Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Georgie can’t be scared, and so, of course, she isn’t. She’s had monsters at her door and in her home and out in the world trying to snatch up the people she cares about, but she doesn’t feel afraid. Sometimes, when the not-fear gets bad enough, she’ll still get break through physical symptoms, almost like the ghost of her former self is haunting her body. She’ll wake up in the middle of the night and lose her appetite and fidget too much when she tries to record, all symptom and no disease. 

When she was a teenager, she used to throw herself sort of madly into a new tactile hobby every time exam season rolled around and completely lose interest once the pressure eased and she no longer desperately needed to keep her hands and mind occupied 24/7. Two months into total radio silence from Jon, Georgie looks around her sitting room full of newly made scarves, shawls, and wall hangings and thinks, maybe, that there is an underlying reason for why she’s suddenly been so obsessed with weaving. Christ, she hadn’t even known she’d had all those materials, but every time she went looking she just found more.

In the absence of fear itself, other emotions pour in to fill the gap, flooding her with anger, confusion, indignation, surprise, apathy, delight, etc. Name an emotion and she will have had it in spades at some wildly inappropriate occasion over the last decade. In a not unpleasant turn of fate, over the last few months her go-to fear substitute has increasingly been love. Warmth, protectiveness, determination, etc. Something goes awry and she just wants to wrap her arms around what’s hers until everything is set back to rights. It is so much more useful than her previously most called upon alternative of anger, she feels far more balanced and proactive. She curls up with her little loom on the couch and lets love lace down and through her fingers, flowing into her newest project. It doesn’t even really matter what she’s making, she just wants it to be soft and homey.

Her phone rings on the floor beside her, and when she picks it up she sees that the screen is alight with Jon’s caller ID for the first time in weeks. A hot spear of care lances through her heart as she immediately takes the call and pins the phone to her ear with her shoulder. “I thought I told you to not be a stranger, Mr. Sims.”

“Ha, yes, you did, sorry, it’s just been, um, a bit chaotic. I’m just back from America, thought I should let you know I’m still alive.”

“Appreciated, if a bit late.” He sounds haggard, more so even than usual. “Did you say you were in America? Sounds exciting, you better have sightseeing photos to show me.”

“I was. China, too, Beijing, though… it wasn’t really a photography sort of trip. More, more work stuff.”

“Ahhh, is that what’s kept you too busy to ring up little old me? International man of mystery Jonathan Sims, traveling the world in the name of chasing leads and outrunning evil clowns?”

He sighs heavily. “‘Outrunning’ is… Let’s say: yes.”

“‘Let’s say?’ What does ‘let’s say’ mean? You know how I feel about keeping things from me.”

He’s quiet for a moment, and Georgie watches the Admiral bat at a spider on the carpet. He never quite manages to catch them, but she’s glad he’s having fun. Jon pipes back up, beleaguered. “I’m not trying to hide anything, it’s just, a bit difficult to talk about, at least over the phone. It’s not relevant, all you need to know is that I’m fine.”

“You don’t sound that fine, mate.”

“Just jet lag.”

She puts down the loom on the couch beside her and properly holds her phone to her ear. “Look, you’re not fooling me, I know your voice when it’s miserable. How about we go for drink tonight? You really sound like you need to unwind.”

“Uh…” He stammers off into silence again, and the Admiral has lost interest in his spider. Georgie dangles a few threads from her finger tips and flicks her wrist to wiggle them around in front of him. “‘Fraid I don’t think I’m up to going anywhere public.”

“What about a night in, then? Like we used to, wine out of mugs and an okay TV show.” The Admiral’s eyes widen and he flattens himself against the floor.

“Um.”

He pounces.

“You know what? Yes, yeah, I think I could go for that, thank you.”

“That’s what I like to hear.” She rises to her feet and shakes her hand until all the cobwebs drop free, her cat rolling around in ecstasy at catching his quarry. Just because it’s easy to play with him doesn’t make it any less fun. “Swing by at eight? I hear the new Westworld’s supposed to be alright.”

“What’s Westworld?”

“Show about cowboy robots, you’ll see.”

“I’m on the edge of my seat.”

“That’s doubly what I like to hear. Alright, see you then.”

“See you.”

She hangs up and takes a nice, deep breath. That’s… relief, she thinks? She’s been wanting to hear from him, to have him over again, so relief would make sense. Doesn’t seem like he’s doing well, but she can work on that. She just wants to get her eyes on him, her hands on him, make doubly sure he’s still in one piece, see he hasn’t quickly blown himself up while her back was turned. Oh, that’s eagerness, isn’t it? She wants to draw him back in.

She surveys her cluttered sitting room and thinks she ought to straighten out the debris of her new hobby into something cozy rather than something crazy before he arrives. If she layers the throw blankets over each other then he probably won’t be able to count them.

She gets two bottles, one red and one white, picks out her two worst/best novelty mugs (a cat wearing glasses and a cat wearing cucumbers over its eyes), and artfully strings up the room with fairy lights. Strands of them hang down from the doorway and she catches herself going on autopilot and almost trying to thread more through horizontally like warp into weft, but, no, that’s ridiculous, she can’t set them up like that. He still needs to get in.

They don’t end up watching more than an episode and a half of the show, which is about what she expected. In her capacity as host, she takes sample cups from each of the wines on offer, but, really, she got them for him, to chemically loosen him up, which begins working after not too long. He slides fluidly from tipsy to drunk at the best of times, and as it stands he does not look like he’s in his best of times.

“A month?” Georgie squawks, lying on the couch.

“God, I know.” He sits on the floor in a nest of pillows and blankets, leaning his back up against the couch near Georgie’s face. “For any of us keeping track, that’s kidnapping two out of three.”

“Well, no wonder you didn’t ring. Where did you say they nabbed you?”

“Uh…” His eyes unfocus and he stares past her shoulder. He points at her drawn curtain. “Just about there, across the street.”

She slaps her hand over her mouth. “Oh God, I’m so sorry.”

He shakes his head. “It’s fine, I told you to ignore me.”

“That is not what you said.”

“It was sort of that, in a way.” He throws back the rest of his cucumber cat mug and pours some more of the white.

“Still, I’m sorry I didn’t do anything, I’m glad they didn’t…” ‘Hurt you?’ They held him captive for a month, of course they hurt him, even if they didn’t draw blood. “I’m glad you made it out.”

“Thanks.” A shallow sip without closing his eyes. “No one else’s actually said that to me.”

“Shit.”

“It’s alright, not like it would really change anything.”

She reaches out a hand to his shoulder and he tenses for a moment before visibly breathing through it and relaxing again. Good. She wants him to like her touch.

He blinks hard and sort of twitches. “Anyway, what’s been up with you?”

A few images flash through her mind. Watching Melanie go from alright to bad to worse every time they speak, her hands itching with the need to do something, thread appearing miraculously in the flat, the Admiral’s whiskers covered in webs, her palms feeling sticky whenever she doesn’t have something to occupy them, shaving her legs for the first time in years the other week and still constantly feeling movement scuttling up them. “Not so fast, you still owe me a kidnapping.”

He shrugs and takes another long drink. “I’ve been overselling it, the last one was barely anything. ‘Abducted at gunpoint in America’ might be a good story if Daisy didn’t already have the ‘gun’ part covered and they weren’t two Brits, and I was basically free to leave after a couple of hours, anyway. All told they were pretty nice. Just a glorified Airbnb, really.”

Georgie gawks. “Do you hear the words coming out of your mouth?”

He smiles. “Increasingly less and less so.” He frowns. “Decreasingly? Decreasingly less? No, that can’t be right, ‘decreasingly less’ would just be more.” His expression drops entirely. “I’m drunk, is what I am trying to say.”

She’ll give him that, but it’s not exactly like he speaks with high regard for his safety when he’s sober. “Right. I know what you’ve said about this before, but I really think you should move back in.”

His eyes slip closed. “Can we not? Just not right now?”

“I’m not even saying I need you to try and quit your job or anything, I just think you’re in a lot of danger and you need to be checking in with someone who cares.”

“I’ve got, I’ve got people, there’s Martin—”

“You say that, but does that work at all in practice? ‘Cause it sounds like he’s nought for three on noticing when you’ve been kidnapped.”

“So are you,” he snaps.

“Because—” she pushes herself up to sitting, looking down at him— “because I haven’t been able to pin anything down with you. If you vanish into thin air then I can’t tell if you’re off getting tortured by some wax or plastic woman or if you’ve just decided you’re back to being the lone wolf.”

“The wolf people actually tend to prefer partnerships.”

“Jon.”

“What?”

She’s up on her knees holding her hands out in front of her. They feel tacky when she curls and uncurls her fingers into fists. He gets to his feet and steadies himself on the armrest as he sways. “What—what is the problem? I don’t get it, why won’t you let me help?” Because, that’s really the issue. It’s not the helping itself, she can do that, it’s all the extra steps he makes her put in. He can’t just let her offer him her spare bedroom, he has to make her wrestle him into it, too.

“I don’t get why you won’t listen when I say no, I’ve told you it’s too dangerous.”

“I don’t care!”

He quirks his lips, too cold to be a smile, but not really anything else, either. “Pot, kettle.” He slips his hand into his pocket and makes towards the door to the back garden. “Don’t worry, something’ll probably kill me soon anyway, I’ll stop being your problem. I’m going for a cigarette.”

She watches as he lumbers outside and slides the glass door closed behind him, and, for some reason, that is what gets her, that, the smoking. She remembers what a devil of a time he’d had trying to quit his first go around, and now he’s, just, just giving it up for no reason! All of that for nothing, back to letting it slowly kill him! Jesus Christ, it’s not even like she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, they’d quit together. And then she’d smelled it in his hair a few months later, anyway. He thinks he’s not capable, that he’s a lost cause from the beginning so any efforts in his favor by himself or others are pointless, but she knows that’s not true. She will only lose him if he lets himself be lost, and, frankly, he’s perfectly aware of that. He simply doesn’t care. He can get better, he can be safe, if he would only. Just. Let her.

She pauses in her thoughts, and she’s gasping for air. She’s shaking all over. She’s seething, her hands buried deep in her bag of thread. When had she even picked that up?

She feels angry. So angry that, as soon as she thinks on it, she’s damn glad he left the room. But… racing thoughts, shallow breaths, trembling. Is she that terrified?

There’s movement at the door to the garden, and Georgie whips her head around to see. He looks—God, he looks devastated. He’s shaking, too, face pinched and eyes red. And—

He’s putting his lighter back in his pocket. 

It’s got a spiderweb on it.

She’s never seen it before, but of course. Oh, God, she didn’t say any of it out loud but she still regrets thinking all that, of course he isn’t smoking again for no reason. No one does anything for no reason. Now that she’s seen it so transparently it’s as easy to spot as anything, she can see all the little threads and strands stuck to his hand. He’s been bound to it, had it woven into his being. This thing got its hooks in him and chained him to his doom. 

It’s not his fault. He’s just not in control.

He comes back over and sits down beside her. “I’m sorry,” he croaks, clearly choking back tears. “I, I swear I don’t want to die, it’s just—” he presses his lips closed like if he manages to swallow the sob before it escapes then she somehow won’t notice he’s upset. It doesn’t work, not even a little, and he buries his face in his hands, crying to pieces.

Right, that’s it. She knows what to do. 

She loves him.

First, obviously, she wraps her arms around him. Tight, encompassing, gentle. She strokes a hand over his head. She strokes a hand over his chin. She strokes a hand over his shoulder. She strokes a hand over his side. She strokes a hand over his knee. She strokes a hand over his heart. She, of course, only has two hands, and as soon as she lets go she will return to always having had only two hands.

Second, she waits until his breathing slows, and slows, and slows. He’s got eight glasses in him, she’s honestly impressed that he’s made it this far without completely passing out, though he is almost there.

Third, she slips one of her only two hands into his pocket and pulls out the lighter. It’s so easy, she just traces her fingers along the spiderweb design and plucks off the threads. She can’t sever them, but now they’re stuck to her, instead. Much better.

Fourth, she whispers in his ear, “Come along, you. You can stay here tonight, up in the guest bedroom again. I want you close by.” He nods his assent, though very sleepily. She doesn’t want to arouse any suspicion just yet, so his compliance is key. She stands and brings up the hand attached to him, and he, obediently, follows. Like her marionette.

He’s unsteady on his feet, but she has arms enough to shuffle him forward without needing to outright carry him.

She encounters a slight problem when they get to the bedroom, as the bed itself doesn’t quite have the right frame for what she’s intending, but that’s amended easily enough, she has plenty of soft woven things. She sits him down at the end of the room and, delicately, peels the strings off her hand and affixes them to the radiator. Just a few moments to make sure he’s positioned in a way that won’t hurt if she leaves him be for a few minutes, then she’s off for supplies.

Jon wakes up in soft daylight and with a terrible headache.

For a moment he thinks he doesn’t recognize where he is, but, no, he knows this room perfectly well. Just not this angle. Did he really manage to go to bed so drunk that he fell fully off the mattress and didn’t notice? Christ, that’s embarrassing.

Or—wait, what? He’s on the floor, but not the hard floor, he’s on a bunch of pillows and quilts folded up into something mattress-like. And there’s… a breakfast tray and pain relievers about two feet away. Well, he supposes he can ask Georgie why he’s laid out on the ground like a Biblically accurate Last Supper in a few minutes, God he’s thirsty. He moves to grab the tray and—hmm.

It’s not that it’s too far away, it’s perfectly within reach. It just appears to Jon at this very moment that his right hand is, possibly, somewhat tied to the radiator.

He blinks at his wrist. His first thought is, At least I’m left handed. His second thought is, That’s not rope. 

In all point of fact, Jonathan Sims is bound to the radiator of his ex-girlfriend’s guest bedroom by extremely thick spider silk.

He knew he shouldn’t have ignored the half-aborted weft in the fairy lights.

Shit.

Chapter Text

Jon is, above all, a complete idiot.

The more he thinks about it, the more obvious it gets. She was so insistent about keeping in contact, having him around, letting him stay, and those all should have been red flags. He’d known it was strange, but he’d put it down to strange simply in the way that Georgie is often strange, like the time she’d seen a kitten in the road outside and fled to go scoop it up and bring it in without even putting on her shoes. She’d come back in with the soon-to-be-named Admiral in her hands, and Jon had said, Christ, what if a car had come by?

I know! Poor little baby would’ve been crushed.

No, I mean you could have gotten hit.

I— Her face had shifted ever so slowly, brows drawing down and tongue licking the insides of her lips in silent thought. ‘Spose I could’ve, yeah.

Georgie can be like that sometimes. Not brazen, not courageous, but… quick. Taking the shortest possible amount of time to run the sums before landing on a decision and refusing to be swayed.

Or, she could be like that sometimes. Because this isn’t Georgie, not really. Probably hasn’t been for months now. But if Jon isn’t careful to stop himself from thinking about that head-on then his vision blurs and it gets altogether very difficult to breathe, so as a rule he tries to avoid it. Best to break the situation down into pieces. Keep his focus narrow and controllable.

The food. He can think about the food without too much bother.

The tray has a tall glass of water, a small bowl of fruit, and two pieces of toast with fried eggs. The toast and eggs are still slightly warm, so they must have been delivered fairly recently. Meaning she was in here while he was still asleep and didn’t wake him. And she’d tied him up while he was unconscious. Touched him, probably carried him here. No, no, wrong train of thought.

Nothing about the fruit looks off, just a fairly standard salad of grapes, blueberries, and some diced up banana and pineapple. The grapes look a little old, maybe, but not unnaturally rotten. He picks up a blueberry, inspects it, puts it down, and repeats the process with every item in the bowl. The sensation of sticky cobweb on the skin of his wrist refuses to fade into the background, and he remembers Ivo Lensik’s description of an apple decaying to nothing and bursting into a glut of spiders in a matter of seconds.

The toast has cooled down to room temperature by the time he moves on, his thumb and forefinger pruning slightly with fruit juice that he refuses to lick off. Is Georgie vegetarian or vegan? Would she even have eggs in the house? He’s just been living with her for months, why doesn’t he know this? He’s obsessive but he never pays attention to the right things, something will take hold of his interest and he’ll shut out all the people around him and not notice when they’re upset, overworked, in need, spiralling, dead, replaced, wrong, changed—

No. Stop that.

Sheep’s cheese. She’d mentioned wanting sheep’s cheese, which means vegetarian, not vegan. The eggs still feel slimy to the touch.

He picks up the glass of water and holds it up to the light above him, swishing it about. It doesn’t look like there’s anything in there, but—is that a solid residue, or just tiny air bubbles? He can’t tell. He brings it down and holds it up to his nose, and it doesn’t really smell like anything, except for the barest trace of something that makes him feel sick. Which could mean absolutely nothing. He already feels sick, he’s hungry and dehydrated and hungover and trapped and his senses are barely on his side the rest of the time, anyway. Maybe the idea of eating any of the offerings disgusts him because they’re all moldering and off and somehow poisoned, or maybe it’s just his own damnable body rebelling against him like it is so wont to do. If he gets stressed enough then even regular plain water has been known to make him nauseous, a fact which he suspects Martin took note of some time ago and is the main reason he so often brings Jon tea.

His eyes slide back to the glass. He’d been getting better at this. He’d been painstakingly teaching himself to dismiss the paranoia, and now he can very easily see a future hoving into view where he loses his mind to such an extent that he refuses to drink any water she gives him and parches himself to death in a matter of days. Delightful.

The door opens without a knock, and in comes the woman who was once Georgie Barker. “Oh, good, you’re up!”

He barely hears her, interrupting her sentence halfway with, “What did you do to the food?”

“Hm?” She steps fully into the room and closes the door behind her. “There’s a dash of pepper on the eggs, if that’s what you mean.”

“No, I mean what’s wrong with it?” Apparently, without his conscious notice, he has concluded decisively that the food must have been tampered with. Alright. Might as well.

“Nothing, I don’t think, unless there was some mold I missed or something.” She takes a step towards him and practically looms. “What’s got you so fussed?”

“Hmm, I don’t know, maybe that you’ve tied me to your fucking radiator?”

“Is it too warm or something down there? It’s not like I’ve got the heating on this time of year, but sometimes I think I still feel some coming off—”

Actually, what’s Jon thinking? He knows how to get what he wants here. He sharpens his tongue and Asks, “What did you do to the food?”

“Diced the fruit first and threw it together before starting on the eggs, then put the bread in the toaster about three minutes before they were done so they’d be ready at the same time. Forgot to refill the water filter last night so I’m afraid that’s just tap.” She blinks hard and brings her fingertips to her lips. “Jon.”

Well. That’s a bit embarrassing.

Her reaction is immediate, but not hasty. She bends her knees and lowers herself to crouching with a deliberate slowness, broadcasting every move. She draws back her hand and she’s going to hit him, she must be going to hit him, hadn’t she said she was surprised that his pushy questions never got him punched? He braces and she strikes and he flinches and—

Her skin doesn’t touch him. There’s no sharp crack across his cheek. The impact is more thick and wet and heavy and lands right over his mouth. It has some give, but it’s sticky and seals his lips shut. A small feeling of movement tickles its way across his chin.

Oh God.

“I’m sorry, but this is exactly what I’ve been trying to get through to you about,” says Georgie, still crouching. “You just—you don’t trust anyone. Someone tries to help you and you freak out at them like they’re insane. And this isn’t even a new problem! It took two months of going out before you stopped preemptively trying to cancel every date just in case I was only pretending about wanting to see you again, and that was the best it got, because at least back then you didn’t call me a liar to my face. Really, what reason would I have to poison you?”

Jon can’t breathe. His mouth is blocked and if he inhales through his nose then one of the however many spiders crawling all over his face will get sucked in, he knows it, he can already feel it. If he just doesn’t breathe or blink or move at all then maybe they’ll all go away. His mind and body are completely frozen, locked in place at a fever pitch of agony. He doesn’t think he could move even if he wanted to.

“And, I’m not unsympathetic. I know your nan wasn’t a barrel of laughs, I’m sure you’ve got your reasons for acting like this, but it’s—” She stops abruptly and takes a single, deep breath. “Come on, Barker, be reasonable,” she mutters to herself. Her next words are very carefully enunciated. “I do not blame you for having your problems. That’s not what I’m getting at. And I hate it when I feel like I have to resort to stuff like this, but I don’t know what else to do at this point. You make it a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, sometimes. I need you to trust me and cooperate, because I’m not gonna let you go on hunger strike, but I’m also not gonna let you lash-out and use your little—” she waggles her fingers in the air like casting a spell “—magic powers on me. Hard boundary on that one. Alright?”

He can’t make a sound or nod or blink or do anything to signal his assent. He is going to pass out very, very soon.

She squints at him. “Jon?”

It’s happening. The room’s going dark.

“Shit, let me get that off you.”

The webbing is yanked off his skin, the spiders going with it, and the rush of sudden rough lungfuls of air almost knocks him unconscious, anyway. The world isn’t there for a moment, it’s just him and the roaring in his head as every muscle in his body loosens all at once. It’s a kind of ecstasy.

The kaleidoscopic visions withdraw from his eyes after a few seconds and he finds he’s half-collapsed forwards, Georgie’s hand on his shoulder the only thing propping him up and stopping him from fully crumbling. She’s very close to him, and she’s leaning down near his drooping head to hold the glass of water within his field of view. “Here, if your throat’s sore.”

He grabs it and squeezes his eyes shut, drinking as quickly as possible. Predictably, it makes him nauseous. The moment it’s done he reaches out to grab the toast.

Georgie takes back her hands as he gorges himself. “I’m sorry about that. Thought I’d left your nose clear.”

In the middle of chewing, he instinctively tries to shield his mouth with his free hand before remembering his free hand is, in fact, still bound. “You, uh, you did. That wasn’t the problem.”

“What?”

“Really really don’t like spiders.” He knows it’s unwise to verbally admit that as soon the words leave his mouth, but he’s having a hell of a day and he can barely think. Nothing like asphyxiation to make your blood and brain scream. “I couldn’t move, couldn’t even make myself inhale.”

“…No? I definitely only gagged you. Not even sure I’d know how to tie up you lungs, which is kind of ironic, ‘cause… doesn’t matter. But you were absolutely holding your breath.”

“It wasn’t exactly voluntary,” he spits.

At some point she’d gone from crouching to kneeling without his notice, and now she sits back on her heels, putting about a foot of extra distance between them. Her eyes slowly track all over him, going up from his folded legs to his face to his tied hand, and then, confusingly, to the space around his head. “Oh.” Her gaze slides back down to his. “Right. This isn’t your fault, to be clear, but I need you to tell me if something I do scares you like that. I don’t really have a sense for it.”

“How, exactly, am I supposed to do that if I’m gagged?”

She sighs. “Okay, what was I just talking about? I’m not trying to poison you or torture you or anything else, obviously I’m not going to do that again.”

Yes, yes, very convincing. He reaches for the bowl of fruit.

“But, if you don’t speak up when I do something wrong then I won’t know to stop, will I? This is what I meant about needing cooperation. I can only help you as much as you want to be helped. Do we have a deal on that?”

Like he’s ever going to tell a fucking Web avatar when he is and isn’t terrified. “Yes,” he lies, and bites into a too-soft grape.

“Alright. Good.” She gets to her feet and brushes off her legs. “Gotta go work on a script, just shout if you need anything, yeah? I only close the door to the studio when I’m actively recording, and I won’t be doing that for a couple days yet. I’ll be by to bring your dishes down in a few hours.” She strolls out the door just like she always has, closing it behind her. Before it clicks shut, she pokes her head back through and says, “Love you.”

It takes a concerted effort not to smash the porcelain bowl against the floor.

The first two days pass smoothly enough.

She comes in with food every so often, and he eats it immediately, silently, and without protest. Sleep comes uneasily, especially while unable to fully lie down, but there isn’t much else to do except count the floorboards and he’d had to make do with much worse at the Circus, anyway. It’s not even a real break from the environment. He still sees her when he dreams.

She drifts in and out of his room like there’s nothing wrong, like she’s wearing glasses that obscure half the situation and block her from thinking about it. She makes a casual reference one time to how much better he’s sure to feel after a week or two of finally getting the right daily portions of fruit and veg and he almost bursts into hysterics. It’s grotesque. It’s inhuman.

I just need to ride it out for a little while, is what is tells himself. He just needs to keep it together. He knows this place isn’t hidden from the Eye, so Elias will surely notice he’s missing soon enough, do one of his sinister little remote check-ins, and send Daisy to come get him. And Daisy is very likely to kill Georgie. Which will be fine. Because Georgie is already dead, and this “Georgie” is just wearing the face of one of the only people who has ever cared about him. So when he hears the inevitable gunshot from downstairs, he will be fine. It’s fine.

He bites his tongue as the thing pulling the strings of his friend’s corpse tugs her face into a radiant smile, because if he screams or resists or in any way stops playing along then she is going to hurt him. If she hasn’t considered anything so far to be a “punishment” then he dreads to wonder what she might do if he provokes her.

He has to wonder: what could he have possibly done to piss of the Spider so badly?

He hasn’t been pushy about any of the Hilltop Road related statements, he hasn’t tried to chase down Annabelle from that university experiment, and he’s stopped getting overtly annoyed whenever he catches a glimpse of Martin’s phone lockscreen and sees another damn picture of a jumping spider. The only thing it could have been was giving his statement about his first Leitner. It doesn’t make sense, and it’s not fair, but none of this ever is. He finally gathers the willpower to physically give voice to one of the worst things that’s ever happened to him, just to himself, just to order his own thoughts, and he accidentally calls down his childhood nightmare to hollow out his friend and force feed him mediocre produce. He made yet another dumb self-centered mistake and now she’s just gone. God, he was even stupid enough to record it in her sitting room.

After dinner on the second night, he spends about twenty minutes giving serious thought to the subject of, if he were to do something like break one of the dishes, whether dealing himself some significant but broadly survivable wounds with glass shards would make Elias likely to notice him more quickly. He concludes that the answer is probably yes, but it wouldn’t be worth the interim of subjecting himself to Georgie’s version of a suicide watch. Or her first aid.

By noon on the third day, Jon has to acknowledge something. His head is starting to swim, his throat hurts, and he’s far more tired than he should be for how much he’s slept. This is faster than it’s usually been happening, but it might not help that he lacks anything else with which to distract himself.

Georgie comes in at around 2 p.m. to collect his dishes, and he stares at her slippers as she stands up with the plate and cup. He pulls together every scrap of weathered humility and politeness in his body and tempers his breathing. He tries to keep his voice soft and level. “Would you bring me my bag from downstairs?”

“Hm?” She pauses on her way to the door. “Your what now?”

“I brought a backpack with me when I came over, I believe I put it on one of the hooks in the entryway. I would like to have it, please.”

She turns back to face him fully, and he can feel her evaluating him. Head bowed, legs neatly tucked away side saddle, voice even, minding his Ps and Qs. “How come?” she asks with a note of suspicion.

“I just want to have my things. There’s nothing dangerous in there, you can take my phone and go through every item yourself, I just want a few of my things.” It’s true, he’s stopped carrying any kind of weapon that someone else could turn around on him. And he asked Basira to dispose of the knife.

“I…” She lingers in thought for a moment. “I can do that, yes.”

He tries not to look too relieved. “Thank you.”

She smiles. “My pleasure.”

Jon lets himself feel a little bit self-congratulatory as she leaves to go fetch it. That could have gone far worse, but he managed to play his cards right. Maybe if he behaves himself enough then he can slowly work his way up to talking her into bigger things. Supervised access to a laptop, possibly.

She reenters the room, beat up black backpack in tow. “You’ve been travelling light,” she says, demonstrably raising it up to shoulder height a few times.

His eyes fix onto it as she sets herself down on the ground. “Like I said, been globe trotting.”

Her hands go the zip on the front pocket first, predictably plucking out his phone. “I’ll be having that,” she mutters.

He can’t tear himself away to look even a few degrees up towards her face. He is feeling, perhaps, a trifle unwise. “I can give you my PIN, if you like.”

She snorts. “Nope. Like I’ve said, I’m not trying to be nasty, I know you’re weird about your privacy.”

He nods automatically. “Yes, of course, sorry.”

“It’s no bother.” She goes to the middle pocket and takes out a deep maroon passport. “Probably shouldn’t be carrying this when you’re just out and about, imagine if you got nabbed again and lost everything you had on you.”

Imagine.

From the same pocket, a packet of Silk Cuts. “Now, if these are what you’re looking for, then I’m sorry but you’re not getting them. Or your lighter.”

In this moment he genuinely could not care less. “Yes, fine.”

She gives a hint of a smile. “Good.” Next, she unzips the main pocket and shuffles around at the bottom. Jon feels like he’s going to hatch out of his skin and really seriously has to swallow the urge to tell her to hurry up. She pulls out a tape recorder, blessedly turned off. “How many of these do you even have? I’ve still got the two you used here knocking about somewhere.”

“I haven’t counted.”

She sets it aside with the rest of the vetted items. Then, his wallet. “Have you got a bunch of foreign currency in here?” she asks with a bit of tease.

“Probably? Couldn’t say.”

“God, you don’t even have anything cool like a travel chess set, the only things left are these manila—”

Jon’s hand shoots out, palm up, fingers splayed. “May I have them, please?”

Georgie goes very still. Her expression darkens and her lips purse. “Are these files from your job?”

“Yes.” Anya Villette and Mikaele Salesa. He’d been planning to camp out with them by the entrance to the tunnels to catch Tim.

“Your evil job that you hate and is making you kind of suicidal?”

He bristles. “It’s not doing that.”

“Sure.”

“Look, you said you were alright with me recording statements here, you said I could have my things.”

“I said you could record here when it seemed like the only other option was you isolating yourself in some lonely dark corner of London with no one to check on you. I really thought it was either indulging you or waiting til you drowned in a puddle beneath a bridge or something. For a while that was why I thought I kept dreaming of you in a morgue, I almost convinced myself I was getting premonitions about identifying your body.”

“It, it won’t hurt me or anything, and you—you can stay in the room and watch me to make sure I’m alright, I won’t mind, I promise.”

Her face completely flattens. “Come on, Jon. I’ve seen you after you read one of these things, I know what they do to you. Can you honestly tell me they don’t hurt?”

“I just…” He should lie. He should just lie. The only smart thing to do is lie. “I need them. It will be much, much worse if I have to go without. So, please.”

Georgie angles her chin at him and sits up on her haunches. “I appreciate your trying to tell the truth, I know it’s hard for you. But that, it, it’s not healthy. I’m sure you have to have realized that.”

He’s starting to panic, just a smidge.

She stands up, manila folders in hand, and Jon rises on his knees to follow her. She takes a step back and he tries to lunge forward with his hand still outstretched, as though he thinks he could somehow reach her. It’s a pointless, stupid, futile endeavor, but it’s instinctive, like he can’t stop himself. He strains and feels the webbing on his right hand pull taut.

Georgie gives a small gasp. 

A glint of something purple and predatory flashes across her eyes. 

Not breaking eye contact, she draws her arm behind her back, bringing the folders even farther away. Pathetically, self-awarely, he stretches forward once again. Her face is awed.

Neither of them moves.

He’s crossed some line that he hadn’t known was there, and it makes the hot panic freeze to cold dread.

The reverence on her features slowly softens and resolves into something less sublime and more blithe. Her lips bow into sweet smile. “Really, Jon, you’re such a workaholic. I’ve never known you to take a proper break of your own free will, I’ve always had to poke and prod you into giving in. And you do deserve the time off, I can’t imagine that anyone else at your Institute has been putting in as many hours as you. No, while you’re here, I’m not letting you work off the clock. This is your time to relax and get all of those productivity compulsions out of your head. I’m gonna take care of you.”

The door opens and closes, and Jon lets his arm drop limply to his side. Then he lets himself drop limply to the floor. He turns his face down into one of the myriad pillows and screeches.

He doesn’t know if it’s emotional or physical, but everything Georgie says for the next day sounds like she’s underwater. He gets the gist, mostly, but any individual sentence is lost to him. Maybe the Eye is cross with him for not feeding it and is going the other direction with his linguistic comprehension abilities.

She comes in the next morning with a stack of books and says something about “if you’re so bored” and “better reading material.” Then she leaves him alone again. For another four hours. 

He contemplates ignoring the books completely out of spite, but in all truth he’s a very weak man, who, despite all reports, has a considerably low tolerance for pain and discomfort, including boredom in all its intensities. He “reads” the first few pages of all of them, but the letters and words swap themselves around and he rereads the same lines dozens of times without noticing and he almost nods off every twenty seconds unless he digs his nails into the scant flesh of his knee, and with both hands occupied he can’t actually hold a book open let alone read it, so. It’s all a bit moot.

Sometime in the afternoon he hears a creak of the door being gently pushed ajar. He goes motionless, picturing long spindly legs reaching their way around to pull themselves in. Instead, he sees the Admiral’s little tabby face poking its way through. The illustrious Admiral Meower-Barker takes a few turns around the room, sniffs Jon’s leather wallet that still lies on the floor, spends a minute kneading and inspecting the strange nest of heaped textiles, allows Jon to scratch him under the chin, and takes his leave once more, getting back to his busy schedule. 

The door isn’t even locked.

“I’m glad you’re here for this. I know you’d just be trying to push through it at your desk.”

Georgie’s sitting crosslegged in front of him with a roll of paper towels, a bowl of cool water, and a wastepaper bin. She had come in to find him shaking violently in a cold sweat and is now very delicately and precisely washing his clammy skin.

“If this happens again, I want you to shout for me, alright?”

Jon is doing his best to just turn his mind off. Put a length of distance between himself and the hands dabbing at his hairline. It’s a bit difficult when his nerves are so prickly and sensitive at present that he feels like the princess and the damn pea, but still.

When she came back earlier with the water and towels, she also brought along a seam ripper. She put her hands on him, unzipped his hoodie, took his left arm out of the sleeve, and deftly undid all the requisite stitching on the right to strip it off him completely. I’ll mend it, don’t worry, she’d said. Just need this layer off to get at your neck and arms.

Deep breaths. Keeping his eyes blurred so he can’t really see her. Focusing on the pain in the back of his skull instead of the gentle caresses at the front of it.

The cool sensations move down to his neck and jaw. “Wow, okay, you are massively tense, what on Earth is the matter?”

His thoughts come slowly, syrupy, and it takes a moment to string together an answer. “I feel very ill, and most of me hurts.” There, that’s true enough.

“You feel like you’ve won a staring contest with Medusa, you’re so rigid.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay, just… take it easy with yourself, yeah?”

“Okay.”

She continues down his neck and he resolutely keeps it together. She daubs across the site of his healed over half-slit throat and he doesn’t move a muscle. But he really can’t help what his face does when she pulls down the collar of his T-shirt to get at the top of his chest. His eyes heat up and he clenches his teeth hard.

The hands come off him at once and she leans back an inch or two. “No, sorry, ‘I’m sick’ doesn’t cut it, you look like you’re being exsanguinated. What, do you think I’m gonna bite you?”

“No.”

“Then what is it?” He keeps his face turned to the side and doesn’t look at her. With the hands off him, his brain is now having a slightly easier time working, but he still can’t make himself say it. He just lets the pause stretch on. She must be running the calculations herself, examining the available evidence, because after a few more moments he hears a low, exasperated sigh. “You think I’m going to reach under your clothes and assault you.”

He doesn’t nod his assent as such, but his silence probably conveys it just as well.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, why would you think that, hm? What have I been telling you for days now? I don’t want to hurt you.”

He doesn’t have the energy to be angry or indignant, it’s more like a low, languid irritation oozing out of him in gruff tones. “You got me drunk and tied me to the floor of a bedroom. You keep touching me without asking and make vague threats if I struggle. You, minutes ago, literally ripped some of my clothes off me while moving my body around like a Barbie doll. All told, I think I’m being fairly reasonable.”

“But… Jon, you know me. We’ve had, not even a conversation like this before, we’ve had this conversation before. I, Georgina Barker, categorically do not want to have sex with you if you have to dissociate to force yourself through it, which you do. I have laid this out for you in exacting detail several times.”

He can’t stand this. He can’t stand this thing using her words and her memories. “Well how about you try getting regularly moisturized while bound naked to a chair for a month and not wind up a bit jumpy about it.”

“What? Jon, what?” She leans to the side and ducks into his line of sight.

“Oh please, I already told you about the Circus.”

“Not any of that part, you didn’t.”

He may have edited around it. He’d wanted to avoid this precise conversation. “I assumed a certain amount was implied by saying they wanted my skin.”

“It absolutely was not.” She stares right at him, face pinched and severe. He can see the gears turning. “I am… very sorry that happened to you.” Her tone is tight and deliberate, like she’s holding back and it’s taxing. “I wish you had said something sooner so I didn’t accidentally trigger you so badly, but I can see why you wouldn’t.” She sits back even farther and scans about at the floor until she lands on the discarded torn hoodie lying in a heap. She picks it up and holds it in her lap. “If you wanna cover up again then you can just have this back now, I’ll sew it back together in a few days.”

He knows better than to keep stupidly feeding her his real thoughts and feelings, but everything she’s doing to bait him into feeling at ease is working. He’s so tired, and that pain-averse part of him is desperately looking for any kind of release. Softly, he says, “It’s not the being a bit more exposed that’s the problem, mostly just the touching.”

“Okay.” She jerks forward a smidge like she’s about to move back into his space then abruptly stops herself short. “You probably don’t want me to hug you, do you?”

No. No, this can’t be—she can’t— “I don't,” he says, like testing a limb.

She nods. “That makes sense.” Instead of reaching directly for him, she leans forward and places her hand on the ground near his leg, palm down and fingers splayed. “I’m sorry. And I love you, got that?”

Oh fuck. A wretched sob bubbles its way out of his throat.

Her face falls. “Did I say something wrong?”

“You’re Georgie,” spills out of his trembling lips, reflexive, exalting. He puts his hand on top of hers.

“‘Course I am. Who else would I be?”

“I don’t know, I—” It’s her. She’s still in there, he hasn’t lost her— “I love you, too.”

She smiles. “That’s good to hear.” She glances at the window behind him, pulls her phone out of her pocket, glances at it’s screen, and sighs. “Look, I really wish I could stay longer and keep an eye on you in case the shaking starts again, but I’ve gotta dash, I’m meeting Melanie for an early dinner. I’ll bring you some water and electrolytes before I leave.” Jon takes his hand back, and she makes as though to move in towards him again before once more stopping herself. She considers for a moment, blows him a kiss, and leaves.

Georgie. Georgie Georgie Georgie Georgie. She can still be reasoned with, even if just a little. He knows he can put up with a lot if he comes across the right motivation pushing him to endure, and he certainly has, now. She is still Georgie. Maybe this is exactly where he needs to be.

He’s going to get her back.