Work Text:
Lying on the tracks to Biohazard Disposal, with a syringe lodged into the side of her neck, Amelia thought of Damon. Not so long ago, she had counted every needle Murkoff’s ratcatcher had driven into him as she knelt there in the wet, red mash of bodies, with his beautiful head in her lap. She had promised herself that for each one, a Reagent would see daylight. At least she had won that victory – and another. The cleanup team were going to have to scrape what they could of the late Clyde Perry off those same tracks, and wash away the rest.
Now, in the infirmary, Amelia’s memories feel more like mirages. It might be a Sunday. One of one hundred spent with Damon. The early morning sunlight through cheap, flimsy curtains. Waking before him on the threadbare mattress, turning into the familiar warmth of his body, tracing his face with her eyes. Heading through to the shitty kitchenette. Stirring sugar into black coffee. Hiding the bottles. It wasn’t easy, but what was?
Easterman comes and goes. When he’s there, he mostly just watches her fall in and out of dreams – in her most lucid moments Amelia can even make out his eyes – and advises the junior doctors and nurses on her dosage. Instructs them on when she should wake enough to feel the pain.
There’s a vague awareness of him now, at the foot of her bed, a tall dark column leaning against the iron frame. She can smell the smoke from his cigarette. Funnily enough, that does finally make Amelia think of her father, who she rarely saw without a cigar; those things used to fucking reek.
They’re alone together on the ward. He paces slowly to her bedside, leans in over her. It is strange to be so close to him. In the past, Amelia often wondered if his magnetism extended beyond the screen, if that was why Murkoff let him do what he does. Now, she knows this cannot be true; in the flesh, he is repulsive.
“I hope you know that you’ve disappointed everyone, Amelia,” he hisses through his teeth. “I thought you were destined for greatness. I was raising you to be great.”
His breath rasps, an exhale of hot smoke against her face. His voice shakes with the effort to control it. “I don’t know what they think you can give them that I can’t, but they’re wrong. They may have thought of you as their comrade, their friend, their fucking… virgin-mother-whore-saviour, but they’ll learn the truth. You’re all going to learn.”
He straightens up. “You’ll wish we hadn’t taken you alive, Amelia. You die when I say you can.”
What she’d really like is to spit on his suit, but her body is too leaden with sedatives, broken from the beating. She manages a curled lip, halfway to a sneer. There are few people she respects in this world more than whores, and even fewer she respects less than pimps. There are things he still cannot take from her.
One Sunday, one of their last, Damon took her hand as they laid beside one another, and pressed it to his lips. “I keep thinking,” he said, “one of these days, I’m gonna wake up, and you won’t be here.”
Amelia smiled, traced her thumb over his cheekbone. Held his face as she would on the day that she found him cold.
“Trust me,” she told him. “I’m not going anywhere.”