Martin Blackwood

There are an absurd few seconds where Martin doesn't remember who the hell Eaton is, or why he should be in his phone contacts. The text comes in while he and John are having lunch in the office, chatting comfortably as has become their pleasant custom, and Martin fishes his phone absently out of his pocket and looks at it, trailing off in the midst of an only mildly amusing anecdote about the copier. He's here is all the message says.

He stands bolt upright before he's had a moment to bloody think this through. He never told anyone about this plan, certainly not John, and just as he'd fallen into the uneasy complacency of assuming, more than a month later, that nothing would come of it, he'd also never considered the very real possibility that the tip-off would come while he was in John's company with no viable excuse to suddenly dash out. Right out of the gate he's already made a hash of it; there's no passing this off casually after that abrupt display. John is incisive and Martin is a poor liar when he's unprepared, and this whole thing is now beginning to feel very stupid indeed.

But there isn't time to work something out. There isn't time, because this is happening now, seven blocks away, and he's already scrambling to get his coat.

"I, er—" He shoves his phone back in his pocket as he pulls his coat on. It's awful, but his only recourse now is to just flee as fast as possible and hope John can't catch him, and that he can explain, somehow, later. "I'm sorry, I, I have to go, it's—something came up. It's fine, just, I need to—I'll explain later, okay?"

Christ, this isn't helping, he just needs to go. He winces and turns around, managing to keep his pace only to a brisk trot until he makes it outside, at which point he bolts down the sidewalk in the direciton of Madison & Revello. He doesn't look back to see if John is following him; he zig-zags his way there, up one block, over the next, and so on, hoping he's harder to follow that way. He feels awful doing this, but this is his problem, he invited it onto himself, and he's not about to let John just stagger into it.

( Read more... )

[CW: implied extreme violence & death, excessive blood, related trauma]

October 31st - November 1st, 2019

This has taken him far too long already.

Martin sits at his desk in his office, the door shut and locked as it's been most of the time for the past month, staring at his phone, at the open history of his texts with John. The last message exchanged is dated the 19th, John asking with exceptional care if he was planning on being in that day, forcing Martin to reply very briefly that he had in fact been there for several hours. No response. Before that, only scant business-like exchanges. He knows, and he'd known then, that John was testing the waters, trying to get a sense for what was going on. But he hadn't needed to delve much further. For better or worse, the message had been received.

The phone's screen dims, and he absently taps his thumb against it to wake it up.

Three days ago he'd made a decision. Twenty-two days before that he'd made another: to reacclimate himself with the Lonely, to give up all his tentative progress toward the recovering warmth of social connection and to return to the path on which he'd been set. The justifications were many, and they were easy: because he'd seen firsthand what form the Extinction might take, and even if it wasn't his world it felt too awful to ignore; because the Lonely is still here, breathing down his neck and threatening John in his dreams, and even if those threats are empty they still burrow deep into his heart; because none of this feels real or permanent and he ought to know better than to allow himself something nice when it will only get taken away, just like everything else. Because he wants to be ready, because he wants to be useful, because he wants to keep John safe.

The 19th, he realizes, had been the day Luke came. So they had in fact seen each other briefly; Martin had seen John with him, how different he'd been. Kind and gentle, comforting this little boy who seemed, impossibly, to have become close to him. It had hit Martin in ways he hadn't expected; it was like he was missing something he didn't know was there.

That had hurt, even more than the rest. It all hurt, it hurt so much, and he'd hated it. He'd gotten a cat to cope with the suffocating emptiness of his flat, and that had helped, but not enough. He'd justified it all to himself in a thousand different ways, and each time he had the conversation it felt emptier and more circular, like he couldn't quite keep track of all the threads of it. He'd tried to sink, but he couldn't, he can't, not here. Here the water is different and there is not enough to drown him.

He hated it and it hurt, but that wasn't enough to stop him. Not even seeing John with Luke was enough, not on its own. Maybe nothing would have been enough; maybe he'd have found a way to drown himself anyway, to disappear into the cold dark embrace that clutches him every night. Maybe that would have been it, if Kat hadn't forced it. Needling into him with questions and counters too precisely on the point of it. Promising that he was making John miserable.

That was far more than three days ago, but it took that long for him to arrive at a conclusion. It took him so long to decide, enough. He is tired. He is lonely. And whatever purpose this might have held feels so far away it's like he can no longer see it clearly at all.

So he stares at his phone. He'd meant to catch John before he left for the day, but they've become good at avoiding each other even in this small space. And it's become difficult. He'd allowed it to become difficult. He makes so many false starts and deletes them all, jiggling his knee with nervous, manic energy. He just doesn't know what to say. What can he say? What can he possibly say after all this?

He's sorry?

He is, it just doesn't feel like it'll ever be enough.

But he can't keep sitting here and staring at his bloody phone so he finally just starts somewhere.

( Twenty minutes later he finds himself outside the Bramford. )