Work Text:
Basira hadn’t expected to find Daisy’s body. Not only was the earth littered with the remains of the apocalypse, but time and space weren’t entirely back into full swing either, making navigating back to the Hunt domain significantly more difficult than Basira would’ve liked.
It was nice to see the world returned to normal, of course, Basira wasn’t heartless. The landscape no longer churned with screams of pain, the tearstained faces cracked wide with joy and relief.
Basira did not cry. The others did– Georgie was near inconsolable and when they finally found life in the rubble of the Panopticon, it marked the first time Basira ever saw Jon full-on sobbing. It was surreal, seeing him with his chest heaving, tears pouring down his face, and clinging tightly to Martin’s side as they both climbed to their feet.
But Basira only picked up the shovel she had brought to bury the bodies she had been expecting to find, and left London. She was collected enough to manage a ‘goodbye, for now,’ to the four of them before she went, but then it was back to the search for Daisy’s remains.
It was almost entirely out of luck that Basira found where the domain used to be. With space so warped, it should have taken weeks for her to even get to the site of what she had decided would be her last murder, but thankfully one of the train lines had still been functioning as a part of a Lonely domain and, once everybody on it had escaped and returned home, it had started operating again.
There weren’t many passengers, so Basira took a booth to herself, still carrying her shovel and leaning against the window as the remnants of the fearscapes rolled by.
Other than the smell of blood, there wasn’t anything remarkable about the site. The land was scorched, but the bodies left behind by the Hunt were scattered or already buried, the majority of its victims already having dispersed.
It made Daisy’s corpse easy to spot.
The shovel she had carried on the train felt heavier in her grasp as she approached the body, the air so still as her feet crunched through the leaves. Having long grown used to the thick, coppery stench of blood, it almost felt calm, walking over.
None of the urge to search, to find, to kill– remained, a strange, hollow victory to standing over the blood-soaked frame, in a world beginning to repair, with not a pistol but a shovel in hand. Basira slowly let her shoulders slump to see the form in a heap on the ground.
The human form.
Daisy’s skill for intimidation had always made her feel taller, Basira had discovered. But here, still and swamped in the coat she had been wearing when the sky had awoken, prying itself open into awareness, Daisy looked strangely… small. Just a corpse, like any of the others.
Basira felt her grip weaken on the shovel for the first time since she had set it down on the train, digging it to stand upright in the soil and peeling her palm from the handle. She slowly sank to her knees in front of the figure, chest feeling as if it had frozen over.
The dirt was cold beneath her knees and she slowly let the bag she was carrying slip from her shoulder, reaching forward to find Daisy’s hand, pale and cold, still sprawled out in front of her. Basira’s palm fit into it, a tremble dying on her fingers as she forced herself to remember that she had only done what Daisy had wanted.
It was cruel, to both of them, to wonder if maybe, maybe , if she hadn’t pulled the trigger it could have been different. If they may have been able to return to each other in time to see the sky clear of the bulging, glistening eyes, eyelids fluttering closed across the cosmos.
She lifted Daisy’s hand toward her, sighing into the quiet air. The flesh hadn’t even begun to decay, her skin still so soft and, even with the blood drying across her split lips and mouth, it looked more like she was just asleep than anything. Basira could only deduce that it was because of how long it had taken Daisy to return to a human form, that perhaps the creature Basira had buried two bullets into had taken the majority of the rot with it before-
Her breath hitched and she caught herself analysing the shape like it was a crime scene, tracing the blood spatters and even thinking to look for a weapon before she looked back down at the hand in hers. It was Daisy. It was Daisy , her Daisy, and she had been granted the dignity to die in a shape she would have preferred.
Basira gripped the hand in hers tighter to keep herself from winding any further down the realisation, pressing words from her lips to keep time moving, to keep herself from being alone with her thoughts when there was only a corpse to distract her.
“We fixed it.” Her voice shook, so she drew in another breath, pausing. “...Things are alright now. Or they will be,” she added more steadily. “Jon and Martin made it out, so did Melanie and Georgie. They're all… still back in London, resting now, of course, waiting for things to start making sense again, I suppose.”
Basira fell silent again, the rest of a one-sided conversation fading from her tongue. She thought back to the other four, now retired to the flat Melanie and Georgie shared, how noisily unspoken it was that she was the only one left alone, how blinding Daisy’s absence from her side was.
“Oh. And I did, too, of course.”
She had figured it was better she leave quickly, with her own plans and a new life in mind, hopefully one in which she would learn to live without Daisy. She knew she would have to, the glaring, twisting dangers of being unable to move on, and frame herself as somebody who could make it through it.
She just didn’t know if she could .
Her throat closed up, her determination weakening as she sank forward over the hand she still clasped, unable to even lift her gaze to the bullet wound in Daisy’s shoulder. She had kept her promise. She had kept it because it was right , and something they had decided on, and even as the most miserable, childish corner of her mind whispered, ‘but I miss you,’ she had done what they had agreed upon.
Daisy wouldn’t want her to apologise. She wouldn’t have wanted her to blame herself or anybody else, to only accept that it had happened, and yet she didn’t understand that even the soft back of Daisy’s hand still felt like the trigger she convinced herself she didn’t regret pulling, but with every shaking, constricted breath everything she had told herself as she wandered the fearscapes began to crumble.
She thought it would be fulfilling, in some distant, hollow way, to have finally reached that end. Maybe when she pulled the trigger there would be a twisted catharsis to knowing the fight was finally over, the tearing back and forth of a soul coming to a close once and for all.
But it wasn’t.
It wasn’t comforting, there was no relief to be found. She only felt cold.
Basira didn’t consider herself selfish, at least not at the best of times, but she wasn’t happy at all with what she had done. She regretted it, if she had known that they would have been able to return the world to normal and they would see each other again, she would have never done it. Because here, on her knees in the dirt, she wanted Daisy back.
“I’m sorry,” she rasped, head sinking further over the corpse. Tears still refused to form, but she could only inhale through husks of breaths, clasping around Daisy’s hand tighter as if it could make up for every moment the Hunt had torn away between them, filter out the poison it had so insidiously tangled their relationship with.
“...I always liked that I didn’t have to explain anything to you. Never the best with words.” She fought to keep her voice level, jaw tight. “But I suppose they’re what I have left.”
“I can’t pretend I didn’t know the risks. If I hadn’t considered the risks, this wouldn’t have happened. …Would’ve quit just after I met you, followed up with that- that plan I had, e-everything I thought I was going to do. Point is, I… I knew that it might end up this way. I had seen what you had done. I knew what I was willing to do. I knew it wouldn’t be fair, I knew it was going to hurt, and all of that over again when I agreed to… doing this. It’s still not fair. It still- it still hurts, Daisy. I miss you and I don’t think it will stop. Not for a long time. But you-”
She swallowed, pressing her lips together to silence the shaky, ragged breaths barely escaping her throat, and closed her eyes.
“You were worth it.”
The moon was still high in the sky, Daisy’s hand still cold, and yet even when there wasn’t even the barest gust of wind, Basira swore she could hear something.
The slightest shift in the autumn air, a movement without a breeze that filtered and wove into the unsteady breaths Basira fought to keep her composure through.
She opened her eyes slowly, finally scraping together the courage to lift her eyes to Daisy’s face, still scrunched slightly in pain. …All the bodies Basira had seen, the ones that were still in one piece, she always saw looking peaceful.
It isn’t fair.
There was blood running in a particularly thick streak over Daisy’s lips and down her chin, crimson-painted incisors cutting over her lip. Basira froze, slowly narrowing her eyes at the mark.
And with a shudder that rippled through Basira’s chest like lightning, she saw that it was still a bright, fresh red.
The odd disturbance in the still air shifted again, and Basira realised, something in her chest reforging itself, that it was the sound of breathing.
Weak, so weak, far more strained than her own, and yet as her grip slowly loosened on the cold hand in hers, she saw Daisy’s chest ever so slightly moving, barely even a rise and fall, but it was movement.
“Shit.”
Basira felt the heaviness evaporate from her shoulders as she let go of Daisy’s hand, panic flooding over the emotion that had been cracking through as she instead splayed Daisy’s arm back in front of her and moved the other to rest across her chest.
Basira fought to resteady her own breathing, arms still feeling weak as she shifted Daisy’s knee forward, but she had better things to do than worry about herself. She wasn’t the one with a bullet in her shoulder, so she focused only on getting Daisy into some kind of recovery position. Sure enough, more blood began to bubble from her throat as Basira rested her hand beneath Daisy’s head, supporting it with a shaking palm and watching as the barely-breathing chest convulsed again.
The bullet wound, Basira realised, was still fresh on the shoulder of Daisy’s human body, so she shifted to open the bag beside her, mind still racing as she searched for what she had of a makeshift first aid kit she had put together before leaving.
It was difficult to concentrate. Basira wasn’t supposed to crack, she had been strong enough to put that bullet in the first place, she was damn well strong enough to keep it from killing. And yet her hands shook more than she could control as she found a cloth to press over the wound, biting down until she could taste copper on the inside of her cheek and Daisy choked on another mouthful of blood.
Basira only swore under her breath, using a free hand to tilt Daisy’s head again, letting it spill over from her mouth. It wasn’t a good amount of blood to lose, but giving up was not an option. It was just that every time she had seen Daisy in a state like this, it had not been her own blood she was drenched in.
It took another few minutes of keeping pressure on the wound, keeping Daisy’s airways clear, and violently regretting the moments she had spent sitting uselessly, speaking to a form she could have been helping instead of just fighting to weave a lament that meant something with words that stung on her tongue.
Finally, though, the bleeding from the bullet wound began to grow sluggish, clots congealing onto the tear in the coat Daisy was wearing, so she pried the coat and shirt free of the wound and cleaned it the best she could.
Her mind was moving too fast with next steps, with ‘when will the next train arrive,’ with ‘I really did not prepare to have to treat a gunshot wound,’ and ‘the flat’s too far from here to bring her to,’ that she refused to let herself process that Daisy might have been alive. Maybe she was only draining the living blood from a long-dead body, clearing away the last of the life that had hitched and stuck on after the bullet hit. She had seen Daisy die. It didn’t- It didn’t make any sense, and yet-
Daisy spluttered weakly, head lolling against the hand Basira had held beneath it, and her eyes began to open. They caught halfway, glassy irises barely visible from beneath her eyelids, but glistening in the moonlight.
“Don’t say anything,” Basira spoke curtly as she shifted the shoulder of Daisy’s shirt down further, wrapping gauze over where the bullet had hit as tightly as she could. She didn’t want to risk any more damage to Daisy’s airways, and that was why she didn’t want her talking. Certainly not because her concentration was already faltering, and she didn’t know if she’d be able to keep this up if she heard Daisy’s voice. “Stay still.”
She had no idea if Daisy could hear, let alone understand her, but it was better than saying nothing. She sealed off the gauze and pressed down on the wound again, gut twisting as Daisy’s face drained of what little colour it still held and she lurched weakly.
“Hurts, I know,” she muttered, moving Daisy’s shirt further from the wound and searching the curled frame for any other particularly threatening injuries. Daisy was in awful condition, of course, as Basira had fully believed she was a corpse, but most of the injuries that led to her appearing so tattered were a result of smaller scrapes and cuts, split seams and frays in her clothing littered across her body.
The worst that Basira found other than her own attacks, one on the shoulder and the other on her ankle, was a deeper cut along Daisy’s collarbone, the drag of a knife around her throat that had failed to sink in enough to kill and evidently pried away two-thirds of the way across. Daisy continue to twitch against the hand Basira placed on her chest to keep her in place while she tended to the laceration, narrowing her concentration only close enough to remember all the steps to keeping a human being alive. That was all it was.
Please stay alive.
When Basira finally drew her hands away from Daisy’s neck, fingers ever so slightly trembling as she lifted them from the gauze wrapping the base of her throat, Daisy’s breathing had begun to smoothen, at least no longer sputtering whenever she tried to draw in air. And for somebody with a knife wound on their collar, a gunshot to the leg, the damage of one apocalypse marked into her skin, and a bullet meant to kill buried in her shoulder, Basira couldn’t ask for any more.
A weak inhale hissed in Daisy’s throat, her jaw twitching as her eyes remained half-lidded and unfocused on the ground in front of her. Lips cracked through the layer of dried blood they were coated with, the barely visible movement giving away a failed attempt to speak before finally-
“...Basira?”
Daisy’s voice was husky and strained, words fractured and barely comprehensible. And yet they shook ever so slightly with uncertainty, a lingering fear that echoed agonisingly in Basira’s skull along with the shot that had followed the last time she had heard the same voice call her name.
But now, the air was still quiet. Basira did not speak, throat closed too tightly and words too shapeless to allow her to pick out the correct ones as she watched Daisy’s lip tremble again. Cracked-open blue eyes swam with haziness, lost and clouded as they wandered up just enough to find Basira’s gaze.
A raspy breath slowly sank from Daisy’s chest, the smallest sound of relief as pale fingers that Basira never thought she would see moving again unfolded, Daisy’s palm slowly opening like the petals of a half-wilted flower. “Good t’see… you.”
Basira’s heart felt as if it were constricting further, trying to cut off the circulation to itself, douse the fuse cutting through and winding closer to something coiled tightly inside her. She hesitated only a moment, the slick of blood still warm on her fingers before she felt her chest clench, reaching over to set her own hand in Daisy’s awaiting palm.
And when she spoke again, her eyes were burning.
“...I told you not to say anything.”
“Was wondering when… when I’d be able to check ‘waking up next to you in the recovery position,’ off our- our couple’s bucket list,” Daisy wheezed, blood cracking over her lips as she struggled to speak. Her ankle had already been cleaned and neatly wrapped up, the pressure uncomfortable but by far one of the least painful wounds.
Even after her shirt and coat had been peeled off so Basira could reach the wound, Daisy could feel more blood soaking into the cushions below her. She distantly regretted getting it on the couch in the empty motel room Basira had managed to drag her to, but she had plenty more to regret– terrible, terrible things lost to the thick red haze of gnashing teeth and a deep, churning urge to find, catch, and tear to shreds– but for now, worrying about motel furniture was more than enough guilt for her to grapple with.
It was difficult to think at all, really, cotton-stuffed thoughts sluggish from painkillers that weren’t doing as much as Daisy would’ve liked.
“You should be dead four times over.”
Basira’s voice was colder than usual, so stiff in comparison to the softer tone she usually slipped into once it was only Daisy around, but that wasn’t the worst of either of their problems.
Daisy coughed in an attempt at a laugh, immediately sucking in a breath again and curling over the wound in her shoulder as pain fired through it. “More than that.”
Her eyes wandered up to find Basira’s gaze retreating, flicking down from Daisy’s face to focus only on the wound. Her eyes grew stony again, glazing over a flash of guilt in her expression as she wrapped her hand over Daisy’s arm.
“Brace yourself.”
Daisy slowly let a breath hiss out through her teeth as the searing of hydrogen peroxide flared across her shoulder, tears involuntarily beading in her eyes as she tilted her head back to press against the pillow beneath her. The light she stared up into, vision wavering with tears, was so bright, so much more powerful than anything she had been since… well, since the world had ended.
It wasn’t just the light.
It was the first time since then that the clock above the door meant anything to her again, that she had been able to lie down so quietly, too injured to continue to stand but knowing she would wake up if she let herself rest. It was the first time since then that she had felt Basira’s touch again, even if at the moment that meant a hand on her chest keeping her from convulsing with each dab of antiseptic on the wound.
“Almost over.”
Daisy nodded stiffly through the pain, eyes crushing themselves shut again. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t been through worse, hell, there was a point where she used to show off to other members of the force for little she flinched when treating her own wounds, but here, her flesh exploded with agony, each splash of antiseptic scorching the wound. Basira had said the Fears had gone. Maybe that was why she felt… fragile again.
Basira must have known, as well, as even as her fingers clamped around Daisy’s arm to keep it in place, she was gentle, a muscle tight in her jaw with focus as she dabbed away the remaining blood.
“There,” Basira exhaled, pulling away and stretching the tension from her fingers before reaching for the first aid kit again. She glanced back to meet Daisy’s eyes, expression thoughtful with her usual tangle of contemplation, then her gaze darted away. “If I’m being honest, I don’t know how you aren’t passed out at the moment.”
“And lose sight of your face? I’d never,” Daisy replied, trying not to wince at the pain across her throat as she turned her head.
Basira didn’t look over, but the ghost of a smile cracked over her lips as she rummaged through the first aid kit. Daisy let her head rest back against the cushion, figuring it might’ve been a bit more smooth if she wasn’t missing so much blood, or unable to stand, or in generally a… better state.
“Not complaining. It’s… nice to hear your voice again.”
She tore open a gauze pad, resting a warm palm onto Daisy’s cheek to keep her head steady as she pressed the gauze over the wound in Daisy’s shoulder. Daisy looked up at the form leaning over her, vision still blurry but once again aware of the heartbeat drumming in her chest as.
“I’ll keep talking, then,” Daisy hummed, watching as Basira slipped the safety pin of a roll of bandages, clipping it closed and beginning to unravel the bandage.
“Don’t strain yourself.”
Daisy nodded as much as she could without doing any more damage to her neck, still winding breaths through the swelling in her throat.
There wasn’t too much Daisy could manage talking about, save comments about the expression of the civilians around the motel when Basira had arrived with the much taller figure slumped over her shoulder. They had been so strangely understanding, not even flinching at the cascades of blood down Daisy’s shoulder and side, only letting Basira force open one of the motel doors and finally lay Daisy down to rest.
Everything else there was to talk about were things that Daisy didn’t know how to bring up, past the very brief explanation she had been given while being dragged to the motel. She was still processing it all for herself, but after they had lapsed into the silence for the second or third time, she finally spoke.
“So- you said…” Daisy frowned, tongue catching on a canine as she ran it along her teeth. She felt her shoulders sink back against the cushions slightly as Basira gently brushed away a streak of sweat that had been beading on Daisy’s forehead with the edge of her sleeve, nodding for Daisy to continue.
“The fears are- are gone?” she asked, still taking some effort to string words together. It was difficult to maintain processing power after being something so far from human for some amount of time that not even Basira seemed to be able to tell her, and the blood loss still wasn’t the most forgiving.
Basira nodded, sitting back onto the chair she had dragged over and folding her arms across her chest, and Daisy fought to make sense of it. It still felt so… wrong to think about, so impossible for the earth to go so quiet after helplessly battling something bigger than it for so long. Whether it was the comfort of a trigger beneath the pad of her finger or the suffocating, relentless crush of an entire world pressing itself onto a brittle, starved ribcage, never with the courtesy to kill her, Daisy knew plenty of the Fears up close and personal.
“Even the-”
“Even the Hunt. And then Eye. All of them.”
“Oh,” Daisy replied softly, swallowing around the lingering taste of copper in her throat. She shakily lifted her hand to the now neatly bandaged cut on her collarbone, the residual sting of hydrogen peroxide still so raw and chemical in the air. She didn’t ever remember being cut, and didn’t dare to wonder what else might have been numbed, lost to the constant low mutters, the rushing of blood of the Hunt that was now silenced. “When did I…?”
“You can ask what happened to you, love,” Basira said quietly, gaze fixed on her feet, and Daisy was reminded of how painfully well Basira had learned to read her. Or maybe she was just worse at concealing it at the minute.
“...Okay.” Daisy swallowed, sitting up to the best of her ability. Her body ached and protested and she couldn’t help but wince, but Basira looked to be mostly focused on keeping herself composed. Daisy took a deep breath. “It can be brief, I just… yeah.”
Basira’s words were quiet when she spoke again, stilted as she told of painfully familiar claws and teeth, evidently trying to press through the worst of what Daisy had done, but it didn’t matter.
Some of it Daisy remembered.
If only in formless emotions, rushes of euphoria and the taste of flesh, the sweet tearing of sinew along her teeth, the throb of satisfaction in her chest that she had once considered justice. She loathed the feeling, the twist of familiarity appearing with each stumble of Basira’s words, voice choking on something she clearly did not want to say, and yet Daisy had already begun to fill into her mind, memory rooting it into her.
Not something she could ignore anymore, claim it was not her who did it. And then…
“...Then we found you.”
“Yes,” Daisy croaked.
“I remembered our promise.” Basira’s voice shook, so jarring for even Daisy to hear, a single tremble in her words that was quickly swallowed back. “I don’t- I don’t know how much of you was there,” she continued, words stiff. “But you asked that- you wanted me to join you, and- and I think I might have wanted to.”
Daisy was silent, unsure if she wanted to be trying to remember what Basira was describing. And yet, she distantly recalled hope, just a glint of it, some shape of love carved into flesh and blood so crudely, even the idea of it already enough for Daisy to taste bile in the back of her throat.
“But I trusted you more back then. I couldn’t let you go on as- as you were, so I–” Basira cut herself off, expression tight as she grit her teeth and took another slow, steadying breath. “...I missed the first shot. I’m sure you can feel just fine where the other two ended up.”
Daisy nodded, pressing her lips together tightly. She still felt nauseous, and whether it was the usual dizziness of being this wounded or because of what Basira was saying, she did not know. There was something so pained, so conflicted in Basira’s voice, winding and knotting into a sound that struggled to keep from strangling itself. But between reeling from the tension in Basira’s voice, Daisy felt the slightest unravelling of relief in her chest. That Basira had done what she had asked, had trusted her, and was strong enough to follow through.
“Thank you,” she replied softly.
Basira didn’t respond, arms instead wrapped around her abdomen as she slowly let out a breath. “...But it didn’t work. You’re still here. I… I couldn’t kill you.”
Daisy glanced over, and Basira’s expression was stony. “You think you might have…?”
“It- it’s so difficult to tell. I thought I had committed to killing you, I thought I could do it, and even walking away, I… don’t remember feeling hope. But I don’t want to have betrayed our promise, whether I was aware of it or not. I really hope I believed I had killed you.”
Daisy was quiet, strain still across Basira’s face, more worn-down and scarred than she remembered it. It was so guilty , and it was all Daisy could do to hold out her hand toward Basira again, only a moment’s hesitation before Basira wrapped her own hand around it.
“You brought a shovel here to bury me, didn’t you? And you would’ve come back sooner if you thought I had a chance of surviving.” Daisy squeezed Basira’s hand, her expression still tight as she kept her jaw set, guilt glimmering distantly in her eyes. “It was about stopping me from causing any more casualties, hold back on trying to forgive me when I only had damage left to deal.” She offered a weak smile, watching as Basira’s expression began to soften again. “So I consider the promise kept.”
Basira exhaled, unravelling her arms from around herself and mirroring the beginnings of a relieved smile, shifting forward to help Daisy sit up straighter on the couch.
“Okay. God, we do… have a lot of catching up to do. Without… having to think about monsters or Fears anymore.”
Daisy hummed in agreement, releasing the hand she held only to instead wrap it around Basira’s cheek. “I know a good place to start.”
Basira’s shoulders sank, no real heat behind the eyeroll Daisy was subject to. She only folded the edge of her sleeve over her thumb, first reaching forward to wipe away the remaining blood from Daisy’s mouth before shifting closer, fingers careful and feather-light on the bandages wrapping Daisy’s shoulder and neck.
Then she leaned in, warm lips pressing to Daisy’s, and for a perfect moment, that was all there was. The world she knew was changing so quickly was left outside, and Daisy could only feel grateful to have been able to see Basira’s face again, with the promise that they could remain that way, on an earth that would not tear them apart again.
Daisy’s chest bloomed with warmth as Basira slowly drew away, fingers brushing strands of blonde hair from Daisy’s face.
“I really did miss you,” she whispered.
“Me too. Nobody I’d rather be shot in the shoulder by,” Daisy hummed, to which Basira bit back a smile and rested her hand on Daisy’s uninjured arm.
“I’m flattered, love. Now rest, and I’ll look for more painkillers. We’ll talk more when you wake up.”
“Deal,” Daisy replied, sinking back against the cushions with the exhaustion of so much stress, leaving her eyes open only long enough to return Basira’s so painfully fond gaze. Then she shut her eyes, letting out a breath that she knew would only grow easier each time.
“Love you.”
A hand brushed her cheek again as Daisy finally gave in to the weight of fatigue, and the comfortable couch of an out-of-business motel room had never felt so much like home.
“Love you too.”