grahamfolgersdeliciousnotebooks:
(CW: panic attack)
It was loud, on the train. That wasn’t true, exactly - they had boarded the train just after midnight, and the hush of early morning had settled over the carriage soon after. The only noise was the rumble of the wheels, the rush of Jon’s breath (slow and even, as he’d fallen asleep not long after they boarded), and the faint, tinny sound of music spilling from another passenger’s headphones. It was, by all reasonable accounts, not a loud train carriage. But it was still too much.
Everything was too much. Martin hadn’t realized how much the Lonely had muted everything - muffled sounds, dulled colours, kept emotions always at an arm’s length, to be observed but not truly felt - until it had been ripped away from him. He felt like one giant exposed nerve. Simply existing in the same space as other people was almost unbearable.
And Jon’s hand was still wrapped around his, and that was worse. All of the painful, tangled emotions that the Lonely had provided an escape from were connected, in some way, to Jon. He had loved Jon. He knew that. He had waited years for Jon to give some sign that he cared (though, in all his romantic fantasies, the gesture had been considerably smaller) and the time would come eventually when Martin would be very glad he finally had.
Martin had to remind himself that that time would come. He wouldn’t feel this way forever. He couldn’t.
For now, though, his feelings towards Jon were… complicated. The memories of his past feelings for Jon were mingling with his present knowledge that Jon cared. If what he’d Seen in the Lonely was accurate, Jon cared very deeply. Jon had rescued him, had torn him away from that lovely, awful, peaceful nothing, and Martin loved him and hated him for that in equal measure.
Jon shifted in his sleep, and Martin softened. He couldn’t hate Jon; not really. He looked so small, curled in his seat with his coat hanging loose around his shoulders. The dark circles under his eyes had deepened, and he looked, somehow, thinner and more gaunt than Martin had ever seen him. Still, the gentle rise and fall of his chest was a reassurance, a refreshing change from the last time Martin had spent this much time with Jon.
Martin pushed aside those memories. He couldn’t think about how he’d felt back then, and he couldn’t think about how he felt right now, so he turned away from Jon to look out the window, at the dark landscape rushing past, and tried very hard to think about nothing at all.