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You always hated the rain, the way it dulls the senses you most value and heightens the ones you don’t. Doesn’t help, of course, that the experience of a downpour is now irrevocably intertwined with incomprehensible loss. You weren’t particularly close to him. Sure, there was respect there, but it was the obligatory sort that comes with an imposed hierarchy rather than the kind born of admiration or fondness. He was a little impulsive for your tastes, a little too eager to make a move before considering fully its consequences. And this coming from you ? Well, that’s how you know it was bad. But still, he’s a person. Was a person. Thoughts and feelings and a web of connections to others all gone in one impossible instant. Not the sort of thing you can ever truly get justice for, although Lord knows you tried. The anger, the helplessness, the whole new set of guidelines for what constitutes ‘reality’ that you were made to keep locked up tightly inside with just a scribbled signature—it changed you.
Of course, you know it was still you . It’s been you this whole time. There might’ve been a ‘before sectioning’ and an ‘after sectioning’ just as there was a ‘before scar’ and ‘after scar,’ but it was you. It is you. The way you see it, nothing could be more of a disservice to this time spent and these lives lost than to profess a claim of elaborate puppeteering. At best, The Hunt tugged at what was already within you. It was simply a means of scratching an itch you weren’t able to reach before. You don’t try to argue with yourself about what kills were wrong or which, if any, were right. It doesn’t affect the gravity of them, and it doesn’t change that you killed because you wanted to. As you stand in the archives toilet and survey in front of the mirror the way your pullover hangs off your shoulders and swallows your entire torso, you consider the possibility that you might also need to feed the hunger, in order to stay here by Basira’s side. But ‘need’ is not something you ever mulled over before your time in The Buried.
You spent a hell of a long time in that endless, suffocating pit and re-emerged undeniably changed. But how much is sustainable? How much relies on remembering that fresh taste of freedom? You question. You worry. You doubt.
You appreciate the rain like you hadn’t before. You still don’t like it much, but your first time smelling it and feeling it on your bare skin in 8 months—a moisture so much richer and purer than the diluted damp of several meters buried—well, let’s just say it’s the first time you understand what people mean when they call an April shower refreshing. You close your eyes and let it soak right through your t-shirt. You don’t even put on shoes before rushing outside as fast as your still-weakened legs can take you at the sound of the first drops hitting the weathered roof of the institute, preferring to feel the solidness of the ground under your bare feet. It's a welcome relief from the discomforting shifting of earth deep within that coffin that still finds you holding your breath in frozen terror at the memory of it. You stay there, drop after drop rolling down the sides of your face, until your hair is a stringy mess atop your head, plastering itself to your newly clean-shaven sides in a way you used to hate so much it prompted you to keep an umbrella in the patrol car at all times (sure the headgear helps, but after a particularly windy storm that once blew it clean off your head, you’d rather be safe than sorry). You stay there until you hear your name in Basira’s voice, a mixture of concern and something else (Frustration? Amusement?).
You appreciate connections like you hadn’t before. Basira, intensely. Jon, even. That’s probably the shift you least expected. But he went down for you. He knew you wanted to kill him, but down he went into what might’ve been his own grave before you got a chance to throw him there yourself. He crawled down even though there was a good chance he wouldn’t crawl back out. Of course he told you he felt fairly confident in his escapist prowess when you asked, but you have a good enough read on him to know that a lot of that confidence is little more than a mask for the stifling fear of powerlessness. You know that mask well. You’ve worn it yourself. Still do, sometimes, although you’re making an effort to pull it to the side where Basira or Jon are concerned. Being trapped down there for so long has given you a paralyzing fear of any sort of containment, including the emotional sort. You want to practice being honest, even vulnerable.
Down there you couldn’t escape the truth. Although it didn’t take long to realize this wasn’t damnation—just the sick work of another twisted entity—in a sense it was Judgement Day (if God’s version of a day was, in fact, several months). Faced with your life up to this point, circumstances both within and outside your control and actions yours and yours alone, you had little choice but to consider if it had been worth it. The dirt would shift above and beneath you, a rise and fall almost like an ocean tide wherein you wondered if this was the moment you’d finally drown in it. And you wondered—had it been worth it? The thrill of the hunt, the excitement of the chase, the briefest moment of thrilling victory followed by the sharp disappointment of an end you always seemed to reach far quicker than you wanted. And now your own likely end, down here meters and meters away from all that had borne you. If you ever got out of there, you wanted all this time spent gasping and choking and helplessly writhing to be for more than a return to the same sort of life you were content to live prior. If there was to be an ‘after the pit’ you didn’t want to allow yourself to be consumed by The Hunt anymore. Not when you were starting to desperately yearn for the little things—the prickle of a breeze on the bare back of your neck or the smell of Basira’s shampoo—the sort of things that had previously seemed so trivial compared to the hulking desire
to find
to chase
to kill
The hunger has a way of overshadowing everything else when you let it, the way thick storm clouds could block the sun so efficiently you might think it nighttime without a quick glance at a watch or a clock on the wall.
You’ve made good on your resolution so far. Not to say it’s been easy. You can hear it calling your name again, without the layers of dirt and mud and grime to mute it. You can feel it prodding at you. It’s the worst when you’re alone. You really try not to be alone anymore. If that makes you weak, so be it. Basira certainly seems to think it does. But then again, she never knew how much of you was The Hunt when you first became partners (first in law enforcement, then in the rest). You decide that the best well to tell her is to simply show her. If she doesn’t like it, she can leave. You say as much to Jon one slowish afternoon when Melanie is at therapy and Basira is off doing whatever latest top-secret investigation she thinks you’re too fragile to hear about. Well, it’s more like you declare it in front of him. You don’t really have organic conversations so much as you each choose to share certain thoughts out loud just to appreciate that someone else is there to hear them. You don’t miss the way his perpetual frown deepens, undoubtedly accounting for all the parallels, considering the commonalities. You know what he’s going to say before he even asks but you’re in highish spirits so you let him repeat himself for the umpteenth time.
“So you and Basira, you’re?”
“Fine.”
“Hm.”
“Fine as we can be, all things considered.”
“I suppose it’s as much can be asked for.”
“It’s as much as I need.”
You return to your task, brushing the nails of your left hand in your favorite shade of deep, sunflower yellow. You don’t do it for aesthetic’s sake. You’ve never been one to prioritize appearance over practicality. But this task, however banal, does have a practical use. It keeps you grounded (morbid pun unintended?) and helps to center your thoughts so they don’t drift too far outside the realm of what’s tolerable. Jon tried to forbid it in his office because of the smell. Hah. That fell through the moment you caught a lingering whiff of cigarette smoke on his person one day when you came to sit and share his space in the far corner by the window. You got a glimpse of Georgie’s car pulling up to collect Melanie for her weekly session before turning to him and telling him he'd been caught.
“Hunter’s nose.” Chipper, pointing to it with a small grin creeping onto your exhausted face. You loved the look of crushing defeat on his. It was almost as good as the look of fear during a chase. Almost.
So some days he has a cigarette in lieu of lunch. And some days you paint your nails in lieu of a hobby. Most days you don’t talk much, some days not at all. But it’s undeniable you both enjoy the company. And you think he likes the sameness as much as you do. Not just the consistency (something harder and harder to come by these days), but the likeness. Your faces hallowed and bodies weak yet heavy from the effort it takes to resist what calls to you. The slightly inhuman way you carry yourselves and lounge about there. It’s not perceptible to the others but you know he’s noticed it in you and thus in himself, too. Basira is quick to defend your humanity as opposed to his increasing monstrosity. You don’t push it—both because you’re worried about her emotional state and because, truth be told, despite all your posturing you are as afraid of being abandoned as you’re sure Jon is. But that doesn’t mean you don’t see all the places where the roads intersect. You both feel the same pull, albeit in different directions. You’re sure it was that mutuality that allowed him to find you and pull you up. You’re positive it was that which you both fear most that bound you together, both in the days spent down below and the much less oppressive time spent above.
Sometimes when the sun sneaks low in the sky or the grey clouds cast a somber shadow on the desk and old shelves and too-full filing cabinets you find yourselves slipping into light, unguarded slumber. You don’t think anyone has caught you yet. You kind of hope someone does, so that they’ll see just how human you can be. At some point lounging in this creepy, horrible office that has seen about as much hell as you have, you draw a conclusion. Somewhere between fitful nightmares and dreamy conjures of Basira’s voice in your ear interrupted by the sound of Jon’s horrendous snoring, you decide that it has, in fact, been worth it.