“You survive this and in some terrible way, which I suppose no one can ever describe, you are compelled, you are corralled, you are bullwhipped into dealing with whatever it is that hurt you. And what is crucial here is that if it hurt you, that is not what’s important. Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less.”
- James Baldwin, The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity
I think one of the fundamental horror elements of jon and martin’s relationship (that is super underutilized in fanworks imo) is that when they say “where you go, I go,” they really mean it. by the time they’re striding across that hellscape, and tbh even earlier than that, there is no duplicity or slight or monstrous act either of them could do that the other wouldn’t forgive so they could stay together. personal insults, lashing out, working with the enemy, attacking strangers, direct violence, deliberately endangering each other, murder, encouraging murder, total and complete betrayals of trust, they’ve done it all and reconciled afterwards. sometimes they talk it out and resolve it in a reasonable way, and sometimes they’re just like “hmm. fucked up!” or (“hmm. kinda cute when he does it <3”) and never mention it again.
it’s not just about letting anything slide with each other, either, it’s bigger than that. martin will make the decision on a personal level that he could never live with surviving off of innocent people’s suffering, but if doing that on a cosmic scale is the way to keep jon with him then he will sacrifice all his principles and do it. jon is hell bent on quarantining the fears by literally murdering the planet as quickly and efficiently as possible, but the second this means martin potentially dying in front of him he changes his mind. when jon says that their love for each other is “the real core of it,” he’s not just declaring affection after a fight, he is stating the cause for the incomprehensible tragedy that they’re about to enact. it’s less “the love was there, it didn’t change anything” and more “the love was there, it doomed us all.” it isn’t even a question, they will wrap their soulmate-red binding string around the necks of everyone in the entire cosmos before they sever it.
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