Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The thing is, Basira Hussain has never thought of her partner as small.

She has thought of Officer Daisy Tonner as many, many things (some of them good, some of them less so, though none of them strictly bad, per se) over the years, and not once has the descriptor small come to mind. Lithe? Yes. Occasionally short-sighted? Yes, but Daisy makes up for that well in other factors. A bit petty? Only when it’s warranted, and won’t interfere with the case at hand. But small?

Unfortunately, if Elias is to be believed, Basira can’t quite come up with any other way of describing the Daisy before her.

Well—almost any other way.

Fawn comes to mind. As does furry, and, of course, the most obvious one.

Feline.

The Cockney deliverymen have already left, seemingly more ill-at-ease with the creature—Daisy, Daisy, this is Daisy, she just has to remember that—than any of the more…eldritch deliveries they’ve brought so far. They’d practically fled the moment Jon had opened the carrier, and with the way the ca–Daisy had hissed at their backs, Basira has a feeling the trip from wherever they’d found her had not been full of camaraderie.

Daisy’s calmed down by now, sitting on Melanie’s desk and grooming herself with a sand-colored paw. Jon watches with arms crossed from a few feet away, expression unreadable.

“How…”

She starts at the laugh coming from her phone. She’d half-forgotten about Elias, still on the line. “You’ll have to be a little further along in your commitment to the Eye for that to work, Detective. Besides, isn’t a bit of mystery more fun?” Jon frowns, striding over from his corner and opening his mouth. Basira recognizes the green glint to his eye, but just as he prepares to speak, Elias cuts him off. “Ah, that’d be my cue. It has been wonderful catching up with the two of you—well, three, I suppose—but unfortunately, I have places to be. Detective. Miss Tonner. Archivist.”

He hangs up just as Jon asks, compulsion strong enough to feel goosebumps rise even though Basira is not its target, “How do we fix her?”

He glares down at the phone instead, as if willing Elias to call back, or for the sunset photo of the White Cliffs of Dover on her lockscreen to answer him. Basira lets him stew for a moment before clearing her throat.

“We should get some things together for her, in the meantime. There’s the Pet Pavilion near us, I can go—”

Jon turns his gaze to her, and the confusion is enough to stop her train of thought. “Why would we need to be getting her things from a pet shop?”

“Jon. Look at her.”

He shoots Daisy a glance, but evidently it’s not enough to make the connection stick. “What?”

“She’s a cat, Jon.”

“At the moment. The goal is to fix that—”

“But that will take time. Especially considering Elias didn’t give us shit to go on.”

“Then why—ah. Sorry, ah, hm.” Jon clears his throat, glancing over at Daisy rather than meeting Basira’s gaze. Daisy continues to ignore him, shaking her head before continuing to pass her paw over one ear.

“Because we may as well make her comfortable, Jon. No point in depriving her for however long it takes to solve this.”

He nods, satisfied with her explanation. “Yes, that…that does make sense.”

“I can go now, and probably still be back before Rosie leaves.”

“Think we can convince her these are work-related expenses?” Jon mutters dryly, and she finds herself tense despite the lack of compulsion in his voice.

Basira does manage to smile, though. “Yeah, if we can convince payroll that the Archives’s new resident mouser deserves decent pay.” He snorts, and there’s a phantom of what they used to have, before things went awry and a cult tried to burn the world. Just as quickly it vanishes, though, and she’s left with a grudging resentment at what working here has turned them all into.

Even a cat, in Daisy’s case.

Jon spends the next three hours attempting to discern how much of Daisy is in the cat they’ve been given.

Unfortunately, the Eye decides to be as helpful as usual.

He’s in the process of gathering up anything in the bullpen that seems as if it may draw a cat’s ire—or interest, which may be worse, in Daisy’s case, if she is in fact mostly there—when the Eye decides to inform him that fawn is a coat color in cats that is caused by an absence of eumelanin and the presence of two copies of the dilution gene, which is of course exactly what he’d like to know, thank you very much, because that absolutely helps with figuring out how to get his coworker-in-law-slash-attempted-murderer back to her human form. Daisy has finished grooming herself at this point, laying back on several printouts regarding Ny-Ålesund spread across Basira’s desk, seemingly content to watch as he moves about the office. He’s halfway to a cluster of bankers boxes full of statements—all with the lids off, of course, and all fully in cat range—when he comes to an abrupt halt.

The Eye informs him that Gerard Keay first tried to leave his home at the age of nine, but no, Jon’s more interested in what he’d said, the time they’d spoken in America, that—

“What? You think people are so special it’s only our fear that counts?” Gerard says, his voice echoing slightly above the faint din of the night outside the cabin.

“Oh,” he breathes. He takes a couple steps over to the side of Martin’s desk—Martin Blackwood has not sat at this desk in six months—and leans against it, a hand going to his mouth. He’s felt relatively stable, today, so he’d left his cane in the back corner of his office, but with the way things are going he may end up needing it after all. The back of his head buzzes with the knowledge that Daisy still watches him from where she lounges, no more interested in his imminent realization-turned-breakdown than she has been in any of his movements thus far.

“Back then I think the only animal fear was the Hunt.” The man formed of words twisting back and forth across his skin—smell of disinfectant and grief that rose from his hospital bed. She was there sometimes, the one he had followed around the world. There was almost sadness—looks contemplative, yet confident, and Jon wonders how many monsters he, too, had to brave the jaws of, to become this comfortable with discussing their innards—

“Oh.”

A door closes, so quietly he almost misses it. In unison, Jon and Daisy look up to see—

The last time Martin Blackwood was in the Archives was nine p.m. last Tuesday, searching for statements from Adelard Dekker.

Martin hasn’t noticed them yet, he’s still shuffling through the papers in his hands, brows furrowed above his glasses in a way Jon has missed so much it aches—

Daisy chooses that moment to stand up, stretch, and bat at a cup full of pens until it crashes to the floor.

Martin jumps, a hand going to his pocket, where Jon knows he still keeps a corkscrew—knows, not Knows, because it had fallen out of Martin’s pocket once, months after Prentiss, and when Jon’d asked he’d said it was just in case—as his eyes flick from the papers to Daisy and from Daisy to Jon, and Jon—

“Oh,” Martin says.

“Hello,” Jon says.

I miss you how are you where have you been what did Lukas tell you are you safe are you well are you okay has he hurt you what has he pulled you into are you aware of just how dangerous he is do you feel that fog clings to every other breath have you noticed how much it’s all gone to hell do you know how much I miss you, Martin, and this is the human part of myself speaking because I am still in here, and I still need you—

“This is Daisy,” Jon says instead, gesturing to the cat.

Martin blinks. Adjusts his glasses. Takes a hesitant step forward.

“Um, right.” He clears his throat. “Jon, you– you said her name is Daisy?” At Jon’s nod, he continues. “Don’t you think that’s maybe, um, a bit insensitive?”

“No.”

Martin chuckles awkwardly, and with it Jon hears the distant bellow of a foghorn, the traces of Peter Lukas’s falsified congeniality. “But, uh, Jon, haven’t you thought about…I mean, what does Basira think?”

“She knows,” he says, instead of any of all he wants to say to Martin.

“She…does?”

He nods. He can’t trust his voice right now, can’t trust himself not to tell Martin of all that has happened down here, of all the rage that stabs at his gut like a heated knife when he thinks of Peter Lukas or Elias Bouchard or the Lightless Flame or—

“Well. That’s, um, a bit surprising, I suppose? Which is why I, uh, reacted like that, but I mean, you do have to admit that it is a little, uh, unusual? Naming a new cat after your dead coworker—“

All at once, Jon understands. “Oh, sorry, I should have explained better. It’s– it’s not that we just call her Daisy. This, uh, this is Daisy.”

Martin blinks.

Jon bites his tongue before he can say anything to make this even more awkward.

Daisy hops off the desk.

Their eyes both snap to her as she walks past Jon, all perfunctory and disinterested, only to stop before Martin and sit back on her haunches. She looks up at him.

(And for all that Jon loves cats, he does worry, briefly. After all, this is the same cat that sent two eldritch couriers packing with a single hiss. He doesn’t want to know what she can do at large, against someone who doesn’t have the same sort of supernatural insurance policy to keep them from dying so easily.)

Daisy meows.

“Do…do you want something?” Martin asks, clearly at a loss.

She bats at him gently, then turns and walks back towards the middle of the office. When he doesn’t follow she stops, looking back at him as her tail twitches.

“I think she wants you to follow her,” Jon says. Martin looks up, and Jon wonders if he can feel the slight chill of the fog drifting behind him.

“I…I shouldn’t even be here, really.” Martin adjusts his glasses, gaze falling from Jon to Daisy, and falling from her just as quickly. “Peter’s—he doesn’t want me to be, uh—”

“Connecting with anyone?”

He wishes he’d kept the dryness from his tone at Martin’s wince. “I have a job to do, Jon. I’m sorry.”

“We all do. Some of us are trying not to make things easier on the Fears while we do it, though.”

Martin turns abruptly, shuffling the papers in his hands again. He starts towards the door, a vicious undertone to his voice as he says, “Sure, Jon. I’m sure the Eye would love to agree, if it wasn’t busy with all the statements you give it.”

Before Jon can respond, Martin’s gone.

Chapter Text

Jon and Basira stare down the objects scattered across two of the desks shoved together—0.03 millimeters of empty space lies between the desk currently used by Melanie King and the desk formerly used by Sasha James—in a silence far more awkward than any they’ve experienced in the past seven months.

“Well. Think this should be enough?”

He’s already nodding in answer to Basira’s question before he realizes it. “It should be. Especially since she’ll only be like this for a short while.”

Basira eyes him, but he can’t make himself return her gaze. Instead, he clears his throat.

“Right. Where are we setting up her things?”

“Tunnels would be safest from Elias.”

Basira lets her suggestion sit in the air, though both of them know they will not be going that route. A cat, loose in the tunnels? If this creature isn’t, in fact, entirely Daisy, that would only spell disaster for the cat. And if it is Daisy, then…well, in all honesty, Jon isn’t sure whether that would increase or decrease the chances of survival down there. A cat once lived for three weeks in the tunnels beneath the Institute, before it succumbed to the manifestation of the Crawling Rot within the body of what was once Jane Prentiss two days before its attack on the Archives. Hm, no actually, scratch that. He doesn’t want to consider whether being Daisy enough would help in this case.

“I don’t think Elias would want to harm her, considering he’s likely how Breekon and Hope knew to bring her here.” He sighs. “My office it is, then?”

They end up setting the litterbox in the corner farthest from both his desk and the door, which does, unfortunately, put it closer to his desk than he’d like. Still, they want Peter Lukas to have as few reasons to complain as possible, and if this is the option that’ll be the least likely to lead to potential smells permeating the rest of the Institute, then…well. It’s not like any of them have had much of a choice in anything for a very long time now.

Melanie shows up while they’re arguing over where to put the cat tree, and by the time Jon acknowledges that the tickle at the back of his neck is, in fact, from someone physically present watching him and not the ever-present weight of Elias’s gaze, he’s turning to see her sitting criss-cross on the floor, Daisy already stretched out across her lap.

“You guys waited until I was out just to get a cat?” Melanie asks, still scratching at the base of Daisy’s ear.

“No,” Jon says, blunt as ever.

At the same time, Basira says, “We didn’t get a cat, exactly, this is—it’s a good thing you’re already sitting down for this.”

Melanie raises a brow. “What, you think a spooky cat’s what’s gonna get me rattled? After fighting off that Hopkins guy’s whole ‘flesh army’ thing back when Ghost Google here was comatose?”

“‘Ghost Google?’ Really? Is that what—”

“Jon, shut up.” His jaw clicks shut audibly and he nods. Basira continues, glancing back at Melanie. “See, it’s not like we went and picked up a cat, or anything.”

“They deliver anything these days.”

Despite herself, Basira cracks a wry smile. “Well, just about, it seems. Even in prison, Elias w—”

“Wait. Elias?”

There’s none of the bleeding, scratching anger that would have burned beneath her words even a few weeks ago. Still, the dawning horror in itself is enough to make Jon inhale sharply. He feels the scalpel, slicing all too neatly into the meat of his shoulder through the layers of clothes, all too big for him since the coma, feels the fury as she screeches practically into his ear, the words burning into his skull, “I’ll kill you I’ll kill you—!” and then Basira’s dragging her away, even as the Knowing sears that Melanie King has had a bullet rotting away in her leg since her trip to India and, if left there, will cause her to enter sepsis if the Slaughter does not claim her fully first and he’s stumbling down the tunnels, arm to the blood streaming as he nearly trips over the uneven sto—

“—on!”

He’s raking his ragged fingernails against skin and scrambling backwards before he can register that there isn’t blood still pouring from his trapezius, that Melanie is across the room, that Basira’s—

Oh. Basira. She has one hand out placatingly, but the other is drifting to her belt, and he can see—

“I’m– I’m so sorry, Basira, I didn’t– I—”

He reaches out, thinking he can take a look at the scratches he’s left across the back of her hand, but she snatches it away from him just as quick. They stare at each other, silent, before Jon lowers his hand.

“I didn’t realize it was you.”

Basira only makes a noncommittal noise, but Melanie’s glare is an oil burn across his skin. “What, you didn’t just Know it?”

“I– I can’t exactly control it, and—”

“Enough.” Basira puts a hand—the one Jon’d just scratched enough to break the skin, because he’s certainly no longer human if this is what he does when he’s startled, only animals lash out when they’re scared, not rational human beings—out towards Melanie, this time. “Back on topic. So, yes, like I was saying, Elias told us that this cat is, for better or worse, Daisy.”

Melanie glowers for a minute before sighing, shoving a persistent bit of hair out of her eyes. “For worse, I’d say. I mean, not like we were buddy-buddy, but I don’t think she’d like it. Always seemed like more of a dog person.”

“You don’t have to use the past tense; she didn’t die,” Jon says, quiet. The scowl turned on him ensures he doesn’t offer any other commentary.

“Regardless, this is what we’ve got to work with. So, for now, Jon and I figured it’d be good to pick her up some things from the shoppes, and get her set up here. There’s not exactly a surefire way to secure the tunnels, and given Prentiss was able to get in, I don’t really trust a cat to stay put.”

“Even if that cat is Daisy?”

There’s less anger in each of her words, now. Jon just has to remind himself of that. She’s trying. There’s no more bullet. It’ll still take time.

“Yes. Particularly given that Elias didn’t see fit to give us more detail.”

“And Ghost Google’s no help?”

They both turn their gazes on him, and even though he doesn’t meet either of them, Jon feels them as a thousand pounds of soil over his chest all the same. “The Eye hasn’t been…forthcoming.”

“Decided to shut you out then? Monster god give up on its pet monster?”

Jon tries to hide the wince. “It’s…well, not entirely. But it hasn’t helped me Know anything about…well, this.” He gestures to where Daisy sits now, perched on one of the cat tree’s upper platforms in a crouch. “I’ve learned far more about cat color genetics than I would have liked to, but no. Nothing particularly applicable to our goals.”

This cat tree is the Kilimandjaro de Luxe Crown model in cream, produced by RHR Pets. Half of the support poles are at least 50 centimetres in height, and they are all made of sisal. This particular one was manufactured in October of 2017.

He massages his temples with a sigh. “Well. I also know pretty much anything you’d like to know about that tree, now, too.”

Basira sighs. “Right. Well, for now, let’s finish getting her settled in, and start researching. We should act under the assumption that she is still in there, but obviously, we do need to keep her safe, in case she is not under any of her own consciousness. I’ll try to get more details out of Elias tomorrow—”

“I can help.” Jon pushes off from the wall. “I can Ask, get him—”

“And what if he refuses to speak to either of us? What’s your plan then?”

He falters. “I…don’t know.”

With a grunt, Melanie gets to her feet, rolling her neck. “Alright, you two can hash out who’s going to go see the dickhead. I’m going to go finish unpacking what I brought for the breakroom stash. Basira, if you want my help on research or setting anything up, let me know. Jon, don’t need me.” Without another word, she turns and heads to the breakroom, a slight stomp to her step that Jon can’t begrudge her.

He turns back to Basira. Before he can apologize again, she shakes her head decisively. “No. We’ve got other things to do now. No time to keep wallowing over it. Come on, help me figure out where to put her bowls.”

Her hand stings like hell, but she tucks that into the same little box she’s tucked all of her recent panics in, already including such hits as my-boss-is-an-eldritch-monster-that-has-too-many-eyes-when-you’re-not-looking-at-his-reflection-dead-on, my-boss’s-boss-basically-let-us-sacrifice-all-of-our-lives-in-what-amounted-to-Woodstock-’99-but-on-purpose-and-without-even-any-bands-performing, and my-partner-got-turned-into-a-cat-and-this-is-our-new-normal-now-I-guess.

Jon’s been a bit out of it since his…whatever that was, earlier (episode, panic attack, midlife crisis; something in her wants to be sympathetic, but the larger part of her wants to ask him what the hell is going on in his brain, to tell him he certainly deserves Martin now that he’s teamed up with Lukas, apparently, to tell him terrible people deserve each other, and ignore the way that nags at the part of her that feels safest around Daisy), but he hasn’t tried to claw at her again, which. Is probably a good sign. And probably means that he’s fine.

Probably.

She keeps shooting glances at the cat tree, and the spot Daisy seems to have claimed as her preferred to keep a careful watch on them. The cat and her partner—no, the cat who is her partner—seem…incongruous. Beyond just the fact that her partner has not, before today, been a cat, of course. Daisy has never liked sitting still. She needs to be on the trail of someone, of something, or she gets trigger happy. Now, of course, Basira understands why, understands that what she’d always just written off as a partner particularly dedicated to pursuit of the ungovernable was actually a partner being selected by some sort of primalistic animal deity of hunting.

She’s not sure if she knows who Daisy is beyond that, actually. Maybe…maybe this cat is who Daisy is, if she got the chance to see her without the Blood soaked into her spine. Maybe that’s why Basira can’t stop looking, can’t stop checking to see if it really is still just Daisy-the-cat and not Daisy-the-human-enough-partner.

Maybe she’s scared of seeing a Daisy without the Hunt.

(She folds that one up neatly and sets it firmly inside the box with the others.)

The door creaks open, and Basira’s attention snaps to it, hand already moving to gr—oh. Just Melanie. She forces herself to calm, inhaling as slow as she can, as Melanie slips by where she’s still trying to decide between a pack of colorful, latticed balls or one of plain ping pong balls. Basira keeps her gaze on the balls, refusing to allow it to follow Melanie into Jon’s office and to the trapdoor.

The door to his office opens with a softer creak and she shakes her head to clear it. Right. Cat toys. She’s supposed to be figuring out which of these Daisy-the-cat-and-maybe-her-partner-? will like the best. Melanie can take care of herself.

A loud crash and a sharp, “Fuck you!” in Melanie’s venomous tone contradict her almost immediately.

She waits, listening, but all that follows is something incoherent in Jon’s lower tone, another sharp remark from Melanie, and then the slam of the trapdoor closing. Right. Fine, then. Melanie is fine. And Jon hasn’t (yet) left his office whining about anything, so he probably hasn’t taken anything he won’t heal from.

…when had she extended her pragmatism from days on the force to her friend’s theoretical injuries?

No. No, no, not friends. She needs to remember that, to remember that whatever happened in Jon’s six months of all-expenses-paid-courtesy-of-one-Elias-Bouchard stay in hospital, that he came out on the other side of it, and that Daisy and Tim didn’t.

Well, Tim didn’t. Daisy…certainly didn’t come out unscathed.

Jon gets up from his desk with a sigh she can feel from a dozen meters and a door away, and closes the door almost all the way but for a crack just big enough for Daisy to swipe a paw through. She hears the muffled thump of his cane as he returns to his desk, and a moment later, if she strains, the telltale crackle of a tape.

“Statement of Kulbir Shakya, regarding a flood…”

Just off to feed his eye god again, then. Right. She stands from her desk, grabbing both of the packs of balls and approaching Daisy's cat tree. She looks down at Basira, haughty, and offers a single tail twitch.

“You want either of these?” she asks.

Daisy’s nose twitches, but otherwise, she doesn’t move.

Sighing, Basira tries again. “Alright, look. Not sure how much of you is in there—as in, Daisy-the-ex-cop you—but Jon and I put a decent amount of work into making things good as we can for you here, on the off chance it is you in there. Which, I’m hoping that’ll help, or at least make it easier on you, so it’s not like a ‘no mouth and I must scream’ type of situation, or at least so it’ll be a more tolerable one. That said, some amount of input would help a great deal. So. Which of these looks the most appealing to you?”

Daisy continues to stare.

Basira fidgets with the edge of her hijab before finally setting her jaw. “Okay. I’ll just open the one I want to, then, hm? Is that acceptable?” At the cat’s continued silence, she takes the bag with the latticed balls and tugs the cheap plastic until it tears. One of the balls, a small purple one that sounds like it has a bell inside, falls out before she can catch it and rolls across the floor.

Daisy’s off the cat tree and springboarding off Basira’s shoulder almost before she can register it. She turns, watching as the cat catches up with the ball and pounces, holding it captive for a moment beneath her paws. She lifts one, and then the other, then bats it off in a new direction and takes off after it.

Rubbing at the point of her shoulder, where Daisy had briefly put all of her weight, Basira grimaces.

Maybe this isn’t Daisy without the Hunt at all.