AN: Written for a dear mutual on Tumblr, who provided the following prompt: "would love ur take on the first time John tells Esther about his nightmares bc 1) they are actively horrifying, holy fuck, and 2) he deserves to have a friend sit + listen + reassure him he's not the monster he imagines he is." Y'all I am so out of practice writing it ain't even funny. XD I think I deviated from the prompt somewhat, as I couldn't quite imagine John fully giving voice to the things that haunt him in the tentative time in which this was set (pre-Esther's transformation), but I hope it's enjoyable nonetheless!

Mr. Martins, Esther had come to notice, never slept well. Despite his very words to the contrary mere days ago.

She couldn't help but notice. Notice the way he never seemed to truly sleep for more than an hour or two at a time, never seemed any better rested when he did wake than he had when he'd retired. Granted, she had seen him but little these past days, so it remained a possibility she was observing exceptions rather than the rule. But she doubted it. With Mr. Dippel's deadline looming ever nearer, she found herself more and more often abed late, rising early, infringing upon hitherto-unseen parts of night in half-fruitless attempts to keep even abreast of her work. Martins never spoke of what work he had found for his own, but she could guess well enough, the unmistakable sweet-rot of death clinging to him like a subtle but stubborn perfume. Corpse-bearers waited only for dead men, and death waited for no man at all. Sometimes she would be hours abed herself by the time he returned, that heavy, shuffling trudge so peculiar to him never failing to rouse her no matter how quietly he moved. And sometimes their positions reversed, though if he was disturbed by her comings and goings, he gave no outward sign of it. She didn't think she had ever met a man more unobtrusive. Yet neither had she ever met one, her late husband excepted, of whose presence she was so acutely aware. She had taken to watching him, when she roamed awake and he did not. She had never intended it. She wasn't sure she did even now. But she couldn't quite bring herself to desist any more than she could bring herself to feel guilty over it.

It was a strange thing, to be a dwelling's sole waking soul. A strangely intimate thing. The keen edge of night's loneliness wearing at her skin, tempered only a little by the knowledge that another shared the air she breathed, the physical space her body bade her take up. Yearning like cold hands wrapped about her heart, warmed only by the presence of another, the sole thing reminding her why she deigned each day to rise. It hardly mattered that he wasn't awake to share aught else. She took what connection she could, nowadays, and if she took it while he slept she could comfort herself in knowing she wasn't imposing on him in any way. He never slept long after she woke, anyhow, and woke none the wiser to her silent vigils. So she kept at them, during the grey hours ere morning could properly be called so, when she forced herself to uphold the banal motions of human existence. Boiling water. Slicing bread. Tidying the shop. Watching him. And noticing.

He always slept flat on his back, hands hidden beneath the heavy quilt. Like a corpse, she had thought more than once, and couldn't have said why the thought discomfited her. Stock-still, stone-faced, by all appearances dead to the world. She mightn't have noticed anything was wrong at all but for the way his breathing changed. He breathed slowly, normally, more slowly than anyone she'd ever known. Once, seized by a morbid curiosity, she had taken up her watch and counted: only six breaths in a minute, and shallow ones to boot. His chest barely seemed to rise at all. But sometimes those breaths quickened. Deepened. Grew heavy, uneven, as though his body was rebelling against itself, dragging air up through lungs that no longer worked as they ought.

The first time she had seen it happen, she had been in the shop, darning one of his stockings; the shattering of the dawn's tenuous peace had so startled her she'd pricked her finger. She hadn't thought at all before rushing through to wake him. Just a light touch to the shoulder, but he had flinched away from her, then stilled, pale-fogged eyes boring into hers as though he expected her to strike him, as though she were a stranger. She had backed away from the bed, slowly, whispering empty assurances she could no longer call to mind, and all the while he had stared at the spots of blood left behind on his shirt. Neither had spoken another word that morning.

The second time it happened, she'd let him come round on his own. That was the day she learned he never woke violently, no matter the force of whatever haunted his sleep–at least, he never did when she was there to see it. One moment he sounded near expiring and the next he was silent as he ever was, dragging himself from the bed and plodding over to the table beside her with nary a word spoken of what had passed. He'd said nothing, so she hadn't asked, and wondered if it was any sort of comfort to him, to wake into light, into silence taken for acceptance, into some semblance of normalcy. Her Ben had always found it so. She thought that if she dreamed herself, instead of falling each night into oblivion and begrudging every morning she was forced to leave it behind, she might have found the same.

This time was different.

It didn't start that way. He slept. She watched the water in the pot. The sun hid its face behind heavy fog. She watched him. All as it was several mornings prior. She had become settled enough into their unspoken routine that she didn't even look up from spinning the eggs atop the table when she heard, through weary indifference's rushing water, the sound of his breaths growing more and more laboured.

Only two eggs. He never ate in the mornings–or at night, that she'd noticed, and she sometimes suspected he only took tea with her because she offered, or because he didn't wish to refuse her, for she had never seen him finish a cup. She couldn't have said why that discomfited her, either.

The pot's lid was rattling. Carefully, she poured some out into the chipped teapot, then hung the pot back over the hearth and took up a ladle to lower the eggs into what remained. When he woke she nearly dropped one. Because she had heard it. She oughtn't to have heard anything. She never had before. But today he did not fall back into silence, but let out a panicked gasp, nearer a retch or a sob than anything else. And the heaving did not stop. Fabric rustled, sharply, crushing the stillness of the air like paper clenched in a fist. When she looked up she saw him, not on his back, or sitting up like nothing was amiss when it was plain everything was, but curled up on his side, the heel of one hand pressing hard into the centre of his brow, just above the bridge of his nose. That hand shifted, digging in above both eyes, squeezed shut, in sequence. The other hand clawed the blanket away from his face, as though its mere proximity choked him. Even from across the room she could see him shivering.

"Mr. Martins?" she called softly. "Are you well?"

He said nothing for a long while. She didn't expect him to. But as the silence stretched on, fraught with all he could have said, she fancied every small sound magnified to painful clarity. The water dripping from the lid of the pot as she lifted it to let it settle; the whistle of escaped steam, the roiling boil. The way his breaths at last calmed, slowed; the way he swallowed, thickly, labouring around whatever clogged his throat to breathe out a shaky sigh.

"Aye," he mumbled, muffled around the pillow and his arm. She didn't believe him. Couldn't. Not rough and raw as his voice sounded, its velvet richness scraped bloody over the nightmare's jagged rocks.

She oughtn't push him. Not because she feared any reprisal; she had long since given up railing against what she could not change, fearing the unspoken lengths to which men might go in their depths of passion. What little energy she could spare day to day was too hard-won and fleeting to waste on such folly as fear. But because she had opened her home to him, and with it her heart, however little she'd intended it. Because he had never taken anything from her that she hadn't been willing to give freely. If nothing else, he deserved the courtesy of mustering up what scraps of dignity he could in peace.

But if nothing else, he had become a friend. And she could never forgive herself for standing idly by while a friend suffered.

"There's tea if you'd like some," she said. It needn't be anything more than that, she offered but did not say. A shared cup of tea. Shared company. Shared grief.

"...Thank you." He rose slowly. Stiffly. As though he were in pain. As though the weight of each year and sorrow he'd lived sat heavy upon his back until even his great strength was forced to bow beneath the strain.

She settled the strainer over her cup, then his, and wondered, as he limped the short distance to the table, if she oughtn't to have given him her arm instead. He never looked well, really, but he usually didn't look quite so much like a dead man unburied as he did now. Moving like a man much older, craggy face haggard and gaunt, jaw bristling with silvering stubble, the ever-present shadows beneath his eyes livid like day-old bruises. He still wore yesterday's shirt and trousers, and carried about him the acrid musk of smoke and fear-sweat. And always, beneath it all, that faint sweet-rot of death.

She offered him his cup and the new sugar cone, a present from Ada. He took both with a faint nod, but didn't meet her eyes, not quite seeming to know where (or when, she thought, and wondered why she had) he was. His hands still trembled slightly, but the knife she handed him was dull. Five scrapes of sugar in the tea. Mechanical. Like he'd done it a thousand times before, though she had only ever seen him take his tea as she made hers. Eyes still downcast, he passed the cone and knife back to her. He made no move to stir his sweetened tea. Takes tea sweet, not stirred. She couldn't help but smile, overcome by a rush of fondness for this strange man and his stranger tastes. Sweet, not stirred.

"I didn't take you for a man fond of sweet tea," she teased–but when he took a sip he grimaced, shuddered, like he'd just tasted something spoiled. She frowned, not a little perturbed. "Is it not to your liking?" You fixed it yourself, she nearly said, but for a brief moment he looked not dissatisfied but ill, and she couldn't bring herself to chide him.

"I–" His brows drew together sharply. He glanced down at the cup, and seemed to start at what he saw; something like a spasm shook his hand, sending the scalding tea slopping over the rim and onto his bare skin.

"Your hand!" she cried. She pushed herself up, grabbed for the cloth napkin nearest her hand–but he hadn't moved at all. Hadn't so much as flinched. Only stared, blankly, at his dripping hand. At skin that should have since burned an angry pink, but instead remained sickly pale.

"I'm sorry." His voice was flat, hollow. She was struck, of a sudden, by the notion that he wasn't quite speaking to her, wasn't quite aware of her at all. "I'll clean it up." Still he didn't move.

"No, it's–let me. It must hurt." He didn't seem hurt. But she doubted he would tell her if he was. Slowly, as though she were reaching out to an injured, cornered animal, she took the cup from his still-shaking hand and set it down, far enough away that no motion of his could upset it. Then she daubed at where the burn ought to have been with the napkin before letting it fall to sop up the rest of the spilt tea. She kept a firm hold of his hand the while, firmly tracing the creases in his palm with her thumb. Though it hadn't even been a minute since the accident, his hand was cold as stone.

"I used to take it that way," he muttered, and for a moment she had no idea what he meant. "The tea. Used to like it, before–"

"Before?"

"Before–" he shuddered again, like he'd been seized by a sudden chill. Someone treading over one's grave. Before the war. Before the wrong. Before he'd swung.

She didn't know who he had been, before. A soldier. A condemned man. A hanged man. Mere fragments, revealing no more of the whole man than scraps of bone revealed the form of a creature long dead. She didn't know who he had been, and she didn't know that it mattered. He wasn't that man any longer. Could never be that man again. She knew only who he was. And the man she knew was not one she could imagine hanging for anything, not even his own despair.

Still she clung to his hand. Limp in her grasp, a dead weight, neither accepting nor shying away from her solicitation. She thought of the night he had staggered into the shop, scarcely bleeding from a wound that would have killed a lesser man but half-insensible from agony all the same. How cold his skin had been then, too, even at the ragged edges of the cut where the heat of fever was wont to start. She hadn't dared take his hand that night, stained with grave dirt and his own blood as it had been. She wished she had. Wished she had offered him that small kindness, something with which to anchor himself to life.

"Do you dream of the war?" she asked. She didn't expect an answer. Wasn't sure why she'd asked at all, except she had grown weary of the silence, and had no reason to think he would begrudge her asking.

His eyes, reddened and glazed still with the vestiges of too little restful sleep, remained fixed on their joined hands. "Not anymore."

"My husband did." Tentatively, she shifted her thumb from his palm to his knuckles, stroking sharp ridges and tender valleys and dry, cracked, cold skin. "Often, while he lived. And when he woke he would apologise, too." She bit her lip, not hard enough to draw blood, but more than hard enough to draw forth the sensation of Ben's cheeks beneath her fingertips instead of Martins', damp with fear-sweat and tears. She was just barely conscious of the way her own hands started to shake as the memory wound itself about her throat like the hangman's noose that had left no scars on him. "I told him once the men at Horse Guards ought to have been the ones apologising to me, not him. They ought to have apologised to him, too. It was on their heads alone he came back missing more than just an arm."

"Where did he serve?" he asked quietly. She wondered if she imagined the way his strong fingers gripped hers more tightly, just for a moment.

"Albuera. With the Resurrectionists."

The moment she spoke the word she wished she hadn't. His hand jerked, convulsively; wrenched itself from her grasp with force enough to sting and clenched into a white-knuckled fist as he dragged in an unsteady breath. Nostrils flaring, eyes wide, he looked more frightened now than he had when he'd woken. Something uncomfortably like betrayal pooled in his eyes as they fixed, knife-like, on hers. The same look Ben had levelled at the physician who had dismissed his nightly terrors as mere nostalgia, the physician who had attended his body when she had found him beside the bed Martins now slept in, service pistol in hand.

She couldn't bear to meet his gaze any longer, for fear of what might come spilling out of her if she did. "I've upset you."

"You…no." He crossed his arms tightly over his chest; hunched down enough that the high collar of his shirt brushed up against pallid lips. "'Twas no fault of yours."

She folded the damp, tea-stained napkin, as small as it could go. "You served with them?"

"No. The 95th. Rifles."

A Riflemen had saved Ben's life at Albuera. She wondered if it had been him. "A Chosen Man?"

He scoffed. Choked a little on the sound. "I were proud of that, once. Chosen."

Once. "And now?"

He shook his head, slowly. Like the pendulum of a ponderous old clock, back and forth, back and forth. "I didn't choose this."

"This?"

"This. Life." A muscle in his shoulder twitched with each word he ground out, like he could scarce refrain from striking out at something, someone, she couldn't see. "This life, I–" With a sigh he slumped down again, all the coiled rage of a moment before unwound, unmoored. A lone spark in the numbing fog, snuffed out. "Do you ever–" He sighed again, heavy through his nose, and curled a bit more tightly in on himself. "I do. I think about it."

She frowned, not liking the strange intentness that had overtaken his gaze. "I'm afraid I don't follow, Mr. Martins."

"About how none living choose to be born. Yet they can choose to carry on living. Or to die." His fingers dug so harshly into the muscles of his upper arms she was sure he would leave bruises behind. "But that choice is denied most. They die at the behest of ill luck, or God's disfavour, or another man's whim." He scoffed again, lips twitching up in a pitiful facsimile of a smile. "Another man's choice."

Abruptly he stood. Spun away to face the back room, the piano behind the door. His whole body trembled, taut as a frayed cord about to snap, but he stood perfectly, frightfully still. "You asked if I dreamed of the war. The men I killed. Some I had to. Some I chose to. I don't. I don't see them. I feel them but I don't see them, not like–" An elbow twitched this time, towards something. Someone. In the back room. "They died so I could live. But we both knew I could've done the same for them. They didn't die to give me life, they didn't have that choice taken from them." He rounded on her, eyes no longer dull but fever-bright, but even when she stood he made no move to close the distance he'd put between them. "Do you understand that? The difference? Do you?"

She shook her head, feeling something in her heart splinter. "Mr. Martins, I–"

"I am the beast with the face of a man." He took a shaky step towards her–faltering, like a child walking on two legs for the first time."Born of a hundred deaths." Another step. "They gave me life." Another. "They chained me up." Another. "Heaven is closed to both of us and they've robbed me of the key–!"

She surged forward as he collapsed, but not in time to catch him. His knees hit the hard wood floor with a dreadful crack, and she only just managed to wind both arms around the bulk of him before he sagged into her embrace, as dead a weight as his hand had been what felt like half a lifetime ago, and brought her to the floor with him. He shivered, violently, but made no noise. Only when she felt the shoulder of her gown grow damp did she realise he was weeping, tears lost within the furrows carved harsh in his face by too much toil and grief. Drawing in a measured breath, she forced the welling tide of her own grief back behind the floodgates she kept ever locked in her mind, and brought one hand up to rest against his cheek. Damp with fear-sweat and tears. She pressed her thumb against his lips, stalling a garbled litany of apologies, drowned in the flood of silent tears. A hand held out to another in pain. An anchor. A lifeline.

"Don't apologise," she said fiercely, "don't. Listen to me. Men haunted by grief are not to be blamed for the burdens other men forced them to carry. For the demons other men set upon their minds. Do you understand that?"

The whispers that tore at her heart ceased, but it was a long while before the tremors wracking his frame subsided. Longer still before he could speak again. "...Some are."

"No." She needed him to see. Needed him to know she meant what she said. "A man who inflicts suffering on others with no thought spared for those he has hurt will not feel himself shadowed by the memory of them. He might be called a monster, should be called a monster, but he will never call himself that. He would never think it of himself." His eyes, tearful still, darted up to meet hers, but all too quickly skittered away again, back to the ground like he wished it might swallow him whole and disgorge only nameless bones. "But a man made to–hunt, or hurt, or kill against his inclination, against his nature, a man who knows not who–died for him, for his life, but carries ever after the weight of the dead and damned in his own soul? That man is no monster. No matter how his heart cries otherwise."

With all the care with which she'd hold a newborn child, she guided his head to lay upon her breast. Upon her throbbing heart, that marked the time of life lived against her better judgement. Life lived by her choice alone. "You are no monster, Jack Martins." The earth would not have him, so she branded his bones with his name. The name of the living man before her, not the dead man behind him. "I will believe that until the day I die. And I will tell you the same until the day you believe it as well as I."

There was a full two pages in there that simply…appeared while typing this up. I do not choose the words the brain worms choose to bestow upon me.

Some fun notes:

I am slightly obsessed with the idea that, post-resurrection, Marlott's body simply does not function as a normal human body ought. We get some of this in the show: the preternatural strength, the enhanced healing ability (and the ability to take wounds that would kill anyone else, no matter that they seem to cause just as much pain). Why shouldn't other functions be irreversibly fucky? We never see him eat or properly drink; maybe he can't. The dead don't need to breathe; maybe he doesn't, either. As a fun tidbit, normal breathing rate for adult humans is 12-18 breaths per minute, maybe 12-20 depending on the person. I fondly (not) recall the days of taking patient vitals in the hospital, and let me tell you, if we had someone coming in with 6 breaths a minute they would be down in the ER faster than you could say shit. That is. TOO slow.

For a bit of Peninsular War lore, the Resurrectionists was a nickname given to the 3rd Regiment of Foot, owing to the heavy casualties and high injury rate sustained at the Battle of Albuera (1811) during the Siege of Badajoz (any Sharpe fans out there will know that name!). I was today years old when I learned of their existence and thought it was entirely too on the nose not to put in a TFC fic.

Nostalgia, a term put into usage by 18th-century Austrian physician Josef Leopold, was a pre-Civil war name for PTSD, and, I thought, an interesting one.