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“You can’t save everyone, Jon.”
This, out of nowhere. This, in Jon’s office late at night with all the lights turned on. He doesn’t question it.
“Maybe not.” He tries for neutral, doesn’t like how his voice wavers. He’d turn his head away from her, try to hide his face, but she’d see through that in an instant. It’s her nature, Jon knows, to take in every small movement like that, pinpoint every weakness.
“But you’re still going to try.”
“I mean, I—I think I owe that much, at this point.” Silence from Daisy. She’s standing in the corner of his office, has been for about fifteen minutes now (he does not care to know with any more precision than that). Before, during the statement, she’d been pacing. They set her on edge, not that he blames her, and she doesn’t like staying still for long these days regardless.
“Mmh,” she offers after a moment. Jon waits. Words used to spill out of her before in jagged, unpredictable patterns. She would go quiet enough that you could forget she was there for the better part of a conversation, and then she would bite something out, caustic and brutal. Now they come slow, mostly, but that’s because she’s considering them. Especially in conversations like these, where she knows she is standing at the edge of something vast and dark and furiously miserable, circling it but not quite within striking distance.
Usually that slowness would claw at him. Jon wants to know , always. He calls it hunger, what he feels when he goes too long without bearing witness, without taking somebody’s fear into himself. It doesn’t feel like that anymore. It feels like holding his breath, this wait for knowledge. Suffocating all over again.
Daisy, though. With Daisy, he doesn’t mind.
However infuriating it can be, he likes that she at least is willing to try finding some way to be gentle with him.
“You know you’re not evil, Jon,” she says softly, inflection hovering somewhere between question and statement. He doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t want to argue. It’s too late at night for that, not that he’s needed sleep for the past few weeks. Not that he ever feels really safe when the lights are turned off.
“You’re a monster,” she continues, “but you’re not evil.”
“Daisy, I can’t,” he says, and he wishes it didn’t sound so pathetically weary, so pleading. “Not now.”
“Jon. You’ve made the choice to live. You don’t have to lie about it; I know it’s true. You had better figure out who you’ll live as.”
He finally looks at her then, turns to stare back at her. Bear witness. She looks hollowed out, like somebody’s taken a knife to her insides and neatly scraped away whatever simple, blood-slick things keep people alive. Her skin is unhealthy and dulled grey, and she’s wearing an oversized forest green jumper and baggy cargo pants to cover up how skinny she’s gotten, but he doesn’t need to see her ribcage to know how prominent every bone is. His stomach lurches at the thought of it.
Unbidden, his mind supplies him with an image of her from before, her from the Hunt. Muscular and long-haired and tall and smiling with canines just a little too sharp and long to look quite right. Trying to reconcile it with the woman in front of him now, rail-thin and slumped and half-smiling wearily, hair chopped uneven and short because she never felt like she could rinse the dirt out of it before she cut it (before he cut it for her, clumsy, unpracticed, with office scissors. Because she asked. Because she trusted him to?). Jon’s not sure which image is worse.
She meets his gaze evenly, flat hazel eyes as unyielding as they’ve always been. “If you’re going to live as a monster, you’d better stay a good one.”
He almost laughs. “I don’t think that’s how it works.”
“Well, why not? You’re still you.”
“Trust me, Daisy, I wasn’t all that good even when I was all human,” he mutters. She watches him from the corner, arms folded, eyebrow arched, something like a frown curling on her lips. She gets like this sometimes, spoiling for a circular fight that satisfies neither of them. They’re both still hungry at the end of these exchanges, Daisy for the thrill of ripping something apart, he for the satisfaction of looking inside something and dissecting it, knowing every piece and knowing he is right . They won’t stop, though. He supposes that’s why they got along so poorly before and get along—well, however they get along now.
“Good or not, if I’m going to die as Daisy, the least you can do is live as Jon.”
The clock on the wall is ticking away in silence. He didn’t keep one in his office for years, claiming that he didn’t want the incessant sound on the tapes, but Martin had very pointedly put this one up during one of Jon’s kidnappings so he couldn’t use his old excuse of losing track of time to stay late at work.
When he speaks again, he does so quietly. “You’re not going to die because of this.”
It’s Daisy’s turn to half-laugh. “Jon, you’re a lot of things, but you’ve never been a good liar. Either I reject the Hunt and I waste away, or I embrace the Hunt and you kill me.”
“D-Daisy, I couldn’t—”
“No, I suppose Basira would do it. She has a pretty firm stance on monsters these days, doesn’t she?” Scoffing, yes, but she looks away from him at long last, glancing down to fidget with the cuff of the jumper. It should feel like a victory, that animal signal of submission. It doesn’t. The look doesn’t suit her.
He sighs. “She’s—coping. With all that’s happened to us, to her, it—”
Daisy snorts and finally bridges the short gap between them, leaning against the back of his chair. “Don’t defend her to me, Jon. I love her, I really do, but lately she’s been…” She gestures vaguely to express what Basira’s been.
“Yes, quite…” He imitates the gesture to the best of his ability and finally gets a half-chuckle out of her before they both settle into a silence that is mostly comfortable. The clock ticks on and he watches the seconds spiral away, each minute folding into the next. He doesn’t mind the clock now, though he’s sure he gave Martin hell about it at the time. In the Buried, in the coma, in the depths of the Unknowing, he didn’t know how much time was passing. Time continues, no matter what he does. At least this way he can watch it go. There’s a comfort to its solidity. He exhales and he lets the silence take him and he watches the clock.
“I just wish it wasn’t so—so damn lonely,” Daisy murmurs in a low rumble behind him, so quiet he almost doesn’t catch it.
Jon inhales, deep and ragged, staring straight ahead. “Yeah. Yeah, me too.”
She drops a hand onto his shoulder, awkward and uncertain. The weight of her palm is heavy but unthreatening, and he leans back into her without question. He closes his eyes. It’s cold in the office, and everything is pressing down on him. They’re back, they’re out of the Buried, they’re here, they’ve been here, and it’s all wrong. It’s a dull but always-present ache.
“I miss him,” he says, just to speak it aloud. Just to tell something other than those goddamned tape recorders.
Daisy makes a low noise of acknowledgement but says nothing, just keeps the comforting heaviness of her hand on his shoulder. So he continues.
“I know you never knew him, really, but he was—”
“Is,” she corrects, still quiet.
His eyes sting. “Is. Yeah.”
Daisy tries. “You don’t have to tell me. I—I get it, you know? Having someone who…” Someone who. There’s no end to that sentence that he can imagine. Someone who doesn’t complete you, nothing like that; he and Daisy are too calloused for that, too world-hardened and weary, too bitter. Someone who is lodged in you so deep you couldn’t dig them out without damaging essential tissue? Someone who doesn’t want to hurt you but has claws hooked in you nonetheless. Someone who you look at and you don’t think safe and you don’t think home and you don’t think mine because you can’t afford to think like that in this world. Someone who is safe and home and yours anyway. Someone who you want to run to always, even if you don’t. Someone who wants to run to you always, even if they don’t. Someone who you think of first. Someone who you can turn off the lights around. Someone who, someone who, someone who.
“Yeah,” he says to nothing in particular.
“I miss Basira,” Daisy replies to nothing in particular. “She was my partner. Is, I guess, still. In some ways.” Her voice isn’t quite choked but it’s something just close enough to it that it makes him stand to face her. She looks at him, eyes glossy and unrelenting, and he looks back.
“I know,” he says, because he’s not sure what else to do.
She smiles weakly (God, she’d hate that he thought of it that way). “I know you do.” He sighs and pulls her into a hug. Or maybe she pulls him. They’re at a loss, the both of them. They don’t have much experience with these kinds of things. Friends, or whatever this can be called. The clock ticks on silently. He doesn’t know what it’s counting toward. He thinks that’s probably not such a bad thing. The future has never been kind to him.
He doesn’t feel safe when they hold each other. He knows better than that. But Daisy is gentle, all soft edges despite the prominence of her bones. It’s odd; he never would have described her as fragile before, but that’s what she feels like in her arms, like her bones are as hollow as a sparrow’s. Like if he applies pressure just wrong she’ll break with a sick crunch. Her breath is quiet in his ear, a slow in-out pattern that he finds himself listening to in the silence of this place. It makes him think of waves. More soothing, though, because the ocean is dead and Daisy is alive. Alive, and they pulled each other out of what might as well be hell, and they’re still in hell wearing a different face, and she is in his office, and she is hugging him, and she smells like lavender and dust and books and old, old blood. He tucks his face into the side of her neck and expects her to pull away, but she doesn’t, just squeezes him tighter.
Nobody hugged him after he woke up.
“Thank you,” Jon whispers.
She doesn’t ask him what for, just echoes it back. “Thank you.”
For now, that much is enough.