Chapter Text
Jon almost walked right past Martin on his way back from the library, so unrecognizable had he become in the months since he had begun to work for Peter Lukas. He always stood at his full height these days, his broad shoulders set back, making him look unapproachable and intimidating. The feathery curls that had always fallen endearingly over his eyes were held back tight in a small bun and Jon swore he could see some thin strands of shocking white striking through his roots. His freckles had faded as his skin had grown sickly pale. He was wearing a steel gray dress shirt, pressed sharply and tucked into his trousers. His shoes reflected the fluorescent lights. Next to him, Jon must have looked like he had just fled a housefire.
The only trace of familiarity in him was the faintest waft of the oatmeal-honey scent of his body wash that had become embedded in the Document Storage bed that Jon had reacquainted himself with in recent weeks, and the too-heavy tread of his footsteps that Jon had never stopped listening for on the stairs.
Still, it was enough for Jon’s head to shoot up from where he had been studying the index of the book he had just picked up, and he didn’t have time to school the thrill from his voice before it was calling out without his permission.
“Martin!”
A longsuffering sigh pulled Martin’s shirt tight around his shoulders as he turned to face Jon. Jon stumbled back slightly at the sudden closeness of him; Martin had always had over twenty centimeters on Jon, but for the first time, Jon felt a powerful awareness of his height, and it settled in his gut with something almost like fear.
Martin’s hands were in his pockets lazily and he looked down at Jon with the utmost disinterest, bordering on contempt. His eyes… They had always been the same shade of blue-gray, but all of the warmth seemed to have been leached out of them and replaced with steel and freezing fog.
“Hello, Jon,” his voice was just as cold and detached as his eyes as he stared blankly somewhere above Jon’s head.
Jon fumbled for something to say long enough that he stopped looking for the right thing and started grasping for literally anything at all . Finally, the words just sort of tumbled out.
“It- it’s good to see you!” Jon’s voice was unsteady but painfully sincere. “I- We’ve missed you down in the archives.” The shaky smile he offered was met with all the expressiveness of a concrete brick.
He tried to keep going. “There’s, uh, there’s a lot going on, I mean, always is, you know, but it’s, it’s definitely different with just-”
“Did you come looking for me?” Martin suddenly asked a chipping spot of paint on the wall. “I told you in no uncertain terms not to look for me.”
“N-No!” Jon shook his head emphatically. “I just saw you in the hall and I wanted to speak to you, it’s- it’s good to see you, it’s been too long-”
A single laugh forced its way out of Martin, so loud and harsh that it made Jon jump. “Too long? You know what’s too long, Jon?” He finally met Jon’s eyes as his impassive face curled with derision. “Six months is ‘too long,’ Jon.”
Jon flinched and began to stammer as he wrung his hands, finally managing a pathetic whisper of, “I- I didn’t mean to.”
Martin huffed another joyless imitation of a laugh, “You didn’t mean to...”
His voice hardened to something past emotion, and Jon felt a pang of that fear again. “You were dead, Jon. I mourned you. Six months . I waited, and waited, and you were dead, and you left me alone. I had no one . Do you get that? Like, really, do you get that? Sasha was dead, Tim was dead, my fucking mother was dead, and you were laid up in a hospital bed with no heartbeat but you couldn’t even have the decency to properly die and just let it end.”
A small sound escaped Jon like something had struck him unexpectedly.
Martin’s mouth drew up into a thin line and his expression twisted into something that reminded Jon sharply of his grandmother on the occasions when the police would arrive on her doorstep with his child-self in tow. His stomach dropped accordingly.
“Six months. You left me utterly, completely alone for six months. That’s too long, Jon.”
Jon at least had the courtesy to look agonizingly contrite before he tried to speak again. “I, I came back!” His eyes were wide and his face screwed up with raw emotion. “I came back for-”
“Yeah, well, nobody asked you to do that,” Martin muttered under his breath, barely loud enough to hear, and Jon’s heart stopped.
“Wh-” Jon’s breathing rattled his hollow chest and his voice was high and reedy. “What?”
Martin’s face betrayed nothing but the purest apathy. “I mean, maybe things would’ve been better for everyone if you hadn’t come back.”
Jon felt like he had been hit by a truck.
His vision blurred, air burned in his chest somehow, though he couldn’t seem to breathe. His fingertips went numb and his skin went cold; his heart kicked against his ribcage so hard it felt like his whole body shook with it. He tried to gasp out Martin’s name through the ringing in his ears, growing louder as he grew dizzier, but all he managed to do was stare unblinking at Martin’s shadow on the floor and quiver his lip like a child. Even the animal whimper in his chest couldn’t escape past the place where his throat closed and choked him. He just stood there, stock still, as the world grew ever vaguer and more distant and Martin’s words bounced around his head like an endless artillery ricochet.
Martin stood before him vacantly and waited. When it had become clear that Jon wasn’t going to add anything more to the conversation aside from the shallow whine of his panicked breathing, he cracked his neck absently and rolled his eyes.
“Yeah, okay. Well, some of us have work we need to get done, so I’m gonna go.”
One of Jon’s hands flinched with the desperate desire to reach out, to grab Martin and pull him back physically, to bury his face in the crisp lines of the oxford he was wearing and cry into it until it was ruined and he had to go back to wearing the bulky knit sweaters that he was always wearing behind Jon’s eyelids.
He didn’t, of course. He couldn’t. He couldn’t even move as Martin threw his voice, unrecognizably cold and harsh, over his shoulder one last time.
“Do not look for me, Jon. I don’t want to see you.”
Jon somehow managed to drag his corpse of a body into a nearby bathroom before he collapsed to the ground. He hadn’t managed to turn the light on or lock the door, so he shook in the dark and distantly hoped no one else would try to come in. His weight pressed into the corner where the walls met was the only thing keeping him from fully sprawling on the dirty floor. He couldn’t hear himself crying over the ringing in his ears, but he tasted salt as tears ran freely into his mouth, hanging open as he tried desperately to heave in enough air.
Maybe things would’ve been better for everyone if you hadn’t come back.
The weight of Martin’s voice, so precious and familiar, telling him that he was better off dead… It settled into every one of Jon’s bones and wrung him dry of pain until there was nothing left for him to feel except the same cold, silent nothing that he had seen in Martin’s eyes.
With salt drying the skin on his face and his heart pumping lead instead of blood, Jon hauled himself back to the archives, barely registering the dark of the sky outside or the emptiness of the Institute. He fleetingly considered trying to lose himself in another statement, but he was just so tired, he was so heavy…
He kicked the door to Document Storage closed and didn’t bother to lock it. He pulled his shoes off without untying them and left his trousers in a heap on the floor. He couldn’t be bothered to take his glasses off before he caved into the battered mattress on the floor, already feeling the familiar ache take up residence in his neck. He curled his knees up to his chest and stared unseeingly at the sliver of light on the wall across from him for a while, feeling hollowed out. Then he shifted, and the faintest hint of that painfully familiar Martin-smell drifted past his face, and, oh, never mind, there’s the pain again.
— — — —
Meanwhile, Martin made it all the way home before the dread and nausea got a grip on him. It wasn’t unusual for regret of the day’s actions to meet him at the door, but tonight, the wave of horror and disgust washed over him stronger than anything he had ever experienced before. He barely made it inside before he was folded in half and a shriek ripped through his closed mouth as he remembered the things he had said, and felt them properly for the first time.
He ran to the bathroom to slam his knees onto the tile and vomit, crumpling to the floor before he could even brush his teeth. He wailed loud enough to concern his neighbors and cried like he hadn’t since he had received the news that Tim was dead and Jon would probably never wake up. He shook and sobbed and keened with an emotion that, even with almost three decades of practice hating himself, he was completely unprepared for. He spent most of the night there, crying until his nose bled and wondering if this time he could finally muster up enough willpower to drop dead out of nothing but the sheer desire to do so. He listened to the distant and unreachable sounds of the other people shuffling about his building and felt deeply, untouchably alone.
Eventually the sheer revulsion he felt for himself forced him up from the ground and convinced him to stick his head under the faucet, but whatever little good it managed to do was immediately washed away as a new wave of tears pushed impossibly through him at the memory of his own voice ringing in his head.
Maybe things would’ve been better for everyone if you hadn’t come back.
No, no, no, no! He wanted to scream, he wanted to gnash his teeth and rend his garments and throw himself into some kind of holy fire. How could he say that? How could he say that?
“It’s not true,” he warbled through tears. “I didn’t mean it. It’s not true.”
I love you took up its familiar rhythm beating at the back of his throat as he stripped and put himself to bed, but tonight he didn’t even deserve to say it aloud. He hoped the formless version of Jon that spent every night sitting up in bed with him wouldn’t miss it too much.
The next morning, he forced his body out of bed, pulled down his sleeves, and made his way to the Institute with red eyes and a throbbing headache behind them. He relished the sharp sting of daylight against the pain. The entire way there, he thought of how he was going to go straight to the archives and throw himself at Jon’s feet, begging for a chance to make it right. He didn’t deserve forgiveness, he didn’t deserve to even ask, but god, if he could just find a way to convince Jon that he hadn’t meant it… The knowledge that he had hurt Jon so profoundly tasted like blood on his tongue and hurt like glass in his eyes.
But as soon as he was through the Institute doors, a wave of numbness washed over him, hot-cold and heavy. Huh. He always seemed to forget that that was going to happen. The tension in his shoulders and jaw dropped and his face relaxed into blankness. He sighed heavily at the state of himself and headed for the upstairs bathroom to clean up, leaving his previous agony in the lobby. What had he been thinking? He didn’t have time to go swanning about the archives, flirting or wallowing in self-pity or whatever it was he used to do down there. It was just too bad if he had hurt Jonathan’s precious little feelings yesterday. Some people had work to do.