#jon was a physical sciences major in uni in this one

[ombreblossom]

Lygerastia—Jmart ?

This prompt has been in my inbox for about a year and a half, and this fill I wrote for it almost finished for the past several months, and I figured what better time to post it than Jon x Martin Week 2022! Thank you, @jonmartinweek, for organizing the event, and I’m posting this for Prompt 7: Forehead Kisses. A day late, I know, but I was exhausted yesterday and forgot to post this on Tumblr haha.

AO3 link here.

Summary

Lygerastia, or one who exhibits amorous affection only when the lights are out.

When else has Jon been able to show his increasingly deep and desperate affection for Martin if not late in the night when no one else is awake to disabuse him of the crueler notions he hugs to his chest at all times?

It's the middle of the night that first night of Jon and Martin's respite in the Scottish Highlands, and Jon is having a think. Too much of a think, if you asked Martin, but Martin isn't awake to offer his input.

Thanks for this very first prompt all that time ago, Bryce! And thank you @morning-softness for beta-ing! Your feedback was and is thoroughly appreciated~

.

A whistling wind blows across the Scottish Highlands as Jon stares intently at the back of Martin’s head. They’d only been inside the quaint, sparsely decorated cottage for a scant few hours, and so much has happened already. Through much painful stumbling and knocking and cursing around the inside perimeter, they found the electrical cabinet and brought light into the unfamiliar space. While Martin made faces at what was now ostensibly their paltry stash of canned foodstuffs, Jon found the sofa and discovered it housed a pull-out bed. A thorough inventory of the rest of the cottage revealed a small bedroom in the corner of the first floor furthest away from the main entrance. Jon stared at the double bed in the center of the room, bemoaning its existence while simultaneously grateful that it left them with options.

A short, awkward conversation later saw Martin nearly dropping both their things in an unused corner of the room, exhausted as he was—they both were, really, lest they forget that Jon had eviscerated another avatar with the power of his mind not 24 hours earlier. Martin had given him a look that probably would have slain Peter just as easily in its naked pleading for Jon to stay with him, just for this one night, while he adjusted to existing in the real world again.

It’s now several hours later, by Jon’s distracted count. The urge to kiss Martin’s unruly cowlick is nigh overwhelming, but Jon has a lot of experience in denying himself the things he wants—the things he needs. And he needs this just as much as Martin professes to, this closeness after so long of having no one beside him, no one to touch him, no one to anchor him, no one to care that Jon was suffering too, no matter how much he probably deserved it in the grand scheme of things.

That last point, he was sure, Martin would argue, if only on principle—and it’d have to be on principle, wouldn’t it? Martin’s now seen (and heard) Jon at his worst; there was no reason to believe that he didn’t have a full picture of Jon by now. Jon compelled Martin to See him, after all, in a last-ditch effort to rip him from The Lonely’s grip. There was no question in his mind that it was worth it to have Martin back in this dimension safe, but the act of being Seen has left him in a constant state of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Martin slowly flips over to face him, a warm and solid presence, draping a heavy arm over the natural dip in Jon’s waist and pressing his broad hand into the small of his back. Electricity races down Jon’s limbs, nerves alight with a bright tingle. Thankfully, they’d already been in contact as Martin slept—Jon’s forehead buried in the divot between broad shoulders, one arm slung over Martin’s side, and the other curled up against his own chest���otherwise Jon might have instantly woken Martin up in his violent haste to scramble out of bed.

He’d already done that when they were both awake, and he refused to talk about it then and thankfully Martin was already so tired that he not so much fell as plummeted into sleep and Jon hates that he’s thankful for Martin’s exhaustion he never wants to see the man he lov—

It’s been a long time since he’s shared space with another person like this.

Was Martin awake? He had to wonder, the timing of his new positioning a little on the nose, but Martin’s eyes dart to-and-fro beneath delicate lids, clearly dreaming. Soft moans and subtle twitches bring to mind a warm vision of The Admiral napping in the sun. He can be a good actor when he wants to be and lead people on when the stakes are high enough, but not even Martin could fake sleep this well.

At the same time, Martin has locked Jon in place, ensuring Jon can’t move away even if he wanted to. And he doesn’t want to. Not really. If asked, he’d say it was the last thing he wanted to do. If pressed he’d say the same. But he can’t help the sharp whispers in the back of his mind that warn him to dramatically increase the distance between Martin and himself.

Jon’s desire for physical contact has, for the past couple of years at least, been something of a Schrodinger’s paradox: impossible to predict, for a start. The potential for him to want to touch and accept touch exists just about as much as the potential to be completely uncomfortable with such things, and which potential actualizes in any given moment is, for all intents and purposes, random, decided upon by some unseen force. (And isn’t it a kicker that it’s observation that collapses a superposition of states into a single definite one, as in the case of Schrodinger’s poor cat.) Jon himself doesn’t decide so much as he observes his body reacting, detached, and then proceeds to deal with the aftermath.

With Georgie, it was easier; those were less complicated times, when Jon’s trauma hadn’t extended past a single supernatural encounter. (The perfunctory traumas annoying children tend to collect from growing up with resentful guardians were nothing compared to witnessing Mr. Spider encircle its long, black-as-night, bony limbs around his childhood bully and drag him through a bloodied door.) On their way to class in the oppressive, cold damp of winter, Georgie would sling her arm around his scarf-wrapped neck with ease and bring him in close. He’d let himself get caught in the well of her gravity, let her pull him in like a satellite on a decaying orbit around her. Wrapping his arms around her and pressing his face into her chest quickly became a staple of their time together.

Mouth kisses…he could do without. His reluctance toward them, he theorized, stemmed from the same part of himself as his broad indifference to sex did. The attraction Jon knew many other people felt, the pull to engage in those acts with a specific person, wasn’t ever there; that wasn’t really part of the proceedings for him. He hadn’t been attracted to Georgie that way, and he hasn’t thus far felt that pull of attraction toward Martin, either—not that he’d know what it felt like, anyway. He might be able to extrapolate from existing data, but, well. It wasn’t likely to ever come up. He knew himself well enough by now.

Touching, embracing, existing in the intimate space of another, on the other hand: these were all things that had grounded Jon in the past, irrespective of his relationships with other kinds of intimacy, things he looked forward to from others and initiated himself on occasion.

He can’t count the number of times he crawled into Georgie’s lap as they watched some documentary or other and basked in her radiant warmth. It was a great source of amusement for her, really, especially so once they’d jointly adopted The Admiral. He could only laugh at the comments she made about how ridiculous it was that she’d somehow managed to adopt two cats in as many years. Jon didn’t mind the teasing, though, as long as Georgie promised to run her fingers through his hair and smother him with sweet kisses up and down the length of his body.

He wants that with Martin. Not what he had with Georgie, exactly; they’re two different people, after all, and Jon has changed as well. Being away from the Institute could be the chance Jon’s been waiting for, a chance to bare himself to the one person who might stick around after having done so. A chance for Martin to do the same, in his time. A chance to explore the languages of their bodies—if only his own would cooperate.

All of this rumbles around in Jon’s mind as he contemplates what lies ahead for him and Martin. If Basira and Melanie’s comments are to be believed, and if his scrambling to understand Martin’s past actions have been worth anything, then Martin has been harboring feelings for him for…quite some time. Without him knowing. Or Knowing, for that matter, which is a bit of a shock given all the nasty ways The Eye could have used that information to siphon fear from Jon.

The point is: Martin stuck with him through the unearned cruelty of their early working relationship, the stalking, the murder accusations, the months of traveling, the longer months still of being (for all intents and purposes) dead, and almost an entire year of suffering as a pawn in whatever wager Elias and Peter had agreed upon. Martin is here. Now. Not shying away from Jon—actively positioning himself as close to Jon as possible, in fact, even if only in sleep.

And Jon is letting him. He can’t necessarily change how his body reacts in the moment, but he can decide to relinquish control and just let this happen. And only time will tell whether his desire to remain untouched by the dangers inherent in submitting to vulnerability or his desire to be fully subsumed by this burgeoning…thing he has with Martin will take Jon over in the end. And time does march on, cruelly hastening the dark’s surrender to bright oranges and yellows.

A reckoning awaits him. Morning will see the safe house fully illuminated, shadows banished to the smallest corners of each room, leaving nothing to comfortable ignorance, nowhere to hide from all that wants to peel Jon open like an old orange still attached to the tree long past its prime.

What is Martin going to make of everything in the morning? No longer soft with sleep, fully cognizant of the situation in which they find themselves, will Martin still choose this? Choose him? Did Martin see a choice in front of him? Or simply a soured inevitability?

The warm body next to him stirs, and the hand keeping Jon in place pulls him closer into Martin’s space, into Martin himself. It’s an odd thing: Jon is both close and far away, neither ceding to the other or diminishing the other. A bundle of nerves wills itself into existence just under the skin of the small of his back and immediately flood his brain with unintelligible nonsense. He’s about to buck, he’s about to levitate out of the bed if Martin doesn’t move right this second. Jon notes all this and rides out the sensations.

He settles again. Was the room always this bright? No. He’s just been awake too long and given his eyes too long to adjust to the low light.

And there Martin still is, breathing with his whole body against Jon.

It relieves Jon to feel, not just see or hear, Martin’s chest ebbing and flowing with slow breaths. The heavy knowledge that Jon can and is embracing Martin leaves him just this side of breathless. He can touch him now, actually, after months and months of being just out of reach, just around the next corner, just out of earshot, and still Jon hesitates. But he wants this! His reflexive responses be damned; he’s wanted this since at least the Unknowing and in all likelihood even sooner, if Georgie is to be believed. Why can’t he….

The possibility of touching Martin with intent is so much scarier than anything else he’s contemplated tonight. It’s one thing to throw an arm around someone for want of anywhere else to put it or to let oneself be cuddled out of necessity by one’s touch-starved bedmate, and it’s another thing entirely to—

Jon reaches out with his burn-scarred hand and places it flush against Martin’s swelling chest. If he didn’t know any better, he’d say he was feeling Jude’s desolate fire wreaking havoc on his hand once again. In and out—almost luxuriously—they breathe together. It is a luxury that they’re able to rest like this at all in the wake of everything that’s happened at the Institute.

Though no longer in London, where the night sky is washed out by millions of streetlights and LEDs of all colors and configurations, the light reflecting off the moon is more than enough to give shape to Martin’s face, if not the reason he continues to keep Jon at the forefront of his mind. An inexplicable urge to take Martin’s head in his hands and get a good look at this sleeping face overwhelms him. It’s an awkward fit with how close they are, but awkwardness, false starts, bad timing—Jon met their acquaintance long ago and became fast friends.

Jon watches as his hand bumbles through the air between them and stops at about the midway point, withdrawing slightly in a defensive curl. The scar tissue braid around his hand is unforgiving in its inflexibility, in the insistent pull against itself. Jon can relate.

His hand lingers. He can’t bear to lose any progress he’s made toward Martin, just as he can’t bear to think about Zeno and the trick of logic that made him think an infinite expanse lay between him and all points around him. All he had to do was halve the distance once, then twice, and again, ad infinitum. He’d get there in time to experience the heat death of the universe, missed opportunities haloed around him in perpetual stillness as all entropy and hopeful opportunity diminish to nothing.

Jon doesn’t move and instead watches his hand curl on itself and then pause, unable to answer the impossible question: backward or forward? It’s an amorphous thought in Jon’s mind that his hand will ache in the morning. Instead of giving that thought form, Jon gazes at Martin.

Dark hair curls around Martin’s sleep-smooth features; freckles mottle the skin around his eyes and cheekbones, reminiscent of the wash of stars Jon has scarcely had opportunity to witness himself since leaving Bournemouth, and living in London is hardly conducive to star-gazing. Clumps of melanin, as beautiful as the sky’s most luminous nebulae, have always caught Jon’s attention—even in those moments when Martin tried to minimize his own presence and hide himself from the world and even more so when Jon would rather have nit-picked Martin’s performance than admit a connection to the man, a fondness. They shimmer now, bathed in pale moonlight.

(Which reminds him: if he wants Martin to sleep well into the morning, and he certainly does, then he’ll have to get up to close the heavy drapes behind him before falling asleep himself. He’s not looking forward to disentangling himself from Martin, and he’s looking forward to the prospect of waking him up even less. They both need sleep, admittedly, but, as The Eye likes to shove through the door in his mind, Martin stopped short of awakening as a full-fledged avatar of The Lonely and is, thus, still quite human. And Jon Knows that Martin had developed his own workaholic streak working under Peter, not to mention the burden of unceasing loneliness he carried for the long months between the Unknowing and, well, recent times.)

A plaintive moo meanders into the room; Jon blinks away his wandering thoughts and returns his focus to the present. Only in the dark of the night would he dare touch Martin like this. Jon’s…issues with touch aside, he doesn’t want to further muddle the already nebulous nature of their relationship, and, perhaps more to the point, Jon’s needs are rather secondary at the moment, aren’t they? They both had escaped a metaphysical realm of all-encompassing isolation, but Martin had courted The Lonely for far longer than Jon had spent inside it himself. There’s no need to complicate things before doing so becomes necessary.

So, Jon cups Martin’s face. The distance between them collapsed in an instant. Soft stubble meets him there; he loves how it feels on the pads of his fingers, loves just feeling Martin against him and gazing into him. Brushing a pockmarked thumb against Martin’s cheekbone, Jon sighs, feeling what he could only describe as peaceful.

He wants this, dammit, and he means it. Lifting himself away from the bed and shifting their blankets ever so slightly, Jon places a tremulous kiss on Martin’s forehead—no matter that the hair there tickles him. He lingers there for a moment, shaking slightly with the effort of keeping himself still on an altogether too pliable mattress. He’s so grateful for this, but he wishes he were able to initiate the same when they were both conscious, when it wouldn’t feel like he was stealing something precious from the one who lay beside him.

The moment is over. Jon lays back down and begins laying the brickwork for a dam in his mind to stem the flood of regret that would overwhelm him if he let it. He still has to get up to close the drapes, but that can wait. Or perhaps he’ll find them closed when he wakes up, Martin having woken up to knowing light pouring into the room and onto their intertwined forms. Maybe he’ll gather what happened and feel guilty for leading Jon on—“I’m sorry I left you,” he’d said after Prentiss when he’d done nothing of the sort—and close them to give Jon one final kindness: more time to sleep before Martin lets him down gently and finds another corner of the Highlands to hide in until things blow over.

Once again fully ensconced in Martin’s embrace, Jon spends the rest of his waking hours building up the dam in his mind and hoping that the worst of what slips past doesn’t come to fruition.

---

It’s whatever hour it is that the sky’s curtain of black begins to give way to lighter shades of navy and cerulean blues. Martin’s eye that isn’t smooshed into Daisy’s eons-old pillow opens to a beautiful sight: his love asleep (snoring, no less! Albeit gently, but goodness. That’s adorable) and nestled under his chin, the two of them touching, forming a continuous line of contact from the top of Jon’s head to where their legs lie entangled further down the bed. Martin could tell, though, that Jon was thinking way too hard last night, the grip Jon has on his shirt so firm that Martin hopes his hand doesn’t cramp.

A weary smile makes its way onto Martin’s face. Warmth blossoms in him at the thought of beginning their rests this way, too, instead of unwittingly grasping for the nearest source of warmth available to them in the depth of unconsciousness.

Though he will silently complain when it wakes him up later, the sun peaking above the horizon draws out the sparkles of silver in Jon’s wavy, otherwise ink-dark hair, like the ice and dust that make up a vast swathe of the Milky Way. It requires no thought at all, no active decision-making on his part, to place a kiss on Jon’s hair. It’s a short-lived thing, as tired as Martin is, but he vows to do it again.

As the sun deigns to reveal more and more of itself, Martin considers getting up and closing the drapes. He’d rather have this with Jon, though, than sleep a couple extra hours. Let the outside world observe them. They’ve nothing of themselves to hide.

The drapes remain open, and Martin closes his eyes, positive that this is the beginning of something wonderful. Martin Saw Jon in The Lonely and wants nothing more than to spend the rest of their lives understanding each other.