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.