He always comes back, but its easier when Jon speaks to him
It just… takes longer to bring him home, when Jon doesn’t catch it early.
He comes back from a walk through the hills to find the safehouse’s kitchenette glimmering with rime, a veil of mist curling around his ankles. He drops his coat in a pile by the door and rushes through to the little sitting area between the kitchenette and the parlor, finding Martin’s indistinct outline at the breakfast table with a stone-cold mug of tea in front of him.
Fuck. Poor Martin. How long had he been sitting there, slipping? He’s nearly all gone.
[Ficlet posted with permission and collaboration from OP. 🫶 Thanks bestie]
This is the worse it’s been since Jon pulled him out of the Lonely. A sickening frisson of fear rips down his spine at the thought that it wasn’t enough. That Jon’s effort, his love, his desperation to save the only good person he has left, will never be enough on its own to just keep him once and for all.
“Oh, Martin… my love,” he sighs. He approaches and, despite the radiating chill and the heavy, metallic scent of rain-soaked sea air, perches on his lover’s lap. The man’s thighs are cold and rigid. Like sitting on the icy headstone of a grave in winter, where the chill has seeped in deep through the pores and cracks of the rock.
Jon loops his arms around where he approximates Martin’s shoulders are amongst the indistinct, shifting mass of blur that is Martin. He makes a similar approximation in order to touch their foreheads together. He stares into his lover’s eyes and Knows him: the faint, hot buzz of his patron’s power coiling hatefully in the back of his skull and the nape of his neck. He’s been trying so hard not to use it. But this… this warrants an exception.
Martin’s outline solidifies just that little bit more, the longer Jon turns the Eye’s gaze upon him.
“Come on back to me, Martin,” he coaxes. There isn’t much there for him to kiss yet. So instead, Jon narrates the most minute details of his walk just now. The pale butterflies he saw. Couple of rabbits. Almost taking a wrong turn. Hiding behind a rock to avoid a pair of villagers on a walk of their own. The inane thoughts he had over breakfast. (Should he cut his hair? He trimmed it a bit since the wild tangle it’d been left in after he awoke from his coma, but there’s still a lot of length left. Too much? He’s not sure. He knows Martin likes to run his hands through it, though.)
And on that note, he spends a little longer than necessary lauding the skill and strength and gentle goodness of those hands, most importantly when they are playing with his hair and rubbing away the building throb of a stress headache. As Jon so often asks of them. He whispers gently,
“I could actually use a little of that tonight, now that I think about it. Haven’t been sleeping as well. You’ll oblige, won’t you?”
A soft, affirmative hum. Martin’s head turns just a fraction up and to the side as if to face Jon more fully, though that pale gaze is still fixed on some point in the middle distance. His shape is clear now. Just still so cold. Jon counts it a victory. Martin is, and always has been, a caretaker at heart. Jon’s noticed — much as he hates the implications — that Jon’s needing something is the most straightforward way to summon Martin back. Not for Martin. Not for himself. But because Jon needs him.
“Thank you, my love. You’re good to me,” he sighs sadly, and leans down to kiss the dew from those cold, cold lips, shivering as he does so. He’s never retained body heat well. Martin is the one who keeps their bed warm. He curses Peter Lukas’s dead name a million times more for daring to rob the world of that warmth, even temporarily. Without it, Jon’s fingertips grow numb. Still he doesn’t let go.
Lacking further topics to babble about, Jon lets himself go there. He might as well. Martin doesn’t hear him when he’s this far gone. Not the words, anyway. Just the tone of voice, the haze of distant ‘Jon-ness’, as Martin affectionately calls it, serving as a lighthouse on the shore. Martin will hardly notice if the light turns a little red from righteous bloodthirst.
“I hate what Lukas has done to us. What he’s still doing. Even dead, he’s found a way to screw with us. To hurt you. Makes me wish I had some link to the End so I could bring him back and kill him again.”
A long pause.
“…Sometimes I wish it had been bloodier. Uglier,” he admits aloud for the first time. “He died in the worst way possible, for him. Known. Seen. But I… even though I Know he died in agony, there’s just this… I keep remembering the mess Elias made of Leitner. The blood everywhere… He didn’t deserve that, least of all from Elias, but I hated that pathetic old man. Beating him to death must’ve been so satisfying. The way Peter Lukas died? It satisfied the Eye. But it didn’t satisfy me. I’d have liked to have had a knife in my hand. Would’ve liked the blood. Just for him, you understand. I wouldn’t ever want to feed the Hunt, or the Slaughter. But with him, it’s personal. I’ll never forgive what he did to you. And a year from now I’ll find his grave on the anniversary of his death so I can piss on it, just for good measure.”
A chuckle, faint and distant as wind over rocks on the moorland. But Martin’s eyes focus on Jon’s face, the hint of an amused smile toying with his lips, and hands slide up Jon’s back to rest across his shoulders. Cold as blocks of ice, but Martin’s not so rigid anymore and the chill doesn’t permeate so deep. His lap is more comfortable now.
“I like when you get a little… vicious. Is that wrong of me?”
“Probably,” Jon huffs as he shifts to get more comfortable on his perch, with the tone of voice that says he’s not particularly bothered by it, and perhaps even pleased to hear it.
He can’t help a shudder as Martin draws him closer for a frigid hug. Martin notices and draws back with a concerned flinch. His face is still oddly blank, eyes without light, but at least he’s present enough to take notice of things now.
“I’m sorry, are you cold?”
“When you’re not around? Always,” Jon whispers, and leans in to hug him anyway.
