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It turns out that Daisy still has a sturdy set of metal handcuffs from her days on the force. Jon knows that they weren’t with her on her trip through the Buried, because they’d both had to just give up and throw the clothes that they’d been wearing when they went into the Coffin away as unsalvageable lost causes. The cuffs would still have dirt caught in their teeth.
“I always had some extras over at home,” she explains when he asks (trying to avoid the thoughts and needs and wants and desperate hunger inside of his head with idle friendly chatter, which is still a new and exciting thing in his life). “Don’t have my flat any longer, course, but Basira saved most of my things from there. It’s good to have on hand. Just in case.”
Caution is good. Being prepared is good. And honestly, of any kind of police equipment, he’s most comfortable with the idea of Daisy having an innocuous set of handcuffs. She hadn’t immobilized him with rope or restraints of any kind, after all, all of that time ago that feels like ages past now. All she’d needed was a gun held to his head.
“That’ll be handy,” Jon says. He remembers, as he often does around Daisy, Jared Hopworth reaching into his chest with his monstrous hand and drawing out his ribs. “If the enemy has conventional wrists anyways.”
Daisy turns a thoughtful, considering look on him. “You know, I bet I could teach you how to break your way out of a pair of cuffs. Could be a useful skill to have.”
“You mean lockpicking? Er, I’m afraid Basira’s already tried to teach that to me.” During their ‘resisting the Lonely hang outs’ as Melanie had named them. “Apparently I have no talent for it and should just stick to my current skills.”
She snorts. “She’s an impatient teacher. And that’s not what I meant. You know that trick of dislocating your thumb so you can slip out of your cuffs? I know it.”
“Oh,” he says.
“It’ll be even better for you, since you regenerate,” she says, looking at his hands appraisingly in a way that makes him want to hide his thumbs from her sight.
“Wh-- while that’s a very, a very kind and practical offer, Daisy, thank you, I think I’d rather not--”
She waves him off, dismissive and calming in one lax gesture. “Relax. I’m not going to force it on you, Jon. Just a thought.”
“Right,” he says quickly.
She lets the topic go easily, going back to idly peeling her tangerine. She’s at ease with silence, comfortable with not speaking. She just likes to be in someone’s company, in the same room as him. She doesn’t constantly need the air to be filled with words. Jon appreciates that, he really does. It gives him more time to gnaw at every thought to pieces inside his own head before he speaks up.
He should accept the offer. Heavens only knows how many times he’s been restrained against his will, and badly in need of a way out of it. But all of those times had been with rope, hadn’t it? And, and--
--and what if his friends need a way to restrain him--
--Jon’s stomach aches with hunger, except for when he pays attention to it he notices that it isn’t localized in his stomach at all, but that the hunger is instead throbbing throughout every single cell of his body, in his skin and his blood and his hair and his bones and his teeth and his eyes--
Daisy’s hand lands on his, startling him out of the thoughts that circle each other like a rat chasing and biting and gnawing at its own tail. He looks up into her eyes. Serious, but not firm and unyielding. Understanding.
“Listen to the quiet,” she says. “Not the blood.”
He huffs a humorless laugh. She has become exceedingly good at spotting his little ‘moments’, even if they take place entirely inside his head, quietly frantic and private.
“Listen to the quiet,” he repeats after her dutifully. “Not the blood.”
She hums approvingly, and goes back to peeling her tangerine. Jon takes some deep breaths, listens to the quiet, and then tries to distract himself with a dry Statement. Just so he can stop paying so much attention to the hunger.
Daisy matter of factly presses every other tangerine boat up against his lips until he accepts it. It doesn’t make him feel any less like he’s starving, but it’s still nice.
Jon had been in the Buried for three days. Much, much less than what Daisy suffered through. And it had been awful. One of the worst things he’s ever experienced. He has nightmares about it. Often. Sometimes there’s a lingering taste of dirt in his mouth, and he has to go and brush his teeth for half an hour until he’s convinced that it’s gone. The Buried was truly, indescribably, horrifically awful. And Daisy had it so, so much worse than him.
Which is why Jon shouldn’t be jealous of how long she was stuck in it.
It’s not like he wants to be trapped in the Coffin. It’s not like he thinks she was lucky. It’s just, it’s just--
“Do you think you ever could have done it without the Coffin getting you started?” he asks her, his voice a rasp. He’s so hungry he can feel it in his teeth, his tongue, his throat, saliva pooling in his mouth, like what he needs is to bite down into something. He thinks his body gets confused, new monstrous needs mixing with old human instincts.
“What?” she asks him. His question breached their comfortable (strained, he’s been straining for what feels like an eternity now, feeling like he’s barely holding on where he’s quietly sitting in his office chair) silence with no lead up or warning. He’s been stewing with this thought for a while now, trying to find a way to phrase it that doesn’t sound wrong, getting more and more tangled up inside his head. To her, this came out of nowhere.
He’s already messing this up. He shouldn’t have opened his mouth at all.
“I-- I mean, eating. Hunting. Could you have ever stopped if…” Daisy patiently waits for him to fumble for the right words, and he’s grateful and relieved, he really is, even if it also feels a bit like he’s digging a deeper and deeper grave for himself with every word, and he looks down at his desk, away from her steady gaze, to keep what little composure he has. He’d used to be so good at pretending to be in control, so long as no one flustered him. Now he flusters himself. “Could you have ever stopped hunting if the choice hadn’t been taken away from you first?”
He darts a glance up at her after he finally gets the question out, just to see if she’s-- offended, or worse, hurt. Thankfully, she seems to be considering his question instead, taking the moment to carefully think about it. She often does that. Lets there be a long lull in a conversation to really think about her response first. He likes that about her. It makes all of their conversations feel genuine.
“Yes,” she finally says. “I could have stopped hunting at any moment. But it wouldn’t have even occurred for me to want to, without the Coffin.”
“R--right, of course.” Of course. That makes sense. She’d already told him, down in the Buried-- he could have inferred. He shouldn’t bring it back up and make her think about it just because-- anyways. The Coffin made Daisy realize that she doesn’t want to be a monster, and Jon already knows that he doesn’t want that either. What was he hoping for, here? A cheat code, a shortcut? As if that’s what the Buried was for Daisy? He’s such a--
“Why do you ask?” Daisy asks, and eyes and looking are his thing, but he feels far too seen underneath her gaze. She knows him too well by now. They’ve talked so much, ever since they crawled their way back to Up Above Ground. Long hours and long nights, trying to dissect their motivations and urges and justifications with each other. Among other, more banal things. First drink, favorite food, wildest party, how many past partners, what movie do you hate the most, dogs or cats? Friendly, stupid hours long conversations that Jon secretly treasures as much as the tough, necessary ones, if not more so. He’d taken those silly types of conversation for granted, once.
“Er,” Jon says.
“Do you feel like you need the choice taken away from you to be able to stop?” She tilts her head and looks at him. Her tone isn’t judgemental or disgusted, he’s fairly certain. Not that he’s ever been the best at subtle social cues. He hopes she isn’t judgemental or disgusted.
“That, that’s not--” He bites his own words off with a frustrated groan, planting his elbows on his desk so he can tug a but helplessly at his hair. He grinds his teeth together, like he’s got a chunk of stubborn meat in his mouth. Monstrous needs getting mixed up with human instincts. If only the hunger clawing at his stomach (at every inch of his body) could be sated with something that he can chew.
He’s not eloquent at the best of times, and being constantly starved and desperate makes him feel frazzled and strung out, like he’d get on day three without sleep back in uni. Scattered.
“Not what you meant?” Daisy says, after it becomes clear that he’s forgotten or given up on continuing his sentence, and isn’t just taking a particularly long time to finish it.
“Not quite,” he says tiredly.
There is a person in this building with a Statement to give him. An employee, working in Artefact Storage. Their name is Jamie Rain, and their sister was murdered by a creature of the Dark five years ago in front of them. He can feel them, his entire body yearning and straining towards them. He has never spoken to Jamie Rain. He could find them with his eyes closed. It’s like ignoring a full meal within arms reach when he hasn’t eaten in weeks.
And if not them, then there’s the woman who works at the pretzel kiosk down the street who lost three members of her hiking group to a pack of hunters picking them off one by one in the night, or perhaps the man who lives in a flat above his shop a block away who had a hand grab his ankle and drag him down underneath the water of a ten foot deep public pool so far down that it felt like his rib cage was caving in from the pressure, or perhaps the old woman who--
He’s a starving man surrounded by food, morally obligated to not touch any of it no matter who much it hurts. God, he’s tired.
“Just,” he says, “just to start. To not have any say in whether or not I-- I hunt, in the first few months. For the worst of it. The beginning, the peak of the withdrawal. I’d be used to it after six months, I’d be able to hold out on my own if I just didn’t have any say in it for the first, worst few months. It’s so tiring, Daisy, making the choice to not do it a thousand times a day. Every single second, I have to summon up the force of will to say no, over and over and over again. It’s exhausting. I, I just want to have to say no once.”
“Jon,” Daisy says. Her hand lands on his, her fingers curling around the burned scar tissue. Holding hands has felt utterly natural, ever since they spent days clutching onto each other, first convinced that they’d both be the last voices they’d ever hear, the last person they’d ever touch, and then when they were desperately clawing their way upwards, unwilling to leave each other behind. Holding on had felt like a matter of life or death. It had been.
“I’m sorry,” is all he can bring himself to say. Letting loose such a rant on Daisy of all people, as if she isn’t the only other person in the world who understands, is mortifying. For heaven’s sake, he sounds like he’s jealous. He’s seen her tremble with exhaustion and frustration. Just because he’s struggling more doesn’t mean that she has it easier. It just means that she’s stronger than him. “That was… disgraceful of me. I know it’s not easy, I know there isn’t a shortcut, and I’m certainly not implying--”
Her other hand comes up to his face, and it’s only as her thumb gently swipes across the thin skin underneath his eye that he realizes that he’d started to cry a bit, as he talked. It’s certainly not the first time he’s ever cried in front of her (that would have to be the time he had been certain that she was about to slit his throat and kill him in the woods), but he still rushes to swipe the sleeve of his left shirt sleeve across his eyes, utterly embarrassed. He keeps making such a fool of himself.
“It’s okay to get tired,” she says, quiet and too kind. Somehow, it makes it harder to pull himself together. He can’t make himself look at her.
“I just want to take a break.” He laughs bitterly. “But that, that’s not an option for me. For us. A break would constitute-- eating. Indulging in our monstrous urges. It’s not exactly cheating on your no carb diet for a weekend, is it.”
“Hmm,” Daisy grunts. A noise that suggests agreement, without actually saying it. He doesn’t notice, focusing instead on taking a deep breath and willing the lump in his throat to fade away, for his eyes to stop feeling so hot and prickly. The urge to just lay down and cry with frustrated exhaustion for a while is strong, but the social embarrassment of effectively throwing a tantrum over not getting to eat people’s trauma in front of his friend (his only friend) is greater. Just barely.
“I’m-- terribly sorry, Daisy. Thank you for listening to me bemoan my woes. I’m sure you must be getting tired of it.”
She smiles at him wryly, soft and sincere. The bruises underneath her eyes are as dark as his own. “Bemoan all you want. Not even Basira is willing to listen to the Archers with me, you know? And she kept quiet about me murdering people.”
He huffs a surprised bark of a laugh. “So what you’re saying is that we’re both making an equal sacrifice in this friendship.”
“Just about. What would you do without me, Sims? Be despondent at your tape recorders?”
“I… do that as well, I’m afraid to say.”
She snorts. He’d take offense, but he feels all wrung out with the short but intense emotional turmoil he just put himself through, and she looks so fond of him that he can’t help the faint pang of warmth going through him, equal parts put on the spot flustered and simple happiness over the fact that someone wants to look at him like that. Let alone someone as incredible as Daisy.
“Of course you do,” she says, as if she were a fool to ever think otherwise. She reaches over to him and ruffles his hair. She has a habit of petting his head like he’s a dog when she’s feeling particularly affectionate. He huffs and blusters and stammers about it, but honestly, really, actually. It’s quite nice.
None of his problems have been solved. He’s still hungrier than he’s ever been in his entire life, except for how it isn’t even hunger, that’s simply the closest word he has for the sensation. Hunger, thirst, exhaustion, restless clawing desperate neediness. He’s still that, and he still has no solution he can resort to without forfeiting what little humanity he still has a claim on.
But they still haven’t let go of each other’s hands either.
Jon grits his teeth, and swallows the pooling saliva in his mouth, ignores the cramp in his gut, the prickling of his skin, how dry his eyes feel. Ignores Jamie Rain who is so close by, and the woman who was hunted and the man who drowned and all of the others who he could go to and use to get rid of all of it, and feel human again for a few days again. So ironic isn’t it, that the only way to make himself feel like he isn’t a monster is to act like it. At least then he wouldn’t have the constant urge to hunt Ask eat running through his head.
He ignores it all, while being so painfully aware of it. He holds Daisy’s hand tightly. As long as she’s holding it, keeping him right where he is, he isn’t sneaking off to do something terrible. There’s a lovely sort of safety in that.
He wishes he could hold onto her forever.
A day after Jon cries in front of Daisy, which he really is striving not to think about so that he can continue to look her in the eye, she walks into his office without knocking. This is the established norm between them now. Knocking might interrupt one of his recordings, after all, which while ultimately not important in the grand scheme of things, feels like the equivalent of someone rubbing sand directly onto his bare eyeballs. Grating. She just opens the door, and depending on what he’s doing, either says hello and slinks off to take a nap in the other chair, or she just skips the first part and slinks off to take a nap in the other chair.
This time, he’s recording a Statement, so she doesn’t say anything. He barely even registers the door opening. Melissa Simes is watching her husband burn in front of her, and nothing she does is making the flames stop. Not water, not the extinguisher, not smothering it with a blanket, with her own hands. She’s panicked, desperate, and she’s starting to consider if she should resort to cutting the burning parts of her husband off to save what’s left of him. Even if he struggles to stop her, even if he screams and begs. His thoughts are focused entirely on the words, the terror of it, like a starving man trying to savor the few crumbs of a meal he’s found on the floor.
“Statement ends,” he says. For a long moment he just sits there as his mind slowly returns to him, to the present, and then it sinks in that it’s done, that’s it. He almost wants to flip through the file, try and see if there are any more pages that he missed, despite how illogical that is.
There had been a time when reading more than one Statement in a week had left him feeling overwhelmed, nauseated, exhausted. Now he can read multiple ones a day, and it feels like trying to subsist on a diet of crackers.
He bites his tongue on all of these words, these needy, whiny, greedy complaints that he’d normally spill to the whirring recorder without hesitation. The tapes can’t judge him, but there’s a woman sitting quietly in the other chair pushed up against the far wall for the moment that can. One of the people whose opinion of him he cares most about in the entire world.
Instead, he presses down on the button to end the recording, and turns towards her.
“What, no afterthoughts to monologue about?” she asks. “That’s unlike you.”
“This Statement doesn’t seem to have any links to anything relevant, unfortunately. Just a terrible act committed upon innocent people by someone serving the Desolation. A snack, or perhaps even just a little bit of fun. And… I find that I’m not as interested in follow up as I once was. I’ve stopped fooling myself that I’m reading this for research, after all.”
“Hm,” she says, face unreadable. Judging him, for not being interested in whether or not Melissa Simes and her poor husband were finished off weeks later by a mysterious fire? For treating their tragedy as a paltry unsatisfying meal for himself and nothing more?
He certainly is. Self disgust roils uneasily in the pit of his belly, familiar but not comfortable. He should check up on them.
He’s too tired to check up on them. Too tired to really care, beyond feeling guilty for not caring.
“Melanie’s gone off to therapy for the day,” Daisy says, instead of pointing any accusations at him. It surprises him a bit. He wasn’t really expecting for her to speak up again. She often comes here, with only the desire to sit in silence with him as he pours over his notes and recordings. She just likes to have some company, after all. That company doesn’t need to be paying attention or talking to her all of the time for her to enjoy it.
“I see,” he says, not really knowing how to respond. It almost sounds like pointless small talk, except Daisy doesn’t really seem to feel the need to indulge in the practice. Which means there’s most likely a point to what she’s saying, but he can’t guess at what it is. He trusts that she’ll get to it, though. She’s a straightforward woman. “That’s nice. I mean, not that she needs to-- it’s good. That she’s getting help. I’m happy for her.”
She smiles briefly, small and fondly amused at his flustered stumbling. It somehow makes him feel less embarrassed of himself, the open amusement. “And Basira’s gone off to chase some lead.”
“Ah,” he says, because he can’t use ‘I see’ again so soon, and ‘that’s nice’ is definitely not appropriate. Basira’s solo operations are a bit of a sore spot, a minefield that he can only navigate with great hesitation and caution.
“Which means,” she says, “that we’re alone in the Archives.”
That’s a fair assessment. Besides the four of them, no one really comes down here. Martin never comes down to the Archives any longer (a brief ache of hurt that he tries not to let cling to him cracks back open in his chest), and he’s yet to even see the elusive Peter Lukas. He’s thoroughly lost touch with the rest of the Institute staff, not that he ever really had it in the first place, but he’s gathered the vague impression that everyone else largely views the Archives as cursed, finally ousting Artefact Storage as the most notorious department. If Basira and Melanie have left for the day, then Jon and Daisy’s privacy is fairly firmly assured.
He fails to see why Daisy seems to think that this is important enough to take note of.
“So we are,” he says. “Which is relevant because…?”
Daisy reaches into her pocket and takes out, of all things, the steel police grade handcuffs that he’d first noticed on her person a few days ago.
“I had an idea,” she says matter of factly, holding the cuffs in her hands. They’re not shiny and new, in a way that shows that they’ve seen use, that Daisy has owned them for some years now.
“Er,” he says, a faint for now sense of alarm rising within him. “Daisy, I did say that I didn’t want to learn the-- the thumb trick.”
“A different idea, Jon.”
He’d be trying to search her face for any clues of what this idea might be, but it’s a surprisingly challenging task to tear his gaze away from the handcuffs in her scarred, calloused hands. “Which is?”
“I’ve been thinking about what you said yesterday,” she says, which makes him wince, because he’d rather prefer that she’d just spontaneously forget the entire overemotional outburst. “About wanting to take a break.”
“I won’t actually take a break,” he says, and some part of him that remembers Daisy holding a knife to his throat and Basira saying or else I’ll have to put you down and Melanie screaming at him as she wrested the scalpel out of his hand suddenly pieces together ‘we’re alone’ with ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said’ and ‘handcuffs’ and comes out with the conclusion that something bad might be about to happen. His heartbeat spikes so sharply that it’s almost painful. “You-- you don’t have to worry, Daisy, I know I can’t do that--” he rushes to get out.
“I know, Jon,” she says, gruff but a little bit soothing, like she’s talking to a spooked animal.
“Right,” he says, and makes himself breathe. “Right, okay, that’s-- good. Good.”
He feels a touch foolish over the brief spike of panic, a bit like a poor friend for thinking that Daisy was about to-- what, chain him up and take him to her killzone in the woods? But it would be reasonable for her to do that, wouldn’t it? After yesterday's display that had practically screamed I’m one bad day away from snapping. Waiting until after he’s permanently damaged another innocent human being seems irrationally generous, to him.
“I just meant that maybe I could help you take a break without, you know. Slurping up anyone's brains.”
Jon blinks at that, ah, descriptive turn of phrase. It certainly brings an image to mind. He’s glad his cravings aren’t that literal, even if the reality isn’t much better.
“And… the handcuffs would factor into that how?” he asks, confused. Curious. He’s intrigued now. What has she thought up? How can he take a break from constantly forcing himself not to hurt someone without hurting anyone?
“Well, they’d go on your wrists, for one thing,” she says. “And then I’d just keep you here for a while, away from all the delicious little traumatized humans, whether you want it or not. Just for an afternoon. What do you think?”
Jon opens his mouth, to say something, but nothing quite manages to make its way out. He’s a bit too busy processing the revelation that feels as unpredictable as Jurgen Leitner waltzing back into his office after being dead for two solid years with a confession of his very convincingly faked death and also a detailed document outlining all of Jon’s enemies evil plans and how to thwart them.
“It’d be like being in the Buried,” she goes on to explain, as he just stares at her. “Having the choice taken away from you, so you don’t have to make it for yourself. Except, you know. Not as bad, hopefully.”
“That…” he says, and then he thinks about it, and oh. Oh, he’s shocked by how tempting it is. Could it really be that simple? Can he really just stop for a few hours? He could get up and go out of the office right now, and find someone and Ask and feed, and be full and whole and right. Or, he could let Daisy put her handcuffs on him, and then he wouldn’t be able to do that. He wouldn’t be able to go and eat even if he wants to, and god, he always wants to. He licks his lips, suddenly dry mouthed with desperation and want. “Would, would you be fine with that?”
“I came up with the idea, didn’t I?” she says dryly.
“It’s-- I-- that sounds--” he stutters, stumbles, floundering for the right words when he’s distracted by how much he just wants to shout yes before she changes her mind and takes it back, and how does one even say ‘yes my dear friend I would love for you to restrain me to give me a break from constantly actively repressing my monstrous urges to feed upon the trauma of the innocent.’
Without saying those exact words, anyways.
Mercifully, Daisy spares him from having to find a way to force himself to deal with the mortifying ordeal of saying ‘yes, I want this’. “I’m guessing that’s a yes,” she says, dry and fond enough to tell him that his eager weary desperation is as plain to see on his face as it feels.
He nods a little helplessly, grateful.
“Alright,” she says, and stands up. “Come on.”
He’s startled, when instead of walking towards him, she heads towards the door.
“Wait-- where are you going?” He stands up and follows her, despite his confusion.
“To the storage room, with your cot. If you’re going to be tied up for several hours, you’ll want to do it somewhere a bit more comfortable than your desk. Trust me, Jon.”
“You’ve been tied up for several hours before? When? By whom?”
Daisy doesn’t respond for a moment, and then says, “No spooky compulsion in any of those questions. Good job.”
Jon sputters. “I, I wouldn’t on purpose-- yes, I’ve been trying to keep that under control.”
“Bullet dodged, is all. You would’ve been too scandalized to speak if I answered those questions with all of the details your big scary eyeball god wants.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That you’re a Victorian gentlewoman. And it was Basira.”
“Why would Basira--?” he has to cut his own question off in frustration when he hears the Beholding coating his words. He gives Daisy a helplessly confused and painfully curious look, but she just grins at him and opens the door to the storage room.
She flicks on the lights. They aren’t the harsh fluorescents that so much of the Institute uses. The downstairs storage room hasn’t seen anything approaching a renovation in decades, and so the lights are old and dim, casting a weak yellow light. Jon likes to think that it makes the large discolored patch of repaired wall where Tim had once axed his way through several years ago less obvious. The room is small, but most of the moldering files and office supplies that had used to clutter up the place had been dragged out when Martin initially moved in what seems like an age ago now, all of the junk crammed into empty nooks and crannies in the rest of the Archives, if not the bin. There’s a desk, a chair, a bin, and the cot with a pillow and some sheets on it.
And a suitcase crammed full of his clothes, and a small old photo album with pictures of his parents, his grandmother, Georgie and the few friends he’d had back in uni. Simpler times. Someone had packed all of the belongings in his flat that had looked halfway important into the battered old piece of luggage back when he was in his coma, before he lost the damned place and all the rest of his possessions with it. When he got the Archives, there it was. He doesn’t know who did it. Georgie, Basira… Martin. He hasn’t asked. None of those people are easy for him to talk to nowadays, some more so than others. And if he doesn’t ask, it could have been any of them.
“It’ll do,” she says. “That cot doesn’t look good on the back, though. You know you look enough like an old man already, you shouldn’t go and give yourself back pains as well.”
“I like a firm mattress,” he says primly, closing the door behind him.
“That’s not even a mattress,” she says, reaching past him to twist the lock with a muted click.
He huffs at her, and she grins and then neatly snaps one ring of the handcuffs around his right hand in one easy, practiced motion before he can even so much as flinch away. His eyes go wide, his mouth falling into a surprised ‘O’.
“Alright?” she asks.
“Ah-- y--yes, I’m fine--”
She walks around him, and he moves to turn around and follow her movement with his eyes, but she reaches out with one hand to his shoulder, stilling him. He freezes. She walks behind him, takes his left hand, and snaps the other ring of the cuffs around it. She takes a moment to adjust the fit, the quiet sound of the teeth turning, constricting the circle of the cuffs to fit snugly against his thin wrists, like the sound of gears, or a zipper.
“Too tight?”
“No,” he says, without thinking about it.
“Tug at the cuffs. Try and get out.”
Unthinkingly, he obeys. He pulls so that the metal cuffs press tightly against his skin, so that his arms strain and shake with the effort, but they don’t budge at all. His hands are trapped behind his back. Immobilized.
His breath catches.
Daisy’s hand settles between his shoulder blades. Not pushing or shoving, just touch for the sake of touch.
“Hey,” she says quietly. “You okay?”
“Y-- yes.”
“I know you’ve been tied up a lot, Jon. And not by people that wanted to help you. It’s okay if you’ve changed your mind. I don’t want to mess--”
“I’m okay,” bursts out of him, too forcefully, too loudly. He just-- wants for her to know that he’s okay. That he’s really okay.
He’s still just as hungry as he was a moment ago. But now, the door is locked and his hands are cuffed behind his back. What can he possibly do about that? Nothing.
Like Daisy said, so many monsters have tied him up over the years, trapped him and then hurt him. So why does he feel so relieved right now?
Maybe because it’s her doing it. Daisy. Something about her being the only other voice in the dirt with him for days and hours that felt endless has made her feel like safety to him, despite everything.
“... Okay,” she says, and he thinks that’s the sound of her deciding to believe him. Her voice is warmer as she continues, less tense, no tight concern lurking just beneath the words. “That’s good. Now, go and sit down on the cot.”
He goes and sits down on the cot. Daisy stands in front of him, and he looks up. She looks over his face slowly, presumably hunting for any signs of distress. He tugs at the cuffs. They hold firm. It feels like a safety net underneath a tightrope. Reassurance. Even if he breaks, the cuffs won’t.
She smiles slightly, apparently satisfied by whatever she did or didn’t find in his expression. And then the smile disappears like it was never there, her face going as stern as the steel around his wrists. “Alright, Jon, here’s what’s going to happen. You wanted to only have to say no once, so this is your last chance to change your mind. After this, it doesn’t matter what you say or do. I won’t let you go until I decide I want to let you go. So. Do you want for me to take those handcuffs off of you?”
He stares at her.
“Jon?”
And before he can change his mind and think better of it, before he loses the little exhausted determination he still has and falters and disappoints himself again, he rushes to say, “No.”
Like ripping off a band aid. Like taking the pack of cigarettes and then flinging it as far away from him as he can, denying himself the opportunity to cave in and give up even if he desperately wants too.
Daisy nods, and it feels like she’s taken something away from him all at once, a knife he wanted to bury into his flesh so dearly even as he feared it. Sharp pangs of regret and relief burst open in his chest in equal measure. He wants to snatch that one word back so it was never heard. He’s so grateful that he managed to force it out in time.
He strains at the cuffs. They still hold him fast just as firmly. Of course they do. Why does he keep checking? It’s like he expects for them to suddenly go slack, to vanish.
Daisy crouches down by his feet.
“What are you doing?” he asks, sharp with confusion and apprehension. It occurs to him that if she decides to do anything to him, whatever that may be, he won’t be able to stop her.
That had been true before she’d restrained him as well, though. Even as weak as she is now, he can’t picture himself overpowering Daisy. She’d find a way. So there’s no reason for why the thought ‘I can’t stop her’ lands inside his head like a rock, solid and heavy and impossible to ignore. It’s not even afraid and panicky, the way it should feel. It’s just… there. Pulling at all of his attention like the center of gravity.
“Taking off your shoes,” she says. “You should be comfortable.”
She reaches out and does so, hands sliding the shoes off his feet one after another, revealing simple black socks. He doesn’t think to move to assist her, and she doesn’t ask. She just moves him as she likes, touches him as she likes.
Ever since she got back, they’ve been utterly comfortable in each other's presence, with touching. Hands tangled together as he reads a Statement, pressed up against each other as they sit on the floor and talk about everything and nothing, even taking some naps together when Daisy’s been particularly sleep deprived and Basira’s been gone for days on one of her trips. She always lies on top of him, because she doesn’t like having too much pressure weighing her down, even as horribly thin as he’s grown.
There is something different to this though, that makes him want to shiver.
She sets his shoes casually aside, and stands up, hands on his knees, levering herself carefully upwards. She huffs a bit with the physical exertion of it, her brow furrowing for a moment with frustration at herself, at her body. But as she looks down at him, the irritation goes away quickly, easily, with no brooding or Jon trying to distract or soothe her from it. He wonders what she sees. He wants to Ask.
He bites his tongue.
Daisy leans over and picks up the pillow on his cot and tosses it aside onto the floor, before sitting down in its place at the top of the cot.
“Lie down on your side,” she says. She keeps doing that, not asking or requesting or suggesting, but simply telling him what to do next. He doesn’t need to make any decisions, any choices. He just has to do as she says. It makes him feel something, a lot.
“Right,” he says, a little bit uncertainly, because he really does want to do what she’s telling him to, he wants to play along and follow her direction, but with her sitting on the cot it’s going to be a cramped affair, his feet dangling off the edge--
“Not like that,” she huffs once he’s uncomfortably settled, like he’s getting something very simple wrong. She grabs his shoulder, and he levers himself up and follows her pull and-- oh. His head in her lap. Right. That makes sense.
“There,” she says, once he’s apparently settled to her satisfaction. She buries her hand in his hair without preamble, scratching lightly at his scalp. He’s reminded keenly of himself petting the Admiral, the cat purring in his lap.
“Um,” he says. He supposes that he hadn’t really pictured what spending several hours tied up in a room with Daisy would be like. What had he thought they were going to do? Listen to an audio book together? Play eye spy? He doesn’t know. He just hadn’t imagined that it would be so intimate. They’ve been intimate with each other before, of course, open and raw and honest, but this-- it feels different. Even more vulnerable than any of their conversations so far, and they aren’t even speaking. He doesn’t know what to do with himself.
“Just relax,” she says. “You’re not going anywhere soon, after all.”
That makes him almost-shiver again. The matter of fact way she informs him of it, like it’s an objective fact not up for contention, already decided and set in stone. Nothing to be done about it. Inevitable.
“Let me go,” slips out of him, and as soon as he realizes what he’s said, he hates himself. He wanted this, he does want this, why is he pushing back just to see if he can get out? The illusion that he can’t is the whole point of this, why is he trying to ruin it? Why--
“No,” Daisy denies him casually, dismissively, and he goes stiff with shock.
“No?” he repeats, as if to give her an opening to explain that she phrased herself poorly, what she really meant was--
“I said no,” she says bluntly. “I’m not letting you go.”
He pulls at the cuffs. They hold firm. “Daisy, I’m serious. I want for you to let me go.”
She leans down, so her mouth is close enough to his ear that he can feel her hot breath. “Tough.”
He can’t believe this. “You can’t just keep me chained up against my will.”
“I can, actually. Doing it right now.”
“I haven’t done anything.” Yet.
“Not relevant. I gave you your chance to get out of this, and you let it go. You’re stuck here now, for as long as I want you.”
“You can’t have actually meant that--!”
“I did mean that. Nothing you can do or say will get me to let you go. So, suck it up and settle down.”
“Daisy. Please.”
“No.”
She strokes her hand through his hair, mercilessly soothing. He pulls at his cuffs and they don’t yield. He shivers, breathless and dizzy even while lying down. She seriously meant it. She really isn’t going to let him go, no matter what he does or says. He’s stuck here, no matter what he tries, no matter how firm or pleading he makes himself sound.
He feels so much. Like the dawning realization that he’s really fucked himself over, made a terrible mistake. The elation that this actually might work. He breathes unsteadily, overwhelmed just by being shut down.
Daisy keeps stroking her hand through his hair, steady and soothing. Despite himself, he slowly melts into it, the warmth of her thigh and the wordless affection of her hand. He tugs at the cuffs, not even straining, just to feel them restrict his movement again. Trapped. Trapped, and safe.
Tentatively, he tries to let go. To just… relax, in this moment, as much as he can.
There is a person with a Statement inside of them, just waiting to be plucked out of them by Jon, in this very building. He can feel the distance between them like they’re connected by a fishing wire, the hook lodged deep inside Jon’s stomach. He could go and rip it out of them right now.
Except he can’t. He can’t go and rip it out of them, even if he gives in, even if he decides that he wants it badly enough to go against his promise. He can’t. He can’t Ask anyone--
--except for Daisy, of course. Daisy, teeming with Statements, with encounters with avatars and monsters, who was an avatar for so long, acted as one, killed as one. A Sectioned officer, for decades. Locked inside of a room with him with no one to possibly interrupt or see. He could Ask her, and once he gets her started she won’t be able to stop. He could wring her dry, take every single story she has in her, and he wouldn’t just stop being hungry, he’d be bloated with it, full and sated and free of pain and exhaustion and constant need and want and she’d forgive him, wouldn’t she? She might, so it could very well be worth it, it could--
“Daisy,” he says in a thin voice, tense again, his heartbeat thundering in his chest again. Compulsion rises up from the back of his throat like bile, and it takes so much to swallow it back. Nothing is stopping him, except for himself. And that’s not what he wanted.
“I’m not letting you go,” she says dismissively.
“I-- I know,” he says, choking on the question that wants to come out instead. He has to find a way to call this off, declare it a bad idea, get away from her, surely hurting a stranger is preferable to hurting Daisy, “I just--” a lightning bolt of inspiration strikes him. He remembers how he’s been shut up so many times before by monsters that didn’t want him laying them bare and open with his questions. Successfully shut up. “Could you gag me? Please?”
Her hand in his hair finally stills. He lies there, tense and biting down on his tongue to keep it in place.
And then, “Yeah, alright. Why not. Not like I was going to listen to anything you had to say anyways.”
Thank god.
He can still speak, so he still isn’t safe (Daisy isn’t safe), but he just has to hold on for a little bit longer and then he can let go, it’ll be okay, he won’t be able to betray himself. Daisy slips out from underneath his head and takes a few steps only to crouch down by his open suitcase on the ground, teeming with all the belongings he has left in the world.
“The clothes in this are clean, right?”
“Everything to the right side of it,” he says, taking a long moment before opening his mouth to make sure of what comes out of it.
She grunts acknowledgment, and then comes back with a pair of balled up socks and a scarf. Somehow, it isn’t what he’d been expecting. Duct tape, perhaps?
“Would’ve gotten a nice ball gag if I’d known you’d want this,” she says teasingly, and he flushes at the image of it.
“I-- I don’t want it, it’s a necessity, and those make you drool terribly besides-- hmmph!”
She grins at him as she takes the opportunity to shove the socks into his mouth. She pulls him up into a sitting position so she can loop the scarf around his mouth to help keep them inside, knotting it firmly behind his head.
“Too tight?”
He shakes his head. God, at least the scarf covers up his forced open mouth. At least the taste of fabric in his mouth is clean. At least-- oh, lord, his mouth is going to get so dry--
“Too loose?”
He shakes his head.
“Try saying something."
He tries. It’s all muffled nonsense of course, unable to move his teeth or his tongue or his jaw to form words.
He can’t talk.
“Good,” Daisy says with satisfaction, and sits back down where she’d been a moment ago, pulling his head back into her lap. She starts petting and stroking him again, like there was no break at all.
She doesn’t speak, and he can’t. The door is closed and locked, in the spare storage room in the archival department of the Magnus Institute, down in the basement levels. This room is soundproofed, insulated. He can’t hear anyone or anything outside of it. No one and nothing outside of it can hear him. Not that it would matter, with the gag firmly in place.
Compulsively, he jerks and shakes his head, trying to knock the gag loose. Daisy tightens her hand in his hair, holds him still with a stern, “Watch it.”
He didn’t manage to knock the gag askew. The knot is firm and just tight enough. He pulls at the handcuffs, not just a testing tug, but a real desperate struggle, like this is something real and dangerous that he has to get away from. Daisy keeps him on the cot, and otherwise doesn’t really try to stop him as he huffs through his nose and struggles and strains, the metal pressing sharply against his skin and leaving bruises that will heal in moments. He doesn’t know the trick to getting out of handcuffs. Daisy had offered it, and he’d said no because he wants for her to have a way to restrain him if she ever needs to, and now he’s restrained and he doesn’t know the trick and it doesn’t matter how hard he tries, it doesn’t matter if he tries every single little thing he can think of, he’s stuck, he’s trapped, he has no say in it.
It’s far from the first time that’s happened to him, but this time it’s different, this time he doesn’t trust himself and he’s so tired and it’s Daisy.
“Fun as it is watching you squirm,” she says in that blunt merciless way of hers, not snarling and sadistic like it used to be, “you’re not going to be brute strengthening your way out of this one, Jon. Those aren’t fluffy, dinky sex cuffs. Just give up.”
Just give up.
Relief crashes through him like a wave over the shore, and he makes a muffled noise, and then he’s turning his head to weep into Daisy’s thigh. Her hand stills in his hair, again, but then starts up again, stroking down the nape of his neck, firm and grounding. He sobs, in that deep way that feels like a kick to the chest.
He can’t move. He can’t talk. He can’t get out of here.
He can’t hurt anyone at all. He’s safe. He lets go.
He cries, and it’s not dragged painfully out of his desperately clutched control, stray tears escaping him as he grits and locks his jaw and tries to compose himself. He hasn’t cried this unabashedly, this whole heartedly, since-- he can’t remember. Even as a child, he tried to muffle his cries into his pillow so that his grandmother wouldn’t hear.
There is someone in this block with a Statement for him, someone in this building, someone in this room, and it doesn’t matter. Handcuffs and a gag and a lock and Daisy fucking Tonner are keeping him from hurting anyone at all, his self restraint and hatred and control and sense of morality and shame and guilt aren’t needed to stop him, so he lets all of that go, he doesn’t have it. It’s just him and his hunger and his inability to do anything about it.
Not having to stop himself through sheer fraying exhausted will power feels like such a blessed relief. Almost like actually getting to eat, to feed, to feel full. Except there’s no rising, all consuming self disgust to go with it. He still aches with hunger, but-- it’s worth it. This is preferable. Between the two, he’d choose this every single time. Especially if he only has to choose it once.
There is no choice for him to fuck up, no opportunity for him to be a monster, and so he doesn’t and he isn’t. He cries harder than he can ever remember doing in his life, and Daisy strokes his hair, hums some soothing wordless noise, and doesn’t let him go. The handcuffs are sturdy and firm on his wrists, unbreakable to him, holding him together where he’s too tired to do it himself.
A long, long time passes like that. He doesn’t try and reign himself in, to stop himself. Eventually, his shoulders stop shaking with sobs, his chest stops aching like there’s a wound deep inside of it. Some last few tears trickle down his face, quiet and tired in what feels like a good way for the first time in so long. He feels too scraped clean to feel any real embarrassment or shame over breaking down like a child in front of Daisy. Maybe later. Not now.
Daisy reaches down and roughly wipes the wrist of her sleeve down one side of his face, drying salty wet tears.
“Good job,” she says quietly in a tone he can’t read, as if he’s done anything except for let himself get tied up and then cried a damp patch onto her trousers. He’s too exhausted to make a noise in reply. Instead, he closes his eyes, and tries not to sink into a sleep, but instead only graze right above it in a light doze. Sleep isn’t pleasant, after all. It isn’t safe. And he wants to stay in this feeling for a while, where he’s too tired to think himself in fretful circles, and his hunger somehow feels distant. Not as pressing.
Time passes, as he just floats in the feeling of not having to hold onto his composure by his fingernails, light headed from how much he cried. The steel of the cuffs are skin temperature, after having been pressed up against him for so long.
“I’m going to let you go in ten minutes,” Daisy breaches the silence softly.
“Nnh,” he protests softly through the gag, as if he’s being shaken awake against his will. He doesn’t want for her to let him go.
“We’ve been here for hours, Jon. Can’t keep you like this forever. Ten more minutes, and then I’m taking those handcuffs off. Get yourself together.”
Why can’t he stay like this forever, exactly? It’s safer than having him loose. It’s easier.
But her voice is as firm and unyielding as the metal restraining him, and he wants to do as she says, even if he doesn’t want to be (dangerously, recklessly, terribly) free. He starts taking deep breaths instead of just thoughtlessly drifting, trying to scrape himself back up together. His name is Jonathan Sims, the Archivist, and he needs to be aware of himself, in control of himself, strictly, unforgivingly. In ten minutes (five now?) no one and nothing will be keeping him in check except for himself.
It’s an uncomfortable weight to take back up, but… a break had been nice, hadn’t it.
Eventually, Daisy pulls at his shoulder, urging him to sit upwards. That somehow significantly helps him in the process of regathering all of his composure, not lying down.
“Ready?” she asks him.
He takes another few long, measured breaths. And then he nods.
She takes a key out of her pocket, and reaches behind him to reach his hands. Her calloused hands on his, a little bit cold, touching him, the cuffs, the sound of the key entering, turning, that hard to describe but impossible not to place sound of the handcuffs springing open. The clink of the chains as she takes them away. Haltingly, he brings his hands forward, and is almost surprised when they don’t jerk to a stop, halted by the cuffs. And then he grunts with surprised pain at the prickling in his shoulders, blood rushing as he moves his arms out of the position they’ve been trapped in for some hours now.
Daisy neatly draws the knot at the back of his head loose, and the scarf falls down to drape messily across his shoulders, his chest. He reaches up and pulls the now spit-damp balled up socks out of his mouth, coughs uncomfortably at the dryness in his mouth.
And just like that, he’s ungagged, unrestrained. Free to do whatever he wants, if he doesn’t keep himself harshly enough under control. He feels strangely bereft.
He is very, very grateful that Daisy gave him the warning. If she’d just taken the handcuffs off with no word to let him brace himself, he-- it would have felt jarring, to say the least.
“I’ll get you some water,” she says, and leaves. He watches her go dully, feeling a bit slow, like his head is stuffed full of cotton. He swallows dryly, and rubs at the red indents on his wrists. He’d pulled a lot at the handcuffs, but he’ll heal quickly. He always does, nowadays.
She comes back quickly. Or rather, it feels like she does, because hardly a thought goes through his mind while she’s gone. He feels peaceful. Like he could lie down and pass straight into a restful sleep, even though he knows for a fact that that isn’t true. She presses a mug full of nothing but water into his hand, and he holds it with both hands, feeling like he might drop it if he holds it with only one. The mug is a pale lavender, the chips in its handle and rim gone dull with age. He can’t recall that it is or has been anyone’s favored mug, but--
“Come on,” she prompts him after a moment, and he starts out of his head. “Drink.”
He drinks. The first swallow of cold water is so refreshing that he immediately goes to drain the entire mug in one go. Some of the water slips down his chin in his haste, and Daisy snorts at him. He wipes at his mouth, which reminds that he just spent a long while bawling, and he must look a right mess, and Daisy’s just looking at--
--not him. She’s looking casually off to the side, towards the ground, her eyes only occasionally and briefly flicking back towards him. Uncomfortably avoiding eye contact is more his thing. She has a tendency towards just looking straight at someone for a long period of time without blinking or looking away, like she’s trying to intimidate them, although she’d confessed to him that it wasn’t some sort of deliberate power move in the slightest. She just forgot to soften the strength and edge of her gaze, forgot to blink so that the person she was looking at wouldn’t squirm underneath her attention.
She’s looking away now, though. With her hands buried in her pockets. For some reason, this alarms him.
“Daisy,” he says, without taking the time to try and formulate and articulate his words before they come tumbling out, a feeling of urgency overcoming him. “I, I hope I haven’t made you uncomfortable? I apologize for losing my composure like that--”
That finally pulls her gaze back to him, and she makes a dry bark of a laugh that he doesn’t know how to read. He often doesn’t know how to interpret the small, casual sounds and facial expressions people make, like it’s a second language he’s clumsily learned only the broad strokes of after he’d gotten too old to ever truly become fluent.
“I know you haven’t done stuff like this before,” she says, “but just so you know, it’s usually the person who had my role who’s supposed to apologize if something goes wrong. You were tied up and gagged. The only thing you could do was react to what I chose to do.”
“Well,” he says, not knowing what to do with someone denying him taking the blame and apologizing. It feels wrong. “I certainly over reacted. And you have nothing to apologize for.”
She raises her eyebrows at him, surprised by his claim and skeptical. “Really? Nothing at all?”
“You-- you did exactly what you said you were going to do. I agreed to it.”
“We didn’t talk about gagging you before we started. We didn’t talk about me ignoring you saying no before we started.”
“I asked you to gag me,” he points out very reasonably, feeling like he’s having a very strange sort of argument. What is the argument, exactly? “And the whole point of this was that I’d only have one chance to say no, so that I wouldn’t have to say it over and over again. It was supposed to be a break from having to make choices, from will power.”
“Yeah,” she says. She looks bothered. “Yeah, I know, but-- you started crying. And I still didn’t let you go.”
He hunches up, embarrassed at her saying it, even though they were both there for it. He clears his throat uncomfortably. “And I’m glad you didn’t. It was-- it felt-- that is to say I, I liked it. It wasn’t… bad crying, exactly. It was--” he searches for the right word, the correct word, “cathartic.”
He says it with satisfaction, relish. Yes, that’s exactly the word he was looking for, the perfect one to describe what he’s feeling. He thinks he’s finally starting to understand why Georgie would willingly read those dreadfully tragic books that left her weeping for an entire afternoon, if this is how it made her feel. Clean and empty and exhausted in the best sort of way.
“You liked it,” she says. It’s not with the inflection of a question, but he recognizes it as one anyways.
“Yes,” he confirms, and something in her shoulders goes loose. It finally clicks. What he’d been seeing before-- it had been guilt, concern. He had cried, and she’d been worried that she’d made a mistake, upset him. “Oh, Daisy,” he says, surprised, “you didn’t do anything wrong. This, you were-- it was perfect.”
She relaxes further, enough to even slink back over to the cot to sit next to him. She takes his hand, rubs a thumb across his wrist, checking. All signs that he’s spent the last few hours restrained has already faded away.
“I was guessing for a lot of it,” she admits, taking his other wrist to check it as well. “I didn’t want to fuck up and hurt you, I wanted to get it right. It made me kind of… nervous, I guess, not knowing if everything was going well or not.”
While he’d been enjoying not being a danger to anyone, being softly but firmly taken care of, Daisy had been hiding her anxiety and worry. He frowns. “So I did make you uncomfortable.”
She shoves at him gently, reproaching. “Oh, shut up. It’s normal to be tense during your first session, with someone. Especially if they’re a first timer to the whole thing in general. Trying stuff out can go either way. Maybe you wouldn’t have liked it at all, gotten nothing out of it. But it’s not like I spent the whole time miserable. I liked it too, I promise. It was nice, you know? Getting to be the one who’s gentle with someone, instead of being the one who’s fragile. Instead of being-- like how I used to be.”
Harsh, violent, downright sadistic. Her old behavior is definitely the furthest possible cry from how she’s been with him this afternoon, soft and gentle even as she restrains and gags him and doesn’t let him go even as he struggles and cries and begs to be set free. He thinks he can see how she’d enjoy this, what she gets out of it.
So he’d liked it, she’d liked it, and that’s all nice and lovely, but--
“First timer to what, exactly?” he asks.
“You know, bondage,” she says.
He chokes on his spit and has to bend forwards where he’s sitting to have a coughing fit. Daisy laughs at him, the noise familiar and soft and rusty.
“What did you think we were doing?” she asks, sounding terribly amused as he wheezes from between his legs.
“Not-- don’t you have to have sex for that?”
“You’re such an idiot,” she says fondly, and leans into his side, a warm weight. She takes his hand, and he threads his fingers through hers automatically, without thinking about it. It’s almost as grounding as a set of handcuffs.