at you,” Jon was quick to confirm, his hand squeezing Martin’s.
“At Peter, then?” Martin asked, a bit distantly, his eyes dropping away.
Jon took a breath, trying and failing to read into his expression. “Yes,” he confirmed tentatively. He remembered the combination of fear, disgust, and hate that Martin had felt toward Lukas when he was closer to human, and wondered where he stood now. Jon had no intentions of lying about his own feelings, however. “I hate him for what he’s done,” he admitted bluntly, watching as Martin blinked and looked back at him. “For what he did to you.”
Martin just stared at him for a long moment, blue eyes slightly wide, the furrow in his brow disappearing. His mouth opened, then closed, then opened again, and he said, slightly stilted, as if he wasn’t used to it, “thank you.”
Jon nodded, looked down at their hands, then looked back up at him again. The question he wanted to ask, for a moment, remained lodged in his throat. “Martin,” he began softly, “do you...do you want to continue feeding from Lukas?”
Martin was silent for a long time, his eyes somewhere between Jon and the floor, drifting over his collar, his hands, and yet not quite settling anywhere. Jon tried not to grip his hand too tight, tried not to influence his answer in any way. Because he would hate it, if Martin said yes, but he would, objectively, understand. There was something to be said of routine, of the familiar. And he could understand, as much as he hated it, why Martin chose it in the first place—even though Lukas never actually gave him a real choice. Jon could understand the appeal of feeding and never hurting anyone but yourself. If he could do the same, would he?
Maybe.
“No,” Martin said, almost hushed, “no, I don’t...I don’t think I do.”
Jon tried, pathetically, not to make his relief too obvious. He slowed the release of tension in his shoulders, forced himself to breathe more evenly.
“But,” Martin said, “I don’t know if it’s that simple.” Seeing the protest on the tip of Jon’s tongue, in the furrowing of his brow, Martin raised his brows, tilting his head. Jon swallowed down the protest, and Martin continued, “I’ve been with him for so long, Jon. So much of the Lonely in me is because of him. I’ve...I’ve never been cut off from him, not really. I don’t...I don’t know if I can,” he sighed, looking down at their hands. “I know you don’t...I know it makes me less—”
“It doesn’t,” Jon blurted, horrified at the implication of whatever Martin was about to say. “It doesn’t. Martin. Martin, look at me,” he murmured, placing his hand on Martin’s freezing cheek. When Martin finally looked back up at him, he took a moment to just look, take in every line and curve of Martin’s face, and let the utter, complete adoration he felt sweep him away completely.
Martin stared back at him, wide-eyed, some creeping confusion on his face, like he’d never been looked at like that before. “Jon...”
“I love you,” Jon said softly, and strangely, they were the easiest words he’d ever spoken. They fluttered out of his mouth like birds, like a lovely sigh that had waited ages to escape the cage of his ribs.
Martin’s eyelids fluttered in a flurry of blinks, his mouth parting, brow furrowing. “You...?”
“I love you,” he said again, with more weight to the words, with more surety than he had ever said anything. “And I don’t...I don’t need you to say it back,” Jon assured him, “but I just...I want you to know that I do.”
Martin stared at him, his mouth still slightly parted. After a moment, his eyes dropped, and again didn’t settle on anything in particular, that furrow reappearing in his brow. He looked, for a moment, decidedly lost, as if he’d been working off a script that had been abruptly rewritten. “I don’t think anyone’s ever loved me before,” he finally said, so softly Jon almost didn’t hear it.
The breath left Jon’s lungs abruptly, a feeling too close to sorrow filling up the sudden cavern of his chest. How could the world have so utterly failed someone like Martin, someone soft and kind and lovely, even when encouraged to be otherwise? Someone who was so made to be loved.
He let his trembling right hand join his left in cradling Martin’s face, leaning in closer. Martin watched the movement with wide, slightly wondrous eyes, but there was still that furrow in his brow, as if he was still a little lost, still didn’t quite believe it as Jon meant it.
So Jon leaned up and pressed his lips to the space between his brows, soothing the tension there. “I love you,” he murmured, drawing back only to press another kiss to Martin’s cheekbone. “I love you.” He slowly drew back, to move to his other cheek. “I love you,” he breathed there, as if he could trace the words into his skin, prove to him that he was so loved in every sense of the word, that he should have always been.
He drew back, his nose a hair’s breadth away from Martin’s. He felt Martin’s trembling breath on his lips. He glanced up and saw Martin’s eyes, big and blue and so softly wondrous it took his breath away for a moment. He sighed, “I love—”
But was cut off by Martin closing the distance between them and pressing a gentle kiss to his lips, soft and unhurried. Jon fought a smile, huffing a breath from his nose. “I wasn’t finished,” he mock complained.
“You talk too much,” Martin told him, a smile so lovely playing on his mouth that Jon couldn’t find it in him to even pretend to be offended.
“Come home with me?” he asked, the question falling from his lips without permission. He realized, a moment after, exactly what he’d said. Home. He’d never thought of his apartment as such. But the thought of Martin there, taking up that extra chair at the table, or poking his head out from the kitchen, or tucked away on the other side of the bed—the thought of that so acutely took Jon’s breath away it was staggering. His apartment was nothing but a sparse structure with four walls, but with Martin there...he supposed it would feel right, then. To call it a home.
The smile on Martin’s face had frozen at the question, then widened, for all the world looking softer. “Only if you have tea,” he said, his eyes bright.
If Jon swiped some of the tea bags from the breakroom before they left, that was no one’s business but his own.
Later, after tea and gentle, fluttering touches, Jon laid in bed, studying Martin’s face as he began to drift off, caught on the way the furrow between his brows was smoothed out completely, the way his freckles looked faint, after Lukas, but still slightly visible, still a lovely spray across his nose, if you looked hard enough. He watched Martin’s eyelashes flutter as sleep pulled him further under, watched his curls bounce with every little shift of his head, and listened to his soft breaths in the quiet, and thought, yes.
This is what home is.