#i’m frothing at the mouth thinking about being able to see the slightest flash of black ink visible over the collar of his shirt

[sxlver-sweet]

do you think chuuya has some tattoos? i feel like he does….

-🍤

i firmly believe he does, but no one ever gets to see them except for you and whoever handles the wounded in the port mafia bc he never takes his shirt off around anyone else. for some reason, i feel like he has a sword tattoo on one of his shoulder blades, but like… with some kind of decoration, like a thorny vine with the occasional rose winding up the blade and hilt OR extra detail on the hilt of the sword. i also feel like he has a tribal tattoo or two wrapped around his upper arm like a band, but he’s educated himself on what it means. i believe chuuya takes tattoos seriously, and he wouldn’t get one without it having a personal significance or without at least looking into it first. do i think that he could have one of those intricate, abstract tattoos that spans from his elbow to his shoulder, dwindles at his neck, and bleeds down one side of his chest/back??? yes. HOWEVER, i will not rule out the possibility of him having a smaller, low-detail one of like a wolf head or a phoenix or a just a symbol on his bicep instead. either way, he doesn’t overdo it. he just keeps it simple: makes sure they’re spaced out enough so one doesn’t draw attention away from the other and keeps it rolling.

as you can tell, i’m indecisive about what exactly i think he has😭 but you get the gist.

[gentlemancrow]

In the quiet haven of Daisy's safehouse, Martin notices he is regurgitating cliche romantic lines from beloved movies in place of his own words when he should be finally able to tell Jon how he's felt about him all along. He becomes convinced this means The Lonely has stolen his ability to love from him and Jon has to reassure him that that, above all else, is a thing absolutely impossible to do.

Presented in Technicolor

The first time it happened, neither of them noticed.  It was so fast, so very quick, just a twitch of tracking on a well-loved VHS or a blip of a warped cellulose acetate bubble drowning in a sea of feedback and static.  

There was only one bed in the safehouse.  So exhausted in body, in essence, in soul, neither of them argued, neither even thought to argue, as they collapsed together and apart on either side to sink into silence.  They’d held each other until then, until that moment of tense intimacy foisted upon them, on the endless soundless train ride to Scotland while Martin searched inside the hollowed-out cavern of himself for his voice and Jon held the atoms of him together to keep both of them from vanishing into the ether.  But in the bed, in the hallowed safety of soft blankets and distance, they polarized.  Still yanking magnetically for each other from around the insurmountable corners of themselves, but held apart by the unspeakable, unseeable force of everything still between them.  They could not give it voice or life.  It gave life to itself in the not speaking and not seeing, in the friction of invisible things looping around and around and shining an aurora green that burned hot and sang with a shrieking fluorescent crescendo.  They lay, back-to-back, vibrating and glowing in swelling, whining incandescence before Jon finally burst in an argon bright concussion of light.

“Thank you, Martin.”

Another pop of flash powder.

“…For what?”

“For loving-“ a bruised pause, “For seeing something, anything to love about me.  Before.  For writing me into the pages of your heart as someone worth penning an epic about.  For thinking me worthy, even in the slightest, of your tragic hero’s end.  Of your sacrifice.  I’m… I’m sorry.”

Afraid to move the mattress, a cotton scum of fragile ice that might shatter and tip them both into frothing white mist, Martin turned only his head, the ozone burnt agates of his eyes shining.

“What makes you think this is an ending?”

Jon’s head swiveled now, with both twisted bodies at parallel meridians and an ocean between them before their eyes could meet.

“I… I only thought.  You said-?”

“I’m still… me.”

Words were still so hard, wickedly barbed on his tongue, raw and blistering as they bubbled over, but it seemed to encapsulate what he wanted to say as best he could.

“Oh…” that carved with a serrated blade from Jon’s chest, “Oh god, Martin...”

His name on his lips sounded like a prayer.  Devotion of one gone from heretic to nonbeliever to basking in the glories of his own personal god of love, descended to anoint his forehead in blood and sing the forbidden gospels of passion snatched from the jaws of things that lurked and preyed.  He hated how brightly he burned so that he could not look directly at him, how much the light still hurt, hated the jagged rip of yearning through his middle too wide now to suture shut.  But the comforter whispered softly as Jon turned and his fingers danced over its oceanic crests toward him, for him.  Martin’s fingers sailed swiftly in kind, as he too, turned and surrendered into the magnetism of this beautiful, clueless acolyte, worthier than any, who bound up his colliding hands and kissed them desperately.

“I’m so sorry it took me so long to get to you,” Jon breathed into his strong, cold fingers, “I’m so sorry.”

The warmth of those hands, those lips and breath, bled into his, turned his paperwhite skin pink again and brought the noontide sky rising in his eyes.  He smiled in faint, glimmering adulation.

“It doesn’t matter.  We’re here now.”

“Yes.  Yes, we are.”

Martin freed one hand to cup preciously over Jon’s pockmarked cheek, over the gospel of him, to thread his fingers into the silken swatch of silvered hair behind his ear and feel out the elegant curve of his neck.  Jon’s hand followed a mirror path, painting color and life into his freckled cheek in its wake and stealing the iconographic crystal tears quivering glimmeringly on darkly red lashes.  They closed the distance between them forever, nuzzled foreheads piously bowed and touching.  A tiny laugh of mingled breathlessness and shattered walls that portended the first smiles bloomed in defiance of endless gray seas.

“I love you.”

Martin’s throat hitched painfully as twin tears rolled down his cheeks.  His chest heaved and burned, his lips and teeth clanked and ground to make the sounds he so violently wanted to make, but they were too heavy.  Too burdensome, wrapped in rusted chains and sunken too deep somewhere in the hole bored out of him in white acid fog to haul up, but still there.  Still there.

“Shhh.  It’s okay if you can’t say it back yet.  Or if you don’t want to.  I understand,” Jon soothed, touching the corner of his mouth.

Martin kissed into his palm feverishly as tears streaked down his cheeks.  He couldn’t say much more.  He could not possibly convey the magnitude of his endless, ceaseless want, only whisper in a weak, resolute treble into the scarred piano fingers playing a sonata on lips.

“I want to.  I-I would have waited… forever for you.  I’ve never wanted anyone like I want you.  You complete me.”

Three simple, stolen words that ultimately meant nothing at all in the wake of the kiss that followed.  A solar flare of months, years, of plasmic longing dripped into the pits of their hearts effused, hands tangled into hair, hot tears mingling on cold crushed cheeks.  They kissed into, through, around each other, kissed until they couldn’t breathe, kissed to atone for all the ones they had missed, for all the ones stolen from them.  They kissed until they were thoroughly wound together and sleep claimed them, Martin’s head atop Jon’s chest so he could hear and feel his heartbeat all through the night.

Martin only realized late into the next morning that his words had sounded tinny and stuck like an ugly, thorny burr to the knit of his memory, sifting its way to the surface only after the floodwaters of love had receded.  They awoke in a waking dream of gauzy, liminal sunlight in dancing ribbons, of unbelieving laughter and kissing and touching each other’s faces just to make sure it had all been real after all.  And it had.  Their words of love could be rewound and replayed, etched into magnetic tape finally untangled and wound straight and true around the stalwart barrel of a pencil eraser.  

It wasn’t until they were halfway through scraping together a quiet breakfast of stale tea and long expired porridge that the scene his words really belonged to came to Martin in a whipcrack flash of sipping lukewarm beer at two something in the morning in a darkened room lit only by whatever was on the tele that could hold his attention for more than a few minutes.  Those three stolen words.  A line he had snorted cynically, jealously, at, even then, drunker than he wanted to be and in the solitary throes of habitual insomnia.  Three stupid, hackneyed words of pop culture parody.  He smoldered in wordless humiliation, but promptly forgot again when Jon interrupted him at the stove to slide his arms around his waist and press a kiss to the corner of his lips for no reason at all other than the late morning rays looked particularly beautiful spiraling in his russet gold curls.

Martin abandoned the bubbling sludge in the pot and kissed him back because didn’t matter in the slightest.  Thoughtlessly plagiarizing a mediocre romantic movie with a single line eternally embedded in the zeitgeist of the era and lingering in the subconscious of all who endured it meant nothing at all, especially when they couldn’t stop kissing.  Giddy with the freedom of just being together, dizzy with the new toy of kissing, of Jon’s lips, Martin’s hands, of the way they fit against each other, and the thrill of newness in radiant insolence of everything they had escaped.  Of course, though, he had to come clean over plain porridge with too much cinnamon and not enough sugar, over-steeped tea, and nervous laughter, lest Jon think he was an even worse poet than he already was.

“It’s the worst thing ever, right?  THAT movie.  Out of all the movies…”

Jon shrugged through the fluttering bird wings of his laughter.

“I didn’t even notice, I mean, how could I?  Kind of a small thing, after… everything… and it was finally just us.”

Martin’s voice came easier now, more like sweet, sugary tea just a little too hot to drink comfortably, so he could laugh and blush and splutter into his hands.

“Still.  I can’t believe I could only choke out all of three sentences to you after I’d been waiting so long to tell you how I feel, and one of them was from Jerry fucking Maguire.”

“Hey, it’s a good line,” Jon chuckled, “Cheesy, sure, but good.  And I don’t care where you got it, so long as I’ve got you.”

“Pfft, who’s being cheesy now?”

“Us.”

Jon took his hand across the rickety breakfast table with its faded flowered cloth and the line was written over in his mind like hitting record on the high-fidelity cassette right at the first chords of your favorite song on the radio.  And none of the DJ’s chatter to boot.

The next time it happened it lingered longer, like a vapid slogan from a commercial, devoid of anything but flagrant rhyme and earworms frustratingly buoyant on the brain.  It wasn’t until the next day though, when the shadows of everything caught them up and the newness of their love had dimmed just enough to cast them, mangled and black, across their joined hands.  Jon had attempted to breach the unbreachable bulwark of The Plan, because they’d had a day, that was plenty, and he couldn’t not be thinking about watching his own feet and his back at the same time because he was him.  They couldn’t stay there forever, after all.  Though Martin was always quick with a plaintive ‘why not?’ every time Jon reminded him of that fact.  He had tried valiantly, oh so valiantly, to keep pace and contribute, to hear Jon’s voice, to process the things he was saying, as horrible as they were, but everything he said clanged around in his skull like a moth trapped in a mason jar, buzzing and fluttering and indistinct in its blind, supersonic lostness.  Every shred of Beholding, or Jonah Magnus, or Smirke’s fourteen, maybe fifteen, was another drop of condensation leaking down the foggy panes of him, scoring a clear, bloodless wound that only fogged over to be slashed open again.

Sometime in the haze of late afternoon, when the sun is pale and stagnant, when the second hand lingers on the twelve a little longer than it should on each revolution, Martin began to breathe just a little quicker than Jon would have liked.  Even after he gave up the frantic turning of the gears in his head that was a little too loud, even for him, for softer dialog, Martin’s eyes darted just a little too frantically, pupils frosted over just a little too white and a little too small while his tongue tripped over simple words and his hand leapt shyly away from his touch.  Jon knew he had tread too far.  Suddenly, mid banal and desperate Band-Aid conversation about how to make a proper Scottish shortbread because he had no idea what else to ask about that wouldn’t recall beaches, loneliness, or eyes, Jon closed his mouth, took one look at the fading marigold of his love, and gently took his hand to lead him outside the back of the cottage.  Neither said a word as Jon propped the ghost of Martin comfortably on the small garden bench, set his phone to a classic music station at whisper volume beside him, and kissed his temple fiercely.

“You just breathe for me out here a while, alright?” he said against his translucent skin, the words so quiet Martin could barely hear them.  He heard them louder and clearer than anything all day, “Just breathe and I’ll be right inside if you need me.  You’re not alone.”

Martin nodded mutely, and closed his eyes to let the sound of the wind in the overgrown hedgerows and the petals of pink primroses, of violins and chaffinches flitting in the trees wash the waxed-on layers of static away.  A few hours later, when the sun had tipped to the west and the sky was flushed with peachy orange daubs of cloud, Jon peeked out of the back door of the safehouse.  Martin was exactly where he had left him, but his eyes were serenely closed, his full lips were a rosy pink and curved into a gentle smile, and he glowed with the flaxen veil of near dusk settling atop their tiny haven.

Jon smiled and padded as quietly as he could to his side.  He perched beside him on the bench, saying nothing, just sitting with him, watching as Martin opened his eyes like bright blue forget-me-nots blooming in a dewy April morning and threaded his warm, sunset kissed fingers into his.

“Hi, you.”

“Hi,” Jon replied breathlessly, heart thrumming, “Feeling better?”

“Much, thank you…”

“I’m glad of it.  Mind if I sit with you a bit?”

“Please do.”

Unbinding their fingers for only the time it took to extricate his pack of cigarettes from his pocket, fish one out, and light it, Jon scooped Martin’s hand back into his and held it atop the cool stone of the bench as cinders glowed bright against the balmy stirrings of eventide.

“Forgive me my vices in these trying times,” he snickered facetiously, seeing the lovingly judgmental look on Martin’s face.

“It’s okay.  I don’t mind,” Martin answered behind willowy wisps of smoke, “For now, anyway.  I can nag you to quit again when this is all over.”

Jon didn’t reply right away, taking a long drag of the cigarette and exhaling it slowly, pensively, letting the heavy smoke curl up from his lips and through his nostrils like some ancient sentinel dragon.  His warm, dark eyes reflected the tilting sky as he gazed up into its aching emptiness and quelled the bored and hungry thrashing of the thing inside him.

“Do you think it will be…?  Over?  That is?” he mused in that gravelly tone he only got when he was carrying something heavy.

“Of course I do.  I have to believe that,” came Martin’s fervent rejoinder, “I have to believe it.  For everyone.  For us.”

“For love?”

Jon’s eyes flicked away finally from the crawling heaps of clouds on the horizon toward the man at his side, tethering his hand to solid rock.  Martin squeezed that hand as he filled those woody, heady depths with his own gaze of boundless blue.

"People do fall in love. People do belong to each other, because that's the only chance that anyone's got for true happiness," he murmured, reaching up to touch his cheek.

Jon closed those eyes of empty galaxies and polished mahogany and tipped his cheek fully into Martin’s palm, pressing it there with his free hand.  The smoldering cigarette balanced elegantly between the knobs of his first two knuckles, painting a wispy circlet of smoke around his head.

“Mmm.  That is a nice thought, what’s it from?” he wondered aloud as Martin’s thumb stroked his cheek.

He snorted incredulously.

“Me…?  I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Really?  But it sounds so familiar… oh-!” Jon gasped in epiphany, “I got it!  Breakfast at Tiffany’s!”

Martin’s brows knitted tightly on his face as his hand slipped away from Jon’s cheek.

“What?  No… No, it can’t be.  I-“

“Yeah, it is!  You remember!  The scene at the end in the cab where he throws the ring at her… tells her she’s… built herself a cage and has to live with herself in it…” Jon recollected, suddenly going darkly joking, “Are you trying to tell me something?”

It was lost in the razor-sharp film reel slithering through Martin’s subconscious, flickering and snapping mockingly in the dark.

“Oh, you’re… you’re right.  Hah, dunno where that came from,” he admitted, rubbing the back of his head embarrassedly.  The other hand, still entwined with Jon’s on the bench, tightened skittishly.

“I should hope you wouldn’t compare me to Holly Golightly,” Jon retorted amusedly, fingers rooting his in reply.

“Oh, there is so much to unpack there, but no.  No Jon, it’s just a movie I accidentally pulled a line from because it was one of my mum’s favorites and I used to put it on for her all time,” Martin chuckled, though it was a little thin for his liking, “Don’t read too deep into it.  I’ve just seen it a zillion times is all.”

A noncommittal, teasing hum rumbled from Jon’s lips as he put them back around the cigarette and pulled luxuriantly.  His long, silvered chestnut waves spilled over his shoulders as he tipped his head back, catching the wavelengths of light in a way that stole Martin’s breath away.

“And anyway.  She still makes the choice to put on the Cracker Jack ring and she still finds Cat and they end up kissing in the rain, remember?” he added.

Jon chuckled a husky, smoky chuckle.

“That she does…”

Martin looked down at their joined hands and felt the shuddering reverb of everything that had gone before.  A sickly tide of guilt washed up over his heart.  He was the reason they were sitting outside quoting Audrey Hepburn movies and idly holding hands when so much was behind them and so much ahead, wedged in the middle of tragedy gone and unknown tragedies to come.

“S-Sorry about all this…”

Jon snapped instantly to attention, sword and shield of emotional chivalry drawn and at the ready.

“For what?  Needing a break from me?  For chrissakes Martin, I’m not easy to deal with even before… before everything that happened to you.  Not to mention I’m probably just about the worst person to learn how to be human again with, if we’re brutally honest.  Since I’m… neither here nor there myself.  I don’t blame you at all.”

His words struck so obtusely, so off the mark, Martin felt hurled into a vacuum, spinning helplessly in space.

“Th-That’s not it!  That’s not it at all!  Th-There’s no one in the world I’d rather be learning to be human again with, Jon.  I want to be here with you, I just… can’t we just be us?  For a little while anyway?  I just want to be with you…”

His words settled for a moment, whispering in echo like dust and dry leaves tinkling after a whirlwind.  The corner of Jon’s mouth curled into a puckish grin.  He paused, just a moment, as if deciding the flash of an idea in his mind was genius or completely deranged, but then stabbed out his cigarette on the cobblestones at his feet.  He let Martin’s hand go so he could pick up his phone, still insistently playing some obscure old string quartet composition, searched through the music app, then turned up the volume as Moon River began its first lilting notes through the speakers.  Setting it down on the bench and rising primly to his feet, he swept himself up in a gentlemanly bow and offered his hand back out an invitational gesture.  Martin stared at it, blinking, and peal of robust laughter rang joyously through his chest.

“…You’re not serious.”

“Deadly.”

Unable, unwanting to refuse, Martin took Jon’s hand and was lifted up into a weightless, awkward dance in the tiny unkept garden to a metallic cellphone rendition of Moon River.  They spun with indulgent slowness, as the stars peeked out and the music crooned on, hand in hand and unsure who exactly was supposed to be leading this waltz, no foxtrot, no definitely tango.  But they laughed each time they stepped on each other’s feet, as they melded back into congruent shapes, and everything was forgotten again in a kiss like a silver streak of comet dust across the luminous pink-purple horizon.

“Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker.  Wherever you're goin', I'm goin' your way…”

The third time it happened, it was a bloody record scratch and a haunting, grainy skipping of warped vinyl.  Jon had woken up after their night full of neon and technicolor splendor completely drained of it and awash in dark-eyed, ailing sallowness.  Only able to insist he was fine as far as collapsing into Martin’s arms the moment he tried to get out of bed, he had been stuffed bodily back in and given a stern talking to about neglecting his needs, however unsavory they might be.  And unsavory they were, Martin’s gut remembered, as he dutifully fetched the tape recorder and the meager folder of statements they’d managed to filch to tide him over until Basira could secret them some more.  They felt grimy and insurmountably tainted in his trembling hands, sticky somehow and cloying with the acrid reminder of what Jon was, what they both were, and what had touched them both with filthy hands and sharp nails.  He laid them on the bed beside Jon like they burned, who watched as he took two steps back and faded into the slice of sunlight spilling through the bedroom curtains.

“You… you don’t have to stay,” he told him flatly.

“Do you… do you want me to?”

“Not really?”

“Okay… Okay, then I’ll go make us some breakfast and come back when you’re through.  Take your time.”

Jon nodded through the kiss Martin planted on top of his head before escaping the room like mist gliding through the black crags of a lagoon back out to sea.  He cooked in choking silence, trying not to let his mind decode words from the indistinct timbre of Jon’s voice in the bedroom through the walls, but it was almost impossible.  They dripped like blood rain through the leaves of a tree, fat and blistering and scattered onto the top of his head.  Words like sobbed, watching, knife, burned, or devoured, scant snatches of oblique terror from people he didn’t know, would never know, people who were probably long gone and far past their reach to help.  Especially now.  

The eggs frying in the pan sizzled and popped distantly beside the sliced tomatoes and mushrooms obtained on the day prior’s shopping trip, and together the bright yellows and reds bled out into the cast iron until they were a vague monochromatic hue of cooked.  A proper fry-up needed bacon, though, didn’t it, Martin thought, mostly to give his brain something, anything to look at while he waited for the disembodied voice to cease, yes, he should really go fetch the bacon.  Staring blankly at the stove, his cloudy, foggy eyes refused to focus on any single point and his feet refused to move, detached and dangling each from a silver thread somewhere.  Once he could connect enough points of radio snow to hew a coherent thought, he doubted the kindness of eating bacon, of all things, beside Jon after he’d had to read whatever unknown horror.  Instead, just mounded an extra helping of beans onto his plate as he loaded up the tray with tea and toast and everything else and ferried it into the silent bedroom.

Jon was still in bed, as expected, sitting up cross-legged and chewing his thumbnail idly with no sign of the statements or the tape recorder.  Martin hated how relieved he was not to see them again, but he loved how much better Jon looked, and how the distance in his eyes fled in bright starry gleams to see him through the gray filter settling over his own.

“Oh, breakfast in bed hmm?  To what do I owe this honor?”

“Just one of the many perks of deciding to put up with me,” Martin replied with as much cheer as he could muster to match him.

Jon frowned a little, but said nothing as the laden tray was alighted over his lap and Martin slid carefully onto the bed to join him.  Martin was an excellent cook, always had been, but both of them picked at the limp, lifeless spread with appetites long truant and senses perverted.  A bit of runny yolk on slightly burnt toast was nothing to a wet crunch of bone and a scream of ire.  The canned beans tasted of seawater and squelched like kelp bulbs impaled on the tongs of his fork.  Martin poked at them distractedly, watching them leave gruesome red streaks of their innards on the chipped plate until the soft, slender backs of Jon’s fingers pressed worriedly into his too cool forehead.

“Are you alright?  You’re the one looking a bit peaky now.”

Martin looked up and nuzzled into the warmth of his fingers needily.

“Am I?” he asked absently, “Sorry, I just… I hate this.”

The miniscule points of light in Jon’s eyes that had winked on at his return, despite everything, dimmed like an empty stage again as he looked down at his mangled plate, crestfallen.  His hand shied back away to his lap where it twisted the hem of the comforter instead.

“I’m sorry, Martin…”

Martin’s chest seized.  The bright red tartan comforter faded to gray.

“Oh shit- no, Jon, not like that!  I-I mean I hate it for you!  I hate what it does to you.  I hate that the pain of other people is necessary for your continued existence in this world.  I hate that it makes you… like it… That’s all.  I-I just need to get used to it.”

Protest withered and died in the atmosphere the moment Jon’s lips parted to unleash it.  They closed as thought flickered behind his eyes, parted, then closed again before he finally conjured the right words.

“Then… I guess I’m just sorry being with me involves learning the ah… care and feeding of an eldritch demigod…?” he offered with a wan smile and a shrug.

Martin blinked, then chuckled softly, mournfully, and leaned over to press his lips in a slow, indulgent kiss into Jon’s forehead.

“It’s alright,” he mumbled against the scarred skin, closing his eyes and letting the sandalwood scent of his shampoo waft over him in verdant waves, “I think I can manage.  Everyone goes through this.  Just, most people have to deal with ‘oh he’s a vegan and she hates cats.’  Ours just so happens to be ‘oh he sustains himself on being a voyeur to gut-wrenching terror and he fades from literal existence every so often.’  No better, no worse really, if you think about it.”

Jon laughed in kind, a little deeper, a little louder.

“You’re not going to tell me you hate cats next, are you?”

“Not in the least.”

“Good, because that would have been a deal breaker.”

“And now I know you’re a cat person,” Martin chuckled, reaching out and stealing Jon’s scarred right hand.

He unfolded it reverently out on the comforter, like the painted paper wings of a butterfly, and traced the old lines of it with a fingertip flushing pink again.  The trails of his life and heart and fate lines were faint and obscure beneath the crumbling ramparts of healed flesh, but still there.

“But that’s the greatest part about being with someone, isn’t it…?” he continued quixotically, the glow spreading back to his cheeks as his fingers danced atop Jon’s palm, “That’s where the adventure is.  Learning about them every day, learning about yourself, too, and how to be two people, but also somehow two people together?  And now I can say I have the privilege, no, the honor, to have embarked on the epic journey to learn how to be with you, weird metaphysical dietary needs and all.  Because the greatest thing you’ll ever learn, is just to love and be loved in return.  Don’t you think?”

It was Jon’s turn to snatch up Martin’s hand with a wry grin, warm again in his palms, and kiss every one of his freckled knuckles as they blazed back to life in ruddy constellations.

“Fancy me a very strange enchanted boy then, do you?” he teased.

Martin balked dubiously.

“I… I’m sorry?” he snorted, raising an eyebrow.

“You know- That song you just quoted.  Nat King Cole?  Nature Boy?  They say he wandered very far.  Very far, over land and sea.  A little shy and sad of eye.  But very wise was he…” Jon hummed, half-singing the lyrics in a drowsy velvet purr, “Heh, I suppose I’m a little flattered this time.”

Too much of a pool of serenaded bewitchment to ponder where he’d gotten the lyrics, Martin’s eyes went positively limpid with love as they flushed songbird blue.

“God, you have… such a gorgeous voice…” he gushed, astonished and humbled to have heard it, even if he could never convince him to do it again.

Jon rolled his eyes fondly as the tips of his ears turned a little rosy.

“Oh, shut up.”

“You know I’m never, ever letting that go now,” Martin said with ruthless affection, laughing sheepishly, “B-But yeah I know the song.  I guess.  I think I must have been thinking of Moulin Rouge though.  Didn’t know it was a song before that…”

“Right, right, that film.  Excellent use of it.  If I recall correctly, didn’t David Bowie do a cover for it as well?”

Jon prattled on for a moment about David Bowie, or covers of songs most people didn’t know were actually covers, or Baz Luhrmann movies, Martin couldn’t tell.  There was another sinkhole opening in him.  Not one filled with frigid fog that eroded him layer by agonizing layer with the tide in a seaside cave like the first, but one more of rusted metal, jagged and eaten away by the creep of something infectious and voracious.  It had started so small, just three stolen words, but now it spread and ate tiny holes in him wherever something beautiful, something his, should have lived, replaced it with a brown patina of rot and decay and overuse.  His fragile armor crumbled while Jon shone, animatedly talking about cinema and devouring, with gusto, the breakfast made for him.  The least Martin could do was allow his radiant light to pierce the ugly, unnamed holes in him and shine in love-wrought florals and wreaths made beautiful through him.

“You know if movies are a-a thing of yours, I wouldn’t mind… err that is to say, I like movies, too?” Jon continued on in his hopeful ramblings, desperate to catch the drooping sails of Martin once again, “I took a film class like everyone does back at uni and I found it absolutely fascinating.  I mean there’s a good reason everyone does, right?  There were a few in there I wouldn’t mind watching with y- Ahah, well we don’t have to watch THOSE kinds of movies, any kind will do, really.  And I swear I won’t get pretentious or academic about it, or- oh u-unless you like picking apart movies like that?  I probably don’t seem the type but, trust me, I am actually capable of watching something and just enjoying it without-“

“Jon,” Martin halted him adoringly, smiling as he met his timid gaze and mentally scrubbing over his rusty spots stubbornly with steel wool and vinegar, for him, for Jon, “I’d love to overanalyze movies with you.”

The anxious bowstring of Jon’s reedy body finally went slack, and he smiled radiantly.

“Oh.  Oh!  Good!” he breathed eagerly, “I um- I know this place doesn’t have internet for obvious reasons, but I think there’s an old VCR hooked up to the TV?  We can hunt around and see if Daisy has any cassettes squirreled away somewhere.  She must have.”

“Sure, after you finish your breakfast though.  Don’t want you keeling over from starvation of either kind, lesson number one in ‘The Care and Feeding of Your Cryptid Boyfriend’,” Martin reprimanded lovingly.

“Hey, same goes for you, baked bean Picasso over here,” Jon shot back.

They laughed, and for a brief, halcyon moment, Martin felt the holes spackled shut.  Perhaps it could be enough, Jon could be enough.  Perhaps it was nothing but paranoia and the lingering fingerprints drawn in sea salt and sand on his throat.  If he only forged ahead, if Jon’s godlike hands could sculpt him into something sealed and whole, perhaps the stuttering film reel could come to a raucous, flapping conclusion in the projector and fade to black.  He only needed to heal.  He just needed time.  That’s what Jon would say.  And that’s what he said, too, but the breakfast still tasted of brine and Bakelite.

The fourth time it happened was the time Martin stopped counting, and instead just let them stack up, sharp and hot, against the back of his skull.  It came, a slow and lumbering sound test later that very evening sprawled on the couch in front of an old VHS from the dusty collection Daisy had indeed accrued.  They had settled on Say Anything from her surprisingly romcom heavy library, which Martin had seen many times but Jon had never bothered.  Horrified and aghast he had never seen the origin of the oft parodied and iconic boombox scene, and then even further scandalized Jon didn’t even know what ‘the boombox scene’ was in the first place, he put it in and figured out the tuning and setup while Jon filched a dusty old bottle of wine of indiscriminate origin and poured it recklessly into two mugs without even searching for proper glasses.  Neither could decide if the wine was awful because it was just awful to begin with, or if wine just tasted weird in general out of a chintzy floral ceramic mug, but they both drank to boneless giddiness as they watched the classic tale of Diane and Lloyd by firelight.

They began ever so politely, each on their own cushion on the couch, just close enough to touch knees or hold hands or brush a thigh on the way to pour more wine.  One mug in and they were happily squashed side by side between the back cushions, battling for whose head got to be on whose shoulder with encircled arms and fingers twined adamantly together.  Martin sitting up to pour a second round freed Jon to slink, catlike, into a curled-up puddle on his lap, all but demanding Martin’s hands in his hair.  He happily obliged, sipping mediocre red blend in one hand while the other stroked Jon languidly, starting at the crown of his long, silvered locks and laying out the waves of them in reverent oaky garlands on his thighs.  The bottle only yielded a half pour for their third and final serving, which Jon downed in several hurried gulps so that he could claim the lay of the couch, wriggling his back into the cushions and opening his arms invitingly for Martin, a dopey grin on his face and his ears bright crimson with drink.

A more sober Martin would have been deeply concerned about their ability to squeeze horizontally together on the couch, but as it was all he saw was a sliver of very inviting cushion and the tantalizing glimmer of a little spoon.  He crashed into those arms, resulting in no less than several minutes of laughing and yelping in pain and mashed limbs, but eventually they wormed their way to equilibrium.  Jon had to tuck Martin’s mop of rusty curls under his chin to see the television, and Martin’s knees dangled precariously off the edge, but their ankles tangled together and Jon’s arm draped preciously over Martin’s chest as he folded him protectively in his embrace and kissed into the crown of his head.  They glowed softly in their final performance after a tableau of love for each act of the film, watching the seminal scene in inebriated reverie.  Both of them pointedly ignored the lyrics of the song that went with it.

“So… the film’s called Say Anything…” Jon mumbled into Martin’s hair as the film marched on, half sleepy, half drunk.

“Mmhmm,” Martin intoned in response, idly toying with Jon’s fingers twiddling at his chest as the room twirled merrily around his head.

“And supposedly she can say anything to her father… but then he’s the one who lied to her?  And encouraged her to break up with John Cusack even though she clearly loves him?”

“That is indeed what happened, yes.”

“So it’s sort of all about honesty, then?”

“You could put it that way, yeah!” Martin replied, tilting his head up spiritedly, “That sometimes we do horrible things, we lie, to protect and care for the people who mean the most to us.  But we still mean it.  He’s sort of a foil to Lloyd in that way, you know?  Both of them unquestionably love Diane, it’s just Lloyd is going to do it despite not being what society deems worthy, being himself, and Jim’s going to do it to make life perfect for her even though he actually can’t and has to lie his way through it.  But the film doesn’t really condemn either of them for their choices though!  Sorry spoiler, she forgives him at the end and she gives him the pen to remember her by instead.  They all learn something about truth and what it means to love someone, familiarly, romantically…”

Jon melted around Martin, his poet, his bard, his untangler of the mysticism of art and the soul.

“But that’s why Lloyd is such a beloved protagonist, he just loves, uncomplicatedly, honestly.  He just exists to exist, you know?  No plan, no need for one, he just wants to live life and love her.”

“So you are good at film analysis…” Jon snickered, lips fluttering in barely a kiss behind his ear.

“Heh, well I didn’t get to take a fancy class at uni like you did, but I guess so?  I dunno, I guess I always just admired him, choosing the ‘no thanks’ option when it wasn’t even an option.”

“Would you like to?”

“Hmm?  Choose the no thanks option?  I think the answer to that’s pretty obvious,” Martin snorted.

“No no… If you got the chance to go.  To uni, I mean.  Would you want to?”

“Oh… that.  You know?  Yeah… yeah I think I would.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah… I could take that pretentious film class and get a better grade than you.  Take a real poetry course for once.  Study all the classics and run an on-campus podcast no one listens to except you about classical themes and motifs in modern media.”

Jon laughed, the joy fizzing in his chest for a past that never was, but a future that still could be spilling into another electric kiss, this time at the nape of his neck.

“Incredible.  Then what?  Business degree?  Run an old arthouse cinema?” he inquired, nuzzling into Martin’s broad shoulder.

“Business degree yes, cinema no.  I run a bookshop,” Martin said emphatically, “A bookshop with a café… I do all the baking and you curate all the books and run the till.  We have this pompous fluffy tuxedo cat who will literally do anything for ear scratches or tuna that we take in everyday and she’s our mascot and everyone loves her.”

“Love it, keep going.”

“Heh… Dunno her name though… Maybe we just call her Cat, a homage to Holly, or no-!  No, we do just call her Cat, but it’s because I finally made you read T.S Eliot and now you can’t stand the thought of naming something that already has a name even if we humans can never know it.  Feels far too cruel.  But we try and guess at her true name anyway and for a few weeks she’ll be called Mrs. Snickelfritz and then it changes for a while to Bumblybabs or The Princess Prisspat or something.  I name a cookie after her and it’s the most popular thing on the menu.  We secretly mock the people coming in to find an antique copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland just to look cool on the coffee table and we don’t even feel bad about it.  Every day we go home and I fiddle about in the garden and my vegetable patch and you take up astronomy.  We drink a lot of wine and watch a lot of really awful tele and fall asleep cuddling on the couch before we remember to go to bed most nights.  And life’s just… just quiet.”

Jon took a moment to rearrange the twisted vocal cords in his throat, just to make sure the tone of his voice was dry and clear and unburdened with saltwater.

“And uh, what would you call the shop?  Our shop…”

“Out of Sight, out of Mind Books,” Martin replied, a smug grin plastered to his flushed face.

“Pfft.  A little on the nose, isn’t it?”

“Hey, be nice.  It took me weeks of fantasizing at my desk when I should have been researching to come up with that name.”

“I knew it.  I knew you were picking out drapes for our proverbial cottage rather than following up on leads,” Jon cackled, “You really had this all planned out huh?  Our life together?”

“Well, the cat’s a new character, didn’t know you liked them before,” Martin answered gleefully, “And what can I say?  So much of my life’s been a story of some kind or another, but so little of it has actually been written by me or about me.  Guess I just wanted a little say over my ending.”

Silence ensued, punctuated with the subtle shuddering of Jon’s breath as it passed through the machinery of him and the pining of the wrinkles raised on Martin’s sweater as he tightened himself around him.

“God I envy you Martin, being able to see a future like that,” he finally whispered, “I can see… well, there’s no telling what I can actually see, but I still have such a hard time picturing anything beyond this… I can’t see the future even in a hypothetical sense.  A-And I don’t know if it’s The Eye or-”

“Hey, hey, no.  Don’t talk like that,” Martin scolded, grabbing his hand firmly as he wriggled his way inelegantly into turning about face to look up into his eyes, “It’s okay, there doesn’t have to be a whole life and retirement plan or anything.  I was literally just talking about how I envied Lloyd for that!  It’s just that, for me, when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”

The crescendo of proclamation hung in the air, sacred, immovable, honeyed on Martin’s smiling lips.  It shattered with one strike of Jon’s crinkling eyes and tittering laughter.

“Ohh, that’s a good one.  You know they weren’t actually supposed to be together in the end in the first draft of the film and that line was basically adlibbed for the new happy ending?”

Martin’s body buzzed numbly as the color drained from the television set and the dying flames in the fireplace, the pleasant buzz of alcohol immediately warping into a frigid tremor and a dull whine in his ears.

“Wh… what film?”

“When Harry Met Sally!  Isn’t that what you were quoting?  I actually love that one,” Jon went on, oblivious, snuggling up against the vast warmness of Martin's chest.

He laughed, still euphorically tipsy with any incorporeal green eyes just as quickly thumbed shut with coins on ashy gray lids as they were opened, as he went on about how no one ever expected him to like movies like that, but how achingly, awkwardly, and awfully human they always were.  The ringing in Martin’s ears turned to the soft hiss of tracking on a blank VHS, the short dead space when the story was over and there were still a few feet of regimented magnetic tape left on the reel, as his eyes swam and danced in points of light.  One time was happenstance, two a coincidence, three and four were a pattern.  The Fog was still there, it had been all along, translated, parasitic, through his soul in static and tracking and monochrome and snow.  His very own personal exile riveted to his bones with rusty old quotes from movies he knew forward and backward and in his sleep.

And it was still so gentle.  A gentle fear of redundancy and acquaintance, of the Lonely routine of watching the same two fake people fall in fake love in exactly the same way time and time again with a safe throw rug and a coffee table’s distance between it all, severed from life and adrift on that small chunk of it.  It fizzled and crackled with fuzzy unfeeling, draped a velvet mantle over his eyes and burned with just enough limelight to see the one shadowy figure emerging for curtain call on the stage.  To see Jon, whose mouth was moving with no sound, whose eyes burned with crystal fires of so many worlds and so many paths that all led back to him, whose hands he could not feel on his cheeks.

Even without sound or touch or sight or feeling, he could still reach back through the nothing for him as he had before.  He could still take the glossy black bindings of ancient digital tape and wind them tight through their fingers and around his heart for he who had fought through the Fog to bring him home.  He could not be selfish enough to ask to be saved a second time, especially not when his heart still surged and swelled and fought with bound and ragged wings to go to him, when Jon was right there, in his arms, warm and soft and heroic and so very fragile.

“I wish I could give you that, Martin, so badly,” Jon was saying as he clicked the THX stereo back on, “Just… rewrite the script to give us a happy ending.  I wish I could be The Architect of our happily ever after instead of The Archivist of our path to ruin already walked, but I can’t.  I can’t promise you forever, Martin.”

“I know that,” he interjected, his voice unshakable and brimming with adoration, “So just… just promise me tonight then?”

Scenes could still be paused, still be rewound.  One beautiful moment could live forever, frozen in time, watched, quoted, uplifting again and again, eternal in its splendor with so much comfort in the not changing.  Just like he could rewind the first time Jon told him he loved him, just like he had so many times already when he could not say it back, he could still have this.

“…What?”

“Just promise me tonight.  That we have tonight, here, us.  That’s all you have to do.  Then in a little while, maybe tomorrow, maybe a week from now, who knows?  I’ll ask again.  ‘Promise me tonight, Jon.’  And all you have to do is promise you’ll promise me that one night again, then I’ll always know I can count on at least one more promise, and that’s good enough for me.  Just… a promise of a promise, no obligations attached.”

Jon mulled it over and around in his mind, the corner of his mouth tugging back up in a grin.

“Just a promise to promise, huh?”

“Yep… no grand gestures, no happily ever, no riding off into the sunset on white horses.  Just right here, right now, every time, and we’ll figure it out as we go.”

“I think I can manage that.”

There were sunsets and white horses in both their eyes as they smiled at each other.

“Then promise me, Jon.”

“I promise you tonight, Martin, just this moment, just tonight.”

“That’s all I need.”

The rest of Say Anything faded into the background of their heartbeats and breathing and the kiss that the clocks stopped ticking in reverence for.  They kissed each other into an exhausted stupor as the finale of the film rolled on, twisted relentlessly into one another, heedless as the ding of the fasten seatbelts sign turning on heralded the end.  Everything would be okay.  So long as he had the anchor of Jon to come back to, he could plumb the depths of the rusted-out holes in him and scour out the rot himself.

They lay like that for a while, half an hour, an hour, longer, Martin couldn’t say.  He just reveled in the stillness and the blanket of quiet darkness settling over them, of Jon’s touch and Jon’s scent all around him and the peaceful rise and fall of his chest.  Perhaps he dozed in the absolute safety of his couch haven while it evaded his protector, but after a time he stirred, snuggling up experimentally into Martin’s chest and nudging him gently, feeling out his consciousness to emerge into the emptiness of his wake.

“…Martin?”

Feigning sleep, Martin slipped back into the shadows to keep his plastic touch off the raw earnestness of the moment that was for Jon and Jon alone.  Satisfied he was well beyond the reach of him and in the realm of dreams, Jon smiled as he laid a whispered offering of riotous color and bloom against his fluttering chest.

“I love you.  I love you so much…”

It could have broken him.  It should have broken him.  It should have been a single, tiny stone hurled through a window that brought the entire house of glass crashing in on itself.  How many times had he secretly, politely left flowers of ‘I love you’ at the gravestone of his love without his knowing?  Instead, it was merely a clean pistol shot through a projector screen.  A tiny chink in white vinyl silver screen armor stretched taut and infallible around him.  He still could not dredge up those words, not knowing what else would cling to them on the way up from the darkest parts of himself.  The film reel snagged and caught fire while he pretended to be asleep for a few minutes more, then feigned rousing to urge them both into bed while melted cellulose acetate pooled in the bottom of his heart.  Jon pouted so adorably he almost relented to staying in a tangle on the couch, but for the sake of both of their not particularly young spines he ushered them both off to bed.

Martin fell asleep groping in the darkness for any other films his heart might filch a line from and impale upon his unwilling armor shrike-like, searched for their fetid corpses so he might purge them before rending into them for a meal of festering, gangrenous love.  He woke up telling Jon that he liked him very much, just as he was, and fleeing the bedroom in a panic to brush his teeth before the line could percolate through Jon’s mind to truth, his own or Knowing.  After lunch and a particularly vexing check-in with Basira at the phonebox that roused more than a few demons and stoked the embers of arguments, in the ashes of the mutual apologies he wielded the ubiquitous sentiment of love meaning never having to say you’re sorry.  Jon had laughed.  Martin had felt sick.

As they days dragged on the tally marks stacked up in turn.  Martin caught himself talking about how love doesn’t make things nice, and how they were there to ruin themselves and love the wrong people.  He could not stop his tongue as it churned and clanked out another platitude about his poetry, and how poetry, beauty, romance, love, were the things they stayed alive for.  The thing in rusty white armor that had taken the place of him became a thing unhinged, carving the crumbling façade of himself with more and more dead word trophies that sagged, heavy and bloated, slowed its stride and left it sinking into greyscale silt and sand as it marched obsessively out to a colorless sea.

All it took was the tiniest one, three words, just like the first, to bring the battlements down at last.  It was nothing more than scooping up empty tea mugs and asking if Jon would like a refill.  When he replied that he would very much like one, Martin leaned down and kissed his cheek while the crack in the cornerstone of himself exploded into a fatal fractal.

“As you wish.”

Jon said nothing at first, but as Martin headed into the kitchen, he heard him musing innocently to himself.

“Heh, The Princess Bride.  Been ages since I’ve seen it.  I bet Daisy’s got a copy of that one here.”

The mugs slipped from Martin’s hands and shattered catastrophically on the tile at his feet.  It was over.  If he couldn’t do something as simple as fetch tea without tacking on some pilfered sentiment from technicolor pixels, he was too far gone.  No one would be able to find him in the fog this time.  He would be lost in the dark of a theatre forever, the lone patron applauding a blank screen long after the final credits had rolled and waiting for the same film to begin again.  Martin’s thoughts were eerily calm, even as his body collapsed to its knees and slumped against the kitchen cupboards, his eyes white and wild, chest heaving as he gulped desperately for a breath that would stay in his lungs.

He never even heard Jon call his name, or the frantic beat of his footsteps as he flew to his side.  He barely felt his hands on his shoulders, then his cheeks, and he could not hear the words spilling from his mouth over the high-pitched test tone in his ears.  But there were tears in Jon’s eyes, and his face was twisted and wrought in an expression Martin had never seen on it before.  His eyes were just a little too wide and too hollow, skin too taut and creased, lips too thin and pale, and as he finally heard his voice, clear and clarion above the rushing and ringing in his ears he realized what it was.

“Martin, Martin PLEASE.  Please look at me!  Please, you’ve got to breathe please!”

Jon was afraid.  Afraid for him.  Jon who had leapt headfirst into countless domains belonging solely to fear itself without a second thought, Jon who bore the scars of every time it had lashed out hungrily for him and survived.  He was afraid for him.  He was still pounding and screaming for him at the gate of his second ruin, or perhaps from the first he had been swallowed by the moment Jon had left it, hand still clinging to his buried beneath the rubble.  Martin reached out to grasp it at last, looking into Jon’s earthen eyes as the tears he had not felt before burned like hellfire down his cheeks and his voice choked out tiny and terrified.

“Jon…  Jon I can’t… breathe...”

“Yes, you can.  You can.  Just look at me, listen to my voice and breathe in while I count, okay?  Just listen to my voice and breathe with me, in for one, two, three…”

Through wracking sobs that shook him through every fiber of his entire being, Jon led him through breathing in deep, holding it in his chest, and exhaling slowly, all the while never once letting go of his grip on his hand or letting their gaze break.  Each breath he drew in calmed the violent sounds in his ears, each time he held it he could feel the firm, cold kitchen tile beneath his knees and the solidly wiry strength of Jon grounding him, coaxing him back from the brink until he was a wilted, weeping heap against his shoulder with enough air and enough pain to just cry.

“I’m sorry…  I’m so sorry…. I’m sorry, Jon,” he wailed repeatedly in answer to his prayer from the first night into the crook of his neck.

“Shhhh, shhh.  It’s okay, you’re alright.  I’m here.  I’m right here.  I’ve got you.  What happened?” Jon breathed in reply, arms wrapped tight around him with one hand tangled comfortingly in the back of his ginger curls.

“N-Nothing…”

If he could not conjure his own words of love, he could not conjure words of pain.  He could not tell him.

“It’s obviously not nothing.  I mean, you don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to, of course, but please at least let me help you.  Tell me how I can help, Martin.”

“I can’t…”

“We’re safe here, you know.  Peter’s gone, he’s dead, he can’t hurt you anymore.  I made sure of that,” there was an edge to Jon’s voice, not unkind, protective, warriorlike, “We’re far away from the institute and Basira’s looking out for us back home, and I-“

“I KNOW,” Martin snapped through his tears, immediately regretting the venom, “Sorry… M’sorry.  I know… I know all that.  I-I just… I just…”

“Martin, please…” desperation now, “Please tell me what’s wrong.”

“…Me,” he finally sobbed inconsolably.

Jon frowned, unsure he had even heard correctly.

“…What?”

“Me.  I’m wrong.  I-I came back wrong.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t quite follow.  What in the hell are you talking about?”

What he once felt as an empty suit of silver screen armor around him, rusted and eaten away by cliché and prosaism and pinned with their trophies had become a leaking vessel of molten cellulose and mylar mixed in the putrid bile and puss of their rotting, full to the brim and seeping out of the lacy holes in him with only two hands to cover them up.  His tongue felt hot and sticky and coated in that death shroud of plastic and mawkishness but truth spilled out of him regardless.

“Jon do you… do you have any clue how long I’ve burned for you?  Do you have any scope or scale for the magnitude and depth of my feelings for you?  Can you even begin to understand the hell I walked through for you?”

Biting his lower lip and stroking the back of Martin’s head soothingly, Jon weighed his words.

“I-I mean… I wouldn’t try to, I would never.  That experience was yours and yours alone, I can’t even pretend to-“

“That’s not the point!”

A thin thread of frustration finally twanged and snapped.

“Then what IS the point?  Talk to me!  I can’t help you if you won’t tell me!”

“The point is-!” Martin snarled, sitting upright and pulling away from Jon’s tear-soaked shoulder.

He looked so lost in the terrifying shadow of his grief, in piebald splotches of the grey light filtering through Martin in reverse, the guilty polycarbonate cased words vomited out of him like magma.

“The point is… the point is I finally got what I’d always dreamed of.  For years.  You.  You coming to save me, whisking me away, looking into my eyes and promising to fight evil, together, side by side.  And not only that, but you telling me love me, wholly and completely.  You didn’t waste a second telling me how you felt and kissing me absolutely senseless.  D-Do you have any idea how many times I imagined how that might actually happen before it did?  Or how much better it was in reality?  It was every dream I’d ever had come true, and I…” the tears welled, scalding and heavy, in his eyes as he buried his face in his hands and wept again, “And I ruined them.  All of them.  Every time we find even a tiny shred of something delicate and beautiful between us even despite all the shit we’ve been through, I ruin it because the broken fucking record in my brain dredges up some stupid movie quote instead of what I want to say that derails and destroys our entire conversation!  You were supposed to say it BACK… not first.  Not first.”

Jon opened his mouth and closed it again thoughtfully, still pulling gently at the tangled mire of Martin’s sorrow to find the origin.  

“O-Okay?  Forgive me, I’m still trying to understand.  I don’t see how that’s-“

“It’s GONE Jon.  I’m gone!” Martin bellowed, red-faced and bawling as he slammed his hands into his lap, “The me that used to pen pages and pages of awful poetry about everything, anything and how wonderful and sad and amazing the world was!  Gone!  Burnt out of me… I once wrote a goddamn poem about how we used to hide the biscuits from each other at work, you know?  But now I… The words aren’t there anymore, my words aren’t there anymore.  It’s just an empty hole.  Every time I’ve tried to tell you how I feel about you it’s just come from some stupid sappy romcom, not me… That part of me, the part of me that loved with my whole heart, that open, senseless, sappy idiot… It took it from me…”

“What did?” Jon asked gently, reaching out but not touching.

“Please don’t make me say it, Jon.  Please,” Martin replied, head bowed and tears dripping from his chin.

“Oh… Oh.”

He rolled his lower lip between his teeth as he let Martin’s words fade to indistinct reverb, his light and color growing dim in the harsh glare of the fluorescent kitchen tubes.

“I see.  I think… I understand now,” he finally began in a slow, deliberate tone.

“Do you?” Martin cut in nastily, his voice wetly sawtoothed, and was almost sick with regret even midway between words.

He slapped his hands over his mouth, more tears rolling down his cheeks, “Oh god.  Sorry that was… Fuck me, I’m sorry that was so unbelievably- of course you do I-“

Jon chuckled hoarsely as he managed a sympathetic smile and reached out to gently brush the messy white gold curls away from Martin’s forehead and tuck them behind his ears.

“It’s fine, I know you didn’t mean it,” he assured him, “We can’t really ever be sure of the full effect they have on us, or how the different entities manifest their… gifts.  But I do know this.  There are things inside us, inside humanity, that, if not given up willingly, can never, ever be stolen from us.  Inherent goodness and beauty impossible to snuff out.  Of that much I am certain.”

Martin’s eyes shifted to the baseboards while he scrubbed at his face messily with his sleeve.

“Doesn’t it bother you, though?  That after all that, you said it to me, that you told me you-“ he tripped on the word, swallowing hard, “H-How you felt… and I still haven’t said it back?  I can’t even say it now…”

“No,” Jon answered swiftly, firmly, “No it doesn’t.”

Surprise finally drew Martin’s eyes back to him, and Jon reached out to touch his wrist, just to let him know he was there, he was real, and what he was about to say was just as real as him.  Color sang a single note of a bell and washed out over his hand in rippling circlets while Jon wrapped it tight in both of his to keep them pinging brightly inside.

“Hear me out, Martin.  Isn’t it possible… that, and god help me I’m about to use an idiom.  But isn’t it a distinct possibility that the cobbler’s children have no shoes?” he ventured coyly.

The sheer random ridiculousness of that apparent non-sequitur strummed a short, tearful bitter laugh out of Martin as he shook his head.

“I… Sorry what…?”

“You know that stupid, asinine saying about how, basically when one is good at something, one is so busy doing it for other people they have no time left to do it for themselves or their family?”

Jon drew light little circles on Martin’s palm with the pad of his forefinger as he watched the color and light trickle thinly into his eyes in a dim wave of serious contemplation.

“Perhaps you’ve poured out so much of your love, so many of your beautiful words, for other people, for the world around you, that you never let yourself have any of them.  You wrote with so much feverish, boundless love for everything there was never anything left for you.  You let your words be like a… a gilded cage for your own heart, with you looking out of the bars, pretty for everyone else to look at, but keeping you like a little bird inside and thinking it would be awfully nice if someone would only just join you.  You spent so long seeing beauty in the world and beauty in other people, you wrote yourself out of the story.”

Martin sniffed back his tears and pursed his lips.

“I suppose that makes some semblance of sense.”

“Of course it does,” Jon chorused without missing his cue, “And let’s be honest.  You never thought you’d actually have… me.  You never thought even in your wildest dreams that I would actually fall in love with you.  But you were okay with that.  In fact, maybe in some ways you even preferred it like that?  Not because you don’t have feelings for me, just that…  Well.  It’s easy to make a dream look beautiful, something you can never touch, something that isn’t yours.  Just like your poetry.  Honoring and cherishing something from afar is easy.  The real thing is different.  When you have it it’s still that beautiful thing you loved so much, but it’s beautiful in a way you can’t even comprehend because it’s real.  You can touch it, hold it, and it’s yours.  And how could you ever fully comprehend that?  How can anyone?”

The tears glittered like drops of diamond on russet lashes, rays of sunset shot out from behind the discs of cobalt in his eyes.  They streaked hot, vibrant pink trails down his face and painted him in pantone heartache.

“It’s so hard, and it hurts,” Martin whispered, voice cracking painfully, “It hurts so much and I can’t tell anymore which are the good hurts and which are the bad...”

Jon held fast to his hand with one of his, while the other shot to Martin’s face, brushing the tears away from his cheek and leaving behind a masterstroke of freckles, peppery and vivacious against flushed pink.

“I know.  But it gets easier.  Not any easier to bear, of course, but… easier to sort out which bits are you, which bits aren’t, and which bits aren’t even really there to begin with.  And once you’ve worked it out then you can fight whatever it was left inside you.  Nothing is gone, Martin, least of all you.  And even if it DID take something, theoretically.  If it was even possible to-to burn your love out of you, as you said.  Who’s to say it’s gone forever?  Things heal.  Worst case scenario, the movie quotes are just your heart going to physio or something, you know?  Your words will come back to you once you’ve healed.”

“But you-“ Martin meekly protested to an emphatic shake of Jon’s head.

“Stop.  Stop right now.  We’ve both been hurt, and we’re never going to get anywhere if we keep ignoring our own in favor of the other.”

Wordlessly nodding, Martin bowed his head again to speak his timid, visceral truths to the ground where they fell just a little quieter.

“I’m just… I’m… I’m so scared…”

“So am I, Martin.  So am I,” Jon echoed, scooping his chin in his hands and holding his cheeks tenderly, “But it’s alright.  It’s okay to be frightened, I’m with you now.  We can both be afraid together.”

Martin looked up and finally caught Jon’s gaze, really caught it, as the lacings of his armor began to fray and the boundless forest song of his eyes hummed its ancient melody through him and bid him to join.

“I’m so afraid that I’ll never… never look at a puddle in the rain and find something indulgently sad about it again.  Or wax melancholy at a particularly colorful sunset.  Or be charmed by a silly little bird oblivious to the world,” he said, heavy words weightless in their unburdening, “But mainly… mainly I’m so, so deeply, petrifyingly scared I’ll never be able to write a poem meant for you and you alone… all I ever wanted was to gift you my words.”

Jon’s eyes hooded with a mischievous fox’s grin as his fingers settled comfortably on the back of Martin’s neck and he tugged him close to nestle their foreheads together, whispering against his lips.

“But you already have…”

“Wh-What?”

“Don’t you see?  You already have written me a beautiful love ballad over the last few days, or at least your wounded heart did the best way it knew how.”

“And how is that?” Martin snickered tearfully, a bit more levity in his voice, tip of his nose brushing up shyly against Jon’s.

“Well, let’s see.  Once upon a time… you began with a quote from a movie about a man who was so wrapped up in his work he felt inhuman, who made a choice to go against what everyone else thought was right, who loses everyone around him while he struggles to live up to his own ideals.  Then we have a film about two people who are both hiding something, but who are so inexorably drawn to one another they can’t help but be drawn into each other’s orbits, deep flaws and dark secrets and all, who can’t help but love each other even as they learn the truth.  Next one features a love for the ages, a love pure and bright and good in the dark underbelly of Paris… but one of them belongs to someone they don’t love, but must serve for the greater good even as their heart yearns for another.  And then lastly, a movie that was originally a bit of a tragedy, a movie about a romance that was doomed from the start, became one about a love that flourished in the face of everyone and everything telling them it could never be…. You were writing a story all along, Martin.  Our story.  Sure, for now the pieces don’t belong to us, but you’re still singing that ballad, loud and clear.  You said to me that night you would have waited forever for me, so I’m returning the favor, I’m just waiting until you finish it.”

With each step of his journey recounted in glimmering fondness, the rusted and rotten silver screen white armor sloughed off chunk by chunk.  The plastic effluvium that had choked him flooded out in an epiphanic tide while the misquoted rivets snapped and crumbled away, all shriveling into ash and nothing.  Stripped down to an open ribcage with delicate, quivering heart throbbing in defiance, Martin shone in full, thrumming, beating technicolor life.  Broken and naked, incalculably vulnerable, but divinely free.  The words did not have to belong to him to be from him, to sing the gospel of his truth in reply at last, to reach out for the touch of another through bars of poetry and VHS tape further than his own trembling fingers had ever dared to go, and to bind them, once and for all, together.

“Oh my god,” Martin half breathed, half mad laughed, “Oh my god you’re right… Jon you’re right!  You’re right!  Jon!  Jon I-!”

The wings of his heart erupted free of their film reel chains, burst out of his poetic gilded cage, and flew, carrying beginning, ending, epilogue now featherlight in three simple words.

“…I love you.”

Jon laughed euphorically through his own burst of tears, hesitated to allow the quip on his lips to escape, but set it free anyway.

“I know…”

It took a second to filter through the golden haze of joy, but once it did Martin laughed and shoved at his shoulders playfully.

“Oh, you absolute prick!  Star Wars?  Right now?  Are you serious!?”

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist.”

They both laughed and sobbed and tussled with one another around a messy, raw kiss, repeated until lips were bruised, breath came in desperate pants, and they were a tangled, idyllic muddle of a tearstained embrace on the kitchen floor still surrounded by teacup debris.

“I love you…” Martin sighed blissfully, kissing the words firmly against Jon’s mouth, just to feel them again and make up for lost time, “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you…”

“I love you, too,” Jon murmured back, kiss drunk and dizzy with love, “And you’re still Martin.  Martin K. Blackwood, or MKB, or Mr. Blackwood or whatever it is these days.  Whatever you want it to be.”

“Just Martin, I think.  For now.  I just want to be Martin.  Your Martin.”

“Sounds good to me.”

Martin’s breath hitched in his chest with a familiar and all too welcome urge, an itch in his chest and a flutter of his tongue.  He teased out a few words from that sensitive and bloodied heart hopping eagerly there in the open, roughhewn and salt of the earth, but undeniably his.

“My love is presented in full Cinemascope tonight.  Unspooled, unwound, free from circular aluminum prisons and plastic spools that twist back inside, alight, alive in full glory, My Technicolor Muse…”

Jon pulled back, stunned by the sudden bashful kaleidoscope flash of affection.

“Oh shit, that was- I… Is that me?  I’m your muse?”

“Who do you think?” Martin chastised affectionately, “You always have been.”

“A-Ah, well, I-I um…” Jon stammered shyly, grinning from ear to blushing ear, “Thanks.  I-I really like that.  A-And it’s a nice line regardless, better write it down before you forget.”

“I won’t.  Not anymore.  Never again.”

“Good.”

Jon nodded, and finally rose carefully from the floor, offering his hand out for Martin.  He took it, and rose with clumsy, but effortless elegance into his arms.  Together, they set about sweeping up the ruins of Daisy’s tacky mugs and putting the kettle on for a sorely needed and very late cup of tea.

“You know… I’ve never actually seen Star Wars?  I only know the line because it’s so famous,” Jon announced as he brushed the last of the ceramic bits and floor dust off his hands into the bin.

“Seriously?  Well, we had better remedy that tonight, who knows when we’ll have time like this again,” Martin thought aloud as Jon’s arms snaked around his waist and a kiss was planted firmly on his freckled cheek.

“Well, no matter what happens, we’ll always have the safehouse,” he purred teasingly in his ear.

“Jon, keep that bit up and I swear I will kill you…”

Martin grinned and turned his head to kiss him again while the kettle bubbled, the sun sank low in the west, and they made their tea to drink in front of Star Wars into the night.  Jon spent the entirety of the first film draped on Martin’s chest, utterly enchanted and entranced, babbling on about spaghetti Westerns and Kurosawa films and all the various influences he could so clearly see, reminding Martin that beautiful things really did come from a colorful patchwork of those who came before.  He knew it now, but for that night, he was content to just hold him and listen to him wax poetic about The Force, just to hear the fervor in his velvety voice.  That night they could just be, he could close his eyes to the sounds of lightsabers and X-Wings and the destruction of the Death Star and the comfortable weight of Jon on his chest, to just be wholly in love with him, with any doubt left like so many scraps of 35 millimeter on the cutting room floor.