#for all his talk of doom and despair jon never really gave up

[autistic-fandom-trash]

i am CONTSTANTLY thinking about how jon starts the s5 journey with "gertrude didn't think [the apocalypse could be reversed]. but she's dead. let's find out for ourselves." and ends it with "maybe we both die. probably. but maybe not. maybe everything works out, and we end up somewhere else." btw. if u even care.

[yikes-strikes-again]

rating: gen word count: 2271 tags: angst, hurt/comfort, light on the comfort part, canon compliant, the slaughter, the corruption, season 5 spoilers, episode: e163, spoilers for episode: e163, spooky eye powers             summary: Martin learns exactly what happens if Jon doesn't give his statements. Inspired by a line from episode 177. Takes place between episodes 163 and 164.

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Buried in the wreckage of the blasted wasteland, a typewriter began clicking rapidly.

With soles caked in mud, they crunched through what must have been leagues of the trenches - though, obviously, there was no way to tell. No way to tell how far they had traveled or how far they had yet to go. The Panopticon-Institute remained on the horizon, ever-distant and always looming.

The sounds of war were not far away. Once in a while, artillery fire would tear the silence apart, ripping through the walls of bunkers and causing a throbbing, painful ringing in the ears. Jon and Martin would hold onto each other for support, though often they would still fall into the wet and sloshing ground, caking their clothing in another layer of grime. But here, the danger was less immediate than it was miles ago. Slower, in wounds rather than weapons.

Countless soldiers nursed the bandaged stumps of lost limbs, ones either amputated or blown off. In the case of the former, the procedure rarely prevented infection from spreading through the victim’s veins with each beat of their heart, or cleanly excised the deepest strains of necrotized tissue. They knew this, of course. They knew that they would only get sicker, and the knowledge terrorized them even more than the certain death that lay not a meter above.

Clouds of flies thicker than pudding swarmed around the dead. Well, one hoped they were dead. It was hard to tell when everyone seemed to be on the verge of permanent collapse, either from mortal injury, illness, or an overdose of grief. It didn’t matter why - when someone laid down in this place, they never got up again.

It was calmer on this side of the trenches. Quieter. But in the quelling of the chaos, it gave Martin a chance to process how awful it all was, and that was worse.

He looked at Jon. If he had to guess, he’d say that Jon was faring worse than Martin was. There was a hard set to his shoulders, and he spoke little save to warn Martin of danger or obstacles. When he did speak, his voice was terse and irritable. Martin rarely got a glimpse of his eyes, but when he did, he saw that Jon’s pupils were erratic and searching.

Both of them had been quiet for days, weeks perhaps, ever since Jon had ranted like a madman in that bunker, surrounded by all those catatonic people. Martin didn’t understand  why  he had to do that, why he was compelled to speak of all the awful things that were already upon them, only that something bad would happen if he didn’t. He had made it clear that Jon would find no audience for his ramblings in Martin, and Jon had accommodated that thus far.

Martin stopped at the turn of the trench, finding a more gentle slope of the wall to rest his shoulder upon, though the soil was damp and rancid-smelling. He didn't feel fatigue, but his shoes were not meant for hiking, and they were uncomfortable. He was soaked to the bone, filthy, and freezing cold, and he really wanted to know when he could stop being that way.

Jon stopped so suddenly that his boots skidded on the mud and he had to sway to keep his balance.

“What is it now, Martin?”

There was no resignation to his voice, no apathy or even frustration, unlike before. Just pure, stifled anger, and the cryptic storm brewing from behind his eyes.

Martin looked at him pleadingly. “Can’t you tell me anything about how long we’ve still got to walk? At least until we get out of… this place.”

Jon sighed the sigh of a parent who had been asked “Are we there yet?” by their impatient child one too many times. “Like I said the first two thousand times, time and space  do not exist in the way they once did. When the world was whole and there existed minds who knew not of terror.” He cringed almost imperceptibly, and scrubbed at his temples with his palms. “As much as I hate to hear the phrase myself, we will get there when we  get  there.”

It felt silly to complain about someone’s bad attitude when they were in a literal hellscape, but Martin didn’t like the way he’d started speaking through gritted teeth. He wanted respite from this particular nightmare, yes, but he also wanted to know why Jon was so angry.

Martin didn’t get the sense that it would do any good to ask him, though.

He sighed. “It’s been so long.  What if we never get there? Just wandering in circles in a never-ending trench.”

“Well, Martin, we  will never get there if we keep stopping to burrow a nightmare and ceaseless frenzy.”

He paused to consider that. He figured he’d heard wrong - his hearing was still a bit muted from the gunfire. “What?”

“I said, we’ll never get there if gangrene blisters or sanguine bagpipes.”

“What?  What the hell does that mean?”

Jon made an irritated noise, then spoke slowly as if talking to someone who was very stupid. “Agony bore a bloody sickle for crushing the sleepless.”

Martin stared at him, and narrowed his eyes, gripped by a dawning horror that had nothing to do with the disease and death that surrounded him. “Jon, you’re not making any sense.”

Some of the anger faded from Jon’s expression. Then, suddenly, he clutched at his head with both hands as if in pain. His eyes widened, focusing briefly on Martin before returning to the million things that only he could see.

“Sever,” he said pointedly. And, as if spurred on by something, he continued, both voice and body shaking with intensity. “Limbs metallic see bloated warhead and vicious gas spitting cauterize through. Spleen pale cannon warhead bile where tetanus sinews. And gore and ring and soldier visceral from bodies brother teeth for rancid crimson darkness.” He spoke with such terrible certainty, as if he fully expected Martin to comprehend the meaning of every word.

The corners of Martin’s mouth became taut, but since smiling requires the pretense of happiness, he did not smile. “Listen, Jon, I know we’re both under a lot of stress, but this is a really bad way to try and lighten the mood, okay? It’s not funny. You’re scaring me.” He drew a sharp and shaking breath and released it in a hollow imitation of laughter. “What’s the matter with you, anyway? Are you just taking something out on m—”

“Chaotic laughter and screeching god.” Jon’s eyes were on him, but they weren’t looking at him. They were wild, desperate. Something awful was happening to him, something that caused him to forget how to stand, that ceaselessly filled his mind with secondhand terrors, that stole his voice and gave it to the neverending flood of words that rose like bile from his throat. “Iron hands, jettison liver, with heroic terror bullets and mottled rage buzzing, burning and lungs gone. Necrotized gurney which hell hath nuclear rot aching, whose shivering eye orders and despairs, immobile river filth screaming for prison and tear—”

“Jon, stop!” Martin pushed off the wall and stumbled over to where Jon had slipped onto the filthy earth. He shook him. “Snap out of it!”

“— off running, smoke and cloth the bacteria acrid, with hungry singing comrade forever hidden. Writhing from crater, sobbing but the fever moans flaking to clinging, melting daggers. Helpless pathway churning through exploding infinity—”

Martin was nearing his wits’ end. He dragged Jon, who went limp, into a nearby dugout, so tiny that sunlight still shone across most of its floor. He tried to block out the onslaught of babbled nonsense that somehow evoked a thousand nightmarish images as clear as day, but Jon’s voice had taken on that quality that made it impossible not to listen. He continued to shake him with repetitive, mechanical regularity, but as the words bore into his brain Martin’s movements grew weak and yielding.

Jon lay on Martin’s lap, staring far beyond the dirt ceiling. “Gorging jaws of metal death surround your blood-borne reach towards distant jargon, but surreal enemy adrenaline has harrowed pathological exaltations. Barbed manslaughter. Feeding warfare. Stinging trigger…”

His eyes fell to him for a split second. “Martin,” he said, and Martin remembered to breathe. But the moment was gone as quick as it had come, and Jon was launched into another disjointed tirade.

If the hands of his watch spun as reliably as they once had, Martin might have found that he sat crouched in that dugout for exactly six hours and thirty-four minutes, keeping Jon’s back out of the mud. But, for what it was worth, it felt like years. Jon continued his nonsensical ranting, scarcely stopping to breathe, and from the way he desperately spat the words one got the feeling that he wished he didn’t have to. His voice rose and fell at random, reaching sudden and unpredictable climaxes of raving and shouting before settling back into a listless murmur. Trying to ignore him was an exercise in futility. Every few words a new, terrible image would implant itself into Martin’s mind, and then another, and another, together weaving a tapestry of terror from the thread of Jon’s omnipotent train of thought. He couldn’t stop listening, and Jon couldn’t stop talking, so whenever Martin’s thoughts weren’t drowned out by the bile of the Beholding they were filled with despair.

Would this never end? Were they doomed to rot in this place, their minds slowly unraveled by the power of the Eye filtered only by Jon’s droning voice? Would they never move again, like all the rest in this awful place, locked in a stony embrace like some warped parody of The  Pietà?

Martin couldn’t know. But in between terrors, it was all he could imagine as tears ran down his face.

It was a small mercy that this particular fear of Martin’s wasn't due to come about just yet. The first clue was that the flood of words had slowed to a trickle. The second was that when Jon paused for breath, it was deeper and less hurried than before. His voice had lost its former vigor, and it was all Martin could hope that he had finally started to exhaust himself.

“... never respite from wretched hope… singe a coagulated daylight swarm… justice not for careening wails… farewell… slaughter,” he paused, panting. “Finished” was too hopeful a word, and his voice carried no note of finality.

But there was a blessed silence. Martin expected it to end at any moment, but it stretched on as the seconds passed. There were distant cries of war, and the sound of Jon trying to make up for the breath he’d lost, but it all faded into nothing in the presence of the euphoric silence.

Several minutes passed this way, and it was only then that Martin dared to speak with the expectation that he’d get a response.

“Jon,” he began, finally daring to make eye contact - his otherworldly gaze had been far too intense to meet, before - and found that Jon was seeing him again. “What… happened?”

He blinked at Martin. There was another silence, shorter and more deliberate than the last, but less comfortable. “I—” He cleared his throat. “I think… I just…” He grabbed his temples with both hands and winced, and Martin pulled them both out of the light.

A moment’s migraine, and Jon collected himself. “There’s just… so much. Fear. Everywhere we go, from everyone in the world. I see it all. I  feel  it all.” Martin listened passively, despair replaced by a deep frustration. He knew this, and Jon knew how he felt about being his… receptacle for it all. But he didn’t interrupt.

“We have been through a domain of The Slaughter, and are now passing into one of The Corruption. I’ve been… accumulating more and more of The Slaughter’s fear all this time, and now that we’re leaving it… I suppose it wanted me to let it out. Now or never.” He paused. “And... I  have  to let it out, willingly, or else…”

“This happens.”

Jon sighed. “Apparently.”

Martin considered this, wondering if Jon could see the tear tracks that had left clean paths down his otherwise dirty face.

“Why didn’t you just give a statement? You know…  before  it was forced out of you?”

Jon looked at his hands for a long time. Then, in a small, guilty voice, he said, “I was trying to keep it inside.”

“Keep it inside?  Why?  ”

“I thought…” He covered his mouth in the gesture of one whose face burned with shame. “I thought I could control it, if I just willed it hard enough. These trenches… too long. Too narrow. There was nowhere for you to go. I didn’t want to stop, and I didn’t want to leave you.”

Martin stopped, and he softened. “Jon.” He sighed through his nose, and placed his hand on the back of Jon’s head. Then he brought him up into an embrace. “This was worse.”

“I know. I’m sorry,” he murmured into Martin’s neck.

“... I’m just glad you’re okay.”

They stayed like that for an undefinable amount of time, relishing the only avenue of comfort available to them anymore. Then, with Jon clinging to Martin for support, they climbed to their feet, and set out under the sky again, which had at some point shifted from violent red to a sickly yellow. A new understanding dawned on them both, mostly Martin, who resolved to allow Jon his space when he needed to… vent.

He only wished the knowledge hadn’t had to come from personal experience.

Something lurking in the ruins ripped the page off the typewriter, and its keys never made a noise again.