tags
The Magnus Archives, Jonathan Sims/Martin Blackwood
- victorian au
- vampires
- monster hunting
- canon-typical violence
“I have a bad feeling about this,” Jon finally says.
Martin’s been waiting for this, in all honesty. Not because he also has a particularly bad feeling about today’s business, but simply because he’s come to expect Jon’s hesitance on any and every assignment they do together. Always filled to the brim with questions. It’s lessened over the two years they’ve worked together, but Martin doubts the anxiety will ever truly go away.
He looks over to Jon. Jon is not looking at him. Jon is meticulously undoing the trim on his wide-brimmed hat with his fingernails, like he’s trying to find something buried in the thread. Martin plucks the thing from his hands before he can ruin it any further.
“It will be fine,” Martin assures him. He sets the hat to his side, out of sight. “It’s not even a job, really, just...a favor to the college. They’re a long-time supporter of the Institute, you know.”
“Yes, and that’s weird isn’t it?” Jon frowns, channeling his nervous energy into a jumpy left leg. “I mean, usually Sonja handles these sorts of things.”
“And Sonja is in America until February. Jon, I promise you, we will be the weirdest things in that library.”
Martin places a hand over Jon’s leg to still it. He knows it’s mostly the carriage that’s getting to him — it’s cramped and stuffy, despite the chill of winter outside, and Jon’s always been wary of spaces that could easily turn into coffins. Martin can’t blame him for that. It’d been a long three years before the two of them had met. Doesn't help that Martin himself takes up the vast majority of space with his wide, rounded shoulders, but he’s come to learn that Jon won't ride without him even if given the option. They just go together like that, he supposes.
Jon chews at his lip, readjusts with a sigh. “I know, I know,” he says defeatedly. “You're right.”
“I'm always right,” Martin agrees. “You should start listening to me more.”
Jon rolls his eyes. “And modest too.”
“Obviously modest too.”
A quick rap against the window pulls them out of their conversation, and Martin pulls back the curtain to a pair of sharp, yellow-rimmed eyes. Just judgmental enough that Martin might have thought he’d have personally offended the other hunter, but he’s worked with Daisy long enough to know her face fits better into a simmering glare. Like it might be detrimental to her health if she smiled. Christ, she’s worse than Jon.
“We’re here,” she says flatly, yanking the door open from the outside. The winter air rudely blasts his unbuttoned coat apart, but he tugs it back into place before slipping out of the carriage.
“Thank you, Daisy,” Martin says, even if he secretly wishes they could have brought Tim along — at least he could have been guaranteed a pint afterward. She doesn’t even acknowledge his gratitude as he passes. She does, however, give a polite nod to Jon, which Martin really shouldn’t feel bitter about but manages to do so anyway. At least there’s someone at the Institute that likes Jon, he supposes. He reasons things like her have an easier time looking another in the eyes without getting distracted by the teeth.
“We should only be about a half hour,” he continues. “Just some verifying and some paperwork.”
“Sure. I’ll be around,” Daisy says, and pulls out a cigarette from the depths of her trouser pockets.
Martin looks back to his partner, fiddling with his sleeves, and presses the hat he’s been toting onto Jon’s long mess of curls. Martin’s always thought that Jon has nice, silver-streaked curls. He’s always thought that Jon is quite easy on the eyes for something that’s usually described as all teeth and blood and leathery skin in his bestiaries, and it really isn’t fair for how distracting it is. They stand nearly eye-level like this, but Martin knows that Jon’s neatly polished boots are doing a great deal of work in the equation.
“Come on,” Martin says, nudging at his shoulder. “We’ve got work to do.”
Jon frowns as he pushes his hat into position. “Is this really even a job that you need me along for? It’s not like you’re even going to let me talk with anyone.”
“That’d be because you’re dressed like you’re attending a funeral,” Martin retorts — god, Gerry is rubbing off on him in the worst of ways, “and to be quite honest, your people skills are rather lackluster.”
“I’m in uniform,” Jon argues, “and it’s not my fault that most ‘people’ we deal with are dreadful things of the night.”
Martin can’t help the smirk that crosses his face. “Well, lucky for you,” he says, “I have lots of practice dealing with one of those.”
He pretends that he doesn’t see Jon roll his eyes before following after. No use in kicking him while he’s already down.
The library is easier to find than Martin expects. It’s the only lit building on this side of campus, where there’s no bustle of book-toting students and not a single muddy step through the vestiges of the weekend’s snow, and there’s something very bookish about it that draws him to it even before Jon points it out. Martin knocks, because his mother always taught him it’s polite, before pushing open the looming doors with a low creak.
“You know,” Martin says as he steps through the threshold, dusting the chill from his frock, “I must say it’s rather strange seeing such a place as empty as this.”
“Mm,” Jon mutters behind him, “It is...rather quiet for a campus. Though it’s been, ah, quite some time since I’ve been in any academic spaces.”
Martin hums thoughtfully. It’s easier now, years after they’ve settled into this mess of a routine, to forget that Jon’s more accustomed to spaces like these. Places that smell of ink and parchment instead of the blood and bile that Martin’s known most of his adult life. “Are they usually this empty around this time of year?”
“Er, well it depends on— um. Martin.”
“I mean, I realize it’s the holidays, but you’d think at least some people would be here, right? Staff maybe? Graduate students?”
“Martin...”
“But the campus just seems so dead, it’s— it’s honestly... I know you hate the word, it’s kinda spooky?.”
“ Martin. ”
Martin halts his rambling. He looks over his shoulder. He spots Jon, standing at the entrance of the library door, shifting from foot to foot and looking rather uncomfortable, like he’s got a bad cramp, like he’s physically incapable of voicing whatever’s wrong with him because there’s some unspoken curse on Jonathan Sims that prevents him from being candid. Not really. But Martin wouldn’t be surprised. Honestly, it’d probably be more jarring if he were looking comfortable.
“Ah,” Martin says, flashing him a sheepish smile. “Right. Sorry, Jon. I welcome you into this library.”
“Thank you,” Jon mutters through his frown, then steps inside. He pulls off his cap to shake the snow out of the brim, loose and graying curls falling every which way over his shoulders. Unruly, he thinks, just like their owner. Martin’s always found it funny how, despite a good six months he has on his partner, people tended to assume that Jon is the older of the two of them. Just something about their personalities, he reckons, something about their faces. Martin’s face is round and ruddy and neat; Jon’s is always frowning, always bloodless and cold, like he’s thinking too hard. He probably is thinking too hard, if experience is anything to go on. Jon tended to do a lot of thinking in that head of his. Martin wonders if he did just as much in the three years before they’d met.
Of course, Martin had been much too eager to believe him when he’d lied about pushing forty, but he also knows that birth certificates are much harder to forge than employment records. Call it experience based.
Jon pushes the hat back atop his head and says, “I do agree that it is a tad unsettling, but like you said, it’s the holidays. Most people have likely gone home to their families.”
“Except us, of course.”
“Except us. And the librarian we’re supposedly meeting — which, might I remind you, is weird.”
Martin barely suppresses the urge to roll his eyes. “Jon, you always work on holidays.”
“I work when there is work to do , Martin,” Jon says. “Like now.”
“And I’m sure there are very important library duties that need to be done today too,” Martin retorts. “ And, I’m sure that means you’ll be taking tomorrow off once this is over, hm? Like Dr. Robinson suggested?”
The sigh that escapes Jon is almost comical, like the deflating of a balloon. “And I was doing so well at not thinking about her,” he grouses to himself before lowering his head and striding ahead into the library.
Now, Martin won’t pretend he’s familiar with academic spaces; that skews much more toward Jon’s area of expertise. To Martin, they’re places of elitism and wealth, neither of which he can say he fits comfortably in just in the same way he can never fit comfortably into the Institute uniform’s coats. But as the library opens up into a great swell of bookshelves, he can’t help the gasp that leaps from his mouth.
Books are all he can see. Hundreds upon thousands of them, stretching back into the library’s mouth and up to the open second floor. They line the walls, the tables, the long, waist-height shelving that runs in parallel rows down the length of the building, and Martin can’t even begin to fathom how many are housed in this section of the building alone. The amount of words! The amount of human history, tucked into neatly organized shelves — he’s certain that, if left to his own devices, he could spend an entire month just flipping through barely a fraction of it all. Christ, there might even be more words than Jon manages to ramble when he’s drunk. And that’s being quite generous on Martin’s part.
Jon makes a motion toward the desk at the center of it all, and Martin takes his cue to approach. There’s no one behind it, just a lit oil lamp that signals someone’s presence at some point during the day and a stack of seemingly unrelated books; Martin takes the one from the top and begins to flip through it. It’s a poetry book, he realizes upon opening. A short collection by one William Wordsworth, someone whose work Martin is more than well acquainted with and whom Jon is more than well enemied against. Probably best not to let him see this one. Martin pauses on the page the spine falls open to, and reads:
Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring!
Even yet thou art to me
No bird, but an invisible thing,
A voice, a mystery;The same whom in my school-boy days
I listened to; that Cry
Which made me look a thousand ways
In bush, and tree, and sky.
“Be careful with those dear, they’ve yet to be catalogued.”
Martin jumps at the voice, nearly dropping the book, hand going for his stake on instinct, and—
There’s a woman smiling back at him.
Not moving. Just smiling. Calling her a woman in the first place is generous considering that she’s slight and rail thin, like a child, but her face makes for no mistaking her age as it watches him. Surveys him. Peels up and down his skin like a knife to a potato as she notes each and every bit of him, and Martin feels exposed and unmasked and known under her scrutiny, up until the very moment she looks away. She pushes her long braid of hair over her shoulder. Dusts her hands on her...rag? It must be a rag, the bright red thing hanging from her skirt belt. The tension does not dissipate even after she puts the barrier of the desk between them.
“Are you Ms. Keay?” Martin asks once he remembers he still has a voice.
“Mary,” she says, holding out her hand, “and yes. You must be from the Institute.”
Martin looks to her hand, long and boney and thin as paper. He takes it, gives it a shake in spite of himself.
“Martin Blackwood,” he introduces himself with a nod. “And that—” Martin makes a gesture back behind him, “is my partner Jon.”
The live wire of the moment snaps as the introduction is bookended by a loud clattering, and Martin whips around to see Jon just barely clinging to a book sliding over the side of the shelf. Just barely. Just long enough for him to give Martin a pleading, helpless look before it tumbles out of his grasp and into the pile of disarray with its siblings. Martin can only offer him a restrained shrug.
Jon grits his teeth, rights himself, and then smiles painfully as he says, “Pleasure.” Maybe a blind man would believe the show he puts on. Mostly, he just looks like he’s been kicked by a horse.
Mary’s eyes swing, narrowed to a sliver, between him and Martin. “I thought there was only supposed to be one of you today.”
“Oh,” Martin says — was there? He doesn’t recall ever mentioning in their telegrams that he would be only him, but maybe he’s misremembering, “W-well, we—”
“I-I’m simply an escort, ma’am,” Jon interrupts, trying his best to collect the shower of fallen books as quickly and as discreetly as possible. “Just, ah. Just Institute policy.”
“Can’t be too careful,” she says, “now can you?”
Jon coughs out a laugh that’s almost believable. “No, you cannot. Though you have my word, I will stay out of the way. Martin’s much more...qualified for this type of thing anyway.”
“Hm,” she nods. Her eyes return to Martin, and then she smiles. He can’t help but notice how it doesn’t reach her eyes. “Well then,” she says finally before stepping back out from around the desk, “shall we get started?”
The library proves even more labyrinthine the deeper in they trek. Rows of tables turn to rows of shelves turn to rows of stretching shadows that congeal the further from the lamp light they reach, and there are no real landmarks indicative of how far they’ve walked. Martin could swear that they’d passed the same stack of plain-bound texts at least a handful of times by now. If it weren’t for the flicker of Mary’s candle, the rhythmic clacking of Jon’s heels, he might have thought himself spirited away by now.
Still might. But he’s trying to ignore that growing pit of unease from the depths of his stomach.
It’s a plain, wooden door that they come to in the end, seemingly tucked randomly between two imposing shelves. It’s only then that Mary finally breaks the heavy silence.
“I’m afraid this is where we must part ways,” she says, looking past Martin completely to Jon. “The school requires a pre-approval for anyone entering the archives, and the welcome has only been extended to Mr. Blackwood. Liabilities and all, you understand.”
The suddenness of her statement takes Martin aback. “N-now, hang on—”
“That’s...quite alright, Ms. Keay. I understand,” Jon interrupts. He steps to Martin’s side and gives his upper arm a gentle, reassuring squeeze. The intent falls flat on its back and does the exact opposite. “I trust it will be fine for me to wait here then?”
“That will be fine,” she nods, and Martin barely catches the almost imperceivable switch in her expression as she looks back to him. Barely. “Follow me, Mr. Blackwood.”
Martin watches as she pushes the door open with a creak. Watches as the flicker of her candle begins to disappear down the stairs before him. Watches as the shadows swallow her figure whole and bend the light ahead into a single pinprick. Martin hears himself swallow around his own dry throat. Martin gives one last helpless look back to Jon before he sighs, steels himself, and then follows suit.
Mary’s steps are silent and graceful as she descends. Martin’s own, in heavy contrast, makes him wonder if she’s even touching the floor at all.
“I can tell you’re anxious to leave your partner,” she finally says, old voice creaking where her footfalls do not.
Martin gives her a soft, wobbly smile. “W-well, I like to look out for him, you know. He is my partner.”
Mary glances over her shoulder. “He is lucky to have you,” she says. Then she smiles, just barely, as if she hadn’t been before. Had she been smiling before? “Right through here, please.”
The room opens at the bottom of the stairs, not by much from Martin’s height, but enough to provide sizable storage for its contents. Boxes of what he can only assume are filled with old parchment line the bookshelves, interspersed with various other school displays: a suit of chainmail armor, a taxidermied fox, a sprawling painting of the campus clocktower among the few Martin can make out in the flicker. Mary sets her taperstick upon one of the stacks, then disappears behind a bookshelf.
“The school calls this an archive,” she explains, “but really it’s just become a dumping ground for anything the professors aren’t using. Mostly junk, but it has the occasional item of interest.”
“Item of interest?” Martin parrots back. He pokes his head around the corner, down the most uniform of aisles, and attempts to pinpoint exactly how far back the cloying darkness stretches.
“The occasional artifact, art piece, once we even had a harpsichord that played on its own,” Mary calls back. “But nothing quite like what I called you for.” Martin thinks that he might see the sway of her crimson rag. Martin can’t help but notice how it moves as if it’s being weighed down by something.
When she rounds the corner once more, there’s a book in her hands.
“Is that it?” Martin asks as he steps closer.
“‘The Catalogue of the Trapped Dead,’ yes,” she answers. “Something of a myth among occult collectors, from what I understand, but rarely seeing the light of day in auction.”
“Fascinating...” Martin hears himself mutter in muted awe, before he clears his throat, straightens his shoulders, and asks, “May I?”
Mary passes the book to him carefully. Martin lets the weight sit comfortably in his hands as he turns it over.
“This is really quite the artifact,” Martin hears himself say. “I mean, I’ve seen my fair share of unusual books, but one bound in human skin—”
“The practice is not as uncommon as you might expect,” Mary says as she picks up her candle, then strides from lantern to lantern to light. “‘Anthropodermic bibliopegy,’ they call it. There are documented accounts in many countries — not all of them real, of course, but this one certainly is.”
Martin flips to a random page, the text in the center scrawled in a neat, cursive hand. “‘When he opened his eyes, he saw nothing, but he heard her breathing, slow and steady and focused, and he immediately knew that she was finally going to kill him...’” To...to kill him? “These are...accounts of deaths?”
“Of the deaths of those whose skin it is written on, yes,” Mary answers from somewhere deeper in the room; Martin can only see the faint flicker of her candle through the shadows.
“Isn’t— heh, isn’t that a tad morbid?” He calls — didn’t his voice stretch farther before? “To be marked by your own death? I mean...who even tanned the skin to begin with?”
“Who’s to say?” a voice — Mary’s? It must be Mary’s — says, “Perhaps their friends—”
Martin hears a faint puff, and then the light from behind the stacks flickers out.
“—Perhaps their murders. It’s surprisingly easy, tanning hides.”
Martin steps closer to the bookshelves, seeing if he can spot her between the boxes. “O-oh? Is it now?”
“Yes, of course. All you need is a sharp hook...”
Something falls in the dark. Martin takes a step back.
“A good amount of salt.”
Another step. His heel hits a box, and he kicks it aside.
“And of course—”
There — there, he can see her behind the shelves, yellow eyes glistening between boxes of god-knows-what, and that rag — christ, was it always that red? She’s looking at him like a predator does prey. That makes Martin prey, doesn’t it? That makes Mary Keay predator.
“An unwilling participant.”
Fuck.
“ Martin! ”
Something slams into Martin’s side, sending him and the book flying, just as the shelf tips, tilts, and teeters into a roaring CRASH! onto the very spot he’d just been standing.
Martin blinks, dizzy-eyed, up at his attacker (savior?) out of focus. Forces his eyes, stubbornly, to refocus. Forces his attention to the details hanging over his head, the face framed in long, dark curls, a wide-brimmed hat, a scowl that looks like its permanently engraved on his face—
“Jon?”
“God, Martin, s-she’s a redcap,” Jon says breathlessly. Martin looks up just as she steps into the light, and only now can he see that from the red cloth at her hip trails a long streak of dark liquid down her skirt. “She’s a redcap, Martin, I thought there was something off. I thought there was something odd about her rag, but it wasn’t until I found a drip on the carpet that I realized it was—”
“Blood,” Martin finishes for him, swallowing roughly as he pushes himself to his knees. The iron stench is near overwhelming, now that he recognizes it; he can only imagine what it’s like to Jon. “You’re the one who’s been binding the book, aren’t you?”
“I don’t recall extending the invitation for this place to you,” Mary says flatly, ignoring Martin’s question completely as her gaze narrows in on Jon.
Jon huffs out a breathy, humorless laugh, then waves a sliver of torn paper. Thrice welcome, darling, it reads in neatly typed print — not that Martin needs to see it to know this, not when he’d left it at the threshold to begin with. “You see, I got permission from someone else,” Jon says with a flap. “Not exactly ideal library practices, but it will do in a pinch. Though, I’d hate to hear what Dr. Robinson would say about book mutilation—”
“Oi, fuck o—”
The words cut out with a choke as the taperstick rams into the wall beside Martin’s head, just missing his ear by a fraction of a second.
“Hey!” Martin shouts as he scrambles out of range. “I was talking!”
“And I was being so patient,” Mary says, yanking the taperstick from the wood it's been lodged in.
She lunges at him like a lightning strike, barely giving him enough time to register what’s happening before he’s dodging her relentless swipes, back and forth and back and forth. Martin tries to fumble for something — a stake, a blade, a damn bottle of holy water — but his hands can’t move fast enough in the flurry of trying not to be struck. His back hits a wall, and she raises up to strike.
The chair CRACKS! over her head from behind, and Martin ducks out of frame as she turns her attention around to Jon. The taperstick is fast in its attack, but Jon is faster. The body of it catches in his hand just inches from his face with a hiss; Martin can hear the sick crackle and pop of burning flesh as he realizes the makeup of the metallic sheen.
“You know,” Mary snarls, leaning close with yellowing fangs much sharper than Jon’s as he grimaces back at her, “I was only planning on doing one page today. But I’ve never flensed a vampire, you see, and I think I’d quite like to try.”
Martin doesn’t think as he picks up a box of books and hurls it in her direction.
It hits her with enough force for Jon to throw her off, and gives Martin just enough time to snatch the stake from inside his coat and catch the taperstick in a mock sword-fight just in front of his nose.
“Jon!” Martin shouts as he shoves her off and grabs another box to throw. “Please tell me you have a way of killing this thing!”
Mary misses him by a hair's length, embedding her makeshift weapon into the frame of an old painting.
“I-I don’t know!” Jon calls from the other side of the bookshelf. Mary wrenches her blade free just as Martin picks up a crate and heaves it. “Where the hell’s your gun?!”
“Er— in the carriage?”
“Oh, fat lot of use it’s doing us there— shit !”
Mary lunges an arm through the slits of the shelving at Jon, just barely missing his throat. When did her arms get so long? Martin doesn’t want to think about it.
“Anything else ?” He snaps impatiently as he swerves around a teetering piece of armor.
He can hear Jon’s exasperated sigh over the clatter of snapping wood. “It’s— it’s their caps, I think!” he calls. “It’s, it’s their skin, they die when they dry out!”
“Well can’t you just — I don’t know, suck out the blood?”
Jon’s head pops out from around the corner. “Martin!”
“What?!” He barely has a chance to look over in the chaos, but the expression of utter bewilderment would be visible from a mile away. It feels like a mile away, with Mary standing squarely between them.
“That’s disgusting !”
“It’s blood, isn’t it?!”
“From god knows who!” Jon protests before lunging after Mary with the broken leg of a chair. It lands square across her chest, sending her crashing into the shelving on the other side of the room. Martin can’t help the relieved laugh that spills out of his mouth, but it cuts out abruptly as he sees the look of contempt Jon is shooting at him. “I literally cannot believe you would even suggest such a thing.”
“Jon, you’ve drunk blood from a possum before.”
“Under extenuating circumstances! Christ, even I have standards.”
A low groan cuts him off from arguing further. Martin’s head snaps to Mary as she forces herself to her feet, the crunch of broken wood and lamp glass echoing through the archives like a gunshot.
Jon swallows audibly as he raises his weapon. “Okay, look,” he says quickly, annoyance bleeding into nervousness, “she invited you here to kill you, which means her cap must be drying up. A-and if the fabric is dry, then that means—”
“It’s flammable,” Martin says as his eyes lock onto the broken lamp behind her. Then he draws a line to his stake. To her skirt. To her cap. “Okay...okay. I have a plan. I need you to cover me.”
“Cover you? What do you mean cover— oh shit— !”
Jon barely catches Mary’s claws before they reach his neck, so Martin takes his cue. Vaults over the mess of boxes and broken bookshelves across the room. Jabs his stake in the center of the unprotected lamp flame until it catches. Sparks. Ignites. Blazes forth.
He whips back around just as Mary winds up her taperstick for a final blow. Jon looks up, gives Martin a wild, cornered look, and mouths, now.
It only takes one calculated leap to reach her from where he stands, and he plunges the burning blade into the edge of her skirt.
It goes up like a pile of kindling. Burning, crackling, smoldering as it consumes the swell of the thing known as Mary Keay; the horrid scream that erupts from her chest is the only thing that tears his attention away as he presses his hands to his ears.
And then, just as he stumbles back, she turns.
She locks eyes with him.
And then she swings with the speed of a snake at his head.
The taperstick hits him square in the center of his face with a crack, and the force sends him falling back into the bookshelf behind where he stands with a shower of splinters.
Martin only manages to look up for a second. He’s barely even cognizant to what he’s actually perceiving between his own blurred vision and a caved-in skull. But he doesn’t need cognition to identify when the shape above him tilts. Tips. Teeters on the edge of its broken perch.
And then all at once, like a snuffed-out flame, everything goes dark.
A small, scrawny thing, Martin had decided to call it in his report, barely skin and bones, and yet with a face so expressive it was as if a ghost had been stretched into skin. Maybe an anecdote about its long, matted hair that had perhaps once held a curl, or about its clothes too simple to be of relation to Mr. Bouchard — a guest, perhaps? A once servant of his home?
Martin wants—
Well. Hm.
To be honest, Martin isn’t quite sure what he wants.
He sets the lamp he’s carrying on the table to relight the wick before carrying on through the halls.
The thing is, Martin hadn’t wanted to kill it when he’d first found the thing, mostly because he’d thought it was already dead. The coffin in the attic of the old Bouchard estate had held a heavy layer of dust when he’d found it; nails fixed the lid in proper place as if for burial, and Martin had no reason to assume otherwise. Some sick fascination of the manor’s owner, perhaps, that he’d left behind when the place caught fire. Martin won’t pretend to understand the man’s obsession with the macabre, but he’s unlucky enough to know it’s a common interest in his line of work.
“Find it yet?” he hears Tim call from one of the upper levels.
Martin pokes his head into one of the empty sitting rooms before hollering back, “Nope, still looking.”
“Well look harder!”
Martin wants to call back “it can’t have gotten far,” but he keeps his mouth shut in favor of putting the energy to search. He knows things like the one he found in the coffin aren’t all that legend chalks them up to be unfed, and there’s no open windows or doors that it could have escaped to. Right now, it’s just a panicky prey animal; maybe Martin should feel better about being in the predator’s shoes, for once, but won’t allow such ignorant thoughts. He knows well enough that cornered prey fights the hardest.
The steps of the cellar stretch before him down into an open throat of black. Martin adjusts the grip on his stake and takes the first step down.
Another thing — Martin’s used to things with teeth and claws and eyes that look a little too human for comfort. He’s used to beasts that will tear his throat out at the first opportunity, at animals that only know hunger and full. “If it’s not human, it’s animal,” Martin can practically hear Dr. Robinson saying, “and if it’s animal, it’s meat or it sees us as meat.” He’s smart enough to learn, most of the time, it’s the latter.
His foot hits the wet floor of the cellar with a resounding, muddy slap. The lamp barely stretches beyond an arm’s length, he finds, so Martin raises it higher above his head.
There’s not much in the cellar by London elite standards. Some crates of god-knows-what, a modest collection of wine shelving, a bucket that seems to have once been catching a leak but has long since bowed and overflowed under the water’s girth, and—
Something crouches in the corner, wincing as the light falls over it.
Martin raises his stake and takes a step forward. He’ll have to be quick if he wants to hit it before it runs further into the cellar, but positioning is less specific than common knowledge might suggest. If he misses the heart, the head will do just fine; if not the head, then the stomach or the gut. Even if he hits just a limb, sharp point tearing through flesh like a bullet, it should still be enough to pin it in place just long enough for him to pounce and finish it off, before it can snap or let out one of those awful, inhuman cries, and—
The creature doesn’t move from its spot.
Martin blinks, then takes another step forward.
It remains still against the stone.
This makes Martin frown. Not because he’s angry or particularly annoyed, just confused, as anything with any semblance of self-preservation would at least have made a move to run by now. Can it not move? No, it was running fast as a spooked horse just a moment ago. Perhaps it thinks it can overpower him? That Martin is the one who should be afraid? It doesn’t make sense, really, not in the state the poor creature is in, but Martin decides to test his theory.
He continues forward, slowly feet squelching along the mud floor until the light is separating them nearly equidistant, and then he lowers it to his hip. Adjusts his grip on the stake. That seems to be the final straw to draw out a reaction as the thing flashes its teeth at him in some bare-minimum defensive instinct — a pointless hiss from a declawed cat.
Oh, Martin thinks, it’s scared of me.
It’s a feeble, careless thought that coasts through his mind. Martin’s been in the business of these types of dealings for many years, and he knows by now that they all act like frightened deer when they’ve got knives to their throats or guns to their backs. But that’s the thing, you see — this creature could still very well run, and with its vampiric speed, it might even have a chance of getting past him. But it doesn’t. It just sits there, legs tucked underneath it and leaning one shoulder against cold, wet stone. Wide-eyed. Face pinched.
Martin lowers his stake. Some unseen tension seems to dissipate from the creature’s frame.
“Do you mean me harm?” Martin asks, stupidly, because even if the thing can lie and charm he still wants to be able to say he tried. Call it his cursed bleeding heart. Tim always says it will be the death of him.
For a long moment, the thing simply stares at him, but then it shakes his head. Well, good. At least it’s shown it can understand him.
Martin takes the opportunity to close the gap between them and crouches to eye level. He places the lantern to his side, tipped just slightly on uneven ground, and tucks the stake into the loop in his belt. Just in case. “Can you tell me who you are?”
Up close, Martin can guess that the creature is male by his clothing — not fancy enough to be of the circles Bouchard ran with, but with the professional air of someone of importance in the working class. An academic, perhaps? Definitely educated, at least, which makes the puzzle of the coffin even more troubling.
The creature — the man — opens his mouth to answer, but all that comes out is a hoarse croak. He raises his palm, presses it to the hollow of his throat, and looks up at Martin with panicked, confused eyes. His mouth continues to move, and though no sound comes out, Martin can read the words on his chapped lips.
Water, he mouths desperately, please.
Something twists in Martin’s chest as the term new blood clicks into place, and all Martin can think is poor thing. Poor thing that doesn't even know what he is. Poor thing, with the strength and speed to put an end to this sad little scene this instant, and yet he simply asks for water that he can't even drink.
Tim's going to kill him for this, Martin is certain. Probably a good thing he's been reading all those necromancy books.
“Fuck me,” Martin mutters to himself and reaches to his hip.
When Martin pulls the short blade from his satchel, the man only shrinks further in on himself. But curiosity wins out in his nervous green eyes as Martin rolls up his sleeve and turns the blade over. This is it, Martin reminds himself. He's dealt with his fair share of new bloods to know that they're notoriously unstable, and inviting blood into the equation is practically asking for an attack. But if he attacks, then it's Martin’s excuse to fight back. It's Martin’s excuse for self-defense, and at least he'll know the truth of those sad, too-human eyes, that he was truly just an animal like all the rest.
The blade drags across his forearm lengthwise. A clean cut. The man doesn't move, doesn't let anything cross his expression besides confusion pinched between his furrowed brow. He only watches as Martin squeezes the wound to make the blood flow faster before replacing his blade in its bag and pressing a handkerchief to the cut. It'll probably ruin, he reckons, crimson soaking through white, but it'd been from his mother, and truth be told, Martin has been looking for an excuse to get rid of it.
Once the white has been thoroughly soaked through, Martin holds out the cloth to the other man.
And the man—
Well, the man simply looks at him. He looks at the handkerchief. He seems strung between two options he can't put a name to, unsure of what to do, uncertain of what he's being offered; Martin wonders if he’s going to have to explain the mechanics of vampirism to this poor man who doesn't even seem to know where he is. He’d had to explain werewolves to a woman once after she'd been bitten, and needless to say, she did not take it well. God, he still has the scar from her claws.
But the thought passes without substance. Instinct wins out, in the end, and the man takes the cloth with trembling hands, presses it to his lips, and sucks.
This is something that Dr. Robinson will have his head for, he reckons. This foolish, feeble-hearted act of kindness to a thing of the night; bad enough that he let the man slip past him when he’d first opened the coffin, and even worse now that he's actually feeding the creature. Martin mourns the reprimand waiting for him after this report, when he returns to the Institute. If he returns to the Institute.
The man drinks and drinks until he's simply sucking on his own spit, and then he slowly lowers the handkerchief from his face. Red crusts around the rim of his lips, his chin, but there’s a more human look to him now — a barely there color just beneath his ashen cheeks. He looks at the cloth that he holds with a different expression than before. Less confusion. More mute understanding. Then he opens his mouth, and Martin tries not to allow his gaze to linger on the sharp jut of fangs.
“Thank you,” he rasps, accent thick and posh. “I...I feel...”
“Better?”
“Strange.” The man swallows, the skin of his throat pulled taught across his adam’s apple. “I-I don’t know, it’s... I think I’m... I think I’m going to—”
His voice cuts out with a retch as he turns and throws up the contents of his stomach.
Martin sighs without meaning to — right, of course. New bloods and their sensitive stomachs. Martin has read enough bestiaries to know the basics of vampire siring, which bears the question as to where this man’s sire could actually be. No one has seen Elias Bouchard in over six months, and given his record, may not for another century.
Maybe that's why he can't help but pity the man. He may be a monster, Martin reminds himself, but it's just not right — cruel, even — to abandon one just birthed into a strange new world. To leave him to feast off the empathy of strangers.
The poor man gags until he’s heaved up whatever’s been left in his gut for all those months in a coffin. Then he pauses, takes a few shaky, shallow breaths, and repeats the whole process once more.
Martin, for his bleeding heart tendencies, only sighs. Then he pushes himself forward, curling over the side of the man, and reaches out to hold back his hair.
“—artin! —rti—!”
Something’s overtop of him, shoving off the great weight piled atop his chest. Martin’s ears pop as he sucks in a much needed, rasping breath.
“Martin!”
Martin blinks. Groans. Blinks again, and again, and again and again as he tries to clear his vision from unshed tears. He doesn’t know where his glasses have gotten to, but they certainly aren’t doing any work for his sight. Idly, he reaches up to his face.
Ow.
“Ow,” Martin echoes his thoughts aloud.
“Ah— careful. Your, um...I believe your nose is broken.”
Well, that would explain the throbbing in his face. A blurry hand comes into vision as it ghosts across his face, and through the numbness, Martin can feel tiny bits of...something being extracted from his cheeks. Glass, most likely, given the way it glistens. Explains where his glasses got off to.
His gaze trails the hand up a black-sleeved arm, to a torn, bloody shoulder, and finally to a mess of curls.
“Jon,” he mutters fondly, so soft that it even surprises him.
Jon meets his eyes, face settling into a soft smile. “Hi there,” he says. “You took quite a hit there.”
“I feel like I got punched in the face.”
“Well, tapersticked in the face, yes. A punch would have probably been nicer though.”
Martin chuckles weakly at that, wincing as it shifts into a groan, and lets Jon’s hands guide him into a sitting position. From here, even with his poor eyesight, he can see the state that they’ve made of the archives and its contents — all bins and boxes and broken wood. Christ, this is worse than the taxidermy shop.
It also doesn’t take him long to realize they’re the only ones present.
“Did she... what did—”
“Escaped,” Jon says, already predicting his question. “She uh...after she struck you, I tried to— well,” he gestures lamely to his shoulder, the gash stark against his skin, “she got me, basically. A-and by the time I got back to my feet, she’d already disappeared.”
“And...the book?”
“Oh! It’s, uh...” Jon glances around, then locks onto a pile of discarded boxes and digs a hand into the center of them. It doesn’t take long to produce the grisly artifact from its wake, now splattered with an appropriate dash of crimson. “Here.”
Martin lets out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. “Well. At least it wasn’t a total bust.”
“What, getting hit in the face isn’t your idea of a good time?”
“Try getting hit everywhere. I feel like an old man.”
That sets Jon laughing, a low, gentle sound that he doesn’t do nearly enough. Is getting punched in the face all it takes to get to hear it? Martin should try getting punched more often. “Come on then, old man,” Jon says teasingly, “let's get you back to Daisy.”
“That’s assuming she hasn’t already left yet,” Martin retorts, grunts, pushes himself to his knees. “Usually she’s gone after the first ten minutes.”
Jon smiles. “I think you’re giving her too much credit. I wouldn’t even give her five.”
To the surprise of both of them, Daisy is still standing by the carriage when they return, still smoking what might be the very cigarette she had when they’d left.
“Damn Blackwood,” she greets, raising an eyebrow, “you look like shit.”
“Thanks Daisy,” Martin mutters flatly. She doesn’t move to relieve Jon of the weight Martin’s putting on him (bless his heart, Martin is not a light man), but she does at least have the decency to open the carriage door. Quite the gentleman, Martin thinks petulantly.
Her gaze flicks to Jon. “You get what you came for?”
“Ah,” Jon begins, adjusting Martin’s arm slung over his shoulder, “the book, yes. The uh...thing guarding it, a Ms. Keay, disappeared though.”
“Keay?” Daisy says. “Like the cem—”
“The cemetery, yes,” Jon finishes her thought.
Martin looks to Daisy. Then to Jon. Then back again, looking for the slightest clue in their facial expressions. “I’m sorry,” he says finally, “am I supposed to know...?”
“Oh,” Jon takes pity on his confusion as he shifts his and Martin’s weight. “Th-the Keay Cemetery. Um. Where Gerry is from.”
Martin blinks as he unravels the film in his mind back to their church grim friend and his roots. It’d been so long since he’d joined their little motley band, nearly as far back as to when he’d become acquainted with Jon, that Martin had nearly forgotten just how they’d met. Forgotten about the church case. About—
“Oh,” Martin says. Feels himself pale. “Oh god.”
“Mhm,” Jon agrees.
“So all those missing bodies...”
“It’s. It’s likely.”
“Did you know about this?” Martin asks his partner. It’s not an accusation, not really — Jon just...just knows things sometimes, and even after two years, Martin’s still figuring out the logistics of it all. Vampire or not, Jon was a very strange character. Martin thinks he likes that bit about him.
Jon chews his lip carefully around his fangs. “I...not at first? It um. It sort of...came to me while we were in there.”
“...huh.”
“Mm,” Jon nods. “But she’s gone now, so.”
Daisy hums thoughtfully at this, thumbing out another cigarette from her pocket. “Sounds like quitter’s talk there.”
“She’s all yours if you find her,” Jon retorts.
“I’ll make sure Robinson knows you said that, Sims.” She smirks, then motions to the open carriage. “Hop in, I’ll take you back to the Institute so Blackwood can lick his wounds.”
“Hey—”
“Thank you, Daisy,” Jon interrupts, helping Martin up the step and into his seat.
Martin wouldn’t have imagined earlier that day that he’d be glad to be back in that cramped carriage. It’s still a tight squeeze once Jon settles in beside him, but it’s a comforting weight against his side — safe. Plus, even if Mary Keay did want to take another swipe at them, she’d have Daisy to contend with, which Martin really didn’t even think was a fair fight.
“How’s your nose?” Jon asks, hand coming to rest on Martin’s arm. It’s only looking down at him now that Martin can see the full scope of his partner — the gash that’s torn through both his coat and shirt, the bruise under his left eye, the hand, god the hand—
“Still broken,” Martin says, trying not to feel sick as he finds himself unable to tear away from Jon’s bubbling, blistered skin. “How’s your hand?”
“What? Oh.” Jon follows his gaze back to his palm, and then has the nerve to poke at it. “It, ah,” he mutters, grimacing, “i-it’ll be fine. Probably.”
“Doesn’t it usually...heal by now?”
Jon lets out a huff. “Well, silver tends to inhibit my healing,” he says. Then shifts, uncomfortably. Then adds, “And, w-well I haven’t. Um. In a while.”
Haven’t fed remains left unsaid between them, but Martin’s known Jon long enough to know what he means. Even if Jon is well adjusted to his current appetites, that still doesn’t erase the whole discomfort of the language of it all, how utterly inhuman it sounds put into words. It probably says something about Martin’s life how normal the concept of drinking blood has become. Not that he’s going to try and figure out exactly what, though.
“Right,” Martin finally says, “well, we can stop and get you a snack later.” And then, taking a deep breath, Martin turns his attention back to his nose.
Martin takes hold of the highest and lowest parts.
“Er—” Jon leans over into his field of view. “What are you doing?”
“I’m...I’m going to set it?” Martin answers.
“You don’t sound so certain.”
“Oh fuck off,” Martin says, rolling his eyes. Ow. How does just moving his eyes hurt? “It’s not hard, I’ve set plenty of noses before.”
“We’re literally on our way back to the Institute—”
“And you’ll forgive me if I don’t want Melanie being the one who gets to patch me up,” he retorts. Sure, it wasn’t like Melanie had any reason to hate Martin personally; they’d worked together for years now, and she’d been nothing but professional towards him in the greatest capacity of the word. It was just that— well. Melanie and Jon were a different story. Always had been and likely always would be. The only source that Martin could identify with any reasonable explanation was the fact that Melanie had a very prominent teeth mark scar on the side of her neck from a job she still hated talking about, and Jon had very prominent teeth.
Obviously her own scar wasn’t from Jon, but that didn’t seem to matter. That kind of thing never really did.
Martin takes a long, steadying breath as he grips the ends of his nose. And then quickly, before he can back out, he snaps the pieces back into place.
“ AH! Fuck—”
“Martin! Good lord, your nose—”
Whatever snapped back into place seems to have unblocked a damn, because Martin can feel the blood gushing from his nostrils now. It’s running down his face, his chin, dripping onto his trousers that he can only be grateful are black to begin with. God, since when did he even have this much blood in his body? Thank god he got over his squeamishness years ago—
Belatedly, Martin realizes Jon’s still speaking, his voice fading in and out between the throbbing from his face.
“—told you if you just waited, then we could have done this— ah ha! Here.”
Martin feels something soft pressed into his hand. He holds it up to inspect.
“Jon.”
“Yes?”
“This— this is your handkerchief.”
It’s more than just that, truthfully. It’s the one everyone gets when they receive their Institute uniform, crisp white and embroidered with the recipient’s initials. Martin’s had read “MKB,” even if the K didn’t stand for anything but a long running gag, and now stays tucked away in his dresser drawer after it’d been torn and soaked through with blood over the course of years worth of jobs. It’d served its purpose, in the end. Martin has no qualms about that. But the thought of ruining Jon’s , now that’s a different story. That’s not his to make such a mess of. That’s the one he’d seemed so happy to have after three years of having literally nothing to his name, it’s—
He catches Jon’s brow scrunch out of the corner of his eye. “Yes...?”
“I-I don’t want to ruin it!”
“Martin, it’s a handkerchief. It’s not— here.”
And then before Martin can protest any further, Jon’s plucked the handkerchief from his hand and pressed it up to Martin’s nose for him. Martin squeaks. He must, given the way Jon jumps. Even through all the acrid iron scent, Martin manages just momentarily to catch a whiff of Jon’s cologne, and oh, that’s quite nice, isn’t it? Kind of reminds him of an ocean breeze. Or maybe pine? A smidge of tobacco, which makes sense he supposes, given that Jon smokes. Maybe—
Before Martin can fully identify the cocktail of scents hitting his mess of a nose, Jon pulls his hand away, turns forward, and pointedly looks at his knees.
“Just— just hold that there,” Jon mutters, and Martin’s not going to argue with that, but...
But he’s studying Jon’s face carefully, and there’s something...off about his expression. Something very focused and just a bit uncanny, which he can’t put a reason to until he moves up to his eyes. He hasn’t blinked once, in the whole time he’s been staring ahead, and his pupils are very wide. Very, very wide. So wide that they nearly eclipse his entire irises, just the faintest corona of green visible as Jon sits there, unblinking, staring motionlessly ahead as he clenches and unclenches his fingers into the legs of his trousers. His nose twitches. His leg bounces, helplessly.
Oh. Oh. Martin thinks he gets it now.
“Jon.”
“Mm?”
“Is this...is this too much blood? I can go sit up front with Daisy.”
Jon winces. Bingo. The slightest surge of pride that flares in Martin is probably a bit misplaced, but he can’t help the feeling that he’s come to know Jon so well. He doesn’t have much of a choice, really, when Jon doesn’t tell him anything. Prick. He’s lucky Martin likes him.
“‘M fine,” Jon mutters in response. “Wasn’t like there wasn’t blood back there in the library.”
Martin huffs a sigh, then pulls away the handkerchief. It seems at least, for the most part, that the bleeding has abated, though that doesn’t help the aching in his face that will surely turn into a migraine later, nor the sticky trail from the initial spill running down his chin. Martin watches, cross-eyed, as a single drop of crimson runs down to the tip of his nose before dripping unceremoniously onto his lap.
“Jon.”
“Yes?”
“Do you...do you think you could help me...clean up?”
That finally pulls Jon’s attention away from his lap.
“Er,” Jon begins, opening his mouth and oh yes, those are some very sharp teeth, “What?”
Martin waves the soaked-through handkerchief at him. “Well I can’t exactly...wipe off with this one, you know? It’s um. Sticky.”
“Sticky,” Jon repeats flatly.
“A-and it just,” Martin continues, ignoring him, “it seems like you’re enjoying this...?”
Jon pulls a face at this, like he’s just eaten something sour. Doesn’t say a thing. Hasn’t moved a single muscle. He’s just sitting there, working his jaw back and forth, back and forth, like he’s chewing on unsaid words, before finally, he answers, “I don’t enjoy seeing you hurt.”
“But...?”
“What do you mean ‘but’? Th-there’s nothing to ‘but’ about!”
“Jon, you’ve been looking at me like a five-course meal since we climbed into this carriage,” Martin retorts, though his voice is light in teasing.
Jon gives him a helpless look, like he’s expecting Martin to deliver him from his own self-imposed awkwardness — it’s difficult not to find Jon completely endearing. Maybe that’s why Martin took pity on him in the first place, even if he can’t do the same now. Martin watches as he fidgets. Then, he makes a frustrated sort of noise. Then he turns to fully face Martin, eyes blown wide, nose just barely inches from his own—
“You know this is highly inappropriate,” Jon murmurs lowly, and god damn does it take everything for Martin not to grab his stupidly exhausted face and—
And—
Well, okay, Martin isn’t exactly sure what he wants to do with Jon’s face, but he wants to do something with it. He needs somewhere to vent all this electricity that strikes him to his core when Jon speaks to him like that.
It takes all of Martin’s self-control to shrug as casually as he does as he replies, “It’s not like we haven’t done worse.”
That seems to be the catalyst right there for Jon to grab Martin’s face, and then he’s pulling him down. He’s breathing so close that Martin can feel each individual puff against his own lips. He’s touching his nose to the jut of his chin, then dragging his tongue, ridiculously soft and feather-light, up Martin’s chin, over his lips, across his barely worth mentioning stubble up to his nose in one slow, languid motion and holy fuck Martin is going to die he’s seriously going to die —
And then all at once Jon pulls away, rights himself, and faces forward as if he’d been doing so the whole time.
Martin just sits there, dumbfounded, as he tries to process what just happened.
“Uh,” Martin begins after he’s stared a frankly ridiculous amount of time at Jon’s lips — jesus, get it together man, “Aren’t you gonna...?”
Jon had closed his eyes when he’d faced back forward, but now he cracks just one open to Martin, his expression unreadable. Did Martin say something wrong? Oh god, maybe he’s completely misread the situation at hand, and now there’s something terribly, terribly wrong—
“Later,” Jon says softly, and oh— okay, Martin can definitely read that expression as harboring just the slightest bit of pride, that bastard.
Martin swallows, trying and failing to keep his tone completely unaffected. “Later?”
“Later.”
Martin chews his lip. Then he nods. Then he does the same as Jon, orienting himself forward and closing his eyes as he attempts to absorb some of that self-satisfied smugness that’s radiating off his partner like heat from a fire. Later, he’d said, like he’d just been putting off laundry until after lunch.
Huh. Well. Martin can definitely deal with later.
Later comes when dusk creeps into Martin’s bedroom. It’s easier to do it in there, with Martin’s bed big enough to fit the both of them, even if Jon doesn’t take up hardly enough room to justify it. He’s all limbs and lean muscle, no matter how often they do this. Not scrawny, like he’d been when Martin had first found him, but still slender and lithe, deceptively so under all his coat.
Jon watches him hawkishly, breathing steady and slow. He doesn’t need to anymore, hasn’t for a very long time, but Martin doesn’t dare remind him. It keeps Jon’s mind occupied, if anything. Better to breathe slow and steady and purposeful so that he can keep his full attention on Martin than worry about the lock on the door, or someone hearing, or worse.
The door is locked, for the record, and Martin’s checked it several times over. It’s an open secret about where Jon finds his meals in between his scheduled, Institute-provided portions, but that doesn’t mean that Martin wants people to know for sure. Maybe he likes having this little bit of Jon all to himself; maybe it’s good to keep this part of Jon away from the others, weak and needy and hungry.
The last button comes free, and Martin shrugs the shirt from his shoulders. Less mess, this way. Fewer things to stain. “Okay?”
Jon looks over him, slow and sweeping, any emotion lost to the shadow of the candlelight. Then he swings one leg over to straddle Martin’s lap and settles, reaches out, graces his fingers across Martin’s chest.
“Okay,” Jon breathes softly, pupils blown wide as he catalogues each and every freckle, bump, and scar. “I’ll try to be gentle.”
“You don’t have to be,” Martin says, and Jon raises an eyebrow. He’s sweet like this, Martin thinks, when his face isn’t scrunched up in a scowl. Just soft and pliant. Easy clay for Martin to work with. “I mean,” he adds, “I trust you, Jon. I’m not scared of you.”
“You’re not,” Jon says, doubtfully morose. It’s not a question, but it never is every time that they’ve had this conversation. Just a statement of mournful fact. Just a resigned acceptance.
Martin smiles at him as his hand finds the root of Jon’s curls and guides his head closer to where it’s meant to be. “Should I be?”
“Hm.” Jon noses at his neck. His skin is cold like winter chill against Martin’s, and it’s comforting and exhilarating all in one. It sends a chill up his spine. It shoots his heart beating faster. They’ve done this a hundred times by now, and yet it always, always, always without fail—
“Christ, you smell good,” Jon mutters, blinking hazily. Unfocused. Just air and Martin's skin separating him from what he wants most.
“I'd hope so,” Martin says. “I've just had a bath.”
“You should bathe more often. ‘S nice.”
“Are you telling me I stink normally?”
“No,” Jon says immediately. Then he thinks about it for a moment. Then he adds, “Well, most of the time. Sorry. Monster guts aren't exactly a pleasant fragrance.”
“Wow, rude,” Martin replies, putting on a stuffy air of offense to mask the fact that his brain is currently spinning in his skull over the fact that Jon just apparently admitted he smells good, fuck, that shouldn't make him feel the way it does—
“Hey.”
Martin looks up. Martin does not breathe. Martin’s quite forgotten how to, however momentarily, as his eyes lock with Jon's sickeningly wide-blown pupils. They're so easy to get lost in like impossible black holes, so easy to forget the jug of fangs that peek out from the edges of his lips, the slight shutter of his figure, the prick of nails on his arms. Jon blinks, slow and hazy, as if he's close to falling asleep. He probably will sleep for hours after this. He's just sweet like that.
“Tell me if it hurts?” Jon asks softly. Runs his fingers along the bend of Martin’s neck. Doesn't breath, but thinks about it; Martin can tell by the flare of his nostrils.
“Of course,” Martin lies. It always does. He never will.
Fingers touch skin. Then nose. Then lips.
Martin closes his eyes as he finally feels Jon’s tongue and waits, desperately, for him to paint the first stroke.