Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Paul drags himself back to reality like a drowning man breaching the surface: only for a few seconds, just long enough to take a single breath, before slipping back beneath the waves.

One moment, he’s curled up beside her, his purring not quite feigned as she drags her fingers through his hair, feeling lucky that he’s now allowed to sleep nearer to the head of the bed. The next, he wakes as if out of a dream, emerges back into the reality of pain and exhaustion and hunger, looks at this woman and her awful saccharine smile, and the full weight of the horrible truth hits him.

He let her into his apartment. He let her into his apartment. Into his home, so she can force him to crawl around on his own floors and lock away all the food he paid for and set out a litter box right in the middle of his living room. And he was - a second ago, he was fucking purring, of his own fucking volition, as easy as speaking, as easy as breathing.

“What’s wrong, Puss?” Melissa says, her voice sleepy, her hand growing heavy against the side of his face. “Get some sleep. We have to go play pretend tomorrow.” And then she’s out.

Playing pretend surely means going to work, which means it’s Sunday night right now, but which Sunday? Or maybe it’s some other weekday and he can’t even recall going into the office at all. How long has it been since the hospital? Everything after slamming into that car seems blurry, a collection of hazy memories that he can’t put into any meaningful order. He remembers waking up, remembers the spark of panic when he learned Melissa would be taken away, because she’d treated him as well as anyone could treat a cat, she wasn’t a bad owner.

But he’s not a cat, he’s a person, a human being who shouldn’t be treated like an animal in the first place. He knows that. Or he should know that, he should be able to keep it all straight, but she seems so convinced of it, so confident it almost convinces Paul as well, and he can’t get his thoughts together well enough to fight against it. God, his head really hurts. Something’s wrong with it, maybe a lot of things. He has a vague recollection of Freddie leaning over him, talking about a skull fracture, a concussion, explaining that his injury was the reason he was so confused about Melissa.

That has to be right; that has to be the reason. He’s got a nasty bump on his head and it’s keeping him from thinking clearly. He made a mistake in the throes of his delirium, one he must now dearly pay for, but it’s not what he really wants, deep down. It can’t be. He tastes cat food on his tongue — how the hell did he get here? How could he have gone back to her, even for a second? What’s - what is—

What is fucking wrong with him?

Eyes still closed, Melissa shifts in her sleep and murmurs, “Poor kitty, it’s alright.” 

And Paul feels almost… comforted by it. He’s got to get out of here, oh god, he’s got to find a way out.

Though he feels the tears prick his eyes, he does not let them fall. If he starts crying he probably won’t be able to stop, and around her he cannot make a noise, cannot breathe too loudly, cannot sound anything like a human, or her hand will whip out to the nightstand beside her and send lightning coursing through his bones. Cats don’t cry, he tells himself. That works; for some awful reason, it works.

-

The first dream is not a dream but a memory.

A memory of her lying in that hospital bed, pale and wan, her tangled hair a halo around her head, her eyes moving beneath their closed lids. Everything feels strange and twisted, not quite real, not quite fantastical. His head swims. This wing of the ward is quiet, bereft of the usual movement of nurses or doctors or guards, the squeak of nursing carts and wheelchairs, the beeping of monitors. They have her hooked only to an IV, slowly feeding her a sedative. It would be so easy to get her out of here. It will be so easy.

What comes next comes in disconnected sensations, his brain too addled to put all the pieces together. Touch: the weight of her body in his arms, the fabric of her bloodstained clothes he finds in a drawer beneath the sink, her pulse thrumming sluggishly in her neck, his own greasy hair against his hands as he nervously combs it back. Sound: the swish of her hospital gown as he pulls it off and replaces it with her street clothes, the drip of liquid from the cannula that he removes from her arm, her senseless murmuring as he stands her on her feet. Sight: the bright white bandage on her shoulder, the harsh overheads stabbing him in the temple. Smell, taste: of fear, potent in his mouth, so vivid that he worries he’ll choke on it.

They stumble out of the room, down a stairwell, into the parking lot, onto the sidewalk. It’s already dark out; no one notices them go by. Time passes in fits and starts, and he recalls only half-dragging her through the streets of Hatchetfield and up to his apartment. They’re both so worn out they barely manage to get inside. But they do manage; he tucks her into bed and then collapses, exhausted, on the floor by her side. Right by her, like the loyal cat he is.

“What a good boy,” she murmurs, maybe. Maybe he imagined it. Either way, she’s out of her mind right now, the drugs still holding her in their vice grip, and she has no idea what she’s saying. But he takes her praise when he can get it.

He levers himself onto his hands and knees with great effort, then hooks his chin on the edge of the mattress, tilting his head towards her. In her sleep, she reaches out and pets him. He purrs.

-

The second dream isn’t a dream, either. It just feels like one.

“Good kitty,” she says, pulling him sharply from his already restless sleep. He’s learned not to react, though, not to flinch or cower or pull away. He opens his eyes slowly, gazing up at her, still disoriented. She grins back down. In the low light, coming only from his bedside clock that reads some godless hour, she looks ghostly. “There you are, Puss. There’s my good boy.”

He meows at her like it’s second nature. Here, in the dead of night, he’s too tired to tell up from down, much less to remember what he truly is; remembering what she truly is, is off the table completely. He’s just her cat, just her loving, adoring cat, with his head cushioned in her lap and his paws all curled up under him, and it feels almost nice. Maybe not even almost.

“I’m so glad you came back.” She scratches behind one ear. As he falls back into sleep, her voice drifts over him, encompasses him, smothers him. “You made the right choice. You came right back to mommy, and now it’s just going to be me and you.”

-

Morning comes in time, and with it, a new dynamic.

“I don’t like seeing you in your skin suit.” Melissa pouts, sitting on the bed, one hand petting him where he kneels on the floor, the other laying a tie out over the three piece suit she’s picked for him. “But I can’t go to work anymore. Those mean, mean policemen want to take me away, and then who’s going to care for you?”

Paul meows in sympathy. He tries to keep his eyes on her like the loyal pet he should be, but they keep drifting to the human clothes, to those simple scraps of fabric that look to him like freedom.

Melissa stands up and covers her face with both hands. “Now go ahead and get changed, but I don’t think I can watch. It’s so hard having to play this game, isn’t it, Puss? I’m sorry we can’t just stay here together forever.”

The thought of forever sends fresh panic down his spine, as does the taser held tightly in her grip. She gestures around the room with it like it’s just a harmless prop. Each time she moves, he has to bite his tongue to keep from crying out. He levers himself onto his feet, his whole body protesting at suddenly being upright after a week of moving around on his hands and knees, and for a second he thinks standing hurts so much because cats aren’t meant to stand like people. But of course he’s supposed to stand like a person, because he is one. His clothes, once well-fitting, hang on his frame; he has to take his belt in two notches, and even that feels a little loose.

“Well, there’s no need to pretend in here,” she says, peeking through her fingers, voice taking on a dangerous edge. “What are you doing standing up like that?”

He drops down to the floor. She grins in pure joy, her anger forgotten in seconds, and meanders out of the room, calling for him to follow as she goes. They weave through his apartment, through the hallway with all of its pictures stripped from the walls, past the litter box that needs to be cleaned, and to the front door. Melissa scratches him behind one ear.

“Okay, Puss, I’ve got you a few human things that will help you blend in.” She hands him his wallet and dangles the keys to his own car in front of his face. He gets to take the wallet, but when he reaches for the keys she snatches them out of reach, and he cowers and gives her his most submissive meow, praying she won’t resort to the taser. “Silly kitty, cats can’t drive!” That dark tone is back. “I’ll be dropping you off and picking you up every day, but since I can’t get near CCRP, you’ll have to get out on the corner. That’s not too far to walk, is it?”

Not thinking, he shakes his head, like a person.

Electricity shoots through him, the taser strike lasting for what feels like hours, his muscles seizing up as lightning crackles through them. She pulls back, leaving him shaking and cramping up as always, but there’s a new, stronger, sharper pain in his right side, over his lower ribs. The skin there is raw, maybe rubbed off entirely, probably because that’s her favorite spot to jab the prongs in. When the tremors stop, he looks up to find Melissa staring at him with her big, gentle eyes. 

“I said, is that too far?” He meows this time, nuzzling her leg. “Good. Let’s get going. Don’t want to be late on your first day back.”

-

He’s never had so many people paying him so much attention.

Several people he only vaguely knows give him odd looks on the way up to his office, like he’s somewhere he’s not supposed to be. Sylvia from the top floor gets in the elevator with him, prattling the whole way about how glad she is to see him back, mentioning that she knew the rumors weren’t true just as he steps out. When he walks through the door to the technical department, the entire place stops to stare.

As his coworkers gape at him, he begins to wonder if they know, somehow. If they can see right through the seams in his human skin suit to the animal that he really is — no, no, he is a human. Of course they don’t think he’s a cat, because he’s not; they just have lots of other reasons to react with such shock.

Bill, for example, last saw him at Melissa’s apartment, nearly naked and swinging a dog cage like a battering ram, only to get leveled by a car and then disappear into thin air. Paul’s thoughts come a little quicker now than they did the night before, but that’s still not saying much: the mortification dawns on him far later than it should, taking its time in spreading from his chest to his entire body, until he can’t even look the other man in the face. God, what if Bill brings that up? What if he wants to talk about it?

“Hi, Paul,” says Charlotte, giving him a little wave. Her sweater has a cat on it. He’s never really noticed that before. “Nice to have you back.”

“Right, very nice,” Bill echoes. He looks almost as shell-shocked as Paul feels, turning without another word and shuffling back to his desk.

Paul really has to think hard just to go through the usual motions, has to tell himself to walk towards his desk and put down his bag and open his laptop. As it boots up, he glances around the office, seeing things but struggling to make sense of them. Ted’s office light is still off, he’s probably running late like always, stopping to flirt with every woman within a ten foot radius, but when he gets here he’ll—

It sinks in slowly, terribly. Ted won’t be coming to work today. He won’t ever come into work ever again, and Paul will go back to a place that now feels more like a jail cell than his home, and nothing will ever be the same as it was before. He thought coming here would give him freedom, but it’s just another cage.

His eyes wander away from that cold and empty office and land on Mr. Davidson, standing at the back of his chair. “Hey, Paul,” the man says with a smile bright enough to blind. He raises his mug of coffee in greeting. “Can we have a little chat?”

“Sure.” It’s the first human noise out of his mouth since he brought Melissa home, and it seems off even to his own ears. Like a meow that almost sounds like human words.

Mr. Davidson steps closer, setting his mug on Paul’s desk, and Paul’s groggy mind screams danger, begs him to fawn, to obey, to be a good little kitty so he doesn’t get hurt. Horrified by his own reaction, he can only stare blankly up at his boss as the man begins to speak.

“You were out for a whole week, Paul, and your absences were very much unexcused.” He shakes his head, but still offers a sympathetic smile. “However, I’ve been told that there was a bit of an… incident on Friday. Bill said you had an accident, is that right?”

How much did Bill tell? What does his boss know? What does everyone in the office know? Paul just nods, unable to form a better response.

“Well, seeing as you had an excuse, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt this time around. But don’t make a habit out of playing hooky, or you might not get so lucky the next time.” He claps Paul on the shoulder. “I’m out the rest of the week, but I expect you to still show up. Just because you’re salaried now doesn’t mean you can stay home whenever you want, yeah?”

“Of course,” Paul says. “Thanks.”

“And, I hate to say this, but I don’t think I can pay you for that missed time. Sorry about that, Paul.”

“It’s fine.”

The man squints at him from behind his thick glasses. “Are you alright? You’re not quite looking like yourself.” His smile turns cheeky. “Have a fun weekend?”

“No,” he answers honestly. Mr. Davidson laughs and leaves, forgetting his mug on the desk.

For a very, very long moment, Paul considers drinking the man’s coffee. It’s a crazy thought, but he hasn’t had anything but cat food, water, and milk for a full week, and his body craves some kind of human sustenance. But before he can decide whether or not to risk it, Mr. Davidson comes back to grab it. Paul watches it go with a profound sense of loss.

As soon as he turns back to his computer, he confirms that he most certainly has a concussion. The light from the computer screen stabs his eyes, makes his fractured temple throb; how he’s going to even look at it, much less do any actual work on it, is completely beyond him. And he has a thousand emails to sort through, messages that take him twice as long to understand as they usually do. He’s not even halfway through them when Charlotte wheels her chair from her cubicle into his.

“So.” She nears him and leans forward like she always does when she wants to gossip. “How was the move?”

He just blinks at her. “The… what?”

She gives him a confused smile. “Oh, you know, the move. Melissa said you moved to Clivesdale.”

Clivesdale? Fucking Clivesdale? Why the hell would he ever go there? “No, I’m still in the same place.” Everything else in his life has changed, but technically, that part is still true.

“Oh, really? That’s strange. She told us you’d moved there, and I did think it was a little unlike you, we all did, but we also thought you’d just up and quit on us.”

That was Melissa’s cover for last week, then. A quick and convenient little lie to draw away their suspicion, and it seems like they all more or less fell for it. It terrifies him to think of them leading their lives out here, none the wiser to his imprisonment, and terrifies him even more to realize that he’s thrown himself right back into it and still they don’t seem to notice. But really, he shouldn’t expect that much of them; any reasonable person would never choose to go back to such a hellhole, so they have no good reason to be suspicious.

“I didn’t - I’m not—” He shuts his eyes for a second and tries again. “Melissa and I aren’t… a couple.” Again, technically true.

Charlotte frowns deeply, her brow furrowing. On the other side of him, he hears Bill fall into total silence, listening in. “You’re not? But all last week, she told us you two had gotten together. She even told that woman – oh, Paul, you’re sure?”

“Positive.” His mouth feels very dry. “She just lied, I guess. She’s sort of, you know, she’s a little…” He stares at the cat on Charlotte’s sweater, and swallows with an audible click. “Crazy.”

Bill, on the other side of the cubicle wall, starts working again, throwing himself into his job with an enthusiasm only shown by people who want to block out everything else in the world. But at least he hasn’t told anyone; Charlotte can’t lie for shit, and she’s too curious for her own good, so if he had, she would’ve brought it up by now. Even though he surely thinks Paul is a freak and a pervert, he still cares enough to keep his secret.

“Speaking of which,” Charlotte muses, “I haven’t seen her yet today. I know she doesn’t like the early mornings, but it’s already almost eleven.” She starts to wander away, now talking more to herself than to him. “And Ted’s been gone a long while. It’s getting pretty strange around here.”

-

Around noon, Bill and Charlotte head out for lunch without inviting him, something that brings him genuine relief. Not only could he not bear to sit across from Bill for a full half hour, but he knows they’re going off campus, and he doesn’t want to leave the one place she cannot enter until he absolutely must.

So he’ll eat in the CCRP cafe. It’s a grisly place, built more like a dungeon than a cafeteria, so loud he can’t hear his own thoughts, with shitty, overpriced meals, but at least it has food at all. Real food, human food. If he can take in more calories than what little is in Melissa’s slop, then maybe he can get enough energy to heal, enough to help his brain to start firing right again, or at least just enough to provide a little relief from his all-encompassing hunger. And she was stupid enough to give him his wallet, so all he has to do is walk down there and—

His money is gone. All his cards are gone. Nothing remains in his wallet but his driver’s license and, horrifically, a tiny picture of her where his credit card used to be. Like with the night before, tears spring to his eyes and swell in his throat; like the night before, he doesn’t let them fall.

So he’ll just… not eat, not have any food, just go home (his home, she’s in his home) and let her toss down a pile of mush for him. With this confirmation of his fate, the hunger that he’s ignored for the last few hours roars back to life. He thinks he might go crazy with it. But he doesn’t even have the strength to properly lose his mind, so he just drops his head down on his desk.

He could take something.

The thought comes from some dark, desperate corner of his mind, from the part that only awakens now that all illusion of civility has fallen away. Never in his life has he stolen anything; he’s never had any reason to, and even if he did, he’d be too scared of getting caught. But he is so, so hungry. There’s an unmanned grab-and-go station in the cafeteria, free of the watchful eyes of the workers that serve hot meals. It’s busy enough in there during lunch that no one will see him if he acts quickly, and he might even manage to sneak his crime past the security cameras. He could, if he wanted to. And he does, he really, really does.

He almost balks when he gets downstairs. There are so many people, and if one of them catches him, he doesn’t think he can piece together a solid enough lie. They’ll haul him to security and he’ll get fired for stealing from his workplace and they’ll send him home, to his home (her home), and he will never, ever get away from her. Why can’t he just be grateful for what he has? Why can’t he suck it up and do as he’s told? 

But now people stare at him because he’s lingering in the very center of the cafeteria entrance, blocking the way. This is enough to get him to stumble forward. After that first step he takes another, then another, then his momentum carries him all the way to the grab-and-go station. If he just turns his brain off and lets his body run on automatic, it’s so easy to just reach into the fridge, steal one of the pre-made sandwiches, and walk away.

His pulse thundering in his ears but his mind strangely quiet, Paul folds himself into a table in the corner, opens his sandwich, and tears into it. It’s not the heavenly experience he thought it would be; the texture is horrible in his mouth, he can’t taste anything beyond the flavor of cat food that always clings to his tongue, each bite sits heavy in his stomach. Of course it would feel so terrible – he’s hardly had any food in a full week. But he only thinks of his own survival, only thinks of getting enough nourishment so he can survive having nothing but slop for the rest of the day, maybe longer. Eating feels like a chore, even more so when half the sandwich is gone and nausea starts to grip him.

His stomach gives a painful twist, the only warning he gets, and he has just enough time to make it to a bathroom stall before he vomits his barely-digested lunch into the toilet bowl. In the aftermath, he slumps against the wall, shaking, his whole torso aching from the torture he just put it through, his head pounding with the exertion. The fluorescents hurt his eyes even when he closes them.

Worst of all, as he curls up in a shivering ball on the disgusting bathroom floor, he knows that his objectives haven’t really changed. He still needs food in his system. He still needs to build up his strength, so when it’s time to leave Melissa, he can flee for good.

(why don’t you go now you’re away from her)

(she’ll kill you if you misbehave she’ll rip all your guts out like she did to—)

(cats aren’t meant to have human food, anyway. that’s the real reason it made you sick. you’re a bad kitty, a bad, stupid, lying, ungrateful cat.)

Time ticks by. He realizes that he’s yet to find a place in so long that doesn’t feel like a cage. But he still pulls himself to his feet, washes up, and trudges back out to eat his sandwich, now with his mouth coated in the awful dual taste of vomit and cat food. This time, he manages four bites before he starts feeling ill again, and he throws the rest away.

The day drags on.

-

“You’re ten whole minutes late, Puss.”

He can’t tell her that he got out late because he needed to send a last minute email. He can’t defend himself in any way. He just has to sit there in the passenger seat of his own car, suddenly feeling like some freak of an animal for sitting upright like a person, and let her berate him.

Run, his mind tells him, behind the exhaustion and the terror, just fucking run. Just unbuckle the seatbelt and make a break for it. But he barely had the strength to walk the block to her car, and she has the taser in her hand, and she could have the knife anywhere, could turn it on him at any time. She and her friends had given Ted no signs of his upcoming doom: he thought they were going to screw him, for god’s sake. They used his most core desire to fool him. For Paul, that probably means she’ll strike when he feels most at ease, when he thinks he has control. No place or moment is safe.

Melissa sighs as she pulls out of her parking spot. “I’m taking a lot of risks, you know. Just today I had to go scrub some footage for you. A sweet little kitty is worth it, but this can’t happen forever, you’ve got to start being on time. Alright?” He meows, leaning across the center console to rub his head against her arm. “That’s a good boy.”

A sorrowful look comes across her face, and Paul stops dead, his pulse thundering in his ears. This is it. This is the moment she hacks him to pieces and sobs while his guts hit the floorboards. And didn’t he just tell himself she’d strike when he least expects it?

But she doesn’t kill him, not yet. She just scratches the back of his neck. “I hate it, but you’ve got to learn your lesson. I need to show you how serious it is when you don’t do things just like you’re supposed to.”

Anything, he’ll do anything, whatever it takes to keep from winding up as a bloodstain on the end of her knife. He chirps at her. It sounds humiliatingly eager.

“So no food tonight, I think,” she says. “My time means just as much to me as dinner means to you. It seems harsh, I know, but it’s for the best.”

That night, he rests on the floor in front of the couch, curled around the gnawing emptiness that is his stomach as she rolls a ball at him and tries to get him to play. He lies there lifeless until she pulls out her taser and stabs it into that same spot on his side. In time she grows annoyed at his lack of enthusiasm – that sends alarm bells ringing in the last distant part of his mind that still sees sense – and when they go to bed, she makes him sleep on the floor.

Chapter Text

He wakes some time in the night and knows he’s not really awake, because nothing hurts.

A silhouette stands in the darkened doorway, a long, lanky figure, leaning casually against the frame. They have a can of cat food in their hand — he’d recognize the shape of it anywhere. 

“Puss!” they call, holding the can aloft. “Puss! Come here, boy!”

Paul knows that voice a thousand times over; he’s heard it crack bad jokes, spit out countless awful pick-up lines, beg for rescue, scream in horror and agony, gargle on blood. Ted. Right in front of him, alive and well and staring down at Paul in disgust. Not in horror, and absolutely not in pity, just in pure, abject disgust.

“How did you get yourself trapped in here, buddy?” he says in his most jeering tone.

When their roles were reversed, Ted pleaded with Paul to get him out, threw himself against the bars of his cage, fought and fought to be free. But Paul just lies there in silence, curled up on the hard floor. Ted gives him one long look, turns around, and leaves. Paul feels most betrayed by the fact that he took the cat food with him.

-

“We can’t let your fur poke through,” Melissa says, sliding the shaving razor down to his jaw.

This moment feels the most surreal of all the bizarre horrors he has faced thus far. After feeding him his breakfast, Melissa had taken him into the bathroom and made him sit perfectly still on the floor – no scratching or biting, Puss, be a good boy – as she shaved his face. It had terrified him, at first, having something so sharp so close to his throat, but the entire time she has only been sweet to him. Now, five or so minutes in, he almost relishes her gentle touch, so at odds with her usual violence, and despite that tiny screaming voice in the back of his head, he lets himself relax, just a bit. 

Really, he’s not thinking about Melissa when those hands tenderly stroke his face. When was the last time she touched him? After their hate-watching date, surely, when she kissed him goodnight, but did they make contact after that? Maybe on that last morning when she brought their coffee, maybe she brushed his arm. He can’t remember.

Oh, fuck, he can’t remember. It’s all sliding away, fading like smoke on the wind, and soon enough he’ll forget her, he’ll forget everything and it will just be him and this woman and his entire world will be this cage of his own making and—

“All done, Puss.” Melissa tosses the razor carelessly in the sink, then takes a towel and runs it over his cheeks, wiping away the remnants of the shaving cream. “We can’t let people know that you have fur.” She drops her voice to a whisper. “Or they’ll see right through your human disguise.”

Paul wonders how disconnected she is from reality, wonders if she really, truly thinks he’s a cat in a man’s skin, or if she knows the truth and just keeps up the game for her own sadistic pleasure. He wonders because she’s only cared this much about his appearance since she decided he could go back to work; getting rid of his stubble and styling his hair will make him minutely more presentable, and lessen the suspicion when he goes out. Surely he looks like an absolute wreck, so it’s best to draw away as much attention as possible.

Either way, he’s just glad to feel a little bit cleaner again. The shaving cream had made the skin on his face smooth and fresh, a welcome relief from the inescapable filth that clings to the rest of him, with his teeth left unbrushed and his body left unbathed. He hasn’t had a shower since she took him, because cats hate water, and he’s used the litter box twice since then. She might have to wash him soon, or else his stench will start to tip people off.

For a second, that tiny voice in his head grows louder, shouts him down, so overwhelming for just a moment that he can’t hear anything else. What the fuck is he doing? Why is he kneeling on his own bathroom floor, wearing only dirty, shit-stained underwear, letting this woman treat him like a cat in his own goddamn home?

Get up and go, he thinks. Get up and go. Get. Up. And. Go. Then the fear overtakes him in one fell swoop, and the thought of trying to run fills him with such terror his weakened body almost collapses. The taser. The knife. He can’t.

“Alright,” Melissa says, as cheerful as ever. “Let’s go get you ready for the day. Come on, be a good kitty.”

She turns her back to him and heads out of the bathroom. That voice rises up again, over the terror, and he turns his eyes up towards the sink. Like with swiping that sandwich yesterday, he doesn’t think, only acts, and lifts himself up high enough to grab the razor out of the basin. Then he falls back to his hands and knees, shoves the razor in his underwear, and follows after her.

-

The first half of the morning passes in an indistinct blur, almost pleasant in its haze. The razor now sits heavy in one of his suit pockets – Melissa couldn’t bear to watch him change, so she’d closed her eyes, and he’d made the switch with her none the wiser. He feels no more powerful having the weapon, only a little more unstable, a little more on edge.

But things look minutely better, his day unfurling before him in a predictable order: work until noon, steal something from the cafeteria again for lunch, try to figure out how to best hold the razor to defend himself. After that, who knows. He can think about the hard stuff later.

Then, at sometime after ten, the elevator dings, and his empty stomach drops to his feet.

“Order twenty-nine,” Emma calls out before she’s even all the way in the office. People start to amble over to her, everyone except for Paul, who is instantaneously frozen. “One caramel frappe, one cold brew with cream, one iced americano. And to whoever ordered that bagel, we’re fresh out, so you’ll have to just fucking deal—”

Her gaze locks onto Paul. 

There is a long, long moment, ten or more beats of Paul’s fluttering heart, where they just stare at each other. The rest of the office grabs their drinks and shuffles back to their desks, leaving no cover, no distance between the two of them. A fire catches in her eyes. When she storms over to him and slams her hands on his desk, his breath catches harshly in his throat, but he doesn’t flinch; he’s taught himself not to these past few days, and anyways, a little bit of noise is nothing compared to what he’s survived.

“You’re a real piece of fucking work,” she snaps, her voice starting in a whisper but rising to full volume by the last word. “You got what you wanted out of me and just moved onto the next one, didn’t you? I shouldn’t even be giving you the time of fucking day.”

Like with all of his emotions lately, confusion takes a second to break through the surface, and hurt lags even farther behind. For a long while, he just watches her without feeling, able only to focus on being very still and very quiet and very good. He doesn’t know why she’s so mad at him, but he also knows better than to ask. Cats don’t speak.

“And I don’t give a shit that you’re in here with all these people around you,” she goes on, “because it’s not like I can get you to answer me any other way. Too busy fucking your new girl, I guess.”

At last, he manages to make a little more sense of where he is and how he’s supposed to act and what she’s saying, and he croaks out, “What?” 

Emma reels back like he struck her. “Unbelievable. You’re an asshole, you know that?”

“What new girl?” he says. His head is starting to pound again.

“Don’t play dumb with me.” She swivels her head around, scowling, hands planted on her hips. “Where is she? We can go ask her and see if she’s a little more honest than your cheating ass.”

Who, he almost asks, but before he can get the word out he realizes. Emma must have questioned Paul’s continued absence at some point last week, and someone relayed to her the same lie Melissa had told the rest of the office. Maybe it was Melissa herself. And then he remembers the date they’d planned, the date he’d missed because he’d been locked up, but of course to Emma it would look like he just abandoned her.

“We’re not together. She’s just…” If he has to say this one more time, he might break down for good, because it doesn’t capture a fraction of what she is or how she thinks. “Crazy.”

“Yeah, she sure is. And you stuck your dick in that.”

“I didn’t - I’m not—”

“She had a very vivid description ready to go. It wasn’t the sort of shit you make up on the spot.”

The room spins a little. What the hell did Melissa tell Emma? What kind of hole did she dig for him? He had a blurry realization of what she’s doing – cutting off his connections. Bill is cowed into uncomfortable, disgusted silence. Emma is angry enough to end things right now. They are the only two people who’d ever notice something is wrong.

Despite the fog that clouds his mind, a little bit of fight sparks in him. He has to convince her to stay, or he’ll lose everything. “I’m not fucking her. I hate her.” His voice breaks, and he almost folds right then and there.

“Text me back, then. Answer my calls. Really try to convince me.”

Panic curls in his gut; it’s funny how every other feeling seems so far away, but the fear always rises up in a heartbeat. “I don’t have my phone.”

“That’s some bullshit. You could at least make a good attempt when you lie to my face.” She starts to back off, and he almost reaches out to her in desperation, but before she can get very far she turns back. “You look terrible, by the way. If you feel so shitty about this, fix it.”

God, she has no fucking idea. Or… maybe she does. There’s this new look in her eye, beneath the fury, not quite concern but something close. Something knowing. Like she can just feel that something’s off, even if she can’t quite pinpoint what. She sees it, he thinks, almost giddy with the realization. She sees it.

She leans forward on his desk, takes up all of his field of vision, and the more he looks at her, the more he wants to scream. Not even at her, or for her, just at anything. His hand twitches like he means to reach out for her, to feel safe connection like he hasn’t in weeks, but in the end he doesn’t even lift it off the desk.

“Paul,” is all she says.

They watch each other for another long moment, but in the end he has to turn away. His heart hurts, his head hurts, and he presses the heels of his hands against his eyes, desperate for that little bit of cover. When he looks up again, god only knows how many minutes later, she’s gone.

-

This time, he steals a pack of chips, something that will last a little longer than the sandwich. He can’t keep risking getting caught, and he knows despite his hunger he won’t be able to eat very much, so he needs something he can keep in a desk drawer for days at a time.

He manages five or six of them before he has to stop. He can’t figure out if he’s so hungry it’s making him nauseous, or if he’s mistaking his nausea for hunger, but he can’t go on like this if he wants to build any strength. If he’s going to take Melissa down, it will take the sort of stamina that right now, he just doesn’t have.

(or you could walk down to the police station and get it all over with)

(she’ll find you she’s done it before she’ll do it again she’ll kill you, blood all over the floor just like—)

The razor seems to burn in his pocket. When he can ensure that the office is empty, he pulls it out, studies it. It’s a typical shaving razor, more plastic than metal, with four rows of tiny blades locked in a frame. Hardly sharp or powerful enough to cause any real damage, but maybe he can stun her for a few seconds.

(so what you know you won’t run away you’ll never get away from her)

Once again checking that he has no one around him, he swipes the razor through the air, a pantomime of an attack, and though he feels quite awkward doing so, he feels even more afraid. The thought of ever striking back against her makes his already queasy stomach turn. Even worse, the weakness that has plagued him for days throws off all his coordination; already far from graceful, his maladroit limbs now barely listen to his commands, and his hands shake to the point that he wonders if he’ll be able to hold the razor long enough to slash her.

But he has to try, doesn’t he? He put himself into this mess, only he can get himself out. He can’t rely on a random visit from Bill this time to make his escape, because Melissa has locked her apartment – no, his apartment – up tight. She doesn’t answer the door anymore. She doesn’t let him out of her sights, except, of course, for the eight hours a day that he spends here.

(run fucking run here’s your opportunity just get away)

The elevator dings, and Bill and Charlotte step out. Paul tucks the razor away and gets back to work.

-

He spends the last hour or so of his workday in the little single-person bathroom at the end of the hall, with the lights off and the door locked. His temple pounds where the bone beneath is fractured, and between that and the growing pain of the taser wound on his side, he feels seconds from once again vomiting up his paltry lunch. Nobody bothers him, though once he hears Charlotte go by, probably talking to Bill, wondering aloud where he’s gone.

But then again, he also swears that he hears Ted’s voice a few times, so maybe he’s well and truly lost it.

-

Today’s the day for awful surprise encounters, it seems.

Paul walks out of CCRP’s front doors and directly into him, and even though Freddie Biggs is a smaller man, it feels like running into a brick wall. He bounces off, hitting the real brick wall behind him, his legs almost giving out, his breath catching in his throat. His thoughts stop coming in words and start coming in terrified screams, blaring like a klaxon going off in his head.

“How ya doing, Matthews?” Freddie says over Paul’s mental howling.

He’s got to get away from here. He only has eight minutes to spare or Melissa might actually kill him this time for being late. But he can’t lead Freddie back to her or they’ll arrest her again, leaving Paul all alone, a stray without an owner, destined for the shelter or the streets. It’ll be a harder life than even this, having to fend for himself, dodge the cars on the roads, stay out of harm’s way. At least she didn’t declaw him, so he can defend himself if she does get taken away.

Freddie places a hand on his shoulder, probably meant to steady him, only succeeding in feeling like a vice. “Let’s have a little chat.” At the terror he surely sees on Paul’s face, the man gives him a brief smile. “No worries, you’re not in trouble.”

But he is in trouble, he is so very much in trouble. When he took Melissa from the hospital, he wasn’t thinking of anything but getting her home. He certainly wasn’t thinking about being discreet, or avoiding security cameras, or covering his trail, so he had to have left a mountain of evidence a thousand feet tall. They’ve probably already got everything they need – footage of him carrying her out, more information about him than he even knows about himself, a timeline of all his activities from the last few days. Freddie is here to arrest him, and then he’ll go straight to the pound. Or, no, he’ll go to prison, because out here they see him not as a cat, but as a person, a person who has aided a wanted criminal.

Freddie raises an eyebrow. “No need to lose your head, alright? What’s got you looking so rough?”

Never in his life has Paul run into any sort of conflict with the police; he’s never even gotten pulled over. He doesn’t know how to get himself out of this, much less how to keep suspicion off of Melissa while still getting away soon enough to get to the car on time. There’s no clock around, he doesn’t have his phone or a watch, but it has to have been at least a few minutes by now. Maybe he’s already late. He feels seconds from keeling over.

“I have some questions for you,” Freddie says. His tone is gentler, like at first he saw Paul as someone suspicious, but now just pities him. “How about we go take a seat? You look like you need to get off your feet.”

“No,” Paul says. Even getting that one word out takes great effort. All of Freddie’s goodwill vanishes. 

“No to what? Getting off your feet or answering my questions? Because the second one doesn’t make you look so good.” The man keeps his firm grip on Paul’s shoulder and shoves him forward, decisive but not quite harsh, leading him towards a nearby bench. Between the shock and his fear and his abused body, Paul barely has the strength to stay upright, much less resist. He drops heavily onto the bench, Freddie sitting down beside him. “Not sure if you’ve watched the news recently, but that woman that took you got away.”

He doesn’t react at all, and Freddie oddly doesn’t seem to find that unusual. Maybe he assumes Paul has seen the news, or maybe he knows that Paul is harboring a fugitive and is just waiting for him to admit it. It’s getting sort of hard to breathe. There’s no way Paul can get his shit together well enough to lie.

“We’re in the middle of a massive manhunt,” Freddie says. “We’ve checked all our leads, all her old safehouses, we even chased after her little Kitty Cat Club friends. Caught one of them, too, but she swears she hasn’t seen Melissa since that night we got you out. And now there’s some fuckery going on with the hospital security cameras at St. Damien’s. They lost a shitload of footage.” He stares at Paul, his eyes like daggers. Fuck, he knows, he fucking knows. “You’re the only victim who’s ever survived. I was hoping you can give us a little insight into how she thinks, where she might have gone.”

Yeah, he can give insight into where she is. She’s in his home, in his bed, controlling every single part of his life and his apartment and his belongings, forcing him to play some twisted game for her own amusement. But if he tells Freddie this, they’ll take her away and take him away, or maybe just her, and he has no idea where he’ll go from there.

“Do I… have to?” Not only can Paul not lie right now, but it seems that he is also incapable of phrasing anything in any way but damning.

“Do you have to talk to me?” The man crosses his arms. “Technically, not at the moment, but you’re doing an awful job of avoiding suspicion.”

“I just don’t want to think about her anymore.”

“That’s understandable, but I’m sure you’d sleep better at night if you knew she was locked up. Even if it’s hard to talk about, any little thing you remember helps. Any little thing at all.” Paul lets his shoulders sag a bit, and Freddie pats him on the back. “I get it, Matthews, it’s real fucked up what she did to you. Gonna take a while to get over it. But can I tell you something?”

The air around them shifts, Paul’s entire chest clenching, and even through the fog in his head he can still sense the bright thread of danger that has crept into their conversation. It’s the exact same feeling he gets milliseconds before Melissa drives her taser into his side. He goes completely still. For half a moment he has the crazy fear that Freddie will tase him for being a bad cat, and then for many more moments he’s terrified that this is the point where Freddie hauls him to the precinct.

Freddie leans in closer, his voice dropping to just above a whisper. “They don’t take aiding and abetting lightly in these parts.” If Paul hadn’t gotten so good at hiding his feelings these last few days, he would’ve given himself up right then and there. “I’m not saying anything about anyone right now, but they think they can fix the security feed in a few days, and when they do, well…” He shakes his head. “But if you were hiding a serial killer because of, say, a nasty head injury and a fear of death if you turned her in, we’ve got a little more wiggle room. If you keep hiding her, though, that’s when things get ugly.”

There’s nothing Paul can say, not if he wants to retain any facade of innocence, so he just looks at Freddie, expressionless. Freddie sighs and hauls himself to his feet.

“I’m not gonna give you my number,” the man says, “‘cause my guess is it’s a bad idea for you to try to call it. But you just phone the police, walk down to the station, whatever you can do, and we’ll help you out. Preferably before that hospital footage proves you guilty.”

-

Paul leaps into the car, nuzzling against her outstretched hand and meowing placatingly, his heart thudding in his chest. The dashboard clock tells him he’s thirteen minutes late. She will kill him, she will kill him, she will whip out that knife right here and kill him.

But Melissa just gives him a sweet smile. “You’re a very good boy, Puss.”

He doesn’t understand. He looks up at her and chirps, watching the grin stay and stay on her face, searching her eyes for some hint of a trick, a trap, but he finds nothing.

“Oh, poor kitty,” she croons, scratching him behind the ears. “Did you think you were in trouble?” He meows in response. “You did a good job, Puss, getting that scary detective mutt off our trail. Why would I ever get mad at you for doing the right thing? You only have to be punished when you’re bad.”

All the way home, she pets his head as she drives, the motion clearly soothing for her, and he’s at least glad that he can help her, since she’s been so kind to him today. He was late; she could’ve pounced on him for that, but she didn’t. Instead, she praises him and rubs him and even turns on the radio for him to listen, humming along to a song that he just so happens to love. He wonders if she somehow knows that.

When they get back to her apartment, she gives him a bowl of milk and a treat. He slips the razor out of his pocket and back into his underwear. She doesn’t force him to play with the cat toys, doesn’t bring the taser out all night, and lets him sleep in her bed. This, maybe, is the reason he brought her home in the first place – she can be sweet, she can take care of him as well as any pet owner ever could, so long as he behaves. So long as he’s a good boy.

Chapter Text

The wound on his side keeps him up most of the night.

It throbs in time with his pulse, and smarts when the air hits it, a bright pain he can’t ignore no matter how hard he tries to think of anything else. Nausea crawls up his throat, the room turning lazy circles around him. His whole body faintly aches, and even though he lies over the covers in only his underwear, the room is uncomfortably warm.

By the time morning arrives, he can’t endure just lying there any longer. He studies Melissa’s sleeping face for a long while, ensuring she truly is asleep before he does something too human for her liking. Then he raises his right arm, gritting his teeth when the movement pulls on the skin around the wound, trying to get a look at it, though he can’t see much more than the edge of it without adjusting himself and possibly waking her. Still, what he can see isn’t great — part of it is red, but part of it is a milky yellowish-white, and looks wet.

She rouses a bit, and he snaps his arm back down against his side, silently cringing at the spark of pain that jolts through him. He cannot let her see it, because then she’d probably demand he deal with it like a cat would, and make him lick it clean.

-

“Sam keeps coming home late,” Charlotte complains. Paul tries his best to listen to her, but he hears her as if from a great distance, like she’s standing clear on the other side of the room. “I know it’s hypocritical, because of me and Ted—” The mention of Ted sends a spike of grief through his chest, but only for a second before the haze settles over him again “—but I really will be so heartbroken if he’s—”

Paul thinks he must have slipped so deep into his fog that he stopped hearing her, that she must still be rambling on while he stares blankly ahead. But when he turns to look at her, he finds her watching him in silence, her eyes creased with a little worry and a lot of confusion. It reminds him of Emma’s gaze yesterday.

“What?” he croaks out, his patience for people’s pitying looks almost gone.

“Are you alright, Paul?” She hunches forward a little, to be more on his level as he sits. God, now even she seems able to see right through him, and she’s the most scatterbrained person here, sometimes so stuck in her own head that she pours salt instead of sugar in the coffee.

“Fine.” He doesn’t want to be rude to her – she has the least amount of involvement in this by far – but he cannot take her endless questions today.

“You’re sure?” She hums, tilting her head side to side to see him from different angles, squinting at him like the answer rests right on his skin. “You were out all week last week. And since you came back, you’ve seemed so tired. Are you getting enough sleep? Are you eating? You do look a little thin.”

He closes his eyes and rubs at his face, saying nothing. Every conversation he has with anyone has started feeling more and more like an interrogation: he’s damned if he answers truthfully, damned if he lies, damned if he just sits here and stays quiet.

Charlotte shifts anxiously, the sounds of her sweater sliding against itself for some reason almost deafening in his ears. Her sweater with the cat on it. “Oh, I know it’s none of my business, but things have just gotten so strange around here. Ted disappears, and then you leave for a full week, and we all thought you’d just quit, but then you come back and Ted doesn’t and now Melissa goes missing. It’s odd, don’t you think?”

Again, he doesn’t respond, but he does open his eyes, fearing that if he leaves them shut for any longer, he’ll fall asleep right there at his desk. Charlotte prattles on, telling him he should get more rest and he should at least let them buy him lunch and he should try not to get so stressed. He plans to wait here until she wears herself out, but after a while she once again stops talking and studies him.

“Actually,” she says, more to herself than to him, “It looks like…”

There’s always been this weird barrier between him and her that doesn’t let them touch. It’s probably because they’re the only relationship among the four of them where the professionalism fully extends both ways; Ted puts his hands on Charlotte all the time and claps Paul on the back more than he’d prefer, Paul pats Bill on the shoulder, Bill sometimes elbows him in the side, but Paul and Charlotte have never made contact. It makes what happens next, when Charlotte reaches out and rests the palm of her hand against Paul’s forehead, all that much more impactful.

When was the last time someone touched him without meaning him harm? Not even in the way Emma touches him, just… at all. When was the last time he felt hands on him that didn’t threaten to tighten, to maim, to kill? He has to fight hard not to lean into Charlotte’s palm.

“Oh, Paul.” A little bit of sadness flashes in her eyes. “You’re feverish. Are you sick? You should have taken the day off.”

A fever. That makes sense, more sense than what he’d been considering, namely that he’d gotten ill from eating human food. Because he’s supposed to eat human food. Because he’s not a cat. But that only makes things worse, because he knows what’s causing it, and knows there’s no easy solution. It’s that damn burn on his side; something’s wrong with it. And if his mind is cloudy with fever it will make it that much harder to figure out how to get away from Melissa when the time comes.

(when will it come? how long will you wait?)

“I’m okay,” he says, but he doesn’t even have the willpower to fake a smile. “Really.”

(how long will you wait?)

“Come on, now.” Charlotte shakes her head at him, a bit fond but mostly exasperated. “I know you don’t like to take days off, but that also means you have a whole bunch you can still use. I think you deserve it. We can handle the extra work for a little while.”

(how long?)

“Honestly, it’s fine.” Tell her, his brain screams. Tell her tell somebody tell anybody get out of here and limp down to the police station do anything but—

(forever?)

Something strange sparks in her eyes, something he can’t name. She gives him a tense smile. “I don’t know about that, you’re burning up. Are you worried that Mr. Davidson won’t let you since you were out last week?”

“No, it’s not that, it’s just—”

“He’ll let you, I’m sure of it. And besides, we don’t want you getting the whole office sick, now, do we?”

Paul lets his head fall back against his chair. Every conversation, an interrogation. He can’t conjure up a lie good enough to convince her that he doesn’t need to leave; there’s no way he can get her to ignore the facts, the glassy sheen in his eyes and the sweltering heat beneath his skin. Not going home would make him look suspicious. More suspicious than he already looks, that is.

“You should go home, Paul.” It’s as demanding as she ever gets.

“It’s okay,” he says, his voice weak. He doesn’t know how many more words he has in him today. “I’d rather be here.”

“Than at home?” she asks.

Not thinking, he nods.

That spark comes back into her eyes. He names the emotions as he sees them – worry, disbelief, sorrow, anger – but they flit by too quickly to catch them all. Charlotte crouches down even farther, until her face is level with his, near enough that she can whisper to him without being overheard. There’s a streak of determination on her face, something he’s never really seen from her before.

She reaches out again, very gently taking his hand. “Paul.” She’s so serious he feels guilty for scaring her. “Are you afraid to go home?”

A memory hits him square in the face, a scene he thought he’d long forgotten. On one of his earliest days at CCRP, Charlotte had come in with her face tearstained and her hair mussed and one sleeve of her sweater torn, and Paul had been young and dumb and had believed Ted and Bill when they said everything was okay. They never saw her like that again, so he’d let it slip into the back of his mind, refused to question things, even just to himself. What kind of asshole is he, upset that no one in the office has noticed his plight, when he’s not bothered to notice anyone else’s?

And it’s worse, because Charlotte probably married Sam before she’d ever seen his true colors, but Paul made the choice to go back to Melissa. He doesn’t deserve to be rescued. He certainly doesn’t deserve the pitying, understanding expression on Charlotte’s face. They’re not the same, and she shouldn’t waste her time on him.

“I’m okay,” he repeats.

She doesn’t press any further, just blinks at him with her big, sad eyes. After a while she says, “I have some ibuprofen in my desk drawer, if you want them.”

“Sure.”

With a speed so fast it makes him dizzy, she rushes over to her own cubicle and returns with a little roll of travel sized Advil, which she refuses to take back. She asks him if he needs some water, too, and he tells her he’ll just get a cup from the water cooler. Really, he’s worried he won’t be able to keep the medicine down and doesn’t want her around if he has to rush to the bathroom.

As he hauls himself out of his chair, she pats him on the arm, glancing away. “If you ever want to talk about it, or - or, if you ever need to—”

“Okay.” If even Charlotte can see it, he’s doing the world’s shittiest job of hiding the truth. “Thanks.”

What he doesn’t account for is that the breakroom water cooler is visible from Charlotte’s desk. She tries to hide it, but she watches him the entire time, concern clear on her face. She’s offering him an out, and she’s not the only one, but he’s just too much of a coward to take it.

(how long? forever?)

-

Despite the bag of chips in his drawer and the fever reducer numbing the sharpest edges of his malaise, he doesn’t eat lunch. The thought of putting anything in his mouth repulses him, ties his stomach up in knots. He hardly even feels hungry anymore, just sort of weak, which he knows comes from a lack of food, but fixing this problem doesn’t seem worth the trouble.

The razor in his pocket is becoming more and more of an empty promise, a beautiful dream but nothing more. Maybe if he was someone else, he could do it. If he was braver, or smarter, or less passive, maybe he could do it. 

But how many opportunities has he given up at this point? If he hasn’t acted already, he won’t act any time soon. He’ll just sit here debating with himself for the rest of his life. For the rest of his very short life. 

-

He doesn’t have the fucking time for this.

It doesn’t help that the medicine has lost a good bit of its potency or that Bill is standing before him like a guilty child. The man is wringing his hands almost as bad as Paul does, and Paul can barely handle one of himself right now, much less two. He doesn’t much want to talk to Bill, either. It’s been three days since he came back to work, and they haven’t shared a word in that time, but even then this feels too soon.

“Yes?” Paul says, frowning at his best friend. It’s clear that this won’t be the usual chit-chat about faulty printers or ex-wives.

Bill swallows so hard Paul can see it, but he still says nothing. The silence stretches for so long that Paul lets his mind wander, first onto the glorified security blanket that is the razor and the things he pretends he’ll do with it – he fantasizes about knocking Melissa’s glasses off sometimes, going for her eyes – then about the Advil that’s now in his drawer. It’s about time for him to take more, but he wants to make them last, and he doesn’t feel that terrible at the moment, just bad enough that he doesn’t want to deal with this new situation.

And then Bill clears his throat, and Paul snaps back to attention, his heart thudding, half expecting to see a taser, chiding himself for letting his focus slip. “Can we talk?” Bill says, hesitant.

Paul just sort of stares at him.

The other man wanders closer, stepping inside Paul’s cubicle, but only just. He won’t look Paul in the eye. “What did—” He grimaces like the words have soured in his mouth. “What were you—”

“You should really just forget about it.”

“I could, but… but it won’t leave my mind.”

“If you try a little harder, it might.”

“And Melissa was - she had a - all those girls had a—”

“Are you alright?” He doesn’t even mean it as a diversion – as the memories of that night come rushing back, he genuinely wonders. Bill had gone down with a scream, and Paul knows better than maybe anyone in the world how much thousands of volts hurts when it flows through you, and he has a feeling that Freddie’s definition of fine has a much lower bar than most people’s.

“What?” Bill’s brow creases.

“Well,” Paul says, “you know, she - she—” He can’t even say the word, but in the back of his mind he hears the taser crackle to life. “She got you pretty good.”

“I’m fine, I was a little sore the next day but now I’m fine. But this isn’t about me.”

“It could be.” With both of these long-winded conversations, and certainly more that have happened behind his back throughout the day, there’s no way they’re getting any work done. Maybe Mr. Davidson will come out of his office and berate them and in turn save Paul from this talk. Maybe he’ll bring his coffee with him and Paul can actually steal it this time.

He’s losing his mind.

“Look.” Bill crosses his arm, less a defiant stance, more like he’s holding himself steady. “I get it. You’re sort of a - sort of a reserved guy, and after… whatever that was, you’re even more cagey, but—”

The word cagey sends Paul hurtling backwards, until he’s standing in Melissa’s bedroom for the first time, dog treats in hand, so shocked by what he finds in that cage that he feels like he’s outside himself for a few seconds. And that thought leads to more, a knife glinting against the light of a living room lamp, blood arcing through the air, a vicarious pain in his own gut. The scent of copper heavy in the air. Shrill laughter. Ted had died with his eyes open.

Paul’s stomach lurches. He stands shakily and brushes past Bill and stumbles towards the bathroom, launching himself into a stall without closing the door, but despite the dry heaves that rock his body, nothing comes up. He simply hasn’t eaten enough.

Ted’s screams echo around him like they’re bleeding out of the walls. His heart beats so fast it hurts. All because of a word, just one single fucking word, and he knows in that moment that he can’t hold his composure for much longer, that soon either she’ll get tired of him or someone else will discover his ugly secret and drag him away from her.

His whole body shakes as he pushes himself away from the toilet and crumbles against the wall of the stall, shielding his eyes from the bright fluorescents, a meager balm to the pounding that has resumed in his head. When he looks up again, Bill stands over him, sheepish and shrinking, reaching out a hand but not quite making contact.

“Go away,” Paul rasps out of his aching throat. It’s not so much a command as a plea. “Leave me alone.”

But Bill just steps closer. “This is what I’m talking about. You keep pushing us away, but it’s obvious you need help. That night, I shouldn’t have called you - you weren’t a pervert, I see now that she - that Melissa did something to you. It wasn’t your fault.”

That voice that usually screams at him to tell someone, tell anyone what’s going on, goes silent. Maybe because it falls beneath the sheer weight of his mortification. When Emma or Charlotte or Mr. Davidson stand before him, all they see is him in the present, without any knowledge of the awful things he’s done or why he’s acting so strange. But Bill – Bill knows. Every time Bill looks at him, Paul knows he’s picturing him as he was that night, filthy, wild, nearly naked, swinging a cage like a battering ram only to run into the street and get bowled over. There’s concern on Bill’s face like there is on everyone else’s, but there’s an undeniable tinge of disgust, too; anyone would be disturbed if Paul revealed the truth to them. 

“It’s got to be hard dealing with… all that,” Bill continues, “especially since you were dating Melissa and all.”

A sharp pain stabs him in the side, and he clutches at it, doubling over. “I was not dating Melissa.”

Bill frowns at the intensity in his voice. “Alright. But still, we’re all a little worried about you.” He glances around, ensuring no one else is in the bathroom, and though he hesitates, he manages to push on with whatever awful thing he’s about to say. It’s just Paul’s luck that Bill decided today was the day to grow a spine. “And a little worried that we’ll have to do something about it.”

For a second, he can only think of the knife, convinced for one awful heartbeat that he’s finally being disposed of. Anything, he’ll do anything to avoid that, he can’t go this way, not yet. But then he blinks hard and remembers where he is. “What do you mean?”

“Charlotte said you’re sick, and you won’t go home,” is all he says.

“And?”

“You’re not taking care of yourself, Paul. And at this point, you’ve gone beyond that, now it’s more like you’re hurting yourself.” Bill sighs and rubs a hand over the back of his head. “And if you keep hurting yourself, and you won’t let us in, we don’t want to, but we might have to… do something about it. Just to get you the help you need.”

Paul laughs, just once, a hollow sound that makes Bill flinch. “That’s a little dramatic.” Like he’s not curled up in the bathroom, shaking and sweating, because somebody said one word he couldn’t handle. Maybe he does need someone else to take the reins for a while.

And then she’d find him the moment he got away. God only knows what she’d do to him if he disobeyed her like that, if he abandoned her for a second time; the taser would be a mercy, maybe the knife, too.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“We just don’t know what else to do. I know we might not be the closest group of people, but for goodness’ sake, we don’t want to see you like this. We all feel the same way.”

“Yeah? Who’s ‘we’?” Paul makes to stand up, but it’s an arduous process, neither his legs nor his arms going quite where he tells them.

“Me, and Charlotte, and that barista who brings our order.”

His body gives way all at once, and he slumps back against the wall. “Emma?”

“She pulled me aside yesterday and asked me if I knew what was going on. She’s worried about you, too, Paul.”

A terrible realization dawns on him, a creeping thing, like a hand slowly closing around his throat. He’s been so focused on the present, on the very next step ahead of him, on getting away from Melissa, that he hasn’t thought about what comes next. How will he go back to the normal world, if he ever even manages to escape? What kind of life awaits him? Will there be anything left? He can’t imagine going back to Emma, can’t imagine making her put up with the sort of thing he’ll be. Right now, he can’t deal with the thought of her, upset about him, scared for him, when he’s done all of this to himself. It’s just a waste of her time.

All of a sudden, he has the strength to not only stand, but to charge past Bill out of the stall. “I don’t want to hear about her.”

“But, Paul, she—”

“I don’t care.” He flings the door open, rushes out. “Just leave me alone.”

-

And Bill does.

Paul spends the rest of the day hiding in his cubicle, staring at the painful light of his computer screen but never really seeing it, trying his damned hardest not to think about her.

-

“On time and everything, what a good boy!”

He preens, and it’s only halfway an act. He’s on time, he didn’t run into any nosy detective dogs on the way out, and thanks to a fresh dose of Charlotte’s fever reducer he feels about as well as he has since this whole thing started. And he’s made her happy. All the rest of his day can fall to the back of his mind as he steps into this role for her, and there’s no small amount of relief at this fact, because cats don’t need to worry about concerned coworkers or involuntary commitments or a feisty barista who inexplicably has not yet given up.

“I think we’re going to have a very good night tonight,” Melissa says with a big cheerful smile. Paul lets himself relax minutely and rubs his face against her shoulder.

Their evening follows a predictable routine – Paul changes out of his suit, Melissa plays with him for a little while, and then he chokes down his dinner and tries not to bring it back up. Afterwards, she lounges on his couch and he curls up at her feet, letting her pet his greasy hair as she watches TV. He’d kill for a bath, but at this point knows better than to ruin this moment by wanting too much, and cats don’t like water, besides. He’ll just have to get used to it.

After a few episodes, Melissa pauses her show, yawns, stretches. “Well, we’d better get to bed, Puss. It’s getting late and you have to play human tomorrow, poor kitty.”

She stands and he crawls after. The medicine has once again lost much of its potency with time, and he somehow feels even worse than he did earlier in the day, an inescapable heat settling in his bones, his nausea now almost constant, his vision spinning a little when he moves too fast. Each time he moves, the burn on his side screams, and he himself has to fight not to whimper. Sleep sounds like a wonder, even if he has to go on the floor.

But when they reach her room – his room – Melissa shuts the door behind them. She never sleeps with the door closed, says it gets too stuffy. Says that whoever had this apartment before her should’ve gotten the air fixed so she doesn’t have to deal with this.

Paul didn’t know his heart could beat so fast.

“I found something,” she says in a sing-song voice. “A silly little surprise hidden in your disguise.”

His chest clenches, the room tilts, and even on his hands and knees he almost falls to the ground. The shaving razor. He left the fucking thing in his pocket, forgot to switch it over when he changed, and now she’ll kill him, she’ll kill him, he should’ve told Bill or Charlotte or even Emma because now he’s going to die in a pool of his own blood on the floor of his own bedroom.

Melissa walks leisurely over to his suit jacket, thrown across the bed, and shoves her hand into one of the pockets, pulling out the razor and confirming Paul’s worst fears. She dangles it in front of her face, holding it by the handle with only two fingers, like it’s so dirty she doesn’t want to make much contact.

“I thought you were such a good little kitty,” she says, almost mournful. She wasn’t sad when Ted died, but she didn’t like Ted; no matter how twisted she is, she likes Paul, or at least the cat she thinks he is. Sorrow doesn’t mean salvation here.

He chirps at her. He’s not a cat guy – or, well, not that sort – he doesn’t know what sound cats make when they’re sorry, when they regret their actions, when they have to fight for their life. If he knew, he’d make it, he’d do anything he has to do to keep breathing.

“What could you have ever wanted with this, Puss?” she asks. “You can’t use this, you don’t even have hands to grab it with. Unless…” Her tone drops to something menacing. He wishes that at the very least she wouldn’t toy with him. “Unless you were planning to do something very naughty with this. Maybe you were trying to be a very bad cat.”

Each word hits like a jab of the taser. He meows pitifully, dropping to the ground and rolling onto his back.

She crouches down near the bed and calls him over, rubbing the fingers of her free hand together, and his breath stutters in his lungs. What a miserable choice. Go to her and quite possibly have a knife jammed in his gut. Refuse and face whatever punishment he deserves for disobeying. He meows again. She shakes her head and calls him with more force, grinning again but with eyes like steel behind her glasses – go for the eyes, the eyes, knock those glasses off – and he crawls his way over to her, stomach roiling.

When she speaks again, the childish tone in her voice is gone. “That bitch you keep ogling stopped by today.” Emma, he thinks, very distantly, but it doesn’t matter. Not anymore. “She must be a fucking idiot. Did she think I’d answer the door?”

Bill had said Emma was worried about him, apparently worried enough to try to check on him. It’s too late for her to save him, for anyone to save him, but maybe at least they’ll find him and treat his body with a bit of dignity before Melissa can toss it away. But he can’t think about her for too long, can’t think about any of them. He just keeps his mind here, like there’s nothing else in the world but him and his captor, like he’ll die as nothing more than a bad cat with nobody to leave behind.

“That mean lady’s putting ideas in your head, isn’t she?” Melissa pouts. “She’s making my good kitty into a bad one. That’s not fair!”

This close, Paul can look her straight in the face, can see that in truth there’s no difference between her real emotions and her feigned ones, no tell to discern one from the other. When did she figure out about the razor? She hasn’t been in the bedroom since he changed hours ago, but she walked right in and grabbed it immediately. Did she find it way back then? Has she been playing with him all night? How much does she really know?

“But you’re my sweet little boy, I’m sure of it, so now you’ve got a choice.” She lets the razor drop onto the floor. Her smile stretches so wide it threatens to crack her face open, but there’s only hunger in her eyes, only anticipation. “You can use that however you want, Puss. Any way you want.”

She rolls one sleeve up and thrusts her forearm towards him, a taunt, a test. The razor lies mere inches from his front paws – from his hands. He could reach out, snatch it up, slash her, run. He doesn’t see the taser anywhere, and even if she has the knife maybe he can survive now that she’s all alone. His heart races hard and fast against his ribs, but the rest of his body is sluggish. Still, maybe he can manage.

(the eyes go for the eyes knock the glasses off go for the—)

“Or maybe I’m blaming the wrong person.” Her gaze cuts right through him. “Maybe I really do have a bad cat on my hands.”

(grab it slash her run fucking run fucking RUN)

“You wouldn’t have come up with such a nasty plan all by yourself, would you? You wouldn’t be so cruel to me after all I’ve done for you. I treat you so good here, give you food and toys and all the scratches you could want. I even scrubbed those pesky hospital cameras so you wouldn’t get in trouble. It’s better than they’ll treat you on the street. Better than it’ll be when I’m gone.”

(do something do anything don’t just sit there why don’t you ever fight)

“So go ahead, show me how you thank me for all the love I’ve given you.”

(something anything whatever you do don’t just roll over and stay—)

Paul’s hand snakes towards the razor. It seems all of a sudden a thousand miles away. His whole body aches and Melissa stares daggers at him and it’s a dull blade that probably won’t even draw blood and there’s never been any point in struggling. He made a mistake once, why make another one now? Just because he spent days making a half-assed plan doesn’t mean it ever had a chance of working out. If he cuts her he’s dead, but if he waits a little longer, has a little more patience, a better opportunity—

(forever?)

He shrinks away from the razor.

“Good boy!” Melissa claps her hands and squeals in joy, then picks up the razor and holds it away from him. “You’re so smart, Puss. You’re such a good boy. Who’s my good boy?”

I am, Paul thinks miserably. A stone drops in his stomach and keeps sinking, sinking.

He crumbles right there in the same spot where he gave up yet another chance at freedom, too weak and despondent to move, and tries to fall asleep. Despite his exhaustion, he never quite manages.

Chapter Text

He wakes up on fire.

Fever pours over him, heat seeping down into his very bones, engulfing his mind and turning his thoughts sluggish. The pain of his side encompasses everything, stealing his breath, hijacking every single thought. It takes him a long time to make sense of what he’s seeing when he opens his eyes – her bedroom is just a smattering of blurry colors for a long while, until he blinks hard to clear his vision. Even then, he can’t quite connect what he sees with the knowledge that this means he’s awake and must get up and get ready for work.

Melissa sits up and stretches, then groggily climbs out of her bed. Despite his haze, she remains in focus; he watches her with half-lidded eyes, more tense than usual for reasons he can’t quite remember, holding himself perfectly still and waiting for her to pet him as she walks by. But she doesn’t. She just steps right over him on the floor and keeps going, not even calling back to him when she leaves the room. It hurts, watching her brush right past him. Somewhere deep inside he knows he shouldn’t give a shit about that, but right now he can’t recall why, and all he can think is that he disappointed her, and he’d give anything to fix that.

Every inch of him aches when he uncurls, and he’s shaking so badly – from weakness or from shivers that inexplicably rack his burning body, he can’t tell – that it’s hard to get his arms under him enough to push onto his hands and knees. Once upright, the room spins in lazy circles; he sways along with it, almost crashing back down again before getting his bearings.

“Puss,” Melissa calls at last, from somewhere near the kitchen. “Breakfast!”

Paul crawls dutifully towards the sound of her voice, a spike of panic shooting through him at the irritation in her words. It’s the only time since he woke that his body and brain seem capable of moving at anything but a snail’s pace. He still can’t remember why he’s so afraid of her anger. She treats him well, after all, he has no reason to be so ungrateful. Even with whatever happened last night, she didn’t pull the taser out, and for some reason he feels like she should have.

Melissa already has his plate of cat food on the floor of her kitchen. “Eat up,” she says. She won’t look at him. Guilt flares in his chest. Whatever he did, it must have been bad.

Something about his breakfast seems particularly unappealing today. It’s cat food, he’s a cat, so he should be happy to dig into it, but the longer he looks at it, the further disgust rises in him. If he focuses hard enough, he can parse out a swirl of nausea from the general malaise that’s taken hold of him. He knows all at once that this won’t go down easy.

But she’s glaring, looming over him with her elbows planted on the countertop. He thinks of tasers. He thinks of knives. Somehow, he made her mad last night, betrayed her trust, and he must do everything in his power to get that trust back, no matter how difficult, how repulsive. So he lowers his head to the plate, trying his hardest not to breathe in and smell the cat food, forcing a little bit of it into his mouth and swallowing as fast as he can.

The first bite stays down, as does the next, and the next, until at long fucking last he gets it all down. But as soon as he finishes, his stomach gives a sharp pang, and everything makes a return appearance. His body convulses and he coughs the cat food back onto the plate, unable to turn his head in time to aim elsewhere. Melissa still stares at him, expression unchanging. She doesn’t take the food up. Surely she doesn’t - surely - of all the needless cruelties—

“Don’t be wasteful, Puss.” Her tone is icy. She doesn’t move a muscle.

Everything sways, not only because of the vertigo but also because his whole world seems, all at once, very strange, very unreal. This cannot be his life. He cannot truly be here, trapped by the once unassuming secretary from his work, crawling around on the floor, playing some awful, stupid game of pretend. Maybe it’s all just an awful nightmare, maybe sooner or later he’ll finally wake up.

Lightning floods his body, and everything jolts back into focus. His muscles clench, stealing his breath away, but the aftermath is worse, because she hit that same spot again. The pain is indescribable. It rolls over him in waves, drags him all the way down until he’s curled on his side, pure fire licking his ribs, his mind blinking in and out of consciousness like it can’t even process what he’s feeling.

She appears above him, but he can’t hear her over the roaring in his ears. He can’t meow at her, can’t even scream or cry or make any noise at all, can’t beg for his life. But if she killed him it might be a mercy, because then this pain would stop.

“Get up, Puss.” He makes out her words at last, though they come to him from very far away, like she’s yelling at him from a mile off. “We have to get you ready. Go ahead and eat your breakfast.” She raises the taser up once more, and that gives him the strength to haul himself back upright. Shit, he’ll do anything, anything, to never have to feel that again.

At least the food doesn’t look much different from when she first gave it to him, but it reeks of bile, and he gags at the smell of it. He can’t even plug his nose to block out some of the scent, because cats don’t have hands, and even if they did, he shouldn’t so brazenly show his disgust.

He bends down and thinks of nothing. His eyes trace the patterns of her kitchen floor, follow the swirls on the tiles and the details of the grout, anything to distract him from what he keeps putting in his mouth, what he mechanically swallows over and over again. The second time he finishes, he doesn’t dare move, save for a shudder that runs through him. His stomach screams at him, but he just kneels there, taking deep breaths, willing himself to keep everything down this time. If he has to eat it all yet again, he doesn’t know if he’ll make it through.

In time, his stomach settles from its sharpest protest, and with the gentlest movements possible, he raises himself up from the plate. Melissa beams at him. It’s enough to almost bring everything back up.

“Come on, then,” she says cheerily. “Let’s get rid of that fur.”

It isn’t until she’s halfway down shaving him, with him sitting there begging the room to stop swimming and the nausea to abate, that he remembers why she’s so mad. He remembers everything. His secret plot revealed, his refusal to strike her, his greatest failure and her greatest disappointment. She’s got the razor right up to his throat, the same razor that he was going to slice her with, how can he ever prove himself again, how can he ever convince her not to just deal with him right here? He’s been a bad, bad cat, he deserves it, she could slaughter him and he would fucking understand. How did he fuck up that horribly? How could he have made such a huge mistake? It’s over for him, it’s over, it ends just like this.

When he flinches away, Melissa just laughs. “Silly kitty, stay still.”

She looks pleased enough with him at the moment, patient enough to play off his disobedience instead of punishing it, but he knows that he can no longer trust the expression on her face. She has become unreadable. He freezes, holds his breath, doesn’t dare blink as she wipes shaving cream from his jaw.

Even though Melissa still holds her hands over her eyes, this morning he changes on the ground instead of trying to stand up. He’s dizzy enough already; who knows what she’d do to him if he passed out on her. It isn’t until they get to the front door, where he has to climb up to his feet, that the full weight of his situation hits him. He pulls himself upright, leaning heavily on the door frame for support, and the moment he’s standing his vision whites out, his ears ringing. His iron grip on the door is the only thing keeping him from slumping to the ground. In time, he’s able to compose himself, but it’s a struggle, and he wears himself out just getting to her car.

-

Melissa drives like someone dead set on using the entire speedometer. Paul closes his eyes and breathes through his nose and prays that they’ll get to their destination before he loses his breakfast all over the floorboards. He’s well past the point of hoping he doesn’t throw up at all; that possibility flew out the window the second time she hit a curb.

She lets him out at the usual spot, and he manages to make it out of her sight before falling against a tree along the sidewalk and vomiting onto the concrete. A little bit of it splashes his shoe. He stares blankly at the mess, then levers himself away from the trunk with trembling arms, his head still spinning, every step towards CCRP a battle in and of itself. How he’s going to not only make it through the day, but avoid suspicion, he can’t even begin to imagine.

As he stumbles through the front door, those same people who, on his first day back, stared at him in surprise, now watch him with something akin to shock. He can’t even fathom how bad he must look. But he keeps his head down, keeps walking forward, ignoring the worried glances and whispers that follow at his back, and he gets all the way to the elevator lobby before bailing. His stomach twists again, dragging him away from the elevator doors and into the nearest bathroom.

This time, there’s nothing left to bring up. He dry heaves over the toilet bowl for what feels like hours, his entire torso spasming, his hands gripping the porcelain white-knuckled, his head pounding every time he retches. Once it’s finally, finally over, he tries to push away from the toilet, but his arms give out and everything turns grey and he wakes up flat on the bathroom floor, his face pressed against the filthy tiles.

He should get up. For a number of reasons, not least among them the questionable cleanliness of his current bed, but even though he could probably claw his way back upright, he just doesn’t have the willpower. The floor, for all the dirt and grime and worse on it, is cool against his burning skin, the first bit of relief he’s felt since taking Charlotte’s medicine the night before. And what’s the real point of trying to stand, or even to sit up? To make himself look more presentable, more sane? To eventually walk out of here and up to the office? It’s laughable to think any piece of his facade still remains.

For a long, timeless while, Paul curls up on the floor and lets the world drift past him. This bathroom is apparently a sparsely used one, or maybe he’s so out of it he misses large chunks of time, but only a handful of people enter while he’s in there. None of them use the stalls, so he never gets found. Aside from the rare bits of chatter from the bathroom’s other occupants – two come in together and make light conversation while washing their hands, another takes a phone call on the way out, all their words garbled to Paul’s ears – there is only silence. No one threatens him. No one interrogates him. For the first time in almost two weeks, he is alone, with no need to put on any front, no need to act like a cat or a normal member of society or any other thing that he’s not.

It’s an awful place to find a bit of peace, maybe one of the worst, but Paul finds it all the same. He’s so goddamn tired of fighting every single second of every single day that he’ll take rest anywhere he can get it. When his eyelids grow heavy, he lets them close.

-

He wakes up with a jolt and the buzz of a taser echoing through his skull, disoriented for a long few seconds before remembering where he is. The bathroom remains empty; he remains unnoticed. His nausea has retreated a bit, as has the ache in his head, but only enough that they’re no longer totally overwhelming. The fever still turns his thoughts to sludge. It takes him ages to get up from the floor, his body weighed down, yet weak. When he finally sits all the way upright, he has to hang his head between his knees for a while so he doesn’t faint.

But at last something other than base survival crowds his mind. How long has he been fucking around in here? It feels like it’s been an hour, at most, but he’s got no real way to tell. If he doesn’t show up for work today, after doing nothing productive this week and vanishing without a trace last week, Mr. Davidson will probably fire him on the spot. Then he’ll have no escape from Melissa.

After half a dozen pitiful attempts, he at last gets his legs beneath him and stands, listing hard and falling against the door, but he stays on his feet. He creeps out of the stall and then out of the bathroom, a hand running along the wall to keep him steady, and finds the hallways much less busy than they were when he last walked through them. A clock in the elevator lobby reads half past two. He’d first entered the bathroom a few minutes before eight that morning. 

It seems unnecessary to even make his way up to the office – Mr. Davidson won’t be any more pleased with him showing up six hours late than with him not coming in at all. But Paul has to try. Somewhere beneath all the fog is that ever-present panic, that desperate desire to maintain what normalcy he can, to keep away from Melissa at all costs, to just survive no matter what it takes. He just needs to hold onto his job; if he does nothing else today, if he accomplishes nothing more, he knows he’ll have won if he leaves this place with the promise of returning tomorrow.

When he steps out of the elevator, though, it quickly becomes clear that his late appearance is the least noteworthy thing to happen in the office today.

Emma stands in the middle of the row of cubicles, in her work uniform, her hands on her hips and her eyes aflame. A cardboard drink holder sits crushed underfoot, and a stack of printer paper has been scattered across the floor. She’s shouting loud enough for the whole floor to hear, her voice rough like she’s been going at it for a while, her words harsher than anything she’s ever spat at a Beanie’s customer.

“Some goddamn fucking friend you are,” she snaps, gesturing wildly. Bill, the target of her scorn, just stands at the entrance to his cubicle, motionless, looking shell-shocked. “You’re telling me he came in here looking like fresh hell and you let him go home?”

“Well,” Bill says quietly, “I think ‘fresh hell’ is a little dramatic—”

“There’s some real messed up shit going on in here and neither of you did anything about it! He’s gone for a week, and that bastard with the mustache is just straight up gone, period, and that four-eyes bitch up and leaves, and nobody seems to, I dunno, look into it? You all just wander around with your thumbs up your asses and your eyes squeezed shut?”

Charlotte, not even the target of Emma’s ire, shrinks away from her. “It’s - it’s Hatchetfield, people go—”

“Missing every day, yeah, I fucking know that.” She cuts her eyes between them, a silent dare to make another excuse. “And you two are fine with that? You’re really, honestly fine with losing like half of this department to mysterious circumstances?”

Bill shrugs, trying for nonchalance, but paired with his nervousness, he ends up looking like a turtle retreating into its shell. “We just… keep to ourselves, you know. I’m not trying to be nosy.”

“Nosy!” Emma throws her hands in the air and turns away from them, still ranting. “I don’t think it’s nosy to wonder where the hell all your coworkers went! I swear to god, there must be something in the water here, because everybody sees all the weird shit that goes on in this town and never does anything about—”

Her gaze locks onto Paul. 

The last time that happened, he felt every awful emotion known to man, all of them crowding his head and his heart until he thought the sensation alone would kill him. Now, he feels almost nothing. The fire dies in her eyes, her eyebrows knitting together, that same horrified confusion spreading on her face that everyone he’s run into today wears when they look at him. She takes two steps towards him, so quick he tenses, then glances back at Bill.

“How about now?” she asks. “That look like ‘fresh hell’ to you?”

“It wasn’t that bad yesterday,” Bill protests.

Emma bites out some retort, but Paul doesn’t hear it, because at the same time she grabs his hand and pulls him deeper into the office, and all his attention goes to staying on his feet. Spots dance in his vision: she’s moving him faster than his battered body can handle. When she sits him down in one of the chairs, it takes several seconds of gripping the armrests and blinking hard before he can see or hear her again.

“—really not doing too hot, huh?” is the first thing he can make out. He knows she’s standing in front of him, but for a long while she’s just a blur, a dizzying swirl of white and green and brown. “Hey. Hey, Paul. Paul?” She shakes his shoulder. “Are you with me?”

He lifts his head. It takes far more effort than it should. 

She keeps her hand on his arm. “What’s the deal with you, really? You catch the worst flu known to man or something?”

“I’m okay,” he mumbles. He made a mistake, coming here, causing a scene. His mask was gone and he knew it, but he still limped his way up here, like an idiot, like someone who wants his secret to get out.

“That doesn’t even deserve a response. There’s no way in hell I’m letting you off the hook with you looking like…” Her voice trails off as she lifts her arm to touch his cheek, then to wrap her fingers around his wrist. He doesn’t react to it – he’s just glad that no one’s hurting him, other than that people can do whatever they want. Emma gives him an unreadable expression, then turns and speaks to Charlotte and Bill behind her. “Can you two get him some water or something?”

As they all but bolt away, Emma gets closer. She lets go of his wrist and takes his hand in both of hers. Maybe she’s got worry in those dark eyes, but he doesn’t know, because he can’t bring himself to meet them.

“What’s going on, Paul?”

Tears spring to his eyes with remarkable speed, so fast that he can’t stop them from falling, but after a few escape he gets back a little control and locks everything up tight. He cannot break in front of her, cannot break at all; he has to get through today and get back to Melissa and make things up to her or else he will die. If he falls apart here, it’s over. He won’t have the strength to pull himself back together.

“Something’s really wrong, isn’t it?” Emma says softly. “All this weird stuff happening to your friends, and with - with that secretary bitch, and now… shit man, you look like you’re about to fall over.” He flits his gaze up to her for a second, just long enough to see how starkly her concern paints her face. 

Even if he wanted to tell her, right now he can’t find the words. He just squeezes her hands weakly in return.

“God, you’re burning up.” Like with Charlotte yesterday, Emma presses her palm against his forehead; unlike with Charlotte, he gives in and lets himself lean into the touch. He’s so tired. 

It would be nice if he could crumble right here and let somebody else take over, but he just… can’t. Melissa will find him. And if her punishment for a single instance of disobedience is as bad as what happened last night and this morning, then he can’t even imagine what she’d do if he ran away.

“Easy,” Emma says, sounding far off. “You’re okay. Just rest for a second.” He doesn’t recall getting worked up in the first place, but now finds his breath heaving, his heart pounding. Maybe he’s afraid, he can’t tell. Everything feels like sludge. “And shit, you’ve—” Emma lets the hand on his forehead trail slowly down his face, her voice growing even quieter. “You’ve lost a lot of weight, haven’t you? In, what, two weeks?”

“I don’t even know,” he says, the honest truth. He can barely bring himself to look in the mirror these days.

“I’m sorry about what I said a few days ago. I know it’s probably hard to believe after I chewed you out, but I do…” She grimaces. “Look, I don’t like to say this so early, we’re still getting this thing started, but I really do care about you. A lot. Just, about you, your wellbeing, all that shit. You can tell me what’s going on and by god will I fix it, hell or high water.”

“I can’t.”

She gives him a long, sad look, but he still feels nothing; it’s incredible, at this point he’s even numb to the pity. “Is someone hurting you?”

He’s just so fucking tired.

The hand on his cheek drops away, and she turns towards the entrance to his cubicle. “Alright, where’d your friends go? It does not take that long to get water.” She starts wandering off, making it out of the cubicle before turning back. “Stay there, I’ll be right back.”

But Paul has a feeling she won’t be; Bill and Charlotte looked eager to get the hell away from him, so they probably went searching for the most distant water cooler in the building, if they actually bothered to search at all. She’ll be gone for a while, trying to track them down.

This is his chance.

At this point there’s no resistance, no small but screaming voice telling him to get help. He’s just a cat, just a stupid animal, able only to do what his owner wishes, his only hurdles now the violent trembling in his limbs as he pushes himself back upright, and the spinning room that almost sends him crashing back down. But he manages. He puts one unsteady foot in front of the other, crosses the room, past the scattered papers and the other remnants of Emma’s desperate attempts to keep him safe, and makes it out of the office.

-

He spends the rest of the afternoon hiding behind the CCRP building, in a place where he can just barely see the road, anxiously waiting for Melissa’s car to go by. When it does, he stumbles his way towards it, and arrives early for the first time this week.

She’s still in a good mood, and doesn’t show even a flicker of annoyance when he fails to greet her in any way, instead collapsing into the passenger seat and slumping against the window. She reaches over, pets him, coos something that he can’t quite make out, then sets off. The radio is on again. He doesn’t like the song, this time, and for some reason that almost breaks him, and he has to turn his face away so she can’t see the few tears that fall. It feels more like a leaking faucet than proper crying, like a nuisance, a betrayal.

His eyes drift shut at some point, but he doesn’t sleep. He just floats, lets the haze take him over, lets his body jolt bonelessly every time she hits a curb or turns a corner too fast. Only when they come to a stop does he rouse a little bit, and even then the fog still grips him.

They’re not at her apartment. They’re in a parking lot somewhere, a row of buildings before them, a strip of stores, maybe, though his vision blurs too much to recognize any part of his surroundings. Panic thuds dully in his chest, but he pays it no mind. What’s he supposed to do about that panic, anyway? Jump up, run away, fight back? He can barely lift his head.

“Puss, I want you to listen closely,” Melissa says. He looks over at her with great difficulty, and even though his eyes are bleary, he swears she’s wearing something she wasn’t when he got in. A pair of sunglasses pushed up flush against her face, a plain white beanie covering her hair. He doesn’t like that he can’t read her gaze behind the lenses. “I can’t go inside because all those mean dogs will recognize me, so I need you to go for me.”

Go where? Inside where? The fear ramps up until it threatens to actually bring his worn-out body to life. Maybe she’s been talking at him this entire time, giving him directions about whatever he’s supposed to do, explaining why they’re here and what she wants, but he wasn’t listening. 

“Didn’t you hear me, silly?” She laughs her usual carefree laugh. He doesn’t trust it. “You’re almost out of food. Somebody’s got to go in and grab some more, and it can’t be me, or those stinky mutts will get me.”

She’s holding something out to him, something thin, small, rectangular. He blinks and blinks to try to clear his vision, and in time sees that she’s handing him his own credit card, the one she stole from his wallet and replaced with a picture of her. It’s felt like ages since he’s needed it, since he’s had to so convincingly pretend to be human. And now she wants him to use it, to handle it, to hold onto it for an extended amount of time. She is actually handing him a sliver of freedom.

Maybe it’s a test, like with the razor. He sags against the window.

Melissa raises her chin and purses her lips, a disapproving expression that more often than not precedes a stab of the taser. Paul snatches the card out of her hand. He stares down at it, at the name written across the front, his name, like he’s an actual person, like he’s worthy of any title other than the one his owner gave him. It’s an ugly reminder of before. He kind of wants to burn it.

“Go on,” she says, very pointedly. “Go in, get four cans of cat food, and come right back out. And I mean right back. Okay?”

He meows, his voice raspy.

“Oh, Puss. Remember, you’re acting like a human right now. Answer me like a human.”

Everything has started spinning again. Melissa abhors whenever he has to play pretend, only allowing it when it’s absolutely necessary, and up to this point, only when he gets out of the car. In here, in this private space with just the two of them to bear witness, he is always and only a cat. But now she’s switched it around on him. It makes his head hurt. Does he obey her and risk getting shocked for acting like a person, for going against the well-established rules, or does he keep purring at her? Is this also a test? Another punishment for last night? What is he doing wrong, what is she watching for, what can he do to make it all stop?

In the end, he takes the gamble and nods, like a human. She clicks her tongue, turns away from him in disappointment. He’s never been so confused in his life.

But it’s abundantly clear that they’re going nowhere until he gets her that cat food. She just sits there, gazing out the windshield, making no moves to start up the car, and in time he gives up on trying to figure this out. He’s exhausted, his whole body hurts, he just wants to go home and lie down. So he opens the door and steps out.

Being in public around humans feels surreal, even with the entire week he’s spent with his coworkers. The office seemed like a controlled environment, like he got taken to some other cat’s house for a playdate, his movements always restricted, his boundaries always clear. Here, there’s a frightening amount of freedom. He has his card, and he’s been allowed back into the real world, if only for a few minutes. He could do anything.

He could do anything.

Anything.

He could run.

Just leave, refuse her orders, wander out of the store and down the street and towards any place at all – the precinct, a bus stop, over the Nantucket and into a completely different town. Even Clivesdale would be better than his current situation. She won’t try to tase him out in public like this, where it would cause a massive stir, where someone could recognize her. And it doesn’t even need to be so grand an escape; she left him alone in here, in a place that certainly has a phone. He could ask someone to call the police.

But the prospect of getting free seems like nothing more than one of a thousand wild, unattainable dreams. There’s a lot he could do right now. He could curl up right here in the middle of the aisle and fall asleep, a choice that currently calls to him more strongly than escape ever has. He could light the whole damn store on fire with him inside. He could start screaming and never stop.

Everything he has fantasized about up to this point – running away from Melissa, attacking her with a useless fucking shaving razor, going to the police or his colleagues for help – is just that. A fantasy. In the same way that it would be nice to have a less shitty job, or not have to pay rent, or to live the rest of his life with Emma, it would be nice to not have to deal with Melissa. But he doesn’t truly want it, does he? Not badly enough to save himself, at least. He keeps going back to her, again and again, wastes or ignores every opportunity to make anything better, pushes away anyone who could help. Maybe he’s always just been built for this.

(You’re so smart, Puss. You’re such a good boy. Who’s my good boy?)

(I am)

“Sir?” The worker before him gives him an odd look. He stares blankly at her in return. “Can I help you? Are you alright?”

Somehow he’s wandered his way over to the register, four cans of cat food held dutifully in his shaking paws. The cashier keeps eyeing him, leaning forward a little like getting closer will make anything about him make more sense, and as she shifts, she reveals the corded phone behind her. It’s probably only hooked up to the store intercom, but it serves as a symbol of yet another choice. A choice he’ll never make.

(tell her tell anyone do something do anything)

Now that voice just sounds mocking, insincere, a boy crying wolf just to see how far the game can go before it falls apart. He doesn’t mean it. He’s never meant it.

“Would you like to check out?” the cashier asks. 

“Sure,” he says. He places the cans on the conveyor belt and makes no eye contact. He pays without a word, though he donates five dollars to whatever animal charity they’re pushing, because fuck it, maybe one day he’ll need to use it. He takes his bag in one hand, his credit card in the other, and goes right back to her car, just like he was told, because he’s a good boy.

Her good boy.

Chapter Text

He regains awareness in the CCRP elevator. It’s not like waking up, because surely he must have been conscious before this, if he got all the way here. Everything from after the pet store is a blank in his mind, but he’s not really in the mood to search for those memories, because he has never felt so awful in his life.

His legs barely support his weight, even as he leans heavily against the elevator wall. Heat crawls over his skin, a fire so intense he doesn’t know how he’s enduring it, and he swears lava instead of blood flows through his veins. The body aches have grown tenfold; the wound on his side throbs deeply, but he can’t even find the energy to wince. He wonders if he’s dying.

The elevator dings, and on instinct he tries to move towards the door, but his feet won’t let him take a step and everything spins and he sways. He lists dangerously, the floor coming up fast to greet him, his arms unable to lift and cushion his fall.

Someone catches him. “Easy, buddy,” they say, gently lifting him back up to where he started. But he needs to get out of this elevator, he needs to go - to go - somewhere, he can’t recall where, or why, he just knows that there are some things animals do on instinct, and he’s an animal, just a stupid, rotten, ungrateful—

“You’re fucking insane,” says a second voice, louder, higher-pitched. A blur of white and green and brown. He should know the person in front of him – a part of him lightens up at the sound of her voice, despite the haze. “We fucking guessed you’d show up for work today, but Jesus Christ, Paul.”

The first person keeps one steady arm around his waist, and grabs Paul’s own arm with the other, looping it over their shoulders. “Can you stand up okay?”

He tries to say something. He’s not really sure what. He leans back against the elevator wall because it’s cool and he’s halfway convinced he’s currently on fire.

“This is ridiculous,” says the second person. He should know her. She feels safe. But he can barely see and his thoughts careen around, uncatchable. “How the fuck are you even upright right now? You goddamn people and your goddamn dedication to your stupid jobs.”

As she rants, Paul’s eyes slide shut against his will. Even in the dark his head spins. He almost falls over again, but whoever has a hold of him must be strong, or he must be weak. This time the drifting is deeply unpleasant, his mind an addled mess, unable to tell him where he is or who these people are or if he’s supposed to be a cat or a person around them. They call him by his human name, but they’re not supposed to, Melissa is going to hurt them, she’s going to kill them and make him watch. Like with Ted.

“You’re okay,” says that first voice. Paul still can’t place it. For ungodly reasons he’s reminded only of Mamma Mia, which must be some kind of divine punishment for disobeying his owner. “We’re going outside, alright? One step in front of the other. There you go.”

If Paul can do anything at this point, he can follow directions. They tell him to walk, he walks. They lead him away, he lets them. If they told him to beg, he’d roll over and show them his belly.

They wind up in some parking lot somewhere. He doesn’t remember the walk between the elevator and this place, but he’s a good cat, he doesn’t complain, doesn’t protest, doesn’t even wonder. It’s better not to fight. Both of them help to load him gently into a car. Someone buckles his seatbelt – Melissa never let him wear one, because she didn’t believe in those silly little pet car seats, didn’t see any need for them. Don’t they know he’s not a person, that they can’t treat him this way? If she finds him like this she’ll shock him again, and his side already burns, his muscles already ache. He can’t take another one. He can’t take any more.

“Hey,” says the woman. “Easy. Deep breaths. Paul, it’s okay, you’re okay.” A cool hand rests against his face; he tries to chase it and loses his balance again, slumping over in the seat, all caught up in the seat belt. Someone leans him back up. “Hang in there, alright? We’re just going to Bill’s house. He says he’s the closest.”

Oh. The Mamma Mia makes sense, then. Bill had been trying to take his daughter to see it, and Paul had considered tagging along due to his newfound love of hate-watching. A love bestowed upon him by - by — of course she’d come, of course she feels safe, even when he couldn’t place anything else he knew she was safe.

“Emma,” he rasps out, hardly more than a whisper.

She solidifies before him. “Yeah, baby, it’s me.” Everything else remains blurry, most of the car and the world beyond it still indistinct, but now he sees her clearly. Her eyes look glassy. Shit, he made her cry. “Did you not know who it was?”

Every time he sees her, it feels false, too damn good to be true. He can’t comprehend that she cares enough to keep searching for him, that she cares enough to shed tears for his sake. He doesn’t deserve it. Doesn’t she understand that he went back? Doesn’t she get it, that between him ignoring her and him running away and him returning to Melissa day after day, he’s not worth saving? Give him five minutes alone and the strength to stay upright and he’d crawl back to that woman, every time. Emma shouldn’t have to deal with someone like him, and she certainly shouldn’t feel bad for him. He chose this. He chose it.

“You’re gonna be okay,” she murmurs. “We’re almost there.”

“Emma,” he says again, because he really cannot fucking believe she came back for him.

“Yeah, it’s still me.” She looks away from him and towards Bill in the front seat. “Hey, man, change of plans.”

“St. Damien’s?” Bill asks.

“Please.”

“No.” He tries to push away from her, to flatten himself against the door, but his arms just won’t cooperate. “No hospital.”

She grimaces. “We have to, Paul. You’re really sick right now.”

“She’ll kill me,” he murmurs, eyelids fluttering. If she figures out he escaped again, no amount of her love for him will save him. He’s just a nasty, selfish cat, and it won’t matter if she cares about him, if he used to be a good pet, because now he’s just more trouble than he’s worth.

“Nobody’s going to hurt you,” Bill says. “You’re safe.”

“Wait, wait. Let him talk.” Emma places her hand on his cheek and guides his gaze towards her. Her palm is so wonderfully cool against his skin. “Who’s going to kill you?”

“Take me home.” If they take him back to her place, maybe he can convince her that he just got lost and couldn’t find his way to the apartment. She’ll think he’s stupid, she’ll berate him for almost blowing their cover, but if she doesn’t know the truth maybe he’ll get to live.

“We can’t take you back to your place,” Emma says. “You’ve got to go to the hospital.”

Paul watches her in confusion; he has no idea what Emma’s talking about, because he has no place of his own. “No, her apartment.”

“What?”

“On Weston.”

“Weston Drive?” Bill tries to turn around in his seat for half a second, before remembering to focus on the road, but his concern is clear even in his reflection in the rearview. “No, Paul, you live there. Where does she live?”

All these questions make his head spin. Of course he lives there with her, he’s her pet, it’s ridiculous that these people seem to think he should have a whole apartment to himself. 

“Does she…?” Emma’s whole body goes rigid, realization dawning in her eyes. “Does she live in your apartment?”

“It’s hers.” Frustration wells in him. He knows she knows exactly where to return him to, so they should go ahead and make their way over there, because every second that passes is another second to stoke Melissa’s anger. If they wait much longer, it might not matter that she believes his lie, she might just do him in for wasting her time. 

“I have to go home,” he says, with as much conviction as he can manage. But the words come out too weak to sway even himself. “She’ll worry.” And then she’ll kill him, maybe. Probably.

“You are not going back to her.” Emma sounds a thousand times more certain than he ever has, and he knows then that they’ll never listen to him, they’ll never take him back, and Melissa will figure out he tried to get away and hunt him down for the rest of his life.

At this thought, some meager amount of resistance wells up in him, and he twists away in Emma’s arms. But as he turns, his right side brushes the back of the seat, his burn scraping across it, and pain explodes all up and down his body before everything goes white.

-

When his vision once again clears he stares at Melissa. She looks deep into his eyes, her own eyes crinkled in sadness, in regret. There’s blood on the frame of her glasses.

“Poor kitty,” she murmurs. Her gaze wanders away from his face, down his neck, across his chest, landing on the spot where he’s only now noticed a slight twinge of pain. He glances down as well, his heart beating so hard it hurts, and even though he knows what he’ll find the dread overwhelms him.

Instead of seeing the expected burn on his side, he sees a knife handle. Only the handle; the rest of it must be inside him, but he can’t really feel it, can’t really feel anything. All that runs through his head is the calm, distant realization that this is it. 

Melissa pushes gently on his shoulders, forcing him to lie all the way down on the floor. As he hits the hardwood, he gets a good view of the room around him, of the familiar furniture, the blinds drawn tight across the windows, that crack in the ceiling he keeps meaning to call the repair guy to fix. Paul means to, because this is his apartment. Not hers. It’s always been his and he - he let her in, into his home, so she can degrade him and terrorize him and stick a knife in his lungs with tears trailing down her cheeks.

Ted fought, screamed, clawed, tried to twist away from them while he was still cognizant, and twitched and writhed even when he wasn’t. But Paul just lies there, blood pooling around him. It’s very warm. Or maybe he’s very cold. It really was always going to go like this; he’s never been much of a fighter.

“What a poor little kitty,” Melissa says, leaning over him. “What a naughty cat.”

She’s the last thing he sees.

-

“—Paul? Paul? Can you hear me?”

The first thing he is aware of is a cool wetness on his cheeks, a crackling feeling in his chest. His shoulders heave. Somewhere nearby, someone is crying. Emma has an arm around him – he can’t see her, but he’d know her touch anywhere – and she keeps trying to comfort him, her grip on him tight and protective, but he’s fine, because he’s still alive. He’s alive, he’s breathing, he’s not yet bleeding out on his own living room floor. Everything else seems inconsequential.

“Don’t let her,” he begs, curling into himself. His voice sounds odd, choked, almost watery.

“I won’t,” Emma promises. “But don’t try to move again, okay? You hit something and freaked yourself out.”

“She wants to kill me.”

She gives a hoarse laugh. “You know, at this point I’m really starting to believe that she does. But we’re not gonna fucking let her, so you have got to trying to calm down, or you’re gonna hurt yourself worse.” She wipes a thumb across his cheek. “It’s over now. She’s not gonna lay another goddamned hand on you.”

Over, he thinks. The concept seems alien. The deeper he fell down this hole, each time he kept quiet, each time he went back to her, the more he’d convinced himself that he’d never get out. But Emma is telling him it’s done, it’s through, and he trusts her. He wants so badly to believe that this is real, this is the truth and those awful last moments bleeding out on Melissa’s floor were just some horrible delusion; even if this is nothing more than his final dying vision, at least he won’t have to go back. He’s free, he’s finally, finally free. 

(how long? forever?)

But it wasn’t forever. The hardest part has passed and he was barely even conscious for it.

Compared to that, the next choice seems so simple, almost inevitable. “It’s Melissa,” he whispers. Panic rockets through him, the fear that she’ll somehow overhear him, somehow find him. But Emma slips her hand in his, and little by little, trembling breath by trembling breath, the terror subsides.

“I figured it was,” Emma says.

“I went back to her.”

“Doesn’t matter.” This, spoken with such confidence that he almost believes ir. “We’ll talk about all that later. For now, just stay awake for me, alright?”

For her, anything.

-

He slips in and out of awareness, caught between hazy reality and nightmares and near-delirium and, on very rare, very lucky occasions, true sleep.

People wander into and out of his room. Many of them speak, maybe to him, maybe to each other, but he can never make out their words. Fever ravages his waking moments, and at one point he dreams that he is literally aflame and all the doddering nurses do is put a cool rag on his forehead. Needles dig into his arms. Restraints tighten around his wrists. He might try to speak, but his words are gibberish even to his own ears.

Then he wakes, all at once, eyes flying open as he flinches away from a taser strike. But no pain comes. He stares dully at the ceiling, tracing the lines of the tiles, though he can’t really make sense of what their presence means, where he is, what’s going on. Hospital, he thinks. Bill and Emma said something about a hospital.

Bill and Emma… was that real? Did any of that happen? It’s over now, Emma had said, and she’d meant it. But when he finds the strength to turn his head, what he hears is—

“Hi, Puss.”

He whips around, chasing the sound of her voice, but when he looks right at the spot he swears those words came from, he sees nothing.

“I can’t believe you ran from me, naughty boy.” Her laugh is filled with all her old goodwill, the sort of laugh he used to draw out of her just for being a good cat. Now he doesn’t trust it.“I don’t know how you got in here, this is a people hospital. We’ve got to go home.”

A twisted sort of longing fills him, horror coming far too long after. It’s so easy to just listen to her, to tuck his tail and do as she says, to turn off his thoughts and let himself be her cat. But when he tries to follow her, he once again can’t find her. Her voice only ever comes from behind him, beside him; no matter how he tries he can’t ever get to her.

“Let’s go, Puss. Don’t keep mommy waiting.”

The taser crackles. He cries out, writhes, that familiar pain running through him, but in the very center of himself, there is only calm. There is another voice, his voice. More specifically, there is that tiny screaming voice, the one that tells him to run, the one that never stopped fighting for him to be free.

(don’t go back, you can’t go back)

“Puss, come here right this instant! Don’t make me find you!”

(you can’t go back you can’t go back whatever you do you cannot fucking go back)

A dream, he thinks desperately. It’s a dream, all a dream, a terrible nightmare, he just has to close his eyes and she’ll go away and it will be over. So, even though the very thought of ignoring her, disobeying her, makes him want to sob, he turns away from her voice, screws his eyes shut, and prays that this will work. It has to work. It has to be over.

Her threats follow him into sleep.

-

From the murky depths of unconsciousness, someone says, “That is easily the most horrifying shit I’ve ever heard.” He can’t wake up enough to open his eyes, but he must stir, because Emma holds his hand tighter. Of course it’s Emma. Always her. “And you just left him alone? Do you people know shit about how victims react to being—”

“We’re just doing our best here, we’re just healthcare staff, not—”

“I don’t give a flying fuck. It’s common fucking sense not to put someone in the exact same hospital, on the exact same goddamn floor as their abuser.”

If Emma’s here, then Melissa can’t be, because Emma might genuinely kill that woman if they ever stepped foot in the same room. If Emma’s here, then he must be safe, it must be over, he made it, it was just a dream, he survived. The shouting continues, but unlike with Melissa, where the slightest switch in tone would send him into panic, he finds it almost soothing, because for once no one is shouting at him. Beneath the bedlam of it all, he sinks back down.

-

The next time he wakes, it feels terribly familiar. Freddie Biggs leans over him as his head swims, as his body aches, as that awful, pathetic part of his brain wonders if Melissa’s alright. He remembers… Emma, and Bill, remembers telling them who hurt him, they said they’d keep him safe, but he’s right back in the same place he was a week ago. Or has it even been a week? Was any of it real? Surely he wouldn’t actually have taken her home with him, surely it was just a twisted nightmare.

Surely he wouldn’t do it again.

“Quite the deja vu, Matthews,” Freddie says. Paul tries to focus on him, because everything else is blurry. At least his head doesn’t hurt as badly this time. “What a clusterfuck, huh?”

Paul can’t bring himself to speak, can’t get out any of the questions that crowd his brain. He just blinks up at the other man, slowly taking stock of himself, trying to make sense of what’s going on. His muscles burn in that telltale aftermath of a taser strike – or two or a dozen. A spot on his side aches wickedly, a bandage covering it, pulling every time he takes a breath. He’s still just as miserably dizzy as he was back with Emma and Bill, and he wants nothing more than to close his eyes against the wild whirling of the room, but at least the heat of the fever has pulled back quite a bit. All sorts of tubes and cords trail from bags and machines to dig into his arms.

After several tries, he eventually manages to rasp out, “What’s going on?”

Freddie sighs. “What isn’t going on? You’ve given me a hell of an exciting two weeks. And a disgusting amount of paperwork.”

So it was real, then. He really did take Melissa from the hospital, let her stay in his house, let her treat him like a literal animal. It all happened – the razor, the pet store, his breakdown in front of his friends. And the talk with Freddie happened, too, the one on the bench where the man warned him to turn Melissa in before it was too late.

Again, a thousand possible questions race through his mind, but he settles on just one. “Am I going to jail?”

This makes Freddie laugh, an actual, deep-chested laugh, which Paul would’ve never thought him capable of. “I like you, Matthews, you’re a man who knows your priorities.” He sobers. “No, actually, you’re not. Based on the shit she put you through, and you being so ill, and the fact that we still don’t have your little jaunt on camera, I think I can pretty easily get you out of prison time.”

I even scrubbed those pesky hospital cameras so you wouldn’t get in trouble, Melissa had said, that night she found the razor. She’d been looking out for him, after all. And now he’s going to turn around and treat her like—

“I was sick?” he asks.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t fucking notice that. They clocked your temp at 104 when you came in. A few more hours and you might’ve been a goner.” He nods towards something over Paul’s right shoulder, and Paul follows his gaze up to a bag of clear liquid hanging on an IV pole. “Those antibiotics seem to be doing their job now, though.”

Paul watches the medicine drip for a long time, trying and failing to make any part of this make sense. “I don’t - I don’t understand.”

“You’ve got a nasty wound on your ribs.” He gestures to his own side, like Paul needs a reminder. “A burn or something. She kept tasing you in the same spot and it got infected. Can’t imagine how many times you’d have to get shocked for that to happen.”

Though Paul can, he doesn’t want to.

“It’s over now, at least,” Freddie says. “We found her in your apartment, just like you said we would, and she went without much of a fight. Had one of her little friends in there, too, like they were planning a surprise for you or something.” He gives Paul a long, pointed look. “She’s already in federal custody.”

“Is she alright?”

“Probably doesn’t even have a bruise. It’s better than she deserves, in my opinion.”

He can picture Melissa, sitting cuffed in some jail cell, her joyful smile nowhere to be found. She’s probably crying – he’s never seen her cry, but he knows she would, after this – and not only because she’d gotten caught. The first time this happened, the very first thing she asked for was her cat. And now her cat has been stolen from her forever, and she’ll rot for the rest of her life in prison, never knowing his true fate.

“Did she… did she ask about me?”

Freddie presses his mouth into a line. “Good try. We know better now than to answer that. In fact, consider yourself lucky you’re not still strapped to the bed, ‘cause you gave us a good fight when you first got in here. We can’t have you running off on us this time.”

“But she just got her cat back and now she’ll never see him again.” Guilt, of all things, curls in his chest. He did this to her.

“Listen to me, Matthews.” Freddie tries to hold eye contact, but Paul can’t bear it, not after a week full of glares and mad grins and pitying looks. He doesn’t ever want to be seen again. “You are not a cat. You never were. There was never a cat. Just a very twisted woman who forced you to play her sick games. It’s done.”

That fills him with more dread than it should.

“Alright?” Freddie says.

“Sure.” Paul nods, but even that small motion feels strenuous. Exhaustion pulls at him once more.

Freddie claps him on the shoulder, not all that gently, and stands up. “I think I have all I need for the moment. I trust you to make this the last time we have to meet in a hospital.” He gives Paul another long look, but Paul is just too tired to contort his face into some convincing expression. He can’t fake his emotions any longer.

Just as Freddie turns away, Paul remembers something and tries to grab for him, swiping the back of his shirt. The man glances over his shoulder. “Was she here?” Paul asks.

“Here?” Freddie frowns at him, looking ready to launch back into his lecture.

“In the room.”

“No, Paul, this time she never even stepped foot in this hospital. And don’t you go trying to find her.”

Paul lets his head fall back on the pillow, and he again stares at the ceiling as Freddie leaves and shuts the door behind him. He stays like that for a long time, worn out but wide-awake, terrified to turn his head, terrified to once more find her at his side.

-

The last time he emerges from the haze, he no longer feels like he’s been through a meat grinder. His head doesn’t hurt, the room doesn’t spin, heat doesn’t rock his body. Even the wound on his side has retreated from agony to little more than a mild pulsing pain.

He turns his head and neither sees nor hears her. For the first time in a very long time, everything stays in focus, and everything makes sense. Though he can’t recall much between passing out in Emma’s arms and waking with Freddie looming over him, what he does remember he can put in a logical sequence, no longer gripped by that terrifying time-blindness that had caused him to lose hours upon hours not so many days ago. He knows where he is, he knows why he’s there, and he knows who is here or, at the very least, who is not here. In this singular moment, he feels more in control than he has in a long while.

Despite its sterile undertones, his hospital room looks very homey, with little signs of life all over. On a bedside table stands a single bouquet of flowers from Mr. Davidson – a sympathetic gesture or an apology, depending on how much the man knows. A few cards sit around it, from his coworkers, one from Alice, even one with Tim’s name and a wobbly drawing on it. Beyond it is a reclining chair, small and uncomfortable-looking, yet made up with sheets and blankets and pillows, and bathed in the sunlight streaming through the window. A bevy of random items clutter the edge of the sink: an empty backpack, bottles of hair products, a bag stuffed with makeup, several changes of clothes, a textbook, a familiar green apron.

When the door swings open, he doesn’t flinch. Emma walks in and for a second doesn’t notice him, moving around some stuff on the counter, but then she must see him out of the corner of her eye, because she turns to him with the brightest smile he’s ever seen her wear.

“You’re up,” she says, rushing over to the side of his bed. “How long have you been awake?”

“Not long.” His voice is scratchy with disuse, but stronger than he expected, stronger than it’s been in weeks.

“And how are you feeling?”

“Better.” And even if he did still feel like shit, she looks so hopeful that he’d be compelled to lie. Now that he’s been up for more than ten seconds, the guilt has started to creep in at the edges. “A lot better. Doesn’t feel like everything’s on fire.”

“Great, ‘cause you had us real fucking worried.” She crosses her arms. “Don’t pull that shit again, alright? Bill and I did not enjoy playing ambulance.”

It’s clear that she’s halfway joking, but he can’t find it in him to share her bitter humor. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. You scared me half to death, but you’re not the one who should be apologizing.”

Silence falls over them for a painful few seconds, long enough that Paul scrounges around for something else to say and comes up empty-handed, but soon enough she sighs and looks around the room. “Now that you’re all alert and aware, you’ll probably be out of this place in another day or two. They’re gonna give you a bunch of instructions about wound care, and taking your antibiotics, and getting your weight back up, and probably more that I forgot. You’ve honestly got a lot of work to do, but I’ll be damned if it has to happen in this stale-ass room.”

He only sort of listens, his eyes glued to her face, studying every line, every slight movement of it. That night, cringing away from Melissa, his heart in his throat and her razor on the carpet, he’d thought for sure he’d never get to see Emma again. Even after that, having this almost-normal conversation with her, one where he is not hiding and she is not desperately coaxing information out of him, seemed like a distant dream.

“Oh, sorry.” She must read his quietness for confusion or overwhelm, because she shakes her head. “That was probably way too much all at once.”

“It’s fine,” he says. “How long have I been here?”

She does the mental math with furrowed brows. “A little over three days. It’s Monday afternoon. We got here Friday morning.”

“Really?” He’s surprised, but more than anything, he feels that guilt grow stronger.

“I know, it seems like a long time, but you slept for most of it. Except when that damn FBI guy stomped his way in here. I tried to get him to leave you the fuck along for five minutes, but—”

“No, no.” He sits up a little more, experimentally, to find his body still weak, yet able to manage this much. “I mean, it’s Monday, don’t you have work?”

“Don’t talk to me about work, I don’t wanna hear it.”

“Well, then shouldn’t you be… home?”

“Home?” She raises an eyebrow. “You’re kidding. What am I supposed to do at home? The dishes? I’ve been avoiding those for a while now. Maybe I can turn in the stuff growing on them for a grade.”

“But you - you stayed. The whole time. Didn’t you?” Only now do all of her things scattered around the room start to sink in. “Three days is a long time.” Her textbook on the counter, her toiletries near the sink, her apron neatly folded but unwashed. Did she study here, sleep here, shower here? Did she come over as soon as her shift ended? She’s in her work shirt.

“Not really,” she says. “And Bill’s been in and out, too. Did you honestly think we’d just leave you?”

“I was safe. I was fine. You could’ve—” His breath hitches.

“Paul?” She sits down on the edge of the bed and reaches over to him, swiping her hand across his cheek. Her fingers come back wet. He doesn’t remember when he started crying, but now he can’t stop, and as his composure slips away he begs himself to get his shit together, for her sake. “Paul, hey, it’s okay.”

“You could’ve,” he says again.

“Could’ve what?”

His lungs feel crumpled up. His head starts to spin. “Left me.”

She smiles nervously, like she’s hoping that’s a joke, but when he just stares at her, her face falls. “What the fuck? Why the actual fuck would we do that?”

“I went back. To her. I ran from you. I took her back—”

All the weight of it falls on him, all at once. He’s caused her so much trouble, so much fear and worry, and even when she knows he’s safe, even when she should be resting, she’s right by his side. He doesn’t fucking deserve it. He did this to himself. And nothing he can say will convince her otherwise, so she’ll just give him everything and he will only ever take and take and take.

Even now, he can’t stop himself from leaning against her as she sidles up closer. Only one cannula runs to his arm, giving her much more space to maneuver herself to his side, wrapping her arms gingerly around his waist, kissing him on the cheek and then letting him sob into her hair. 

“Listen to me,” she says, when he’s calmed down a little. “You were so far away from being in a good mental state it’s not even funny. In fact, did you know—” She gives him a sardonic grin “—that when we found you, you were basically dying? A few more hours and you would’ve gone septic. How was I supposed to leave you like that?”

He tries to argue, but he can’t find the breath.

“You were hurt, and sick, and scared, and also exhausted and concussed and literally starving. And she was an actual serial killer constantly threatening to murder you. Come on, Paul.”

“I went back,” he protests weakly.

“Sure, after that car scrambled your brains, you made one bad decision. Not like any of that blame could’ve fallen on, I don’t know, the staff here for keeping you two in the same ward, or mister secret agent for telling you that she was worried about you, or maybe, possibly, perhaps, the monster herself.”

“I made more than one bad decision.” But something else catches his attention, like a nail snagging a sweater. He looks at her sidelong. “How did you - what did they - how much do you know?”

She pulls back a bit, looking at him with a soured expression, her lips pressed together. “What Freddie knows, mostly. And they, uh, they found her in your apartment, and when they arrested her they - they found some… other stuff.”

He just watches her, the horror dawning slowly, slowly. “Then why the fuck are you still here?”

“They said she…” Her hand slides towards the wound but stops several inches away. “They said she tased you so many times that it… god, Paul, I’m so sorry—”

“Emma, why are you still here?”

“Because it’s not your fault,” she says instantly, almost distractedly.

“But she kept me like a - she wanted me to be - I chose it, Em, the second time I chose it. Everything she wanted, I did, I didn’t even try to fight it—”

“Doesn’t matter.” Her dark eyes bore into his. He almost can’t stand their gaze for how intensely they burn. “Because it is not your fault. She was fucked up and she did awful things to you and you did what you had to do to survive. I’d never hold that against you.”

Tears pool again in his eyes; it seems that now that they’ve started, he can’t get them to stop. “I don’t understand.”

“You will.” She rises up a little and kisses him on the lips. “I’ll make sure of it.”

They nestle together like that for a long while. As the tears fall and then dry on his face, he just relishes in the feeling of her in his arms, because he almost lost her somewhere in the middle of all of this, and not just physically, not just because Melissa was always seconds from locking Paul away from the world. He was willing to let her slip away, to let it all slip away, to give himself up to Melissa and her sick desires and her taser and her knife.

Now, though, he wants nothing more than to hold on. “On the ride here,” he says, hesitating, “when I figured out who you were, you called me—” Yeah, baby, it’s me. She’s never called him anything like that before. He’d never believed she could let something so sentimental slip out.

But she just glances up at him, looking uncharacteristically uncertain. “I guess I did.”

“And did you… Melissa says you went to my apartment.”

“Yeah, twice.” She shrugs. “I was mad for a while, but then I realized that you couldn’t be ignoring me, because my messages to you never even got delivered. It wasn’t like you were leaving me on read, it was more like you really didn’t have a phone. You looked like shit, too. I was worried. And then after you showed up like six hours late that one day and practically crawled to your desk and then disappeared, I went again. Nobody ever answered the door.”

“Why, though? You thought I was cheating.”

“Not for long. You wear everything on your face. I knew something was really wrong.”

That’s not really that much like the old Emma, either. The old Emma who pushed everyone away, who talked endless shit about her boss and her coworkers and every customer who walked through Beanie’s front door, who approached every one of her dates with Paul with the flippant half-interest of someone most comfortable in the talking stage. Much as he adores all the other parts of her, she’s also the last person he’d expect to chase after someone she thought had broken her heart. But despite all that, she’d come back. For him.

“What now?” he says, just to keep talking to her. 

She raises her eyebrows. “Well, you go home and probably get a shitton of sleep. After that… who knows? Now it’s all up to you.”

For just a second, he’s back in that bathroom stall with Bill hovering over him, shaking and desperate and wild, terrified at the thought of what sort of life lies ahead of him. But back then, he’d been convinced that Emma would take one look at him and discard him. And yet, here she is, tucked up against him despite everything. With that fear quieted, all the others seem to diminish, as well.

“I think I’m pretty fucked in the head now.” He says this without a shred of humor, but she smiles.

“If you weren’t, I’d be concerned. Look, Paul.” He does, and as their eyes meet, he cannot fathom why he ever tried to run from her. “I really do not care about that, because we’re gonna figure it all out, alright?”

“We?”

“Yes, we,” she says, and then, to maintain her reputation, “Dumbass.”

He sighs and sinks back against his pillows, their conversation having depleted his still meager strength, but at least it’s not that bone-deep exhaustion that has followed him for two straight weeks. Knowing that he can fall asleep in peace and that he will wake up safe makes this whole thing seem unreal, almost unbelievable. But Emma said it’s over, and even if he doesn’t quite feel like he can trust himself, he knows he can trust her.

“Get some rest,” she says as she slides off the bed. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”

And she is.