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Daisy has a small, dark mole on her right cheek. It stands out against her pale skin, a stark dot on a soft canvas, getting lost in a collection of rough scars.
Jon remembers noticing it a long time ago, in a forest, the coldness of his own dull knife pressed against his throat and a snarling mouth just inches from his face.
She's sitting on the other side of his desk, now, arms behind her neck and chair leaning dangerously back, while he sifts through his messy notes regarding the statement he read a few hours ago.
(The Vast. Falling so fast that you're not able to breathe. The young woman tried to explain it, but it's worse than anything your mind can come up with, the smell of ozone and wind and emptiness filling your lungs until they feel like they’re ready to burst. Words written and crossed out and written again.)
He's looking at her face, trying to figure out how this Daisy can be the same person as that Daisy, when his dark eyes are met with her icy blue ones.
Jon tries (and fails) not to flinch as the front legs of her chair hit the floor with a loud thump that resonates along the empty corridors.
"Stop doing that," she growls, her voice low and scratchy and barely human.
Jon swiftly moves his gaze down. 'You should never look a wild animal in the eyes', he remembers reading in one of the many books his grandmother used to get him.
"I'm sorry," he whispers, eyes still staring down at the scratched surface of his desk, and if he tries hard enough, he can almost convince himself that his voice doesn't tremble.
She lets out a long breath and shakes her head, the fine strands of her blonde hair gently moving with it.
"It's fine. My bad for snapping like that," she says steadily as she leans back again.
They've been spending most of their time together, after The Buried. She comes into his office unannounced and sits in the chair, or on the floor, or on the desk as he works (or, at least, pretends to).
She silently leaves whenever he reads a statement and comes back as soon as he's done.
Jon doesn't understand it, not really, this quiet coexisting and these shared moments.
This woman, so different from the one who first came to the Institute, looking for answers and for a trail to follow.
(For a prey to kill, a petty part of Jon’s brain tells him, a part he usually tries to ignore.)
Her eyes are closed again now, so he goes back to staring at that same small dot on her cheek.
Daisy's mouth quirks up in a slight grin.
"You know I can feel it whenever you look at me, right?" she says.
His lips curl upwards in a smile.
He's sitting at the small table in the breakroom, with an apple in front of him.
The image of teeth grinning at him sits stark in his mind and he hasn't moved for... how long has it been now?
He's not sure.
He's tightly clutching a knife in his right hand, the scarred skin pulling for the strain he’s putting it under. The pain almost feels grounding.
He was in doctor Elliot's dream last night.
The man was screaming, as always, tightly curled in a corner of the lab, his clothes splattered with red.
Seven people (no, not people) stood smiling at him, blood on their hands, slowly dripping on the clean tiled floor. One of them was holding a perfect red apple in its outstretched hand, an apparently innocent offering.
Sometimes the doctor is alone in his dream.
Sometimes the students keep him company.
And Jon watches and the doctor calls for help and the students smile.
He wants to laugh at himself. Or maybe he wants to cry. He's not quite sure, if he has to be honest.
The apple on the table is green and normal because no one has touched it or filled it with teeth or...
And suddenly the apple is gone, a pale hand snatching it away and snapping him out of his thoughts.
"Are you going to eat this or what?"
Daisy is cautiously inspecting the fruit in her hand, her thin eyebrows pinched together in a confused frown. Because the apple is fine. It must be.
"I don't know," Jon answers. And it's true: he can't stand cutting it open because what if it isn't a normal apple? What if there's something inside?
('Thank you for teaching us the insides', they keep saying, over and over and over, until the doctor's screams turn to whimpers.)
He knows how stupid it all sounds, even in his head.
But what if?
Daisy is staring at him, studying his face. He doesn't want to know what she sees.
He hasn't showered in a while, too exhausted to even try, and his hair is long and greasy, hanging limply around his face.
He's thinner and paler than he’s ever been because he doesn’t get hungry anymore, not really. Well, not for food, at least.
The splotchy dark shadows under his eyes speak of sleepless nights, spent awake to allow them to rest without having to see him.
"We can share it. You need to eat something: don't want you turning into a ghost. God knows we have enough of those already."
She sits next to him and gently takes the knife still clutched in his hand, her calloused skin touching his own scarred one.
He almost stops her as she cuts the apple in half, then in quarters.
There's nothing inside it.
She hands him two slices, their bitter smell filling the entire room, and Jon starts breathing again.
Later that day they're back in his office: Daisy is sitting on the floor, back against the wall.
"So, what was that all about? Back in the breakroom?" she asks casually while fiddling with a tape recorder.
Jon freezes for a second.
There's no way he's going to tell her about it, about how he got scared of an apple because of someone else's nightmare.
But what if?
He takes a deep breath and the heavy words spill out of his mouth, one after the other.
They're slowly walking in a park on their way to the closest supermarket, their pace allowing Daisy's legs to keep up.
Jon is not sure why she insisted on dragging him out of the Institute, ignoring Basira’s loud complaints, but it's nice to be outside, for once.
It's been a while since they've let him leave.
It's been a while since he's trusted himself enough to do it.
But Daisy is here next to him, wearing combat boots and a jacket that fits her now thin frame wrong. Jon knows the feeling too well, drowning in a jumper that smells of dust and bittersweet memories.
(It's made of soft wool and Jon loves its rich brown colour. Tim gave it to him as a birthday gift a lifetime ago, back when they worked in Research together. Back when they were friends.)
She's changed so much after The Unknowing, after The Buried: her wiry muscles are gone and her hair is now tied up in a messy braid. Its soft look clashes with the deep scar on her eyebrow, a pink, thick line shining in the sunlight.
She's still strong enough to drag him out of the Institute, though. Or maybe he's even weaker than he thought.
"Everything fine?" she asks, unbothered by the people staring at them. And what a sight they must be together, scarred and thin and with a haunted look in their eyes.
"I think so. I haven't wandered off and traumatised anyone yet, so that's good," he huffs.
"Don't worry. That's not going to happen with me here."
He trusts her enough to know she would do anything to stop him.
It makes him feel safe for the first time in, well, years.
"Since no one is bothering us, should we stop for some ice cream? There's a nice place over there," she says, pointing to her left.
"Did you... you dragged me with you so that you could have some ice cream," he blurts out and he can't help the laughter that accompanies his words.
"Maybe."
The ice cream is nice and Jon and Daisy chat about everything and nothing.
She tells him about the first time she met Basira and about her love for flowers (she even tells him where the name Daisy came from, its softness clashing with its origin) and Jon tells her about his years at university and those first few weeks in the Archives, memories bright and faded at the same time.
They laugh and they talk and Jon tries to ignore the faint sting deep inside him.
(The last time he had ice cream was years ago, on Martin's birthday. Just the four of them, together.)
The Archives are quiet at night.
Jon wakes up from her nightmare with the taste of mud in his mouth and the shadow of cold, damp fingers twisting around his ankle and he can't go back to sleep, not when he knows Jesse Terrell will be there waiting for him, screaming and raging and then staying quiet to save her breath.
He thinks about making himself a cup of tea, but he discards the idea immediately.
(He never gets it right anyway. It's always too strong or too sweet or too bland. Martin got it perfect every single time and no matter how much effort Jon puts in it, it's never the same as his.)
He leaves his office and walks down the hallway to the door behind which Daisy and Basira sleep. There's an empty cot for him in the room, but he tries not to use it: they're better off without him intruding.
Basira left a few days ago to follow a lead: he caught her hugging Daisy and pressing a soft kiss to her forehead before picking up a backpack and saying goodbye.
Daisy is sleeping under her covers, curled up in a way that reminds him of...
No. No more thinking about him.
He sits on the floor, carefully raising his hand so that it touches her arm. She's warm and solid and maybe he won't fall back asleep if he focuses on her.
He Knows she's dreaming of the coffin, the image harshly forced into his mind by invisible fingers.
He can’t join her anymore, not since she signed the contract, but he still tries to stay awake, waiting for her breath to slow and her face to soften.
He reaches for her hand and squeezes it softly.
"You didn’t sleep last night," she says over a steaming cup of tea the next morning, “again.”
Jon is trying to keep his eyes from sliding shut, but he knows he did the right thing.
They needed to rest more than he did.
He shrugs and sips at his own tea.
(It’s too bitter: he used to add more sugar).
The door to his office creaks open and Daisy looks inside.
"Are you done?" she asks.
He isn't. He's just finished recording (The Spiral. Drawing swirling patterns and losing yourself in them. Slowly, ever so slowly, losing your mind too.) and he needs to take notes.
He tells her he was just tidying everything up.
"Great. See you in the breakroom."
She leaves the door open and he can hear the faint clinking of bottles down the corridor.
"...and he just burst in my office holding a jar filled with those worms. Like it was nothing! I was way more scared than he was at that point, and he was the one who had been stuck in his flat with Prentiss just outside his door!"
Daisy is laughing, clutching her beer close to her chest, and Jon knows how stupid he must look with a lopsided smile stuck to his face.
They stay like that for a while, revelling in the quiet. Daisy finally moves, squinting her eyes at him and leaning forward.
"You love him, don't you?" she whispers as if she was telling him a secret.
And, well.
He's known for quite some time now, even though he can't quite pinpoint the exact moment it happened.
He already did before The Unknowing, that's for sure. He made sure Martin was safe at the Institute (or as safe as he could be with Elias there).
Maybe... maybe when he offered him his cot in the archives?
Or the first time Jon fell asleep at his desk and woke up with a warm blanket draped across his shoulders and a warm mug of tea offered to him with a cheery 'morning'?
He doesn't know.
He knows that he can feel something warm bubbling up every time he talks about him now, woven together with the cold tendrils of melancholy.
And Daisy...
"And you love her."
(Not a question. He's careful not to slip up when he's speaking with her.)
He doesn't need to Know: Daisy gets the same soft look on her face whenever she talks about Basira, about everything they've been through.
She smiles bitterly now, as if something left a bad taste in her mouth, and clicks her bottle against his, long forgotten on the table.
"To hopeless crushes," she says, before drinking the last of her beer.
"I don't think yours is hopeless," Jon replies as he gets up, taking her bottle and throwing it in the trash.
(The bin is almost full. Maybe they had a bit too much, or maybe not.)
She snorts, turning to look at him, a sad smirk staining her face.
"Well, neither is yours then," she rebuts.
And maybe, maybe before he left (before he died), it could have been true.
He remembers Martin blushing and stammering every time he came into his office.
He did that a lot, after gently opening the door to his office (he never knocked: he somehow knew Jon can feel his heart racing every time he hears a sharp knock knock).
He remembers him coming inside and asking how he was, if he’d had lunch and scolding him for ‘not resting enough, Jon, you need to take care of yourself. You can join me for dinner and then you’re going back home to sleep.’
He remembers Tim's jokes and Sasha's (or Not-Sasha's: he's still looking for a photo of the real her) encouraging smiles.
But now?
His chance is gone, Martin doesn't want to see him anymore, locked up inside Peter’s office, and Jon has turned into something that only looks human.
"I wish you were right," he says as he sits back at the table.
Daisy shrugs and there's a real smile on her face now, so different from the pained one she was wearing earlier.
"Just wait and see, Sims. I’m always right."
Sometimes they end up wearing thin t-shirts, leaving their blankets and their heavy jumpers as far away as possible.
They don't need to explain why they do it to each other. They were there together.
And sometimes, even the comfort of soft, worn wool can be too much like The Buried, choking and pressing against their ribcages.
'Too Close I Cannot Breathe.'
It's such a ridiculously long name, but, at the same time, it's the only one that does it justice.
Sometimes, shivering and cold but too haunted by the memory of dirt and mud and the earth closing in, they sit together in the middle of a room, slowly breathing in and out.
Tonight is one of those times.
Basira is sleeping and they're listening to The Archers, even though Jon hates it, sitting together on the floor.
(Sometimes, they just listen to their own breaths, exhaling slowly and sighing shakily, as they try to forget about the time they couldn't hear them.)
Melanie agreed to have dinner with them for the first time in what feels like months, even though Jon knows it’s only been weeks.
She’s grown less distant, trying to make peace with what happened, with what he had to do in order to save her.
Therapy must be helping her somehow, even if he still wonders how she can put into words what happened to her, to all of them, without sounding completely out of her mind.
Basira got takeout for everyone and they dragged a chair from Jon's office to sit together in the breakroom. She’s sitting cross-legged on it, while Daisy has her arms wrapped around one of her knees, a heavy boot on her own chair. She's wearing a pale blue cardigan that gently sits on her shoulders: Jon likes the way it looks on her.
Melanie is now intently staring at a dark spot on the table and The Eye tells him that, apparently, Tim made it the very first day he came in the Archives.
Suddenly, Jon can feel something stir deep in his stomach that suspiciously feels like nausea and decides to put the small container he got for himself as far away as possible.
They've been talking for quite some time, ignoring the heavy weight they have to carry on their shoulders.
"I really don't understand how people can hate cats," Jon replies to what Basira has just said.
"Listen," Daisy quickly interrupts him, her foot back on the floor, "all they do is bring you dead stuff and look at you as if you're supposed to be proud of them."
"Well," Basira says, shrugging and crossing her arms, a teasing smile tugging at her lips, "that's exactly what you do with me, you know? And I still like you."
Daisy's mouth is left hanging wide open and Jon laughs so hard that his stomach hurts.
He wonders why it's so hard for them to be happy.
They go to Hill Top Road and the whole thing turns into a disaster.
Annabelle’s statement leaves him feeling weak, a leaf drifting in the wind of her carefully constructed sentences and the storm of doubt they raise in his mind.
And then there’s the fact that, apparently, Martin decided to leave a tape for Basira to listen to. His little secret is out. They all know what he is, what he does.
That small string of trust holding them together is gone.
“Basira said you’re managing,” he tells Daisy, in the quiet of the night, with dark shadows creeping along the walls. They seem gentler, somehow, after what he saw in Ny-Ålesund.
“Am I now? Because it doesn’t really feel like it,” she answers, not looking up from her phone.
But she is. Surely better than he is doing. There are no tapes, no desperate people coming here to look for help because of her. No victims, even though he knows she’s better than him at hiding them.
“This whole place reeks, Jon,” she whispers, finally looking up at him, “you, Peter, even Martin now. I can feel you all and you have no idea how hard it wants me to get rid of all of you.”
“Have you talked to him?”
Jon doesn’t even have to tell her who he’s talking about.
She scoffs, but there’s no trace of irony in her eyes, just a deep weariness weighing her shoulders down.
“I tried. He sent me away. Couldn’t even see his eyes behind his glasses,” she tells him.
She keeps talking, about the smell of murky water and seaweed and the deep, deep cold that grabs you and tries not to let you leave, about the colour being drained from Martin and the way he now talks, sharp knives aimed to hurt whoever is listening.
She tells him about how she’s never killed an avatar of The Lonely before, about how much it wants her to go upstairs and change that.
(“So, The Lonely smells like the sea,” Jon tells her, “and The Eye like old books?”
She shakes her head and tells him it doesn’t.
Jon smells like fear and sweat, just as she does. The sharp tang of blood is missing, because, while the Hunt is fight or flight, the Eye is freeze.
“You hunt too,” she continues, “like me.”)
Martin sends him away.
Melanie quits.
Her screams flood the whole Institute as Jon calls an ambulance, just as she asked him to do. Her blood feels warm on his fingertips as they ask him if he knows anything about what happened and why.
“She just wanted to switch career. Archival science wasn’t really her field,” Jon says, his mind blurred by hysteria.
The officer looks at him as if he wants to ask more, but thanks him instead before leaving.
"I managed to quit smoking once. After I got a job here," Jon says quietly as they leave the small shop.
He'd found himself without cigarettes, fingers itching for something to hold, and Daisy agreed to keep him company while he went out to buy some.
"I feel like you want to say something more than that," she utters back as she puts her hands in her pockets.
"Well, what if I did that with statements? Cold turkey," he explains, grabbing a cigarette from the pack ad lighting it.
"You could try. Didn't you say it hurt when you did that in America?"
And yes, he remembers it clearly.
The dizziness filling his head like thick cotton, the white-hot pain rushing through his veins, a need scratching and clawing deep inside his brain, tearing his mind apart.
But what if he went through with it this time?
(The precise duration of withdrawal is influenced by which substance has been used, as well as the magnitude of the dependence on said substance. It may take days, weeks-)
He hasn't read a statement today and his control is already slipping from him. Small bits of information get right into his mind, like cold wind drifting through a badly sealed window.
He shrugs and tells Daisy that it's worth a try.
"I'm not alone this time," he adds, before offering her a cigarette.
Jon rubs his eyes, again.
They've been stinging for... some time now. His vision has become blurry and unfocused, as if he's looking at a badly taken photograph.
He sighs and picks up the notes sitting messily in front of him, amidst pens and crumpled sheets of paper.
He's been trying to read them for the whole day, but, every time he tries, the neatly written words get tangled together in a way that The Spiral would certainly enjoy.
He reaches for a cigarette, then remembers he smoked the last one a few hours ago.
(The man who sold them to him lost his father to lung cancer three months ago. He hates the things with a passion and he feels sick whenever someone buys them. All he can see is his father, suffering and dying for something he chose to do to himself.)
"And you're most certainly not helping," Jon states, his words hanging in the empty room, heard by no one but himself.
Well, maybe Elias is watching.
Or The Eye.
Can The Eye even hear what he says? Probably.
It's been roughly shoving random bits of knowledge in his skull for the last few days, ever since he's stopped reading the statements, like a child throwing a tantrum and getting its petty revenge against Jon. His heart beats faster than usual and Jon can feel its fluttery rhythm as a headache builds up behind his eyes.
(By analysing the heart rate variability through its spectrum, two main components can be easily spotted out: the low-frequency component, also known as Mayer waves, -)
Jon groans loudly and leans back in his chair, dragging his hands down his face.
He needs a distraction.
(He needs a statement. 'A live one', as everyone in the Archives likes to call them.)
He gets up and leaves the room.
Basira is running some errands and Daisy is... somewhere. Doing something. It's just the two of them, stuck in the chilly rooms of the Archives.
(Daisy is curled up on her cot, wearing the headphones she bought from the same small shop where Jon usually gets his cigarettes, the one right next to the Institute. They're supposed to be 'noise cancelling', but she can hear everything through them. She should have expected it from something so cheap.)
Well, that clears it up then.
He doesn't want to see anyone, not now, so he heads to the breakroom and opens the small fridge in there. There's not much to eat, the shelves almost empty but for a few ready meals and leftovers from yesterday's dinner.
(He kept staring at his noodles, eyes unblinking. Daisy had to snap him out of it, loudly calling his name.)
He doesn't really want it to happen again: it's getting harder and harder to stay focused, not to lose himself in the never-ending stream of information.
(Over ninety per cent of inks are printing inks, which differ from writing inks because they contain pigments instead of dyes. Pigments are insoluble, whereas-)
"What does that even mean? How is that connected to... noodles?" he says, again, to an empty room.
"Okay, you know what? Fine. Fine! This is getting out of hand, so I'll just sleep for a while and hope you won't be so annoying after that," he continues, slamming the fridge door closed and walking away from the room.
(Martin is chewing on his pen, a cheap plastic thing he bought in a gift shop during the only school trip he ever went on. It's the same pen he used to write poetry with. He hasn't written poetry in exactly seven months, three weeks, five days and-)
Oh.
Jon stops, his hand still on the doorknob.
That’s what it means.
He's standing in front of the fridge, its door wide open, his hand tightly curled around the handle.
Why is he here?
Jon looks around the room: it's empty and tidy, save from a few dirty mugs in the sink.
(Martin used to clean up after everyone, washing the empty mugs so that they were ready to use whenever he made tea for someone. He picked a specific one for each person who worked in the Archives and he made sure to save the best one for Jon.)
He closes the fridge and leaves.
"Jon?"
He's sitting on the floor in the middle of his office.
He took his jumper off a while ago and he's now wearing a thin t-shirt he stole from Georgie: it's soaked through with sweat, clinging uncomfortably to his damp back.
(Georgie is sitting on her couch right now, looking at an e-mail from a questionable sponsor, wondering if she should answer. She has been putting it off for almost 37 hours.)
His hair is hanging down on his shoulders and he wants to pull it up in a bun, but he can't find the strength to pull his arms up.
(They have a statement from a woman who found herself paralysed: she moved, but it wasn't her. There was something else controlling her limbs and her face and her words. She was just like a puppet, with invisible strings pulling in all the right places, no free will left in her.)
"Jon. Look at me."
There are hands touching his face (they're so different from the hard plastic of Nikola's ones) and when his eyes focus, he sees a blonde woman crouching in front of him.
She almost looks like Daisy, but Daisy had short hair and cold eyes and is now stuck in a coffin.
This woman has long, wavy hair that gently frames her face. Her eyes look worried.
(Hyperpyrexia can cause hallucinations and confusion. If untreated-)
Daisy.
He asks her if she's real.
He's not sure if he's real either. He wants to know.
He asks her that as well.
(He tries to ignore the faint static deep in his mouth, because he didn't mean to Ask, not to her, but it's too late.)
She tells him they're both real.
"Ok, I don't care about your quitting cold turkey bullshit. You're going to read a statement. Now."
She sounds angry. Did he do something wrong?
It's not the compelling. Daisy tries not to react to it, even though she often snaps at him, with angry words and hard stares.
After a few seconds, his sluggish brain catches up with what she said, her sentences cutting through the thick fog of everything The Eye keeps forcing him to Know.
"No. Wait."
That can't be his voice, can it? It's weak and tinged with a deep desperation.
Daisy's gripping his arm tightly and the pain helps him focus (The bone tissue is a viscoelastic material with an average elastic modulus of 17 GPa. It can sustain higher stress levels when compressed rather than-) as he looks her in the eyes and tells her that no, he can't stop. Not now.
It's been...
How long has it been?
A week? No, that doesn't sound right.
More? He hopes it's been more.
He asks Daisy.
(And there it is again, the buzzing in his tongue and in his ears and in his teeth as he speaks.)
It's been five days.
She lets him go and grunts as she leaves.
He almost begs her to come back.
He's scratching at the door leading to document storage, trying to get it open, trying to reach what is calling out to him. He was the one to ask for it to be locked, wasn’t he?
(A pin tumbler lock is a mechanism that uses pins of different lengths to stay locked unless the correct key is inserted. It is commonly used in-)
He stops and struggles to get up, leaning heavily against the corridor's wall.
He has no idea what time it is: he Knows everyone is sleeping, so it must be the middle of the night.
He gasps for air as he stumbles back to his office, locking the door behind him and sliding down to the floor, his back pressed against old wood.
He can feel the statements just a few walls away, a taut string pulling him towards them.
There's a painful ache sitting deep in his bones and a single thought bouncing against the insides of his skull again and again and again.
(A man came in Gertrude's office once, years ago, and curled tight in this exact same spot on the cold floor. The statement still lies unfinished just a few doors away, tear stains warping the letters on it. The man watched as Gertrude faded, swallowed by a thick fog, just like everyone else he knew. Gertrude watched as the man slowly disappeared, taken by The Lonely.)
(Jon wonders how Martin is doing right now. It's getting harder to See him, his edges blurry and his body hidden by a pale mist.)
He lies down on the floor, pressing his cheek to the cold tiles covering it.
It distracts him from the pain for a few seconds, but soon the need is back and it feels stronger, hitting him like a tidal wave and taking his breath away.
He wants to sleep and he wants to go back to the door and he wants to leave and look for someone with a statement for him.
There's blood on his hands, sticky under his fingernails (Factor Xa, also known as thrombin, plays an important role in the coagulation cascade, as it-), but his skin has already healed.
He wonders how it got there.
He closes his eyes and tries to sleep, hoping the nightmares will leave him alone, just for once.
(They don’t.)
(Daisy finds him the next morning, scratching at his face and pulling at his hair, tear tracks marking his cheeks.)
Someone is softly pushing his hair away from his forehead, thin fingers catching knots as they move.
"...and that's how it all started. That thing was the first one I killed."
His eyelids flutter open and he's met with the sight of Daisy staring down at him, deep shadows under her tired eyes.
"Welcome back Sims. I thought you were gone for good."
His head is resting on her legs: he can feel how thin they are even through the heavy pants she's wearing.
He gets up, slowly.
His head is clearer than it's been for quite some time and it seems to have decided to leave him alone, granting him some respite.
He doesn't remember anything, just a loud voice echoing inside him: his little experiment must have failed, then.
She explains what happened, how she found him, rambling and out of his mind, how she had to keep him down while she gave him a statement.
Dread pools cold and thick in his belly when she tells him, but Daisy reassures him that it's fine, she's glad she did it.
(“Trust me,” she told him as her hand kept brushing his damp hair, “I have a lot of those. And I don’t have to see your face every time I fall asleep anymore.”)
They stay like that for a while.
The hunger (because that's the only word that describes the need tugging at his body and his brain and everything he’s made of) is gone.
"Are you going to accept it now?" she asks.
He has no choice but to nod.
The light in the bathroom is on, its dim yellow brightness cutting through the shadows of the corridor.
Jon gets closer and finds himself slammed against a wall, something cold pressed against the scar on his throat. Daisy's breathing is ragged and Jon’s eyes drift back to the mole on her right cheek.
(He knows her eyes wouldn't look human, their bright blue replaced by a bleak yellow.)
"Daisy, please."
She presses whatever she's holding harder against his thin skin. It's getting difficult to breathe.
They remain there, unmoving, the silence broken only by their laboured breaths.
After a while, she growls and lets him crumble to the floor.
Daisy walks back to the bathroom and, when Jon dares to look at her, she's staring at her own reflection.
"I need you to cut my hair," she says, holding out a pair of scissors (oh, that's what she was pressing against his throat then).
He gets up slowly and approaches her, trying to keep his hands where she can clearly see them, as if he was getting close to a dangerous animal.
(In a way, the usual bitter voice inside him spits out, you are.)
"Are you..." he whispers, gently taking the scissors she's offering to him, before stopping midsentence.
He doesn't have time to find a way to ask without Asking before Daisy turns to look at him.
(Her eyes are blue again.)
"Please," Daisy whispers, voice watery and so different from the one he knows.
He makes her sit on a chair, right in front of the mirror. Slowly, small chunks of blonde hair fall to the floor and soon, the old Daisy is back.
She looks even gaunter like this, a smudged version of her old self.
"I... I know it's not good," Jon mutters, but she smiles and this, this is nothing like the old Daisy.
"It's perfect," she says, gently touching her now short hair, "thank you."
They're back in the ice cream shop.
They enjoy pretending to be people when there's so little that is human left inside them.
He's in the middle of telling her about his first day at the Institute when he feels it, tugging and grabbing his attention.
He turns his head.
A group of friends sits on the other side of the room, laughing at something one of them said.
There's a young man with them. His name is Daniel.
It was his mother's birthday when it happened. The acrid smell of burnt plastic still fills his nostrils from time to time.
The fire department told him it had all been because of a faulty wire, but he remembers something different. 'A child's imagination', they scoffed, with deep pity in their eyes. But it wasn't. He knows it wasn’t.
You see, an odd woman came to their house that morning: her face was wrong, not bad looking, but wrong, like it had the consistency of a half-melted candle.
His mother sent him to his room.
He couldn't complain of course, he was only ten at the time, nothing but an obedient child, so he went upstairs.
But he knew that if you keep your ear pressed against the wall, you can-
Jon is yanked back to reality and finds himself out in the street.
He struggles against Daisy, at first, pulling at his arm, trying to get away from the hands clutching it.
He wants to go back. He needs to go back. He needs to Know.
Soon, they're far enough that he can't feel anything but a lingering echo hidden by the loud noises of London.
He turns to Daisy, eyes wide open, a pit opening in his stomach as soon as he understands what happened.
"I'm sorry," he says, "I'm so sorry. Please, I need to go back to the Institute. I can't... I'm not..."
Daisy wraps him in a hug and holds him tight.
He lets the tears fall.
Don’t listen to the blood. Listen to the quiet.
He keeps repeating it again and again and again until he manages to quiet his racing thoughts, like a nursery rhyme. Or a tongue twister.
Words that lose their meaning after you’ve repeated them in your head far too many times.
It works, sometimes.
He leaves the tunnels holding Martin's cold, cold hand.
He keeps talking to him, keeps telling Martin to look at him whenever his skin gets damp and a grey fog clouds his eyes.
Basira is waiting for them, clothes spotted with red and eyes wet with tears.
He knows without having to ask.
Daisy's safehouse is everything he expects, but, at the same time, it keeps surprising him.
(There's a scary amount of knives hidden in every room and he forces himself not to Know about the dark stains in the bathtub. The Eye ignores his efforts and Jon spends a whole day scrubbing at them.)
Yet, he can see the person he's come to know in the details spread everywhere.
A collection of paperback romance novels on the bookshelves. A soft duvet, covered in pastel floral patterns. A soft buttercup yellow jumper hidden in the back of a closet.
(There’s a gun underneath the bundle of wool. He doesn’t tell Martin.)
He finds a photo in the wooden drawer next to his side of the bed, while Martin is out for a walk.
(His heart still flutters every time he remembers that he has his side of the bed now, a bed he shares with Martin.)
He looks at the picture and Daisy and Basira look back at him, smiling, beautiful.
Happy.
Daisy is wearing a dress and her combat boots and it makes Jon laugh and soon he’s crying, clutching at the photo, smoothing its wrinkled corners.
There’s something written on the back of it, in faded black marker.
It looks like someone brushed their fingers over it again and again and again, trying to calm themselves down with the motion, just like he does by repeating the same smudged words that now sit in front of him.
‘Listen to the quiet - B’
He won’t forget it. He won’t forget her.