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Jon is trapped.
Not that he minds. As places to get stuck indefinitely go, being pinned to the sofa by one’s napping husband is probably among the most pleasant. Absentmindedly, he runs his fingers through Martin’s hair. The white streaks are wider than they were this time last year, getting closer to matching Jon’s.
Once, Jon had been self-conscious about his grays. It had been an outward sign of weakness, or so he’d thought. A signal of the truth he’d tried so hard to hide: that he was overworked, frequently tired, prematurely frail. Only human, in other words. Before he’d come to work at the Magnus Institute—before he’d taken that fateful promotion—he’d resented being only human.
How times change.
Now the white hairs that encroach on Martin’s auburn curls and his own darker mop are a symbol of the life they’ve built together in the wake of what is now referred to as the Calamity. Jon’s not entirely human anymore, and neither is Martin, but they’re close enough for comfort. They’re not old men yet, but they’re getting there, day by day, week by week, year by year, wrinkle by wrinkle. The arithmetic is simple: two men, plus a little house in a quiet suburb, plus friends, plus a cat, plus time, equals the best future Jon could possibly have hoped for.
“Jon?” comes Martin’s voice from the kitchen.
Well. Two-ish men.
“In the living room,” Jon calls back.
“Come here and try the pasta sauce!”
“I can’t,” answers Jon. “I’m stuck.”
There’s a loud but fond sigh from the direction of the kitchen, and then Martin bustles out, one hand holding a spoon, the other cupped underneath to catch drips. “Tell me what you think? I thought I added plenty of salt earlier but now I’m not so sure—ah.” He pauses when he catches a glimpse of his other self, head pillowed on Jon’s chest. A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. “When you said stuck, I thought you meant Her Highness was sitting on you.”
Jon chuckles. “Her Highness is considerably easier to move,” he says.
“Jon!” Martin claps his free hand to his chest in mock outrage before hastily moving it back under the spoon. “Move a sleeping cat? I’m pretty sure that’s worse than treason.”
“Oh, naturally,” says Jon. “Which is why I wouldn’t dare even consider moving a sleeping husband.”
Martin snorts before crouching down beside Jon’s head and blowing gently on the spoon. “Can you at least sit up a little? I really do need a second opinion.”
Between the two of them, they contrive to allow Jon to taste the sauce without dripping on the sofa, a minor miracle. Jon hums thoughtfully before pronouncing, “Needs more salt.”
“See, that’s what I thought. Thanks, love.” Martin leaves a peck on Jon’s forehead and then vanishes back into the kitchen. Jon smiles to himself and goes back to petting Martin’s hair.
Martin continues to doze for several more minutes before suddenly jerking awake and half-sitting up in one motion. “Jon, did I leave the stove on?”
“You didn’t!” calls his other self from the kitchen.
Martin sighs with relief and lies back down, though not before poking Jon’s chest in mild reproach. “Why’d you let me drift off? I always get disoriented, waking up in the middle of doing something complicated.”
“Sorry,” says Jon. “I didn’t realize you were already working on dinner until after you’d already fallen asleep, and then I figured it was best to leave you and hope you didn’t wake up until after the stove was off. I’ll check in next time.”
“S’all right,” says Martin, and yawns. Then he fumbles for the remote. “Will you rewind to where we were, please? And don’t let me fall asleep this time?”
“Might want to sit up, then,” says Jon, and Martin grumbles before maneuvering himself into a sitting position. His hair is a mess, Jon notes with slightly guilty amusement.
Rewinding is a matter of skipping back only a minute or two, as Jon had paused the documentary they’d been watching together as soon as he’d realized Martin was no longer paying attention. They watch another half hour in cozy silence, punctuated only by the occasional clatter or snatch of humming from the kitchen.
Finally, Martin calls both of them to the table, and they settle in to eat. As usual, Jon sits on one side of the table with the Martin who’d watched the documentary with him, the quieter one, at his left, and the more talkative Martin sitting across the table from him. They’ve experimented with half a dozen different sitting arrangements over the past five years, but they always return to this one.
It’s like a scenario out of the pulp-paged puzzle books that Jon had worked through in uni. Jon always wants to sit next to Martin, but doesn’t have a preference between his two halves. Martin, who unlike Jon is left-handed, doesn’t like to sit on Jon’s right side at the table, because it makes the elbows of their dominant arms bump uncomfortably. Furthermore, Martin doesn’t like to face himself directly, preferring to have his bodies arranged either side-by-side, facing different directions, or at an angle relative to each other; it doesn’t bother him to look at his own face, but he complains about his memories being difficult to detangle afterwards, once he’s slept and can remember both sides of the encounter. And, finally, the clue that makes the whole puzzle resolve down to a single solution: if forced to choose, Martin’s talkative self prefers to be able look at Jon, while his quiet self likes to have the opportunity to hold his hand.
Even after five years, Jon still sometimes finds it hard to wrap his head around Martin’s no-longer-new state of existence. Martin isn’t two different people: he’s one person living in two bodies. But he’s also, by definition, not a unified individual: he frequently disagrees with himself—usually about minor things, but not always—and though each of his two selves remembers everything that’s happened to both his bodies since the moment that that particular self last woke up, he doesn’t always interpret the same events the same way. He even has different preferences when it comes to romance: his more gregarious self likes dressing up and going out to dinner, delights in giving and receiving bouquets of flowers, and writes a great volume of love poetry; meanwhile, his more reserved self would rather listen to Jon read a book than venture to a restaurant, and prefers flowers in the garden rather than in a vase. He’s still a poet—he’s still Martin—but he tends to write about nature or everyday life rather than romance.
After dinner, it’s Jon’s turn to load the dishwasher while Martin feeds Her Highness and removes the latest load of laundry from the washing machine. The routine is comforting, even as it carries a hint of contention; Martin still insists that he should be doing two-thirds of the chores, while Jon has yet to give up arguing for a fifty-fifty split. But even that old argument is well on its way to being worn-out and comfortable with age; they’ve found a routine that works, and if they both occasionally steal a task or two from each other, it all eventually comes out in the wash.
Jon straightens with a grimace, stretching his back until it cracks before shutting the dishwasher and setting it to run. “Want to finish that documentary?” he asks Martin. “I think there’s only about twenty minutes left.”
Martin nods and gives Her Highness one last pat on her fuzzy gray head before turning to follow Jon out of the room. Before leaving, Jon turns to where Martin is also closing the door to the airing cupboard. “Care to join?”
Martin smiles but demurs. “Nah, I’d rather remember the whole thing all at once than try and figure out what’s going on from the ending. Think I’ll turn in early.”
“All right.” Jon stands on tiptoe to kiss him as he passes. “Good night. I love you.”
Martin reaches down to touch Jon’s face, gently, softly. “I love you too.”
As his footsteps recede up the narrow staircase, Jon turns back to where Martin leans against the wall nearby, watching, expression soft. “Shall we?”
Jon’s appetite for real food has never been predictable, and ever since the Calamity, it’s been less convenient than ever. He’d finished as much of his dinner as he could at the table, but he’s glad to find that he’s able to stomach a small handful of the salted pistachios he keeps in an airtight jar on the coffee table for exactly this purpose. Martin doesn’t say anything, but he offers Jon a tissue to wipe his hands on afterwards, and hugs him tighter once it’s thrown away.
They don’t fall asleep on the sofa, but it’s a near thing. They shepherd each other up the stairs, brush their teeth side by side—although he has only one wardrobe, Martin insists on using two toothbrushes—and dress for bed.
When it comes time to actually lie down, Jon slides under the covers immediately, but Martin pauses. His other self is already out cold beside Jon in the larger of the two beds, the one that can hold all three of their bodies if they don’t mind a bit of squeezing. The size of the master bedroom had been one of the reasons they’d chosen this house, out of the dozen or so they’d toured: Martin always wants to sleep holding Jon, but he’s not exactly small, and neither one of him likes to feel crowded or overheated. He’s usually fine as long as Jon is in the middle, but not always, so the second bed—a twin rather than a double, to avoid taking up even more of the floor space—is a necessity.
He doesn’t use it tonight, though. Instead, he shoves the top blanket down to the foot of the bed and then slides in next to Jon, who eagerly presses his cold hands and feet against Martin’s ridiculously warm body. “Good night,” Jon murmurs. “I love you.”
“Good night,” Martin whispers back, and drapes a heavy arm over Jon’s side. He doesn’t need to say anything else. Jon knows what he means.
Most of the neighbors haven’t figured it out. They probably never will, honestly. There are many conclusions both easier to jump to and more interesting to gossip about than the notion that Martin and his “twin brother” are the same person.
Jon is vaguely aware that a portion of the neighborhood thinks there’s some kind of deception going on, whether on Jon’s part (“That poor man, doesn’t he know his husband is carrying on with his brother behind his back? His twin brother, no less?”) or on Martin’s (“It’s fine if he wants to pretend to be his brother sometimes around the rest of us, but around his brother’s husband as well? Something isn’t right there.”), despite his and Martin’s best efforts to avoid provoking scandal. At least most of the surrounding families seem uninterested in stirring up drama.
Jon sometimes wishes that he could tell the real truth to more than just a handful of his and Martin’s friends. But, although most people old enough to remember it agree that the Calamity was real and not a hoax (though there are always some exceptions, of course), very few people came out the other side with any notion of the supernatural beyond vague memories of impossible terror and perhaps a few nightmares. Whatever it was that had happened to make Martin’s additional self fail to absorb back into him like he’d expected, it hadn’t been a common occurrence.
Procuring a birth certificate and education history for “Kristopher Blackwood” (Jon is certain Martin chose the spelling as a joke, though Martin swears up and down it has nothing to do with his false middle initial) had been a headache and a half. In the end, it had only been possible because a great many people really had lost important documentation during the Calamity, and mistakes in the official records had been unexpectedly numerous.
So they don’t explain. The gossip would only get worse if the whole neighborhood thought they were crackpots.
“I think the girl next door is onto you,” Georgie remarks one day, as the five—or rather, four—of them crowd around the kitchen table for a homemade brunch. She and Jon aren’t as close as they once were, perhaps, and might never be again. But in the wake of the Calamity, they’d found that even as ambivalent acquaintances, it had been a comfort to know one more person who understood the full extent of what had happened. And after a few years of friendly chats over meals a lot like this one, they’d each found themselves ready to call the other a friend again. “Or, even if she doesn’t actually know, then she’s sort of right by accident. She asked as we were going up to the house if we were going to see the bloke with two husbands.”
“She did?” asks Martin, mildly alarmed. He and Jon trade glances across the table.
“Yeah, but then she said her mum had told her to stop saying that the neighbor man had two husbands,” Melanie chimes in. “It could be just a kid getting words mixed up. How old is she? Five? Six?”
“Looked more like eight to me, but I’m no good at kid ages,” says Georgie.
“Seven and a half, I think,” says Jon. “There was a party last May.” He sighs. “It might also be just gossip. Their neighbor on the other side is a bit of a busybody.”
Georgie reaches over and rests a hand on Jon’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. Should I not have brought it up?” She glances between him and Martin.
Martin flaps a hand. “No, it’s fine,” he says.
“You think I’d get tired of curiosity, but I haven’t yet,” says Jon with a wry smile. “I’d rather know what they’re saying than be surprised, I suppose. And it’s not so bad. Inconvenient, certainly, but, well… unpleasant as it is to be a source of gossip”—Georgie winces, just slightly, though Jon’s long since accepted her apology—“it’s not exactly likely to sow real discord between us. And even if this lot turns unfriendly, we do have other friends.” Georgie and Melanie both smile at that.
“And besides,” adds Martin from across the table, “it’s only a few of them who talk, really. I think most people have decided that it’s none of their business.”
“Really?” says Georgie. “People mind their own business? In a cozy idyllic suburb like this? I’d have thought the gossip would be absolutely mad.”
Martin shrugs, but from where he sits beside Jon, he pipes up, “Maybe before the Calamity, it might have been. But I think this lot had some bad experiences with gossip, during. Most of the people who talk the loudest have been here less than five years, and the rest give them the cold shoulder when they get too nosy.”
Jon blinks and turns to look at him. “I hadn’t realized.”
Martin smiles, a little bit sadly, and bumps his shoulder against Jon’s. “Course you didn’t,” he says, teasing. “You’re always looking for the best in people. Uncomfortable truths are my specialty.”
“Better you than me,” says Martin from across the table, and then he chuckles, both of him at once, sharing a private joke with himself.
Melanie, who’d situated herself at the table to have one of him on her left and one on her right, frowns slightly. “How do you tell them apart?” she asks, vaguely in Jon’s direction. “Because this is giving me a headache.”
“Practice,” says Jon. “But also, most of the time, it doesn’t matter.”
Her brow wrinkles. “But—he’s always making jokes—excuse me.” She turns to the Martin sitting across the table from Jon. “You’re always making jokes about one or the other of you being better at things. Right?”
Martin shrugs, and then frowns at himself. “I do joke about that, yeah. And it is sort of true. I’m more inclined towards making polite small talk, and smoothing over disagreements, and, uh, also-me is more inclined towards sticking up for—us, me, whichever. And stopping me from being dishonest with myself. But it’s not a case of better, it’s more like—being in the right mood, or the right frame of mind. I dunno. It’s sort of hard to explain from the inside. But Jon’s right. Most of the time, it doesn’t matter.” He smiles the smile of a man about to say something irritating on purpose. “I’m always me, no matter which one of me I am, and neither one of me is less me, or more me, than the other.”
Melanie groans, feels around for a clear bit of table, and then leans over and gently rests her forehead on it. Martin laughs again, as do Jon and Georgie, and the topic falls by the wayside in favor of more cheerful things.
Normally, it’s difficult for anything to distract Jon from his monthly ritual of gazing into the antique kaleidoscope Salesa had tracked down for him in the nick of time after the end of the Calamity, but he finds his mind wandering back to what Martin had said over brunch. Eventually, he puts the kaleidoscope away with painstaking care in its padded box, and slides the box into the back of the closet where it would be invisible to a burglar. He’s sated enough on scraps of ambient, spare terror to go another month, if not more, but he still feels unsettled.
“That took a bit longer than usual,” Martin murmurs from the twin bed as Jon climbs into the double. “Everything all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” says Jon soothingly, and lets Martin tug him close, his back pressed tight against Martin’s chest. “I didn’t mean to worry you. I was just… a bit distracted, that’s all.”
“Oh?”
Jon rests his head on the pillow and looks across the gap between the two beds. “It doesn’t bother you too much, does it? That people talk?”
Martin smiles at him, features barely visible in the dim light from the window. “It doesn’t bother me at all.” But he also clears his throat pointedly from where he’s pressed against Jon’s back, and, across from Jon, rolls his eyes and sighs in response. “All right, it does bother me. I don’t like that people think I’m lying to you, or that you’re lying to me. But we’ve got as good a situation here as we’re likely to find, I think. I wasn’t kidding when I said it was only a small handful of them. Or, I don’t think I was, anyway. It’s definitely a thought I’ve had before.”
“Wasn’t kidding,” Martin murmurs against the back of Jon’s head.
“If we lived in a perfect world, it would be easier,” Martin continues. “But we don’t. So we’ll have to make do with a pretty damn good world, instead. I think that’s more than fair.”
Jon blinks away a few tears. “Sounds fair to me as well,” he says, his voice choked. Martin’s hand fumbles up from his waist to his cheek, and Jon kisses the back of it before moving it to his chest. “Good night, Martin. I love you.”
“I love you,” comes Martin’s voice from in front of him, and “Sleep well,” comes Martin’s voice from behind him, and Jon drifts off, like he does most nights, to a deep and dreamless slumber.