#Martin's daemon is a jumping spider

[bibliocratic]

Only a little late!

Written for the prompts: AU and Touch for AspecMartinWeek

Ace Jon / Ace Martin, AU – Daemons, post 159.

They are lying dozy and lazing on the settee when Jon clears his throat and apologises.

Martin's thoughts have been like the unheeded tumbling of water through a brook. He hasn't spoken, he's sure, for a long while, not confident that he's fully awake. Jon's tucked neatly against Martin's graceless outstretch of limbs, mumbling whatever comes to mind against his throat. His breath is hot, mildly damp, condensing Martin's skin like he's fogging up a window.

There is the curiously new, near-dazed feeling that Martin is basking in like the shallow waters of some island beach. Every tension unhooked from him like an unburdened yoke, of having said everything that he has always wanted to say. Digging out the gristle of small deceits from his stumbling mouth was a stop-judder-start of a conversation, and it's been a painful, physical release to bring them up. Martin's held his hands over his mouth and the words have spilled out anyway, scraping his throat on the way up, and Jon had rubbed his back and listened as every emotion he forced down came back in nauseous waves.

It's been exhausting, feeling so much all at once. Martin's snapped and snarled and sobbed and slept a lot. And now he has the blessed relief to lie, feeling like he's dug up all the weeds of his fears, the soil of him loosened enough to allow something better to bloom.

Jon knows Martin loves him. Vast-welled, bone-down-deep. Jon knows that love will never be physical, and had still cradled him and declared him beloved, confessed that it was a form of expression he'd never sought either. Jon reframed question after question so they barely resembled enquiries at all, and Martin laid down all the cards of himself with a trustfulness he is having to practise again.

“Hm?” Martin questions sluggish. He opens a squinting, disgruntled eye, discomforted by the radiance of the room, and sees Jon gnawing on his bottom lip. He is managing to give off the impression of both staring intensely at Martin and attempting to avoid his gaze entirely.

“I'm sorry,” Jon repeats. His words are steady enough, but Emer is fluttering hither-and-thither over his head like an anxious coronet. Landing on his shoulder, antennae bobbing, crawling flustered over to his other shoulder before returning airborne in an overactive bluster of motion.

Martin has always liked watching Emer. The flash of gossamer-white wings circling Jon's head or sat on his wrist like an overly-extravagant watch while he read statements.

“Stop looking,” he used to hiss at the moving lump under his shirt, poking many orb-like eyes over his collar to stare even when Martin stopped. “It's rude.”

“What're you sorry for?” Martin asks. The question comes out squashed, half-sighed. His arm encircling Jon's shoulder, he strokes the skin of his upper arm in a light reassurance.

Jon's forehead is establishing trenches as he deepens the lines on his brow. Emer lands and whispers harsh, insistent words into his ear, but he shakes his head like shedding water, and she goes back to hovering.

“I should have asked,” Jon says finally. “I'd never.... you were always so private about him, so I mean, at first I wasn't sure he was even yours, but then – when you, when you went with Peter, and I – he was so small, and I thought he was h-half-dead and Emer wouldn't leave him. S-so I picked him up and I carried him. And I'm sorry.”

It takes a few moments for Jon's garbling to reach understanding.

“I'd kind of assumed you must have,” Martin replies slowly. “I'm the – I'm the one who left him behind.”

At the hollow of Martin's throat, he can feel the crouched and scratchy weight, still unfamiliar to him. He brings up his hand, uses a finger to stroke the short, bristling fur down his rounded abdomen. He stops, leaving his hand nearby, close but undemanding. A second later, delayed, two probing legs tap affectionately and tiredly onto the back of Martin's hand, before withdrawing again.

He was never so steady before. He used to crawl, scramble, quiver and jump, always in motion under the cover of Martin's shirts, the camouflage of his bramble-coiled hair. If he got excited, he'd jump from Martin's shoulder to ear to get his attention, chatter and chirp animatedly. Most of Martin's life, he's rarely strayed a foot from his side.

Martin doesn't feel him now. Not like it was before. There's no solid anchoring when he concentrates. Like a weak signal, a light seen through fog, a previously taut string scraped threadbare.

Peter had suggested a knife. Had even held one out to Martin with a chummy, encouraging smile. Telling him how clean it could be to slice through.

“It won't even kill you,” he had said. “Best part of it.”

“It'll hurt though,” Martin had replied dully, jaw set, as the spider quivered against his throat.

“Oh, certainly,” Peter had replied, admiring the sheen of the blade. “But you've already given away so much, Martin, what's a little more in the grand scheme of things, hm?”

Martin had refused, and Peter had sighed, pocketing the knife again, responded:

“Pity. You'll have to leave him anyway. It would be so much easier to make the separation quicker for the both of you.”

Aron hadn't said anything when Martin scooped him off his neck, setting him down on top of the tape recorder. He'd stared, resigned but with still enough expectation in him to feel betrayed.

It hadn't made the rending, punch-breathed stretching of their distance hurt less.

It had stopped hurting after a while, like everything else had.

Jon must have carried him all the way into the Lonely and out, Martin thinks, stroking Aron again. Maybe longer. The days, they've not been as clear as Martin would like. It's been as treading through murky water a lot of the time. He's not even sure when he woke up blearily, cosseted by the tight bundle of blankets Jon had barricaded him with, and felt Aron nestled in his hair like the old days.

“You couldn't have asked anyway,” Martin continues. “It's not like, well, not like I was around to say it was ok, was I?”

Jon makes a grunt of agreement, but it's one of those distracted sounds he makes when he's taken something in but not really listened.

“When you got out though,” he says, seeming, if anything, even more shame-faced. “When we got here, you didn't – you didn't even ask about him. He'd be at the other side of the house and you didn't blink at how far that was, he-he'd climb onto you and try and get your attention and you wouldn't flinch. I don't think you even knew he was there. And then Emer talked to him, wouldn't move from his side, and then – it-it was the second night, guess you don't remember but you were – you were struggling to come back to yourself. And he – he crawled onto me, and I didn't – I didn't push him away.”

“I'm not mad at you, Jon,” Martin says. “'s like you said. I wasn't – I wasn't in the right place. You kept him safe, how could I be mad?”

Jon nods stiffly. Looks at Aron. Martin likes the way Jon looks at him, carefully, like something might have changed while he wasn't looking.

“I just... thought I should apologise,” he says, more lamely than before. “It's not right, to go around touching other people's.... Anyway. I won't – won't do it again.”

Aron's chelicerae twitch against Martin's adam's apple.

“What's your thoughts on all this then?” Martin says, directing it lowly at Aron.

He's not expecting a response. Their conversations have been stilted, working through the gap Martin ripped between them. Those last few months, they'd mostly fought. Peter Lukas' arrival had found Aron sullen and petty, argumentative and frightened, and Martin had ignored him or snapped back in kind. Aron had stopped speaking to him long before Lukas dragged him into the Lonely, and it's a slow cautious revival, to find out how to talk to each other again.

Aron unfolds his legs carefully, creeps unobtrusively up to the side of Martin's face to lurk near his ear. Even as a bigger example of his species, he's still about the length of Martin's thumb. He flexes the stubby pedipalps under his eyes like he's kneading something.

“He's the best decision you've made in a long time,” he says resolutely to Martin. “He loved me even when you thought you couldn't.”

Martin's mouth is raw from saying sorry but he murmurs it again. Aron's front legs tap him like a reassurance.

“Would you like to?” Martin turns to Jon, who is militantly trying not to listen to their conversation. Emer is circling the ceiling as though to further compound the gesture of privacy. “Touch him, mean – intentionally this time?”

When Martin was younger and working everything out, he'd diligently done his research on the ways he thought he was failing. He'd watched a lot of films, read a lot of books. Romantic stuff, filled with swelling, stirring scores, or purple-prose dramatic declarations of passion. It's quite a common trope in a lot of these; the couples confessing their tormented adoration, their daemons touching, tail in tail or rough-housing in play. Then one half of the couple will reach out, suddenly tender, tangle their fingers in the fur of the other's daemon or scrape along their scales. The other will gasp like they've been shocked, their body rocking with the aftermath of it, before they follow with shaking hands. Martin would replay those moments of intimate connection, fantasising about how someone might hold his own bristled and secretive soul.

It inevitably leads to sex. And Martin would switch it off, then, feeling nonplussed and uncomfortable and wondering if that part was necessary.

It doesn't matter to Martin if Jon doesn't want to, if he never touches Aron again. Jon's already carried his soul so many miles.

It's important to him that Jon knows he can. That Martin wants him to, that Martin trusts him with Aron more than he trusts himself.

Jon's face goes a dark spasm of oxblood red.

“It's – I mean – I'd – course I'd – that's a lot though, are you sure – ?”

Emer chooses that moment to make some quick fed-up comment to Jon before decisively fluttering down and landing on Martin's nose.

Jon gives a squeaking, mildly scandalised gasp. So does Martin, more at the shock.

It doesn't feel like how he expected it might.

There's no rush, no swelling violins or heightened poetry.

“Hey,” he whispers to the white-winged moth. Emer preens, giving a show-off little flap before closing her wings against her back.

“She's beautiful,” he says to Jon sincerely.

Jon's holding his breath like he's trying not to disturb the moment.

“How – how do you feel?” He asks tentatively, his words slightly strangled.

“Warm,” Martin says. There's a steady coil of heat in his chest that matches the warmth of their close-knit afternoon. He feels beheld in the surest of light, cherished and reverential, the same feeling he gets whenever Jon says he loves him.

“Like you expected?”

Martin told Jon about the films he'd watched, the books he'd read, the expressions and sensations he'd thought would make him happier. Jon had listened in the blanketing dark of the evening, and admitted the same in kind.

“I mean, I still don't feel much of an urge to suddenly rip your clothes off, if that's what you're asking.”

Jon's lips hook up in a smile, releasing some of his nervous tension.

“How disappointing,” he intones, and Martin, going a little cross-eyed staring at the speckling spots of black over the fuzz coating Emer's body, laughs.

He reaches up, his hands gone a little shivery, glances over at Jon.

“Can I...?” he asks.

Jon gives a jerking motion, looking like a rather demented nodding dog in his poorly disguised eagerness.

“Er – y-eah – that would be – I-I'd like that.”

Martin strokes a blunt nail from her thorax down.

“Oh,” Jon says, sounding more than a little awestruck. If possible, he sinks even more limbless against Martin. “That's.... that's lovely.”

Martin strokes Emer for a while, rhythmically rubbing the fur with a precise concentrated effort. Jon hums, looking dazed and pleased.

He wonders if it'll feel the same with Jon touching Aron. If Martin will be able to tell, if the sensation will be muted or altered in some way.

Aron, impatient and with apparently less decorum about the whole thing, gives a restless huff and decides to find out himself by jumping onto Jon.

Jon, jolted from his near-soporific state, rather valiantly does not shriek or flail the way he might if an actual spider flung itself onto him. He jerks but makes a serious effort to hold himself ramrod still.

“Stop it,” Martin warns.

“You are absolutely no fun,” Aron answers back playfully as he skitters down to where Jon's hands are. Jon if anything holds himself even more still.

Aron reaches his wrist and taps the skin there, waiting. Slowly, Jon cups his hands together, and Aron clambers delicately onto his palms. Jon's face is making another one of those wowed expressions. Martin feels another pulse of that settling warmth, not as dulled as before, strengthening as Jon rubs a self-conscious finger down Aron's abdomen.

Martin feels Emer flutter up and settle against his hair as he hums and closes his eyes, his soul held in the safest hands he knows.

[bibliocratic]

for @speakerunfolding who has done some AMAZING art of Jon and Martin with their daemons: aren’t. they. beautiful!

jonmartin, that martin’s daemon character study that’s finally finished.

Some cws in the tags. Also on A03

“What do you think then?”

“'bout what?”

“About this one.”

“Don't think anything much. You like it, I like it.”

There's a rodent-fanged nibble on the fleshy pad of his thumb. A sure-footed scamper up his arm, a scritch-scratch scrabble of claws up the terrain of crumpled uniform that he's yet to change out of.  Backpack slumped spineless by his bedroom door, his shoes toed off unlaced.

“You've got to have an opinion, Martin.”

“Why?” Martin replies, playfully obtuse. He's gifted with another nip.

“You jus' hafta,” comes the long-suffering, impatient response. Long buck-teeth roll the lobe of his ear in an admonishing but painless grind.

“Fine. Bossy. I like this one, right?” Martin says to keep the peace. He brings his hand up to flatten the attentive perked-up peaks of rounded ears, ticks the fur-fat round of a soft stomach. The pink tail that's trailing lazily, wormish with ridges, he strokes along its length and it coils around his middle finger. He brings it up and watches the mouse trapeze itself playfully by his tail.

“You like everything I try,” harrumphs the mouse dismissively. There's a flutter of dirt-brown wing, and Martin giggles as the nightingale alights on his forehead, hopping initially to balance.

“That's not a bad thing,” Martin says. His attention truly stolen away, he closes the notebook he's been tongue-out concentrating on, filling with careful doodles.

“You're indecisive, 's what it is.” The nightingale pecks at his nose affectionately.

Martin shrugs because it's true.

Expecting a response, the nightingale chirps a half-annoyed sound.

“What about this then?”

The bird transfers to his chest and fixes him with a beady, challenging stare. Martin stares back, though it makes him grin cross-eyed

The weight on his chest increases, and bigger rounded eyes look out of a furred face.

“Ergh – you're getting hair everywhere!” Martin complains, pushing petulant against the bulk of the huge rabbit. “Mum'll get mad!”

“I'm fluffy,” the rabbit says almost defensively. “How'd you like that – me being soft?”

“You are really soft,” Martin concedes, running his fingers through the dense tufts.

“Right, what about this?” The rabbit repeats insistently, shifting on his haunches, getting hair absolutely all over Martin's school trousers. He'll have to clean them before Mum notices.

Suddenly the face has lengthened to a snout, the teeth have sharpened vulpine.

“What you think? Better in a fight than a rabbit or a mouse.”

“Are you planning to get into fights?”

“Someone needs to protect you,” the fox says simply, the colours of his fur pulling his face into a natural frown.

“Well, you don't like being bigger animals anyway, so it doesn't matter,” Martin replies. He rubs the silky fur through his fingers like trailing river water.

The fox growls and whines in the way he does when Martin's just not listening.

The grasshopper mouse comes back, snuffling his small pink nose.

“You really wouldn't mind?” Aron says slowly. His words more precise now, considered. “Even if I'm not big, or soft, or fast, or strong?”

Martin shakes his head and thinks mournfully that he really ought to get a start on his homework.

“We've got ages yet,” Martin replies, scooping the mouse up under his chin. “Ages 'n ages. And I know I'll like whatever you end up being, so why do I need to worry?”

“That's 'case I do the worrying for the both of us,” says Aron, but he nuzzles up against Martin's throat anyway.  

–

The first day of the summer holidays finds him blearily squinting in the dawn-wash glow of his room.  Its grasping fingers illuminate bookshelves and posters and a pile of clothes that's slipped off his desk chair; it cuts a slice across his bed, over his pillow.

He wonders, too woozy for irritation, blinking deeply, why he's awake so early.

“Martin!”

Something nips at the skin of his hand.

“Mart – wake up.”

“Wossit?”

He garbles a sound that barely makes landfall at language, strains his neck up to look around for Aron.

He sees the crouching, cringing shape sat unfamiliar against the back of his hand, near the fin of skin between thumb and forefinger. Legs folded tight against each other, the spokes of the form folded neatly back into itself so that it squats like a bobbly pebble, eyes catching the room light and reflecting it back like the precisely set stones in a crown.

“I can't change back!” Aron moans. “Martin, I don't know what to do, I – ”

“Ok,” Martin whispers roughly, sitting up and wincing as it sets the bed off in a snapping creak. His hands hover because he wants to pet and stroke and reassure, but he doesn't know where he can touch. “Ok, it's, it's alright, it's – try something easier? Come on, it's alright.”

Jointed legs tufted with monochromatic hairs flail, propelling themselves to scuttle over skin, off his hand, unsteadily tumbling onto the bedclothes, clambering back up on the duvet slung messy over Martin's knees. There is a sensation of a headache that barks with a sudden ferocity behind his eyes even as Aron gasps, strained.

“I'm trying,” he replies, miserable, and that headache rips and snarls up in Martin's head, the ache distracting from everything else but Aron's panic. “I'm trying, I can't, I can't, a-and I don't know what to do, what should we – ?”

“Shh,” Martin says, near tears himself, clearing his throat. “Sh, it's – stop, stop for a minute.”

Aron stops. The headache subsides. Martin feels clammy and overheated, and his small soul is churning out enough terror to blanket them both insensate.

Martin forces himself to take a very long, very troubled breath.

“It's – it's ok,” he whispers finally. “We'll just. Let's just – let's breathe, yeah. We'll – we'll sort this.”

“I'm sorry,” Aron garbles, “I'm sorry – I'll – I'll try something else, something bigger, something with teeth or a tail or wings, I'll be better, give me a minute.”

Aron's tried on the shape of dogs and lizards and snakes and horses, and even – once, when he was younger and Mum took him to the seaside, a fish.

Martin's never seen his soul in the dressing of a spider before.

“Aron,” Martin says slowly. He keeps his hands folded on his lap but his fingers twitch to reach out. “This is – we've settled, haven't we?”

Aron can't nod. His form can't allow for such an expression. But he brings his legs in closer, pebbles up and won't look at Martin, and that's answer enough.

“Please,” Martin says, holding out his palm. Flat, fingers docked against fingers. “Come here, please.”

It takes a moment before Aron creeps shamefaced onto his hand. Martin adds his other hand so he can cup the small shape like he's holding a weakly burning candle flame out of the wind.

Martin studies him now the panic has subsided. Admiring the greenish-blue of the chelicerae at the front of his face, the way they ripple with colour as the light catches them like fish scales, like an oil spill. The downy white tufts and lines like tree rings along his abdomen that break up the coarse run of  black hair.

“Aron,” Martin whispers, “I think you're great. Look at you. You're amazing!”

“But I'm not – ” Aron begins tentatively, but Martin interrupts him by clumsily reaching out with a pawing touch, stroking the upstruck wired fur against where he thinks his neck probably is.

“Ow.”

“Shit. What?”

���.... you poked me in the eye,” comes the response, tinted with a ghost of amusement.

“Sorry!”

Martin pauses, and then leans in eagerly to see, holding up his hand to get a better look.

“I am not an art exhibit Martin,” comes the huffy reply.

“Sit there and be admired for a minute,” Martin snarks back, and he feels Aron's fleeting smile in return.

“I can and will bite you.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Martin replies, not really listening, turning his cupped hands this way and that. “How many do you have? Eyes, I mean?”

“Eight. Duh.”

“Woah,” Martin replies, ignoring the snide aside. He casts out a finger again, moving it over the abdomen a bit more carefully, his bitten nail trailing along the curving round to the small protrusion at the back where he supposes webbing must come from.

“I think you're cool,” he whispers again.

“What about Mum?” Aron asks. He's grown bolder, crawls up to the ends of Martin's fingertips where he sits like a lord surveying his kingdom.

“We just, we just won't tell Mum yet.” Martin worries at his lip. “She'll... she'll worry, she doesn't need to know right now, does she?”

They keep their secret for four days. An advantage of how small Aron has grown.

Until his Mum catches sight of him, half-burrowed under the lip of his t-shirt collar while Martin is finishing drying the dishes. He's had a growth spurt recently, and barely going on tip-toe, he reaches up the higher cupboard where the glasses are kept.

“Change into something else,” she says briskly. It's been a bad day, her face washed out and lined with sleeplessness, pale-lipped and shivery. Martin watches as she finishes swallowing the last of her tablets with a blank expression, clipping her pill box closed.

Martin stiffens. Feels Aron crouch and bristle against his collarbone. He sees Kacper perk his ears up, his yellowish eyes snagged on Martin's throat. His bushy tail tipped with white flicks distracted.

“I can't,” Martin replies, feeling his face heat up with the suddenness of attention being paid to him. His voice cracks in the middle, and he flushes at how squeaky it comes across.

“Something else, Martin,” she insists sharply, her eyebrows pulled down.

Kacper, who has been sat on his hunches near her leg, stands. Glances up at her.

“Lena, calm down,” he warns, but his Mum takes a step forward. Martin blunders back the same distance, nearly elbowing a plate off the counter. Their kitchen is pokey, and he's crowded back against the washing machine.

“Mum, I- I can't,” he repeats. His words are thick and clogging in his throat, his body feels too unwieldy, too big for the suddenly very cramped space. “Aron's, he's settled, Mum, and – ”

“Don't be stupid, Martin, you can't have – ”

“He's settled, Lena,” Kacper's voice is grumbling terse at the back of his throat. “Being upset about it isn't going to help anyone.”

“He's not settled. Not as that!” she barks, and Martin's not sure who she's snapping at, but she takes another step and  grabs against his wrist, and it's tight as a manacle and her nails dig into the pasty skin there, and Kacper's protestations become a vocalized growl. “He's not settling like that.”

Martin does start crying then, hot tears leaking down his cheeks, his free hand cupped protectively over the fragile, unwanted shape his soul has taken. His mum's lip curls upwards when she sees his tears but still she doesn't let go, and her grip is bony and harsh and it hurts.

“Lena!” Kacper snarls, and his teeth catch and yank backwards at the fabric of her trousers,  “Enough, Lena, leave it!”

“Mum?” Martin asks faintly with his squeaking, crumbling voice. He doesn't pull away. There's nowhere to pull away to.

His mum sniffs. Sets her shoulders high again, and rips her hand back, and leaves the room without another word. Kacper glances over at Martin, and Martin desperately wants to bury his face in the soft orangey fur like he used to when he was younger, wants to feel it under his fingers.

But Kacper leaves too, and Martin and Aron are suddenly very alone.

They don't say anything for a long time. Martin puts the last of the plates away, and he goes upstairs and locks the door of his room, sits heavily on the side of the bed.

“Aron...” he begins.

“I don't want to talk about it,” comes the cloth-muffled response.

“I – ”

“I mean it,” Aron snaps. “I don't want to talk about it. Leave it be, yeah?”

“Oh,” Martin replies. He wipes at his eyes, stares at his feet.  “Oh. Ok.”

The entire incident is never spoken about again.

Aron takes to lurking under Martin's clothes whenever they're in the house.

–

“All you have to do is look in a mirror.”

The world rings wrong in his ears. His in-gasping weed-choked breaths  are scraping and disjointed as he parses them as noise. He can hear the slide of his own fingers curling against his damp palms. The room is at once so loud and crushingly far away like a distant crashing storm tide, and yet right up against his ear, like a dropped glass in an empty room, Elias' voice, cut-sharp and close and the slivers sliding into him as splinters as he listens.

“The resemblance is quite uncanny. You even have a spider, you know, just like he did.  Not the same species of course, but then she never looks close enough to check, does she? The face of the man she hates, who destroyed her life, watching over her...”

“Shut. Up.” Martin hears himself push the sound out as a feeble whistle between his teeth, and it gets lost in the groaning rigging of sound in the room. The weight of being so splayed open has him bow-backed and trembling.

It's hard to remember why he's doing this. It's hard to focus on anything other than how much she despises him. How much he's always known it.

Through blistering tears, he watches Aron scuttle down his trouser leg, over his shoelaces, a tear-blurred shape moving at surprising speed over the foot-worn and un-swept floor. He thinks he might be planning on biting Elias. He can feel the pulsing reckless fury that is the only thing breaking up the solid mass of despair cementing and expanding in the hollow of his chest, the rage that even the satisfaction of burning statements hasn't appeased. At everything this man has done – but he's not a man, he's not a person – , at everything he's sat back and watched and done nothing to prevent, and as Martin chokes airless on his own drowning grief, his anger has found motion, enough room to lash out amidst the agony.

Elias looks down at Aron, almost bored.

And brings down his foot.

Martin drops.

There isn't an expression to describe the sensation. His knees send a pained recoil down his legs as he slams against the floor, a shock up his spine, but Martin can't feel that, can't feel anything but alight, burning, illuminated down to the bones of him. He retches on a shell-shocked wail as Elias idly watches the panicked body squirming under the vicious pressure of his shoe, as  Aron cries out as his body is pressed squashed against the floor, and Martin can do nothing.

There's a curve to Elias' smile now.

He shouldn't be touching him, Martin's brain is scream-sobbing, he shouldn't, he can't, he shouldn't be touching...

“You want to know what she sees when she looks at you?”

Martin thought he didn't have room for any more, but Elias pushes his mother's hatred into him anyway.

There's a harder, painful pressure, and he hears Aron squeal. He thinks his own voice mouths a  pleading 'stop' that goes unheeded.

Elias' voice is tight and biting and cold.

“Don't burn any more statements.”

Even when the pressure lifts, there are steps walking away, the door closing on this pitiful tableau, Martin cannot move, awash in the flotsam of wrong, smudged and tarnished and beheld in the cruellest violent light, knotted in the weeds of a revelation that is no less choking for how little of a surprise it was.

Half-blinded by tears, he inches forward on his knees, feeling around, finding the furred body quivering where it was made to stay.

“I've – I've got you,” he slurs desperately, scooping the shape up against his face, feeling for anything broken, anything fractured, feeling his front legs twitch feebly against his cheeks. “He – he's gone, he shouldn't have, he – he....”

“She hates us,” Aron finally speaks. The loudest thing in the room, Martin almost wincing from the suddenness – where Martin's grief has already begun to settle into the cracks of him, Aron's is an outpouring, a final barrier broken. “She hates us so much, Martin, a-and we did nothing and she – god, he left so we got everything she reserved for him for no better reason than we were there to hate and he wasn't, a-and she...”

Aron's words are lost in a babbling wail, and Martin can do nothing but clutch him desperately, shushing, every excuse and reasoning and childish hope he's ever entertained that she'd ever be proud of him laid bare as the dessicated husk it always was, already striped by life's disappointments long before.

Aron climbs under the collar of his shirt when Melanie comes in. He will not crawl out for a very long time.

–

He discusses it with Aron while Jon is in the shower. Jon uses up all the hot water from the immersion heater, his showers long, aimless and scalding, even with his hair now hacked back from its tangles. Sometimes Martin even thinks he catches a hum, a snatch of tune, though it's always faint, muddied by the bathroom acoustics, close-lipped and idle. He thinks Jon's happy here. Hopes he is.

There's the slow wash of steam trickling from under the bathroom door onto the landing, into the sitting room. Martin tries not to be reminded of other, colder mists.

“It seems unnecessary...” Martin is responding, chewing the nail of his thumb.

“We don't know who could come here!” Aron replies dogged. He keeps rubbing his front legs together anxiously, like Martin does with his hands, but he stays on the sofa arm so all his front-facing eyes are fixed on Martin. “One of us needs to be here to keep watch. Who knows who could come? Daisy – ”

“Daisy's Jon's friend.”

“She's tried to kill him before,” says Aron dismissively. “We don't know her, Martin, we don't know she can be trusted.”

“Jon does – ”

“And it's never helped him,” Aron snaps. He untenses, and the bristles coating his back soften. “OK. Maybe Daisy isn't a problem. But what if Elias finds him? While we're out getting food or walking down to the village, it's not safe for him to be alone.”

Martin nods worriedly. He rubs the cold-cracked skin of his palms over his thighs and tugs at his lip with his teeth.

“We don't even know if it will stretch that...”

“We do, don't lie,” Aron retorts. It's not unkind. It's just harsher. More direct. Everything about them has had all the edges taken off. “You know it will stretch that far.”

It will. Martin doesn't know how far it was, from his office to the Panopticon, but he'd stretched it and stetched it until he'd stopped feeling Aron's terror, until it had boiled down from a fire-brand mutilation to a wincing sunburn of feeling. And once Peter cast him into the Lonely. Well. He hadn't felt anything at all then.

“We shouldn't be able to do this,” Martin says miserably. He rubs his hands over his face. “Be so far apart from each other.”

“Well, we can,” Aron replies simply,  “so we should use it to make sure they stay safe.”

Martin lets out a breath too heavy for his lungs to hold.

“You're right,” he says finally. “I know you're right, s'just... it's not – it's not natural. Being able to – it's not, it's not right.”

“No.” Aron says and he crawls onto Martin's arm, up onto his shoulder. “No, it's – it's not. But it's what we've got now.”

Martin wipes at his eyes, takes another more pronounced inhale.

“Hey. Hey, it might heal one day. Don't make that face.”

“'m not making a face.” Martin replies, feeling belligerent and childish in his response.

Aron rears up and sets both front legs on the spot on Martin's chin he can reach.  

“Your sulky face,” he says, and his voice is warm. Everything about him feels warm these days.  Martin is mummified in five layers of clothing and still has goosebumps.  

“I missed you,” Aron continues, simply. He has never found honesty easy, but he looks at Martin, taps against his chin with the stunted pedipalps at the front of his body and repeats: “I missed you.”

“I missed you too,” Martin croaks out, and he has no more words to express what he wants to stay.

After a moment, Aron makes a decisive 'clearing throat' noise, and continues.

“I've told Emer. The plan.”

“How'd she take it?”

“She's practical. She can see the benefit.”

“Is she going to be the one to tell Jon?”

“You don't want to do the honours then?”

“You know I don't.”

“Chicken.”

“Sod off.”

“I'm right though.”

“Yeah, don't get used to it.”

Aron hums in reply, and then returns his gaze to Martin.

“You really want to get back into the habit of keeping secrets from him?”

“No, I.... No. You're right.

“Twice in one day.”

“It's a miracle.”

“If you're going to be this insufferable with him, he'll hand you back.”

“I'll hide in his sleeve cuffs. Jump out at him.”

“Don't.”

“I won't. Relax.”

Martin carefully traces a finger over the bristles of Aron's abdomen, scratching lightly with a nail near the back, rewarded with a contented chitter.

“Then it's agreed,” he says, and they sit, quiet and sedate in each other's company until Jon and Emer come out.

–

Martin frets, so as he tramps down the uneven and rain-boggy hill, muttering and grumbling about the state of his boots, he throws out little questioning checks through the wide net their thread has become.

Aron, secure in the safehouse and out of the spitting rain, responses momentarily with reassuring pulses, wordless and rudimentary but implying safe – warm – dry.

Martin gets these placid reassurances three times in a row when he sends a hand-wringing anxious ?, before he's eventually gifted with a spikier snatch of mild frustration. The wave of safe – warm – alive – annoyed is speckled with the impression that whatever Jon, Emer and Aron are now doing, Martin's frequent checks are now disruptive.

A pause, and then a kinder wash that implies that Martin should hurry up and get back.

Martin leaves it at that and keeps his queries minimal.

It's while he's in the little shop that the humming connection shifts, a new harmony billowing into the background melody, and he's treated to a rising ball of crunched and cosy heat blooming and pulsing at his breastbone.

Martin knows what causes such a fireplace in him. He's been feeling it a lot recently. His hands suddenly  don't feel as cold-nipped. He has to try and keep the smile off his face to avoid looking foolish as he peers at the 'two for three pound' offer on grapes, ticks vegetables off the shopping list, impulsively throws in some strawberries on the off-chance Jon might like them.

Another pulse, not three minutes later: a glint through his spine, like a cloud shifting and exposing a sun trap as he stares non-plussed at the spice isle, trying to decipher Jon's deplorable handwriting.

The steady sensation comes upon him with the regularity of waves upon a beach.

He has a pins-and-needles buzz at his fingertips as he makes the walk back, the bag handles digging into his palms, and even the rain, pouring hard from burdened storm clouds, does not dampen his mood.

He hears Jon's rumbling tumbling speech as he shoulders open the front door, hefting the bags into the entranceway.

“... and it's actually a common misapprehension, easily done by rudimentary scholars in the field, when in fact, a  rather simplistic way of rectifying such an error is to...”

Martin watches and allows the smile to claim him utterly.

Jon is ironing. A little pile of ordered clothes on the sofa, precisely folded. Chattering away to his audience: Martin's spider soul, settled comfortable on Jon's shoulder. Martin waits long enough, and Jon, thoughtless and undisrupted in his lecture, reaches up to run his finger all the way from Aron's front section, poking one of his eyes more likely than not though Aron doesn't say a word, all the way down to his stubby spinnerets, doing this two or three times in a rhythmic gesture before he returns to his chore.

Martin feels bathed in an undemanding tenderness.

Emer has noticed his arrival where Jon hasn't. She flutters over to him, lands in his coarse briar bush of hair before alighting again and setting down on his shoulder, the position more to her satisfaction.

“You've missed a treat,” she says drolly, using her front legs to clean her long, feathery antennae.  “He's been on a roll for about twenty minutes.”

“That's our Jon,” Martin murmurs. His eyes crinkle as she snorts a laugh.

They watch him for a minute.

“He irons his socks?” Martin continues, Jon using the steam function to neatly flatten the fabric over the toes obliviously.

“Even the socks,” Emer replies, ever so fond.

Another pause.

“Never thought I'd see the day when Jon would like spiders,” Martin says.

“Not any spiders,” Emer says, and she flutters her gossamer-white wings at him affectionately. “Just yours.”

Jon notices him then. His face breaking into softness. Helps him unload the shopping into their neatly categorised cupboards and newly cleaned fridge, makes them both tea though he steeps it too long and adds too much milk, sits up against him, folded up and knobbly-limbed as they channel-hop through the rubbish on TV.

Martin's soul sits safe on Jon's shoulder all evening.