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Daisy didn’t think she could describe what it was like to hear Basira’s voice again.
She couldn’t form it into words in her mind, and certainly couldn't have verbally, as her windpipe still felt as if it was being crushed with the entire weight of creation.
She was slumped onto the outside of the coffin, the entire room washed out with an incomprehensibly bright, blinding white. She felt herself blinking harshly against it, head pounding and all her senses overloaded with an entire world of light and sound and her own breath floating in her chest, heaving and choking in gasps of lightheaded relief. If she hadn’t just been able to make out a frame standing in the doorway, she would have assumed Basira’s voice was only a part of the cacophony of static and whirring around her and Jon.
But Basira’s voice had cut short, fallen quiet as Daisy had let her eyes flutter shut against the light again, feeling as if her insides had been scraped hollow, brittle and damaged but she and Jon had escaped, and Basira was there . And there was air around her that fit itself into her lungs, that wasn’t saturated with dust and she could breathe again.
She let more air flood back into her lungs, slumped on her back and eyes pressed closed against the bright light, as she could hear Basira’s voice woven through the layers and layers of static and drone of statements, moving closer to them.
There was the click of the nearest tape recorder turning off, Jon struggling to his feet and breathing heavily, so heavily, as Daisy’s vision began to adjust, light and colour she couldn’t even process yet pulsing in her skull.
“Basira-” Jon gasped through the hum of his own voice, flicking off another tape recorder. “What day is it?”
“...March 27th.”
Jon exhaled and breathlessly muttered something that sounded like ‘three days,’ moving to continue turning off the tape recorders, but Daisy couldn’t even get herself to process the date. March– it was spring. It hadn’t been spring when she had… last remembered. She didn’t care, mind flooded too much with relief and high on how easy it was to breathe here, to try to figure out any of the numbers or names. She had barely been able to remember her own.
Whatever season or date or time it was, she could breathe, and as her vision cleared, she could make out the frame, outline glowing with the gleaming light behind her, of Basira kneeling at her side.
“You're- you’re here,” Daisy croaked, head resting back against the wood of the coffin. Distantly, she could feel her chest continue to heave and was grateful for how numb she was, as she knew her skin was coated with dried blood and dirt, painted with the however many months of bruises and scrapes. Her skull was numb and pounding, heavy with a pressure that still felt as if she was trapped underwater.
“I’m here,” Basira replied quietly, nodding, hands flitting over Daisy’s body for something she could help, something she could fix, but Daisy just let out a breath, shutting her eyes again. She didn’t need anything, lying against the carpet and listening to Jon turn off the tape recorders one by one, just to continue to be able to breathe with Basira near her, relief washing over her, cool and finally loosening the tightness in her chest.
She only nodded to let Basira know she had heard, unable to think of anything that might have been the next to thing to do, as it certainly wasn’t going to be getting to her feet. She couldn’t feel any part of her body, let alone her legs, and lying on the ground was the most comfortable thing she had felt in so, so long.
“Jon–” Basira had looked over her shoulder to the other skeletal frame who was grasping one of the bookshelves for support as he turned off another one of the tape recorders. There was strain in her voice, now audible over the layering of voices that were beginning to thin out.
“I’ll… leave you two to catch up,” he rasped, wiping dirt from his lips with his sleeve. “I’ll be alright.”
“You sure?” Daisy asked from the floor, weakly lifting her head to see him brushing more dust from his hands, still hunched and stumbling. His shirt was torn down the seams of sleeves, whatever colour it was before now unrecognisable, what was visible of his skin littered with scrapes and bruises. If he had been in there three days, she dreaded to think what she might have looked like. No wonder Basira had stared at her like that.
“Yeah… yeah, all this is beginning to heal already,” he muttered, brushing his fingers over a scab on his arm that, as he had described, looked to be far too repaired for a scrape that he had just gotten. “I’ll be fine, just- might go lie down.”
“I’ll… talk to you later, Jon,” Basira added, voice low, and he nodded, grabbing a couple of the table recorders and something else that had been dropped on the floor before opening the door with his foot and stumbling out of the room. The door swung shut, the room so perfectly silent, and Daisy realised she couldn’t hear the endless shifting and groaning of the coffin, finally letting herself sink into the quiet filled by only two steadying sets of breathing.
“This is… real,” Daisy whispered into the still air, voice still shaking and husky against the dust and dirt in her throat, but she didn’t care. She felt so faint, heart pounding, and could feel the fear, that awful, awful fear that had burrowed so deep into her bones, begin to fade.
“I’m having a bit of trouble believing that myself,” Basira exhaled, hand lifting from her lap and faltering near Daisy’s cheek. “...Could I?” she asked.
Daisy nodded, letting Basira’s hand move to rest across the side of her face and feeling her shoulders sink with relief. “How… how long has it been?” she asked shakily. “I can’t- I can’t remember–”
“Almost eight months.”
Daisy could see the muscle tight in Basira’s jaw, sure, now, that Basira had believed she was dead. Daisy had believed it too, for a while, and had been wrong. She had just permanently been in a place where death would have been a mercy.
“God,” she breathed, still trying to fit together just how much time that was. Part of her was grateful for it, to know that she had made it through just that much pain, that for others it hadn’t been as if she was there only a day, but to think there would be a gap in her mind that wide, everything she would need to catch up on– “…I missed Halloween.”
There was a silence, one Daisy did not mind letting herself dissolve into for a while, but she saw something thoughtful cross Basira’s expression as she tilted her head slightly, gaze still fixed on Daisy. Eventually she frowned gently, brushing her thumb across Daisy’s cheek. “You sound…”
Basira trailed off, but Daisy understood. She could hear it in her own voice, feel it in the lack of tension in her own muscles, in the absence of rushing blood, constantly, tracking everything in the room with a pulse, everything that breathed. Whatever used to be there had been replaced with only a loose fondness for the sound of a steady inhale and exhale, a reminder that even as she was still, it was not because she was trapped.
“The Hunt… it let me go. I don’t… know if it’ll stay that way, but I made up my mind. I don’t want it back. I’ll… I’ll fight it,” she promised, a declaration imbued with far more confidence than should have been appropriate for someone lying immobile on the floor, overwhelmed with relief at the mere ability to breathe. “I don’t know… what I’ll be without it, but I want… to be different.”
“...Okay,” Basira replied after a moment of thought, chewing on her lip in the agonisingly familiar display of ‘I have questions, but I’m deciding if it’s worth bringing them up.’ “Sounds… complicated.”
Daisy nodded again, still too weak to lift her head much from the ground. “Yeah.” She looked back over to Basira. “But I’ll have you.”
She saw Basira smile, as difficult as it still was to see through the blinding light, her palm still rested across Daisy’s cheek. She had almost forgotten what it felt like, to have every worry inside her unwound by a single person caring so much as to wait at her side as she did her best to recover, vision finally growing clearer with each fresh, steady breath. It had been so long.
…Christ, getting to her feet was going to be a problem.
“Could you help me up? I haven’t stood up in eight months. Or seen light. Or eaten or slept or heard my own name.” Daisy exhaled, resting her head back against the floor. “...I think I might need to go to a hospital.”
Basira scoffed amusedly, moving to wrap an arm over Daisy’s shoulder and beginning to help her up.
“Never would’ve guessed.”