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The thing about Martin was that--though he might try to hide it with sarcasm and a fair bit of bravado when he could afford it--he was scared of a lot of things. Tight spaces. The dark. Fire. Clowns, if they were bad enough. He’d been more wary of worms, after Prentiss, even the inconspicuous ones that wriggle in the dirt after a good splash of rain.
They were all somewhere on the list. But what sat atop the list in a suitably shaky scrawl was heights.
It wasn’t so bad if he had something solid beneath him and he was firmly in control of how close he decided to be to the edge of whatever metaphorical cliff he was braving. It had taken him a good few weeks to get comfortable on Angela’s fire escape without clutching the railing and pressing his hand against the floor so hard the grooves in the metal would leave little indents in his skin. But it had the best view of the rooftops where Peter and Elias liked to spar, and if Martin wasn’t quick enough to respond to Peter’s waving he’d get grumpy and irritable like a very large child, so Martin’s gradual acclimatizing was well worth the spinning, dizzy feeling he might get if he got too ambitious with his glances toward the pavement below.
And he met Jon there, of course. For Jon, he would have braved heights far higher.
Martin was not, however, afraid of spiders.
You’d think that would have helped him in this situation.
Not for the first time, Annabelle Cane said to him, “I wouldn’t wriggle. It only makes it worse.”
Martin would have very much liked to snap back that wriggling and trembling were two very different things, but the spiderweb firmly plastered over his mouth wouldn’t let him do much more than mumble and, as it was, he was breathing so hard and so fast he didn’t think he’d be able to make a sound anyway that wasn’t just a frantic rush of air.
He thought it would help if he could have some kind of footing--she, at least, had her delicate heels balanced on a line of web as if she were perched on a very thin step on a very steep stairway, but Martin’s feet were dangling over nearly 300 meters of open air, with nothing but the length of web wrapped around his wrists and chest keeping him attached to the enormous web strung to the side of the tallest building in London.
Annabelle, he had learned, was nothing if not dramatic.
She took a step toward him, and the web shivered, and so too did he, dangling as insubstantial as a bit of loose thread. The sound he made was embarrassingly close to a whimper, and though he was holding out the hope of being rescued, he was also a little glad no one else was there to hear it.
I’m sorry, he tried to say, looking pleadingly at her. I’m sorry I invaded your territory. Peter got it into his head that he could try to face up against you, and he wanted me to do some snooping, and I didn’t even really find anything because I was chased out by a woman full of worms, and it wasn’t worth it at all and I won’t ever do it again, just please, please, let me down.
It was a mouthful to try to say in the best of times, let alone when one had been muzzled by spiderweb.
Annabelle raised an eyebrow at him, and surprised Martin by holding out a hand and then flicking her fingers toward her body, and suddenly the webbing crawled off his mouth like a spider in its own right. Martin was too relieved to be disquieted by it, immediately gasping a breath and spitting out the bits of webbing that had made their way into his mouth on the first go. “Oh,” he gasped, “oh, God, please, I-I’ll tell Peter never to bother you again. I-I’m sorry. Please. Please, let me down. Oh God.”
Annabelle tilted her head at him, her amber eyes and dark brown skin practically glowing in the afternoon sun. She took a step along the web with ease, as if it were as thick as the curb on a street when in reality the heels of her shoes looked as though they would slice the line of it in two with her weight. The vibration of her movement shivered along the web, and Martin closed his eyes when the line of webbing holding him shuddered with it. He made that noise again, but this time he thought it was justified. His mouth was so dry he could hardly swallow his terror. “Oh God. Please. Please--”
“I see you think this is about you,” Annabelle said, amused.
Martin blinked open his eyes at her words, then caught a glimpse of the ground and the distant spots of people below, and then immediately shut them. “I-I...” he managed, after a moment, his eyes still screwed shut. “I’m sorry?”
He didn’t look at her, but he could hear the smile in her voice. “I do like you, Martin. I think we’d get on. But this visit isn’t about you, I’m afraid.”
Martin stared at her, and then said, in a rush, “you can have Peter, if you want. He’ll be easy to catch. He can’t even get the input on the telly to work without me--he’s probably struggling with it right now. You could just go grab him, a-and we could be done--”
Annabelle interrupted, her voice light and careless as a bell, “this isn’t about Peter Lukas either.”
Martin stared at her again, longer this time, fear and a bristling, blooming protectiveness vying to fill up his chest. She hadn’t said who she was after, but something about the look on her face, as if she were waiting patiently for him to connect the dots, said it all.
“What do you want with him?” Martin asked her, his fear of the distant ground, for the moment, forgotten.
Martin had thought Peter mad when he’d said he was thinking of facing off against the Spider. Annabelle Cane was a soothsayer and much more, easily the most powerful entity on the continent. Martin had indulged him, after countless hours of incessant needling, picking one of her abandoned haunts to scope out. But he never, for a moment, would have let Peter actually try to fight her, and he hardly even liked Peter in the best of times.
He loved Jon. And if she had set his sights on him, that scared Martin more than the heights.
She looked at him, her expression strangely...soft. “He is...very fond of you, Martin. Very protective of you. I do regret causing you such distress, but it is important that it looks distressing, you understand.”
Martin didn’t understand, and he was even more terrified now, because Annabelle had snatched him away when he’d gone to the shops for some sandwiches for the two of them, and Jon had to have known something was wrong by now, and Martin couldn’t warn him. “You’re using me as bait?”
Annabelle’s mouth pursed into something rueful. “It does sound very crude when you put it like that. But you must understand, Martin, there is nothing he cares for more than you. And...I need to see what he is capable of when what he cares for is...jeopardized. I need to see what he will do.”
Martin swallowed dryly, his heart thumping. The wind was picking up again, the web shivering in the breeze. “Why? What--what are you going to--?”
The webbing smacked back over his mouth with a flick of her fingers before he could properly close it. The taste was vile.
He made an indignant, angry sound behind it, squirming even though she’d told him not to. Annabelle, at least, looked mildly sympathetic.
“I am sorry about this, Martin. I wish there was a more effective way. But we may be running out of time, you see. Things may be happening sooner than we expected.”
I don’t see, Martin tried to shriek at her, I don’t understand anything. Unfortunately, the words were unintelligible.
She smiled at him, fond, all the same. “You will,” she said.
And, before Martin could try to mumble anything in reply, he heard, in a low, familiar voice: “Annabelle Cane,” and, on the rooftop of the next building over, Jon was stepping out of a familiar fog, followed shortly by Peter Lukas.
Martin was honestly so shocked to see them in each other’s company that, for a moment, he forgot he was supposed to be afraid.
“Jon,” Annabelle said, in that unnervingly soft, fond way. Her voice carried over without being raised, unnaturally. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
Jon hardly spared her a glance, despite the fact that his voice had carried nothing but disdain when he’d addressed her. Instead, his eyes, bright, green, desperate, found Martin’s.
“Martin,” he said,--shouted, really, to be heard above the wind--“are you alright?”
Martin looked back at him, his heart beating high and hard in his chest. He could hardly make a sound that could be heard, but he managed a nod.
Jon’s eyes raked over him as if trying to confirm it for himself, something almost wild in his expression. His eyes were a shade of green Martin had never seen before.
Peter was glaring at Annabelle, only slightly less effectually. “If you harm a hair on my assistant’s head,” he shouted over the wind, “I will be very angry! In fact, I’m already very angry, seeing as you’ve made me miss my programs! They only air so often you know!”
Martin sighed through his nose, long-suffering.
“I’m very sorry to hear that, Peter,” Annabelle said indulgently, which seemed to placate Peter some (the traitor) and aggravate Jon in equal measure. “Perhaps--”
“Enough ,” Martin heard Jon say, but it almost wasn’t even spoken. It rattled in his head, and Annabelle seemed to feel it too, going, for a moment, very still, her eyes on Jon and Jon alone.
The two of them stared at each other, narrowed green eyes set against sharp, careful amber.
”Put,” Jon said, “him. Down.”
Annabelle looked at him, assessing, for only a moment. Then, she smiled. “As you wish,” she said.
And the little string of spiderweb Martin dangled from snapped.
There was a sick moment where he felt almost as though he hung in the air without it, and, distantly, he could hear Jon screaming his name. Then, gravity pulled at him, and he was falling in earnest.
It felt like his stomach dropped first, and then the rest of him. His heart beat so fast it almost seemed louder than the wind whipping in his ears, and he flailed--the webbing still pressing his wrists together--desperate for something to hold onto, something to stop the rapid rush of the ground toward him. There was a scream caught in his throat, though it wouldn’t have had anywhere to go with the webbing plastered over his mouth.
The terror of it was so mind-numbing he could hardly think, but the absolutely insane thought caught in his head as the ground rushed at him, relentless, was that he was going to die before he got a chance to see if that ring he’d found while online shopping was actually going for such a discounted price or if it was just a scam. He’d hoped it wasn’t a scam, because he’d never found another that had seemed more suited for Jon’s lovely hands.
The wind roared at him, drawing tears from his eyes and tearing his breath from his lungs, and it was all he could think about. He’d had plans for proposing. He’d nearly had the ring picked out.
It seemed highly unfair that he’d be splattered over the pavement before he could even find out if Jon would say yes.
The ground was racing up at him, and he screwed his eyes shut against the wind, and so he didn’t see the moment the Lonely portal yawned open and caught him inside.
He hadn’t seen, and so couldn’t take a breath before the shock of the freezing ocean was suddenly engulfing him. In an instant, he went from fearing he was going to hit the ground to fearing he was going to drown, swiping ineffectually at the water with his hands still bound in a desperate bid for air, for light, for anything but the freezing cold.
The water pulled at him deeper, and he was suddenly sure his lungs would burst.
But then the water broke below him into a pocket of air, and then he was falling again with a crash of water, and something shockingly warm broke his fall, cradling him, murmuring into his hair.
The webbing was peeled away from his mouth with careful fingers, and he finally took in a huge, gasping breath. It broke on a sob.
“You’re okay,” Jon was murmuring, sopping wet, but he hardly seeming to mind. He only pulled Martin closer to him, letting a hand rest on the back of his head, fingers carding through his hair, as Martin shook and shook and shook. “You’re okay, love. I have you. I have you. You’re okay.”
“How dare you,” Peter was saying, and Martin almost thought it was directed at him before he heard another, light set of footsteps touch down onto the roof, “I should--”
But then Peter went quiet. Martin looked up, blinking through tears and shivering, to see Peter had frozen in place with his fog still half-coiled around him, as if caught in amber, glaring at someone who had already stepped lightly past him.
Annabelle Cane stepped into view. She looked down at Martin, and then at Jon, and then--
Then, she was the one who went very still.
Martin’s head suddenly started to hurt--different from the looming, beating stress headache he’d felt coming on, but instead something like a low, static-like hum nearly outside of his perception, like a dog whistle. He heard sounds of honking come from the street below. Sounds of brakes squealing and more than a few cars crashing against something or other, bright, quick sounds of metal crunching on the distant street below.
A slow well of blood ran from Annabelle’s eye, as she stared at Jon. Martin couldn’t see Jon’s face, turned away as it was, and it was already difficult to see beyond the windswept tears and the dizziness he couldn’t shake even with the ground beneath him again.
But he could see that green light bleeding from Jon’s eyes, snaking over his cheekbones like newly-made veins, like crackling lightning embedding deep in his skin. He could see bits of Jon’s hair coiling up as if caught in static.
"How dare you." Martin heard Jon say, but again it didn't sound as it were spoken. It sounded like a thought in his own head, a reverberation through his skull.
That humming in his head only grew louder, almost to the point of pain. He heard distant sounds from the street, elevated voices, almost shouting.
“Oh,” Annabelle said, looking at Jon. The bead of blood hung over her lip, and for a moment the red smeared when her tongue darted out to lick her lips, an almost nervous motion. “I see,” she said.
The humming got louder, and she flinched, and Martin couldn’t help but do so as well. Jon whirled to look at him, his eyes skirting over Martin’s face, the green in them fading. The static did as well, almost immediately.
“--hurl you into the Lonely and--!” Peter’s tirade died, and Martin saw him look around wildly, a befuddled expression on his face. “Where’d she go?”
The space Annabelle Cane had occupied was gone. She’d slipped away, quick and quiet as her namesake. Martin caught Jon’s expression as he took in her absence, an uncharacteristically dark thing, but when he turned back to Martin it was as if it had never been there at all.
“Come on,” he said, pulling Martin closer, cradling his head. He pressed his face into Martin’s hair, and for a moment Martin heard him simply breathe. Then, he said, achingly gently, “Let’s get you home.”
“I’ll get it!” Martin announced when the doorbell rang.
There was a sound of clattering from the kitchen, then a soft swearing, then, “are you sure? The headache’s better, then?”
“I’m well enough to stand, Jon,” Martin said back. “I’m not an invalid.” He carefully did not say that the headache had only grown very bad after the static. Jon didn’t need to know that. Martin wasn’t even sure of it yet.
“Bring the blanket!” Jon shouted, his tone firm.
Martin privately rolled his eyes, but complied, only because, alright, he was still bloody cold. It hadn’t been his idea to go swimming in the Lonely ocean.
He opened the door, but frowned when no one was there. He glanced down both ends of the hall, but no one seemed to be hurrying away. The halls were deserted.
He looked down to see a cream envelope placed delicately on the welcome mat, his name inscribed in cursive on the back.
He stared down at it in trepidation. Slowly, cautiously, when nothing beneath it sprang up to bite him, he crouched and turned it over in his hands. It had been closed with a wax seal, dried in a design of a web.
He should have called Jon. He distinctly thought that.
Something made him open it in silence right there in the doorway.
The paper unfolded in his hands, the material soft and buttery and expensive.
My dear Martin,
I hope that little fall hasn’t left you too rattled. I hope you’ll forgive me for it. I needed to put on a convincing show, you see. Please know I never would have let you get as far as the ground.
I wish I could leave you only with my heartfelt well-wishes and the happiest of news, but I’m afraid I must tell you something else. I told you that I needed to know what your Jon could do.
Well, I know. I have taken a good look, and nearly every strand is woven towards the same, foreboding point.
Your Jon is very, very powerful. Far more than he has any right to be. More powerful, I think, than me. It is a very dangerous thing, to have so much at one’s disposal, and to feel as deeply as he does.
You see, he first caught our attention when his feelings for you ran so deeply they cracked through the Lonely. Lukas drew you both out in the same moment, I hardly think he even noticed, and the rift healed itself quickly enough, once Jon was gone along with you. The Lonely shies away from love, of course, but not like that. Never like that.
He felt so deeply for you, it broke through a reality itself, and that was when he was in perfect control.
I regret having to tell you this, Martin, but I feel I must. I feel it will be safer this way, and the threads seem to indicate it might. But it is always a ‘might’
There is something...cataclysmic about your Jon. Something world-ending. And the possibility we have foreseen is fast approaching.
Keep him close. Mind him with care. Don’t Perhaps
It would be wise to keep this between us. The threads are not kind with the future if you do not.
Ever yours,
Annabelle Cane
Martin stared down at the signature line for a long time, his head buzzing with a kind of static that was all his own. Jon called his name from the kitchen, and Martin managed something in reply, wrangling his throat back into cooperation, making it sound normal.
Under his breath, staring at the letter with wide eyes, he said, with feeling, “fuck.”