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Lynn Denlon tilted her head up slowly, hands dropping to place the rag down on the table. She had no way of knowing if the blood had been wiped away or not, and she doubted it mattered. Nothing here felt clean, anyways, as much as they’d tried to create a hospital room among the damp and the grime.
She closed her eyes, breathing slowly. Even that simple action, the uneven rise and fall of her chest, felt dangerous. Every motion, each turn of her head or uneven step, had the potential to be her last. Staying still was death, but moving at all was loaded, terrifying, risky - like stepping on a tightrope high above the grime of the city, like a knife balanced on the head of a pin, like the cold sweat of Russian roulette.
That was, Lynn supposed, the most similar to her unfathomable reality.
But there was nothing uncertain about the situation, not in the way that a roulette wheel might land on red or might land on black, or a gun might click past an empty chamber. There were no chips to lose, no brightly smiling dealers, no bright lights and flashy tokens. There was only this: the constant beeping of the stolen equiment in the small, tiled room, the flickering lights, the weight on her shoulders in every sense of the word. The heart rate monitor blipped steadily for the moment, leaving the horrible contraption around her neck dormant and cold. Dead.
Lynn glanced away from the monitor to where John lay, horribly still and rasping for breath. He was dying, she knew. There was very little she could do about it at this stage, without any of the proper equipment or resources. She’d already done more than she would ever have thought she could in these circumstances; Lynn shuddered at the memory of the carefully sterilized drill bit breaking through John’s skull, the horrible pressure of saw against bone. He was unconscious now, between the anesthetic and the trauma. Lynn couldn’t say she was surprised, given the circumstances, and it was probably for the best: his brain was incredibly vulnerable after such a horrible procedure, and any motion could disrupt the fragile stasis that he’d very luckily settled into.
She stared at him with eyes like a rabbit in a snare, fighting the panic that threatened to overwhelm her in the moment of silence.
With one last agonized look at the pale figure in the bed, Lynn turned away. She needed - she needed to be doing something. Anything, as terrifying as every step was. Standing in place was almost worse.
She turned towards the metal cart against the wall. The drill was still there, and the saw as well. She’d already cleaned them as best as she could manage, but the sight of them made Lynn feel dizzy. They were still speckled with gore, and the image was nauseating.
Unceremoniously, she tugged the plug from the wall and lifted the saw and the drill from their metal resting place. She could move them out of her immediate sight, at least. Not too far, in case - god forbid - she should need to use either again. Just far enough that she might be able to take stock of the makeshift hospital without her brain remembering with sickening clarity the smell of blood and electric heat, the deafening noise of a skull splitting into pieces under her steady hand.
Pushing through the plastic strips that covered the doorway, Lynn glanced around the warehouse for somewhere to place the two tools. There was an empty space on a table, between a mannequins body fitted with something that appeared to be sunken into its shoulders and connected to its collarbones, and a pile of chains. Lynn didn’t want to know what the prior was for, whether it had ever been used. She shoved the two tools down and made sure she didn’t look closely enough to see whether they were the only items on the table to show evidence of grisly acts.
Now what?
She leaned against the table, gaze directed towards the plastic enshrined doorway of the medical bay. There was nothing more she could do for John, unless he had another episode. The idea sent a shiver through her; he almost certainly wouldn’t survive any kind of traumatic episode, if it came down to it. He would die if there were any further complications, Lynn was reasonably sure. And if that happened, so would she.
Suddenly, she realized that her hands hand found their way to the collar around her neck and she tore them away. Thinking about the machine she wore was as pointless as agonizing over John’s heart rate monitor. She believed Amanda, that it would be nearly impossible to disable herself, and that moving too far away would result in her death. There was nothing to do except try not to set the horrible contraption off by some accidental motion, and keep an eye on John.
And Amanda.
Lynn glanced around the room, not spotting the other woman anywhere. Amanda was very clearly unstable, but had it not been for the device around Lynn’s neck and the particularly grim circumstances of John coming into her care, Lynn could almost see her as another grieving family member. She wondered if John was Amanda’s family, then shook her head slightly. Even if he technically wasn’t - and Lynn didn’t think he was, in any legal way - he undeniably was. Lynn had seen that kind of horror, those desperate tears, from countless people at the hospital. She almost felt bad for Amanda, who had seemed moments from breaking down when John had that horrific, bloody episode.
Lynn rolled her shoulders carefully under the weight of the lethal collar.
She almost felt bad for Amanda. Only almost.
But the absence of the other woman made Lynn uneasy, especially having seen how quickly she swung between bouts of violent rage and desperation, complete lucidity and unbelievable instability. The rules - and that almost made Lynn laugh, like this was all some innocent board game with a little paper instruction manual - dictated that Lynn only died if John died before that other man made his way through whatever hell the two had set up elsewhere. But Amanda seemed much less strictly confined to the bizarre ideology than John, and Lynn didn’t trust that Amanda wouldn’t kill her before the task was done. Having her in sight was better, even if the proximity was terrifying in its own right.
Sweeping her eyes across the maze of tables and myriad of grizzly devices, Lynn saw no movement.
“Amanda?”
She’d said it quietly, afraid to break the silence. Afraid to speak too loudly, lest it somehow trigger the death sentence around her throat, but there was no response.
She breathed out and tried again, louder.
“Amanda!”
Lynn’s voice echoed in the space, an answer with no answer at all. She had only just started to yell again when there was an answer from the other side of the space.
“What! What the fuck is it?”
There was a sudden rustle from a curtained off section of the room Lynn hadn’t noticed, and then there was Amanda.
“Is he okay? What - what’s happening, aren’t you doing your fucking job?”
Lynn was forced to back up as Amanda stepped into her space, eyes wild. Her back hit a table, and something metallic clattered to the ground.
“I said, is he fucking okay? I swear to god—“
“He’s - he’s fine.”
Amanda had looked dangerously close to grabbing Lynn again, her hands poised in front of her like weapons, moments away from reaching for Lynn’s throat.
“Good,” Amanda said, breathing a sigh of relief. “Good.”
She lowered her hands and Lynn let out a breath, her gaze following them as they settled at Amanda’s sides.
They were red, with blood caked under her nails and drying to a rusty brown wash across her pale skin. She must have gotten blood on them somehow during their improvised operation - there had certainly been enough to go around, and Lynn had asked for Amanda’s help as an extra pair of hands. She’d been shaken when it was done; maybe Amanda just hadn’t gotten the chance to wash up. She didn’t strike Lynn as someone who was happy to just sit around covered in gore as it dried, even if she was a part of this sick Jigsaw game.
But then - there, a perfect little droplet rolling down the finger of Amanda’s right hand and falling to the floor, a rose petal splash on the gray cement. Lynn couldn’t see where on the blood was coming from, but her eyes traced the path of a second drop as it joined the first.
Amanda seemed to notice that Lynn was staring, and she huffed a frustrated breath. Her right hand disappeared behind her back as the left one came up and settled on Lynn’s face, gripping her jaw and tilting her head up so her gaze was dragged back upwards.
“Well?”
Amanda stared at her intensely, forcing Lynn’s eyes to lock with her own through the strong grasp on her jaw. Her face was close enough that Lynn could see a fleck of blood just above her eyebrow, a slight smear on her cheekbone. There was something deeply sad in her eyes, some awful darkness that ached to get out. It was grief, but it was rage, too, there among the flecks of green in her hazel eyes. She didn’t blink, staring at Lynn and breathing steadily through parted lips.
The grip on Lynn’s jaw tightened just enough that the pressure began to tip towards pain, and Amanda leaned even further into her space. Lynn’s eyes fluttered closed, bracing.
“What,” Amanda said, suddenly close enough that her breath tickled Lynn’s cheek as she spoke low and quiet into her ear, “did you want?”
There was a moment of silence, and Lynn was frozen in place, pinned between the table behind her and Amanda’s form. Her hands were gripping the edge of the table tightly enough the her knuckles were white, and her breathe had stilled in her chest. She could tell Amanda was still close, could feel the even whisper of her breath and the heat rolling off of of her. Her hand was still firm on Lynn’s jaw, holding her face in place - as though she were making any movements at all, to pull away or otherwise.
Lynn broke the stillness with a sharp inhale, opening her eyes to see Amanda watching her, face too close to see more than just her eyes. They looked at each other that way for a few long seconds before Lynn breathed the words “You’re bleeding” into the quiet, cramped space between them.
Amanda stared at her another moment before releasing her grip on Lynn’s jaw with enough force that Lynn’s face was forced to to the side, like Amanda no longer wanted to look and be looked at in the way she had demanded moments before. Some kind of spell broke, and Lynn found herself gasping for air, almost dizzy from holding her breath without meaning to.
“It’s nothing,” Amanda said, all of the breathy quiet gone from her voice. She was looking dutifully away from Lynn, that persistent gaze turned towards the ground.
Lynn dragged her eyes away from Amanda and followed suit, looking at the floor. There was a small pool of blood on the ground where Amanda had been standing, the drops collecting in a haphazard puddle of color against the cement. Lynn rolled her eyes, huffing a muted laugh.
“Yeah,” she said, sarcasm dripping off of the word in waves. “Right.”
Amanda looked up then, eyes burning hot enough that Lynn took a step back, bumping into the table again.
“It’s fucking fine,” Amanda said, face with frustration. Her words dripped venom as her bloodied hand clenched into a fist.
“It doesn’t matter. You’re not mine - you’re not here for me, anyways,” she corrected quickly, bitterness seeping into her tone. Her gaze flicked over her shoulder towards to plastic covered doorway on the other side of the room.
Lynn wondered how many people in Amanda’s life had ever been there for her, in any way that mattered. How many things had been hers, how many people. It couldn’t have been many, or much. Not if she’d ended up like this.
“Don’t be an idiot,” was what Lynn said instead. Amanda look back at her, mouth quirked down into a frown, but Lynn continued before she could speak. “I can’t do anything else for him. Not right now.”
Amanda looked at her in silence, brows drawn, fists still clenched at her sides.
“Just let me clean up whatever the hell happened,” Lynn said. “Do you want it to get infected on all this rusty shit?” she asked, her voice slipping into the no-nonsense tone she used when patients were being petulant at the hospital.
Amanda looked at her, gaze flitting across Lynn’s face as though looking for something in her features. Lynn didn’t know what she was hoping for, but she must gave found it, because she said, “Fine.”
She turned away, moving swiftly towards the same curtained off area that she’d come from, not stopping to see if Lynn was following. Rolling her eyes again - there was something almost childish about the way Amanda acted, all fiery emotion and extremes - Lynn followed the other woman without question. Her gaze skipped briefly over all the instruments of torture that she passed, but she made no move to reach for them. She could still feel the smooth wood of the axe in her hand, could still hear Amanda’s condescending, bright voice telling her exactly what would happen if Lynn killed her. Lynn had thought about it, really thought about it, but when Amanda had turned around to look at her with that knowing smile, she’d accepted that it would lead to nothing except her own brains splattered across the wall.
Amanda had pushed through the curtains, and when Lynn followed her, she was sitting on a bed, waiting.
“Well, doc,” she said, voice light again. “C’mon and patch me up.”
“I got the right stuff back here,” she added, jutting her chin towards a selection of medical supplies on the blanket next to her, and a bowl of water on the table near the foot of the bed. A knife sat among the stark whites of the medical supplies, glinting against the blanket. There was also a box out, clearly where these items came from when they weren’t in use. Lynn figured that this space - this bed, these medical supplies, the photos on the wall - was the closest thing Amanda had to her own room. At least, here. She wondered - the knife, the medical supplies....
“Well? I’m waiting,” Amanda demanded with a grin. She stuck her bloody arm in the air and wiggled her fingers, a macabre wave.
There was one deep wound across her palm, and another set that crossed across all of her fingers, like she’d gripped something hard enough to break the skin. Two shallow lines ran parallel across her palm, clearly incurred separately. They oozed bright red, rivulets of blood dripping down Amanda’s wrist. Lynn couldn’t tell, beneath John’s blood and Amanda’s own, whether there were any other wounds on her arm.
The doctor moved forward slowly, reaching towards Amanda like one might move towards a wounded animal. Amanda, for her part, just watched.
“What happened?” Lynn asked, gently grabbing Amanda’s hand in her own. She maneuvered it so that it was tilted towards the light coming from a desk lamp as she sat down next to Amanda on the bed. Amanda was pliant then, turning her body to accommodate as the other woman gently moved her injured hand for a better view and settled onto the creaky mattress.
“Dog attack,” Amanda said, and Lynn could hear that she was grinning. Lynn looked up, scowling, waiting for Amanda to stop joking.
“Run in with an axe wielding maniac,” she tried again, smiling sweetly, like it was an inside joke between the two of them. Lynn couldn’t help the ghost of a grin that threatened the edges of her lips - maybe she was starting to lose it, just a little - but she schooled her expression into something she hoped would read as unamused and quirked a brow.
Amanda puffed out a breath, looking up at the ceiling.
“Does it matter? Just fix it.”
Lynn sighed, looking back down at Amanda’s hand. There didn’t seem to be any other open wounds, but there was enough blood that it was difficult to say.
“I’m gonna clean you up first,” Lynn said, slipping into the medical practice of announcing her actions to scared patients.
Amanda just hummed, staying still as Lynn turned and grabbed the rag that was folded over the edge of the bowl behind her. The water and the rag looked clean, so she wet the fabric and turned back to Amanda. Lynn started with the wounds on the other woman’s palm, gently cleaning her hand as best as she could. Amanda stayed still and silent, not reacting at all to the surgeon’s tentative prodding and patting at the oozing wounds.
Lynn moved on to Amanda’s forearm, where she was fairly sure there were no other wounds. Still, she moved carefully and gently as she wiped the blood away. As the red and brown washed away, Lynn could see scars littering Amanda’s pale skin - lines and dots, raised white and red marks. Some were clearly older than others, but some were still the angry, purple red of a fresh keloid scar. Lynn slowed, her hands stilling on Amanda’s wrist. The scars were too uniform to be anything other than the product of self inflicted habit, something Lynn had never gotten used to seeing on her patients.
She looked up then, only to find that Amanda was already staring at her.
“Well? What’s the diagnosis?” she asked, her lips a sharp slash of a grin across her face. Something about her face was sad, and Lynn had the sudden feeling that Amanda was indulging Lynn’s request to dress the wound with no actual care for her own wellbeing.
“It’ll be fine,” Lynn said, not seeing the point in broaching the topic of the scars. Amanda hummed quietly, and Lynn couldn’t tell if the other woman was relieved or disappointed that she hadn’t commented on the scars.
Lynn turned and let out a breath, releasing Amanda’s arm in order to wring out the rag. The water began to turn a pinkish orange, blood oozing from the black cloth like tendrils of some unknown monster. Lynn changed her mind and dropped the rag, leaving it to color the water out of her sight. She’d already seen more than enough blood that day.
Instead, she twisted back around, past Amanda and towards the medical supplies littering the space between their bodies and the wall. Her gaze settled on some antiseptic, which she reached for first.
“This will sting,” she said, as though these weren’t Amanda’s supplies to begin with. Amanda said nothing. Lynn picked Amanda’s hand back up gingerly from where it had settled on her thigh and sprayed it with the antiseptic; Amanda let out a quiet sigh, closing her eyes as the sting of the chemicals washed over her.
After that, it was only a matter of wrapping her hand with some bandages. Lynn opted for individual adhesive bandages for the wounds on Amanda’s fingers, a neat row of beige wrapped carefully just above each of her knuckles. It felt good, soothing, to be doing something so mundane as wrapping up minor wounds. Lynn wondered why Amanda was letting her do this - she clearly had planned to handle it on her own, she thought, dabbing some antibiotic gel onto the gashes across Amanda’s palm. Maybe she knew that Lynn was starting to feel the sickening weight of the situation, and needed something to do to keep her from snapping, to keep her tethered to normalcy.
The way that Amanda had looked at her earlier when she’d said that Lynn wasn’t hers, face bitter and gaze unwavering, came to mind unbidden as Lynn reached for the roll of gauze. Maybe this indulgent break wasn’t about what Lynn needed at all. Maybe Amanda had wanted - had just wanted.
She could feel that same steady gaze burning into her as she wrapped the gauze gently around Amanda’s palm, over and over and around her thumb to hold it in place. She smoothed the edge down, gently, leaving her hand to linger holding Amanda’s. They just stayed that way for a long, quiet moment: Amanda watching Lynn, who was just staring down at the clean bandage wrapping around the hand she held in her own.
Amanda broke the silence, voice soft again like it had been earlier. She leaned forward, like she and Lynn were in on some big secret, and said, “So?”
Lynn breathed out, raising her gaze from Amanda’s bandaged wounds, but still holding her hand. They were close, just looking at each other again.
“Amanda,” Lynn said, trying to keep her voice as soft and even as possible. She let out a shaky breath, feeling her heart rate begin to speed up. This was risky. The entire situation was, but this...Lynn swallowed thickly. She felt a sudden cold sweat, her hands clammy where they still held Amanda’s.
Amanda, for her part, didn’t speak. She hadn’t even moved, except maybe to shift ever so slightly further into Lynn’s space. All she did was stare, studying Lynn the way that a hunter might study the deer that had just wandered into his clearing. The moment was heavy with the promise of something imminent - a storm cloud brewing in the makeshift, lamplit bedroom.
“You don’t have to do this.”
Lynn’s voice was low, quiet. It wasn’t as though anyone else would have heard her anyways, but there was an intimacy to the moment that she was hoping, praying, might mean she had a chance.
There was silence, just the humming of the light fixtures and the breathing of two women nearly knee to knee on a metal bed, blood crusted under both of their fingernails.
And then the lightning touched down, and the room exploded into flames.
“Of course,” Amanda said, said stretching the syllables out so they dripped with sarcasm. “I should’ve known that’s what this was.”
She moved quickly, twisting her bandaged hand to wrap her fingers around one of Lynn’s wrists. Her other arm appeared in the space between them, and suddenly Lynn’s hands were pinned snugly against the blanket beneath them.
“Amanda,” Lynn said, a note of pleading creeping into her voice as she tried to wiggle her hands free. Amanda only tightened her grip, tutting softly.
She leaned forwards, shifting so she could leverage more of her weight to hold Lynn in place. There was a lazy grin on her face as she leaned further in, forcing Lynn to lean back; she had nowhere to go, not with Amanda keeping her hands pinned to the bed between them. There was only as far back as her arms could straighten for Lynn to shift away, and that distance was overcome by Amanda in one smooth motion.
Their arms brushed as Lynn continued to wiggle her hands under Amanda’s, pressed together between their bodies. Amanda responded to Lynn’s persistent struggle with an annoyed twitch of her lips and a sudden, unexpected increase of pressure to Lynn’s wrists. She gasped at the sharp stab of pain, her hands freezing in their motion. After a moment, Amanda relented, and the two were still.
She was staring at Lynn again, her nose inches from Lynn’s with nowhere left for the other woman to go. Her pupils were blown wide. Lynn wanted to sever the connection, but she couldn’t tear her gaze away any more than she could free herself from Amanda’s grip.
“Doctor Denlon,” Amanda said, admonishing. He eyes travelled slowly down Lynn’s face, breath steady. There was something hungry in it, as though Amanda wanted to swallow her whole - as though maybe she could, if she only looked hard enough.
Amanda leaned forward abruptly, her face suddenly right next to Lynn’s.
“Don’t play games,” she whispered, breath hot against Lynn’s ear.
And then Amanda shot up, freeing Lynn’s hands and sending her careening backwards onto the bed in one smooth motion. Lynn gasped, steadying herself to avoid landing completely on her back as Amanda paced to the other side of the small space.
“Amand—“
“No. No!” Amanda cut her off, laughing. “You’re all the same.”
She whirled around, ghost of a grin on her features.
“All so...selfish,” she continued, staring down at Lynn. The hunger was still there, but it was tinged with anger. Hatred, and beneath that, an awful, horrible pain, and a yawning expanse of emptiness. Not just a desire to consume, but to devour; flames that would decimate all in their path, both of them left burnt corpses. Lynn shifted away from Amanda, hoping it would go unnoticed.
“So ungrateful.”
Amanda stalked back towards the bed, stopping just shy of bumping into Lynn’s feet.
“You don’t care about anyone but yourself, your money, you job. You don’t ever look around you. You’re too busy acting like you’re not fucked up like everyone else - you walk through your life like you know, like you understand. Like youve earned it. But you don’t know anything,” she spat.
Lynn opened her mouth, then closed it. She looked down at the ground, body tense, bracing. Waiting.
“You think you’re better than me.”
Amanda wasn’t asking, but she seemed unsatisfied with Lynn’s silence. In a flash, there were fingers in Lynn’s hair, forcing her gaze upwards, back to Amanda’s.
“You do!” She laughed, rolling her eyes to the ceiling. “You think that because you have a job and patients you don’t care about, a house you don’t appreciate, a husband that you cheat on”—each item on the list was punctuated with a tug, tilting Lynn’s head to the side with a wince—“you really think you’re better than me. Better than him,” she added, jerking her chin towards John’s makeshift hospital room, invisible behind the curtain. She pulled Lynn’s head along too, drawing a sharp inhale.
Amanda dropped to her knees in front of Lynn, one hand still tangled in her hair.
“But at least we’re trying to fucking do something here,” she continued. “We are saving people. What are you doing, Lynn? Lying to your husband? Talking to dying patients like you couldn’t care less about them? Drinking until you can’t see straight, going home, doing it all again the next day?”
Lynn said nothing, feeling sick. She wondered, briefly, how long Amanda had been stalking her. Long enough to know that Lynn was a liar and a cheater, a mess of a woman slogging through each day with an empty space that nothing filled - not the endless drinks, not the beds she slipped into that weren’t her own.
Amanda leaned her forehead against Lynn’s, holding the other woman’s head in place by the firm grip on her hair. Lynn closed her eyes.
“And you still think you’re better than me,” Amanda said, quietly. Her voice ticked up at the end slightly, as though maybe it was a question, this time.
Lynn felt an unexpected pressure behind her sinuses, the sudden threat of tears. She thought of her husband, of screaming matches and the bitter taste of alcohol burning up her throat. Of strangers hands on her, of patients crying while she moved on to the next room. Of the wedding ring on her hand, looking rusty with blood even though she’d tried to scrub it clean.
“I don’t know,” she whispered finally, voice thick. It was all too much. This was hell, Lynn was suddenly sure of it - the blood, the smell of rust and metal, the damp chill and the phantom pressure of fingers around her wrist and the sound of saw against bone. She thought she might throw up.
The hand in Lynn’s hair suddenly released its grip, sliding smoothly down the side of Lynn’s face.
“He doesn’t—“ Amanda started, breaking off abruptly.
Her voice was quiet, all the righteous, hot fury gone. Her hand had retracted, slipping down Lynn’s arm to settle on her knee.
Lynn opened her eyes, looking down at Amanda. For once, the other woman wasn’t looking back. Her head was bowed, loose strands of hair falling forward around her shoulders as she gazed towards the ground.
“He doesn’t deserve to die,” she said, like a prayer.
Her voice was high and uneven, and if Lynn hadn’t just seen her go from enraged to broken in a tailspin, she might have laughed. The statement was awfully rich, given what she knew about him. Wasn’t that the call he made for others, every day? The one he’d made for her, by letting Amanda kidnap her, lock that collar around her throat? Who deserved to live, who deserved to die - that was the realm of the Jigsaw killer.
Killers, Lynn mentally amended, watching a shudder run through Amanda’s curled over form.
But she stowed the judgement, leaving the clear irony of what Amanda had said unspoken. What would be the use of pointing it out? It would only be stupidity to let the judgement slip, almost certain to send Amanda flying off the handle in a way Lynn was less than eager to witness. Not to mention how cruel it would be to Amanda, who suddenly seemed impossibly small - nothing like the woman who had loomed over Lynn, pinning her in place just minutes ago.
Lynn breathed out, rubbing at one of her wrists.
“I’m sorry,” she said, finally.
Amanda sniffed, turning her face back up towards Lynn. Her eyes were rimmed with red, glassy with tears, but just as angry as earlier. Just as pained.
“No,” she croaked, with a smile that looked more like a grimace. “You aren’t.”
Lynn bit her lip. She had never been good with this part, with patients in tears, with the cold weight of grief and despair. She knew how to deal with sutures and scalpels, but was much less adept with the kind of pain that couldn’t be mended on the operating table.
And of course, this wasn’t just another patient. The warm metal around her throat was a testament to that, a reminder that as much as Lynn was there as a surgeon, she was also a victim; the woman in front of her wasn’t just a grieving family member, but an unstable, delusional criminal.
But looking at Amanda, whose shoulders shook with quiet, shuddering sobs as she let her head fall again, Lynn felt an awful ache. The images of Amanda clicking the collar into place, whispering threats across John’s makeshift gurney, pinning Lynn’s wrists to the bed painfully - they danced around the crumpled form of the woman in front of her, ghosts that didn’t seem to fit into the present. Lynn tried to call to mind what she’d seen on the news of the Jigsaw killer: a body mangled in razor wire, a corpse found burnt alive, a house of horrors filled with corpses each treated to their own special demise. A woman who had lived, but only after being forced to kill for it. Amanda.
Lynn sighed. Maybe it was the weight of the day, or the overwhelming fear for her life, or the sudden, crushing confrontation with the truth of her own failures as a person, but Lynn felt pity more than anything else as she looked on at Amanda’s grief.
“Maybe I shouldn’t feel sorry,” Lynn admitted, quietly. Amanda hiccuped, saying nothing. “But it’s a horrible thing to watch your family die. I know - I see it every day.”
And that’s what he was, wasn’t it? Amanda and John - he was all that Amanda had, as blood soaked and horrific as that was. Lynn could recognize that in Amanda’s desperate anger, her grief, the way she looked at John.
Amanda had gone still at Lynn’s words. She took a shuddering breath, hand still resting on Lynn’s knee, and looked up.
She looked nothing like the woman who had wheeled Lynn into this nightmare. Her eyes were red and wet, tear tracks shining down her blotchy face. Strands of hair had come loose from the ponytail at the nape of her neck, framing her face and sticking to her wet cheeks. Breaths heaved in and out of her lips, uneven and violent. Amanda looked so small, so much smaller than she had minutes ago, curled in on herself and looking up at Lynn through wet lashes. There was a palpable ache in her eyes, an innocence in the vast seas of grief behind her gaze.
Amanda looked almost childlike with her flushed cheeks and wide eyes, hair unruly and body hunched over at Lynn’s feet. She looked like every little sister, every daughter who passed took up vigil in one of the hospital’s many waiting rooms: lost and grieving, angry and sad. Desperate and alone and so very, very, young.
Lynn found herself reaching out tentatively, unfurling her hands from where they’d been clutched to her chest. She settled one on Amanda’s, on top of her own knee. Amanda sniffed, her fingers curling around Lynn’s wrist again - softer this time. There was no threat in it, just the grip of someone lost, seeking anyone to hold on to.
Seeing that Amanda hadn’t snapped at the contact, Lynn reached out her other hand and brushed some of the loose hair away from Amanda’s face. She tucked it behind her ear, moving slowly.
Amanda’s eyes fluttered closed as Lynn’s hand settled against her cheek, fingers curling gently behind her ear. She leaned into the touch, one last sob shaking her chest.
There was silence then, except for Amanda’s unsteady breathing. Lynn could feel her own pulse thundering in her ears, the panic bubbling under her skin warring with the urge to soothe. This wasn’t about trying to convince Amanda to let her go, not like before. It was something unknown, some part of herself that had been cracked open by the horrific circumstances and the grief the poured off of Amanda in waves. Lynn wondered, briefly, if she would have ended up here at all had she been able to treat her patients with this sort of tenderness. If she’d been able to treat her husband this way. Herself.
She felt scraped raw, gently rubbing her thumb over the curve of Amanda’s wrist. Maybe there was something in it, as awful as it was - learning to appreciate life through death. Rebirth through blood, a metamorphosis only to be found when you were broken down completely to your most vulnerable and desperate.
“I’m doing - I’m doing everything I can,” Lynn whispered finally. She was almost surprised to hear herself say it, voice sounding soft and foreign in the yellow-washed light. Amanda didn’t open her eyes , just let out a quiet half sob and squeezed Lynn’s wrist lightly.
“Mandy,” she said, the nickname rolling off of her tongue like a drop of blood off of a wounded hand, falling onto the cement floor. “I mean that.”
Amanda finally opened her eyes again. The gaze that met Lynn’s no longer belonged to a feral predator, nor to a desperate child. It was just wide and steady; still full of pain, but less tumultuous than before. Seas of brown with flecks of green, washed clean with grief and glowing with an empty longing.
The watched each other quietly, Lynn’s hand still on Amanda’s cheek, their fingers pressed together on Lynn’s knee. There was a recognition in their gaze, some moment of connection amidst the grief.
Lynn breathed out slowly, her thumb swiping across Amanda’s cheekbone under her eye, wiping the wetness of tears away. She moved subtly, afraid to disrupt the strange moment of understanding. There was some sort of equivalent pull between them in that quiet: Lynn leaning forward as Amanda looked up at her, straightening up. All the while connected hand to hand, palm to tear stained cheek.
There was a sudden, horrible cough, and the moment shattered.
Lynn didn’t know who moved first, but suddenly her hands were back in her lap and Amanda was standing, rubbing at her tear stained face. She followed suit, getting up off of the bed and moving towards the curtain that separated the two of them from the rest of the warehouse space.
Lynn hesitated, one hand on the thin, scratchy material. It felt like sacrilege to open it, to let out whatever heavy, swirling understanding was still clinging to the air around them. But it was fading fast anyways, slipping out of the cracks and under the curtain, seeping away from them like blood disappearing into a bowl of water. Suddenly, the collar around Lynn’s neck felt incredibly heavy.
Amanda sniffled from somewhere behind Lynn, and the moment vanished entirely. The lamplight was a sickening yellow, the quiet permeated by the hum of the lights and the creak of pipes, the ghost of touch already vanishing.
“I need to - I should check on him,” Lynn said, stilted. She felt out of place in her own body, abruptly reminded of where and who she was. There was a man dying of cancer across the room and a bloody power saw sitting in a warehouse of horrific contraptions and death sentence locked across Lynn’s collarbones, and she was standing there with the tears of the stranger who had kidnapped her drying on her blood stained hand.
“Right.” Amanda cleared her throat, voice thick with tears. “Go. I’ll be right in.”
There was a shuffling of feet behind her, but Lynn didn’t turn around to look at Amanda. She didn’t want to fall back into that heavy gaze, didn’t want to wade back into that angry sea. Whatever storm had been brewing was gone, leaving only the taste of electricity and the smell of rain in the air.
Lynn pulled the curtain open and pushed her way through.