Chapter Text
It’s a long train ride to Scotland.
They don’t talk much. Martin stares out the window at the dark scenery flashing by, and Jon fiddles relentlessly with anything his hands can find. The strap of the bag crammed with cash they found in Peter’s office before they ran - the smooth case of his phone, powered off (just in case) - a loose bit of stitching on the seat beside him - a blank tape from the recorder, mindlessly turning it over in scarred hands. (The right one doesn’t have a lot of feeling anymore. He tends to drop things in that hand.) If Martin wonders what he’s doing, he doesn’t say anything.
(Somewhere, sounding more self-satisfied than it has any right to, the Beholding tells Jon that the first automotive in Scotland was a Daimler model in 1886. Jon ignores that.)
They rent a car and drive the rest of the way to the address Basira gave them. Well. Martin drives. It’s Jon’s turn to stare out the window.
Daisy’s safehouse is dark and sparse, wedged between two small towns that Jon doesn’t bother to look at the signs for. The light bulbs are dusty, but there are thankfully few cobwebs hanging in the corners as Martin flicks on the lights. There’s a cramped kitchen area, attached to an equally cramped living room with a couch and a single bookshelf. (They are mostly crime novels. Daisy likes trying to figure out who the killer is. She frequently can.) There’s one window in the kitchen, over the sink, through which Jon can see the hulking shapes of the treeline some dozen meters from the house. He immediately doesn’t care for that shit at all.
There’s a single other door, presumably leading to the bedroom, but Jon is suddenly extraordinarily tired. He drops the bag of cash - all the luggage they’d really had time to bring - and takes a moment to realize just how much he aches, all over.
Martin sensibly checks the kitchen. “Not much,” he reports ruefully. “Guess we’ll have to head into town tomorrow.”
Jon manages a hum that could, theoretically, be any answer Martin wanted to take it as. It’s not like he can starve. Not from lack of calories, anyway.
“You want the bed?” Martin calls, opening the door to the bedroom and peering inside, flicking the lights on in there as well. Banishing the dark seems to have become second nature to both of them. Probably for the best.
“It’s fine.” I’d take a pile of straw on the floor at this point, he doesn’t say, trailing after Martin into the bedroom. What he’d meant to say was, I’ll take the couch, but it’s too late to say so now without sounding awkward.
“Are you sure? Your posture is already terrible, and that thing looks—”
“It’s fine, Martin. If it’s horizontal I’ll sleep on it.”
“Right.” Martin looks at him strangely for a moment, but shrugs it off. “Yeah, it’s been a weird few days, I guess.”
Jon tries a laugh that doesn’t come out right, more of a strangled gag. “Yes... I guess that’s one word for it.”
“Right,” Martin says again. He hovers there in the doorway, seeming like he doesn’t want to leave the conversation there but not wanting to leave.
The decent thing to do would be to ask if - no, not ask, just - mention, that it would be sensible for Martin to take the bed instead. Martin, whose first thought was for Jon’s terrible posture.
He can’t quite manage it before Martin leaves, closing the door behind him, vanishing silent and ghostlike down the hall. Not a floorboard creaks.
(There are extra lightbulbs and batteries in the bedside table. The washroom holds more medical supplies than most hospital supply closets. All of the paracetamol is over a year out of date. He knows these things while still standing in front of the closed door.)
Jon sits on the edge of the bed and stares at the splintering wood flooring and lets the Watcher tell him about French Baroque flooring styles and sanding methods and wainscoting and Daisy Tonner’s father until the night turns into dawn.
-
When he leaves the bedroom, Martin is gone. There is a note on the sofa about going for food and essentials. The sofa looks untouched.
He shouldn’t be alone, says a distant thought that sounds a great deal like Georgie Barker. You shouldn’t have left him alone.
Jon takes a battered old broom and starts knocking down the dusty cobwebs at the corners of the ceiling. He does not permit himself to worry about Martin.
(The Steatoda capensis spider is not native to Scotland. These are descendants of a pair that were brought by accident from some distant neighbor’s holiday to South Africa in 1964.)
-
Martin returns before noon with a few shopping bags of food and some cheap charity shop clothes. “I had to guess at your size,” he says instead of hello.
Jon puts the food away slowly, waiting for the part Martin isn’t telling him. He refuses to Ask.
“I called Basira from a phone box.”
There it is. “How is she?”
A moment of quiet. “Got her hands full. She says the Institute is swarming with police. Lot of blood, but no bodies. Terror attack, she thinks they’re going to call it.”
“Daisy?”
“No sign of her. Or the others, Herbert and Montauk. Seems like everyone’s laying low. Basira says she can send statements once they start letting employees back into the Archives.”
Jon exhales a little heavily. “Pragmatic as ever.”
Martin doesn’t respond to that. But at least he doesn’t ask the big question, not yet. The are we safe here? one. Jon wouldn’t know how to answer. (Modern refrigeration techniques were started in 1748 by William Cullen, who taught at the University of Glasgow.)
But Jon finishes putting away canned soup and frozen vegetables, and when he turns back around, Martin is still there.
Martin is still there.
-
“You take the bed tonight,” Jon finally manages, later that day, as the sun is beginning to set. “I didn’t. Uh. Didn’t give it much use.”
Martin looks back from his place staring out of a dusty window at the trees. He’s been there for hours. The sky threatens rain. (The forests outside are composed primarily of Scots pine, Norway spruce, and a scattering of English yew. The woods are dense and there are three bodies in the parish boundaries that have not been found. One was murdered, one was a suicide, and one was an accident.) “That’s not really necessary,” he starts, and Jon is quick to interrupt.
“Look, just, please take the bed. Humor me.”
“Is it really that bad?” Martin cracks the ghost of a smile. “I mean, it looked a bit creaky, but you’re sounding desperate.”
Jon tries to summon up a smile but it dies somewhere in his cheek. (The zygomaticus major (the orbicularis oculi (the depressor anguli oris (the largest muscle used in screaming is the diaphragm (the mentalis muscle is)))))
“Just humor me,” Jon manages to repeat around the images of skinless anatomical models that flash through his brain.
Martin looks Jon in the face, studies it for a moment. “All right,” he says, and sounds like he would like to say something like are you okay but restrains himself.
The sun goes down. Clouds gather. It will start to rain in thirty-one minutes.
-
The trees creak and shudder in the rain.
Jon is at the window, watching them sway. If he focuses hard enough, he can see Basira, still at the Institute even this late, making phone call after phone call. (She is calling Institute employees and old friends on the police force and Daisy and Daisy and Daisy. Most of them have not picked up.) He feels a bit guilty for watching, but he can’t think of anyone else to look for who wouldn't hate being spied on even worse. (Georgie Barker is applying antibiotic cream to Melanie King’s ruined eyes. The five signs of a blocked nasolacrimal duct are—)
Something prickles at the edge of Jon’s awareness. The hair on his neck rises.
“Martin?” he calls down the hall, keeping his eyes fixed on the tree line. The trees bob and wave and shiver. The dirt between the house and the woods has long since turned to mud.
Something else is there, in the dark and rippling mass.
“Yeah?” Martin appears in the living room with hardly a sound. Mist trails in at his ankles like a shy dog.
“There’s something coming.”
It is breaking from the tree line, beginning to snake along the ground, stretching under the sodden sky, grasping at the mud. Like a jumble of pipes along the outside of a building.
But Jon Knows it, and it has no more power. Not here.
Martin sounds as calm and faraway as a ship’s horn in a fog bank. “What do we do?”
Jon watches it drag itself through the mud like a dying insect. “Nothing,” he says. “It won’t make it to the house.”
The servant of I-Do-Not-Know-You howls in the voice of someone who was not Sasha James and never was. Limb by limb and joint by horrible, distorted joint, the Not-Them scrabbles in the mud, quaking and blurring between a dozen shapes, all of them stolen, all of them wrong.
“It is in its death throes,” Jon says. The sentence falls from his lips like a spilled drink. He searches for something else to add, to make it make sense. “It was… attacked, I think.”
“Good,” says Martin. There is heat to it. Nothing grounds you quite like spite. He drifts to Jon’s shoulder, and they watch through the rain-spattered window as the creature shudders in the shadow of the trees, inching through the muck.
The Not-Them radiates hate and fear in equal measure. It knows that it is being Watched, and it hates it. Jon feels the ever-present itch in his soul soothe, for a moment, as he drinks in its terror like a warm cup of tea.
The thing in the mud tries to scream his name in Sasha’s voice, but it can only manage a garbled wail from three different stolen throats.
The trees tremble again and birth a new shadow.
It’s fast and big and grey under the rainclouds, and it streaks across the ground like lightning.
Jon draws a sharp breath.
“Jesus,” Martin hisses at his elbow. “That’s not — is it?”
“That’s her,” Jon says. His mouth goes dry.
The massive shape that used to be Daisy Tonner closes its jaws over one of the Not-Them’s many, many joints, and the horrible thing gives a shrill scream that sounds like static feedback.
It should be over quick, but it’s not.
The Not-Them twists and thrashes its too-long limbs, breaking Daisy’s grip and flinging her sideways into the mud. When she hits the ground, Jon can feel it shake the floorboards of the house. The small victory seems to give the Not-Them new energy, and it writhes towards her in a mass of joints like sticks.
Martin swears once, violently, and rushes for the door.
“Martin, no!”
“She needs help!” Martin snaps, and then the door is open and he’s out in the rain.
Jon allows himself the luxury of swearing, too, before following him.
The wind throws rain in his eyes like it hates him. (The rain will stop in one hour and eleven minutes. Several miles away, a lorry driver is pulling off the road. He has driven in worse conditions and regretted it.) “Martin!”
Martin, not looking back, seizes a fist-sized rock from the mud and throws it hard at the Not-Them. It connects with a sound like stepping on a tick. “Oi, you!” he shouts over the wind and rain.
The thing jerks back. It doesn’t have a face, at least not one that Jon can see in the dark, but it screams its shrill feedback scream again and lurches at Martin.
But then Daisy is back up on all fours, a hulking grey shadow against the night, snarling and slavering, and with two quick bounds she leaps onto the Not-Them again and her impossibly long jaws clamp shut and do not let go.
Jon finally catches Martin by the arm and pulls him around. “Martin, get back inside! She doesn’t know us anymore. She’ll kill us.” (She does not know friends or foes. There is only prey. There is only the hunt.)
There is a noise that is somewhere halfway between ripping fabric and breaking a stick over your knee. The thing that contains the remnants of Alice Tonner roars and a gush of blood spurts from its neck.
Jon swears and dive for Martin, but Martin is of a single-minded purpose and slips through his fingers like fog. (Martin Blackwood feels that he was born to help people. He doesn’t even like helping people. He sometimes believes he was born with a hollow space where altruism should be.) (It is something his mother used to say.) (Martin Blackwood does not remember this, but he has internalized it.) (Martin Blackwood does not have a middle name.)
Something cold and fuzzy like radio static closes around his leg and Jon kicks the many-limbed servant of I Do Not Know You in the place its head ought to be. A host of faces flash across it before it goes blank again. It lets go, though.
Martin is speaking gentle but firm to Daisy, inaudible over the shattering rain and the slorp of mud and the ragged breaths of the beast. But she is not killing him. Not yet. (She is growing dizzy from blood loss. It frightens her. Fear punctures her rage but the Hunt laps it up like puddle water. It will not let her go. Not yet.) (She thinks she might just be real. She isn’t sure. Not yet.) (Jon knows the feeling.) (The Not-Them screams a death rattle that sounds like calliope music.)
Jon fixes the scrabbling broken thing in the mud with a gaze that Gertrude Robinson used no more than forty-six times in her life. It stops shifting rapid-fire between every form it has ever stolen, writhes, screams, but it cannot move under the weight of his eyes.
Something strange happens in his head, the same thing that happened when he tore Peter Lukas apart, and the Watcher reaches into him (through him) (out of him)
The thing that is not Sasha James and never was bursts into radio static and the aftertaste of terror.
Jon sucks in a shaky breath as the head rush hits him, staggering a little bit, slipping in the mud, but keeping upright. Stars cover his vision and then clear. He turns to find Martin.
Martin is approaching Daisy with both hands raised, appeasing, shuffling in the mud. (Appeasement was one of the first lessons he learned.) Daisy huffs huge, steaming breaths, gouts of blood pouring into the mud. (A human being can lose four liters of blood before they will die for certain.) (The animal before Jon is not human, but she cannot lose much more.)
Jon stumbles to Martin’s shoulder but doesn't interfere. He can hear Daisy’s thudding heartbeat and her sluggish half-there mind, as she pants and gasps and tries to decide if it’s worth putting her teeth around Martin’s skull, as she tries to catch his scent between great heaving gasps for air. (Heavy rain can disperse a scent trail, but water vapor holds volatile compounds better than dry air.) (She can smell them.) (If she can smell him she can follow him anywhere.) (If she can follow him she can kill him.) (She wants to kill them both.) (Daisy has wanted to kill Jon many times.)
But the blood loss and the Beholding and the weight of Martin’s calm appeasement beat back the Hunt in tandem. It holds a clawed grip on Daisy’s soul but claws can be shattered (like a skull by a steel pipe) and a soul can be stolen (like a life from Terminus) and Daisy is beginning to believe that she is real and fighting her way back to her mind (like a desperate man in a wax museum fighting his boss for a detonator)
The beast shudders and swoons and falls into the mud and bleeds and melts into the aftertaste of terror and something furless.
Daisy Tonner is whole and she is dying.