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Martin has been dreaming of humming wings.
He must have, at least, because the world is quiet when he opens his eyes in the morning. Just the soft tick of the radiator, or the gentle buzz from the kitchen sink, or a bird, stray and unknown in nature, singing its ever-looping song outside of their window. Some days, he thinks it must be a sparrow. Others, a robin. Occasionally, a mourning dove. He never looks it up, in the end, though he could; the mystery of it all is part of the novelty that keeps it from slipping into the mundane.
Martin doesn’t really know if he dreams anymore, to be honest. He thinks he must — he’d read articles, back when he was faking a psychology degree, that said everyone dreams, just not everyone remembers it. Sometimes, Martin wonders what dreams he must be forgetting, if they’re important to the world he’s now found himself in. Most times, he allows them to flutter off into unreachable subconsciousness, so as to not interfere with the not-dream he’s having now.
“I was dreaming of insect wings,” Martin tells him apropos of nothing over breakfast one morning. Jon is making them eggs just the way he likes them — over easy, just the slightest bit runny, never too much salt or pepper or anything else. Jon is standing in the kitchen with his silly little apron that Martin had bought at the store in town, and Martin can’t help but think how much he loves him. Lets his heart swell to the fullness of his chest, just so he can remember it's there.
“Really?” Jon says, voice blanketed in affection. “What was it like?”
Martin shrugs. He’s making tea. He’s making tea just the way Jon likes — always black, two sugars, just the smallest splash of milk. Martin isn’t like Jon, who always does things perfectly. Sometimes, the tea is terrible, not even fit for human consumption, and sometimes, Jon even tells him that.
All the time though, regardless of his shortcomings, Jon drinks it.
“It was like a storm,” Martin answers finally, “like tapping against the windows.” Did it rain last night?
“No,” says Jon. Don’t be silly. It doesn’t rain in Scotland.
“Oh,” says Martin, kicking himself for forgetting. Silly Martin, he thinks. Of course it doesn’t rain in Scotland. Scotland is wonderful like that, not like London where it rains and rains and rains and never stops. Martin had a roof leak in his flat, once, where water came pouring out from the kitchen light fixture and beat down into an old bucket like coffin nails, like ever-insistent knocking, and some days he thinks he can still hear the thump, thump, thumping of it from the bedroom. He tells himself that would be silly. There’s no rain in Scotland, which means there are no roof leaks, and there are no doors in their cabin which means there’s no knocking. Except for the front door, of course. But they never use that one anyway.
Martin, someone is saying as they make eggs at the stove. “Martin.”
Martin looks up. It’s only Jon making eggs. It’s only Jon who is wearing his silly apron that Martin bought and letting his hair hand long over his shoulders as he smiles. Martin likes the days when Jon wears his hair long. He likes the chance of sitting on the couch and running his hands through it, long and loose like thick acrylic yarn.
“Yes?” Martin says.
“Your dream,” Jon answers. “Tell me more about it.”
“Oh,” Martin says, ignoring the way his heart thumps in his chest like he’s being chased. He’s not being chased. There’s no point in it thumping like that other than his heart likes to do strange things when he’s with Jon because he loves Jon more than his words could ever express. He’s tried to put it into words before, but it never quite works out. “Oh,” Martin says again, trying to remember the question. What was the question?
“Your dream,” Jon supplies helpfully.
“Right,” Martin says. “I don’t remember.”
“You do.”
“I do?”
“You do.”
“Right,” Martin says. He nods, like he’s remembering. Tries his best at remembering. Of course Jon would know when Martin knows something because Jon knows everything about Martin. That’s the package deal they come in. Jon knows everything about Martin to keep him from slipping away like he’s done so many mornings, fingers blue with near-frostbite, teeth chattering as the fog pours from his lips and the world around him goes soft and gray. This is the best way, Jon had told him once, pressing their foreheads together as the knowledge flowed between, this is the best way to keep you from slipping. Martin believed him. Believes him. Of course he does. Jon doesn’t have any reason to lie to him. “There was a tower, I think,” Martin says finally, then picks up the kettle and pours the water into Jon’s mug. It blooms a deep brown as it scalds over the tea bag.
“A tower?” Jon says, like Martin’s telling him about a new pair of shoes he bought.
“A tower,” Martin agrees.
“What kind of tower?”
“A tall one.” Impossibly tall. “It stretched to the sky, I think. I couldn’t see the top.”
The eggs behind him don’t sizzle and crackle on the stove. There’s no sound at all in the kitchen, just the tinkling of his own tinnitus in his ears and the record track of the bird outside of their window. Maybe a cardinal. Maybe a mourning dove.
“What was inside the tower?” Jon asks. Flips over his eggs that don’t sizzle.
“I don’t know,” Martin says. No, that’s not right. “Stairs,” he amends. “And words.”
“Words?”
“Lots of words. They were— ah. They were written across the walls, I think?” Lots of words and lots of whispering, all barely audible over the humming of wings. Martin thinks that he can almost remember the feeling of the papery texture beneath his fingers as he climbed, the almost-words swirling and collapsing in on themselves under his touch. Clean dry hands, he remembers from his archival training back when he’d first been transferred. Handle manuscripts only with clean dry hands, so as to not damage paper older than his mother’s mother’s mother about horrible things like wives watching their husbands peel and eat their own skin and brothers watching their sisters weep fat, wriggling maggots and men climbing up from pits half-eaten by grave worms and masks of skin and hands of porcelain—
“Martin,” Jon says, voice gentle but firm.
“Yes?” Martin responds. Looks to the steeping cup of tea. He doesn’t know how long it has been sitting there — the clock on the oven doesn’t work anymore — but he reckons by the color it’s just about done. Can’t even see the bottom, with how dark the liquid is. He bobs the bag through the thick, viscous liquid, watches with fascination as the tea sloshes and possibly skitters over the edge of the cup, and deposits the bag in the bin.
“Martin,” Jon says, looking at Martin with his only two eyes. “What else was in your dream?”
“I don’t know,” Martin answers. He needs the sugar next. The sugar isn’t in the cabinet like it usually is, like it’d been when they first arrived to this place exhausted and smelling like train because the shower wouldn’t work, which means that today the sugar is in the basement. Martin’s gotten used to how the house works like that. When he wakes up and the curtains in the bedroom have melted into the walls and the bed has sunken a quarter of an inch into the wooden floor, now soft and porous like pulpy organic material, he knows that the sugar will be in the basement. The basement is where the laundry is. Martin should probably do laundry, given the fact that he’s wearing the same shirt he wore yesterday.
“Martin,” Jon says again. The eggs have finally started to sizzle. Martin looks over to Jon, to the man who looks at him with so much love and affection with the impossibly wide pupils of his eyes, and Jon blinks, just once, like he’s only just remembered that he can do that. Jon only has two sockets today, the same as most days, but the left one has filled up with four or five different eyeballs, all different colors and different shapes and all searching desperately for something to look at. He blinks again, slowly, and the skin of his eyelid stretches taut over their mass. When he opens his eyes once more, they’ve amalgamated into one, indistinguishable from any other aside from the extra pupils.
“I need the sugar,” Martin says. He needs to go to the basement to get it.
“I have it right here,” Jon says, holding it out because he’s always been holding it. Jon’s sweet like that. Jon knows that Martin hates going down to the basement because the basement is where things with legs and wings and chittering pedipalps lurk in the corners, and Martin can’t do laundry anymore without the lint trap in the dryer filling with mutilated moth wings and vitreous. It doesn’t make much sense when he thinks about it, honestly. He knows there are no bugs in Scotland, just like there’s no rain.
“May I have it?” Martin asks.
“You may,” Jon says, and his hands don’t blink as they pass it to Martin’s. “Tell me more about the tower.”
“I don’t know,” Martin says, which is at least partially true. He doesn’t know because he doesn’t want to, and so it sits like a cancerous mass in the back of his skull, at the base of his brainstem. He uses a spoon to pick through the legs mixed in with the sugar and mixes it in.
“You do,” Jon insists.
“I don’t,” Martin argues; he can’t help the way his voice pitches. “I don’t know what you want from me, Jon. There was a tower and words and stairs and insect wings. I don’t know what else you want.”
He doesn’t mean to get upset with Jon. He isn’t, truly; he’s just frustrated that Jon expects him to know something when he doesn’t remember it. Martin doesn’t remember much from before, these days. It should be a blessing. It should be a good thing that he can’t remember much of the archives or of the worms or of his mother being dead. All Martin knows is the cabin and all of its idiosyncrasies; all Martin knows is Jon at the center of it all. Jon is his ever-burning flame at the center of it all. There’s no real need to know anything else, when he’s just going to orbit until he falls in anyway.
“I’m sorry,” Martin says. “I don’t mean to get upset.”
“It’s alright,” Jon says. Martin says. Someone says.
“I just don’t remember anything, really. I’ve never remembered my dreams. You know that, don’t you?”
“I do,” Jon answers. “You’ve told me before.” Jon always remembers his own dreams, all cloying and crawling. Martin wishes that he could take some of Jon’s dreams, sometimes, just so Jon doesn’t have to dream them. Does that make sense? He thinks it makes sense.
“I’m sorry,” Martin says. “I love you. I wish I could remember. Should I remember, Jon? Is it bad that I don’t?”
“I know,” Jon answers to none of his questions.
“I just get so tired when I try to remember. Like...like something is weighing me down in my mind at the thought of it. I know there were insects, but that doesn’t make sense, does it? There are no insects in Scotland.”
“There aren’t,” Jon agrees. Just like there are no people. Just like there is no sky.
“Maybe it’s a metaphor,” Martin says, because he just can’t stop talking. “Maybe I’m supposed to know something, and I don’t, and it’s burrowing at me. Like an insect.” Like something with fangs and digging, needle-like proprioceptors just waiting to find purchase. To pull him apart. Martin doesn’t remember Jon pulling him apart yesterday, plastering his skin in long strips over the parts of the peeling cottage wallpaper, where it’s still hanging on the walls even if Martin doesn’t look. There’s no point in him remembering that, so he doesn’t. It’s as simple as that.
“Maybe so,” Jon says. Turns off the stove. Grabs a plate with his arms with too many joints and slides Martin’s breakfast onto it. Jon doesn’t eat breakfast anymore unless he eats Martin, but Martin doesn’t remember that, either.
“Maybe,” Martin says; his chest is aching in the center around the fluttering muscle, and his breathing is getting quick. “Maybe—”
“I think you should sit down,” Jon says before Martin can let himself get worked up further. “I made you eggs. They’re just the way you like them.”
“Oh,” Martin responds, and just like that the feeling is gone. Poofed straight out of his being as if it were never there in the first place. He was anxious about something just a moment ago, wasn’t he? Anxious and scared and he couldn’t remember. What couldn’t he remember? He doesn’t know anymore. “Thank you,” Martin says. “I love you. I made you tea, too.”
“Thank you,” Jon smiles — except he doesn’t because he doesn’t have a mouth anymore. Just a bright, golden eye situated amongst all the others across his face. It doesn’t matter though, as he raises the mug to his lips and lets the tea crawl its way out of the mug and down his chin, dribbling to the floor in a viscous pool of legs and antennae. Martin smiles at this as he takes his plate. Lets the little spark of joy that’s been kindling in his chest bloom to fruition; Jon liked his tea today enough to actually drink it, which means Martin’s done something right. What a good job, he thinks, taking care of Jon like that.
Martin takes his plate to the table. Jon follows him, in all his jerky, half-human movements, and sits down with his too many joints across from him. The chair bows under Martin’s weight as he sinks into it because the house isn’t all that solid today, you see. Some days it’s just like that. Some days it’s impenetrable, like reinforced steel. Others, it’s soft like a jumper, like a nest, pockmarked in holes where the mud hasn’t dried from all of Jon’s hard work. Martin likes each kind of day for different reasons. Martin likes everything Jon does, when he’s trying so hard to be human.
“I love you,” Jon says with his not-mouth as he crouches across from him. “And I’m sorry about this.”
“I know,” Martin answers. Does he know? He isn’t sure. It just sounds like the right thing to say.
“I wish it could be different,” Jon is saying again. “I wish we could have our own house away from it all. I wish that this could be real.”
“It’s okay,” Martin replies; he doesn’t want Jon to stop talking. “It’s not like we could afford our own house anyway. We’ll make due. It’s okay.”
“I love you,” Jon says again, “I do. I hope you know that.”
“I do,” Martin answers. “I love you too, Jon.”
“Does that scare you?”
Yes, Martin wants to say. “No,” he says instead. “Of course not.” Jon knows, either way, and smiles wide with his so so very many clusters of eyes, all spilling out of their sockets and threatening to drip and skitter down his cheeks just like the tea. Martin wonders where the tea’s gotten off to now. He wonders if he’ll find it in the lint trap later, along with all the other twisted shells of the house and its many wings.
Martin looks down at his breakfast before him as it blinks back up at him, just once, its pupil glittering and hungry. Then he presses his fork into the center, watches as it pops and oozes forth with vitreous, and picks up a piece. Raises it to his mouth.
The same moment that Martin remembers he can breathe is the same moment he remembers he can blink, eyes fluttering and flitting against the unforgiving watchfulness of the sky above. He’s so close to it now, he can see. So close that he can see when the sky bows down under its weight, bulging against the atmosphere nearly close enough to scrape its cornea against the tower’s tip. The tower stretches up to the sky to meet it, and yet it will never reach it. No matter how much it grows and grows and grows of flesh and bone and pulpy organic matter, it will still always stay just the slightest bit out of reach, untouchable except by the beating wings of its Archive. Its Archivist. They’re the same now; it doesn’t matter which name Martin uses.
It doesn’t take but a moment for the Archivist to notice he’s awake, the nervous hum of his wings coming to a stop as he lands on the stairs where Martin is built into the structure itself. Not fully, of course. His head and his arms are still exposed while the rest of him is wrapped in nesting mud from the Archivist’s own creation to keep him warm while he works. Some days, Martin calls to him. Some days, the Archivist listens, alights on its digitigrade legs that are all chitin and coarse hair and shapes its body into something more knowable, more almost-right, even if it doesn’t fit quite in the skin anymore. He wishes he could forget the moment Jon had reached the top of the tower and shed his skin like a too-small exoskeleton. Why can’t he forget that? Why can he forget everything else, but not that?
The Archivist approaches, all joints and nervous energy as its antennae wave, and Martin opens his mouth. “Jon,” he tries to say. He can’t form the sound to voice it. He doesn’t remember how to use his voice anymore, just like he’s forgotten how to use any other parts of his body other than his eyes. That’s quite fitting, isn’t it? Beholding would be proud, he thinks bitterly, and the eye above confirms his thoughts as it watches him without blinking.
The Archivist does not answer, does not speak — it doesn’t have a mouth to do so, anymore — but it is almost gentle as it cradles Martin’s face in two of its hands. Like it loves him, in its own impossibly god-like way. Maybe it's just working on instinct, at this point, or maybe, however unlikely, it still remembers how.
The Archivist holds Martin’s face and presses their foreheads together. Lets the knowledge flow between them in waves. The last thing Martin feels is the tickle of its proboscis slipping up under his eyelid, and then the dream begins again.