Chapter Text
Martin liked to think he wasn’t a violent person by nature. Protective, certainly. Strong enough to do what needed to be done to keep the others safe, he hoped. Standing next to the likes of Melanie, however, he couldn’t see himself ever tapping into the raw anger that poured off her in waves.
For all he hated Elias, he found it hard to imagine just…letting loose the way he knew the others might. Beating him bloody with anything on hand, turning on him the same way he once turned on Leitner and splitting his skull as recompense for all the manipulating and entrapping and murdering.
Melanie never fumbled with weapons when she turned her sights on the things that infiltrated the archives. Screaming bloody murder, she cut and slashed and stabbed and sliced until it seemed as natural as breathing to see her hand curled around the hilt of a knife. Sudden, bloody, brutal.
Talking to Peter Lukas, Martin could almost understand the appeal of following the path of a violent god.
“But what am I supposed to do?”
“Think of it as…a vacation,” Peter suggested. His polite smile couldn’t hide the fact that he gritted his teeth through every strained word.
“While the others are still stuck in the archives.”
“You need to let go of your attachments, Martin.”
“I’m doing this because I want to protect them. How am I supposed to keep going if I forget why I’m doing all this in the first place?”
“Don’t worry about all that. There won’t be anywhere to escape to once you’re on the Tundra.”
“That’s really reassuring,” Martin deadpanned.
“Reassurance…isn’t one of my strong suits. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have things to do.”
“But you didn’t answer my—” Too late.
Martin glared at the empty space that Peter occupied not a second before and hoped the man could still see it.
The Tundra was somehow smaller than he’d expected it to be. Of course, it was still easily the biggest boat he’d ever seen in person, but once on board he began to realise how little space there really was. The rooms were cramped, pressed so close together it came closer to claustrophobia than “the spirit of true loneliness.” Only after they set sail did he begin to develop a new understanding of the nature of his voyage.
Being alone while surrounded by people was a unique form of torture he’d never fully appreciated before. Even in the archives, surrounded by people a misstep away from tearing out one another’s throats, at least he had the luxury of small talk. Shared smiles with the barista in the cafeteria, inside jokes with Rosie on the nights he left through the front doors instead of camping out in storage. The crew of the Tundra gave him a wide berth, never offering much more than a stiff nod when he muttered apologies for bumping into someone, or thanks when they served him food in the mess hall.
Talking was a habit Peter assured him he would break eventually, but privately Martin suspected he would forget his own name before he dropped the manners his mother instilled in him so deeply.
What bothered him more than the solitude was the boredom. The first week wasn’t so bad, with a whole ship to explore and a backpack of books to occupy his time, but the inevitability of it weighed on him heavily as the narrow corridors cemented themselves in his mind. By the second week, he knew them too well to become lost in the bowels of the ship. By the third, he’d begun to loathe the slate-grey of the walls.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d been allowed to keep his phone. At least then he would have been able to scroll through his Instagram feed and take comfort in the endless supply of dog photos at his fingertips when he grew restless. Maybe it would have helped to play games when his mind grew foggy from the under stimulated, or even simply to be reminded that life outside the confines of the Tundra continued to exist.
Even without the warm comfort of a familiar voice on the other end of the phone, he would have given anything just to be able to flick through his photo gallery again. Refresh the details the clammy fog seemed determined to blur.
Of course, that was the point of this whole exercise, wasn’t it?
Refreshing the details would defeat the point of this, Martin.
Reminding yourself of your attachments won’t help you let go of them, Martin.
I want you to slowly drive yourself insane with boredom, Martin.
Amazing how quickly he’d grown to loathe the voice of a man who hardly ever spoke.
The one thing Peter hadn’t seen a reason to try and pry away from him was his love of poetry. Either because he didn’t know, didn’t care, or genuinely saw no reason to make Martin give up a primarily solitary hobby. Regardless, his writing soon became his sole refuge in the drab and painfully mundane routine he’d found himself trapped in.
While the members of the crew worked themselves to the bone finding ways to occupy their every waking moment, Martin poured over the collections he’d carefully selected for the trip and toyed with the blank pages of his notebooks. He’d packed plenty, so supplies weren’t an issue so much as inspiration.
No TV to distract himself when he got stuck, no internet to hunt for the word balanced on the tip of his tongue, no headphones to listen to his favourite soothing soundscapes. Just the aching embrace of his self-imposed solitude, without so much as a comforting word to break the weeks of pained silence.
What he did have, and what even Peter Lukas wouldn’t dream of taking away from him, was the ocean.
The visceral fear of losing his only source of refuge made him reluctant to take his notebook up to the top deck where it would be exposed and in plain view of the sunken, haunted eyes of the ship’s crew. It didn’t stop him from spending hours up there, searching for the right words to describe the peaks of the perfect blue waves.
Martin remembered Jon mentioning that he grew up in Bournemouth, never more than a short drive away from the ocean. Leaning over the railing, he tried to imagine what Jon would think of the breath taking view stretching out in every direction. Did he even like the sea? Or did his nostalgia for his childhood end with the gritty, coarse sand he would inevitably track back home after a trip to the beach?
Had he ever been on a boat before? Or, like Martin, would he find the Tundra strangely alien? What would he make of Peter Lukas? Of Martin leaving the archives to pledge himself to one of the entities?
It hurt that he could only speculate, the gaps in his knowledge gaping and unfillable.
Somewhere in a world far removed from his own, Jon lay motionless in a hospital bed without even the rise and fall of his chest to offer the illusion of life. Martin wished he knew which direction to look back in, but they’d been surrounded by empty ocean so long he couldn’t even hazard a guess. Perhaps there was no direction, only a place where the Tundra existed and a place where it did not.
Sometimes he liked to guess how many kilometres separated him from the hospital bed. When they first departed, he’d marvelled at how the Tundra effortlessly outpaced the surrounding vessels. Looming over them all as it carved its path out of the port. Out in the open water, without fixed landmarks around to offer a sense of relative space, it slowed to an agonised crawl. No end in sight, no indication of any form of life beyond the distant horizon. Nothing at all, beyond the endless sprawling sea.
It helped to think of their distance as a physical, measurable thing. Something that could be mapped and charted if you knew the way. Given the right knowledge and the right tools, he could navigate all the way back to the archives where Jon would no doubt be waiting to lecture him on taking a leave of absence from work without informing him.
At some point, the layer of thin mist settling over the water became a more immoveable barrier than the physical distance. Unable to shake the chill creeping under his skin, he found himself thinking more about how cold Jon would be when he woke up. Even with a functioning heart, he remembered the muttered comments about the stiffening joints in his hands when the chill invaded the normally sweltering archives in the winter.
Jon never turned down an offer of tea, even if only to hold the mug for warmth as he read his statements. After realising this, Martin stopped being put off when he poured their contents down the drain a few hours later. Realised for the first time that, for all the snarky comments he made, Jon never once asked him to stop.
He wondered if Jon was aware of the cold as his eyes darted back and forth behind closed eyelids, tracking horrors Martin couldn’t see. It would be kinder if he didn’t, but his god didn’t care much for acts of kindness.
Martin knew he needed to let go of Jon eventually. To focus his attention on protecting those who still remained in the land of the living. And to protect the people left, he needed power. To obtain power, he needed Peter Lukas, and for that he needed to succumb to the Lonely.
So, Martin stopped looking in what he imagined was the direction of a distant landmass and focused on his real reason for being there.
Losing himself in the solitude was…more difficult than he anticipated. The loss and sorrow made it easier to wallow, but the cramped quarters and lack of direction made him restless. He never expected to miss separating jumbled statements or tracking down the many misfiled ones in the labyrinth of shelves that made up archival storage, but the lack of stimulation made him more irritated than melancholic.
He tried thinking Lonely thoughts, an easy enough rabbit hole to get lost down, but after a few hours something would inevitably shake him from his dazed state, and he’d be back to fighting to offset the crawling need to do something.
Given a shred of self-confidence, he may have taken up jogging like some of the crewmates, but he saw little appeal in running laps around the deck, and even less in joining their silent march.
Instead, Martin threw himself whole-heartedly into the task of trying to describe the ocean.
He expected the challenge to lose some of its appeal after a few weeks out at sea, but even as the numbness of the fog crept in, the sight of the endless waves never lost its novelty. Growing up in a densely packed city, he found it hard to explain the feeling that incredible, inescapable emptiness brought him. The awe mingling with a visceral terror as he imagined a sudden lurch hurling him over the railing and into the churning waves.
How long would it take for the ship to vanish over the distant horizon-line? It may seem to trail lazily across the waves, but he knew it would look quite different from the perspective of someone watching their only hope of salvation vanish. Even the trail it left in the upset water would fade soon enough, leaving no indication they’d ever been there at all.
Martin supposed he might be able to last a while in those waters if he were equipped with a life jacket, but if the ship never came back for him, what then? Would it be the cold that killed him? Or would he have to wait for dehydration to do the job? Could he hold out for a whole day? Two? Three?
Would it matter? Martin thought numbly as he leaned over the railing to watch the sharp peak of the boat stir white sea foam in the still waters. What are a few days worth when it would take me years to swim to shore?
These thoughts made him feel very small in the face of the ocean’s enormity, and he supposed that must be a good sign. What could be more lonely than the prospect of an inevitable end, alone in the endless waves with only the stars to keep him company as he came to terms with his fate?
The sunset became a rare constant to separate the days, and his nightly ritual of wandering onto the deck after dinner to watch it became a grounding routine. Some nights he even brought his notebook, and while the crew ate in silence below he wrote about the fading rays splashing smudges of red across the cloudless sky, content in the knowledge that the Lonely would never sap the colour from the sunset the way it did from people. It helped to know that some things were still sacred, untouched by the dread power they served.
He was wrong, of course.
The thin sheen of fog that lingered in the air around the lone ship grew dense as they charged onwards. Martin suspected it was less a matter of drawing closer to something so much as leaving something else behind, leaving everything behind. The dense filter dimmed its brightness with every passing day, and at once his nights of watching the sun set from the quiet deck became painstakingly numbered.
He could only watch with mournful eyes as the sheet of grey dulled the vivid colours streaked across the sky. It curled around the hull in a cold embrace, growing in the vacant corners until it spilled over and took its root in the bowels of the ship. He saw it in the air he exhaled, how his breath hung in the air a little longer than it should have. A little lazier, unhurried as it grew reacquainted with the mist seeping in through the walls.
Despite being surrounded by water, the ship had always felt dry, though never quite warm enough to fully alleviate the lingering chill. Now the air tasted damp, its icy tendrils snaking down his throat and coiling in the lining of his lungs and still it didn’t stop spreading. Hiding in the soft marrow of his bones, freezing his blood as its creeping march pressed on.
The irrationally rational part of him clung to the notion that it made sense. They must be headed north, of course the nights would get colder. Martin needed to get ahold of himself, stop personifying a natural phenomenon. Fog couldn’t be malicious.
But this fog was, and in the depths of his sluggish heart he knew that it would hollow him out until all that would be left was a cold and empty skin. Would he even remember who he’d been before? Or would the hollow ache serve as his only reminder that he’d once been whole?
He barely noticed the crewmates anymore, just tricks of the light that walked and moved, and on the rarest occasion spoke. To instruct, to ask questions that couldn’t go unasked, to say anything that needed to be said and offered no sense of connection.
When he lost sight of the distant horizon, Martin closed his eyes and searched for the right words to describe the sound of the waves lapping at the metal of the ship. After weeks (months?) of staring out at the ocean, it was easy to summon the visual to match.
He realised with a start that the steady rhythm still shifted as if to match the changing weather conditions. He never saw any sign of change beyond the constant fog, but the harsh slap of water against metal told him plainly when the weather turned the waves choppy.
He couldn’t see the sunset anymore, but the mist didn’t reach high enough to block out the stars.
Forgetting the crew entirely, Martin started lying on the deck at night. If he slept at all, he dreamed of the same sky he saw when he was awake. Perhaps he learned to doze with his eyes cracked open, or maybe the stars painted themselves against the backs of his eyelids to keep him company.
The stars were his favourite, of course. Perhaps the only silver lining to this whole miserable trip. Without the London light pollution, he could see them. More than he ever thought possible, more than he ever knew could be seen. It boggled his mind to think that every distant pinprick as a star, every bit as bright and searing as their own sun. So many, farther away than his mind could possibly comprehend.
So much farther than he could possibly travel in a thousand lifetimes, yet their brightness reached him even here. Penetrating the impassable fog and the threat of endless solitude to reassure him on the long nights spent alone. He’d read somewhere that it took light years to travel between the stars and the Earth. Decades, centuries, millennia. Numbers he’d seen written down but never truly comprehended before, and he wondered why they’d never seemed worth thinking about.
The hugeness of it made him want to scream, but who would hear it? Who would care? Tears rolled off his cheeks to splatter against the deck, indistinguishable from the splashes of sea spray. If he leaned over the railing, they’d drip all the way down to the waters far below. His misery would be just another drop in the ocean, and the thought made him want to laugh so hysterically that more tears would join the first. No matter, of course. If he rang every drop of moisture from his body, it still wouldn’t amount to anything more than a pinprick in the face of the ocean’s immense vastness.
Such a lonely thought, but somehow it didn’t feel the same as the aching chill of the mist. The ocean didn’t care about his solitude or his sadness. Wouldn’t even notice if it swept him out of sight of the Tundra. The fog drank in his suffering and threatened to strangle him with its creeping tendrils. It would separate him, leave him to wither where there could be no hope of salvation…but the ocean would kill him out of sheer uncaring. A bacterium at the mercy of disinfectant, so miniscule he could only be worth a passing thought as part of a collective.
He wondered if the Tundra counted as that collective but dismissed the thought out of hand. How many ships sailed these oceans every day? Every year? Spanning across the centuries, would a thousand legions of fishermen and soldiers and saviours and destroyers be worth noticing? Would all the people on all the lands it touched?
Why call it Earth at all when it’s so much more water than land?
He didn’t know the answer but looking up he knew the stars cared even less. It would be a thousand years before the sight of him could reach them, and he’d be long dead before they decided if he was worth looking back at.
Martin either didn’t notice or didn’t care to notice the night the crew of the Tundra roused from their slumber. Awaking one by one to gather on the deck, more mist than men as they stepped aboard their lifeboat without ever exchanging a word. Had he turned his head to watch them go, he would have caught a few of them staring at him. The ones with a semblance of colour in their cheeks, and an alertness burning through the feverish glaze in their eyes.
But he didn’t, and the crew of the Tundra rowed their tiny lifeboat out into the still waters (yes, still tonight. The waves hardly made a sound as they lapped at the hull). The fog pressed closer. Cold enough to freeze his blood solid in his veins and thick enough to choke him if the sight of the stars hadn’t already stolen the breath from his lungs.
The more he tried to wrap his mind around them, around the sheer quantity of them, the more they seemed to multiply until at last he swore there were more stars than black sky between them. He wondered how he could ever have believed the creeping fog would block out a sight so impossible and bright that it cut through his closed eyelids when he tried to blink in the face of their brilliance. It sounded positively absurd.
It proved him wrong again, of course. The tendrils of fog stretched high above his head to form a slate grey canopy, perhaps deep enough the fill the miles of sky between him and the edge of the atmosphere. Or maybe only a few inches thick, just enough to blindfold him in a perfect bubble of solitude.
It didn’t matter either way. The fog tried to trick him into believing the Tundra was his whole world, but high above his head the stars shone down on him as they had long before he existed even as a concept, and would continue to long after the distant memory of him faded. He’d never known anything so deeply before, but he knew the fog could never truly block out the stars. The sight of them burned into his retinas, he only had to close his eyes to the fog to see their piercing light again.
He couldn’t hear the ocean anymore, but that was okay too. He knew how quiet the waters could be when the waves stilled, undisturbed except for when the ship ploughed forward and sent ripples of white foam through the calm blue. If he stretched his imagination, he could hear the roar of a storm a thousand kilometres from where he lay sprawled out on the deck.
The Lonely whispered that he was all alone on this ship. No crew, no ties to the land. Nothing to alleviate the maddening isolation except the all-consuming numbness. He knew he was supposed to let it in, remembered in a distant sort of way that this was what he signed up for. To let the Loneliness eat away at his thoughts and hollow him out until the mist that filled him with every breath was all that remained to hold him upright.
Martin couldn’t remember why it once mattered to him so much. Staring up at the terrifying enormity of creation and knowing with complete, despairing certainty that nothing would ever care enough to stare back, he wondered why anything had ever mattered to him.
His fingers twitched, and with some surprise he realised they were still curled around a notebook. Pages of futile attempts at capturing such a sight when the words didn’t exist to encompass all they were. Scratches at a door so large he couldn’t even find its edge.
Except…he wrote about something else before he turned his gaze to the endless sky and sea. Someone in a hospital bed, asleep in another world and unreachable in every way that mattered. Separated by death and miles and a curtain of fog, how could he be naïve enough to even dream of reaching him again?
Martin stared at the stars he couldn’t see. Stars he could spend a thousand years trying to reach without ever getting close, yet the distance made them no less dazzling to behold.
Somewhere in a hospital in London, Jon dreamed even in death. A world away, perhaps, but somehow they both lay beneath the same sky, and at once Martin understood what he had to do.
The fog, though dense and suffocating, wasn’t heavy enough to keep him pinned to the deck. It blinded him, but he didn’t need to see with the sound of the waves roaring in his ears. His outstretched hands met cold metal, and though he couldn’t see it, he didn’t hesitate to throw himself over the railing.
The tendrils tried to grip him tighter, but the dizzying rush of falling jolted him free of its choking numbness. Wind whipped his face, stealing the air from his lungs until not even the mist could take hold there. The fall lasted longer than it should have, but beneath him waves crashed in a steady rhythm, in perfect time with his pounding heartbeat. Time lost all meaning in the stretch between the deck and the water, and though the fog filled the air he fell through, it could not touch him with the adrenaline burning in his veins.
At last he hit the water, plunging through the surface, and sinking like a stone. It was dark without the pale glow of the fog, but the dark didn’t scare Martin so much as the depths it concealed. He sank deeper and deeper, though he could no longer tell which way was up. It swallowed him, all-encompassing no matter which way he twisted.
Perhaps he wasn’t sinking at all anymore, only floating as the endless black consumed him on all sides.
Empty lungs filled with water, robbing him of the ability to voice the scream begging to be released from his throat.
He flailed and kicked, though he knew there was nothing in the depths to reach for. He’d been swallowed by something far greater than the fog encircling the Tundra. Something bigger and more terrible than it could ever aspire to be, bathed in a dazzling beauty its creeping tendrils couldn’t touch.
Martin closed his eyes as a different kind of numbness washed over him. One that buzzed, alive with a terror so intense his mind could only process it as serenity. Instead of darkness, a billion pinpricks of light filled the endless space around him.
Not empty, he realised as his silent scream relaxed into a smile of acceptance. Just vast.