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So first--or last, maybe, depending on how you’re coming at it--there’s light. More or less? This is all subjective; really this is a space that isn’t actually a space, it’s ... a state of being? Or a thought? It’s not got things you can see or hear or touch or taste, but you can feel, this is a place (except, remember, not really a place--I am describing something indescribable in a language that can only approximate anything on its best day, and this is not at all its best day, to creatures whose brains create their reality in ways even they don’t realize or understand or find comfortable--I am trying to translate the plasma of the gods to something humans can comprehend, so none of this is accurate. Nothing I am writing is true. Except, in its truest sense, it is) made up of feeling.
So, “light.” Through a “crack,” which is how all light gets in, right? And then a writhing mass of--hell, I don’t know--here, put your hands up, about a foot apart. Make your fingers claws. Twist your hands, each in the opposite direction from the other. Maybe do a bicycle motion. That. A writhing mass of that. Through the crack, static if there were sound, barreling into and through this space that I have now spent 226 words describing in a nanosecond. Less than a blink. It hits--I dunno, something, a membrane I guess, weaker than it ought to be, and the writhing mass of that rips through and now we’re somewhere completely else, we’re everywhere else, and in the split bare blinking millisecond of flight into everywhere and somewhere and nowhere, the Mother of Puppets looks (does not, actually, look, but by now you know what I mean, right?) to the trailing strands of webbing and tape (except not webbing, not tape, just a translation made by your poor lying brain) tangled around what is left of the ... of her ...
... of her best beloved tool, and the one who refused her but that she loves anyway.
(The fuck does a spider know about love, you are well within your rights to ask, and fuck if I know, to be honest. There’s only fear, right? That world we just left, the one before the place that isn’t a place it’s a feeling, that world was only fear. There were no gods of rainbows or joy, gotta make and snatch those yourself in that nasty tragic world. It’s enough to make you tell the gods to fuck off, make you create a coffee or a flower or a book shop, make you create a null-space full of feeling, where a scrap of love might lodge itself in a spider’s carapace, that old curse: you will love the first thing(s) you set eyes on, even if sight isn’t a thing here, even if it takes 487 words to describe something that happens in the space of one.)
The Mother looks at them, bloody scraps, and twists (without moving, nothing is actually moving, this is translation) and plucks a string at (really?) random, then like a piece of dry cereal on the table, flicks them away from the writhing mass of that.
They land--they do not land. They end up somewhere else. Somewhere close, but not the same.
***
Martin
Martin’s parents get divorced when he is eight, and it’s that thing where the mother automatically gets custody for the week and Dad gets every other weekend. This is probably because filing for divorce was about as much confrontation as Sam Blackwood could handle all at once, and his wife thrived on that shit until she didn’t. So there’s little Marto, cute as a button, blonde and brown-eyed and taller than all the other kids his age, and skinny, like a marionette, just bones strung together with tendons and covered in pale, freckled skin. Quiet little Martin who shoves down every Bad Feeling he’s got because Mum keeps telling him to be quiet, to shut up, what do you mean you didn’t clean your room, of course I told you to clean your room, and even if I didn’t you could see it was messy, Martin. Oh, you got a B, why didn’t you get an A, Martin, are you stupid? Why can’t you do the dishes properly, Martin; I have told you how many times not to rinse the dishes before you put them in the washer, do you listen at all? How will you ever survive the real world, Martin? Quit lying, Martin. God, I don’t know how you got so tall, must be your father’s side coming out.
Sounds familiar, right? We know this toxic dance, we’ve seen how it ends up.
But then Martin’s dad ... well. He doesn’t go away.
Every other weekend, he’s at the door of his old house to pick up his son. He’s called the school and gotten on all the email lists, so he’s there for open house and parent-teacher conferences and the art show and the little party they throw for the kids whose writing is in the literary magazine. Even when his ex-wife “forgets” to tell him they’re happening. Even when Martin actually forgets to tell him they’re happening. Even when Martin himself isn’t there for them.
That’s not great. But it gives Sam the chance to speak privately to Martin’s teachers, to ask for their opinions on some things he’s seeing on his weekends.
Martin will forever feel guilty about his whispered “My dad” in the judge’s office, and for how, when his mother tells them both she never wants to see them again, he feels relief so huge he almost falls over. But he never regrets it. His dad is a large, awkward, self-contained man who doesn’t quite know how to be a father, but he shows up for everything, he gets Martin to school each day; he feeds him up and sends him to college.
Martin, by now also a large, awkward, self-contained boy, never quite makes friends (some acquaintances, some of whom--he would be shocked to know--would like to be his friend or more than his friend) in school. He has a lonely childhood. But he has a childhood, and he knows he is loved.
Jon
Jon’s father dies and he and his mother move in with his paternal grandmother in Bournemouth. Jon is, by all accounts, an annoying pedant of a child, constantly throwing himself into whatever special interest has currently got him in thrall, convinced that, even at age seven, he knows better than anyone else around him. He is his Gran’s despair, particularly because he comes by these traits naturally, passed from grandfather to father to Jon in a chain of DNA so damned stubborn it’s probably a relief to the old lady when Jon finally explains asexuality to her and she thinks he won’t be passing his genes along.
After Jon is brought home by the police for wandering the streets of Bournemouth like a tiny, curious hobo, he gets scolded by everyone--the cops, his Gran, one of the neighbor ladies who came over to sit with them when they realized he was missing. It’s irritating.
That night his mother comes into his room after he’s in bed, and he braces for the worst of it. Nobody can make him feel worse than Mum. Thinking of a Mum-scolding never actually stops him in the moment, but it does tend to quash any further urge to get into this particular brand of trouble.
He’s ready, though. Got his apology prepared, notebook under his pillow to write out his feelings, secret stuffed animal cunningly hidden under a floofy bit of duvet for comfort.
She sits on the side of his bed and looks at him for a while, solemn. Her eyes are big and brown and serious, her hair held up messy in a clip--you might think that was because she was stressed, but she always wears it clipped off her neck in a tangle. She takes a breath, sighs, then grins lopsidedly.
“Jonathan Sims, I could not ask for a kid more perfect for me than you. Please don’t get kidnapped and murdered, okay? I’d be sad.”
Jon has no clue what to say to that. He’s equally pleased and flabbergasted when she buys him a cell phone that nobody approves of for an eight-year-old and tells him to fucking call her when he goes missing or needs help. (Yes, she says “fuck.” She doesn’t care about American broadcast standards, and she’s making a fucking point, here.)
So he does.
And she comes around the back of their house like one of the Furies just in time to see Daniel or Thomas (“I don’t give a flying fuck what your name is, get the hell away from my son!”) punching Jon in the kidneys, and fires him immediately.
There is a lot of arguing in that house, blunt opinions and high expectations from all three of its inhabitants. But there is a lot of love, there, too, and age-appropriate books, and a decided lack of spiders.
***
What happens next, then, in this world that treats our Archivist and his assistant just slightly more gently than their original? University. And in this somewhere else, that university is good but not posh, and that’s fine with everyone involved. So off they go to uni, Jon with enough money and scholarships he doesn’t need to work but does have to live in the dorms, Martin juggling some work study hours with classes and living off-campus in a school-owned apartment. Their paths do not cross for a year.
And then.
***
Jon
Jon walks into his Elizabethan playwrights lecture and this blonde haired boy catches his eye. Not exactly heavy, but filled out so you kind of think he is. Legs too long for the desk he’s at--all of the school’s furniture seems to be made for the malnourished, short people of a century ago--and earbuds in as he flips through the textbook.
There is no universe where Jonathan Sims is anything other than socially awkward, so instead of sliding into the desk next to the blonde boy and smiling at him, Jon keeps staring from the aisle and trips on the riser as he makes his way to a seat two rows back. Martin--who has not developed the hypervigilance previously inspired by his mother--doesn’t notice a thing. In fact, he spends the entire term unaware of the short guy two rows back who pays more attention to him than he does Professor Carson. Jon, for his part, keeps waiting for the crush to fade, but Martin Blackwood makes thoughtful observations about Kit Marlowe, has the unmitigated gall to have a really pretty laugh, and keeps cat treats in his bag for the stray that lives in the bushes by the lecture hall--Jon sees him from time to time feeding the thing and scratching behind its notched ear.
Well, what’s he supposed to do? Talk to the guy? That’s out of the question. That’s so far out of the question it never actually occurs to Jon because Jon is always, always an idiot.
That’s okay, though, because the narrative is on his side.
Martin
It starts on a Friday, and usually, as a rule, Fridays in the library are dead, but Martin comes through the door of his flat an hour and a half later than usual because this guy had come in about thirty minutes before closing with a bunch of books to return and an ILL request list so long that Martin had kind of panicked. Like, he has no issue telling students that it’s too close to closing for them to start whatever long-ass research project they’re working on--your lack of time management skills is not my problem is a university library mantra--but this guy was awkward and seemed a little shy, and Martin just ... thought he was kind of cute.
“Oh, no--that’s fine. Whenever you can make the order,” he’d said. “I’m starting early, I’ve got time.”
So ... polite, actually has time management skills, and holy god that voice.
Some eldritch god (ahem) must have been watching over Martin, because he glanced over the list and realized this was a topic he actually knows something about--“The Romantics?” he asked.
“Yes--I’m looking at ... well, depictions of the apocalypse--” (for fuck’s sake, Jon, we might very well think at this point, but things are going to echo, ripple, resonate; but nothing will come of it or we might as well be watching Sam or Alice or Gwen, and that’s another tag completely) “--which is really broad, I know, but I’m in the general researching phase right now trying to narrow it down, and I don’t really know much about the Romantics or the--”
“Year Without a Summer,” Martin said as he did, nodding. “Oh, that’s an interesting time. Rise of the last man on earth trope and all that.”
The student smiled. He had a really nice smile. “Yeah, exactly.”
“Sorry, I’m studying literature, love the Romantic poets,” Martin said (echoes and echoes and echoes).
“I, uh. I know. That you study literature, not the ... um. Poets thing,” he said. “I. Um. We were in Carson’s Elizabethan playwrights lecture together.”
How on earth did I not notice you? Martin thought, but had the bare presence of mind to not say out loud. “Oh! That was a good one--Carson’s great.”
“Better than Foster, anyway,” said the student with an eye roll. “I’ve got his post-modernism class this semester and it might kill me.”
“Everyone survives Foster; he’s a rite of passage,” Martin said. And then the student--Jon--had said something about post-modernism and Martin had responded with something about Rushdie, and the next thing he knew the two of them were being kicked out of the library--where Martin works, mind you--by the circulation supervisor (who whispered, “Get him,” as she closed the front doors after Martin, and she’s, like, old enough to be his mum, so that was horrifying and also kind of heartening), and then they stood on the library steps and talked some more about books, now things they read for fun, and eventually Jon asked for Martin’s number.
Jon
It suddenly occurred to Jon, standing on the library steps together in the late afternoon sunlight, that he could, in fact, ask for Martin’s number. They could talk again, after this, maybe by phone or via text. It felt weirdly like the moment he realized he could just go wander Bournemouth; the only thing stopping him was some rules adults made that he could ignore--except there were no rules to asking for someone’s number (aside from respecting the possible “no,” which was irritating sometimes but his mother had managed to shove a moral compass into his skull along with the concept of boundaries), he was allowed to ask for someone’s number. So he did--abruptly, again much like he took off to wander the streets for a day--and Martin actually gave it to him! With a smile, fumbling his phone a little, looking pleased.
And then he finds an excuse to text Martin, and Martin answers.
What the hell does this even *mean,* Martin? Followed by a photo of Jon’s laptop screen, and one of Dr. Foster’s patented nonsense essay prompts on it.
I have no idea, but as long as you include five direct quotes and don’t argue with anything he said in class, you’ll be fine.
I know we’ve only just met, but ‘don’t argue with anything he said in class’ is really not an option for me.
They keep talking from there. They keep talking. This is what making friends is as an adult, apparently. He sucked at this as a child, so it's somewhat surprising to find he can do it now.
***
They exist in a liminal space for a while, a null-space (if you will allow me the indulgence) that they slowly fill up with feeling.
***
Martin
Jon has the prettiest hands. Long fingers, knobby knuckles, a little bit veiny across the back. Martin finds himself staring at them when he and Jon study together, moving quickly across a page as Jon takes and makes notes. Jon notices, and of course assumes Martin is looking at his pen. In what little defense can be scrounged for him, Jon does buy fancy Japanese pens--it’s one of the few things he splurges on, because he’s picky about friction and nib size and has lost too much concentration time in his life already to pens that aren’t Right--while Martin uses whatever random writing implement he can find in his bag because he seriously does not even notice pen quality unless the thing leaks all over him. But with that said, Jon can perhaps be forgiven for assuming Martin is looking at the metallic-gel-ink 04 Pilot and not the hand that’s holding it.
(Maybe by you, he can. I’m not in this for a slow burn; this is a world without a coma! Or the Lonely! This entire goddamned world is a Scottish safehouse, for fuck’s sake, get on with it, boys!)
Jon buys Martin a selection of fancy pens, leaving Martin entirely confused (because he, again, was not focused at all on the pen and thus this gift is out of the blue) but game to try them, and that is how Martin also becomes a pen snob. Because they’re actually really nice! And light, which he knows he’s on his way to carpal tunnel at some point, so light is good! Jon owns fifteen different colors because of good study habits; Martin ends up with fifteen different colors so his ink can suit his mood. Those first five barely get used because every time Martin looks at them, he gets distracted remembering Jon’s hands.
Jon
Jon watches Martin across the library, supposed to be studying Milton but Martin is working and so Jon studies him instead. Jon is trying to put him together like a puzzle, solve him like a mystery. Work out why this boy is the one his eyes are always looking for, why his voice is the one he always hopes to hear, why the way he smells wraps around Jon like ... well, like a blanket, but Jon rather resents that pedestrian metaphor, maybe especially because he can’t think of anything more apt.
(We know what Martin thought--shared trauma brought them together. Maybe four gazillion cups of tea and a cot in Document Storage and a dozen or so transatlantic phone calls had something to do with it; this person is kind to me, but I don’t know what to do with that; this person is softening to me, but nobody has ever softened to me before could be the dynamic, sure, but never forget the dog in the archives, yeah?
Sure, we say, like we learned from a certain detective.)
Love is confusing because Jon doesn’t understand its whys. Oh, yes, Jon knows he loves Martin, didn’t fight it at all, just fell and let his breath leave him, let gravity pull him down and down until here he is, watching Martin arrange books on the shelving cart, just knowing in his bones. But why? It feels like there should be a reason, Martin is not the only beautiful, golden-haired man with a Northern accent and crooked bottom teeth in the world. He is not unique, except that he is, he is the only person Jon has ever felt pulled to like this, like orbiting another star, like holding hands even when they’re not touching, like he could walk the ruined, dying world with him.
It’s just weird, because Jon would not ever call himself romantic, but when he looks at Martin it feels epic, somehow, this depth of feeling.
Martin
Jon’s mum is exactly how Martin pictured her: small, dark, sharp as anything, terribly embarrassing to her son, absolutely perfect. It feels like he’s been imagining her much, much longer than he has; that image of her in his head feels old, somehow, little faded, little bit worn.
She pokes at her boy in a fondly teasing way that gives Martin a pang—this is what could have been, had his mother not been his mother in every goddamned timeline—but mostly he just enjoys watching the two of them interact and tries not to stammer too much when she asks him a direct question.
They’re at Martin’s because Mrs. Sims insisted that she cook for them and Jon didn’t want to subject her to the dorm kitchen and the thirty-odd scrungy college kids who’d follow their noses to try to steal some curry.
“I can cook for thirty,” Mrs. Sims says, offended.
Jon holds up a wooden spoon like a scepter. “None of them deserve your curry. Bunch of stoners. Only Martin deserves your food.”
“I wish I had brought your Gran. She’ll be so proud of you for judging your peers for their drug use.” She turns from where she’s stirring something on Martin’s terrible little stove and asks, “Martin, Jon says your father still lives in Stockton?”
“Oh, um ... yeah, he does. He’s a manager at a car parts place?” We’re not like you both, Martin thinks, not unkindly, just considering the quiet of his childhood home compared with the current ruckus in his kitchen, part of him afraid he’s about to get asked if he knows what his father does for a living or not, because that’s what his mother would have done.
Mrs. Sims just goes on, “And you’re studying literature?” At which point they’re off on books, because of course Jon’s mum reads, but she’s not half as picky as Jon is, so they can talk about pulp thrillers and the free book she found online that’s entirely trashy but also funny, and Martin can suggest some titles she might like while Jon bangs his head softly off the counter when she asks Martin for an idea of how violent and bloody they are because apparently Jon’s mum is a fan of the old ultraviolence, loves Kill Bill; she’s just a goddamned delight. He can see the line from her to Jon, direct and unwavering, the humor he tends to hide because other people think it’s weird, that fierce intellect neither of them can tamp down, the decency and oddly-shaped kindness Martin has just recently begun to see shining from Jon as they get closer. Martin loves Jon so much; he couldn’t tell you when that happened if you asked, but there it is like a rock in a stream, all of him reshaping itself around it. He’s wallowing in it for a while, keeping it close.
The curry is amazing. Martin is inordinately pleased that Jon thinks he’s deserving of it.
Jon
Jon is wary of Martin’s father, and he has no idea why.
Martin has said his father is quiet, a little unsure of how to be a dad, but still a good one. Martin told Jon a little about what living with his mother was like, how Mr. Blackwood came back for him—Jon honestly, to the depths of his soul, is grateful for that. He doesn’t like to imagine Martin being bitterly pecked to death. He has an (inaccurate but very cute) idea of Baby Martin in his head, which he feels very protective of even though he knows it’s silly, that Martin is fine.
But when he shakes Mr. Blackwood’s hand, Jon feels a spike of anger down his spine that makes no rational sense at all. Like he’d never come back at all, like he’d come back far too late and now he wants to be a part of something he doesn’t deserve to have, like how dare you, like I will ruin you if you hurt him.
It’s an intense ten seconds. Then it’s gone.
After that it’s a very nice evening, the three of them at Martin’s, drinking tea with the telly on for when the conversation falters—which it does, all three of them are awkward after all, but there’s a sense there that silences like that might one day be comfortable. Jon can imagine holidays like this, he and Martin watching something stupid about, like, Edinburgh’s urban legends while Mr. Blackwood falls asleep in his chair, and it doesn’t occur to him to get flustered by the image.
“Did Martin ever tell you about his poetry prizes?” Mr. Blackwood asks, and Martin—who doesn’t blush as much in this timeline—turns bright red and says “Dad!” in a scandalized tone.
“He did not,” says Jon, eyebrows nearly to his hairline with gleeful curiosity. Lobster red is a nice shade on Martin. “Martin, did you win prizes for poetry?”
“Oh yeah,” says Mr. Blackwood. “Third place the first year, when he was little, but then the next four years of secondary he won first—and the upper level students weren’t half mad about it, were they, Martin?”
Martin has buried his face in his hands. “Yeah, I was a prodigy.”
(Amazing what some self-esteem and time to actually write can do for someone’s talent. Amazing what support can do for someone’s confidence. Amazing what having a proud parent, even when they don’t quite get the thing they’re proud of, can do to make someone’s life better. The bare minimum, there, and Martin got it, and look at him thrive.)
“You did win quite a few contests in primary, too,” says his father calmly, sipping his tea with a glance at Jon, who is smiling.
“Do you still write?” Jon asks. It seems, in that moment, extremely important that Martin still writes. Jon will buy him more fancy pens, Jon will scour the earth for beautiful notebooks, Jon will figure out how to turn the sunset gorgeous and watchful and worth preserving in words every evening to help Martin write.
Martin has not removed his face from his hands. “Yes.” He lifts his head with a deep breath, clearly girding himself, and says, “I’m actually taking a workshop next term. Little nervous about it, but probably it’s a good idea?”
Jon, who has never considered other people’s opinions a worthwhile thing to seek out, says nothing to this. Instead he asks, “Can I read some?”
Martin gives him the side-eye. “Do you like poetry?”
I like you, Jon thinks, but says, “I have no idea. I’d like to find out.”
***
(After Jon leaves, Sam Blackwood tells his son, “I was a little worried, when you said he was sharp—your mum was sharp, very clever, and I was … well. But he’s a good one, Martin.”
Jon’s mum, on their way home from Martin’s flat, just says, “Get on with it, Jon, I like that one and he’s cute.”)
***
And last—or maybe first, depending how you come at these things--there’s a kiss.
They spend their Christmases with their parents, then come back to London to spend New Year’s at Martin’s. They missed each other terribly the previous week, and it’s changed something between them. They cling to each other at the train station upon being reunited. It’s a little (a lot) overdramatic, but neither of them makes a joke about it. Nor do they call attention to how they hold hands out of the station and onto the tube and into Tesco’s for ready-made food and a bottle of wine and along the street and up the front steps to Martin’s door.
Jon feels made of longing. Martin feels like he’s only real when he’s touching Jon. They talk about their holidays and next term’s courses, share their food, drink some wine. They put on old episodes of Twilight Zone because Jon has fond memories of watching them as a marathon on New Year’s Eve as a kid. They never open the blinds, so the flat is dim, cozy, a small space of just the two of them, full up with feeling and unspoken words and staring.
(Idiots.)
How does it happen? Who even knows—their orbit deteriorates; they create a bubble within the space of the living room, they breathe together and the word is intimate, that’s the best that language can do in that moment, and perhaps they’re swept up in the plasma of the universe, the currents of the narrative, maybe they just succumb. They’re certainly not shocked when their lips meet; when the kiss begins, they fall into the relief of the inevitable.
“Martin,” Jon whispers into the air between them. “Martin. I love you.”
“I love you, too,” Martin murmurs, cups his hands over Jon’s ears and kisses him again.
And does anything stir with that moment? Anything sinister, doom on a horizon? Sometimes this this between them has been heavier than they knew what to do with, right, so we might be forgiven for worrying that they’re about to get sucked into a cursed version of WindowsNT by a clown with not-soft teeth.
No. Promise. This entire world is a safehouse in Scotland. This is a world where colors don’t hate you, a world with parents, a space made up of love wedged into a spider’s carapace. Two lovely, awkward boys kissing on New Year’s with the Twilight Zone theme in the background just for the laugh of it.
Maybe somewhere a spider is pleased, or maybe that’s just me.