Chapter Text
Martin Blackwood is holding a knife.
What? No, he isn’t. He’s holding a pen. Why would he have a knife? People don’t bring knives to job interviews, especially not when they’re trying to fly as low under the radar as humanly possible. People don’t sign contracts with knives.
He’s not holding a knife. He’s holding a pen, but… he must have dropped it. He was holding a pen, he’s sure of that. He can still feel its weight, held tight in his fist and angled upward.
The way his hand is curled is not the way he would ever hold a pen.
When he looks down, his cheek scrapes against something rough, and he finds he has to squint to make his vision focus. Why were his eyes shut? It’s not like he would have been sleeping in the middle of an interview, and yet he’s prying his eyes open like he’s been out for hours and he can still see the contract in his mind’s eye, ink barely dry and smeared slightly where he’d rested his hand on it by mistake. He doesn’t want to imagine what Mr. Bouchard will think of him for this, or how his chances of swinging that assistant position are looking.
His head hurts.
He thinks he might be lying on the ground.
There is no contract in front of him, no pen in his hand. No knife either, for that matter, but what he does see is even more perplexing. He’s grasping a wad of dark fabric, twisting it in his fist and squeezing hard enough that his knuckles ache. He blinks. There’s an odd quality to the fabric; it’s denser than it should be somehow, heavy and strangely stiff in a way that doesn’t quite sit right with him. The texture is off, too. His grip is tight, so tight that he can’t unlock his fingers to feel it properly, but there’s a strange kind of give to it, like when the pressure of his hold changes incrementally, there’s an accompanying shift under his fingertips. For several seconds, he remains with his cheek pressed to the pavement and just stares blearily at it.
Then the fabric moves. No—not moves. Breathes. A great, shuddering breath, like a drowning man who’s only just remembered he has lungs.
Martin freezes. Slowly, slowly, he looks up.
Lying curled on his side facing Martin is a man. He’s bruised, battered, and scarred underneath all that to boot. Even just looking at his face, Martin can see what looks to be a long history of remarkably painful damage. What isn’t obscured by tangles of grey hair is pockmarked with a constellation of neat circular depressions, each barely a fingertip wide but numerous and overlapping and occasionally ragged around the edges. They extend all the way down the man’s throat, and at the base of it is a long, thin, pale line. Under his eyes, shut but fluttering in spasmodic bursts, are bags so dark they look like bruises. Martin’s face screws up with sympathy pain just looking at him.
Then his gaze travels down, back to where his hand is still clenched, and his face slackens in raw horror instead. The fabric he’s clutching isn’t black, it’s stained—absolutely drenched with a fluid so dark it looks like ink except for where it’s smeared on his skin. As he watches, a single rivulet of red runs down the back of his hand and drips off his wrist.
Cold shoots through his veins all at once, dizzying and leaden. Martin jolts, his entire body seizing with alarm, and his hand stays locked so tightly in the man’s shirt that he yanks the bloody fabric along with him. A second wave of panic follows closely on the heels of the first, and this time he manages to loosen his grip enough to jerk his hand away properly, fingers still hooked into claws and joints aching with the release. He launches himself backward, scrabbling against the pavement until his back hits a wall, and gasps for air. His hand trembles as he holds it up in front of him and stares at the sticky red that coats every inch of his palm. He is distantly aware that his throat is closing up.
A low rasping noise comes from the crumpled figure lying mere feet away, and Martin makes a shocked, pained sound, barely catching himself in time to avoid clapping his bloody hand to his mouth in horror. “Oh god,” he says, and it comes out high and warbled. “Are you- are you-”
The word okay sticks in his throat, and Martin has to struggle to swallow around it. There’s a massive wet patch in the middle of the man’s shirt, wrinkled and warped where Martin’s fist has left an impression. For a moment, it’s all he can do to cast a panicked glance between his own shining red hand and the wine-dark stain plastering the shirt to the man’s skin, trying to reconcile one with the other. The smell of iron permeates the air. Martin’s heartbeat is deafening.
“Martin?” the man rasps. He sounds like he has a throat full of gravel, and something in his voice makes Martin want to burst straight into tears. His eyes seem to struggle to focus, squinting heavily.
“You’re going to be okay,” Martin hears himself say in a strangled tone of voice, as if from underwater. He’s dreaming, he thinks with dizzying desperation. This is a nightmare. God, he’s always been rubbish in high-pressure situations, always ends up getting in his own way until his words spill out in the wrong order or he gets snapped at or, apparently, until complete strangers bleed out right before his eyes in unfamiliar alleyways.
Except this is real, and he’s not going to watch this stranger bleed out. He’s not. Martin fumbles for his phone, probably smearing blood all over his good interview trousers, never for a second taking his eyes away from the bleeding man. The stranger stares back, watching Martin come up empty-handed.
“Oh god,” Martin whispers when he’s exhausted all his pockets twice over. He… seems to be wearing something different from the dark slacks he had put on that morning, but the different clothes are bloodstained now just the same, and he doesn’t even spare them a thought. Martin casts another panicked glance around, taking in the narrow alleyway and the distant hum of London bustle, then shuffles back within reach of the stranger and hovers his hands frantically over the wound. He looks the man in the eyes. With this much blood pouring out of him, whether he’s lucid enough to understand a word Martin says is anyone’s guess, but he tries anyway, voice cracking. “We’re going to get you to a hospital, okay? You’re going to be- whatever happened, you’ll be just fine-”
“I’m okay,” the man says, holding Martin’s gaze with such solemn sincerity. “Martin, I’m not- I’m fine. It doesn’t hurt, I’m just… just a bit tired.”
That makes another high, raw sound punch out of Martin, because of course he’s tired, and if he’s past the point of pain already this is even more serious than it looks, which means it’s very serious indeed. He turns toward the mouth of the alley and shouts, “Help! Someone! Someone, please! We need an ambulance!”
“Martin.” A hand wraps around his wrist and squeezes, alarmingly hard. Martin looks down and flinches bodily before he has time to control his reaction—the hand is covered fingertip to palm in a shiny, warped scar.
“What happened to you?” he whispers. No one appears in the alley to help. Who is this man, to have managed to get so severely injured so many times over and survive it, only to wind up bleeding out in Martin’s hands?
“We did it,” the man says reverently. His voice wobbles. “I think we did it. Oh, god.”
Martin just shakes his head, at a loss. His free hand jerks awkwardly back and forth, caught between tugging the man’s shirt up to get a sense of what lies beneath and grasping at half-remembered warnings not to pull knives out of stab wounds—does that rule apply to clothes too? Is the layer of fabric all that’s holding this man in one piece?
“I have to go get you an ambulance,” he says, voice thick and unsteady. “Don’t move, okay? I promise you’ll be alright, just don’t-”
When Martin tries to pull away, the man does not let go of his wrist. His grip is strong, much stronger than it should be considering the staggering amount of blood pooling beneath him. “Look,” the man insists, and Martin has to bite back a shout as he watches him heave himself into an upright position with absolutely no regard for the blood blackening his shirt.
Then the man pulls the hem of his shirt up to expose his sternum, and Martin’s helpless protests die in his throat. Everything from the man’s chest down to his stomach is liberally smeared with blood, dark like it always is in films when something vital’s been hit, sticking to the fabric and already beginning to dry and flake at the edges. There are more scars faintly visible beneath the blood, too. A scattering of the same round little pockmarks that cover his face and a wide, ugly slash of gnarled scar tissue right at the base of the ribcage overlap with a jagged patch that’s textured like a burn and shaped like shrapnel, painting a picture even more brutal than the one on the man’s face. There are too many old wounds to count, but not a single one of them bleeds.
Martin gapes. When he aims a baffled look up at the stranger, he finds him already looking back with a smile so faint it seems to be waiting for permission, eyes gleaming with an emotion that twists at something deep in Martin’s own chest.
“What?” Martin says numbly.
He means to append something else to the end of that, but he can’t for the life of him imagine what. The man just keeps watching him like he’s waiting for something to click, and with each deep breath he takes, Martin can feel his mortal terror begin to ebb and leave room for more reasonable reactions. He’s kneeling in an alley next to a stranger, he’s covered in- it must be fake blood then, Christ, what’s that about? He has the stuff smeared all over his own clothes, except they’re not his own clothes, and between the disorientation and the fading white-hot shock and the conviction that he’s still meant to be holding a pen, signing quite an important contract, this is all becoming a bit much for him.
He can’t keep the hurt out of his voice as he says, “What is this, some kind of a sick joke? I thought you were seriously hurt, just about gave me a heart attack-”
“What?” The stranger raises his hands in an ineffectual calming gesture. They’re still slick and red, but he doesn’t seem to notice as he reaches out for Martin. “No, no, it’s- it is my blood, but I’m not hurt. Not anymore.” He smiles, eyes wet, like Martin’s just given him everything he’s ever dreamed of and more. “Just—look around. We did it, Martin, we made it.”
Martin flinches back, out of reach of the man’s bloodstained hands, and stares at him. Something is wrong here. So, so wrong. From the blood anointing them both to the way this man says his name like there are worlds of meaning behind it, everything about this is wrong. “Did what?” he pleads. “I- I’m sorry, do I know you?”
The smile drops clean off the stranger’s face. It’s probably a trick of the light, but Martin thinks he can actually see the color drain from his cheeks.
There is a long pause.
“Oh,” the man says, barely more than a breath given shape. He withdraws his hands, now shaking like he is suffering from acute blood loss after all, and raises them slowly to his face.
Martin watches, quietly petrified, as the man first presses a palm to his mouth, then covers his entire face, leaving behind overlapping handprints in stark red. “Sorry,” he repeats, tentative and halting. “Are… are you alright?”
Immediately after the words leave his mouth, Martin feels like kicking himself. Is he alright. The man is sitting in an alley soaked in blood from an unknown source, looking with every passing second more like he might have a cry, of course he’s not alright. Martin isn’t even feeling alright himself, and he’s not the one possibly on the verge of bleeding out.
“I’m-” The stranger’s voice wavers. He shakes his head and starts again. “I’m so- I’m so sorry. This is all my fault, if I had just- and now you don’t even know-”
For no reason at all that he can discern, Martin’s heart cracks in time with the stranger’s voice. “Hey, hey, no,” he says, hands hovering awkwardly in the negative space between them, twitching like they want to reach out but falling short. “I’m sorry, I’ve got just the worst memory for names, faces, all that sort of thing, not your fault at all. Um. Remind me? You clearly know me, but I’m… drawing a bit of a blank, at the moment.”
The stranger makes a dreadful choking noise into his hands. After a beat, a sharp pang goes through Martin as he recognizes it as a muffled sob. He makes a split-second decision, then, because whatever this man is going through is unbearable to watch and Martin fears if he doesn’t start getting answers to some of his many questions soon, he might just lose it entirely. He sticks out his hand, blood and all, and says, “I’m Martin. Uh, Martin Blackwood. You already knew that, I guess, but… nice to meet you.”
For a small eternity, the stranger only stares at his hand like it’s the last nail in a coffin with his name on it. A veritable whirlwind of emotions flickers across the stranger’s face—Martin identifies despair, reluctance, doubt, and a fresh wave of pain in rapid succession—before he swallows thickly and manages a look at Martin’s face through his fingers. When he does finally speak, it’s in a voice thick with emotion. He takes Martin’s hand. “Jonathan Sims,” he says. “Jon. Nice- nice to meet you.”
The funny thing is, Martin doesn’t think it’s a lie. Not even when Jon lets go far too quickly and averts his eyes like the sight of him burns.
“Right,” Martin says. “Jon.” It’s a nice name, a pleasant shape in his mouth. Oddly familiar, too, but he shelves that thought for a time when the amount of blood in his direct field of vision is much lower. It’s a common name, and he has bigger things to worry about—the look of agonized hope Jon is now fixing him with, for example. He changes tacks. “Are you hurt anywhere else? I know you’re not hurt there, but that’s still really a lot of blood, Jon, and I don’t want to find out where it’s coming from the hard way.”
Jon lets out a slow, shuddering breath. The last vestiges of hope seem to drain from his expression with it, leaving him looking small and vulnerable curled around himself on the pavement. He shakes his head.
“Good. Okay, good. Um. What happened to you? Can you talk about it, or… do you know why we’re here?”
The silence is longer this time. Heavier. Martin’s on the verge of apologizing again, sure he’s crossed some kind of line, when Jon rasps, “It’s a long story.”
Martin winces. “Even just a… severely abridged version would be great, if you can manage it. I—I want to help you, I do, but it’s kind of hard to do that when I don’t even know where I am, you know, one minute I’m in the middle of an interview and the next I’m here-”
He breaks off, because Jon’s eyes have snapped up to meet his with almost frightening intensity. Desperation, if he’s going to put so fine a point on it.
“An interview,” Jon says. “What interview? What… what’s the last thing you remember?”
“Uh. Archival thing? Doubt I got it after all this, to be honest, but Jon, that’s really not—wait. Wait a second. Jon?”
Jon’s eyes go wide as saucers, and there’s a certain gleam to them like threatening tears again. So softly it almost goes unheard, he says, “Martin?”
“Jonathan Sims,” Martin says. Jon takes a sharp breath, hands hovering reluctantly in Martin’s direction. Every line of his face betrays an emotion so large Martin can’t put a name to it. He looks at Jon, really looks at him, taking in every weary and worn inch of him in search of even a scrap of familiarity. But there wouldn’t be, would there? Not if Martin’s right about where he’s heard that name before. “You… you aren’t the new archivist, are you?”
Jon makes a sound like the air has physically been knocked out of him by way of a swift blow to the stomach, so violent and abrupt that for a moment Martin thinks he’s about to discover the source of all that blood after all. Then, with an expression of purest agony, Jon repeats, “What do you remember?”
For the first time since processing that a stranger is bleeding out in his hands, Martin deliberately casts his mind back to the moment before his cheek was pressed to the pavement. Or, rather, he tries to. There is no moment before; there isn’t even so much as a vague transition. He is holding a pen, and then his hand closes around something else, and then Jon is bleeding before him. A spike of cold lurches through his gut at the realization, at the awareness that there is a space in his memory that should at least be grey and instead is nowhere to be found at all.
“I.” His voice is very small. “I—I don’t know? I was in Mr. Bouchard’s office, I was just signing the contract, and then…”
He looks at Jon, whose expression is heartbroken in a way that leaves him tongue-tied all over again. There is no surprise in his eyes. There is resignation.
“The Archives,” Jon whispers. He doesn’t seem to be talking to Martin anymore. “Christ, of course. Of course it would be that. Take it all away, leave no trace that it ever existed-”
“What? What are you saying? Take what away? Jon, did—did the same thing happen to you?”
There is a face people tend to make when they are bracing themselves to deliver bad news. It takes practice to identify: a mournful softness around the eyes, resolute determination framing the lines of the mouth, possibly paired with a pat on the shoulder or a weak, sympathetic smile. Martin has seen every permutation of it over the years, and when he recognizes it on Jon’s face he can almost hear the words Jon says before they leave his mouth.
“I wish it had,” Jon whispers. “No, I—Martin, god, I’m so sorry, it’s just you. You don’t remember… anything.”
Martin laughs. Tries to laugh. What comes out is strangled and sick-sounding. “Right,” he says, loudly enough that Jon flinches. “I’m—you’re saying amnesia? No offense, but I’m pretty sure I do actually remember most things, I, I just don’t know how I got here, specifically. The rest is all…”
Jon is looking at him like he is the last port in a storm, slowly being subsumed by the waves. Even sitting down as he is, Martin feels abruptly and distinctly unsteady.
“It’s all still there,” he finishes faintly. There is far less certainty in the statement than he would like.
“No,” Jon says, voice raw. “No, I’m—I’m quite sure it isn’t.”
Ignoring the rising sound of his own shallow breathing, Martin strains his memory. The image is so clear in his mind. The office, the uncomfortable chair, the thick block letters at the top of the contract reading INTER-DEPARTMENTAL TRANSFER. The weight of the pen. The stray smudge of ink next to Blackwood. And then, nothing. Nothing at all. An alley. A different kind of stain altogether.
A buzzing sort of panic is beginning to build in the back of Martin’s skull. He swallows thickly.
“You know what’s missing?” he asks, and it takes several seconds for him to realize why this strikes him as odd.
He believes him. Even bloodstained and half-crazed with panic and whatever else that emotion lacing Jon’s every word is, even now, Martin wants to trust Jon. Something deep in his bones tells him he’s right where he’s supposed to be. That should scare him. That should have him scrambling to his feet and running far away and never looking back. It doesn’t.
“I know you, Martin,” Jon says, which isn’t an answer just as much as it is. Martin has spent his life distant, by necessity for the most part and habit for the rest. That someone knows him in any capacity outside of break room small talk or passing pleasantries is telling enough, in that sense. The idea of people properly knowing him has always made him a bit nervous. Somehow, though, a complete stranger giving him a look that speaks of history isn’t as alarming as he would have expected.
In a motion so brief it could be mistaken for a trick of the light, Jon reaches out again and just as quickly seems to remember the blood on his hands, pulling back with a pained look. Martin, whose hands are bloodier still than Jon’s and who finds himself fighting a senseless swell of disappointment, takes a moment to ask himself sternly whether he’s actually going to entertain this. He doesn’t like the answer.
Jon seems to take his stunned silence as disbelief. “Please,” he says. “Please, I—your name is Martin K. Blackwood, but the K doesn’t stand for anything. You- you’ll drink anything but oolong, you keep your poetry in a little red notebook, you’ve only left the country once in your life, you worked in the library and it took you months to get the hang of the Dewey decimal system, you- you faked your CV to get there-”
“How do you know that?” Martin demands. “You didn’t- why do you- god, you haven’t told anyone, have you?”
“I would never,” Jon says with immense gravity. He holds Martin’s gaze with nothing short of anguish. “Martin, please. Please.”
Martin’s hands are shaking. He fists them in his pant legs, leaving more dark streaks behind.
“I’ve never left the country.”
“Oh.” Jon takes a shuddering breath. “No, of course you haven’t. That was… that was after.”
After. Bloody hell.
It could be a lie. It could all be an elaborate lie constructed from fragments of his employment history and some illegally acquired data, and Martin wants to believe it is. He could so easily brush Jon’s words off as a freak coincidence, go home, probably change his locks and his bank password, wash off the blood, and forget about the whole thing.
Instead, he says, “I know you too. Don’t I.”
“You did.” Jon seems to curl in on himself protectively. “It should have been- if anything happened, I thought it would be me. God, I- it might be for the best if you don’t know me. Maybe- maybe this time you don’t need to be involved at all.”
A wave of cold rushes through Martin, chest clenching tight. “No,” he says before he can think. It’s the shock, probably. Besides, if he doesn’t at least ensure that Jon isn’t quietly bleeding out as they speak before they part ways, he’ll be bringing down a murder investigation on his hands on top of everything else. That’s all. “I need to make sure you’re really okay,” he says, and when Jon sighs in a way that tells him he sounds precisely as unconvincing as he feels, Martin tacks on, “and anyway, how am I supposed to get my memories back if the person who apparently remembers me leaves? I can’t just—do I even still live in the same flat?”
“You don’t,” Jon says. His eyes are shut now. “Christ, I… you’re right. You’re right. I can’t see anything, don’t even know if you have a flat here, and if you don’t remember any of it, maybe that’s enough. Buys us some time, at least. We’ll… we’ll figure this out together.”
Martin’s pulse ratchets back up in the space of a breath. “You can’t see?” he demands, lurching forward to grasp Jon by the upper arms and frantically examining his eyes. They’re rather lovely eyes even when looking back at him with mild alarm, deep brown and soulful, and nothing seems immediately off about them, but something is wrong and it might as well be the eyes, if it’s not the nonexistent stab wound. “Okay, that’s it, I’m calling an ambulance, you can’t tell me you’re fine-”
“I’m not blind, Martin, I just can’t-” Jon breaks off with a short, frustrated sound that verges on a sob. He looks down but doesn’t pull away. “Never mind. Never mind, that’s my cross to bear, not yours. You don’t—please don’t worry.”
Martin manages not to mutter something snappish under his breath about how he bloody well will worry if he so pleases, and about how people with drying bloodstains covering half their clothes aren’t in any position to make such demands anyway. It is a close thing, and entirely reliant on the sad little crease forming between Jon’s eyebrows. Martin wants to smooth it away. He doesn’t know what to do with that impulse other than shove it aside, letting go of Jon and wrapping his arms around his own middle instead.
“What happened?” he manages after an eternity, voice rough and shaking with poorly suppressed tension. “Can you at least tell me how we got here? Where all that blood came from, maybe, if it’s not you bleeding out?”
Everything he says, it seems, is a misstep in the minefield of Jon’s emotions, because Jon flinches, face crumpling even more, and takes an uneven breath. “No. I’m- I’m sorry, Martin, but if you’ve been cut off, we can’t risk attracting any attention. Believe me, this is… by far the more pleasant alternative.”
“What? You can’t be serious, Jon. Cut off from what? And, sorry, what kind of attention do you think you’re gonna attract just by telling me things I already knew? You can’t just not—that’s not fair!”
“No, I’m afraid it isn’t.”
“Stop,” Martin snaps. He can’t stand it all suddenly—the disorientation, the lingering shock, the vague non-answers that he can’t help but trust even as they leave him spinning in circles—he’s never had any intention of landing himself in the middle of a poorly written B-list film, and he’s not about to let Jon write him into one now. “Just—stop, okay? Don’t tell me you have answers and then keep them to yourself. Don’t act like whatever’s going on is all on you, because clearly-” he makes a sharp gesture down at Jon’s disembodied bloodstain- “clearly there’s more going on than just that, and don’t lie when I don’t have the context to know the difference.” He pauses, takes a breath, and takes in Jon’s expression. It hurts to look at, but he grits his teeth against the sting. “I’d like a straight answer, please, and then I’d like to take you to some kind of clinic so I don’t wind up wanted for murder somehow. God.”
For a long, long moment, the only sound is Martin slowly getting a grip on his breathing as Jon stares at him. In the aftermath of his outburst, Martin can barely bring himself to meet his eyes, abruptly embarrassed and vaguely guilty, but what he sees in Jon’s face is enough to freeze him in place before he can look away. Jon looks heartbroken, but he has looked heartbroken from the moment Martin laid eyes on him. Beneath that, now, is something open and raw, so intently focused on Martin that he squirms under the attention. He hasn’t the faintest idea what to make of it, but it leaves his insides feeling rather like they’ve been passed through a blender.
“Alright,” Jon says softly. Defeated. “I can’t tell you everything without putting you in danger, Martin. God knows I—I want to, but I won’t waste this opportunity to keep you safe."
He pauses, and Martin makes a go on gesture. Jon winces.
"In the most… minimal terms possible, we are not from here.”
“This isn’t London?”
Jon laughs ruefully. “I have no idea. I… I don’t know.”
There is an intonation to his words that leaves Martin with the strangest sense that those are two statements with entirely different meanings. He is also gaining the distinct impression that he is in far over his head. Nonsensically, it strikes him that he’s probably very, very late for that department HR meeting he was supposed to attend after visiting Bouchard. He barely clamps down on a hysterical laugh.
“We were brought here,” Jon continues, “by forces that, in all honesty, are quite beyond our understanding. Even if they were something that could be afforded a coherent explanation, I would not explain them to you, but they are powerful. They… were. I don’t believe they’re quite so potent here.”
“Forces,” Martin repeats, incredulous. The Institute’s library doesn’t deal with many wayward visitors themselves, but Martin’s been privy to enough water cooler gossip to recognize the sound of a statement, and one that might well be laughed out of the archives at that. He refrains from pointing this out to Jon, remembering the way the color had drained from his face at the mere mention of the Institute. He also doesn’t comment on the yet that seems to silently trail Jon’s words.
“I tried to stop something terrible from happening.” Jon’s voice goes even rougher, and Martin recognizes the sound of choked-off tears. His jaw is clenched tightly enough to look painful. “I failed. We were sent here as a result, and... it appears your memories were affected as well. I’m- Martin, I’m sorry.”
Not for the first time, Martin wonders if he’s caught in an unbelievably outlandish dream, because Jon can’t possibly mean what he seems to be implying.
“When you say from here,” he says slowly when he’s composed himself enough to even consider entertaining the concept. “You mean we came from another city, right? Not…”
He flicks his gaze meaningfully up to the sliver of sky visible between the buildings, ignoring the part of him that is absurdly surprised to find it dull and overcast.
Jon remains terribly, suspiciously quiet.
“Fuck off,” Martin mutters under his breath. Something strange flickers across Jon’s face.
“I’m… afraid so.”
“And you’re—Christ, I can’t believe I’m saying this. Listen, I’m not saying I believe you on this, okay, but just hypothetically. You’re sure I’m… the right Martin?”
He makes sure to inject a potent amount of doubt into his voice, because the longer this goes on the likelier it seems that Martin’s been the victim of a terrible prank, but even while implying that he and Martin are either space aliens or from another dimension, Jon’s expression gives nothing away, and the pit in Martin’s stomach yawns wide. In fact, rather than sheepish or guilty, Jon looks to be in the process of swallowing a sizable and remarkably pointy rock.
“It did occur to me,” he says. “But then I saw the scar.”
Somehow, in the grand scheme of concepts he’s been presented with in the last fifteen minutes, this barely even registers. That, or Martin’s going into shock. With almost alarming calm, he says, “The what.”
Looking quite a bit like he might cry again, Jon raises a hand to his throat. The blood on his fingertips has dried enough to only leave a faint smear over the scar Martin had noticed earlier, and for a moment Martin blinks at him dully. Yes, Jon does have a scar there. What in the world does that have to do with Martin? Even if he is missing enough memories that he somehow ended up in a different world in the interim, he can’t bring himself to believe he’s the one who tried to slit Jon’s throat. The very idea of adding to Jon’s extensive list of injuries makes his stomach turn.
The blankness must be clear on his face, because Jon swallows thickly. He gives Martin a meaningful look, then slides his gaze down past Martin’s chin. Unconsciously, Martin’s hand rises to mirror Jon’s. It encounters a line of texture that was not there before.
“Oh.”
The scar is wide but neat. Martin fumbles across the length of it, feeling his own pulse hammering beneath the raised skin. The edges are smooth, and he can’t help a flinch. The knife must have been quite sharp. A clean cut. He and Jon match, in that sense.
“I’m so sorry,” Jon says again. “I wish… I wish you’d never gotten that scar in the first place. I wish so many things had been different, Martin.”
“What happened?” Martin whispers. His voice shakes, reedy and thin, and he presses his palm to his throat as if he might be able to push the mark back beneath the surface. “How did—is it the same as yours?”
Jon flinches. “No,” he says. “No, they were… separate incidents. I tried to stop them. Please believe that.”
For the first time, it occurs to Martin that perhaps Jon is dangerous. A single look at him is enough to confirm that someone has wanted him dead—multiple people, if the quantity of scars is any indication. If the fact that someone has held a knife to Martin’s throat and Jon has been in a position to try and stop them is a sign of the sort of life he has led. It doesn’t matter. He can’t bring himself to feel anything approaching fear as he meets Jon’s anguished, devastatingly earnest gaze.
Martin’s hand trails over the scar and comes up to rub at his face. If nothing else, he has to concede that this is undeniable proof of a gap in his memory long enough for a scar to heal over, and then some; he doubts, somehow, that his comparatively dull life transformed into the sort of lifestyle where he might acquire a throat scar immediately after his memories disappeared. He must have gotten himself tangled up in something in the months following that moment, something big.
“Okay,” he says eventually. “Okay, fine. The… coming from somewhere else thing? I don’t know about that, Jon. But clearly there’s something else going on-” he gestures vaguely from his own head to the bloodstain on Jon’s shirt- “and you know what it is. So. What now?”
“Now…” Jon runs a hand through his hair. A shower of dust cascades down, leaving his hair looking slightly less grey than before. Jon is probably around Martin’s age, he realizes abruptly. With the weariness lining his face and the myriad scars, it makes for a jarring realization. “There’s a place we could try,” Jon says slowly. “It might be a bit of a trip, if we are in London, but it’s unlikely to be occupied. It’s… served well in the past, and doesn’t run the risk of involving anyone unnecessarily.”
“Right,” Martin says. “Just to be clear, by unlikely to be occupied, you don’t mean we’re breaking in somewhere, yeah?”
“I know where the key is.”
Martin shuts his eyes for a moment. He has no idea where he is. He is covered in foreign blood and new scars, he is missing at least several months of memories, and a man who he’s fairly sure was supposed to be his new boss is offering to take him to a secondary location. Possibly via breaking and entering. He trusts him implicitly and has no idea why. His head has ached since the moment he woke up, but it’s beginning to feel more like a stress response than a concussion. He breathes deeply and looks Jon in the eye.
“Fine,” he says. “Okay, Jon. We’ll figure it out together.”
An unreadable flash of emotion crosses Jon’s face. He nods.
“Together.”