TAGS Stalking, Paranoia
WORD COUNT 12,920
TAGS Stalking, Paranoia
WORD COUNT 12,920
Click, tick—
Click, tick—
“You cannot be serious about this.”
Click, tick—
Jon scowls at the lock. “About what?”
Click, tick—
“Jon, this is literally breaking and entering!”
“It’s not breaking and entering.” Jon flips to the next key on the ring, then jams it into the lock. Click, tick— His frown deepens. “I have a key,” he says, yanking that one out, “...somewhere.”
“But did you ask if we could go rummaging through Bouchard’s office?” Martin says, voice pitching in slight hysteria. He stands over Jon like a mountain despite only having a few inches on him, determined to shield his illegal activities from any a passersby who might wander through the hallway. It’s a generous gesture, but completely unnecessary. Jon knows that not even the custodial staff are still here at this hour. “Where did you even get a key for this anyway?”
Click, tick—
“Um,” Jon says, looking at the keys left in his hand. He’d already tried this one, right...? No, no, it was this one he’d tried. “Borrowed it from uh. Breekon a bit ago.”
“Who?”
“Th-the custodian.”
Click, tick—
“Oh,” Martin says, eyes swinging nervously back and forth down the hall. “Is he the one with the, uh, hair...? A-and the eyes—”
“Y-yes yes, that one,” Jon agrees, then flips to the next key. The last one. He shoves it into the lock. “O-or actually, the other one, maybe...? I get them mixed up.”
Click, tick—
Clack.
The door sways open, and Jon looks up to Martin. Raises an eyebrow. Martin, in turn, looks rather like he’s torn between being sick or metamorphosing into a turtle. But he nods, regardless, and Jon swings the door open further before stepping inside.
Jon knows that Elias is much more organized than him, which has its benefits and its shortfalls. They don’t have to risk breaking their necks for forgoing the overhead lights, for one, because the floors are clean and chairs pushed in. They do, however, need their phone flashlights, as Elias’s near neurotic level of cleanliness means that every wall of his office is lined with a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf, all full, and Jon has no idea where to even start looking. He picks a random one behind the desk to start, at least.
“What are we looking for again?” Martin asks as he tiptoes over to Jon’s spot behind the desk, glasses glinting in the harsh artificial beam. The cautiousness with which he approaches the whole affair is honestly of great amusement to Jon, but he doesn’t dare bring it up. Doesn’t want Martin to think he’s laughing at him, crouched down like he’s exploring some haunted house in Scooby Doo. He supposes that makes Martin Shaggy, given that he’s the dog person out of the two of them. Who would that make Jon, then?
Jon puts a foot on the bottom shelf to step up, and Martin quickly darts around behind him, hands shooting to Jon’s waist to spot him. “It’s called, er, ‘Psychosocial Myth,’ I believe? By uh...Calvin, or, Carlton, or...something with a C. I-it addresses that article you were looking for that wasn’t in the databases, and I know I’ve seen it if I can just remember...”
He feels Martin shift a bit closer, hand sliding up between Jon’s shoulder blades to steady him. “And...how do you know Elias has this?”
Jon glances back, finding Martin almost nose-to-nose with him. Close enough to see the smattering of freckles just below the frames of his glasses, the thin and non-distinct septum piercing just above his lip, the fuzz on his chin that he forgot to shave. He quickly turns back to the task at hand before he can be caught staring. “I mean, he was my advisor,” Jon says. When a beat passes, Jon raises an eyebrow. “Did you not know that?”
“Wh— no?” Martin says, then lets out a giggle. “Bouchard was your thesis advisor?”
“The very same,” Jon answers, then steps down. Moves over to the next bookshelf and waits for Martin to get into position before stepping up on the shelf once more.
“I thought he was like, a thousand years old.”
“He only got promoted to chair...four...? Five years ago? I honestly can’t remember. I think he’s in his fifties, actually.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Geez,” Martin says, one hand brushing just barely under his shirt and sending a jolt straight up his spine. He squirms, but keeps quiet. Doesn’t need Martin knowing he’s ticklish in such a vulnerable position. Martin will use that to his advantage. “...What was it like?”
“What, working with Elias?”
“Yeah.”
Jon hums, thinking as he reaches out for a book without a spine. If he remembers correctly, the one he’s looking for was either yellow or pink — a small inkling of hope sparking to the surface of his mind as he pulls the book out and sees a taxi-yellow cover. That is, until he turns it over, and reads the half torn-off words “Phobias: For Dummies.” Why the hell would Elias even have something like that...? Scowling, he shoves it back into its slot. “Honestly? Most of the time it was a pain in the ass.”
Martin snorts, then rips a hand away from Jon’s waist to, what Jon assumes, cover his mouth. “Jon.”
“Martin, I worked with the man for two and a half years and T.A.ed seven of his classes. I’m allowed to say that I thought the man was a prick.” Jon steps back down from the shelf. Turns around. “Though he was a good mentor, despite everything.”
“Seven? Jesus.” Martin follows him as he wanders to the other side of the room. Jon selects one of the smaller bookshelves here for his perusing, sinking to his knees to pick through it. “I’ve only done two so far and I feel like I’m dying.”
“Oh don’t worry, it will only get worse from there.”
“Wonderful,” Martin says with a dramatic sigh. He kneels beside Jon as he searches, holding up his phone light helpfully. “You know, I— I, uh, read your thesis, by the way.”
Jon’s finger pauses on the worn spine of a book. “Oh?”
“Yeah. It was actually quite good.”
He huffs out a laugh. “You don’t have to lie for my feelings, Martin.”
“I’m not lying!” Martin insists. “Your whole argument on higher rates of childhood manifestations of the supernatural as compared to adults, i-it made a lot of sense, I think.” Jon hums lightly, but stays quiet, so Martin continues. “I just— I didn’t think you...I dunno, believed in a lot of that stuff?”
Jon pauses. Looks up at the man knelt next to him, his wavy hair hanging sideways with the tilt of his head. “What, in the supernatural?”
“Yeah.”
“Well I don’t,” Jon says. Pulls out a book and flips it over — something french, it looks like? Jon didn’t even know that Elias spoke french. “Or, at least, I don’t believe in most of it. Some things, though.”
“What, no room for vampires and werewolves in Mr. Sims’s belief system?”
Jon rolls his eyes. “If vampirism and lycanthropy spread in the way that pop culture suggested, then the world would be overrun with examples of the both of them. Hell, humanity would probably be on the brink of extinction by now.”
“Maybe it is,” Martin says, nudging Jon’s leg with his own teasingly. “Maybe you’re just out of the loop.”
“Mr. Blackwood, are you suggesting that you believe in the existence of bloodsuckers and wolfmen?”
“Well...” Martin answers, then seems to notice Jon hiding his snickers and reels back in offense. “Hey, d-don’t laugh!”
Jon shakes his head, still smiling. “Listen, if you ever find proof of either, you are more than welcome to show me and change my mind. I will be the first to admit I’m wrong.”
“Oh please, you never admit you’re wrong.”
“And yet you still keep me around,” he retorts mildly. And then his finger comes to rest on a soft, worn pink spine. “Ooh, wait, hang on—”
“What?” Martin says, shifting closer as Jon tugs it free from its neighbors with a little “ah ha!”. He turns it over in his hands gently, then flips through the old, yellowing pages.
“T-this is it!” Jon exclaims. “This is the book — ‘a full analysis of the human condition and its effects on the commonality of cultural mythology’ — this is definitely it, we found it!” He lets out a pleased, hearty chuckle before turning to Martin and thrusting it into his hands. “Here.”
The shared glee drops out of Martin’s face in an instant, replaced with wide-eyed bafflement. “Wh— I can’t—!”
“Well you’re hardly going to read it here,” Jon says, smearing a handful of dust from the cover, “and it’s not like Elias has used it recently.”
“Jon, if I get caught with this I am literally going to be expelled!”
“You won’t be expelled. If anyone asks, just tell them I gave it to you,” Jon assures him. “Elias won’t fire me. Trust me, I’ve tried to get him to many times.”
Martin lets out a nervous giggle, pressing the book over his mouth to stifle it, and a swell of affection builds up in Jon’s chest. He loves seeing Martin like this — bright eyed, rosy-cheeked, the little gap in his teeth peeking out between his lips; joy is an emotion that fits Martin Blackwood like a well-tailored suit. Maybe it’s no wonder that he loves Martin the way he does. It’s easy to fall in love with Martin. Jon doesn’t know why everyone isn’t doing it.
“Thank you, Jon,” Martin says softly, setting the book to his side. “Um. Jon. Could I— could I ask you a question?”
Jon tilts his head, shrugs, but nods.
Martin takes a deep breath. “Do you...have...um, dating. You...?”
Jon snorts. “Yes, Martin. I have been known to date on occasion.”
“Right,” Martin nods to himself. “Cool. Um. Would these...dates happen to include guys...?”
Jon thinks for a moment. “Sometimes.”
“Would they...um,” Martin chews his lip. “Would they have the potential to include...” Oh, Martin is quite red now, Jon almost wants to remind him to breathe, but he doesn’t dare derail the question forming on his lips. “...this guy?”
Jon struggles to contain the wild grin that’s tugging at his lips as he shifts his gaze down to his lap. “Perhaps.”
“Perhaps?”
“...Possibly.”
“Possibly.”
“There is...a good chance of it, I’d say.”
“Oh my god,” Martin says, exasperation winning out as he grabs hold of Jon’s shoulders. “Jon, do you want to go on a date with me or not?”
“Well, if I knew breaking and entering was all it took to get you to ask, I would have done it a long time ago,” Jon says. He looks over to Martin, the blatant unamusement dripping from the other man nearly making him burst out laughing. “That’s a yes, Martin.”
“Oh, thank god. Okay.” Martin slumps back onto his heels like a string’s been snapped, hands pressed into his eyes. “Geez. Sorry, um. Cool.”
“I might,” Jon says, teasing air in his tone, “even let you kiss me if you asked.”
Martin looks up. His eyes are wide. His throat bobs as he swallows visibly, leaning forward just close enough for Jon to see the dusting of pink in the faint light. “Do you...” Martin says lowly. “Do you mean that?”
Oh, he said that out loud.
Jon looks over to Martin, who watches him with a careful eye. That’s how Martin’s always looking at him — carefully. Careful with his words. Careful with his touches. That sort of thing used to irritate Jon, back when he was younger, back when he didn’t know how to accept someone caring enough to be careful around him.
Jon wets his lip. Chews on it, and nods.
He hears Martin shuffle closer. “Can I kiss you?”
The words are everywhere except in his mouth, so all Jon can do is simply nod again.
And then Martin’s knees bump his. His hand curls up behind his neck, up to just below his hair elastic and tilts his head back. It’s easy to smell the peppermint on his breath here. Even easier to see the speckles in his amber eyes, the little scar on his upper lip that he claims was from a stapler as a child, the little flecks of gray in his eyebrows and lashes as he leans closer and closer and closer—
The jingle of Jon’s phone jolts him awake. He rubs his eyes, feels around for his glasses before finding them on his head and pulling them down to his nose, then picks up his phone. It’s only Tim, with some meme about Twilight vampires that he suddenly feels way too old to get. Why Tim is awake at 2:46 in the morning is beyond his own fathomability. Why Tim assumes Jon is also awake at 2:46 in the morning is something that would probably require a bit more self-reflection than he’s capable of this early.
Jon flicks on his laptop that’s fallen to the cushion beside him, wincing at the bright light glaring back at him. The page that he’d been looking at, however, is still open, with a bright bold picture of the man he’s hung up over like a teenage girl doodling her teacher’s name in her notebook.
It’s not that Jon believes Tim’s more...exaggerated claims. No, he doesn’t think Martin’s a drug lord or a part of the mafia or whatever. That’s ridiculous, and much too convenient for his feelings to conjure up some insane plotline in which Martin is only doing all of this for Jon’s sake. Martin’s a jerk. That’s as simple as it is. But despite this, despite reason calling out to him from every direction with airhorns and big blazing neon signs, he can’t help but feel...as if something doesn’t add up. As if something, someone is keeping a secret from him that he just has to know.
The question of how much Jon really knows about Martin keeps pinging around in his skull like a stray pinball, and Jon is nothing if not stubborn to a T.
It’s easy enough to find Martin’s instagram, even if he hasn’t posted to it in nearly three years. The man — though a little thinner and with fewer piercings — is definitely the Martin he knows. The Martin who makes his chest feel funny just looking at him, which is a sure sign in and of itself that Jon is truly pathetic. He clicks through each one mindlessly, not sure of what he’s searching for but taking it all in. A picture from Martin’s high school graduation, face smeared in acne and hair much longer than Jon’s ever seen it. A handful of nature shots, from trees to bumblebees to a family of round, white ducks. A group picture of what Jon assumes to be his university’s rowing team, given he’s quite certain the man in the back is one Michael Crew, given the neck scar. A few vent posts, a picture of a cat, an old photo-of-a-photo of a woman who Jon assumes to be Martin’s late mother, and then lastly, most recently, a picture of the flowerbed in front of their university’s sign. Jon scrolls through his followers, finding most of them sporting a “class of 2010” in their bio and none of them being of any significant note.
Jon sighs, clicks to another tab, and tries facebook.
It takes him about fifteen tries and at least eight different emails to actually get into his long neglected account, but he does manage to get into his old account, only to be greeted with his nine-years-outdated profile picture of him in his first year of uni: braces, pop-bottle glasses, long hair tied off into a mess of a braid, crappy metal band shirt that Georgie had liked, the whole shebang. He tries not to cringe as he navigates up to the search bar, punching in Martin’s name.
He gets even less there: a few quotes, a sunset photo, and a handful of pictures from what must be early high school, given how young Martin looks. Twitter is a bust, after combing through what must be fifty different Martin Blackwoods (though none of them Jon’s), as is livejournal and myspace. He does manage to find a tumblr with some poetry that Jon would at best call “quaint” and at worst call “not his taste,” but his activity on the site seemingly vanished in late 2012 and never returned.
Jon rubs his eyes, pulling on them in hopes that stretching out his eyelids will somehow improve his ability to find something on the over-bright laptop screen. It’s weird, right? That a man like Martin Blackwood has seemingly zero online presence after university? Sure, Jon doesn’t have much of an online presence other than the accounts his former partners have made him, but he’s Jon. It’s understandable. No one meets Jonathan Sims and asks to exchange snapchat handles because no one would snapchat him unless under extreme duress. Jon’s come to accept that about himself over the years. And sure, maybe Tim and Sasha are exceptions to that rule, but it’s hard to lump them into the same category as the general population.
Jon twists his feet up underneath him, setting his laptop on the coffee table, and navigates back to the old instagram. The profile picture smiles back at him.
...Martin really is an attractive man. Jon wouldn’t say he has a type, not that the small handful of exes throughout his adult life are really enough to sift through for patterns, but it’s easy seeing just what he liked about Martin in hindsight. He’s got a lovely smile. His teeth are a bit crooked, just like his nose (he’d explained that’d been from a break in ninth year, when he’d fallen backwards off the bleachers in the school gym), but it’s charming in a way that suits him well. Just like the few wrinkles he’s starting to get up around his eyes. Just like the dimples.
Jon swallows, the motion feeling thick in his throat, and opens the picture of the rowing crew once more, then saves it. He navigates to a search engine in the next tab.
Jon would not call himself a tech-savvy man. Not really. He’s nearly bricked the library computer more time than the record would actually show had Sasha not been on the same shift as him, and Tim has joked many a time how he would be more suited technologically for living in the nineteenth century that anyone within the greater London area (well, maybe not Elias, but everyone else, at least). But despite this, he does know how to reverse search an image, which he has a sneaking suspicion must be somewhere else on the web given just how many people are present besides one Martin Blackwood.
And he’s right, at least, in the most general of terms — he finds the exact photo posted by another member of the team years back, a man who has seemingly just been married and bears little significance to his overall search, and an article from Martin’s university documenting the team’s second place status in the regionals.
And then he keeps scrolling, on and on and on through what must be dozens to hundreds of similarly posed team photos with much less attractive men, until—
Oh.
Huh. He squints at his screen. That...is the same photo, isn’t it? Much lower quality, sure, but it’s easy to make out the similar shape of the logo on their shirts when he zooms in.
Jon clicks the link and watches his internet spin round and round before the page finally loads in.
It’s not another social media page like he’d been expecting. No local news article, no blog page from some aspiring college-aged journalist. No, the place the photo leads him to is apparently a message board reminiscent of the terrible ones he remembers frequenting for scary stories as a child, stark white boxes on black with horribly compressed animated gifs for signatures. But it’s not the embarrassing amount of kaomoji, the casual slur usage, the crude banner advert that his less-than-reliable adblock tries and fails to remove that catch his attention.
No, it’s a post about halfway down the page that has him leaning over his keyboard to get a better look. One with that very same photo from Martin’s instagram, but with a bold circle around one of the men’s faces. The one Jon recognizes starkly by the lopsided smile.
Looking for information on this man. Does anyone know him?
Jon’s pulse picks up as he taps his way down the page.
Got a new one do ya?
Looks like it. Just moved to London recently, bit of a loner. Looking like he’s linked to a good bit of those incidents in Stockwell.
Better for us. Dangerous ones are usually easier to track down.
Ha, yeah. Might even lead us to some others if he’s sloppy enough.
He doesn’t realize his hands are shaking until he completely misses the arrow key. What is that supposed to mean? What do they mean by others and incidents? Who even are these people? Surely they have the wrong person — despite all of the lighthearted jokes he’d endured from Tim, it isn’t that Jon actually believes that “Martin Blackwood” and “dangerous” could ever exist in the same sentence. It’s absurd. It’s downright ridiculous. It’s Martin, and despite everything, despite every uneven corner that he’s stumbled upon in navigating his relationship with the man over the past few weeks, Jon knows him.
...Doesn’t he?
The post is from nearly two years ago. He should leave it alone. He should assume it’s all a mistake, that they’ve got the wrong man, that maybe the grainy picture isn’t even of the same team that Martin had been on and the man that they’ve singled out of the crowd just bears an uncanny resemblance to his most recent ex. It’d be the rational thing to do. It’d be the smartest choice, the safest choice, the choice that doesn’t end up with him in a ditch somewhere where they won’t find his body until a whole seventy-two hours after the fact.
And yet...
Jon’s hands move on his own as he moves up to the top of the page, where the non-descript arial font invites him to make an account. He clicks it, fills out the questions with the thumping of his own heartbeat in his ears. Then he finds the original poster. Types out a long, lengthy message.
It belatedly occurs to him that the whole idea may not be the best he’s ever had while he’s already sitting in the restaurant.
Jon’s not stupid. Obviously. He knows that meeting up with some stranger on the internet whose face you’ve never seen is usually the start of a Dateline episode. He’d still been of the generation that learned about internet safety as a child, which largely consisted of the tenets “don’t give out revealing personal information,” and “don’t talk to strangers,” and “don’t meet with strangers, for the love of god,” and yet here he sits in his unpressed trousers and a jumper that likely hasn’t been washed in over a week — maybe more, given that it’d been at the very bottom of the hamper — but he’s hoping that some combination of his lack of social charm and physical appearance will dissuade any possible foul play that may arise. Even if he doesn’t want to consider the possibility, because that would mean accepting that he is, in fact, meeting a stranger from the internet at a place about five blocks from his home.
He sips on his water as he tries to calm his nerves. Nothing’s going to happen, he tells himself. Worst, the other party doesn’t even show — no, wait, worst the other party drags him off into an alley somewhere and beats him senseless — no, wait worst the other party drags him off into an alley somewhere, beats him senseless, and then throws him in the back of a truck and drives him off to god-knows-where — but so long as Jon doesn’t let them remove him from the premises, he’ll be fine. Probably. And best? Well, best he gets some answers, or at least walks out of the place with his wallet and his head still intact. He just needs to...distract himself, he supposes. Think about something else while he waits. The person two tables down from him has green hair and a whole sleeve of tattoos, and he does his best to study the collage of ink without coming off as rude.
The noise of the chair across from him yanking back jolts him out of his thoughts in an instant as his head snaps up.
There’s a woman standing across from him. A big woman. She’d have at least a foot on him if he stood up and looks quite like she wouldn’t break a sweat snapping him in half, given her arms are about the size of Jon’s thighs. Her close-cropped hair sticks out in jagged, faded tufts from under her cap, and the old scar over the left side of her face only stands out as much as the piercing on her eyebrow — like it belongs there. Like it’d look strange if she didn’t have one. She tugs at the edge of one of her rolled-up jacket sleeves, and Jon catches the corner of some tattoo he can’t make out. A snake, maybe. Something with teeth.
“Jonathan Sims?” she asks, voice gentler than he would expect from someone like her. It’s almost more unsettling that way, his throat going dry as he attempts to speak up.
“Um,” he clears his throat and holds out his hand, “Jon, yes. And you’re...Miss Montauk...?” The name feels too weak, too uncertain as it leaves his tongue to give him any hope of an equal footing in the conversation, but he can’t help it. He keeps thinking how it’s the same as that serial killer’s from two decades ago, which is really doing little to reassure him about meeting people on the internet.
“Julia,” she answers, only looking at his hand as she takes the seat across from him. Jon takes the opportunity to pull it back into his lap along with his gaze.
He can feel her watching him. Cataloguing. Taking in every bit of him as a person, peeling him apart, and lying the bloody, gorey pieces in neat identical strips across the table before him. God, this was a bad idea. This was a bad idea because Jon is already looking for an exit strategy, and just as he goes to make an excuse, to get up and hustle out of there as fast as humanly possible, when Julia opens her mouth and asks:
“Do you have a dog?”
Jon looks up. Squints. Raises an eyebrow. “Sorry?”
“You smell like one,” she says, so matter-of-factly that Jon can’t help but bring his jumper to his nose to give it an experimental sniff. Christ, he really needs to wash this thing. Does he smell like a dog? He isn’t sure. He thinks he can make out a hint of thai food, somewhere nestled deep in the acrylic fibers, and maybe a whiff of coffee around the sleeves, but fails to find what she’s talking about. Maybe it’s someone nearby she’s smelling. Maybe he’s going mad, trying to rationalize why some strange woman off the internet who looks a bit too much like a docuseries serial killer is asking him why he smells like a dog.
Jon frowns. “Um. W-well, no, but my friend has a cat...?”
Julia doesn’t seem to take that as a good enough answer, because her scrutinizing gaze fails to let up. She glances down to his hands, and then to his half-drunk glass and Jon realizes he may have made an error.
“Oh, would you like me to order—”
“Let’s cut to the chase,” she interrupts, folding her hands in front of her and leaning across the table. Jon leans back on instinct. He can’t help it. He’s quite getting the impression that she might try to bite him. “What do you know about Martin Blackwood?”
Ah. Right. The reason he came in the first place.
Jon tries to find someplace to stare that isn’t directly into her eerily yellow eyes and ends up fixed on a spot just above her left ear. She’s missing the tip of it, he notes. It reminds him a bit of a feral cat. “W-well, not much. I met him about half a year ago? Um. I-I was actually hoping you could tell me more about him.”
“So you just came here to waste my time?”
“No! No,” Jon argues, wincing at the implication. “I-I know things about him, I just—” He finally does meet Julia’s gaze. She’s not blinking, not angry if her lack of expression is anything to go off of, just...watching. Waiting. “I...I don’t know if I can...trust you.”
Julia looks at him for a long moment before lowering her head. Jon almost asks if she’s alright when he notices her smiling, wide and curled like a serpent. “Guess you’re not as stupid as I thought you were,” she says, tone strongly suggesting that he should take this as a compliment. “Fine. We’ll...trade, then. You give me what I want to hear, and I’ll give you what you want to hear.”
As if I want to hear this, Jon thinks, but keeps to himself. He wets his cracking lips. “Fine.”
“You first, then.”
“What— what do you want to know?”
“How did you meet Martin Blackwood?”
It’s a simple enough question, and yet the gentle tone in which she asks it makes his skin bristle in defense. You don’t know her, Jon reminds himself, you don’t know her intentions — which is ridiculous, that he feels the need to protect his arsehole ex like this, and yet...
Jon clears his throat. “I work at a library nearby. He came in to do some work there.”
“And when exactly...?”
“Um. March. O-or February maybe...? End of winter, I suppose.” Jon scratches a finger through the prickly scruff of his chin. “He...he gave me the impression of someone who had moved here recently. Maybe...two years at most? Came from up near Manchester, from what he’s told me.”
Julia hums. “That seems to line up with our understanding.”
Jon raises an eyebrow. “What is your understanding exactly?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Julia smiles wryly.
For as on edge as he is, Jon isn’t in the mood for games. “Actually, yes, I would like to know, that’s exactly why I came here. And I believe—” he leans forward with the intent of intimidation, though he’s certain regardless of his expression that he just looks like a shivering chihuahua to the woman across from him; she reminds him of Daisy, in that respect, “—that it is your turn to share.”
“Tetchy,” she murmurs to herself, tugging at a half-formed argument in his mouth, when he notices the canvas bag in her hand. He hadn’t seen her bring that in, had he? Maybe she’d had it on her shoulder and he simply hadn’t noticed — not that that does anything to quell the anxiety that spikes in his gut as she rummages.
And then he watches as she finds what she’s looking for. She takes hold of it. She slowly pulls it out—
It’s a folder. Plain and manila, nondescript in every way save for the little green flags sticking out from the papers inside. Julia glances over to the other patrons in the cafe — the tattooed person still sitting a few spaces down from them, the little girl and her father across the way, the two lonely employees wiping up behind the counters — and then after seemingly confirming that none of them have any interest in the mess of a man and the maybe serial killer sitting in the corner, she hands it over.
Jon doesn’t think twice about snatching it up feverishly. It’s a lead, it’s a question, it’s an answer he has to figure out—
The documents spill out onto his lap in his careless fervor, and he looks down at the pile. Picks up the first one with trembling hands.
It’s a payslip for one Martin K., straight from what he can only guess is an Italian restaurant up in Manchester.
Jon frowns, unsure what to make of it, and picks up another.
This is one is similar — an application form to retail store from K. Blackwood, with the neat, looping handwriting he’s come to recognize over the broad shoulders of a man he knows.
He flips through some others. They’re all different. Some are applications or bills or payslips, others are prescriptions and receipts, even an instance of a letter from a concerned neighbor. The locations span out from Manchester to Leeds to London, with even a small town in Devon getting its representation. What’s curious, however, is the names listed at the top of each one.
And so on, and so on, and so on. Each just close enough to gloss over if he weren’t looking for it, each barely far enough away to instill a sort of queasy, unsteady feeling in his gut. Hell, he’s only skimming the surface here; the ages are a whole nother ditch to wade through, with some documents from years ago claiming him to be well into his thirties, and others more recent proclaiming him in any manner of asynchronous ages in his twenties. One of them claims he was twenty-nine years old in 2007, which Jon knows is quite impossible as he’d celebrated Martin’s twenty-ninth birthday with him almost three months ago. He knows this for a fact, he knows it—
...Doesn’t he?
Frowning, Jon looks up to Julia. “I don’t...I don’t understand.”
She leans forward, sinking her chin into her closed fist. “Neither do we. But it is interesting, isn’t it?”
Jon frowns. “But h-how do you know this is even the same person — that it’s Martin Blackwood?”
“We do,” she assures him as she fishes out something else from her bag — a few photographs. Jon takes them carefully, feeling incredibly voyeuristic as he flips through them. Most of them seem to be pulled from corporate websites or IDs, but a few are taken from far off, blurry and unaligned as if they were taken by some sort of P.I. looking for divorce evidence.
Jon doesn’t think Julia, or whoever she might be working with, is a P.I.
He tries to swallow, but his throat is dry.
“But— but it doesn’t prove anything,” Jon argues, even if the words he’s saying hold little weight in his own mind. “S-so what? He’s worked under some different names, he’s moved around — that’s not a crime.”
“It isn’t,” Julia agrees slowly. She reaches over, close enough to draw out an unsure, impulsive wince, and then picks up Jon’s drink. He can only watch, helplessly, as she finishes it off. “But usually people don’t run like that unless they’ve got something to hide.”
“Do you have something to hide?” Jon says, then regrets it in an instant.
Julia smiles at him, the kind of smile an animal gives as a warning to those who test it. “I gave you my name, didn’t I?”
Jon can hear himself swallow, skin of his throat pulled tight around his adam’s apple like an invitation.
Julia folds her hands together, index fingers thoughtfully steepled. “My turn. Did Martin Blackwood ever spend time with anyone else?”
Jon frowns. “What do you mean?”
“Did you ever know of any social circle outside of his visits to your place of employment? Friends? Romantic partners?”
“Why do you have an interest in Martin?”
“Why does a man take interest in a stray animal?”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Neither was yours.”
“Fine, no. I never saw him with anyone I didn't know.”
“Are you lying to me?”
“Oh, like you have any room to talk,” Jon snaps. He’s getting impatient. The anxiety over the woman across from him has simmered into a low, restless heat under his fingers, which he digs into the worn cushion beneath him. “Look, if you’re just going to waste my time—”
Julia reaches over, plucking the folder from his hands. Then she flips through the papers within, one after the other after the other in a slow, methodical analysis of its contents before she pauses on something. Wriggles it out from its siblings and passes it back to Jon’s embarrassingly sweaty grip.
It’s a newspaper clipping. From Leeds, by the looks of it, yellowed and torn, yet not so old as to fade the ink that reads April 8, 2011 underneath the headline: Animal Attacks Continue. Jon frowns, opens his mouth to ask as he looks up—
Julia’s laid more slips across the table in front of him. Some newspaper clippings. A few printed-out articles. A torn-off cover of a local magazine from Manchester. Another, he notices, is from leads, and another from just outside Exeter. His gaze settles on the two from London, the latest one barely over a year ago. Man loses leg to unknown animal in London park. He thinks he remembers that one, if vaguely — there’d been rumors that it was a bear attack, except for the fact that there are no bears in London to do the attacking. Jon sets down the clipping he’s holding, his thumb leaving a dark stain of sweat in the already curling paper.
Julia studies him carefully. She gathers a few of the papers up, tucking them back into her folder, and then asks, “Were you and Martin Blackwood ever involved?”
The question may have knocked him on his ass if he’d been standing, Jon spluttering out a noise in protest. “I-I hardly see how that’s relevant.”
“Humor me.”
“We weren’t,” Jon lies, a bit too quickly. It doesn’t matter what answer he gives, not when she looks at him like that. She can see right through him, the radiation of her gaze sinking harshly into his bones. His skin crawls, like it’s trying to flee from her scrutiny.
Julia only shrugs her shoulders, infuriatingly casual. God he wishes he could just sink his teeth into—
Jon takes a deep breath. No. Focus. He’s here for a reason. He’s here for the specific reason of getting answers, even if every muscle in his body protests against it. He needs them. He needs to know so badly that he can feel the ache in his teeth like a muscle spasm.
He needs to know, even if it terrifies him. And god, does it terrify him.
“Is...” Jon takes a deep breath. Wets his lips. Focus. “Is Martin...dangerous?”
Oh, and if a single look could grow teeth—
Jon feels himself pulling back as Julia leans forward, some noise rumbling up in his throat on instinct. “Jon,” she says, too calm for the frantic beating of his own heart, “do you own any manner of self-defense?”
What? He tries to let out a nervous laugh, but it stalls in his throat and twists into a whine. Is she threatening him? “Um. Y-you mean like a personal alarm...?”
“Knife. Spray. Gun. Any of the sort.”
“A gun?” Jon hisses out, leaning across the table in hopes that the other patrons won’t hear. “In central London? Are you out of your mind?!”
Julia pulls back a bit at this and holds up a finger. Then she reaches for her— oh, christ, she has a gun in there, doesn’t she? She has a gun and she’s going to shoot him in a cafe so his face can be plastered across every newspaper in the country as a warning not to meet strangers on the internet that happen to share a surname with one of the most notorious serial killers of his lifetime. Sue him for optimistically assuming that he wouldn’t be around to see another in the family claiming the same fame.
And then Julia pulls out something...small. Smaller than a gun. Small enough to fit into the palm of her hand and have it completely concealed, which it is as she places it on the table in front of him. Jon looks down at the offering. He can’t tell what it is. It’s in one of those sparkly drawstring bags that he hates, because he can never find it in himself to throw them away — he still has the one that Martin’s earrings he’d ordered for his birthday had come in, sitting on the counter of his bathroom. Jon isn’t sure whether to laugh hysterically or burst into tears.
“I think,” Julia says as she stands, slinging the bag over her shoulder, “that it would be a good investment.”
“Um,” Jon says, reasonably.
“If you have anything else about Martin,” she continues, “you know how to get in contact with me.”
“Er,” Jon says, less reasonably.
Julia doesn’t wait for an answer. She just turns and heads for the door, leaving Jon with the enlightening view of the back of her denim jacket, patched over in a multitude of different threads from years of wear and tear. And tears. It’s not difficult to see how uniform they look. How much the neat lines through them remind him of claw marks. Jon swallows, his throat aching, his sympathetic nervous system shrieking, as he looks back to the bag in front of him.
Jon pulls the strings open and reaches inside. His fingers close around one of the objects, and—
“Ow!”
He flinches away, dropping the small piece back into the bag as he shakes off the pain. His fingertips glare back at him a bright, angry red, as if he’d just touched a hot coal, and he shoves them into his mouth as he peeks back into the bag to see whatever had assaulted him.
Oh, Jon thinks, hysterically, as his brain registers the glint of metal staring up at him from the shadows, it’s bullets.
He can’t help it then. He does laugh. He laughs at the whole absurdity of the situation — is this a threat? Should he consider it a threat? Should he trust the word of some deranged woman from a seedy internet form saying that his ex-boyfriend is...what? Some sort of criminal? Some sort of violent monster who gets off to mutilating people before moving on to somewhere else? It’s mad. It’s deranged. It’s impossible except for the whole mountain of evidence shoved in his face, and Jon wishes so badly that he could simply dial Martin’s number and ask him the truth, if you can’t give me anything, at least give me the truth—
Christ, he needs a drink. Alcoholic or not. He needs a drink and a cigarette. Maybe a pipe. Maybe a bowl that he can pray calms his nerves that feel like they’re sparking electric fire in his skull as he tries to find something in this scenario that makes any goddamn lick of sense. It has to have an answer. It has to.
“Jon?”
Jon startles hard enough to slam his knee up into the underside of the table, pinching out a cry from him and a sympathetic hiss from his...attacker? Adversary? Would-be assassin?
Jon looks up to the man with his hands up placatingly. Oh. He can practically hear the air hissing out from him as his body deflates. Tim. It’s just Tim.
“Tim,” Jon says hoarsely before remembering to remove his fingers from his mouth. He tucks them embarrassedly into his lap. “Um. Wh-what are you—”
Tim points with his thumb through the window. “Was at the store across the street and thought I saw you. Well, you and...”
“Ah.”
Tim doesn’t wait for the invitation to occupy the space across from him. “So,” he purrs, leaning across the table, “you going to tell me about it?”
“Tell you about what.”
Tim leans over and gives him a good-natured nudge to the arm. “C’mon. Big boss, back in the dating pool?”
“It was not a date,” Jon corrects petulantly. “We were simply...meeting about something.”
“Uh huh.”
“Something business related.”
“Whatever you say,” Tim purrs, before his hand jolts out, too fast for Jon to even react, and snags the sparkly bag from in front of him. “And I’m sure fancy gifts have nothing to do with romantic connotations of any sort.”
“Ah,” Jon’s hand shoots out to stop him, but Tim swerves out of reach. “Careful, those are hot—”
“Ooo!”
Jon watches, the sharp spike of anxiety from a moment ago unknotting in his gut into something more of...indigestion. Confusion, for one. Concern, for a large other, as Tim rolls the little metal balls harmlessly through his fingers. “What’s this?” he says, grinning like some sort of demented dental care advertisement. “Quite shiny. She one of those...crystal ‘in tune with the earth’ sort of people? Didn’t think that was your type.”
“It’s not,” Jon says irritably. “Please give those back.”
Tim looks at him for a long time in a way that suggests he’s trying to chip away Jon’s hardset attitude into something more manageable. Tim does that quite a lot. Jon likes Tim: he’s smart, he’s a hard worker, he’s got a downright killer collection of old medical textbooks he’d snagged from an old publishing job and has no qualms about letting Jon comb through all of them, but he can be too...out of sync sometimes. Pushes too much when he shouldn’t and backs off the second Jon shows his teeth. Like now — trying to wear Jon down into some shape he can understand, something he can manage.
He relents, in the end, dropping the piece of metal back into the bag and sliding it across the table. Jon snatches it away and shoves it into his pocket.
“Jon.”
Jon looks up as Tim begins to reach over. He doesn’t fight as Tim takes his hand between his own. Tim’s hands are bigger than Jon’s, softer too, the faint aroma of eucalyptus wafting off his hand cream reminding Jon of those oil diffusers that people in his first year dormitory used to collect. It’s a bit irritating, just how relaxing it is. Even more so that Tim’s hands are good at massaging, as he watches him rub soft circles into the backs of his palms. Huh. Jon’s hair has really gotten quite thick on his arms. It’s only against Tim’s own that he’s now noticing such.
Tim takes a long, slow inhale. “Do you remember when Danny came back?”
God, how could Jon forget that night. He’d known Tim for nearly a year at that point, long enough to know just how he ticked, long enough to understand his anger and exactly which cuts it stemmed from.
Jon had never met Danny before he’d gone missing. He hadn’t met Tim either, not until long after Tim had resigned himself to bitterness, and it’d taken quite a while for Jon to learn that Tim even had a brother to begin with. He looked a lot like Tim. He looked a lot like Jon imagined Tim looked, back before he went missing, before Tim had shelled himself off to the possibility of letting go when they’d both had desks beside each other at their old job. Danny was always missing to Tim. Not dead. Not kidnapped or maimed or abducted, just...just missing. Jon thinks, sometimes, that he can almost understand where Tim was coming from.
The night Jon had driven them both to the hospital all those years ago, when Danny had showed up at Tim's door without a word, the first impression of Danny he’d gotten was that he was nothing like the young man in the photos. He was pale, deathly so, and thin. Shaking all over. Covered in cuts and bruises and blood that might or might not have been his own, and his eyes were—
Well. Jon hadn’t been sure that he would make it, at least. He’s glad he did, though. He likes Danny. He’s a nice kid, even if he’s technically the same age as Jon, a little strange, and a lot of a night owl. He likes what Danny being around does for Tim most of all.
Slowly Jon nods.
Tim inhales long and slowly through his nose. “He was different. I didn’t...I haven’t really...talked about it much, but for a while there, I wasn’t sure that I really knew him anymore, y’know?”
Jon doesn’t know, not exactly, but he nods again, anyway.
“What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that even despite that, I still knew he was my brother.” He smiles, giving Jon’s hand a gentle squeeze. “And I still know you’re my friend. I’ve got your back.”
Jon swallows, hating that those simple words are pulling up emotions in his chest. “I know.”
“And you can trust me, yeah?”
“Yeah. I know.”
“And,” Tim says, “you don’t have to force yourself into these things if you’re still not over everything.”
Jon laughs. A weak, wet thing that doesn’t actually convey any humor, and wipes his nose on the back of his jumper. Yeah, okay, this thing’s definitely going in the wash. “I-I’m not still moping about it. I promise.”
“You sure?” Tim raises an eyebrow, because Jon knows he’s a bad liar and Tim knows that Jon knows this. So he doesn’t lie. For the most part.
“Yes,” Jon says with a wobbly exhale. He looks to his empty glass. Imagines the papers all spread out in front of him like a red string board as he mentally twists and turns and tugs each one together. This isn’t about Martin anymore. It’s bigger than him. It’s a mystery, something to be solved and picked apart, something — for a man like Jonathan Sims to dig his nails and teeth into and rip and rend and tear.
It's a mystery, and Jon most certainly hates mysteries.
“Yes,” Jon says firmer, steadier this time as he rolls his shoulders back. No more moping. Time to find some answers.
So he’s been doing some thinking.
He’s got a lot on his mind. He hasn’t been sleeping much. Whether that’s a direct result of thinking too much or the fact that his body continues to mutiny against him, Jon can’t exactly say, but he’s probably setting some sort of record for the amount of aches and pains he’s been dealing with that aren’t a result of sleeping on said body part weird. His legs ache. His fingers ache. He keeps itching his skin something awful until his arms are bloomed up red and irritated from fingernail marks. He’d had the briefest inclination that it may be an allergic reaction — something in the new detergent he’d bought, something in a meal he’d eaten — but even after days it hasn’t seemed to go away. There’s a lump at the base of his spine that he’d noticed this morning: nothing really big enough for major concern, but annoying in its positioning. He keeps trying to rub it discreetly as he waits in line without looking like a total pervert, but the woman behind him insists on standing much too close, and he resigns to shoving his hands in his pockets.
The barista calls for the next customer. Jon steps up, trying not to grimace with every move.
“Good morning, how can I— oh, it’s you!”
Jon smiles tightly at the woman behind the counter. He can never remember her name — something with an L, maybe? Lily? Linn? She’s sheared her black hair into a bob since the last time he’s been here but still has the same unbridled enthusiasm that he can never seem to match.
She pulls out a cup before uncapping her marker. “Do you want your two chais today?”
“Um. Just...just one,” Jon answers, trying not to let the words get to him. “Could you, uh, put espresso in that?”
“You got it, love,” she says as she scribbles it on the side of the cup, then flips the screen around to let him pay.
Jon likes this place. Liked this place. He used to come here with Martin a few days a week before work, and he’s always appreciated the quiet despite teetering on the edge of a busy university campus. Now standing in the corner as he waits for his drink just feels like prodding at an open wound still yet to heal.
Martin. Right. Jon’s been doing a lot of thinking about him, too.
It’s difficult not to. It’s difficult not to when he’s been trying to digest all that Julia had said in their meeting a few days ago when he’s still not even sure how much to take as fact. He’d done a bit of research on her too, after it all. She hadn’t been to college, had worked in security for a bit, and then had seemingly dropped off the face of the earth doing...whatever it is she does now. Made sense, he supposes. Made his distrust of her that much more justified.
But he couldn’t find any connection between her and Martin, and that was the weird part. Some sort of hidden animosity might be able to wave away a lot of the things that she’d said. A slighted business partner. A scorned friend. A bad breakup, even — Martin had told him about a woman he’d gone out with in university who he’d gone out with before figuring some things out about himself that had filled his flat with worms after they’d gone their separate ways, so it isn’t like that’s out of the realm of possibility.
Granted, Jon would never fill his flat with worms as a sort of petty revenge, but he can’t say he doesn’t sympathize with this nameless figure from Martin’s past.
It’s just—
It’s not like Jon wants Martin to be something dangerous. Obviously he doesn’t. He likes — liked — Martin as a person and never was given any sort of indication that he had a bad bone in his body. Maybe Jon’s standards are just shitty. Maybe too many key years in his developmental period were spent hanging around the wrong people or sitting in rehab group therapy while someone yelled about getting into a knife fight with their spouse to know what normal relationships are supposed to be like.
Jon rubs his eyes. Sure, Jon doesn’t want to believe it, but the evidence—
Evidence of what, exactly? It’s— all Julia had had was a handful of coincidences and conveniences all tied together on a red string board. It’s not like moving around a lot and fiddling with your name and not talking to your family is a crime. Jon gets it! It’s normal! It’s completely fine! Martin knowing where he works? It’s where they’d met. Not weird. Martin knowing where he lives? They’d dated; it wasn’t like Jon was going to hide his home from his boyfriend. Martin having a spare key to his flat? It’s— okay, that one’s less than ideal, but it wasn’t like he thought Martin would break in there and tie him down to the bed and smother him with a pillowcase or poison his electric kettle or take one of those sharp, sharp kitchen knives that Martin always liked to use when they’d have dinner together and drag it slooooowly up his belly, all the way to his sternum—
Jon flicks himself. Stop that. Snap out of it. Martin’s an arsehole, sure, but there’s no reason to believe that he’d be out for revenge when he was the one who broke up with Jon.
Jon crosses his arms around himself as he tries to think. He needs something to take his mind off of all of this. Something mellow and mindless that he can focus on aside from when and where his ex-boyfriend is going to kill him brutally.
Jon watches the barista as she bustles around behind the counter. He really wishes he could remember her name. He knows it was embroidered on the left side of the old uniforms, back before the cafe had undergone a facelift and changed its color scheme, and, if he thinks about it hard, can almost make out the loops of the cursive letters. It had to start with an L. He watches as she forms a flower on the top of a latte that will inevitably be capped for no one to see. Does she even know his name? He usually doesn’t bother using his real one at cafes, given that no one can ever spell it right. Always an H in there somewhere or too many N’s. Usually, he just gives them the name of whomever he’s with at the time. Usually—
Wait, had she asked for his name?
“Chai for Martin,” the barista calls, smiling over to him sweetly as she places the cup on the counter. Jon doesn’t even try to suppress a wince. Ah. Right. Of fucking course it would be that.
Jon reaches for the cup—
—just as the man beside him does the same, bumping him at the wrist.
Jon looks at the hand with its chipping blue nail polish. Follows up its arm, over the patched zip-hoodie sleeve. Up to the shoulder. Up to the man it's connected to.
Martin stares at him for a long moment, hand twitching as he struggles to decide whether to grab the drink or pull away or say something or or or—
“And here’s the one with espresso,” says the barista with a smile as she slides it over in Jon’s direction.
Jon picks it up on instinct. It’s scalding hot against his hand. It’s scalding hot and yet he can’t bring himself to put it down or grab for a sleeve, because that would mean breaking the taut line between him and one Martin Blackwood standing not a foot from him at the cafe bar. Maybe he’s dreaming. Maybe this isn’t real and all the lack of sleep is catching up to him, now manifesting his ex-boyfriend at the same place they always used to come together. That would just be his fucking luck, wouldn’t it?
And then Martin picks up his drink, pivots around, and heads for the door.
Jon, not having any better idea of what to do, follows.
It isn’t— he just— he’s not— it’s not like Jon has anything he particularly wants to say to Martin Blackwood. All the things he wants Martin to know and Martin to feel and Martin to understand are all impossibly complicated to put into words. Jon’s never been the one of the two who is good with words. Jon’s never really found himself in a situation like this, you see, which means that no one has handed him a manual of how to deal with your partner breaking up with you and then maybe possibly potentially being something dangerous. Maybe he shouldn’t be following Martin, if he’s dangerous. Maybe he should have thought of that before he wandered out into the street with him where there’s no one around for a good few blocks and no one to see if—
Martin pauses just ahead of him, grinding Jon to a stop before he can ram into the back of him.
“Jon,” Martin says, heaving out a slow sigh, “please stop following me.”
Jon wets his lips. His mouth suddenly feels very dry. He can’t quite find the feeling in his legs, in his arms, and yet he’s too aware of every bit of himself like his skin’s been stretched over a skeleton it doesn’t fit. He says, “I wasn’t following you.”
Martin half turns toward him, expression doubtful.
“I do work this way,” Jon protests.
Martin takes a long breath in through his nose. “Right. ‘Course.” He turns back around, lifts his foot—
“And—”
Martin stops.
“And I— I wanted to—” Jon swallows. Okay, well, fuck. He didn’t think he’d get this far. He needs to come up with something to say right this instant or he’s going to lose him. I noticed you trimmed your hair and it looks nice? No, absolutely not. Do you come here often? What are you, straight? I can’t get you out of my head and I’m half convinced you might have killed someone in your past. Would you like to start over? Jesus christ, get it together, Sims. “I just wanted to say.....................hello.”
“Hi Jon,” Martin says neutrally.
“And—” And? And what? And this conversation must keep going at all costs or he’s quite certain he’s either going to implode or explode or some sort of -plode or bend right over at the waist now and throw up. He absolutely cannot throw up right now. “And I wanted to ask...how you’re doing.”
Martin inhales through his nose. “Fine. Just fine.”
Fine. Fine? Fine! That’s...that’s good right? He should want Martin to be fine. “Oh,” Jon begins, “well, that’s— um. That’s g—”
“Jon.”
Jon looks up. Martin’s lips are pressed into a tight line. Martin has taken out his piercing sometime between now and last week, leaving him drawn to other placed on his face to avoid looking in his eyes — the little wrinkle he has between his eyebrows where he squints, the mole on his cheek amongst the smattering of freckles, the hairline scratch on his glasses where he’d dropped them in the sink while trying to scrub clean a few mugs for tea. He looks tired, Jon thinks. He looks a lot like how Jon feels.
“Let’s not do this,” he says finally.
“Do what,” Jon says stubbornly, as if he doesn’t already know.
“Do— do this. Do this...this thing where we pretend—” Martin lets out a noise in frustration as he struggles with his words. “Look. Just— stop finding me, please.”
“I’m not trying to find you.”
“It’s not— you know what I mean.”
“Then why,” Jon protests. “What— what happened to us, Martin?”
He wants to argue, he thinks. He wants to feel some of that simmering rage he’d felt the first time he’d first confronted him, back when he was choking on heartache with no place to put it. But he doesn’t. He’s a little cold. His cup is still too warm, but he’s gotten used to the sting on his palms. His nose is dripping. His eyes itch.
“It’s not...” Martin begins slowly. He closes his eyes. He opens them, slowly, and looks to Jon. “You could have seriously hurt, Jon. You could have died,” Martin says finally.
...What.
Jon frowns. “I don’t...I don’t understand.” Could have...died? Died? Surely he’d remember something like that. Surely Jon would know if he were on death’s doorstep, and even with the awfulness he’s felt the past few weeks, he’s had it worse. He’s sick, is all. He’s sick and whatever it is simply refuses to go away.
Martin’s mouth twitches into what might be a frown. When he speaks, his voice struggles to stay steady. “No,” he says, “you wouldn’t. But it’s for your own good.”
Jon wants to protest. Jon opens his mouth—
And then from his left comes a “hey, Blackwood!” before a woman comes crossing the street towards them. A small woman. A woman with half her head buzzed short and the other half pulled into what might have once been a braid, and a woman whom Jon hopes can’t see him, because the look she’s giving Martin makes him seriously concerned that she’s going to bite him.
Instead, she marches up to him, tilts her head back to look at him, and then gives him a solid punch to the arm.
Martin gasps out in pain, stumbling back. “Ow, what the hell?!”
“What the fuck, Martin!” the woman snaps, voice pitching octaves higher with each word. “We haven’t seen you ‘round in two weeks! Two weeks!”
“I’ve been busy,” Martin bites out between his teeth. He rubs his arm like he’ll remember that hit for the next few days, and Jon silently revels in the thought.
“Oh, sorry, you’ve been busy have you? Well, I’ve been busy actually attending meetings like I’m s’posed to, and you not being there means I have to sit next to— next to Sarah Fucking Baldwin!” She grabs hold of Martin’s arm, digging her very sharp-looking nails in, gritting her very sharp-looking teeth. “You know how I feel about Sarah Baldwin.”
“You’re hurting me,” Martin bites back, the words a deep rumble in his chest as he leans in close to the woman’s face.
“Melanie,” says a man— Jon jumps at his appearance. Good lord, when did he get here? The man stands taller than Martin and yet had somehow slipped in without him noticing — intimidating, but in the way that a wide river is, and not like the sharp edges of the smaller woman. He glances over to Jon as he scratches at his pierced lip, raises a pierced eyebrow, then turns back to the other two parties. “Remember to breathe.”
“Fuck you too, Gerry,” the woman (Melanie, apparently) spits out, but she does drop Martin’s arm. Martin steps away quickly to clutch his wounds.
Gerry looks up to Martin. He isn’t angry — at least, Jon doesn’t think he is — but his neutrality betrays little else about his demeanor. He slowly steps forward before placing a hand on Martin’s shoulder.
“Martin,” Gerry says, “we’ve been wondering where you got off to.”
Martin swallows visibly. “I-I mean...I was planning on being there tomorrow—”
“Oh, well that’s just wonderful.” Gerry takes the opportunity to put his full arm around him, spinning them away from Jon’s direction in one swift motion. “Because I had some things I wanted to chat about with you. You are heading to class, right?”
“W-well, yes, but—”
“Then we’ll walk you. C’mon Melanie.”
“Don’t you tell me to c’mon you funeral-dressed bastard,” Melanie grumbles, but follows dutifully behind.
“Wait,” Martin stops, wriggling his way out of Gerry’s grasp. He turns around to face Jon. He looks at him — really looks at him, maybe more so than he has at any of their encounters over the past few weeks — and presses his lips tight together. Jon wants to be angry with him. Jon wishes he knew how to feel anything other than sad.
Martin whispers, just barely loud enough to hear, “Please, Jon. Please stay away.”
And then he’s being swept away by his two companions off to the vague shape of education in the distance. Two people that Jon’s never seen in his life. Two people that Jon didn’t even know existed, given that he’d always assumed Martin’s friends were his friends.
Unless these people aren’t friends. There had been a strange sort of...inverted camaraderie there. Antagonism, but not quite. Distrust, maybe, if the smell on the air was anything to go off of.
Jon watches until the three figures disappear around a corner up ahead. He looks down to his hands. Notices his long forgotten drink and picks it up for a sip.
It’s grown long cold as soon as it hits his tongue, and he fights off the urge to gag. Then he sighs, shoulders his bag, and heads off to work.
Jon probably should have done more research on what to do before he came here.
It’s not— it isn’t that Jon doesn’t know what a stakeout implies. He’s seen enough bad police procedurals and mystery dramas with Daisy to know the general outline of what they entail, and it isn’t as if Martin is particularly difficult to find. He has the same schedule as he did nearly three weeks ago. He has the same backpack, same rotation of three jumpers, same grown-out undercut in desperate need of a buzz as he swerves out of the sea of students leaving the classroom and down the hall towards the exit. It’s easy to follow him, because Martin has no reason to suspect he’s being followed.
It’s just everything after that’s questionable, like what exactly he’ll do once he corners the man who could probably lift three men Jon’s size at once, but...well. He’ll get to that when he gets to it.
It’s easy to keep track of Martin through campus this time of year. It’s quiet. The bottom halves of the trees have all turned burnt and ruddy, some drifting through the wind lazily, but not enough to yet accumulate in thick piles blanketing the grass. It’s the time of year that Jon doesn’t mind much being outside, being easier to get around without the risk of heatstroke or being run over by some tosser on an electric scooter, though he rarely finds the time. Midterms leave the library chronically understaffed, and most of Jon’s days are spent cleaning up after the groups of distressed students who refuse to walk the five feet to put their trash in the bin, and filling out loan requests for textbooks on backorder until December. He knows better by now to expect first years to actually read their first day syllabi.
Not Martin though. Jon hasn’t seen Martin at the central library since their date. He hasn’t seen much of Martin at all besides their brief encounter the day before, though occasionally he thinks he sees someone who fits his description by the reflection pond — flannel shirt rolled up to the elbows, t-shirt with some bad 70’s horror poster on it, trainers that look like he’s glued the soles back on a half dozen times and still refuses to replace. Jon sometimes pretends, at those sightings, that he’s sitting there writing his poetry down there.
He never really liked poetry. He’d liked Martin’s poetry, though.
Martin makes a right once he makes it to the end of the sidewalk. He doesn’t notice Jon. He waves casually at a man on a skateboard, stops to pet a terrier in front of the engineering building, and then cuts behind the agricultural building and heads for one of the general lecture halls. Why is he...aren’t Martin’s classes done for the day? Jon knows this. He knows it for a fact. He’s walked Martin to class enough on his breaks to know his whole schedule like the back of his hand, which means this is typically the time that Martin catches the bus at central campus, rides it to the station, and then takes the northern line up to his flat in Stockwell. He doesn’t typically go to study after class on Fridays, and he certainly doesn’t head back to one of the buildings.
Unless this is that “being there” he’d mentioned to those two people the other day. Jon hasn’t been able to find anything about them yet. Turns out, it’s a lot more difficult to track down someone when all you have is their first name and a vague physical description describing at least thirty queer people in a five mile radius. Jon would know. He’s probably met at least half of them, at some point.
Jon waits for him to slip inside before he approaches cautiously. It’s not locked, thankfully — there’s a large rock wedged to keep the door open, which means some sort of meeting must be being held. Who even uses this building for anything other than first year chemistry exams? The only club that comes to mind is jujitsu, given how many posters they like to slap on the library doors, but Jon knows that rickety built-in desks would be a less-than-ideal space for such.
Jon steps inside. Christ, it’s freezing in here. He tugs closed his cardigan, billowed open by the air conditioner unit hung above the door, and follows the smell of old dust and the sound of faint voices down the hall.
And then there — at the end of the hall, he sees Martin dip into a room. He hears Martin greet someone else in the same light manner that one might greet a friend, except Jon has always been under the impression that Jon’s friends are Martin’s friends. Had he ever spoken about them maybe, recounting some night out at the bar or over-the-top birthday party? Has he ever given the impression that he does things with other people that aren’t the strange collected crew of library employees and all the strays they’d osmosed into it over the years? Does Martin even have friends? Does Jon?
...Does Jon even know Martin?
Did you ever know of any social circle? Julia had asked, and it settles like a bullet in his gut to admit that he hadn’t.
Jon doesn’t think. He can’t think. He rushes forward in a surge of fiery, bullheaded curiosity, because he needs to see who Martin is speaking with, who Martin is laughing with, who Martin knows and talks with and laughs with who isn’t him—
He runs head on into a shape stepping out from the doorway, stumbling backwards.
He looks up.
It’s a man — well, a man’s torso. A man’s torso is all that Jon can see before he cranes his neck back to a near painful contortion just to get the whole panorama of the lumbering form that stands before him. It’s like looking at a mountain. It’s like watching a rocket blast off, trailing it up and up and up and up...
Jon is not a large man in any scope of the word. He’s perfectly average — enough weight to hold his trousers up without a belt, enough height to reach the tupperware on the second highest shelf in his kitchen. But standing before the man in the doorway, Jon feels as if he is the smallest, frailest, feeblest creature out there, only having the good sense to run or die when confronted by a predator.
And he wants to run. He really wants to run.
“Um,” Jon says, like that’s going to get him anywhere.
The man looks at him. Squints at him. Opens his horrible, yellowed eyes at him and gazes over his nose as if they might drip out of his sockets like horrible, half-cooked poached eggs if he leans forward. Jon fights back the instinct to gag, just like he fights back every other instinct clawing up his spine in a hair-raising shiver.
“Who are you?” the man says in a voice deep enough to rumble in his bones.
“Ah,” Jon says reasonably. Tries to laugh but only gets out a wet cough. “...Hello.”
The man does lean over him then. He leans and leans so much of himself that Jon believes he might crush him or swallow him whole, and then asks again, “Who. Are. You.”
Jon swallows. “I-I work here.”
“You don’t,” the man insists.
“A-at the library,” he corrects, then takes a step slightly to the side, in an effort to both get out of the hulking shadow of the man and peek around some of his girth to see inside the room behind him. “Um, sorry, but what exactly is going on in...?”
“Were you invited?”
“Well, er...well, no, but—”
“Then it’s none of your business,” the man states.
Jon can just barely see around the man’s side. There are definitely people inside. Not too many — maybe ten, fifteen — all making polite conversation with one another, and oh, wait, is that the man from yesterday? The one in all black with the piercings, he thinks if he just turns around then maybe he can—
The makeshift guard turns slightly, blocking his view.
Jon feels his shoulders slump in exasperation. “Look, I know— I saw a man go in there, and I really just need to speak with him for one—”
“No.”
“Look if you just ask him, I’m sure he’ll—”
“You weren’t invited,” the man says in his impossibly deep voice, “so you don’t get in.”
“Well, that’s quite a stupid way of going about—”
“Jon?”
Jon jumps like he’s been shocked, whirling around to the voice.
Oh. Oh, it’s just...
“Daisy?”
Daisy raises an eyebrow at him, her expression frustratingly neutral. The kind of look that usually makes him want to tuck his tail between his legs and run for cover, but now only brings a billowing, all-encompassing sense of relief. She looks to the man blocking his entrance. She looks back to Jon. Maybe he’s imagining it, maybe he’s hoping this is the truth because he’s feeling like an anxious chihuahua at a dog park, but he swears that the hulking creature of a person beside him cowers back under her gaze.
Daisy takes a long, deep breath in, then takes two steps forward. She doesn’t ask what he’s doing there. She doesn’t even acknowledge the other person standing behind him, just reaches forward and places a hand on Jon’s shoulder. “Come on,” she says, “why don’t we go for a walk?”