left over / for John

[loficharm]

"Good," John whispers in his ear. "Good."

It's dark. Martin can feel the mattress beneath him, as familiar as it is strangely unyielding, but he can't really see. Only the shape of John above him, a shadow slightly darker than the rest.

John pins him down with the weight of his own body. He holds Martin's arms at his sides, leans down heavily on his chest. John is straddling him, Martin realizes, and that seems wrong. But they must have talked about it. They did, didn't they? Perhaps he forgot.

"It's all right," John says, and he licks Martin's neck, the point of his tongue driving into the soft skin just beneath the hinge of Martin's jaw.

Something shifts in the mattress. The sheets twist in strange angles against Martin's back. There's an itch between his shoulder blades, distracting, trying to pull his focus away. He fights it. He wants to stay here. Just a little longer. He's close.

John's fingers skitter over him, prodding and pinching, and Martin tries to speak, but there's something covering his mouth. A gag? It doesn't feel right. John's hand, he thinks. Except that makes too many hands. This is getting too confusing. He wishes he could see properly. Did John blindfold him? He shakes his head against the obstruction around his mouth, trying to speak, to ask to see. He wants to see.

The itch is stronger now, less of an itch and more of a building pressure, as of something digging into his back. He struggles to move, to roll over or somehow allay the discomfort, but he's stuck.

"I've got you," John says. "Almost there."

And then the pressure breaks, and something bursts out from beneath him, seizing its freedom with violent alacrity as it surges up and wraps back around him. Martin can't see but he can feel it, eight hard curling lengths that snap tight around his body and start to pull, dragging him down, trying to fit him through that little paper door.

Martin gasps, breathless and muffled, struggling to get free, struggling to be heard. He wants to scream, to cry out for John to help him, but there is still something blocking his voice. He doesn't want this, he wants to go back, to rewrite himself back before he noticed that awful feeling at his back.

Even as Martin struggles, John remains calm. Martin sees the dark shape of him raise up a few inches, hovering over him, seeming to hesitate for an unearthly moment; then he sees the glint of his eyes, like a cat in near-darkness.

All at once the fear vanishes. John wouldn't let this happen; therefore it can't be happening. The pressure recedes as quickly as it came over him. There is nothing clutching onto him, no danger here. Only John perched over him, watching.

John continues to observe him in shadow, then leans down close to breathe in his ear: "Don't move."

He gets up then, leaving Martin weightless and unmoored, and he drifts out of their darkened bedroom.

Martin waits. He tries to imagine what might come next. He ignores the scratching suggestion that something is still wrong. He waits.

And then John does not return. Martin sits up eventually and wipes a hand across his mouth. It comes away with a sort of phantom sensation, feathery and faint. There was something there, but it is there no longer. John does not return.

"John?" Martin calls out, his voice still too quiet, smothered in the dark. He gets out of bed, bare feet touching the floor, and he feels his way toward the door, the hallway beyond. "John, where are you?"

The hallway continues, stretching on into darkness. Martin walks for what feels like far too long. His footsteps echo crisply around him though his feet are bare and he can still barely make a sound. Perhaps they aren't his footsteps.

Who was he looking for?

"Tim?" His chest tightens. He thinks he can hear laughter in the distance, sick and self-immolating, coiling endlessly around itself. The footsteps are still there, just a half-step disjointed from his, just around the next corner, or the next, or the next. Martin tries to hurry but something keeps catching at his ankles. "Tim?" He can barely hear himself, his voice swallowed up in that distant swirl of jagged-edge laughter. He tries again: "Don't leave me!" But it feels as though his own words are getting farther and farther away.

Then the laughter stops. The footsteps stop as well. There is still something clinging at Martin's ankles, trying to curl around them, too weak to find purchase.

He sees a shape in the darkness, coming out to meet him. A face he's meant to know but cannot remember. The wrong face. He shuts his eyes against it and opens them again. No; not her. Something else. A roiling mass, movement against the dark. This, too, familiar. The misshapen hive of Jane Prentiss slouches unsteadily toward him, thousands of tiny bodies spilling across the floor, rushing toward him like the tide. John and Tim went that way. She will have already met them, already overtaken them. He's the only one left.

Martin turns. He runs. His legs don't want to work right. He runs at a bizarre, uncomfortable lope, lopsided and awkward. He can hear the occasional minuscule crunch of a stray worm beneath his feet. He has to keep moving. Anywhere. Anywhere else.

Something catches him. First he thinks it's a net, something stretched from wall to wall to trap him, nearly invisible, sticking fast. He shakes that sensation away in disgust. No, it's hands. Hands fitting around his arms. Catching him, holding him fast. John? No, John couldn't possibly have passed this way. He looks up into angry eyes, and for a moment he thinks Elias, Elias was setting off the Co2, and Elias was looking for him, angry at him because he... because...

"Don't move," a voice growls, and Martin's heart jumps in terror. Not Elias. Not Elias at all.

Jacob Riggs pulls Martin to him, holding him so tight he can't breathe. He should've known. It wasn't safe out here, John told him to stay put and he just didn't listen. Riggs has been looking for him this whole time. Martin had almost convinced himself that he was dead, but that isn't right at all. He's still here, and now he's found him. How could he be so stupid?

Martin tries to speak, to cry out, but Riggs is crushing him, too strong, impossibly strong. Martin strains against him but there's nowhere to move; he's locked in place, his legs, his arms, all of him, surrounded on all sides by a steady, solid pressure that is far too extensive to come from one man. Martin gasps for breath, and soft soil fills his mouth.

The earth constricts around him and then releases, just enough, just enough to let him breathe as he coughs up mud. He is alone here, entombed, drowned in darkness. How did he let this happen? How did he get so lost?

"John," he whispers, his voice barely audible even to him. "John—"

"He's not here," answers another voice in his ear, a dull lilt he can't quite place. He tries to twist around but the earth presses down on him again, keeping him still. The voice continues: "He left you. Remember?"

Something is crawling back up his ankle. He can feel it even here. Martin shivers and twitches, a new terror suffusing him, new and yet old, far older than this. Old and familiar. "...Peter?"

The earth suddenly crumbles around him, vanishing into nothing, and Martin falls. He falls and thinks frantically that he does not want to be falling; so then he stops. Something has caught him. That strange feeling he'd had earlier, faint and feathery, as of a substance so light he could almost believe it's not there. He's caught in a net, and only now does he understand it's not a net at all. It's a web.

For a moment he just lies there, letting himself breathe. This isn't so bad. He's not falling; nothing is trying to crush him or break him. He isn't even afraid of spiders. They mind their business, is the thing. They just want to live, to eat bugs and keep to themselves. He doesn't mind. He's never minded. In some ways it's nice, knowing there's a spider nearby. As long as you know it's there, you're never really on your own. Are you, Martin?

A little shudder passes through him over the thought he suddenly recognizes as alien, words in his head that are not his own. It's a strange fear, a remote fear of something not quite right. He can't identify it, exactly. It's so subtle. It speaks through him. And like the Lonely, it really only seeks to offer comfort. Isn't that right? Of course it is. You'll be safe here. You will not have to know fear, not ever again. You will be kept and held and cherished.

No, Martin thinks, no, that's wrong. And he already has that. He already has it.

Doesn't he?

Does he?

Martin's body jerks violently, a sudden shudder of resistance that finally forces him to realize he can't move. He's stuck, caught on the web that seem to stretch into infinite darkness all around him. And it's then that he sees John, standing impossibly on the edge of that darkness, balanced on a strand, so perfectly still. He is so far away that Martin should not be able to make out his eyes, and yet they are intensely visible, bright and piercing in the dark.

Martin starts to panic, tries to cry out to the Archivist, to John, and finds he can't make a sound; there is, again, something covering his mouth, that same sensation as before, only this time he understands what it is. It's spider silk, weaving its patient way around him, and it's been here all along. Catching at his ankles in the Spiral, crawling up his legs in the Buried. It wraps around him now, covetous and uncontested, pinning his arms back to his sides, keeping his legs locked together, coiling gradually tighter and tighter. It has clung to him as he passed through every other hand, the only power clever and patient enough to keep hold. It has won him now, and it has no intention of letting him go.

Martin tries to fight — he wants to fight — but then, does he? Isn't this what he likes? Being bound, being wrapped up tight and helpless? This was a nice dream, wasn't it? Isn't it?

Don't move, something whispers, gentle in the back of his head.

In the distance, so terribly far away, Martin thinks he sees John smile, a little flicker of approval that feels like nothing more than an indictment.

And then he wakes up. For no reason, really, after all that. No sudden violence to shatter him from the dream, no breaking point causing his consciousness to forcibly reassert itself. He just wakes, sucking in a sharp breath, soaked in sweat.