Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Prologue

“You should move to a small town, somewhere the rule of law still exists. You will not survive here. You are not a wolf, and this is a land of wolves now."

She comes to Hope County because she is a woman of too many principles and morals, and because she is not a wolf.

She has learned that life isn’t as black and white and square as a chessboard. She’s had lessons shot straight into her Kevlar vest, and she would be a damn fool not to learn from them. So she decides to heed the advice of an agonised, probably-evil man, and get herself as far away from the arid beauty of New Mexico and Arizona as she can.

It’s easy to arrange this new life. Suspiciously easy.

She imagines that some smug bastard galavanting the upper echelons at Langley gives her transformation from rising-star-FBI-agent to rookie-deputy-out-in-Bumfuck a benevolent push. Hell, she’s pretty sure she can name the motherfucker behind it. She certainly is intimately acquainted with his shit-eating grin.

But what’s the point?

There are no cartels in Montana. There are no ghost-men holding guns to her head, forcing her to sign away all her ideals.

So she scribbles her shiny new name onto a shiny dotted line, and she drives straight across the country, and she doesn’t sleep because if she sleeps she dreams. And vaguely, distantly, she thinks that maybe this could work out. Maybe she could live a simple life doing boring shit like speed controls and breaking up bar fights and learning to fish in her free time. Grow some herbs, figure out how to cook. Scrapbooking? Yoga?

Yes, she thinks as she looks around her new apartment, non-descript and so fucking reassuringly beige, maybe this will be just fine.

Yes. Fine.

She’s numb and indifferent and she thinks that, shit, it’s still better than having all your spirit squeezed out of you, having it forced out of your mouth and eyes and fingertips. Being as blank and van as a sheet of A4 paper is safe. 

She doesn’t sleep.

She leaves all her boxes unpacked and she goes to work.

Well.

Well.

Turns out Hope County is overrun with wolves. Wolves and devils and terrifying men of God, and she doesn't know which is which. And she finds that the wolves running in Montana are a different sort of horrifying than the wolves roaming the desert plains.

And the rule of law goes out the window pretty much the week she arrives, right around the time she crashes back down to the ground to the tune of Amazing Grace. 

So. 

Wolves and rampant lawlessness. Drug manufacturing and distribution, oh yes. Torture and murder and coercion and pretty much all the crime she can shake a stick at.

Fucking domestic terrorism.

She wonders if the tortured, grizzled hitman of her recent past would laugh if he knew.

Nevermind. She knows the answer to that.

Alejandro doesn't laugh.

Not anymore.

At first she tries to get out. She tries to just fucking drive out of there and, well, that doesn’t work.

She even tries contacting Graver of all people but there’s no way to get through, no way to reach outside of the county lines.

She is thrown by just how well organised this is. Tunnels blown, phone lines cut, radio signals jammed. Deserted roads and empty homes and distant gunshots becoming white noise. Patrolling planes and helicopters. 

She might have to revise her opinion of that bare-chested lunatic. He’d pulled off quite the well-oiled coup, after all, there’s no other way to see this. She now suspects that underneath his doomsday talk, his Book of Revelations mumbo jumbo, lives an ice cold strategist, a charismatic tyrant with fists of iron. And he fooled them all. They all thought him crazy, and sure, maybe he is, but he’s smart too. Evidence of his intelligence is all around her. It’s in the Bliss fields and the trucks full of loot and vans full of forcible converts. It’s in their fucking bunkers. They have actual bunkers.

So. She’s stuck. Stuck in Hope.

She would laugh, but she’s too busy trying not to get killed, or caught.

And...

All her life she has known desertscapes, and she is genuinely surprised at how quickly she grows to love the unsubtle verdancy of Hope County. In the desert she had to look for beauty, tease it out, adapt her eyes to see it. Hope County is not like that. Hope County is forthright, brash, in her face. Undeniable and intense. She can’t get enough, gorges herself on chlorophyll and sap and strong colours even as she dodges bullets. 

It’s strange how happy she is in the run. Wind in her hair and hallucinations at her fingertips and death every which way. 

And it’s weird how liberating lawnesses is. She, who once punched a CIA operative in the face for having the temerity to work outside the law...now she revels in it, delights in it. She finds a dark well inside herself that enjoys the fighting, she runs and she kills and shoots up adrenaline like heroin.

Fight fire with fire, huh? And she was always good at this, wasn’t she? A grifter on the front line, kicking down doors, taking bullets, stubbornly waging Sisyphus battles against the cartels.

Yes. Yes. Like this, she could nearly forget about before, it’s hard to dwell on the past when she’s so exhausted and delirious and strung out that she can barely even remember her name. 

Her real name. 

Or her new one.

She almost becomes someone else this late summer in Hope County, and that was kind of the point of coming here, wasn’t it?

Forgetting herself, that is, until she runs headlong into a man with sins all over his hands.

A man determined to write all that is her on her skin.

For everyone to see.

Chapter Text

Chapter 1 : his whispers were whips and jackboots

She hears tales of all the Seed siblings, of course. She skimms the Book of Joseph before getting in the chopper, she reads the reports and the clippings while in the air. She watches the shaky, filmed-in-portrait-mode cell footage. She takes note of Whitehorse’s apprehension, but dismisses it as the overwrought fretting of hick law enforcement even as she meets the eyes of the enormous statue in Joseph Seed’s likeness.

(that will turn out to be quite the mistake, but she doesn’t know it yet)

Before they set down in the compound she has memorised the available information on them all, without even meaning to, thinking that it’s unnecessary, but old training so solidly ingrained in her as to run entirely on autopilot.

But in the church all her focus is on Joseph, and no wonder. What shining madman, such delirious, addictive fervour! She can’t take her eyes off him even as she curls her tongue around a new kind of fear, a new kind of ignorance.

Tongueless corpses built into walls she can just about grasp, because she understands the workings of corruption and greed. How can she not, after so long staring deep into the abyss that is the Mexican cartels.

Religion she can not understand. The gilded web Joseph’s spun around his believers...otherworldly to her, incomprehensible. Their blind, violent devotion frightening and alien.

So John Seed is just someone disturbing the corner of her eye. She barely notices him just as she barely notices Jacob or Faith, sucked entirely into Joseph’s force field instead, swirling her finger in his prophecies, deciding between terror and revulsion.

But then... then John forcibly inserts himself into her narrative.

She gets no further than Holland Valley.

At first she thinks this will just be a temporary blip. She escaped his forced river dunk, after all. And again, between the psychotropic fireflies and Joseph’s appearance, she’d barely taken note of John. 

Even if he did try to drown her.

But when she wakes up deep underground and groggily shakes Bliss out of her hair and mind, it becomes clear to her that this, this she won’t get out of so easily.

And it’s rather impossible to ignore John Seed now.

She is of course quite literally a captive audience, but even if she wasn’t tied to a bloodied, piss-stained office chair...she thinks that he would still have her rapt attention. She’s met many bad men, evil men, in her life, but she doesn’t think she’s ever met anyone quite like the youngest Seed.

The way he wears and then sheds guises, like he’s changing moods and minds and skins on whims ruled entirely by rage... she’s quite astounded, even through reeking fear, as she sits there strapped down and watching him. He veers from mania to devoutness to savagery to vulnerability and his fingers twitch with the need to cut and gouge and penetrate. 

She’s never seen anyone weaponise trauma quite like him.

And worst of all, most dangerous of all: he believes that he believes.

This, this she does not know, cannot begin to comprehend or touch, and to hell with all her training. She knows intimately of men killing for revenge. She knows of the killing for greed, for power. But the acuteness of this man’s motivation is almost enough to cut through her femoral artery and have blood running down her legs, and she’s sitting there with iron heavy on the air and she doesn’t understand.

He causes hurt and is hurting because it feels good.

Sweat is beading between her breasts and it takes her less than a second to decide to say yes. She hasn’t known Hudson for long, but she misses Reggie and his teasing and his bra advice. She thinks that if things were different, then Hudson, brave, fierce Hudson, might have become a good friend. 

And also, apparently she didn’t sign away all her ideals. Apparently she’s still clutching some dumb-fuck notions of heroism and goodness close to her chest.

Jesus. The more you know.

Of course, the door has barely slammed shut behind John and Hudson when she starts shuffling across the floor, old wheels squeaking, lungs sucking musty, haunted air. Nobility is all well and good, but if she can get out of here then she will. He may no longer be in the room, but she can still see his eyes. No mercy, no quarter. Just a white hot need, an urge to spin and weave and stitch pain into coverings he can wear when looking at himself in a mirror. She’s got no wish to stay around and let him turn her into threads.

“And just where,” comes his voice in singsong “do you think you’re going?”

She’s only a few precious inches from the edge of the stairs but that doesn’t matter now. He has returned faster than she had counted on. A part of her wonders bleakly if he had simply tossed Hudson down a hole now when he’s acquired her acquiescence.

“Away from you,” she answers simply, eyes briefly closing in despair.

There’s a small smile on his lips when he walks around the chair to face her, like he’s delighted that he’s caught her reneging on such solemn a vow as ‘ yes’.

She meets his eyes. She’s got only defiance left now. 

As he wheels her back into his torture chamber she thinks that she had been foolish to dismiss him in favour of Joseph. Down here, he is a king. Emperor, warlock, high priest. 

And she thinks that perhaps she won’t get out of this.

“What do you want with me?” she asks over her shoulder as they go, and he brings her chair to a stop in the middle of the floor and spins it around so they may see each other again.

“Oh it’s quite simple, Deputy. I want you to confess and atone. As do Joseph. That’s all. Oh. Except…you see, we are also awfully curious about...well, you.” 

He gets closer, close enough that she can see the silk fibers in his shirt, the raised, angry letters on his chest. She doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction of her attention, but she can’t stop looking at him. 

“I want everything from you. Everything. I want to turn you inside out and see truth and confessions clatter to the floor. I want you to give me all that you’ve got, and then more still. And I will get it all. I always do.”

Then he gets closer still, bends down over her with his hands on her upturned wrists where they are tied to the armrests. There is an awful sort of intimacy in it, his fingertips on her veins, his hold on the fragile bones underneath. He could break them like that, then tear into her blood vessels with his teeth. And she can smell him. No cologne, but evergreens. Hemlock and yew and holly. She’s not used to such poisonous greenery, but she draws him deep into her nose anyway. 

And he smiles, a gentle smile, a reassuring smile, and there is venom dripping from his teeth. 

“But why don’t we start simply, with just your name?”

Why not?

“Jenny.” 

The lie of her fresh new moniker glides as smooth as cold water over her lips, but looks like it's sticking in his craw as he tries to swallow it. He tuts, shakes his head just a little.

“Hmmm. No, I think not.”

And entirely without ceremony or warning, without really moving from his hunched position over her, he punches her in the face. 

It’s a vicious uppercut, and her head snaps back in the chair, hell, her whole body wants to follow the motion but it can’t, she’s bound. She realises even as she straightens back up again that it could have been much worse, that he hadn’t had much power behind it.

She thinks it might be John Seed’s version of a polite admonishment.

Pain is radiating through the left side of her face though, from her mouth to her jaw to her temple, and fear is real. It’s a shadow just behind John, adopting his shape, touching his shoulders.

But strangely the hurt seems to centre her, she clutches at the pain like it’s a tangible thing, like it could hold her hand back and maybe stroke her bruising cheek and whisper in her ear that really, she’s had worse.

She meets his eyes square and vows to play at this theatre of fearlessness for as long as she possibly can get away with such blatant lie. 

“Petty violence?” she asks through a split lip. “You know, I’ve heard, ah, things about you. I assumed your methods of cruelty would be more...refined.”

He smiles, and she smiles right back but it’s really just a flash of bloodied teeth. 

“Disappointed?” he asks.

“Indifferent,” she shrugs, and they both know it’s false bravado, but he decides to humour her all the same.

“I’m simply adapting my methods to my surroundings,” and he throws his hands out to indicate them, the room, the county up and beyond, “and this is hick country. Bluntness tends to speak the loudest and the clearest.”

He smiles again, encouraging, falsely curious except maybe not. He starts fiddling with the tattoo gun again, eyes thoughtful and shrewd as he’s watching her.

“What have you heard about me?”

She uses Joseph’s own words, hoping they will hurt him, offend him, do something . She recites, gunning for an indifferent monotone but not quite able to hide the frisson of liveliness in her voice as she realises, in technicolour, in 3D...

“ A heartless shapeshifter, a monster filled with rage, a man who wants to see the world burn.”

...that Joseph had been entirely right.

And John doesn’t deny it. He looks unperturbed, unruffled, but there is a certain tension in his shoulders as he walks over to his work bench, there’s emotion in the way his fingers curl around the tools there.

Not that it helps her.

When he turns around again he’s holding a knife. A handle made smooth by years of use, the beautifully grained wood now shaped to his fingers. Evolution. The blade, wicked and sharp, carefully tended.

His favourite knife, his favourite thing, she thinks by the way his thumb strokes it, and he wields it as an extension of self, a missing limb long lost but now returned to its rightful place.

He steps deep into her space again, stands between her knees, bends and holds the knife to her face, and it’s so close she sees herself in the blade. Her warm tones against the cold steel. She looks into that knife blade like it’s naked lie told straight to her face, and maybe it is. She seems beautiful in that mirror, a sparse, severe beauty, veiled and fleeting. Same colouring as the desert, and features as angular as the mountain peaks on the horizon beyond Juarez.

Cemetery eyes.

You remind me of someone very special to me.

But she can’t have his voice twisting like an ouroboros serpent in her ear now, not when there is a man just as dangerous inhaling her exhales. He’s close, so close, and she thinks of blood-red berries against dark green.

All of a sudden he withdraws, again, and the volatility of him becomes bone sharp fragments wedged deep behind her eyes.

“Let’s try this again. What’s your name?”

“Jenny,” she answers immediately, refusing to not infuse her voice with a mocking honesty, and his answering sigh is exaggerated, long suffering. He tosses the knife from hand to hand without even looking, deft and entirely comfortable, and she thinks that she really is thoroughly fucking stupid.

By his raised eyebrow he seems inclined to agree with her.

“Do you know, Deputy, that we had all your names and files before you even got in that helicopter. We knew everything about all of you. Hudson. Pratt. Whitehorse. Even that clown Burke. Everything. Except you.”

She’s heard his broadcasts. Down by the car place. The orchard. Not to mention performing to Hudson and her. Fervent and sharp, sometimes edging close to frothing. He doesn’t talk like that anymore, now when it’s just the two of them. His voice is...calm, but oh so many things bubbling underneath. 

“For you, we only had a name and a blank slate. No background. No history. Apparently you just showed up recently. And then all of you come flying in here, and your colleagues, all supposedly so much more experienced than you, immediately caught in our web. Meanwhile you, a junior deputy, you tear quite the bloody path through our operation. Bodies everywhere. Fires too. Explosions.”

He thinks she’s undercover, she realises suddenly. Thinks that their dirty little backcountry cult warrants enough attention for some kind of covert federal mission. 

She tripped into this. Fell into it. Fucking coincidences, goddamn warped serendipity. She’s gone beyond just simple bad luck and veered into cursed-by-a-vengeful-god territory. Got to be the only explanation.

She starts laughing. She can’t help it. Fuck everything.

He walks a little half circle, gets himself behind her, and bound as she is she can’t turn with him, track his movements. Can feel him though, his eyes on the tender column of her exposed neck, the little bumps where her spine rolls gently under her skin. She can feel the heat of him, unnatural.

She keeps laughing. 

Then she stops when his fingers follow his eyes, swoops along her spine as if he’s flying close over rolling hills.

The gentle touch is terrifying to her because she doesn’t understand it.

“Shall we begin?”

He uses his knife, not that she’s surprised. She supposes she should be grateful really, because he’s a maestro with it, its blade a complicated and elegant dance across her skin. 

He cut away her shirt earlier, but it was impersonal, clinical, eyes not lingering on her greying sports bra (yeah. she knows) or any of her exposed skin. Focused entirely on his task, the consummate professional.

The blade really is so sharp it barely hurts at first,  but she can feel blood running down her back, so she knows he’s cutting through skin. The pain comes after, vicious and insistent. It’s exhausting, to sit there trapped, all this adrenaline and fight-or-flight with nowhere to go. She gets dizzy, and time is dragging dragging dragging, becoming a distended thing shivering in the red light beams. But she can see mallets and screwdrivers and pliers over there on his workbench, and thinks that the knife will do just fine, thank you very much.

Though this is but a prelude, she knows, they are only warming up. He’s not asking any questions, not pushing for confessions. He’s...fucking showboating. Playing. Indulging.

“You are monstrous,” she tells him conversationally, when he’s back by the workbench pedantically cleaning the blade of his knife with a rag before going in for a second round. Or is third? 

He looks like he’s been called that before, and the spiel she gets in return sounds as mechanical as her insult had.

“Actually, I see myself as a collector. Of sins. Of souls.” His hands dance in the air in front of his face, red light catching on the blade of the knife. Hypnotic. Wrong. “I ease burdens for people, carry them myself.”

She scoffs, gargles on incredulity and hopelessness as he gets behind her again. She can feel his hair brushing her back, his face is so close to his canvas.

“What are you doing back there, anyway?” she asks over her shoulder. “Do you keep mirrors down here, like at a hairdresser, so you can show me your work once you’re done?”

The puff of warm air against her skin is the only hint of his quiet chuckle at her lip.

“Just a little something something to get us warm in our clothes. What’s your name? Your real name?”

”I’m not telling you,” she says, which is stupid really, because what does it matter? He can do nothing with her identity, not really, can’t weaponise it, and she will have to give it to him eventually. She harbours no illusions of her ability to withstand true torture. His torture. But the same stubborn, reckless, moronic part of her that had once looked Graver straight in the eye and informed him that she was going to fucking talk makes her dig her heels in now. Why make it easy on them both? 

The punishment for her obstinance is immediate, a cut deeper than the rest, and she bites down on a whimper, tears it in half even as she can feel his pleasure through her torn skin.

With his delight she realises that she’s feeling numb. Loose. Unmoored. Something...something akin to...carefree? 

When was the last time she had felt like that? When? In The Wild Pony, Phoenix? Dancing in a baggy grey tee, with greasy hair and more beer than blood in her veins. Dancing with Ted.

Yeah.

That had ended well. 

Suddenly she gets a flash of hard hands squeezing her life out of her, of Alejandro appearing with a halo around his head, saving her, damning her even more.

Standing with him in her kitchen, trying to draw smoke down her bruised, battered windpipe. 

Her throat still hurts sometimes.

Well, she’s feeling almost carefree now, but that’s because she’s been pushed all the way through fear and exhaustion and out somewhere on the other side. There’s a certain tainted freedom in having no more room to negotiate, no options, no choice .

Now she feels almost...comfortable strapped to his chair.

He notices.

“You look nearly serene,” he says to her on one of his visits back to the bench, head tilted, arms casually crossed over his chest. “As serene and strict and blank as a saint in a church. How peculiar.”

“Oh just get on with whatever it is you’re going to do,” she huffs, and his face tightens. He’s getting impatient, she thinks, he’s itching to do some real damage. There is a deadly urge shading his eyes, an insistent twitch to his fingers. Something has got to give.

“Now...You refuse to tell me your name. So let’s go another route. You’ll have to give me something.”

With false indifference he picks up a plier. Plays with it. Its gripping jaws are darkened; old blood. She’s lightheaded, her mind bouncing from shadow to stark, blinding light, and suddenly she thinks about something she read once. About how pottery might trap soundwaves, acoustics. How ancient clayware might reveal untold mysteries. She wonders if the same might be true for metal. She wonders if John Seed’s pliers, and screwdrivers, and most of all his knife, have suffering and screams and confessions trapped inside the steel.

She wonders how long Alejandro would last if tied to John Seed’s chair.

Probably forever.

John, perhaps able to sense that her attention is seeping away from him, and jealous about it, calls her back to him. 

“A confession. Something of yourself. So you tell me…” 

He gets closer, crouches in front of her, between her legs, hands on her thighs, looking up in her face. Impossible to escape or deny.

“...what do I want to know about you?” asks this man who eats confessions like amuse bouches and she can tell, she can tell how violence is only a wrong word or a right word away. She can’t possibly predict or read him accurately, and this coiled recklessness living inside her makes the situation heady. 

Terrifying.

Fine, she’ll give him something. He’s worked hard for it, earned it, look, that’s sweat on his brow! 

She smiles, but there are tears in her eyes.

“A man once put a gun under my chin and said I reminded him of his daughter when I was afraid.”

The tears, they are running freely down her cheeks now. She sticks her tongue out and catches them on their way past her mouth. She’s thirsty.

“I thought I was strong. He made me realise I’m weak.”

John’s eyes flame with delight at this juicy titbit, this part of her that she just ripped from within herself and offered up to him, dripping with blood. He looks enraptured, high, pupils blown wide, a flush on his cheeks.

This is manna to him. This is drugs and alcohol and power and pain to him, just for him.  

His.

“What was his name?“

She smiles through the blood in her mouth.

“Sicario.”

John leaves, and eventually she sleeps, fretful and tied.

She dreams, a viscous tangled mess of Ted strangling the life out of her, Alejandro pressing a gun up underneath her chin, his wife’s headless body, his daughter dissolving. 

She jerks out of her nightmare so suddenly she startles John, tools clattering down on his workbench, and she thinks that this is who she is now, she has shouldered some of Alejandro's demons for herself and he won’t ever thank her or know it or appreciate it.

She hasn’t heard John come back into the room. Her nightmare had been too loud. 

He leans back against the bench now, legs crossed, elbows slung back into dried blood. He’s gotten rid of his waistcoat while he was away. Sweaty work indeed, turning her back into origami.

“What happened to his daughter?”

He’s picking up right where he left off, as if he hadn’t left her alone to stew for hours, as if she hadn’t been frogmarched to a dingy bathroom by a bearded, filthy man with the Eden’s Gate cross tattooed on his forehead. Allowed to pee, but denied any drinking water.

Then she was tied to the chair again.

He’s back with her now, and he seems ready to continue, seems to deem her desperate and weary enough to spill.

“No. No,” she wheezes, protective of her old tormentor to her new one. “His pain is not for you to know, to gorge on. I won’t let you.”

And oh his face, when he takes in all the hurt, all the broken illusions making shadows on her skin. He wants to dig it all out, unearth it, hold it up to the red light and make it his. He looks like he’s struck gold, found the fucking holy grail.

“Can I have a cigarette?” she asks, despite her thirst, her parched throat. She’d seen a busted up packet of Camels peeking out of the back pocket of his jeans, and the urge reawakened in Mexico flares.

“I didn’t have you down as a smoker,” he says, even as he pulls the packet out, shakes a cigarette loose.

“I didn’t use to be,” she croaks, before he gently places the cigarette between her lips, cups her jaw as he lights it for her. She pulls deeply on it, draws the smoke as far down her lungs as she can, and when he removes the cigarette again she lets it come seeping out of her mouth, her nose. He takes a deep drag himself, staring thoughtfully at her through the smoke, the ember from the tip highlighting parts of his face, making him look like a tidy demon.

They share the cigarette, every other drag, quietly, him standing in between her strapped down legs and carefully holding the cigarette for her each time. Until there’s nothing left of it. Until he lets her have the very last drag then crushes the cigarette under his boot, until she’s buzzing and nauseous with nicotine.

They study each other. She’s having to strain her neck to meet his eyes, he’s so close, his knees touching her thighs where she sits on this awful throne of his.

There is a horrific kind of communion in the giving and the receiving of pain, she thinks, in being helpless and entirely at someone’s mercy. They are connected now, they are old friends. She blows out the last smoke and rests her sweaty brow on his chest, head tipped forward, leaning into him in a grotesque parody of an embrace as he cards his fingers through her matted hair.

She tips her head back again, neck lolling weakly. He looks thoughtful, rapt, and she swears him a sacred oath.

“When I get loose I will kill you.”

He looks delighted.

It’s sometime later. Hours? A day? Days? He’s left her again, she’s all alone, and she’s so thirsty.

She floats, and Alejandro’s eyes full of violent grief turn to John’s mercurial ones. What’s the difference there is no difference is there a difference?

She wants another cigarette. 

She doesn’t get one. Instead he returns once more, back from whatever hellish tasks he’s occupied with when he’s not tormenting her. She is suddenly and unexpectedly cut loose from her chair and immediately zip-tied again, her wrists in front of her, the unsteady, flickering mirage of freedom lasting less than a second. Her arms are too weak to use anyway, and she sits there and studies his glossy hair as he’s bent over her, pulling the tie unnecessarily hard before he cuts through the ropes tying her legs to the chair.

“Come with me, now.”

She has to lean on him to be able to shuffle along. She wonders how men are able to do this to her, reduce her to something pitiful, confused, shaking, and she promises herself that if she escapes this, comes away with her life intact, then a man will never make her weak again.

She will claw power back. She will. 

She will.

He takes her topside. It’s just the two of them, and she gulps lungfuls of fresh air as she takes in his sign, white and pure against the dusky mountainside. He hands her a bottle of water, and she chokes it down, uncaring that the fluid runs from her chin down to her chest, soaking into the front of her grimy bra.

“What’s this?” she asks when she can talk again, indicating the mountains, their surroundings, them, with a quick jerk of her chin. Her back burns and stings, stubborn shockwaves of pain. 

He smiles, all gleaming teeth and sadism.

“I’m bored, Deputy. Things are a bit samey around here. So, we’re going to play a little game.” 

He looks manic, his eyes nearly incandescent in the fading daylight. 

“I can kill you now.” 

He pulls his gun, cocks it, and puts it under her chin, forces her head back, and she’s going to maim him, just tear him apart, for doing this to her. For rubbing her nose in her ghosts. 

“Blow your brains out, like he could have done.” 

He smiles wider, and she has never seen him look more dangerous, and she can’t ever begin to name all the demons dancing in his eyes. He removes the gun again, and she feels sure it’s left a mark in the fragile skin.

“Or. I’ll set you loose. You’re going to run. And I am going to chase you and find you. Me. Not my men, nor anyone else. Just me. And when I catch you, you are going to tell me more. Over and over again, until I have everything, until I have all of you.”

He pulls her closer by her wrists, so close she can feel him, so close the cobalt of his shirt turns inky.

“And when that happens, you’ll be mine. Mine to do with as I wish, and my wish, Deputy, is to cut your sins and your past right out of your skin. Slowly. And you will be atoned, and Joseph will get what he wants.”

He studies her intently.

“Yes?” he asks, even as he cuts through her zip ties, before she has a chance to answer. So confident. 

And not without reason. 

She rubs her wrists, welcomes the pain of blood rushing into her fingers.

“Yes.”

And she runs.

Chapter Text

Chapter 2: her eyes wanted nothing to get away

She doesn’t get a chance to look at her back until two days later, maybe three.

She’s in a tiny room above The Spread Eagle and timeworn country music is leaking through the floorboards under her bare feet. She’s just had a shower, her first in about a week, but she still doesn’t feel clean. She can smell flames on her wet hair, there is copper and iron clinging to her skin, a scent of gunpowder on her hands. 

She shouldn’t be here at all, in the largest settlement of this beautiful, godforsaken county, and right in the middle of John’s region. But when Mary May had offered her a shower and a bed for the night, she had accepted. How could she not? The last couple nights she’d slept propped uncomfortably in a stolen truck, old jerky she found in the glove compartment making up breakfast, lunch and dinner.

But not very clever, being here. No. She might as well wave a flag and draw a target on her back.

Speaking of.

There’s a little mirror on top of a chest of drawers that looks like it was thrifted sometime during the first half of the century. It leans precariously against the wall, showing more ceiling than room, but she carefully straightens it, then drops her towel. Turns around, twists, tries to read her back over her shoulder.

Letters, in capital, carefully carved: 

“WHY WON’T YOU TELL ME WHO YOU ARE?”

She feels a curious amalgam of fury and fear as she studies his work, takes in each delicately, brutally etched line. It takes her a couple of seconds to realise that he’d actually written it in mirror reverse, ensuring that she’d be able to easily read his question.

His message. 

The letters are red, angry, but don't look infected. In fact, they look like they’ll heal over nicely, and probably itch like a bastard while doing so. After which they’ll remain a permanent reminder of him. 

At least Alejandro hadn’t left any physical scars.

Fuck.

She turns back around, gets closer to the mirror. Takes in her face. He’d punched her the once, and not his hardest, but he’d still painted her mien in quite the palette. His knuckles had split her lip on their way up to her right cheekbone, where he’d skilfully made an impact, bruising both the bone and the eye socket. 

Yes. The man was quite the artist. 

Disregarding her nudity she moves over to the small sash window, pulls it open. She needs air. The room is towards the front, and she leans with her elbows on the sill, looking down on the dusty street below. It’s going towards evening, and everything is suffused with that shimmering, golden afternoon light of late summer. It’s making this tiny, shabby old town dreamy instead of sleepy, and she falls into a queer sort of nostalgia that isn’t even hers.

Time standing still. 

It’s quiet down there, not many people out and about. She had helped retake the place, but the townsfolk still seem weary, careful.

And with good reason.

She wants to look towards the mountains, anchor her churning mind to their beauty, but then there’ll be the sign.

She can’t stand the fucking thing.

For a moment she is overcome by a wild, sharp sadness. Sorrow. Given time, she thinks she could have learnt to live here. Quietly, slowly. She would have given up that fucking beige apartment and come to live right here. She would have returned home at dawn after a night shift herding drunks, and she would have rested in a narrow bed in a bedroom with faded old wallpaper, and she would have watched the rising sun trace shapes on the walls through fluttering net curtains.  A morning breeze coming through them, stroking her forehead, whispering her to sleep.

Perhaps she would have experienced peace. Perhaps she would have been happy, finally happy.

Or perhaps she’s lying to herself. Thanks to the Project at Eden’s Gate she’ll never find out. 

She sighs, and despite herself looks up towards that awful sign, considers the fevered mind behind it.

He’s been quiet since she saw him last, no messages on the radio, no capture parties. Still, she takes John Seed’s threats seriously, his game even more so. How can she not, after the time spent with him in his dungeon? She has never tasted sick sincerity quite like it, it’s still as heavy and thick as poisonous nectar in her throat.

The day after he released her she had tried to leave the county again. Drive for Missoula in a beat-up, pilfered truck with fresh blood stains all over the backseat, but she got pushed back by two separate roadblocks. The only thing she accomplished was giving him confirmed sightings of her. That, and cementing to herself the knowledge that if she’s going to have the slightest chance of leaving it’ll have to be on foot, from way out in the wild.

She grimaces. She’s not one for wilderness. She can’t build fires and subsist on raw pine cones, she can’t hunt, she can’t fish. She’s a city girl, but even so she can’t bring herself to miss the bright lights of Phoenix. Not even now.

She shakes her head, moves away from the window again. Her plan had been to go straight to bed even though it’s still daylight, but now she thinks she might need a drink after all.

She pulls on some of the clothes Mary May lent her. The fit is poor, the other woman shorter and curvier, but she doesn’t care. She drags fingers through her wet hair trying to untangle some of the knots, but gives up and heads downstairs.

She’s three beers in, lulled by the white noise of the jukebox and murmured conversations around her, when Mary May moves from behind the bar to the front, slides into the stool next to her. She’s got a beer of her own, and they solemnly clink bottles. 

“Deputy.”

“Call me Jenny,” she says, and feels like a liar and a cheat, especially when Mary May smiles warmly and raises her bottle in another salute before taking a long pull. They sit in silence for a while, before Mary May nods at her, indicating the black eye.

“John Seed?”

She hums noncommittally, finding what had transpired in his bunker an intensely private thing. As abhorrent as it is, it’s something between her and John. She hates that she feels that way, like she ought to protect the wretchedness that had taken place.

“Did he give you a tattoo?”

She starts, thinking Mary May knows about her back, had somehow seen it, but the younger woman carries on without waiting for an answer.

“He tattooed me. Drugged me to the gills with Bliss and wrote ‘envy’ on me.” 

She pulls down the neckline on her old top to reveal an ugly scar. 

“Had to have it removed. Allergic to the shitty ink he used. I prefer the scar.”

She pulls her top back up and takes another long drink of beer. The hand holding the bottle is shaking slightly. 

“There is something thoroughly wrong with him,” Mary May says, a grimace on her face, revulsion drawn crudely on skin. “I can think of no redeeming feature beyond his handsome smile, and even that gives me the creeps. There is only bloodthirst in it. He’s the worst kind of predator, mad and wild and intelligent. Do yourself a favour, Jenny, and stay well out of his way until you can safely put him down.” 

Too late, she thinks, far too late, even as she nods at Mary May and decides to move from beer to whisky.

She leaves in the middle of the night. Still a bit drunk. Maybe more than that. She jumps from her window out onto the roof and then on to the lean-to at the back, before landing heavily on the ground. She feels like a criminal, and a thoroughly bad person, and a betrayer, but she can’t risk anyone knowing the direction she’s leaving in. She doesn’t want to be seen by either friend or foe. 

She runs her hands up and down her person as she walks quietly between houses and across backyards, checking for her gun, her knives, her explosives. She lost her service gun right at the beginning of this whole mess, but it’s proved depressingly easy to restock in Hope County. She’s missing her clothes too – what she wouldn’t give for her FBI tactics gear now, even her deputy’s uniform, instead of Mary May’s ill-fitting hand-me-downs and a men’s fishing vest she bartered at the general store. But beggars can’t be choosers, and at least she’s warm. At least she’s not running around with John Seed’s little question on display. 

Her back itches and burns with the thought, and she thinks that it always will, even after it’s healed completely. He’ll always be on her, no matter what she does, no matter where she goes. 

Which is hopefully far from here.

But she doesn’t want to think about him right now, doesn’t want to think about him ever. She is in no doubt of his sincerity, of his thirst for her internal injuries, and wonders that he hasn’t made an attempt on her yet. The last time she saw him he had looked like he could barely contain himself, like he had wanted to cup his hands, reach in between her ribs and scoop out all her pain and hurt and gulp it down like it was milk and honey. She thinks the only reason she hasn’t seen him yet is because he enjoys drawing it out, stringing her up and along, playing a sick little game of cat and mouse.

Her hand is clenching her stolen revolver too hard and she has to force herself to let go of it, to concentrate instead on her immediate surroundings. She’s at the very outskirts of Falls End now, passing by the water tower, old wood creaking in the night breeze. She decides against stealing a car - too visible. Too loud. She’ll walk instead. It shouldn’t take her that long.

She stands before the imploded tunnel just beyond the Lamb of God, and she considers her options. 

There’s no way through. The cult did their job well, and the tunnel is thoroughly lodged shut by debris, dirt and shattered rock. Probably a body or two. 

She scratches at her arm, graced by a knife not twenty minutes ago when she ran into a couple Peggies scoping out a new perimeter around Fall’s End. It had been a nasty encounter, ending in broken bodies and an exploding flatbed truck. Hardly quiet, but she had proceeded in loops and been careful. She’d seen no one else.

She surveys the area best she can in the dark. Perhaps she can go up, and over? Could she climb?

A night bird calls, a sound imbued with portence and danger. She heeds her instincts just a fraction of a second too late though, and she feels the barrel of a gun pressing against the back of her head before she can turn around.

“Hello, Deputy,” 

“Fuck,” she responds. He had been supernaturally silent sneaking up on her. She’d heard neither car nor footsteps, and she wonders exactly how he got here. 

A puff of air against her neck is the only hint of his silent laughter.

“Yes indeed. Caught you. Now, drop your weapons. All of them.”

She obeys. Drops her gun, pulls out her knives and throws them to the ground harder than is necessary. Gun never leaving her head, he relieves her of the explosives she carries in her make-shift tactical vest, his touch careful and deft.

When he seems sure she is empty of weapons he pulls her backpack from her, then taps her on her shoulder with the gun.

“Turn around.” 

She does. He handles the gun easily, expertly, wrist loose but barrel unwaveringly aimed at her when she slowly spins to face him. Not as intimately acquainted with the gun as with the knife, but competent and sure. She can see only the weapon and his face clearly, the rest of him disappears in shadow. He’s dressed entirely in black. Black jeans, black polo, black gloves, and between his dark beard and hair he appears ghoulish, all wide grin and gleaming eyes suspended in Stygian air.

She keep her hands raised, but ready to pounce or flee at any opening or opportunity. She is nothing but fast, and she might be able to outrun him if he can be disarmed, unable to shoot her in the back. 

Not that she thinks he would. At least not yet. He’s enjoying himself far too much and she hasn’t yet outlived her role as a chew toy. In fact, she thinks bleakly, she suspects they haven’t even started yet. 

“How did you find me?”

He grins wider. 

“You’re pretty obvious. You leave a trail of entrails and explosions.”

“So do you,” she says, and she thinks of the night the Reaping started. It had looked like Juarez after Guillermo Diaz was taken out of play.

Do you like fireworks?

“Well,” he says and lowers his arm a little, but still remains vigilant as he kicks away all her weapons into the dark, one after one, before throwing the bag after, “I’m actually not so much for explosions, myself. I prefer more…visceral statements.”

She can do nothing but silently agree. 

“Now then,” he says, making a production of looking around where they are standing, right in front of the destroyed tunnel.  “You were trying to leave Hope County, weren’t you? Tsk tsk, Deputy. That’s cheating.”

“You never said anything about staying.”

“It was pretty loudly implied, don’t you think?” he says and, apparently satisfied that she’s thoroughly disarmed, shoves his gun down the waistband of his jeans. She immediately tenses, hypervigilant for an opening, a chance. She keeps talking to distract him. 

“Some hunter you are. Bet you’re the sort of man who would go to Africa and shoot fenced-in lions.”

She regrets her choice of words immediately, not least because of the mockery on his face when she compares herself to a lion. 

She’s not even a wolf. 

“Be that as it may, Deputy. If you try to leave again there will be consequences. More bodies strung up, for one.”

She snorts, shakes her head.

“You think those corpses hanging from bridges and signs deter me? I’ve seen it all before,” she says and thinks of Juarez. “At least the backdrop is prettier here.”

But she knows her bravado is empty and full of hollow echoes. There was a reason she went into law enforcement, a reason she went on to volunteer for Graver’s little multi agency task force despite misgivings. The slaying of innocents is abhorrent to her, an abomination. She is already darkened well beyond grey for the murders she herself has committed since she arrived here, the concepts of self defence and innocence so hopelessly skewed in Hope.

By the hungry look on his face he sees right through her. 

“You may feel differently if the bodies swinging in the wind are those of people you know. How is our favourite little barkeep?”

She resists the urge to bare her teeth at him. Of course he knows that she’s been in Fall’s End. She, along with the Resistance, had hardly retaken the town quietly. She can still feel the recoil from the rocket launcher, hear the screams, see blood pooling in the dust. 

“From now on, for each of your feeble attempts to leave I will have one of your friends captured and killed. I’ll start with Deputy Hudson. Won’t even have to catch her first. She’s already in situ. All I need is a length of rope, some barbed wire.”

He takes a step closer to her, and she has to fight the instinct to turn and run away from the look in his eyes. Oh, he’s having so much fun.

”And should you manage to get away all together...well, you said it yourself. It’s Joseph wanting to save all these people, not me. They can all burn, and I’ve no qualms speeding up the process.”

She believes him. She believes him entirely. She takes a step back, and she knows that he notices. For now he allows it, even putting his hands on his hips in a show of casual indifference.

“Will you get away with this?” she asks bitterly. “I heard Joseph. He wanted me atoned and in line like a good little lamb, not a part of one of your little batshit psychological experiments.”

“For this I’m willing to risk my brother’s ire. Well,” he amends, a wry look on his face, “more of it.”

She whistles through dry lips, even as she despairs. If his brother can’t keep him in line, then who can? A demon called forth and set loose on innocents, and no one around with holy water and salt.

“Is ennui a bitch, John? Sane old begging, same old screams, same old confessions?”

He shakes his head at her and regains lost ground, takes two steps towards her. Too close, far too close.

“Enough of that. Now. I caught you. I want my piece of you. So tell me...why are you trying to leave?” 

He cocks his head, waves his hand at her, an elaborate gesture taking in her entire person. Then another step, forcing her to give way, back up.

“I had you down as dumbly heroic. As someone who would decide on what they believe is right, then follow that path unthinkingly, unquestionably. Instead you try to run away into the night like a craven. What gives, Deputy?”

His words hurt her, his assessment a reminder stinging like acid on her skin. She discovers with some incredulity that she is fighting back tears. How does he burrow under her skin like this, how does he peel it back, exposing her insides to the night?

“You’re such a vampire, aren’t you? Feeding on pain. Only with me you’ve discovered that the emotional pain is better than the physical, so you worry worry worry away at my wounds, hoping more blood will spill out.”

He doesn’t deny it. He shrugs, and she turns into the woman that punched Matt Graver in front of all his men. Instead of trying to run she tries to hurt him. Of course, her aim is mostly Jack Daniels, and he blocks her easily, as an afterthought, hand around her fist, shoving it straight back down again.

The insult stings.

With his hand still around hers he moves forward mercilessly, straight into her, and she realises that he has effectively backed her into the opening of the blocked tunnel. She is trapped between destruction and him, and she’s got no choice but to spit confessions into the thin sliver of air between them

“I did try to do the right thing once. Stubbornly. Unthinkingly. It fucked me over. Made me realise that nothing is right.”

The words in her mouth have barbs on them, and they dig into the inside of her cheeks, into her tongue, the back of her throat. She spits them out anyway, even if they make her bleed.

“I’m no fucking hero. I’m in over my head. I’m just a scared little girl, thrown into a vat of acid.”

His eyebrows raise just minutely at this revelation on behalf of her sicario, and maybe, she hopes, just maybe at the unthinkable, heinous cruelty, but when he speaks he doesn’t mock her for betraying a trust that was never asked for.

“You’re not.”

The moon is a setting sickle and it’s close enough that she might reach out and use it as a weapon. She wants to spear him with it, run it right through his throat as a way to shut him up. Maybe string him up on it, the way he string people up. She wants to do that because he is denying what she knows to be true.

She settles for punching him as hard as she can and now, now she hits home, sharp bone.

“I am.”

He laughs even as he clutches his face, as he cups the pain of her repayment in his hand. Relishes it. There is blood at the corner of his mouth.

“You’re not.”

He says it to deride her, not because he means it. He does it to rile her, provoke a reaction, make her lose herself even more, pull agony from her pores.

He succeeds.

She pushes forward, intent on murder, on tearing him apart. She manages to make him back up enough that she can move some, swing her arms, kick. 

She uses the advantage, and never before has she felt so elegant, like a dancer, a ballerina. He meets her just as sinuously, comfortable in his tarnished skin, confident in his body language written entirely in violence and blood.

They don’t hold any punches.

They perform an ugly dance, grazed knuckles and bruised bones, blunt force trauma and hematomas. They both want to win and they try, they really do, and she feels subliminal in her movements, the night is warm and the moon is darkening. They are delirious together in this absence of light, attempting to kill each other almost tenderly, lovingly. 

Of course, she’s hardly sober. And he’s got weight and length and sheer lethal ability over her, and soon enough he’s got her in a disabling grapple. Flat on her back on the ground, his weight on her, his knees on her arms, hands around her wrists.

And with her nails digging into his jugular she realises something.

He makes her feel beautiful in violence. And, not unexpectedly, violence becomes him. Makes him tender.

He looks down on her, visibly enjoys the way she struggles against him, the way she hurts him, the way she’s causing blood to run down his face. He’s panting and laughing with the effort, and his eyes are sensual with wildness, his expression wide open. She bites off a whimper at the pain of her raw back being rubbed into grit, and he catches it in mid air, sucks it into his own mouth.

“Oh, look at you. You are so full of wretchedness. I want to kiss you.”

His words slide into the little grooves in the shell of her ear, they become an ear cuff gleaming dully in the faint moonlight. And she remembers, she remembers what happened last time she let a man touch her, kiss her. It still hurts to swallow sometimes.

“If you touch me I’ll rip your tongue out,” she promises.

He notes her discomfort and terror and flashbacks, drinks it all down, tastes it like expensive smoky bourbon, smacks his lips on all the nuances, the layers. Delights in finding even more pain to excavate, bring to the light. Yes, she’s a bottomless well to him, he can just scoop and scoop and drink and drink and never ever die of thirst.

“Oooh, something happened, didn’t it? A man hurt you. Sicario?” 

Pins her like a butterfly to a board, little sharp nails through her arms and feet and wings that doesn’t even exist.

“He wouldn’t. Not that.”

She doesn’t even know if she speaks the truth.

“Someone else then.”

It’s not a question, and so she doesn’t answer. He knows, he knows anyway, and he lets it slide for now, eager for other things. He digs his nails into her wrists, cuts in enough that she must relinquish her grip on his throat. 

A pity. She had enjoyed holding his jugular between her fingers.

“I caught you and I won. You owe me more than a piece of yourself. You owe me your name.”

“You’re changing the rules,” she spits, and he chuckles.

“I am the rule book, Deputy,” he says. “This is my game.”

She trashes some more under him, tries to get free, but he holds her easily, won’t move away from her, determined to not ever let her get free. He so obviously enjoys her failure, his victory, his gloating thickening what little air she’s got left.

“The man who held you at gunpoint, who ruined you. Your sicario… what would he say if he saw you now?

She realises that she is smiling up at him.

“He would be proud. He would be sad.”

He pushes his face closer to hers, much closer, she can smell the evergreen poison of him, she can feel his breath on her brow, her lips. 

“Did he care for you?”

She thinks that might be jealousy flaring like nebulosity in his eyes. He wants to be her only tormentor, he doesn’t want competition from some faceless hitman roaming Mexico while sieving the law through his fingers like water.

“Perhaps a little. Not enough not to hurt me.”

She leans her head back, studies him. 

“Are you angry? Are you angry that someone got there before you? That someone else broke me first?”

“Of course not,” he lies, then he kisses her anyway, despite her threat. 

He kisses her black eye, just the briefest touch of his mouth to her pain.

She leans into his lips. She’s won a little bit as well, his victory is not total.

“My name is Kate. Kate Macer.”

He laughs like it’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard.

“Hello Kate Macer,” he says. Then he removes his arm from her throat, stands in one sure motion. Slides back into the shadows a little, and not even the approaching dawn can reveal the lines of him.

“Now run again, Kate.”

Chapter Text

Chapter 3: his kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to

Effectively caught in invisible ties, trapped in this Colosseum of John Seed’s, she’s left with the conundrum of where to go now. Thinking that he won’t venture outside his own territory, infringe on his siblings’, she heads for the Henbane.

What a mistake that turns out to be.

It’s as stunning here as everywhere else in Hope, vistas startling in their beauty, high peaks and wild meadows, perfect soft slopes and pleasing angles, trees with golden foliage and the river curling lazily through the landscape. But that river, it’s been corrupted into a snake carrying poison in its belly. Madness snug within its scales, death at the tip of its fangs. 

And Faith Seed riding its back.  

It makes her furious, that this much ardent delight could be so twisted and mangled. That people could be turned to mindless husks and weaponised in this manner, drones with empty eyes. She’s seen it all before of course, and that makes it all so much worse, that this purported paradise of Joseph Seed would stoop so low.

That such penetrating ugliness could be juxtaposed with such beauty. 

It’s a deep moral hurt she’s feeling as she walks the Henbane, one reverberating through her entire being. The offence to her senses is deep and palpable, and it makes her feel murderous. She wants to cause hurt to cancel out hurt, and the constant presence of Bliss is confusing, misleading; it’s softening all edges when she needs them to be sharp. But she perseveres in her anger. Here, in the Henbane, it’s more imperative than ever before that she does, or she would be lost.

Because before she arrived in Hope County, she dedicated her career to fighting the entire machinery surrounding drugs, this reaper of children and women and men. Mass graves and torture. And here, here it’s the air. It’s everywhere, tendrils in her nose, clinging to her eyelashes, her hair. 

She can’t bear it. And she can’t bear how she is proving Graver and Alejandro right, over and over again, with every kill, every overblown exaggeration, every explosion.

She never believed in fighting fire with fire but now she is doing it anyway.

She meets Faith. 

She meets Faith several times in the Bliss, of course. But then she meets Faith outside of it. 

At least she thinks so, she thinks it’s actually real, but it’s impossible to know.

She’s down by the river washing blood from her hands and arms, and when she looks to the side there is Faith, sitting perched on a rock. Feet dangling gaily into the water, toes wiggling and the sun streaking honey across her hair. 

Honey like that on her tongue.

She’s not wearing her white dress. She’s wearing a tatty old band tee, print too faded to see, hem coming loose. She’s wearing torn old jeans, rolled up to just below her knees. She’s barefoot, and her toenails painted in a candy pink.

Her fingernails are chewed to the quick.

“Hello, Deputy,” she says and smiles, and Kate’s hand clenches around some gravel.

“Is this what you really look like?” she asks, because she needs to know, but she also knows she won’t get a straight answer. 

There are no straight answers in the Henbane.

Faith kicks some water up in the air, and Kate watches the gentle arch it makes, the drops disturbing the flow of the river further out.

“Does it matter, Deputy? People see what they want to see, always, and that is never more true than with me.”

Kate sits back slightly, still crouched, still ready to spring, but slightly more confident now that she won’t be dragged off into an apocalyptic hellscape. 

“Are you even real?” she asks on an exhale. 

Faith laughs, a tinkling laugh like morning dew on grass, a fraught laugh like spider legs on glass.

“I could touch you, you know. Then you’ll know for sure that I am really here. You could hold my hand.”

She reaches out, and Kate can think of nothing she wants less than holding the hand of Faith.

“No thanks.”

“Suit yourself,” Faith says, cute nose wrinkling a little as she squints into the sun to look at Kate. “I was only trying to help.”

She’s got freckles scattered across her cheeks. She looks about seventeen, Kate thinks, so young, so unsullied. 

How clever of Joseph.

She shifts a little further away, just an inch or two. 

Faith notices.

“I can feel your revulsion, you know,” she says. “And your pity. It’s a noxious substance coursing your veins. A toxin. You hate me, you pity me. You pity my Angels, yet you slaughter them, tear them from their purpose. And your pity is such a waste. I’ve made my Angels of light. Sure, their bodies are here, serving me, serving the Father, but their souls are ascended. Gone. They are at peace.”

Kate thinks of the Angels’ eyes when she kills them. Rage. Fear. Not peace. She thinks that Faith lies straight to her face.

Oh, but she does it so well.

With her old black and white beliefs Faith would have been a straight up perpetrator, an offender, wicked, but now she doesn’t know. She’s learning too much, far too much, about victims and perpetrators, that one doesn’t exclude the other. The lesson is as painful here as it was back in Arizona.

“What do you want, Faith?” 

The fair young girl grows serious then. Gone is her languid movements, her fey mannerisms. The effect is eerie, and even though the August wind whispers warm Kate feels goosebumps spring up on her arms.

“I’m here to tell you to be careful, Deputy. Just that. Be careful.” 

She says it so quietly, a shiver and a shake slinking between the words, her eyes wide, and Kate pulls her sleeves down over her arms, suddenly frozen.

“How do you mean?”

Faith giggles then, suddenly back to her forged persona. Or maybe her real self, Kate doesn’t know.

“I think you know what I mean.” Her voice is a sugary, tooth-rotting sing-song now. “You are about to walk the wrong path. You’re about to make the wrong choice. Don’t. Walk with me instead.”

And suddenly she stands and skips towards Kate fast, far too fast, hand outstretched. There are scars and old track marks on her arm. Her fingers are blue.

Kate throws herself backwards, lands on her butt, scrabbles away in an awkward crab walk, suddenly terrified of the pretty girl, irrationally convinced Faith will take her and eat her brain. As Faith stops and laughs softly, head at a tilt, honey strands blowing about her face, Kate stands and backs away further. Brushing her hands off on her jeans, trying to gather herself back together again. 

Leave.

But childishly wanting the last word.

“Do you know I will probably have to kill you for all this?” And she sweeps her hand around to indicate...everything around them; all the wrongness, all this monstrous betrayal of nature.

It feels preposterous to promise such faded angel her murder, but none the less she’s sincere. 

Faith shrugs a little, and gnaws on a cuticle because there are no nails left to chew.

“You could kill me right now. Or, you could at least try.”

She smiles a little, and stands. Begins skipping between the stones, further and further out in the river, calling over her shoulder.

“But you won’t do that, will you, Deputy.”

And she laughs again, a cold laugh, and Kate walks away not knowing if she knows Faith.

He doesn’t have to chase her down for their next time. He doesn’t even have to find her. She’s right there, sitting in yet another stolen car in the parking lot at Lorna’s. Smoking.

She’s just retaken the place singlehandedly, and she’s exhausted, and she should get out of there and find somewhere calm to decompress. But there is nowhere calm in the Henbane, littered with Angels and drugs, and so she just sits there, frozen, staring straight ahead. She contemplates driving back to Holland Valley, to Fall’s End and the Spread Eagle, but she can’t stand the thought of company. She wants to be on her own. It makes it easier not seeing herself through the eyes of others. Bad enough having to look in the mirror.

And she is ashamed of the way she left last time, sneaking out in the middle of the night.

A white cult truck pulls in then, coming to a stop on the other side of the parking lot, and she sighs and draws her gun, cocks it. Then she puts it down, rests it on her lap as she sees the driver’s door open and John Seed jump out. She watches him stuff his own gun into the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back, then make his way across the lot toward her. He’s stepping deftly over corpses without looking at them, eyes trained entirely on her. By the time he reaches her car and slides into the passenger seat her attention is elsewhere again. It’s with the broken bodies of Angels, it’s with the pungency of Bliss on the air. It’s on the horizon. She barely reacts when he grabs her gun from her lap and tosses it out of the window.

John is unbothered by her lack of reaction to his presence. He twists in the seat and leans against the passenger door to better take her in.

“You look like a Pollock. Did you have fun here?”

She answers his question with one of her own, is too wounded on behalf of the land not to.

”How can you and your family ever justify this?”

He stretches his legs out a little, makes himself comfortable, and she can only describe it as a sprawl.

“Afraid you will have to be a little more specific than that, Kate.”

She draws a deep breath, then lets it cling to her oesophagus.

“Oh, what’s the point.” 

It’s not a question. He knows it.

“No, no. Now you’ve made me curious.” His voice oozes with false sincerity, his eyes a strange hue of derision, dark and noisy. “What is it you’re talking about?”

Fine. 

“Drugs. Bliss. The way you empty people of their own free will, then fill them back up with your own purpose. The way you brutalise them. The way this whole place shimmers with mirages and falsehoods, because everything is that fucking drug. The river is Bliss! What have you done?”

John’s upper lip curls a little, and he sits up straighter, no longer playing at nonchalance.

“Ah. Well, trust me when I say that Faith and her methodology has nothing to do with me. I dislike having to take things using trickery. Smoke and mirrors. Drugs. Conditioning. That’s not my style.”

He doesn’t carry on, but he doesn’t have to: his style is brute force. 

At least he’s upfront about it, she thinks glumly.

“Don't screw me about. You’re complicit. You all are. You say you dislike it but you don’t do anything to stop it. You dump that stuff into the river when you baptise people. You use it too.”

“I do what I have to do to save people, see them walk into a better world. We all do. Maybe one day you’ll see that. Or maybe one day you’ll die.”

She wants to meet his threat with one of her own, perhaps secure in the knowledge that he’s having too much fun with her to cause her any serious injury just yet.

“Speaking of Faith, this is her territory. You really want to just barge in? Maybe I’ll tell on you.”

He seems depressingly unperturbed by her weak attempt.

“Oh I’m sure she won’t mind,” he says lightly.

“Wow,” she says and leans her head back against the headrest, almost closes her eyes, “you really must be bored. The risks you take aren’t even calculated.”

His grin is an ugly grimace.

”Had some run-ins with my latest sister then?”

Kate allows his odd choice of words to slide because it’s easy to just sit here next to him and let ghosts and pain fill the air between them.

“A few times in the Bliss. Not real. Then once…once that I think was real. I’m almost sure of it. Sure that she was right with me. She looked different. She acted different. She told me to be careful.”

Obviously he puts his finger right on the weak part, the sore spot, then digs his nail in.

“You’re “almost sure”?”

She sighs.

”Well, it’s Faith. How the fuck am I supposed to know what’s real and what isn’t with her? She operates in a dream world, doesn’t she? That’s her battlefield.”

He laughs a little, and straightens up more in the seat, then leans forward and wipes some blood from her forehead. Angel blood.

“You know, I think sanity is being able to tell the difference between dreams and reality. Are you sane, Kate?”

His voice so full of mockery, because of course he knows that they have the game rigged. Then, blessedly, before she has to answer, he carries on.

”Now, enough about us, let’s talk about you. I’ve been digging a little since I saw you last. I’ve not found out a lot about you, Kate Macer. I guess you will just have to tell me yourself.”

She smiles, and it feels like it might be genuine even though it hurts her face.

”Guess cutting Hope County off works both ways, huh? Finding it tough to get information from the outside, John?” 

She doesn’t even try to hide the tone of her voice, as bitter as wormwood. He’s trapped her here with no possibility of escape that doesn’t involve the bloodshed of good people, and he’s made her his plaything. He’s effectively isolated her from everyone for fear of making them targets, and she knows what he’s doing. She’s done the psychology training, the kidnap training, the criminology courses, the lot. But she’s discovering that academic awareness of the strategies of bad men doesn’t make much difference from the inside, when you’re the one tangled in their webs. 

He’s intent on her face, studying all the changes and emotions, the absence and presence of light, like she’s a baroque painting come to life.

“I did manage to find out a few things. I have many old contacts, and I’ve got a satellite phone. I know that you were an FBI agent in Arizona. Special Weapons and Tactics team. Explains some of the carnage you’ve managed to cause here. You’ve got some skills in destruction, haven’t you? A bruiser.”

He looks pleased with the knowledge he holds, with the expression on her face, and carries on with something like tarnished joy on his face.

“Then you dropped off the face of the earth, and re-emerged in my chair with a different name. This I know. But it’s the blood I want. The why. Why you left Arizona and changed your name. Why you have those eyes…” 

He gets closer to her, almost leaning across into her seat, into her. She thinks she can feel his breaths on her cheek. Her own are short, almost little pants, and she wonders if she might hyperventilate.

“You know, you are gawky and plain. But your eyes…I love your eyes. Wounded and bare and full of things for me to pull out. That’s all I ever want.”

She wants to pull back, press herself against the driver’s door, get away from him. But she can’t. There is something so zealous and burning hot about him, this need for pain blooming in the air around him, irresistible, horrific, a sucking malevolent force, and she has to find a way to use it for herself, to...

Her radio crackles to life on her hip. She jumps, and John pulls back a fraction.

“Deputy? Jenny? You there?”

It’s Mary May. 

“Jenny? Come in. We could do with some help back in Holland Valley.”

John smirks, showing exaggerated faux-interest and surprise in Mary May’s next words, eyebrows waggling, an expansive, convoluted gesture towards the radio.

“John Seed took back Fall’s End. We took heavy damage, Dep. We could do with you back here.”

Wordlessly Kate turns off the radio, throws it over her shoulder into the backseat. Turns to John. 

“You fucker,” she hisses. “I’m playing along, but you still hurt them.”

“I never said anything about active resistance, Kate, and resist they did. Foolish sheep.”

“That’s semantics, and you damn well…” 

John’s smile is full of uncontained delight, ignoring her rage, interrupting like it’s a trifle.

“Jenny”? You haven’t told them your real name? Am I the only one to know? Oh, you.”

She does recoil now, and damn showing him weakness. He devours it, invades her space again, reaches across and pulls her towards him. The gear stick is digging uncomfortably into her side and she fights to stay still. If she starts struggling against him she will panic entirely in the face of this tangle of ugliness he makes her feel. And that could be her undoing.

Because he is looking that way. Like he is coming undone just a little bit, like the threads that are holding him together are unravelling. Yes, this monster of society and Joseph’s creation is developing a will of its own, is pushing from the inside against the stitches of weak steel and dogma holding it together. Developing a real taste, no, an addiction, for just the sort of nourishment he needs, and Frankenstein will soon lose control, his creature running amok amongst rolling hills and the smells of pines and blood and gunpowder.

And she, she caught in between, John’s teeth sharp in her flesh. And he looks at her like he knows so very many things, like he can hear the quiet but clear voice inside of her wondering how she can use him right back, take some of what he is and become a wolf.

People used to think that wolves were monsters. 

She breathes deeply, and realises she doesn’t know if it’s John or Alejandro she wants to show, to which one of them she wants to say look, look! You underestimated me, I’m dangerous too! 

She laughs drily, and at his politely enquiring look she deflects by giving him something else.

“I used to fight the Mexican cartels. I used to think that nothing was more evil. That nothing was worse. Now I kind of miss it. At least it was familiar.”

He smiles a little. 

“Oh Kate,” he says and chucks her gently under her chin, and when she shies away with awful memories his hand travels up her throat and into her hair, grabbing it. Keeping her still for him. She’s halfway across the console, halfway into his lap. “Only boring people think that the safest devil is the one you know.”

“Are we done here?” she asks even as she knows for certain it’s in vain. Not yet. Oh, not yet.

“Not quite,” he says, sure enough. “I still want my pound of flesh. Still want my piece of your real hurt.” He shifts, looking horrifically eager. “Tell me more about your sicario. Tell me of the ways he damaged you.”

She tries to pull away, but he won’t allow it, holds her firm with his grip on her hair. His other hand is on her wrist. Her pulse, she realises, he’s got his tattooed fingers on her pulse.

She thinks of the ways Alejandro cut into her. You look like a little girl when you’re scared. His gun under her chin, his calloused fingers wiping away her tears as he forced her to sign away all her principles at once. You’re not a wolf.

You remind me of someone very special to me.

“I think,” she begins slowly, then stutters, stops. Tries again. “I think one of the things that hurts the most is that even though maybe he felt protective of me, looked out for me...he wouldn’t hesitate to kill me.”

John looks like he understands that, and she wants to claw his eyes out for it.

“Actually, no,” she amends, “that isn’t what hurts the most. What hurts the most is that he changed me totally, irrevocably. Sent me spinning way off course. But I doubt he can even remember me now. That hurts the most. He upended my entire life. I was barely a blip on his.”

She’s proud of how she’s almost not crying, and John sighs, looking blissful, almost post-coital. His tongue flicks out to wet his lips, and he bares his teeth.

“My god,” he says. “Your eyes. Your eyes. They are so heavy and full. They are exquisite.” He pulls her by her hair, even closer, far too close.  “I like this,” he murmurs. “I like how you’ll soon have no one but me.”

Then he kisses her, and it’s meant as a power move, that kiss, a way to assert control, vicious and hard and tongue and teeth. He kisses her like he means to suck everything true out of her, her past, her present, her future too.

...and she sits stock still and lets him, because he’s right.

Then, when he’s distracted, pupils swollen with avarice, breaths heavy with want, she opens the car door and runs again, because he has no right being right.

Chapter Text

Chapter 4: Her embrace was an immense press to print him into her bones

It’s hell. 

It’s nine circles and more, all wrapped about her, tying her feet together, her arms, her wrists. Trapping her forever among raising and falling wails of agony and despair.

She’s never been one for poetry and old classics. Sonnets, stanzas, Shakespeare, Byron, Keats. Dante and his Heaven and Hell and Innocence and Experience. But here, now, with nothing to do but stare at her own death through iron bars, she obsesses over remembering all of the fucking circles.

Limbo. Gluttony. Greed. Lust. Wrath. Treachery. Fraud? Heresy?  No. Wrath. Treachery. Lust. Violence? Glutt...No.

She can never remember all nine at a time, and certainly not in order, but the ones she can recall the clearest correspond to words tattooed on John Seed’s hand and she clings to that. To the words, and to all the things carelessly, haphazardly blended into the blue hues of his irises. Blue turns to Alejandro’s hazel then back again, but she doesn’t let go, holds onto the memories of his eyes while she wonders if she’ll die of hunger or thirst or exposure. Or, maybe, by having her throat ripped out by one of the horrifically altered wolves patrolling the walkways between the cages.

She would laugh if she had any saliva left in her mouth. Fucking wolves. It always comes back to wolves. Alejandro a wolf. John a wolf. And his brother...

She had thought she could withstand situations like this. Hell, she’d gone through regular training and workshops on what to do and how to act if ever captured and tortured. 

All of that cold logic and dry instruction vaporized into the sweltering air around day three or four.

Turns out you are reduced to nothing without food and water, literally and figuratively. 

During the day the bars of her cage are too hot to touch, at night too cold. At the blue hour they are just right, and she soothes her swollen, tender face against them and thinks again of John’s eyes, because they are the same colour as that precipice between night and day. His eyes become tangled with blue hour in her mind, with dawn and dusk, and with relief too, even though she knows it’s tainted. He had put her in a prison as well, of course, but a large one where she had options and choices within the barbed wire of his parameters. Wind in her hair. He allowed her a certain freedom, and she used it to run straight into Jacob Seed.

After their meeting in the parking lot of Lorna’s she had intended to heed Mary May’s call for help. But she never reached Fall’s End. On her way, she briefly crossed into the Whitetails and that, as they say, was that.

Bliss darts burn like a sonofabitch. Even now, with other pains more acutely at the fore, she will reach up and scratch at the entry wound in her shoulder whenever she feels strong enough. 

So not that often then. 

She considers Jacob. A hulking man, made larger from below, from the ground where she sits slumped. Scarred and pockmarked, hair and beard like old copper coins and an ideology so much more fucked up than his little brother’s manic and unhinged one. Broad of chest and shoulder, limber of wrist when he wields his knife or sniper rifle, and reeking of so much feral energy that she has to fight herself not to bare her jugular at him whenever he strolls past her cage.

No wonder this man holds his monster wolves in such thrall. He is most certainly a wolf himself, and sometimes, when dusk is giving way to the inky blue of almost-night, she thinks it’s Alejandro stalking the grounds of St. Francis. Same build, same slow, sure movements, same brute lethality.

She’s wishing for John’s jerkier quicksilver turns. 

Bigger cages and all that. A whole county.

Once she comes close, so incredibly, awfully close, to calling out to Jacob on one of his irregular passes in front of the cages. To clutch the bars and press her face so hard to them as to leave imprints and shout don’t do this - I’m your brother’s! He won’t like it! 

But she doesn’t, because she thinks no one else knows of John’s little game. Jacob calls her only Deputy, and so did Faith when they probably really met, and she thinks that her name, her real name, Kate, is only for John. And so even though she suffers somewhere around the ninth circle, she keeps quiet and doesn’t mention John at all.

She can’t consider why.

The days creep by, and she is getting weaker and weaker. And then there are the trials.

Fucking trials.

She thought she would have a decent chance of running them considering her background. Kicking down doors, charging through buildings and taking people out and down kinda being her livelihood. But no. She barely scrapes through, more injuries for every turn, grazing bullet wounds, enough punches to have her brains sloshing in her skull. Turns out it’s easy to be a thumper when she’s at peak physical condition, not so much when she’s reduced to a starving creature eating raw meat out of Jacob Seed’s hand. At least those few times he deems her efforts acceptable. Soon, she thinks, she’ll prostrate in the dirt before him and attempt to lick the corners of his mouth for more scraps. 

She doesn’t even have energy left to lament the deplorable condition of Staci, the wisecracking, easy-going guy who had done his best to welcome her to her new life, even though he knew nothing about her when she arrived. Still doesn’t.

Only John knows something of who she is and was.

Oh, and then Joseph comes, and tells her about his daughter, and the revulsion she feels is of a new shape, a sickly green aura to it, this disgust. And she thinks of Alejandro spending his hollow life trying to avenge his little girl while Joseph casually suffocated his to placate a god that doesn’t exist, and she vomits in the dust of the cage. Right in front of the mad prophet himself. 

She can ill afford to throw up, she thinks, and desperately wishes that Joseph would put his fucking aviators back on, because his naked gaze burns worse than the bile.

She keeps feeling like she’s disappearing, which is ironic really, considering she is firmly behind bars. But she holds onto blue hour, always blue, and she thinks that if she makes it out of Jacob’s trials alive she will find John again and tell him some truths.

Can you believe it, John? You’re not the worst thing in this place, how about that?

By day twelve she is starting to think that she’s dead. Or at least she is certain that she is no longer completely alive, and she’s angry but not enough to fight it.

She doesn’t protest when they tear her out of her cage for another trial.

Fuck everything, she’s dead anyway.

She wakes atop a pile of corpses, and she thinks that she’s most definitely not alive. She can’t feel herself breathing.

She passes out again.

Next time there she jerks into consciousness there is no denying that she lives, she can feel the flies crawling all over her, can smell decaying meat and coagulated blood and she must move, get away from here. She thought she had been in hell, but she had been stupid, because that wasn’t it, this is. Sprawled on top of countless bodies like the princess and the pea, and she starts crawling on her elbows, and she doesn’t recognise the noises she’s making, those toneless, gutural whimpers. Are they from her?

She eventually clears the pile, and clutching trees she manages to stand, move forward. Step by step, and the sun comes up, urging her on, daylight becoming something beautiful and sacramental.

More steps. She falls, but she stands again, every time.

She comes to a clearing. She doesn’t know where she is, if she’s still in the Whitetails, but it doesn’t matter. 

The clearing is shaded by spruce and firs, sun beams filtering down at an angle. There’s a little stream here, and flowers growing through an intricate lattice of moss and roots. Wormwood, nightshade, henbane.

It is more beautiful than it has any right to be, she thinks, and sinks onto the ground, before she rips her bloodied, dirty clothes off. She crawls into the water, and drinks until she can’t breathe and washes herself at the same time, and to hell with everything because she’s never felt anything as pure as this, she could swear it. She scrubs her skin and scalp with sand from the bottom of the stream because nothing has ever felt more important, nothing.

Nothing.

Then she crawls back onto the soft green bracken and the August day is warm enough and humid enough that she falls asleep like that, naked and with wet hair.

When she comes to it is night again and her head is in Faith Seed’s lap.

She doesn’t open her eyes, because that would make this real, but she can hear Faith humming, can feel small fingers smoothing through her hair. It’s dry now, and she thinks that maybe the fire she can feel nearby might have something to do with that.

She hadn’t built or lit a fire before passing out amongst the lady ferns.

“Faith?” she asks, still with her eyes closed.

“Hello again, Deputy,” comes the answer, words dressed in a laugh of tinkling bells and razor blades. Kate’s cheek is resting against a denim clad thigh, and she thinks that it’s the maybe-real Faith that is here with her.

“I happened on you sleeping, Deputy, and took pity. What did my big brother do to you, hmmm?” A soft hand tickles gently along the jagged canyons of Kate’s ribs, protruding uncomfortably against her skin. “You’re skin and bones.” The hand travels onward, and sharp nails dig innocently into the steep angle of her hip before sliding down her thigh. Then back up into her hair, combing delicately through the snarls and tangles, smoothing it against her upturned cheek. 

It’s nice, Kate thinks, and still doesn’t open her eyes. Daren’t. Just a second more, just a second of feeling safe and warm and not scared and pretending this is something else.

But it’s impossible to ignore the unease, the sense of danger, the creeping dread. So she opens her eyes, lifts her head from Faith’s lap and sits up. They are both cross legged opposite each other, far too near, and Kate wishes she wasn’t naked. She looks around for her clothes, prepared to step into them even as covered in blood and viscera and shit and piss as they are, but Faith smiles.

“Threw them on the fire.” 

Faith is wearing jeans and an old flannel shirt tied at the waist and a messy ponytail, and Kate is pretty sure she can see flowers that aren’t there in her hair. 

“What are you doing here?”

Faith tilts her head, looking girlish and adorable. She’s started gnawing on her cuticles, Kate sees, now when there are no nails left to chew. They are frazzled and raw.

“Wanted to make sure you wouldn’t just down and die after my brother’s cages. That would be pretty inconvenient, and I’d rather not see it happen.” 

She laughs a laugh that tinkles false, then pats an honest to god wicker picnic basket sitting next to her on the ground, opens the lid and shows off what’s inside. Fruits gleaming like jewels. Bread. Cheese.

Kate nearly whimpers at the sight, so hungry, so incredibly, painfully hungry, but she also knows that she’ll never ever take food or drink from Faith Seed.

She shakes her head no thanks.

“Oh poo,” trills Faith, “and my Angels prepared it so carefully for you too! They’d be disappointed if they could feel anything.”

Hearing that the Angels have touched the food, made it for her, makes Kate even more determined not to eat any of it. But Faith mentioning her Angels make Kate latch on to something she had said when last they met.

“Are they truly gone?” she whispers. “Is it true what you say, that they aren’t here any longer, that they don’t know what’s happening to them?”

Faith stills.

“No,” she says, her smile a cruel grimace, her eyes brimming with something like pain, and for a second Kate sees someone else behind, sees the shadow of another being. 

“I lied. They are still there. But behind, locked away. And they can’t break through and come back to themselves, no matter what they do. But they….they know everything.”

Kate gags and retches. She had thought little girls thrown in acid were the most heinous of things, but Faith Seed shows her that she’s been unforgivably naive.

“How can you?” she bites out. “How can you do that to human beings?”

Faith tuts at her.

“I was made that way, Deputy. I can’t go against my nature. I’m doing what he created me to do.”

Kate wipes at her forehead, rubs her eyes, trying to vanquish this new vision of hell that is burning inside her head.

Faith studies her, scoots a little closer. Their knees are touching. 

“You know, sometimes I see truth in the Bliss. Sometimes I see you.”

Faith reaches out and runs her hands up to her throat, exactly where Ted tried to squeeze her life out of her, and presses gently.

“We will use you, Deputy. We will bleed you dry. Use us back.”

She leans forward, and her hands tighten around Kate’s throat, and she can feel Faith’s breath brushing her lips.

“My brother is having fun excavating you, I’m sure. Make sure you get something too.”

There are queer spirals in Kate’s head, wind tunnels and everything that is happening and has happened and will happen is swooping and falling heedlessly, senselessly. There is now way she can ever pick through it all and see.

“And you?” she rasps, sitting here in this beautiful place with Faith Seed’s hands around her throat. 

“Oh, I intend on using you, Deputy. You see, you will help me.” She smiles, and Kate is sure she can see her cranium clean through her skin. “But not just yet.”

Then she kisses Kate on her forehead and there’s a smell of rotting lilies and cherry bubblegum about her. 

“I’ll see you soon,” she giggles, and stands, and moves onto the darkness beyond the fire. Gone. Just like that.

She leaves the basket behind. Kate doesn’t touch it.

She loots some old men’s clothes and a few cans of beef stew from an abandoned cabin. Then she goes back to Holland Valley, fretful, trying to hold her skin together, leaking nightmares in broad daylight.

She lies low for a couple of days in yet another cabin, decorated with blood stains and cult graffiti. She licks her wounds, tries to regain some strength, some equilibrium, but it’s tricky when trapped in a violent parallel universe like this one. She tries to sleep but can’t unless it’s in fits and starts, not deep enough to dream. It occurs to her that since she arrived here the only true rest she’s had has been unconsciousness. 

Meeting Grace helps. Taking pot shots from a fucking clock tower ironically brings her back from the brink of ugly hued insanity. It’s a simple, tangible task, isn’t it, one with a beginning and an end. Clear, obvious results, and the quiet place she goes to when bad guys shoot at her and she shoots back. 

Black and white, good and bad. Like life before she met Matt Graver and Alejandro Gillick.

She likes Grace. Steady and forthright, warm underneath the pricklishness. And the love for this place, this sleepy, tucked-away world beyond the mountains, is etched as deep in Grace’s skin and bones as in everyone else around here. Such love. She understands why people have taken up arms, why they fight back.

She wishes she could feel something of that too.

She doesn’t go with Grace after. She stays in the old church. She likes the light tumbling in through the large windows. She likes the dusty wooden floors and the white simple walls and the air all around her. And the coffee machine in the office still works, there are stale cookies in the pantry, and some clean t-shirts saying “Sing For Jesus!” in a box in one of the cupboards. 

Now when she’s alone again Faith’s words ring in her head 

(“we will bleed you dry. use you. use us right back.”)

and she needs a lot of space for those words so that they don’t get too close. So she doesn’t have to look at them and think about them, those words that are as poisonous as Bliss.

She pours some water into the baptismal font, drags it out onto the middle of the floor, pulls off her reeking, too-big shirt, sinks to her knees. Rips pieces from an old linen tablecloth she found and uses them for wash cloths. Soothes her temples with the cool water, her neck, her chest. 

Behind her she hears the big doors open, but she doesn’t turn around.

“You’re proving disappointingly easy to catch, Kate,” he says from behind her. “I honestly didn’t think you would still be here.”

She doesn’t answer, and she doesn’t turn around. She dips the washcloth in the font again, wrings it out, and sweeps under her arms, down her sides. She hears his approach, his sure steps up the aisle of this old church, like he’s got any kind of business in a holy place. He stops right behind her. She can almost feel the warmth of his legs against her naked back.

“I’d count the bodies out there, but what’s the point? You and the sniper did quite the job.”

She breathes deeply, wrings out the washcloth over her chest, feels the cool water running between her breasts. Is reminded of the time in his bunker, when it had been sour sweat instead. 

This is better.

“It felt good,” she answers quietly. Her voice is husky, raw. “Effortless. It’s what I’m trained to do. It’s what I know.”

She hears him step a little closer to her. She can feel his jeans brush her lower back just above her waistband. And she can feel his eyes on the words on her back, making them itch.

“It’s healed nicely,” he says.

She shakes her head a little.

“A waste of a dramatic statement though, don’t you think? You found out my name and who I am pretty quickly, after all. You could have saved yourself the bother. Or written something else.”

With his low chuckle she lifts her arms over her head and squeezes the washcloth. Feels the water run over her hair, down across her face. She closes her eyes, and senses him move around her. When she opens them again he’s opposite her, and sinks down on his knees on the other side of the font.

What she’s been waiting for.

With the fluid grace of old training and muscle memory she drops the washcloth and reaches under the discarded old shirt next to her, pulls her gun out from underneath it, grasps it with both hands and brings the barrel up to his forehead. Holds the gun steady, and cocks it.

He looks unsurprised, even smiles at her. And she, she wants to pull the trigger. She does. Her whole body shakes with the need to just let the bullet explode into his brain and be done with it.

He remains motionless, regards her steadily

“Go on,” he says. “Do it then.”

She wants to. She wants to shoot him point blank, but she knows even as she squeezes the trigger ever harder that she will not. Not now. It's not time.

He studies the shapes that failure paints on her face, decides to goad her further.

“I thought you said you’d kill me when you’re free.”

“I did,” she whispers. “I did say that. But I’m not free yet, am I.”

He laughs with her cold steel still firmly against the bones of his skull.

“No,” he agrees. “No you are not.”

Distantly she wonders what would have happened if she had shot Alejandro that day. Would she even be here?

“One day I will,” she says, and her voice is a promise as holy as anything he has ever thought he believed. “I will.”

He smiles, and it’s a sting of venom and delight and a little pride.

“You’ve said that before, and I believe you. But until then…”

And he reaches up and pushes the barrel away and down. And she lets him. Because right now he is the only one who knows her, who she is. If he disappeared, would she disappear too? And she takes in his eyes, crinkled at the corners with glee, and thinks of how blue hour had sustained her through her time in Jacob’s cage.

His gaze travels from her face down over her bared breasts and up again, his pupils blown so wide and she knows he wants another sharp little piece of her pain, wants to drag it up though her oesophagus until she vomits blood.

She throws the gun back on top of the dirty shirt, and slumps a little as she thinks that sure, it might make her boring, but right now he’s such a familiar devil and she feels almost safe.

“Have at it,” she murmurs.

His eyes are hooded, lazy, where he sits on his knees opposite her.

“The man who hurt you so much that you don’t want to be touched, kissed…who was he? What did he do?”

She looks up and out of the window as she answers. Remembers.

“He was a bought cop. The cartels had him in their pocket. They sent him to find out what I knew. We were in a bar.” She laughs tonelessly. “A fucking stupid cowboy bar. Country songs and beer. We danced. It was nice.” 

She can feel her voice about to break, just crack in two, and she struggles to keep it whole. She doesn’t know why. She’s already so incredibly vulnerable before him. 

“We went back to my place. Made out. It felt so good. It felt so good to do something normal after the time I’d had. I wanted to fuck him.”

John’s attention is absolute, oh how he revels in this, she thinks, how he flourishes and extends outwards, the lines of him looking to envelope the lines of her and obliterate.

“But then I made him. He was sloppy and I made him. And it turned real ugly. It ended with me on the floor. He was strangling me. I was losing consciousness. Dying. But Ale…” She cuts herself off, can’t bring herself to speak his name out loud. “The sicario. I looked up and there he was, and the light made a halo around his head.” Her laugh is a stuttered sob. “Biggest lie there ever was. Anyway. They, the fucking task force, the spooks, they had figured I would be a target and followed me, hoping I would draw someone out. And I did, didn’t I, and they got someone to torture information out of, and I got to live.”

She looks at him squarely then. He is still quiet, but he burns, he burns white hot with rapacity.

“Now I always feel Ted’s hands around my neck. Always.”

”Delicious,” John sighs, and her hands shake on her lap.

Everything quiets down. There is no birdsong coming through the open windows, no wind in the trees outside. There is only their breaths aligning, there is only his eyes on her.

There is only Faith’s voice in her head.

She’s surprised that he doesn’t reach for her, that he stays still. She knows that he wants to grab her and just crush her, grind her into a fine powder, dilute her in the washing water and gulp her down as a tonic against the flames that burn him from the inside. She knows that. But he doesn’t move, and she thinks that he is waiting to see what she will do.

So she moves. She reaches over the baptismal font, and as he stands high up on his knees she unclasps his belt buckle. He strains hard against the denim of his jeans, and his breaths grow more shallow with her touch. She pulls the smooth, worn leather from the belt hoops and there is nothing blue left in his eyes. 

Nothing.

She loops the belt around her neck, pulls it through the buckle again, then offers him the end. He accepts it far too greedily and pulls it taut against her throat. His eyes are indescribable when he takes in the gaudy buckle against her windpipe, and she knows there is a real chance he’ll pull too hard, take it too far.

Somehow that feels amazing.

She keeps her hands on her thighs, uses only her voice to stop him when he reaches towards her breasts. 

“Touch yourself, not me.”

He chokes out a laugh but stops trying to touch her, instead pulls the belt tighter, just enough that she’s struggling a little to breathe. Then he uses his free hand to tug down his zipper and pull out his cock. He palms himself, then starts stroking immediately, long sure pulls with his tattooed hand, and she can’t stop looking.

It's somehow ugly and beautiful at the same time, his white knuckles along the lenght of him, the black ink of his seven sins against his flushed and swollen skin. He handles himself harshly, almost violently, and she shifts a little where she sits, little sighs managing to creep out between her lips.

He’s not letting go of her either, is fixed on her face, on her heavy eyes, her lips, her breasts. He pulls at the belt again, and when her breaths turn louds and rasping his hand speeds up. He bucks his hips to chase more friction, and she sinks into the sound of skin on skin, the rumble growing deep in his chest. When she glances down as far as her noose will allow she sees that her heart beats so hard that her left breast vibrates wildly, shaking droplets of water from her skin. He’s looking too, and his breaths grow harsher, his hand goes ever faster.

“More,” she bites out, and he groans, pulls at the belt so hard that she can hear her own heartbeats rush in her ears. Her vision swims and her brain goes peculiarly, blessedly clear, sudden silence after deafening noise. It's blissful, it's addictive, she chases it inside her head, this quiet space brought forth by having her air taken away and seeing him bring himself off.

And she’s careful to keep her hands in her lap. He rules whether she breathes or not, and she rules him by giving him the freedom.

Tendons stand out on his neck now, his strokes grow more irregular and she can tell he’s close.

“Harder,” she wheezes. He obeys, yanks the belt so hard she falls forward, almost passes out with the rush and the release, and he comes with that, long spurts over himself, the font, her. He growls with it, head thrown back, teeth bared, an animal sound unlike anything she’s ever heard from him before, wild and wanton and insane.

She supports herself on her hands against the floor, feels the belt loosen, and she thinks that she will always feel his buckle against her throat now, and that is better, so much better, than the hands of a corrupt cop.

John tucks himself away, his chest heaving under the shirt. He wipes his hand on his jeans, then crouches down again so he can look at her properly, see what he’s done to her, see what she’s done to herself.

She can smell his release in her hair.

“Kate. You’re using me, aren’t you?” he says calmly. “You’re using me for exorcism.”

There is no accusation in his voice, but she huffs a strangled laugh, shakes her head. 

“Isn’t that precisely what you’re here for, you fucking hypocrite? “Spill out on the floor, swim through an ocean of pain”?” she mocks, her voice wispy and pained, forced through a newly bruised throat. “You should be happy. I’m doing exactly what you want me to do. You’re having me, piece by piece. And if I get to slay some demons in the bargain, well, I’d call that a fair fucking trade.”

He stands, and now he touches her. He takes her hand, helps her to her feet, then pulls her towards him. Her bare nipples brush against the silk of his shirt, and she shivers. He sweeps her hair to the side and leans in, sets his mouth to her ear, and her naked toes curl against the rough wooden floor with his voice.

“My brothers and my sister, they can’t have you. Do you understand? All that pain inside of you, it’s only for me. They wouldn’t know what to do with it, they would waste it. Only I know. Only I.” He shakes her. “Do you understand?” he asks again.

“Oh, aren’t you just the gourmand,” she rasps, then nods. “I do. I understand.”

“Good,” he sighs, then releases her, takes a step back. “Go now. My people will come soon to collect the bodies outside. You should be away from here by then.”

She’s disappointed. She would have liked to stay in this place a little longer, drift in almost-sleep safe and sound up in the bell tower, enjoy the light and the space and the quiet. But she heeds him. She pulls on one of the clean t-shirts she found, and she slinks out the backdoor, disappearing into the dappled dusk of the woods behind the church.

She feels…not good, no. But better.

Chapter Text

Chapter 5: his smiles were the garrets of a fairy palace

She tries to find Faith but she can’t.

Well. She finds apparitions of Faith and plenty of them, but not what she has begun to think of as the real Faith. The girl with the messy hair and worn jeans and band tees. Of course it occurs to her that it might be a trick, that there is no such thing as a real Faith. Or that the real Faith is simply the twisted siren by Joseph’s side.

Either way, she’s determined to find out. If nothing else it’ll partly divert her mind from what had happened between John and her at the old church. She can still remember it, as clear as if it had taken place just a minute ago. The rush of silence, so brash and real as to be almost tactile. The delicate, crude balance between power and a lack of it. She wonders who had walked away feeling the most victorious, John or her?

Probably John, she decides. Then she decides not to think of him anymore, before she inevitably does anyway. She wonders at the thoroughness with which he has become such part of her mind, uncomfortably nestled in there, barbed and vicious.

Roaming the Henbane is a good diversion though, whether she finds the version of Faith that she wants to find or not. She uncovers atrocities at every turn. Blood soaked, bullet ridden homes. Teddy bears and tiny, delicate shoes trampled into the dirt. Bodies strung up from bridges and signs, draped in barbed wire and Bliss flowers. Bloated animal carcasses stewing in the sun. Spectres and wraiths, apparitions and hallucinations. The region is rife with it all, and her mind is exhausted with abhorrence, at risk of becoming almost entirely numb for protection. 

She doesn’t want that.

Worst of all though, are the Angels. Now when she knows that they are of trapped consciousness and awareness, locked inside themselves, killing them becomes something deeply corrupted. Wrong, disgusting, depraved. But unavoidable, because they keep coming for her, mindless and deadly, and she’s got no choice but to kill them.

She really, really needs to find Faith. A Faith that doesn’t disappear between her fingers like tainted fairy dust, a Faith that doesn’t turn into a bull elk or a wolverine or a fucking vicious turkey.

Jesus fuck, this place.

She finds other things too. Scrunched up, torn notes. Voice messages. Little hints here and there, fragments of a picture that is frustratingly shattered and out of reach. Perhaps part of a larger piece of hallucination, perhaps not. Perhaps true, perhaps false.

But the implications make her go cold even in the balmy August heat.

Then she gets herself cornered, much like the rookie she’s pretending to be.

She’s investigating an old garage, scrounging for spares and any loot she can find, when she hears the doors behind her slam shut, throwing the space into a murky dusk.

“Deputy.”

She spins around with her gun drawn, but she recognises that rough voice, of course she does, and she already knows what she will find.

Jacob Seed, leaning against the closed doors, ankles crossed, arms folded in front of him. She catalogues him quickly, notes his ever-present knife strapped to his thigh, the rifle slung over his shoulder. The quiet confidence displayed in having precisely none of those weapons at the ready, relaxed as he’s looking down at her through half lidded eyes. But then again, he holds something clenched in his fist more deadly than knife and rifle combined. 

Of course, she thinks bitterly without once wavering with the gun, he’s got her nice and boxed up.

“Why are you in the Henbane?” is her first question, inconsequential in the grand scheme. “I thought your little family of misfits didn’t encroach on each other’s territories.” 

He ignores the question.

“I was surprised to hear of your good health, girl. You were thrown on the kill pile after your last abysmal trial.”

“Yeah, well. I crawled it off,” she snarls, tightening her grip on the gun.

“So I see. Perhaps there is more life in you than I thought.”

He straightens up, makes to push off the door, and she tightens her grip on the gun.

“Get any closer and I’ll shoot. Think you can open that fucking box quicker than I can squeeze off a bullet?”

He huffs out a cold laugh, but stays where he is.

“You shoot me, and the box will open when I fall, play a little tune,” he rumbles, and casually tosses it from hand to hand. “Then where will you be, Deputy? Huh?”

She considers shooting it out of the air as it sails from one of his hands to the other, but decides that as far as calculated risks go, it’s a bad one.

Very bad.

“What do you want, Jacob?”

His eyes are cold and speculating, but his smile is playing at friendly, and she thinks of the stories he told her in the cage. Thinks of them and shivers violently.

“I wanted to take another look at you. My little brother seems to think you’re his. He implied that I should avoid putting you in my cages. I wanted to see what’s so special about you.”

He tilts his head, pretends to seriously consider her.

“But I don’t think there’s anything about you. Anyone can kill grunts and blow things up. You’re just a small town deputy with decent aim and a bit of luck.”

Somewhere in the background there is relief over John not sharing any of her secrets with his siblings, relief over how jealously he guards her, but rage is greater. All consuming. Rage over being put down, belittled, dismissed. 

Again.

“I can’t kill you right now, but I will. Soon. You’re dead, Jacob Seed, your body just hasn’t caught up yet.”

She shakes with wrath, and she stutters with how hard her teeth are clenched, but he picks up on what she says just fine.

He stands up straighter, tall and broad, crowds her from across the room. And in the semi dark she thinks of another garage, a police car full of drugs, Alejandro casually and efficiently putting two bullets in her Kevlar vest

(“Don't ever point your gun at me again”)

and she wants to kill him so much she starts crying with it, the desire for death a sticky, viscous coating on her tongue.

He seems to enjoy her tears juxtaposed with her murder lust, his face lights up and his smile is genuine. Bright blue and copper and a flash of straight teeth.

“I look forward to you trying, Deputy. Stay away from my brother.”

And he opens the door and leaves, and she doesn’t shoot him in the back because he will always hold the music box over her.

And because shooting someone in the back isn’t...it isn’t...

Fuck. Fuck. 

Then she stumbles onto the Horned Serpents cave.

And how she regrets going down there.

The bodies and the skeletons, casually discarded. The lethal water. The cruelty and the lazy evil as a haze hovering over the surface. 

And then...and then a white dress floating like a ghost on the water, a careless, pathetic billowing, a swan with a broken neck. A white dress just like…

Oh god. 

Her mind is lurching and hurling at the depth of it all. She already knew that the cult stands unflinching in the face of casual atrocities. Knew that they torture and kill and bend wills. But this...this somehow takes it a notch further. This makes bile pool in her mouth.

She needs to get help. She needs to get some help from the outside. This is beyond and above her, she is one person with a ragtag bunch of locals playing at a resistance movement. 

She knows from bitter experience that it’s impossible to get out of Hope, but remembers John telling her that he’s got a satellite phone. The question is whether down the bunker or at the ranch. 

She hopes it’s the ranch. And she hopes Graver’s still got the same cell number.

She steals one of the beat-up white cult trucks and heads back to Holland Valley.

Always back to Holland Valley.

She spends the best part of a day crouched in a tall tatch of toadflax outside John’s ranch, a treeline of pines at her back should she need to turn and run. She sees no sign of John, but the guards form a tight line around the perimeter. It’s not until early evening and a change of guards when she finally gets an opening long enough to slip through. 

She climbs from a lower level side roof onto the wrap-around balcony, and from there she slips through an unlocked door into a long corridor. The second interior door she opens reveals what can only be the master bedroom. She gives it just a cursory scan, establishing that it’s empty, before she closes the door and opens the next. 

Office. 

Floor to ceiling bookshelves, an enormous map over Hope County taking up one wall and, in front of a large casement window overlooking the mountains, stands a desk of burnished oak. Ring binders, files, and piles of papers speak of an existence without digital aids, but sitting atop a few leather bound books sits what is unmistakably a satellite phone. 

“Thank fuck,” she whispers and hurries across the floor, sinks into the wheeled office chair in front of the desk. She doesn’t know if the guards are as zealous about patrolling the inside of the house as the outside perimeter, but she knows she won’t have long. 

She taps out the number she learned by heart during those fucked up days dancing on the Arizona Mexico border, then listens as the signals ring out. Leg bouncing, fingers rattling against the gleaming surface of the desk. 

Pick up, you sonofabitch. Pick. Up.

Eventually, just as she’s about to hang up only to ring straight out again, comes the deep baritone of the man partly responsible for the way her life broke apart.

“Who’s this?”

“Graver? That you?”

He recognises her just on her voice, and she is surprised, almost stunned. She would have thought that he erased her from his mind just as soon as she stopped being useful to him.

“Kate Macer? How’s that Deputy Bumpkin gig I got you? Bored already, kid? Well in that case I…”

Kid. He calls her kid even though she’s a divorcee in her thirties and was a successful FBI agent up until she met him. Even as she rolls her eyes her hand tightens on the phone, frustration and anxiety making it shake. 

“Shut the fuck up, and listen to me. You and your guys need to haul ass over to Montana. There’s been a take-over. You need to…”

“Bit busy here too, sweets. Shit’s going down all over. Whole fucking world’s on the brink of…”

The phone is tugged out of her hand.

“Brazen, Kate. Very brazen.”

She spins the chair around, and is only vaguely surprised to see John standing there, holding the phone and being her familiar devil. He raises a brow at her, and she wonders if he had been at home all this time, if he’d seen her staking out the place, if he had simply allowed her to get this far for shits and giggles.

“I’m supposed to chase you, you know, not the other way around.”

She doesn’t answer, and she can hear Graver’s voice, tinny and not ever near enough to help.

“Macer? You there? Macer, what’s going on?”

John smiles down at her, a big, toothy, terrifying smile, then casually presses the phone between ear and shoulder and gestures at her with one hand to stay put in the office chair.

“Afraid Kate is otherwise engaged,” he says and hangs up, throws the phone back onto the desk.

She sighs a little, wonders if the short time she had talking to Graver would be enough to galvanise the man, make him curious enough to pull a few strings, come look. Probably not, she decides, and rests her head back against the chair, eyes on John. He wears a black, short sleeved tee, his hair is messy and he’s got a gun tucked into the waistband of his jeans. He’s making no move towards it, but she stays still, keeping her hands where he can see them. She doesn’t think he will draw it, and if he did she doesn’t think he would shoot to kill. He’s having too much fun with her, but she wouldn’t put it past him to put a slug in her kneecap to score a cheap point. Slow her down as a bonus.

She makes no move towards her own weapons. They went past all that, she knows, back at the church. He knows too, because he doesn’t ask her to remove them, hand them over. Lets her keep every single one.  

“Well,” John says, “that was pretty naughty.”

She shrugs a little.

“It would be stupid of me not to try, right?” 

“Absolutely,” he agrees politely.

She studies him, sinks deeper in the chair, and realises that she’s actually resting, right in front of him. She’s worn to the bone and he, he’s her safest enemy in this place, and his eyes are blue hour. 

Hardly strange that she’s exhausted. She’s in a pretty terrible shape. Still not recovered from her stint in Jacob’s cages, and she can’t remember the last time she was eyeball to eyeball with a square meal. And then there is the time she spent in the Henbane, exposing herself to all the damaging properties of Bliss.

He deftly picks up on her thoughts, holding them hard in his tattooed hand. 

“You look tired, Kate.”

“Well, I don’t sleep,” she says honestly, half wondering if one small fragment of truth, of confession, might be enough to sate him.

He sits himself down opposite her, on top of the desk, and his gaze on her is familiar and close. Too close, intimate, and she blushes despite herself as she thinks of the church. Again he seems to correctly interpret her thoughts, and one corner of his mouth tips up, his eyes hooded as he considers the tender, exposed column of her throat. 

She diverts, not ready to touch the snarled, unhealthy knot suspended between them.

“I want to know more about Faith. I want to know what you’ve all done to her.”

His lip curl, just a little. Derision, contempt. Disgust.

“She tell you one of her sob stories? Don’t believe a word she says, Kate. You think I’m bad? At least I don’t take away agency, choice. You can always say no to me. You can’t say no to Faith. She empties everyone she gets her claws in.”

She shakes her head.

“There have been others, haven’t there? Other Faiths? She’s not the first, is she?”

“She’s not. But she is certainly the most efficient.”

It’s hard to breathe, inhale and exhale, when the very air here is so permeated with casual, throwaway cruelty.

John gets off the desk again, steps closer.

“And anyway, I thought I told you that you’re mine. I don’t want you to give anything of yourself to any of my siblings. Everything you’ve got, everything inside of you, is just for me.”

“Jesus,” she whispers. “How’d you get this damaged?”

He walks in between her legs, and she thinks of his torture room, his bunker. How he had stood just like this, with her tied up and bleeding from his knife, and they had shared a cigarette and almost understood each other for a moment.

“I was damaged. Joseph fixed me.” 

His voice is a low growl and she laughs in his face.

“Fixed you?” she spits. “With fucking what? Chewing gum and a few prayers? Well, I’ve got news for you. Joseph’s losing control over you. You’re coming undone. You’re full of cracks. You’re leaking.”

He gets closer still, all the way up to her, touching her with his body, bending down just a little to put his right hand across her jugular. Squeezes gently.

“I’m not leaking as much as you,” he whispers, squeezes harder, a gleeful reminder of what had happened between them in the church.

He might be right, she thinks. And she can tell how eager he is to subjugate, dominate. She had been in charge during their last encounter, she had dictated and he had consented to obey. Now he’s keen to reset that balance, tip it in his favour. 

And she wants it. Truly. The quiet in her mind that had sprung from the crossroads between him being in charge of her breaths and her not allowing him to touch her. How for a minute she hadn’t had Alejandro’s demons beating against the bones in her skull. How his daughter and his wife had floated away on white noise and the glorious inability to breathe properly.

She knows she wants to feel it again. She knows she needs to. She knows she’ll let him.

“Tell me what happened that made you change your name and move here,” he murmurs.

She starts, blinks at him, thrown by his sudden change of direction, and he smiles down at her. 

On purpose. He’s doing this on purpose and he’s playing her. She jerks her head away, suddenly furious, makes him lose his grip on her throat. He allows it, a knowing look on his face.

“A confession, Kate. One each time, remember?”

She tugs on her lank ponytail, wipes some sweat from her forehead. 

That motherfucker.

“Come now, agent. What went so wrong? Was yours the face that launched a thousand botched missions? A thousand explosions? A thousand deaths?”

She scoffs at him, because Alejandro is a wolf of death, not her, and she wants to stretch her legs out but he’s so deeply entrenched in her space that she barely got any room to breathe.

“Back up a little,” she snaps, and he does, perches on the edge of the desk again. Folds his arms across his chest and and inclines his head at her, a falsely benevolent gesture that sets her teeth on edge.

“I was asked to take part in an inter-agency task force.” She spits out each word as if it’s  something abhorrent on her tongue, acidic and barbed. “I accepted because I thought I could make a difference. Because I thought that they...they truly valued what I brought to the table.”

She stops there, breathes deeply, breathes shallowly, and she wonders how she could have been so stupid, how she could have fallen for Graver’s spiel. They had taken what mattered the most to her, the corner stones on which she had built her identity, her principles, and they had laughed at it all. Condescending. So exasperated at her naivety. 

And Alejandro, protecting her, but hurting her more.

“Turns out they were spooks, and turns out they only wanted me along to legalise their lawlessness. I was their fucking loophole, their domestic agency representative so that they could play gods on American soil.”

She was no Helen of Troy, she was the fucking Trojan horse.

“I got myself compromised.” She winces a little, remembers how she had gone against Graver’s orders

(“don’t go into the bank, Kate.”)

because she was so desperate to do the right thing, the legal thing.

“So the cartel sent someone after me. I told you...before.”

She remembers the diagonal sunbeams in the church, she remembers them sitting with the baptismal font between them, she remembers John choking Ted’s ghost straight out of her. And it had worked, she thinks. Ted isn’t touching her anymore. It had fucking worked.

John remembers too. She can tell. His pupils are black holes independent of gravity, and his pulse is beating heavily on the side of his neck. 

“It was suggested that I’d made myself a cartel target. It was suggested that I move away, to a small town somewhere.” She meets his eyes, and her own laugh pierces her eardrums, ugly and sharp. “So I did. And that worked out well, didn’t it?”

John considers her, and he’s almost sated for the moment, she thinks, he’s almost full up.

“You’re leaving something out.” His voice is soft, but there’s a penetrating sharpness in it, wrapped in the middle of that treacherous gentleness and of course, she thinks, of course. He wouldn’t be a master of his trade if he couldn’t smell lies, omissions, beautiful jewels of confessions buried among rock. Jewels she knows he’ll grind down and take inside himself. 

She laughs again, winces at the way it sounds.

“You think you’re getting all of me in one fell swoop? Fuck you.”

He hooks his feet around the base of the chair and wheels her forward, into him, straight back into her space. He grabs her chin, leans down, so close she can feel his breath on her lips and she wonders if he’ll kiss her again.

“You have such an unquiet mind,” he says. “I hope you never manage to silence it. I’ll always be here, eating the loudest screams.”

She closes her eyes against his words. She can feel him move back again, can feel the space between them growing wider, but there are so many things orbiting in the contained air they share, so many sharp things and she snags herself on them, they cut her cheeks, her eyelids, they tangle in her hair.

“Now go take a shower. You stink.”

So she does. She takes a long shower in his ridiculous, over the top bathroom, and she enjoys every second. She refuses to ponder why she doesn’t feel vulnerable while naked and exposed in his home, her weapons and clothes out of reach on the floor. Somehow she knows that he won’t exploit this situation, will leave her alone.

It would be too easy for him.

She steps out of the shower to some clean clothes in a pile on the washstand. She shakes them out. Jeans, underwear, a plain shirt. Female, but not her size. She’s got no intentions of asking where they came from, and she’s not going to squabble about the fit, having worn too large men’s pants and a fucking choir t-shirt for too long. She pulls them on, and she untangles her hair with her fingers and braids it, then steals his toothbrush and brushes her teeth. Sticks the brush into the back pocket of her jeans and considers her mirror image through the steam.

It’s the most human she’s looked since all this started, she’s almost sure.

When she’s done she walks quietly past his office. He’s sitting by his desk working, his back to her, and she stops in the doorway, but says nothing. He stays quiet too, and he doesn’t turn around, even though she’s sure he knows she’s standing right there.

So she moves on, exits from the same balcony she came, climbs down and heads back down towards the river.

Back to looking for maybe-real Faith. 

Or waiting for maybe-real Faith to find her.

Chapter Text

Chapter six: her smiles were spider bites

Graver and his cavalry shine with their absence. Of course they do.

“Fucking figures,” she mutters as she struggles through marshland straddling the Henbane and Whitetail border. 

But of course, she hadn’t expected him to help . Not really. She knew there was no way he would drop whatever little coup he is trying to pull at the moment to come and hold her hand through a domestic terrorism trifle. She had known that when she made the call. But still she tried.

She grinds her teeth. Graver had mentioned that something big was going down. She wonders which cartels, or perhaps indeed countries, he’s got pitted against each other now. 

That fucking smarmy ice cold strategist playing God.

She stops and looks around. She doesn’t actually know where she is. She had been on her way to the county jail when she was chased off the road by one of Jacob’s air convoys, and she continued on foot. Now she’s somewhere she’s never been before, the ground getting softer and wetter with each step she takes. It’s darker here too, she notes, the sun that had followed her earlier today now unable to break through the fog that is rolling in.

And the fog...writhing and curling about her legs, tendrils like ghostly hands about her ankles, waist, wrists. Shimmering a solemn grey and thick with unease, seemingly warping time and sounds. Thick enough that she wonders if she can cut out a door in it and step through into somewhere...else.

Underworld. Fairy world. Otherworld. 

It takes less than a minute before all she can see is mist. Gone are the peaks of the Whitetails on the horizon, disappeared are the leafy trees so abundant in the Henbane. She can barely see her own feet touching the ground, which is treacherous, because she realises now that she is walking in a bog. A bog littered with dead bushes and trees, twisting roots and branches straining towards the invisible sky like drowners in quicksand.

There’s a mute scream tearing through the area, as if the earth itself here has been sundered, corrupted.

“What is this place?” she whispers just to hear something, and her voice falls flat to the ground, dampened and muted by all the grey. All is quiet; dull, peculiar slow motion echoes, and she thinks that if she screams it would be entirely lost. 

She turns around, intending to return the same way she came but she can see no path, no way. She fumbles with her foot in front of her, trying to find firm ground, sturdy tufts of grass, but dark water well into her boots. She loses her balance, goes down on one knee, and immediately starts sinking down into the moss. 

She flails, tries to grasp her panic between her teeth and bite down, hold it firm, but doesn’t quite succeed. It feels like hands pulling at her from below, down, down, ever down. She’s terrified of sinking further, of getting that dark, still water in her mouth, nose, eyes, ears. 

Disappear.

She can’t even hear her own heartbeat in her ears, that’s how silent it is here. 

Her grasping hands finally manage to find the branches of a naked, spindly bush, and she pulls herself toward it, clings to it like a piece of driftwood in the middle of the ocean. She tries to calm her wheezing breaths, but all she can taste is decay, death, each gasp pulling putrid, dank air into her lungs. For the first time since she arrived in Hope County she wishes for sand between her fingers, the dry air and scorpions and miragic horizons of Arizona. 

Cautiously she stands again, the ground swaying under her feet, but her breaths are slowing. She pulls herself together, jerkily, angry. She’s not proud of losing her composure; this is just a mire in Hope County. She can stay put for a while. The mist will go just as fast as it came, no doubt, and she’ll see to walk out. All she needs to do is wait here. 

Yes. Great plan.

Then she hears singing. 

Badly muffled by mist, but unmistakable. False notes, a melody without purpose or end, wailing and forlorn and grating. 

And she recognises the voice. 

“Oh fuck right off,” she mutters, then staggers in the direction of the song. It must be very close if she can hear it in this soup.

And only a few paces away sits Faith in among the massive root network of a toppled tree. She’s wearing leggings and a plaid shirt, her hair is loose and there is an ugly scratch traversing her cheek. She’s without shoes, and her bare feet are black, covered in mud. There’s a tinge of blue to her lips, and she sits with her arms wrapped around herself as she sings. Cold. 

That doesn’t stop the radiant smile splitting her face when she sees Kate.

“Deputy,” she sing-songs. “What a lovely surprise.”

Kate snorts, grabs hold of a piece of winding root and doesn’t let go.

“Seriously.”

Faith nods, earnest, pinched.

“I was hoping I would run into you again. I feel we’ve got so much to talk about.”

She giggles, and Kate shivers.

“Hoping you would run into me again?”

She gesticulates wildly around her. Her gesture takes in their surroundings, them, this entire overwrought production.

“This...this is all bullshit.”

“How so, Deputy?” asks Faith sweetly, her head at a tilt. 

“You know I’ve been trying to find you. You must know. You didn’t need to lure me into a death trap just to talk.’ She stops, suddenly considering something. “Wait. Is this place even real? Is this one of your goddamn mind fucks?” 

She takes a step away from the fallen tree to test this theory and immediately sinks to her knees in mud much like tar, pitch and sticky. She swears, and while Faith waits patiently she pulls herself free. 

When she’s back by the tree Faith speaks again.

“This place is quite real. I wanted you to see it. Want you to know.”

“Know what?” Kate asks, frustrated and angry and sad. She wants to sleep. She wants something resembling normalcy. She wants that faded wallpaper and those lace curtains and a comfortable but rickety old bed, the bedstead of wrought iron and her face stroked by a cool morning breeze.

Not this surreal hellscape.

“Look around you,” says Faith, her voice calm but a violent twitch at the corner of her eye. “Look down. Really look.”

Kate looks. 

“I can’t see anything but…” she begins, then bites the sentence in two with something approaching true dread. 

Because...because she looks. As Faith asks of her, she looks. She looks down into the mire, into the black, and like an incomprehensible pattern suddenly and horrifically becoming a picture, she sees. Roots bleached white by weather and winds turn to limbs. Fingers and arms and legs and toes. Swamp grass becomes hair, held in stasis by the thick bog water. Reflections become faces, eyes black and mouths open in wide, eternal screams.

It’s impossible to count bodies, limbs so plentiful and tangled and topsy turvy that she can’t separate them all out. 

“What...what is this?” She’s surprised she can still form coherent sentences; she wishes she hasn’t grown so used to visceral horror. 

“These are the people that failed to become Angels. They died when they tried to ascend.” 

Faith is looking too, deep down into the water and her voice is mournful but it rings not false but... strange. Queer resonances in the way she speaks, like there are two voices struggling to leave the same oesophagus. 

“You mean all the people you forced so full of Bliss that they ODd? Isn’t that what you mean, Faith?”

She wants to crush the thin girl, she wants to punch her in the face until her eye sockets implode, until her cheek bones crack and her nose breaks, she wants to tear her in half.

But then Faith looks back up at her and her face is so still. A pretty little doll with blue lips and dirty bare feet. 

“I told you, Deputy. I obey my creation. I do what I am created to do. I’m Faith.”

Kate shakes her head, and with the movement she realises that tears are running down her face.

“Why are you showing me this?”

“I need you to know what I am, of course,” says Faith with a brilliant smile, then gnaws on a cuticle. It’s bleeding, Kate sees.

“But why?”

“So you don’t feel sorry for me.”

Faith's smile is so tight, brittle as glass, that Kate fancies she can see her cranium clean through her pale skin, a grinning skull with honey hair.

She feels acutely ill, wretched, helpless, alone, standing here in a sea of corpses. 

“I don’t…” she begins, but Faith cuts her off.

“Yes. Yes, you do. Don’t.”

Kate jackknifes forward, still clinging to the root, trying to swallow the bile as she thinks of the thermal waters in the Horned Serpents cave. So much casual, cruel death, so many atrocities.

“I thought you all got rid of the bodies down that wretched cave.”

Faith giggles, and the sounds jars against the horror Kate feels.

“That’s only the resting place for the Angels that died serving the Father, silly.”

Kate thinks of the billowing white dress she saw down there.  

“There were others, weren’t there? Other Faiths.”

“Yes.” Faith’s voice changes, becomes orating and sweet, like she’s reading out loud from a fairy tale. “Once upon a time there was a fair, broken little princess called Rachel. And before Rachel there was a Selena. And a Lana. And who knows how many more. But Rachel, she became the best Faith. The most devoted.” She makes a grand, expansive gesture to take in all the corpses.  “The hardest working.”

“Fuck all this,” Kate whispers. “Fuck you. Fuck all of you.’

Faith jumps down from the tree roots and lands in the water with a dull splash, before making her way over to Kate. She grabs her face in both hands, pulls her down so that they can touch foreheads in a grotesque parody of the Seed siblings greeting. The stench of lilies and cherry gum washes over Kate, sickly enough that it overwhelms the rot of the bog.

“Never ever feel sorry for me again,” she whispers against Kate’s forehead, then releases her and takes a step back. “I’ll see you again soon, Deputy,” and then she skips away, sure of foot in the moss.

Kate stands looking after her, with no safe way out. 

She doesn’t know how long she staggers around the bog looking for firm ground. It feels like days, but it’s probably not even hours.

She loses all sense of time and space, her own body, and almost her mind. All that exist is the search for firm ground, dread, and the will to forget what Faith had shown her.

But her will is weak, and she’s starting to think that she’s come undone. That she’s dead. 

Perhaps Faith killed her too and she just hasn’t realised it yet. Perhaps she’s doomed to forever roam this bog, just another ghost among many. 

She’s covered in mud and dark water. She thinks of all those twisted bodies, forever submerged. In a thousand years, will archaeologists unearth them all, perfectly preserved? What will they think? Will they think of a mass sacrifice, like the even older Incans?

Well, they wouldn’t be far off. Not far off at all. Sacrifices to one man’s Messiah delusions, bodies all over Hope County, and her trapped in the middle of it all.

Her sobs are loud.

“Kate.”

The relief of her own name is heavy against the mist, and she stumbles towards the sound of his voice. She can see her hands, pale and wan, she can see her hair seeming to float around her face, covered in perfect little droplets.

Nothing else. 

“Here, Kate.”

Then his tattooed hand emerging, unbodied, from within the grey and clasping her wrist far too hard, pulls her forward.

She’s oddly grateful, because otherwise she thinks she might have dissolved and become part of the fog. 

“There. Caught you.” His voice is bone dry, exasperated. “Come with me.”

“How'd you find me?”

‘Radio chatter. Heard Jacob’s Chosen mention that they’d lost you heading into Faith’s little graveyard. Thought I’d better come pull you out.”

She’s slumped against the passenger door of his truck, her cheek pressed to the window, watching Hope County whizz by in a blur of greens and reds. 

He says nothing more to her as he drives, his focus on the road, and she doesn’t feel like conversation anyway. Especially not with him. 

He just confirmed that he knows about Faith, about her….mass murder.

But for the moment she is content to let him take her wherever he wants.

She hates herself, but she does it quietly. 

He ushers her through the large front doors of his ranch house, and she steps into the main living area, ceiling to the rafters and taxidermy bothering her peripheral.

“Wow, I come so often I should keep my own toothbrush here,” she says without enough venom in her voice, and trails mud across his floor. 

He says nothing of the toothbrush she stole last time, and nothing about the mess she makes, just shakes his head.

“Stay here. Don’t touch anything.” And he exits through a door to the right, she can see the wood and chrome of an expensive kitchen before the door swings shut behind him.

She considers the sofa in front of the fireplace. It looks heavenly, but she can’t bring herself to ruin it. Instead she heads for the dining table on the other side, wants to sit on one of the chairs. Just for a second. All of her hurts. Just one second, then she can take on whatever John Seed has in store.

The blinking of the answering machine distracts her. 

She can no more resist pressing that button than she could stop her tears as Alejandro made her sign in blood.

She stands with her hands braced on the table top, head lowered, as she listens to Joseph’s message to John. Every word, clinging to her dirty clothes, nestling in the grooves of her ear.

So Joseph is aware that he’s losing his grip on his younger brother.

As the words end she runs her fingers over the old phone, touches each button, considers. The phone lines have been down for weeks. The message must be old, but John has kept it. Saved it. 

She wonders why. Or, maybe she doesn’t. 

A hard hand on her shoulder confirms what she’d known throughout playing the message: he’s been standing behind her the entire time, watching her listen.

She turns around unprompted, faces him. Her chin raised, even as spattered with mud as she is.

“What?” she says to the look in his eyes. “Did we promise each other confidentiality and space and lines that aren’t to be overstepped? No. We did not. Did you think that this,“ her gesture takes in both of them, “is a one-way deal? No.”

He’s holding a bottle of water for her. She can see that he’s furious, she can see the rage seeping through all the breaches in him, all those holes, and she braces herself for impact. But then, to her surprise, he reins himself in, breathes through his nose. Shakes his head.

“Come upstairs. I should have another change of clothes for you.”

She breathes out, and follows him. Not for the fresh clothes, but because she knows he didn’t get her out of that bog for free. He’ll want his piece of her now. He’ll want what’s owed to him.

He leads her into his office, and rummages around a few cardboard boxes in the corner. She hadn’t noticed them the last time she was here. He comes out with a motley mix of clothes, and throws them at her. She catches them in mid air and puts them down on the chair, forgets them.

Waits for him to begin.

He smiles at her, gets a little closer. 

“Who did you call the other week?”

No point in lying; she feels sure he’d heard the entirety of hers and Graver’s conversation.

“Matt Graver. Spook. He led the task force I told you about. I thought he might be able to come. Help me.”

“And?”

This is a formality, and it’s him enjoying himself. Of course Graver won’t help her.

“I doubt it,” she says through clenched teeth. “Apparently he’s very busy.”

John laughs, just a low, dark chuckle. 

“I just bet he is.”

She wants to ask what he means, but he strikes true before she can. 

“And would you call him? Your sicario?”

Kate can’t help herself, she flinches like she’s been struck, a fist crushing her lips against her teeth, blood running down her chin.

Oh, how he loves her blood. The iron tang of it, the colour. She can see him open his mouth, inhale, like he can taste it on the air.

She opens her mouth too, gives him more truths.

“If I had any way of contacting him. Yes. Yes I would.”

“And would he come?”

Ah, that is the real question.

“I don't know.”

John looks almost feral with delight and jealousy, grin wide, eyes wild as he walks to the desk and pulls the satellite phone from a drawer. Holds it out to her like an offering, a sacrifice, like a bloody beating heart freshly ripped from someone’s chest cavity.

But not hers.

“Go on then. Call him.”

She grabs the heavy phone out of his hand then just stands there staring at it, feeling empty and paper thin and white.

John pushes himself deeper, through skin and muscles and flesh, through torn arteries and veins, he’s almost to her bones now.

He steps closer. 

“You don’t want to know, do you? You don’t want to know if he would come or not. You won’t call. That way there’s still that hope. That he cares for you. That you made even a fraction of the same impression on him that he made on you.”

He comes closer. Too close. 

Close enough.

She hits him with the phone. Throws her entire force behind it, and his head snaps back and blood spatters on the wall. She takes in the damage with some relish. He’s crushed her lip against her teeth figuratively. She’d done it to him literally.

She will take what she can get. 

While he’s still getting his bearings she follows up with a knee to his gut, almost purrs in satisfaction when he bends double. She moves in for an uppercut to his chin, but he’s prepared now, throws himself at her waist and hurls her backwards into the wall.

The blow to the back of her skull makes her see stars and the blue of his eyes. She shakes it away though, and kicks out at his ribs. Hits them too, but that doesn’t slow him down. He barrels into her, kicks her shin as he goes and while she’s distracted by the pain he captures her wrists, holds them caught in one hand and wrenches them behind her. Traps them between her and the wall. Presses into her with his entire body so that she can’t kick out. She considers biting him but then relaxes instead. 

He’s got the upper hand but the fight was mostly fair, she thinks. It’s just that he’s got height and weight on her, and years more experience of violently subduing people. Not to mention that he feeds off his own pain.

Still. She studies his abraded face with satisfaction, and she smiles when she sees all the mud smeared on his blue shirt.

He smiles right back, and experimentally his free hand squeezes her throat. Her hips jerk, grinds into his. Chasing that feeling of being choked that she’s taught herself now means oblivion and tainted pleasure. Not death and failure. 

She can feel her eyes going heavy, her breathing laboured.

He notes her reaction, of course he does, and he releases her wrists so that he can cup her breast, the one with her heart in it. He feels the weight of it in his hand, and runs a nail slowly around her nipple, managing to make an impression through the cloth, and she hisses through the constriction on her throat.

He smiles wider when her heart speeds up in his palm, thirsty for her reaction, hungry for acquiescence. She can feel his beard drag slowly across the fragile skin on the side of her neck as his lips travel upward to her ear.

“I want to…”

She gets her arms out from behind her, puts both hands on his chest, and she pushes him back a couple of steps.

“No.”

He raises a brow even as she misses his hand around her throat.

“You aren’t going to let me touch you? I mean…” he throws his hands out, “You watched me get myself off. I’d say we are intimate now.”

She appreciates that he isn’t just trying to force her, that he seems to be after consent. Then she deplores the state of...everything, her life, that she would consider that such boon.

She stands firm, even though she wants to feel him again. She needs to be touched, and he’s best placed to do it, this evil man who knows her real name and holds pieces of her story in his hands. 

“I thought”, her voice is raspy, sore. And mocking. “Well. I met a….” she hesitates while she considers how one might accurately describe Hurk, “gentleman up north. He said this little cult of yours has rules, and one of them is “strictly no fornicating”.”

John smiles again, and there’s more than a hint of cruelty to it.

“Told you, Kate. I make my own rule book.”

She considers the message she heard downstairs, and thinks that yes, it looks like he does. In all the wrong ways, and Joseph’s grip on him grows ever more tenuous. It has been a mistake of Joseph to deny an addict his outlets. John’s simply gone and found other things to shoot up, inhale, suck down, insert himself into. He’s ripping confessions straight out of people’s chests instead of snorting cocaine, and now he’s toying with her instead of...everything else he used to do.

“Such a black little church sheep, aren’t you?”  But she can hear herself, how bland her voice is, monotonous, no real poison.

“I can choke you while I fuck you if that makes it easier,” he says crudely, and forces a real laugh out of her.

That motherfucker.

“No. Not today, John Seed,” she says and turns to leave, still wearing her dirty clothes.

It’s mostly pettiness, of course. Because he played her last time, and because she needs some power over him.

He lets her go, though his rage and want and frustration warm her back and neck.

And she feels like she has won a little while he has lost.

Chapter Text

Chapter 8: his glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets

She doesn’t leave Holland Valley. She doesn’t go far from John’s ranch at all.

Casey is diligently re-distributing grime around some beer glasses with his shirt tail when she sneaks through the back door to the Spread Eagle.

“Mary May around?”

Casey looks up at her, then does a double take. 

Yeah. She knows. She’s a state. Filthy, greasy, battered, bruised. Still covered in the black mud from Faith’s funeral bog. Cobweb in her hair from having hidden in a garden shed until she deemed the coast clear to come here. The back of her head throbs dully after the impact with John’s office wall. She wants a beer, a shower, a bed, and she doesn’t know in which order.

“Upstairs,” is all Casey says, and jerks his chin towards the stairs.

Kate casts an eye around the bar whilst limping for the stairs. Empty. Dark, with the windows haphazardly boarded up. The only light comes from bullet holes in the walls and the jukebox, flickering erratically where it’s been shoved into a corner. 

She finds Mary May in the upstairs space that serves as a living room. The small blonde is sprawled on her back on a lumpy sofa, a bandage wrapped around her head. The look on her face is faraway, but sharpens when she sees Kate in the doorway.

“Hello, stranger,” she says tonelessly, and Kate just barely holds back a flinch when the bullet hits. She had helped liberate Fall’s End, but of course it was retaken just as soon as she turned her back. The reasons for her ignoring Mary May’s pleas for help were many and complex, most of them tied in frazzled, uneven knots to John Seed. 

“I ran into Jacob Seed,” is her answer to Mary May’s unspoken accusation. 

“Ah,” says Mary May, and sits up with a wince. “The stories I’ve heard out of the Whitetails...well. You want to talk about it?”

Kate very carefully sits down on a mustard yellow armchair. Everything hurts. She smells like death. She’s so tired she’s seeing double. There are pretty wildflowers in makeshift vases dotted all about the room.

“No. I want a beer.”

 Mary May snorts.

”Fuckin’ Peggies cleared us out. Emptied the bar, took all my stock. Probably dumped the lot in the Henbane. Goddamned cult and their prohibition bullshit.” 

She stands from the couch and stretches. “But I’ve got a bottle stashed in my mattress. For emergencies.” She cuts her eyes to Kate’s face. “And this looks like an emergency to me.”

She leaves the room, and Kate allows her head to fall back against the headrest. She thinks of the bottles of vintage bourbon she’d seen at John’s, and she remembers his offer to choke her while fucking her, and she thinks that John’s path diverged from Joseph and the cult’s some time ago. Perhaps they were never really on the same page. 

Then she thinks of the church, how she had his belt buckle against her jugular, how she urged him to pull the leather harder and harder around her throat. Self loathing swirls with arousal when she recalls his eyes as he came all over himself and her. Dangerous, bright. Greedy for her pain. His blue hour eyes.

Dusk.

John Seed is a wolf, there can be no doubt, but a rabid one.

Mary May comes back with a half full bottle of Jack in her hand. She tosses it to Kate, who barely manages to catch it in time, reflexes depleted and worn. She drinks deep swallows straight from the bottle, then reins herself in, thinking that she needs to keep her wits about herself so that she doesn’t tell Mary May too much. Then she wonders why she thinks that way, that she has to censure herself, when Mary May is on her side.

But things have been altered. There is no way around what has happened between her and John, even if it exists in a universe parallel to the Resistance and the Project at Eden’s Gate.

Whatever it is, it concerns no one else. Only them.

“Are you ok?” she asks Mary May.

“Yeah,” Mary May says and flops back down on the couch. Kate hands her the bottle. “Bit battered and bruised, but nothing serious. It was pretty perfunctory, the way the Peggies took back town. Almost insulting. And they let us stay. I thought for sure I’d wake up down John Seed’s bunker, but apart from shutting down the bar and taking all my weapons and booze, they let me be. Same goes for Nick, Jerome, all other folks around here. They took our shit, but didn’t toss us into Seed’s confessional. It’s weird.”

John playing funny little games, thinks Kate, letting his bargaining chips run around loose, knowing he could pick them off anytime she did something to misbehave. Like trying to leave Hope.

That crazy fuck. 

“Could I use the shower, stay the night?”

Mary May looks her over; the filth, all the injuries, and she fancies the blonde can see John's fingerprints on her throat. She wonders what she would say if she knew they are there by Kate’s own wish and warped views on confession.

“What’s happened to you?”

Kate looks around this shabby little room where she would like nothing more than to stay forever, and she deflects.

“What do you know about Faith Seed?”

It’s later, and Kate is once again by the window overlooking Main Street. She’s back in the time-worn, charming little room where she’s stayed once before, and she tracks the moonlight moving across the iron bedstead like it means something.

She showered earlier, and she almost cried with the pleasure of it. The last time she had a proper shower was at John’s, after he’d interrupted her vain call to Graver. That was...she doesn’t know how many days ago.

The little town is quiet and almost soothing in night. The occasional white cult truck drives past, and she can pick out Peggie sentries dotted about. Leaning against street lights, sitting on stoops. Heavily armed and halfway attentive on their graveyard shift, but the room she’s in is dark, and she’s confident they can’t spot her even though she stands framed by the little window. And if they did, she knows she would get away. She’s used to running by now, and if she faltered John would see to it that she didn’t fall. 

Not until he wants her to.

Tomorrow she will help retake this vital outpost, and then she intends to find Tracey Leader. She ought to rest.

She crawls into the rickety bed, and she’s clean and a little drunk and all she wants is sleep.

But she can’t. 

She’s on the move again, a shower and a night in a real bed and a gun battle under her belt.

Fall’s End is back in the hands of the townspeople once more, but Kate can’t feel good about it, nor does she think there is any permanence to it.

It had been too easy.

There had been hardly any push-back from John’s men, they had more or less rolled over and allowed her and the rest of the Fall’s End residents to take back the little town. The bloodshed had been minimal, no aerial reinforcements, no flamethrowers. Just some token resistance, a few grudging bullets here and there, and John is playing games, Kate knows he is.

She just doesn’t know what the rules are. Other than fucking with her, that is.

She tries to shake off her unease. She’s on her second attempt to reach the prison, this time to try and find Rachel Jessop’s old friend Tracey, and she doesn’t have room in her head for John Seed. Not right now.

The way is fraught.

As soon as she crosses into Faith’s region the landscape is rife with Angels, and she struggles to control her revulsion and her pity, even as she kills them, even as they rise again. The Henbane is a vicious concentrate of everything she has ever worked to defeat and eradicate, and it’s a deep moral hurt she’s feeling, one that cuts her bloody. It was to fight the unthinking cruelty of drugs that she threw herself onto Graver’s task force and got so turned inside out that she can’t ever put herself right. And here she walks a region where the drug is the air, the water, the bodies of everyone around. 

As she keeps on she can feel her own vision blur and warp, those telltale fireflies of Bliss everywhere.

And the Angels…she almost turns around and crosses back into Holland Valley. Everything Faith has told her about these ravaged husks plays on a loop in Kate’s mind. Every atrocity afforded them, every violation. But she’s got no choice but to slash and shoot and maim, they won’t stop.

It makes her rage when it’s sentient cultists rather than Angels coming for her burn all the hotter.

Because unlike the Angels, they still own their own minds, they can still decide. They have a choice, and what they choose to do is murdering and kidnapping innocents in the name of Joseph Seed. And so she is vicious as she kills the ones that get in her way, coldly furious and, she realises, righteous.

That brings her up short. 

There is, after all, nothing righteous about killing someone else. She’s always been a firm believer in that, an upholder of law and justice and principles and morals. Right and wrong. It was she who begged for restraint during the bloodbath at the Mexican border, it was she who punched Graver, her fucking superior, because he thought himself above the law. And now she kills out of righteousness and fear and disgust, and she knows she’s fallen further than she ever thought she would. Yes, perhaps Graver would even be proud if he saw her now.

That’s the thought that makes her leave the road and head in among the trees, sit down on a moss-covered stone and cry. Her hands are stained. Her hair is matted with sweat and blood, no longer clean from the shower just a few hours ago. Her mind is raw. Her breaths are barbed in her lungs.

She never reaches the prison. As she sits there and weeps, Faith comes through on the radio. The radio. Not inside Kate’s head or as a beautiful dancing girl in a wildflower meadow.

“Deputy, are you coming to see me?” rings the girlish voice from Kate’s hip. Kate jumps, then unhooks the radio from her belt.

“Faith?”

“Yes”, comes the answer with laughter like silver bells, like nails against chalk. “I understand you want to visit, and so I invited some guests to our little tea party.”

There’s some static and scuffling with the radio on Faith’s end, then a familiar voice comes on.

“Rook?”

Kate struggles for a second to identify the voice, but then she recognises the old-man frailty beneath the frazzled authority. 

“Sheriff Whitehorse?”

Her free hand claws at the moss. She hadn’t known Earl Whitehorse for long before falling out of the skies into Hope, but he had been kind to her, fatherly. He had been just what she needed when she’d arrived in Montana with raw nerve endings and somebody else’s nightmares fighting for room with her own. Now he’s with Faith, and all she can think of is the funeral bog, and those bodies floating down the old mine shaft.

“You alright, Sheriff? Are you unhurt?”

Whitehorse doesn’t answer. At least not with words. He begins humming Amazing Grace down the radio at her, his voice shaky and distant and that, thinks Kate as her hair stands on end and she breaks into a cold sweat on a warm August day, is answer enough. 

How she hates that song. How she hates everything here.

Faith comes back.

“The Sheriff has decided to walk the path. He’s proved a good disciple. Attentive, receptive and true. What do you think? Do you think he will Ascend? Do you think he will become one of my pure ones? I hope so. I do like Earl very, very much. We’ll be waiting for you, Deputy. You’ll come, won’t you?”

Kate can barely unclench her jaw enough to speak.

“Faith...you...I...fuck! Fuck! Don’t you hurt him. Don’t you hurt anyone else there. I’m on my way. I’m coming. That’s what you want, right?”

Faith laughs again, so sugar sweet, so acidic. Kate grows dizzy to listen to it, as if Faith’s laughter is as warped as Bliss, as if it can affect her over airwaves, cripple her.

“Oh that is great news! I will look after him until you get here. I will look after him very well.”

Then her voice grows other, insinuates tones so low and dark that Kate can barely hear over the radio static.

“And Deputy? I want you to remember what I’ve told you. I want you to remember what I’ve shown you.”

Some slight breathing, what could have been a sob torn in two.

“See you soon.”

Then she’s gone, and Kate clips the radio back onto her belt and thinks that she doesn’t actually know where she is going. She doesn’t know where Faith is, outside of hallucinations and their maybe-real meetings engineered entirely by the tattered siren herself.

She hears a noise, like bells, and she looks up. Just down the forest path stands a cougar that turns into a falcon that turns into bull elk. It starts walking away from her, then stops and turns its head, giving her a piercing look before beginning to walk again. There are Bliss flowers wound around its antlers, Kate sees.

She hesitates for just a second, then she follows the creature.

Fucking Bliss.

She’s too late, of course. When she arrives covered in the blood of the men and women she had to kill to get into and through this hellish bunker, Earl Whitehouse is dangling gaily from a noose. His face is swollen and blue, his tongue poking through his lips like a black, twisted sausage. Broken glasses below him, Bliss flowers undulating around him.

She thinks of tongueless faces behind dry walls, she thinks of the pieces of meat that used to be bodies hanging from bridges in Juarez.

He couldn’t even be left to rest on the gently billowing sedgegrass that makes out the floor, instead he’s been left hanging like a grotesque marionette, eyes milky, soul gone. 

She can see other people hanging in other cells, just in the corner of her eye, but she doesn’t fully look. 

She doesn’t want to. She’s got no time.

She’s going to find Faith.

She tears through the bunker. She glides on smooth grass, is softly brushed by Bliss flowers, and ducks bullets and knives like she’s done nothing else in her life. She kills like a natural, fluid and sure, the rage she feels as she tries to track down Faith something white hot and pure. Of all the fucked up things going on in Hope County the ravages of Faith are by far the worst. The ripping out of minds, the altering and the shredding of wills. The intrinsic mind rape. 

Drugs. 

She can feel how all her rage and frustration and sorrow since Arizona, since Mexico, since her start in law enforcement...how it forms into a spear point she could cut herself on. She could certainly cut others with it. Alejandro, Graver, Faith Seed, the cartels, the dealers, …she could run them all straight through and never look back. The death of a man she’d hardly known has become the last straw, has galvanised her into this creature of wrath, of cold-blooded murderous intent, and there is not a thing she wants to do about it.

It has been mere hours since she sat on a stone in the woods and wept over being forced to kill innocents, now she’s cutting down everyone in her path. And there is no Jacob Seed here, no music box. Just her and all her broken morals and principles metamorphosed into something twisted yet sleek at the same time.

But she can’t find Faith. She can find only destruction, the bunker seemingly about to implode from within. There are sirens and people running back and forth, robotic warnings over the tannoys, smoke and searing heat. After a little while reasoning settles over her, clears some of the berserker rage if not her mission.

Something very bad, other than Kate’s intentions, is happening.

She starts fighting her way up, out, towards the surface. Every step is hindered by Bliss, by visions, by screams and by panic. She sees flames out of the corner of her eye, and everything is a maelström of destruction and bodies flying every which way; by her hand, by forces that are starting to tear the bunker apart. There is seismic shaking and shuddering and Kate can barely run or see her way, in the end is led only by an animalistic, primitive instinct for light and air when she pushes through a final throng of trashing bodies, up a staircase and out into fresh air.

Well, as fresh as the air can get in the Henbane. Her head still swims of Bliss, there are still flashfire hallucinations in her peripheral. Breaths are still hard to take, sickly sweet and noxious, sticky. But she’s not underground. She stands bent at the hips, hands on knees, and she could laugh with glee at being topside.

As her balance starts to steady her radio crackles by her hip. She knows even before she unclips the radio that it will be Faith.

“Do you remember the river, the river were we first truly met?”

That’s all she says, and it’s all Kate needs. She starts moving. She knows the way.

She finds Faith sitting under a peachtree willow, her knees drawn up under her chin. The gently falling branches frame the thin girl, a grotesque juxtaposition of jutting bones and absent eyes with the soft, abundant greenery whispering around her.

She stands though, as Kate stops a couple of paces away, gun drawn. Then she smiles. A filthy angel in denim cut-offs and a boob tube. Kate doesn’t doubt that she’s real.

“Oh, you came!”

As if Kate could do any other thing.

“What is this, Faith? What the fuck is this?”

Faith’s hands are shaking, Kate sees, and there is fine blood spatter across her left cheek, abrasions on her forehead. Bruises like wreaths on her arms and legs, mud on her feet, filth under her fingernails, but her smile is radiant, so radiant.

“This? This is where I finally finish. And you’ll see to it. You’ll help me.”

“What do you…” 

She sees how Faith looks at the gun. There’s a naked need on her face, greed even, open and ugly. 

“Jesus. If you wanted me to kill you, you could have just said. You didn’t have to murder Earl.”

Faith shakes her head.

“I don’t know about that. You’ve needed teeny tiny little pushes. You know, I’ve been watching you. Keeping an eye on you. When you first came here you hesitated to kill. You did it only when you had to, when you were cornered, left with no choice. But now… now you seem to relish it. You seem to think you’re doing the right thing.”

She spins then, a dainty pirouette. Then another, her hair whipping around her, and Kate tightens her grip on the gun. When she stills again she throws her hands out, laughs. She’s got little dimples. Kate’s never noticed them before.

“And isn’t that a glorious feeling?”

Kate’s hands are shaking like Faith’s, but still she holds the gun trained on the smaller girl.

“I’m not a wolf,” she says bitterly.

Faith tilts her head, taps her chin, studies her with pretend thoughtfulness.

“Not quite yet, perhaps, but I think you could be. You could be a predator. Oh, yes, Deputy, spend more time with my brother and you will be.”

Kate ignores that, ignores whatever it is Faith knows about her dealings with John. She can hear her own harsh breaths in her head, and feel her chest heaving for more oxygen. This is...all of this...it’s…

Oh god. Fuck.

“Why have you done all this, Faith? How could you let things go so far? All the people you’ve irreversibly ruined. All the death. The corruption of things that are meant to be good.” 

Faith smiles again, a wavering smile but her eyes are clear and sure as she repeats something she’s told Kate before:

“I was made that way. I can’t go against my nature. I’m doing what I was created to do.”

She looks to the sky.

“The heavens will fall, Deputy. It will fall in pieces all around us, but I won’t be here to see it. It will fall, and there will be shards of blue all around, and perhaps the little fishies will jump from the river and swim in these fragments of sky as if it was water.” Her face darkens, and Kate’s finger starts to squeeze the trigger. Just a little. “I ruined the river after all, didn’t I? Nothing can live there anymore.”

Without warning she staggers right up to Kate, movements suddenly jerky and sharp and uncoordinated. She ignores the gun pointed right at her, ignores how Kate tries to scramble backwards as Faith grabs her shoulders. She can feel those filthy nails dig through the plaid of Mary May’s shirt, leave indents in the skin.

“Listen to me. Listen. I closed all the valves,”  she whispers. “I put explosives around the pump station.  My bunker will be ruined, everything within it gone. Everything. I did my bit, now I want you to do yours.”

And she wraps her hands around Kate’s holding the gun, and she lifts them to her forehead.

“Do it,” she cry-laughs. “Do it, Deputy.”

“My name is Kate.”

In a flash she sees Alejandro’s eyes, the cold rage, the searing despair, and then she pulls the trigger. Faith falls backward, into the river she goes, and she floats away with the stream.

“Goodbye, Rachel,” whispers Kate, and her eyes are dry.

Then, as Faith’s bunker begins to explode beyond the trees, she pulls the radio out. 

And for the first time ever it is she hailing John Seed.

They meet up back at the Lamb of God. She chose the place - she does so like the light and air there, how the warm August sun glides through the large windows almost sinuously. Everything is so warm, so soft.

Untrue.

He gets there before her, stands down by the overturned altar when she slinks through the big double doors. She stops just inside, and they stand looking at each other across the church space.

He looks calm, collected, but there’s a muscle jumping on his jaw. Well coiffed and in his long coat, despite the warm breeze outside. She’s got no idea what she might look like, but she can imagine. Snarled hair, dirt and sweat and crazy in her eyes.

He’s the first to speak.

“Why did you ask to meet?”

She takes a couple of steps towards him, then stops.

“I wanted to take you up on your offer.”

He doesn’t have to ask which one.

“Oh? Do you feel you can fuck me on more equal terms now when you’ve killed my sister?”

She sways a little towards him, but her feet stay planted on the ground.

“Yes.”

“I see”. His smile is lopsided, his eyes flare with fury. “Come here then.”

And she goes, walks up the aisle towards him, and a faraway part of her wonders if he’ll let her live through this.

He watches her come, and his eyes darken as she gets closer. When she stops right in front of him, looks up at him where he stands on the step above her, then his eyes are electric storms. Flashing summer clouds at night. He lifts his hand to her face, and she doesn’t flinch. He strokes her cheek, lips, brow, and his fingers come away red.

“What gave you the right?” he wonders softly.

“It wasn’t murder,” she says. “It was suicide,” she continues, “and it was mercy.”

“And you think yourself in a position to decide that.”

She meets his eyes.

“Yes,” she says simply, but her hands still shake.

He laughs. It’s pure savagery, that laugh, smooth and deadly.

“You’ve fallen a long way.”

Then he’s on her. It’s their first real kiss, mutual and violent. Teeth and burns from his beard. His tongue moving in her mouth, wet and warm, his hands on her jaw holding her still. Forcing her to take. There’s an enormousness to it; how she feels, the overwhelming sensation of having John Seed trying to step inside her skin. She can smell that cold evergreen smell about him again, frosty red berries and poisonous dark greens.

Yew trees in winter.

She reciprocates best as she can, tug handfuls of his hair and clacks her teeth against his. Sucks on his bottom lip and whines when suddenly he pushes her backwards, so abruptly that she loses her balance and falls heavily to the floor. He gives up his height advantage and follows her down, straddles her and picks their broken kiss back up. She tries to grind up into him, but he won’t let her. Keeps kissing her as he pulls open her shirt with such violence that she can hear buttons rolling away under the pews. He bares her breasts to him and sits up to take her in.

“Look at you,” he says slowly. “You’re all flushed and hungry.”

She doesn’t want to listen, she doesn’t want to think. She certainly doesn’t want to remember. All that will happen if they tarry.

“John, just fucking…”

He doesn’t let her finish, puts one hand over her mouth while the other unbuckles her gun belt, unpops the button on her jeans, pulls down the zipper. Still muzzling her he stands up high on his knees while she lifts her hips so that he can pull her jeans and underwear and weapons down. She does the rest herself, uses her feet to shuffle off jeans and boots in one. Then she lies there, splayed and exposed in the light, draped in only a broken shirt while he is fully dressed. He’s watching her, the way her chest moves with her rapid breaths, the way her skin is pulled taut over her ribs. Her parted lips and whatever is in her eyes, she doesn’t know what he sees there.

She still feels on equal ground in her nakedness, but only just. Equal enough that she pulls him back down towards herself, finds his mouth. Pulls his shirt free of his jeans and runs her hands up underneath it, palms his warm back and sucks on his tongue. Then she digs her nails in and down, draws blood, she can feel it under her nails. He rocks into her in reaction, cock hard against her stomach. With a manic growl he flips them so that she is on top, digs his hands into her hips. She wants to be back underneath him, wants the tang of powerlessness and coercion and the freedom it brings, but he stops her.

“No. I want to see your face. I want to make sure you think of no one but me.”

Not the sicario, he doesn’t say, but that’s what he thinks, she knows it is. But she agrees, reaches behind her and gets his jeans open, pulls him out, hard and pulsing in her hand. She gives him a couple of strokes from that awkward angle, arms wrenched back and breasts pushed out. She watches him grind his teeth, enjoys the movement of his hips underneath her. Then she rises up enough that he can come inside her, and she sinks violently downwards at the same time as he viciously thrust upwards, and the amalgam of the pain and the pleasure is something entirely shiny and singular in her head.

Better like this anyway, she thinks hazily: with her on top. This way she might see it if he tries to kill her.

She takes his hands where they hold her hips, slides them up to her throat and encourages him to move.

And he moves.

He fucks her hard and furious, and she wouldn’t have it any other way. Her knees bruise, her buttocks are rubbed raw against his jeans and belt buckle, and she can feel his heart flutter where she palms his chest. She keeps looking at him, and he keeps looking at her, their eyes wide open, the light around them keeping nothing hidden. All the ugliness, all the desperation, all the cruelty and need.

“Go harder”, she urges, and he increases the strength of his thrusts and the pressure around her neck. Her breathing is getting laboured, she can hear her heartbeats in her ears, see light flair in front of her eyes. It’s still not enough.

“More John, more,” she wheezes and now he chokes her hard enough that she will pass out soon, unconsciousness skirting around the edges, narrowing her vision. He goes deep, so deep inside, bares his teeth and snaps his hips so harshly that she’s only staying on because of his grip on her throat. 

And she can’t breathe, not at all, and it’s bliss, and she’s falling, falling above him.

Suddenly, all stops in her head. Stills. Quiets.

She comes hard around him, convulsions that can surely be felt in the wooden floor beneath them, and there is no sight, no sound. No bloodied Faith floating away on the river, nor can she see Alejandro’s eyes. No gunshots, no screams, no memories, no nightmares; hers or his.

Just whiteness.

John lets go of her throat and holds onto her waist instead, forces her up and down until he roars with his spend, head thrown back and nails leaving crescents in the skin of her naked hips.

She falls down on top of him, and with him still inside her slips away into sleep.

She wakes still on top of him, surrounded by his smell and sunbeams and peace like fool’s gold. It’s probably just a short time later; the light hasn’t changed much.

“You talk in your sleep”, he says, just as she marvels that she slept.

“I don’t want to know what I said,” she answers and sits up, dizzy and sated and tense.

“No,” he agrees. “you don’t.”

They are silent as she gets dressed, as he rights his clothes and brushes his hair back. Then he speaks again.

“Did it work this time?” he asks.

“Did what work?”

“Did it work to use me to exorcise him?”

“No,” she answers. “A little,” she amends.

He nods curtly, and then he leaves. Before her for the first time. Without a confession. 

That hurts a little.

What a fucking idiot she is.

Chapter Text

Chapter 8: he wanted to topple with his arms around her

She keeps moving because what else can she do? She struggles with purpose, because she feels like she hasn’t got one right now. 

Faith is dead, and her Bliss production with her. It was always Faith who Kate found to be the most reprehensible, and the biggest victim. The whole terrible juxtaposition would hurt her, and hurt her profoundly, if she wasn’t so irrevocably sure that killing Faith had been the right thing to do.    

(Who made you judge, jury and executioner, Kate? she doesn’t ask herself)

Of course, there is also...there is the rest. There is Jacob. John. And Joseph, Joseph looming large behind them all, casting a shadow across Hope County much longer and darker than those of the Whitetail peaks. Somehow he must be stopped. They must all be stopped. 

She can’t think how, though. She could continue as she is, but she is tired. So incredibly fucking tired. 

And she can feel John Seed between her thighs. She can feel him in her rib cage, she can feel him in her head. If nothing else she needs to keep busy enough to drown out the tactile way he moves inside of her.

She can’t. She knows she can’t. Maybe she doesn’t even want to.

Luckily the oldest Seed appears to be happy to provide something of a distraction.

She’s sniffing around Elk Jaw Lodge when she’s unceremoniously bashed over the head. When she comes to she’s trussed like a Christmas turkey, and Jacob Seed is crouched across a campfire from her. She clenches her teeth against the throbbing pain in her temple, and struggles into a sitting position. The left side of her face is stiffened with drying blood, and nonsensically she thinks that Jacob’s hair and beard merge seamlessly with the fire.

She tries to use the eye not crusted over to scope her surroundings. All she gets are tall trunks and shadows, the wind gently blowing through tree crowns. A sort of background humming close by, a white noise that she can’t place right now. 

So she could be any-fucking-where in Hope then.

She can feel that she’s been relieved of her weapons. Gone is the reassuring weight of her revolver on her hip, the comforting discomfort of the two knives normally on her person. Her bag with ammunition and explosives: also gone. She tries her bindings. Her hands are tied behind her back, but at least it’s with rope, not cable ties or handcuffs. 

She can work with rope. 

Her ankles are tied too, but right now that seems to be her least concern. She tries to bite down on the fear. Losing her head won’t get her out of this. Her best bet is to keep him talking while she tries to loosen the knots.

Jacob allows her time to figure all this out, watching her calmly across the flames.

“I thought John told you to leave me alone,” is the first thing she can think to say, agitation making her honest in a way she normally only is with John, used to be with Alejandro. Or maybe it’s just terror. She can’t take a second round of Jacob’s cages, she thinks, she can’t take any more of his trials. 

“Yes. He did, didn’t he? That was unwise of him.”

She wants to lie back down again and close her eyes, will all this away. Trust the youngest Seed brother to get her into even more trouble with his possessive, obsessive bullshit, she thinks. She wonders how much Jacob knows.

“What do you want?” she asks as she instead sits up straighter, tries to shake the pain and exhaustion out of her head and truly start looking for a way out. Hanging around with Jacob Seed can’t be good for her life expectancy. And she’d rather die than go back to the cage.

“You look like shit,” he says instead of answering her question. “My little brother used to go gentler on the ladies.”

“Like hell,” she mutters, and oh god, everything hurts, everything, “And anyway, aside from the injuries you just caused me, most of this is courtesy of your late sister. I had a little run-in with her.”

She’s vaguely proud of herself for not slurring. And she hopes he won’t mention the fading fingerprints on her throat, knows he can’t see the bruises on her hips and thighs.

“Yes,” he rumbles, and prods at the fire with a booted foot, making sparks hiss and fly. “I heard about that. Everyone did. Caused quite the ruckus, you and her.”

She wonders if he knows that it was Faith, not her, that blew up Faith’s Gate. Then she wonders if she should tell him or not, just to keep him occupied. Distracted. But she says nothing. If Faith had wanted her brothers to know, Kate feels sure she would have found a way.

She owes the broken little siren her own secrets to take to the grave.

And Jacob, he keeps looking at her. Fuck. Fuck, she wants out of here.

“What do you want, Jacob?” she asks again

“What’s your name, Deputy?”

She’s pretty certain that he couldn't care less what her name is.

“Jenny,” she answers, and wonders why the echo doesn’t feel the same. If Jacob knows she’s lying he’s not letting on, just nods thoughtfully. But he doesn’t use the name she gave him as he speaks again.

“You promised to kill me, girl, and then you went and kill my sister. Maybe I just want to neutralise a threat. Maybe I ought to just pick you up and throw you in the river. It goes fast, just beyond here. You’d be carried along. Eventually you’d sink like a stone.”

And now Kate realises that it’s the rushing of water she’s been hearing all this time, melded with the wind through the pines.

“I would like to,” he continues, “- but frankly, it would be too easy on you.”

She keeps watching him, quiet, as she worries away at the rope behind her back. She thinks she can feel the slightest slack, and she grits her teeth against the pain in her wrists, the burn.

“Joseph asked me to bring you to him. Asked me to personally ensure it. See, he’d like a word.” He cuts his eyes to her. “I’d imagine he’s got an opinion or two about you killing his Faith, and imploding his entire Bliss production.”

She goes cold. Last time she saw Joseph she was half starved and fully insane and he told her, calmly, how he killed his infant daughter, justifying it as the fucking will of God. She wants to be nowhere near that crazed motherfucker until she is reasonably sure she can kill him. She works away at the rope, trying to not make her movements obvious, trying to not show a reaction to how the rope saws through her skin.

Jacob chuckles and it’s warm. Anywhere else, from anyone else, it would be a nice sound.

“Maybe he’ll do my job for me. Maybe he’ll let me watch.”

He stirs the fire again, then nods at her.

“But nah. Joseph is more of the forgiveness kinda type. Of course,” his smile turns truly malevolent, “- more often than not, Joseph’s forgiveness is worse than his righteous wrath.”

She shivers in terrible belief, in premonition. She had looked into Joseph’s naked eyes, straight into them with nothing in between, and she believes what Jacob says absolutely, irrevocably. She needs to get away. She can’t confront Joseph the way she is now, scattered, shattered, blowing on the wind. She can go nowhere near him until she is ready.

Maybe she will never be ready.

“You seems to have changed your opinion of me.” She can feel one of the knots slowly coming undone, and it’s torture, to have to keep her movements so slight that he wont notice when all she wants is to tug herself loose. “What was it you called me? A hick deputy with a decent aim and some luck? But now I’m a threat?”

“I guess you became one when you killed Faith.”

The one knot is entirely loose now, the other one is coming along. She could almost treasure the excruciating pain in her wrists, because it means she is getting somewhere.

“So what’s the plan, Jacob? Why are we sitting here conversing? Don’t you have a job to do?”

His movements are calm and unhurried as he sits up straighter, 

“Oh, I don’t know, Jenny. How are you getting on with those knots? You free yet?”

And he’s up, unbelievably fast and graceful for his size, and he is jumping straight through his fire towards her. All she’s got time to think is that he wanted her to, he wanted her to try and get loose. Fucker was just looking for an excuse.

Then he’s on her.

She wrenches her hands free of the rope just as he heaves her backwards, but her feet are still tied together. And one of her arms are trapped underneath hers and his combined weight, making it very easy for him to wrap his large hands around her throat and squeeze.

The panic is instantaneous. 

Her free hands scrabbles at Jacob’s face, scratches deep gouges into his cheek, but he acts as if it's nothing, a butterfly caress. He’s got his entire weight on one knee, pressing it into her sternum, and even though she trashes as best as she can, wriggles her hips around, she can’t throw him off her.

“Do you really think I will let you harm my family?” he whispers calmly in her face. “I have looked after my brothers since we were small. I’ve protected them. I will continue to do so until I die.”

He lifts her head up by her neck only to slam it back down into the bedrock beneath, and more pain explodes between her temples, adds to the head injury he already gave her. She would whine in agony if she had any air to do so.

“That is my purpose,” he continues, and she understands, she really does, that he considers this purpose greater than Joseph’s direct orders.

He squeezes harder, she can’t breathe, and all she can think is that she had finally managed to exorcise Ted. She had replaced his hands with John’s, and here comes Jacob and tries to undo it all. And this time, this time there will be no Alejandro with a false halo around his head.

Oh, she is so scared, and she is so angry.

She scratches at his face again, comes very close to his eyes, and he shifts, inadvertently freeing the arm she had trapped underneath her body. She flails it around, trying to find purchase on the other side of him, trying to find a way to throw him off her. 

Finds his knife holster instead.

Suddenly she can see it very clearly in her mind’s eye: his large hunting knife with the red handle. Can see the long, serrated blade, can see him playing with it, using it.

Fuck you, she mouths at him, because there is no air to speak. Then she pulls the knife out the holster and rams it into the side of his neck with all her power.

He stiffens, jerks, but doesn’t let up on her throat. She pulls the knife out of his neck with a squelching, wet sound, and a spray of blood follows it, settles warmly on her face, on the ground around her. Then she stabs it into his neck again, and again. And again.

She can’t stop.

His neck is just shredded ribbons by the time his hands finally give up and she can feel the pressure on her jugular lessen. She pushes at him, and he falls off, onto his back next to her.

She drives the knife into his heart as well, just to be sure.

Then she lies back down. She looks up at the stars, and she listens to the wind, and she is trying to remember how to breathe.

Finally she sits up. Unties her ankles, stands. She rummages through his pockets and clothing, but can’t find the weapons that he took from her. She looks around, spots a bag some way from the fire, and finds it all there, along with his rifle.

She returns to Jacob’s body, and laboriously she drags him to his camp fire, then manages to roll him onto it. As his clothes and hair and beard catches fire she collects large branches and small twigs from all around, wedges them underneath his body, around him, on top of him, until finally she has built him a funeral pyre. She throws his rifle and his knife on it too, and then sits back and watches.

It’s a large funeral pyre for a large man, but no one comes to investigate, because these days there are fires all over Hope County and what is one more?

She performs her wake. Warms herself on the flames, sits quietly through the night and inhales the smell of roasting flesh and greasy ash, until there are only bones left of Jacob Seed. 

Then she sits there longer still, tries to hide from dawn, before gathering up a handful of dust and ash and itty bitty bone fragments. Slowly, like an old woman, she walks towards the river. She throws her handful of Jacob into the rushing water.

It might be what he would have wanted. 

She doesn’t know.

She radios John around midday.

“I need you,” she says, voice a pitiful croak, and that’s all. He doesn’t say anything in answer, but she knows he will come. When could he ever resist someone‘s pain and anguish?

She bathes before she meets him. 

She walks into the water upstream from where Jacob found her, the river freezing cold this close to its source high up the Whitetails. She scrubs her skin with soft sand, and she soaks her hair, finger-combs it. Her entire body is a treasure map of bruises, she can barely move for pain, her teeth chatter and her fingers turn blue. But it seems like the least she can do is wash the smell of Jacob Seed’s bones and ashes from her skin and hair before she fucks his little brother.

She didn’t tell him where to meet her. She didn’t have to. He waits for her by the Lamb of God; she sees him standing out in the graveyard and she has to quench a hysterical giggle when she thinks that this is their place now. A church. A fucking church.

He looks at the angry fingerprints on her neck as she approaches.

“Those aren’t mine,” he says calmly when she stands before him, too calmly, and of course, she thinks, no one is allowed to hurt her but him. She realises with mild surprise that she treasures his jealousy. It seems like something almost pure in this place of terror and warped dogma.

“Jacob managed to jump me,” she says, voice broken to a whisper. “He tried to take me to Joseph.” She draws a deep breath. “I escaped.” Then: “You know I will kill him if I can?” 

And she meets his eyes squarely and thinks that it’s a weird kind of lie and a weird kind of truth, this one, dipping awkwardly into past and future. She remembers Jacob’s empty eyes as she rolled him into the fire, like she remembers the corpses inside the drywalls in Arizona. And she wonders if John really knows, but is playing along.

“I love him,” is all he says, and she hears very clearly what he doesn’t say: that he hadn’t loved Faith.

She considers the possibility that he is playing her, then discounts it. John Seed is not one for long games and subterfuge. He is one for mercurial impulses and stabbing you in the eye on a whim

He gets closer to her while she is contemplating him, and he kisses her between the eyes, right on her thoughts and fears. His hands grab her hips, pull her into him, and she can feel how hard and warm he is against her stomach.

“The clock tower,” she says. “I like the views. I like the light.”

He says nothing about that, just raises a brow then puts his hand on her lower back, guides her before him. They walk into the church, up the stairs, and all the way he touches her, his hand a brand on her; heavy, far too heavy.

But she likes it.

Up in the tower she inhales the fresh air, gorges on the views. She glides over the treetops, the fields, the blue skies. She basks in the golden light, and she feels calm, and she feels like she could defy gravity.

If she leapt from this tower, she thinks, she would float on the breeze. 

And she wonders that she can feel like this, so supple, so languid, so aflame, when not 24 hours ago she hacked a man’s jugular to pieces and burned his body. When a few days before that she put her gun to a young woman’s forehead and pulled the trigger.

But what is Faith and Jacob, she thinks, against all the other bodies she’s racked up since she arrived in Hope?

Then she stops thinking, because John takes over. Takes charge. She’s already learnt to love the feeling of putting herself in his hands.

So soon.

“Take off your clothes,” he says, and she does, slowly, holding his eyes the entire time. Measures the way his pupils grow outwards, like rings on water, like greed and like lust. Notes how his pulse speeds up, beats against the skin on his throat, flutters and whispers. 

When she stands entirely naked before him she realises that she feels beautiful. As golden and warm as the light up here. A strange, unknown feeling, but welcome nonetheless.

“You,” she says hoarsely, and he strips, no artifice to it, no fuss. Economic movement and vibrating impatience. When he’s bare she studies all that sharpness to him, the hardness. He’s lean but strong, tattooed and scarred. Chest and cheeks and cock flushed red with desire.

He steps into her, puts his arms around her, so much skin on skin she can barely stand it. Then he kisses her, slips his tongue into her mouth, and such a difference it is when a kiss isn’t just about violence. This one is deep, like he wants to eat her alive, but slowly. And that smell of him. Evergreens. He imprints it on her; she will carry it always now.

“Turn around,” he says against her lips, and she obeys, such curious grace to her movements, she feels lighter than she ever has.

“Lean forward,” instructs his voice from behind her, and she does, grabs the arched window frame before her. In doing so she realises that he has placed her with the best view, looking out over the forest and the mountain peaks. Just so much beauty, she feels so close to it, like she could reach out and touch it all.

He steps up behind her, tickles his fingers up her spine, then down her sides. Reaches around and cups her breasts, weighs them in his hands. All the while she can feel him between her buttocks, throbbing, thrumming, warm. So warm.

“Please,” she whispers as he tweaks her nipples, and she wishes she could shout it, but Jacob has stolen her voice away.

He glides his fingers down from her breasts to her cunt and dips inside. It’s almost cursory, just enough to ensure that she is ready to take him. She is, oh she is. She has been since she radioed him and told him she needed him.

“Hold on tight,” he murmurs, and then he pushes inside her with a long hiss. All the way in, forcing her up on her tippy toes, making the old wood in the window frame creak in protest when she is moved forward. 

Then he goes slow, and it’s driving her insane. Even strokes, all the way out, then in again, working her open on him. He plays with her all the while, rough, hard strokes on her clit in cruel contrast to his leisurely thrusts, and her toes curl, she throws her head back and she whines and begs: please, please! 

How good it feels, she thinks hazily, how good it is to exist in the palm of someone’s hand. 

Suddenly, perhaps realising that she is drifting, he wrenches her head back by her hair. He kisses her deep and hungry, sloppy, wet, and she realises that it’s nice. This is nice; being French kissed by a madman as he slowly fucks into her and she’s got Hope County from up high in her peripheral.

But she needs more, and she pushes back against him, urges him to go faster. When he refuses to heed her she tries to turn around, but he drapes himself over her, puts his weight on her and moves his hands forward to hold hers down hard on the window frame.

“Fine,” he growls in her ear. “Stay still and take it.”

And he speeds up. Skin slaps against skin and he goes ever deeper, spears himself inside her, impossibly hard. She can feel all of him. One hand wraps around her sore throat, squeezes, and if she could she would shout with joy that he is erasing Jacob from her. As it is she struggles to stay still and receive him, his thrusts so violent she thinks he will force them both out of the tower. 

Worse ways to go, she thinks hazily as he abruptly forces her to come, his teeth in her neck and buried so deep inside her that she will always feel him there.

“I liked that,” she tells him afterwards. She is sitting naked against the rough wall, feeling his spend running down her thighs. He’s wearing only jeans and smoking a cigarette. “It was nice.”

The look he gives her is unreadable as he hands her the cigarette. She takes a deep drag, her gesture following the smoke outwards as she explains:

“Hope County is so beautiful from above.”

His smile is wide and singular, and it gives her pause. 

(it will stick with her, that smile. a long time later, in the future, when she will have nothing to do but think and think and going slowly insane, she will realise that it’s because it was the only truly genuine smile she ever saw from him)

“Oh, come with me then. You’ll like this.”

“Where?” she asks, frowning.

“Trust me,” he says, he actually says that, with a straight face and the blue in his eyes about killing her.

And she goes with him.

He pulls up outside his hangar, and she immediately tenses, reaches for her gun. He grabs her wrist before she can pull it out.

“Easy. No guards here right now. Come.”

And he jumps out of the truck, and she follows him into the hangar. Stands there and looks at the sleek little single propellor plane. Affirmation, he calls it, because of course. 

He offers to take her up in it, up into the skies, and she doesn’t say no.

The last time she’d been in a plane she’d been trapped in a very small space with Alejandro’s nightmares. This is different. She is not enclosed. Her head is free, in the clouds, and below Hope County undulates, verdant, so verdant. 

John flies his plane like a bird flies, sure and soaring. Free. Although she can only see his shoulders, the back of his head, she knows that up here, up here he is someone else.

He flies her all over, and she leans over the side and takes in the patchwork quilt of Hope. The Henbane snaking through the landscape. The fields of Holland Valley and the colours of the Whitetails.

That something can be so beautiful, she thinks. That something can be so perfect, yet so spoilt. It hurts her more than she could imagine, to look at all this and love it, yet know that she can never have it. She wants to lean forward, tap John on the shoulder and ask him to just keep going: over the Whitetails and away. Far away.

But she doesn’t, because he wouldn’t.

Afterwards he drives her north. Drops her at an abandoned cabin he knows about, where the water is still connected and there’s gas for cooking. She could take a couple of days, he tells her, regroup, rest.

“Don’t do this,” she tells him as she stands outside the little cabin, he in his truck with the window rolled down, engine running, wanting to get back to his bunker.

“Don’t do what?” he asks.

“Don’t make me think you’re anything but a monster. It wouldn’t  work.”

“Maybe I am, but that’s ok  because so are you?”

I’m not, she wants to scream, I am not, I’m no predator, Alejandro said so.

And there is...something in his eyes that she doesn’t want to see, a faint softening around the edges, a question, a wish, and she knows it can’t be there. 

“Would you stop all this,” she asks instead of answering his question, a gesture taking in all around her: Hope, the atrocities he and his family have committed here, everything. “Would you walk away?” 

They both know what she is really asking and they both know she is lying to herself and they both know his answer.

“No,” says John simply, and prepares to leave, puts the truck into drive. She finds she isn’t quite yet ready to let him go, and puts her hand on the door to stop him.

“No confession today? That’s twice now.”

The look he gives her is knowing, and far too deep.

“Next time. And then you will give me everything, won’t you?”

Her radio spews static then, saving her from answering. She fully intends to ignore it, but stiffens when Casey’s voice crackles by her hip. She unlatches the radio, lifts it to her ear to better hear.

“Deputy? Jenny? You there?” says Casey, his voice urgent. “John Seed took Mary May, Deputy. He took Mary May, and he took pastor Jerome, and he took Nick Rye. Nick got pretty beat up. I don’t know where they are. I don’t know if they are even still alive. We could really do with you back in Fall’s End.”

She doesn’t answer. The hand holding the radio clenches it so hard it hurts. She lifts her eyes, meets John’s.

“What,” he says, a brow raised, “- did you really think I would let Faith’s death go unanswered?”

Then he steps on the gas, drives back down the slope and all she can think is that he hadn’t even loved Faith.

Chapter Text

chapter 9: in the morning they wore each other's face

She stays in the cabin for a little while. She’s not sure how long. Long enough to put wildflowers in empty bean tins on the windowsills.

(they are pretty, she thinks)

And long enough for her bruises to go from blue to purple to green. Long enough that her voice comes back and her heartbeats begin to settle into something like a median rhythm. For her nails to begin to grow from where she chewed them to the quick.

(like Faith, she forces herself not to think)

She showers. Her hair begins to shine again, and it has grown so long and the sun has lightened it into warm honey. 

There are clothes in the closet. Jeans and sweaters and comfy tank tops. Some button downs and stripy socks.

The pantry is well stocked. Just tins and dried foods, of course, but still she eats better than she has pretty much since she came to Hope County. Ravioli and SpaghettiOs and beef stew. Beans. Peaches and pears. Porridge, one morning, when she finds some oatmeal and dried milk powder at the back of one of the cupboards. 

She eats it out on the porch and looks at the mountains and she thinks of being a little girl, of eating porridge with honey and milk, and the world was big and bright, and she was brave and pure.

This is stupid, she thinks, this is so, so fucking stupid. Nick and Mary May and pastor Jerome captured and looking to her for help, and here she is playing house with herself.

Why does she do this to herself? Why allow John to give her something she can’t keep? 

Because, she thinks, for now, she needs it. There was implicit understanding between her and John, out there on the drive. He captured the three resistance members in retaliation for her killing Faith, sure, but she knows he won’t hurt them. He’s waiting for her move.

At least until he finds out about Jacob. Then there is no telling what he will do.

This is a status quo, then, this is the eye of the storm, and she doesn't want to leave it. She wants to stay in this bubble of quiet surrounded by raging violence and destruction.  She wants it to be hers. 

She remembers her day dream. Coming home from a night shift, falling asleep lulled by the morning sun and the birds, in a bedroom with gently wafting lace curtains. How close did she come to getting that? Was it ever even within reach?

She sits out on the porch, and she listens to the night birds, and she tells herself just one more day. 

Her peace is broken, as she knows it must be, by the radio.

“Jacob is missing.”

John’s voice. 

It’s coming from the bedroom. She has taken to leaving it in there, the radio, no longer obsessing over keeping it clipped to her hip, within easy reach.

“Kate?”

Now it’s almost something alien, she thinks, the way it emits tinny noise, something unnatural in a place where she has grown used to birdsong and quiet.

Where she had considered putting lace curtains up in the bedroom. 

Such a fucking idiot.

She picks it up from where it’s fallen between the wall and the bed, and hesitates just one second before pressing down on the receiver.

“Hi John,” she says, and her voice is husky. Unused. 

“Jacob is missing,” he repeats, and the sound quality may be tinny and cold, but she can hear as clear as day how empty his voice is of emotion. How carefully measured. “He’s not been seen for a few days. His wolves can’t track him.”

And that scares her most of all. John’s voice always brims with things. John’s voice always boils over. With rage. With violence. With glee.

It’s never empty. It’s never like this. 

What have I done? she thinks.

I did what I had to do, she thinks.

I told you, she says to herself as she stares past the wildflowers and out the window. I told you no subterfuge.

“Is that so?” is what she breathes down the radio.

A long silence. She can hear his measured breaths though, and she leans on the danger of them. What else can she do, while she holds her own breaths tight waiting for his reply?

“Come for dinner tonight,” is what he says. She can still read nothing in his voice. No danger, no wishes. “I’ll send everyone away. It will be just the two of us. I’ll cook.”

She believes him. She believes him when he says it will be just the two of them. He would do that, for her. He would.

“Release the hostages,” she says. “Mary May and Nick and Jerome. Release them, and I’ll come.”

“You’re a fool, Kate,” comes the reply. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Do it, and I’ll be there. Do you think I would lie?”

A silence. She thinks she can hear low laughter.

“Consider it done,” he says. “Come at eight.”

“Ok,” she says, and then she clips the radio back onto her hip.

No more peace.

She packs up her few possessions. She empties out the bean tins with flowers. She takes the trash out, she makes the bed. 

It’s so stupid. 

She finds a dress that looks roughly her size. She pulls all of her clothes off, and puts the dress on. It’s a little too big, and it’s got a print of little daisies. She can’t remember the last time she wore a dress.

Actually, no, she can. It was at her wedding. She laughs at herself in the old mirror hanging on the back of the bedroom door, then she brushes her hair until it falls soft and smooth down her shoulders. She pinches her cheeks, she straps her gun and her radio to her thigh and a small knife down her boot. 

Then she steps outside, and remembers that John left her with no truck.

No matter. She’ll steal one in a jiffy, she thinks, and walks down the hill, through the large patch of ponderosas between her and the closest dirt track. Warmth, the smell of crushed pine needles and moss, the sun filtering sideways through the branches; it sticks to her brain like velcro, forms a memory like oatmeal and milk and honey. Like a memory of Hope County from above.

And there, a flatbed with the driver’s door hanging open, blood splatter and bullet holes, the radio blaring something upbeat and jarring.

She smiles, and she gets in and she jumpstarts the fucking thing.

She heads first to Fall’s End, keeps her distance, and stays only long enough to see Mary May being dropped outside the Spread Eagle.

So. He kept to his word.

Satisfied, she drives up to the ranch. She spends some time stalking the perimeter, but on the surface of it he appears to have done as he’d promised here as well. There are no guards in the summer dusk, at least none she can visually confirm. She harbours no illusions that they won’t be there within a minute or two should they be called, but at least she won’t stumble over them right now.

She squares her shoulders, she smooths down her dress, she walks up to the big front door, and she knocks.

He doesn’t keep her waiting. He throws open the doors almost immediately. His face is still, those damnable gleeful eyes of his carefully tempered. He’s wearing jeans and a white t-shirt and he’s barefoot and she wants to scratch deep gouges into his face so that he will show her something.

“I…” she begins, but he pulls her forward by the front of her dress and kisses her.

“Say nothing,” he sighs into her mouth. “Not right now. Not yet. I can’t.”

She just nods and kisses him back. 

His face and his voice may be carefully blank but in this, in this he is himself, he is John, damaged and broken and wild in how he expresses himself. She gulps down his breath and thinks that his soul will always stain her insides now. She lets him leave his teeth marks in her lower lip and she wants to keep the indents forever, run her tongue along them and call him back to herself.

He takes a step back though, and she can’t find it within her to feel shame for how she chases after him. He puts a finger against her lips in reproach.

“Let’s eat.”

“You actually did cook?” she asks.

“Of course,” he says, like it’s nothing. She doesn’t know whether to laugh or weep at the notion.

He turns to lead the way to the dining table and she sees the gun tucked into the waistband of his jeans. Fair enough, she thinks as she accepts the seat he offers her. She is grateful that he sits himself down opposite her. They can both keep an eye on each other then.

She picks up her knife and fork as he tells her, without apparent irony: 

“Bon appetit.”

The macaroni cheese is sloppy, watery. The steak is tough and overdone. The broccoli is falling apart. 

She eats it all with a hearty appetite. He pours her wine, much better than the food, and she drinks that too, a deep red, complex and treacherous. It smooths her out a little, makes her feel loose-jointed and mellow.

Of course he’s doing it on purpose. She feels for the reassuring metal of her gun, warmed by her skin. It’s still there, safe and snug against her thigh. When will it all go to hell? Should she lead them both there, or wait for him?

They eat silently, but she is not overly uncomfortable. It could be worse. They can see each other, and the food is home cooked, as mediocre as it is, and she is glad to see him, she really is. 

She appreciates this. She appreciates what he is doing for her. He has both hurt her and helped her and shown her horror and beauty alike; she appreciates him. 

How preposterous.

Eventually, John puts the last piece of steak in his mouth, leans back on the chair. Chews slowly, wipes his lips. They are red from the wine. They clash with the blue in his eyes.

Blue hour and blood. She remembers. He is her safest enemy.

“You owe me,” he says, voice so carefully modulated. So controlled. 

Well then. She puts her own fork down, and nods at him. Readies herself, hand on her thigh. This is it, then. This is it.

But then, she is struck with a fucked-up mixture of premature grief and longing and want. She doesn’t want this to be over. Not yet. 

Not quite yet.

So she stands, and she pulls the dress over her head. Is it a distractionary tactic?  Of course it is. Is she just putting off the inevitable? Of course she is. But he looks at her nakedness, wearing only the gun and the radio strapped to her leg, and he is so unabashed in his hunger that it’s worth it.

“Upstairs,” he says. “I want to have you in a fucking bed.”

She follows him up the stairs - she doesn’t want him behind her when she is naked and vulnerable. She can feel herself go flushed and warm, though, with anticipation, with need. With the way only he can make her feel. Cleansed and tainted at the same time. The oblivion too. 

He opens the bedroom door, ushers her in. She’s seen this room before, and taken no note of it then. She doesn’t now either. It’s just hazy impressions. Muted colours, lots of space. Wood, windows. Lights here and there, giving everything a warm glow. A large bed. 

She heads straight for it. Climbs onto it, turns around on her knees and watches him come.

He joins her on the bed with no hesitation, leans forward and kisses her hard. They haven’t kissed so much, before tonight, but now they both put a lot of themselves into it. The inherent slotting of facial contours to fit, the teeth and the tongues; it’s a smooth thing, a deep thing. She knows what this is, they both do, and now they offer up as much of themselves as they are able. Her hands in his hair, his fingers tickling up her sides and beneath her breasts, making her shiver. 

She feels him slide her gun out of the thigh holster, and stiffens. He holds the weapon up between them, it gleams in the lamp light, and then he puts it down on the bedside table. He does the same with her radio. He smiles. Then he pulls his own gun out and places it on the other bedside table.

Equal.

She smiles back, and when he pushes her so she falls down onto the pillows she allows it. He gets on top of her, making her thighs cradle his hips. Denim rubs against the wetness and heat of her, and she can feel her eyes flutter, her breaths quicken. His chest pressed to hers, two sets of hearts beating up against each other.

“I want you this way,” he tells her, and she nods, even though it’s too much, too intimate. 

He pushes down his jeans and his underwear with one hand, kicks them off. She helps with the shirt, and then refamiliarises herself with the uneven edges of scars and tattoos on his chest and back. Like reading Braille, she thinks, letting her fingertips travel along sins and old pain and misplaced pride.

“No airs and graces and frills,” she tells him. “Just fuck me.”

He huffs a laugh and nods, and then pushes in. Just like that. Just had she had asked. 

It’s a push and pull, delicious and almost painful, and she daren’t close her eyes. She receives him and he takes her and he is so determined to make her feel everything, to force the sensations down her throat. 

Their hearts speeding up against each other, and it becomes something like a competition; who can crush whose first?

She comes with her eyes wide open.

He follows quietly, with bared teeth.

She doesn’t give herself time to breathe, to settle. To think.

His cigarettes sit on the bedside table next to his gun. She pushes him off her and grabs them, scoots to the bottom of the bed so she can look out the windows, at the mountains and the trees. The sun is truly set now, but the silhouettes remain, in purples and in blues.

She lights up and drags the smoke deep into her lungs. Her empty holster chafes her thigh. She blows the smoke out towards the glass as John speaks behind her.

“A confession,” he says.

She pulls her knees up towards her chest. Sighs.

“This game of yours was always stupid and we’re not doing it anymore,” she throws over her shoulder. 

He scoffs at her where he is sprawled on his bed, naked and entirely comfortable.

“Quite so,” he says drily. “You’ve been taking as much from me as I, from you.”

“There was never any agreement that I wouldn’t,” she murmurs, looking forward again. She wonders if she’s being a coward. She wonders if he is stalling for time, just as she was, if he is trying hard to make this last just a little bit longer before it has to turn ugly.

“But tell me anyway,” he says. “Tell me everything.” 

She can feel him lean forward and stroke down her back. She remembers how he cut into it, down there in his dungeon. 

“I think…I think this will be your last chance, Kate.”

She considers the finality of his words. She blows a smoke ring. She thinks of going over to the window and opening it, letting the smoke out like a bird. But that would take her too far from her gun, and so she stays put. Watching how the smoke meanders towards the ceiling, and thinking of how all this came to be.

”We…” she starts. “Well, “we” would imply I was somehow involved. I wasn’t. I was a fucking marionette.  The taskforce got intel about a tunnel through to Mexico. We went down. It was all just a big fucking cover, of course. Just an excuse to start firefights in enclosed fucking spaces and sneak him through. Alejandro.” 

The first time she has spoken the name out loud here. Given it to John. A treasure, a gift, a rotten piece of leftover heart.

“I noticed. I broke off from the others, followed him. Stupid. Fucking stupid, but I just had to know.” She laughs, out into the room, and the sound is pathetic, small.  “Saw him keep a Mexican policeman at gunpoint. I tried to stop it and he…he shot me twice in my Kevlar and told me to not ever point a weapon at him again. I couldn’t breathe. I was in the dirt and I couldn’t breathe. And he just told me to catch my breath and then head back.”

Her eyes are dry. She is grateful. She hates crying. Little girls cry. 

“I was an idiot, John. I don’t know why he slipped into Mexico, but I know it can’t have been good. I know whatever he did there…it must have been awful.” 

She looks over her shoulder at him again, for longer this time. Keeps his eyes. She had known even before turning what he would look like. How languid and splayed and…and aroused. Horny. He’s looking horny even though he just fucked her, with his parted lips and blown out eyes. This is manna to him, this is sex. Her pain, her trauma, her shame. Her confession.

“A fucking idiot. Trying to do things by the book. Trying to do right.” She laughs, looks straight ahead again. Out the window, at how the landscape of Hope melds with darkness. “There is no such thing as right. I know that now.”

She shakes her head, feels his seed leak out of her.

“But of course, even if I knew nothing then, I still knew too much. Alejandro showed up at my apartment after. Just like that. I turned around and he was there. He wanted me to sign a piece of paper legalising the whole fucking operation. He wiped my tears as he held a gun on when I refused.”
Her words are coming fast now, too fast, syllables melding, t’s and r’s too soft. Blurred. “I signed. Alejandro told me I’m not a wolf. He meant weak. Just a little girl, like his dead daughter. He told me to move away. Then he left. I went out on the balcony and pulled my gun on him. He had his back turned, but he knew. Alejandro is a wolf, you see, and he can sense these things. So he turned around. Gave me his front, gave me a solid target. I think he wanted me to do it. I think he wanted to die.”

She turns around completely then, just as Alejandro had, to face John. She wants him to see her face, her eyes. She wants him to see everything.

“And still, to this day, I don’t know if I didn’t pull the trigger out of spite, because I didn’t want to give him an easy way out, or because I just wasn't strong enough.”

She smiles, and she knows it’s ugly.

“There you have it. You happy?”

John is leaning forward, towards her. He looks like he wants to fuck her again. He looks like he wants to eat her.

“So you were too weak to shoot your sicario,” he says. 

She thinks he doesn’t want to say the name. Alejandro. She thinks that he doesn’t want to give Alejandro too much space, too much life. She thinks he’s jealous.  

“But you had no problems shooting Faith point blank. And Jacob, Kate.” He inches forward, just a little. “Did you kill Jacob?”

Her own gun is still on the bedside table. She can see it there. He hasn’t moved it.

She turns back around. Her back towards him again. She doesn’t know why. It’s stupid. But maybe it’s because she wants to leave things to chance. Maybe it’s because she can’t bear to look him in the face. He loved Jacob. He told her.

And this must end now. Maybe she is a coward and she can’t watch it come.

“Yes, John,” she speaks on a sigh. “I did. I killed him. But it was me or him. He went for me first. He almost killed me.”

He sounds closer when he speaks, close enough that his breath ought to brush across her shoulder blades.

“And if he hadn’t gone for you…would you still have killed him?”

Is he clutching at straws, at fairytales? Is he looking for a way out for her?

She doesn’t hesitate. She is proud of that.

“Yes.”

Only silence, and she is ashamed to be the one to break it:

“And what will you do now, John? Will you kill me right back?”

She doesn’t leave him space to answer. She can’t. It would be stupid, a mistake. She throws herself sideways off the bed, lands on the floor, and rolls, smoothly, over to the bedside table. Grabs her gun, cocks it. Finger sure about the trigger. She knows this, this is familiar.

“John,” she says. “John.”

She’s sitting on the floor, eyes over the side of the bed. He has got his back to her now. She points her gun at it. A large, reassuring target, like Alejandro had been. He is turned towards the bedside table with his gun. She can’t see his hands, but she thinks he’s holding it. She thinks he is as fast with that as he is with everything else.

“You know,” he says, “It’s a shame, it’s a pity. Maybe we could have made something out of this.” He gestures, a sweeping, uneven thing, to indicate them, and everything. With that, she sees that he holds the gun in his hand. He wants her to see, to know. “Maybe we could have made something...not horrific out of it.”

She thinks about how this will go. Then she smiles anyway. It’s the least she can do, even though he can’t see it. Maybe he can hear it in her voice.

“Maybe we could have,” she says.

Some silence, then. She feels her nakedness acutely, but John seems unbothered about his. His tattoos rise and fall on his shoulder blades. He is staring straight ahead.

She is struck with a hopeless, fucking idiotic notion of not making the worst out of this. Maybe…

“Turn around,” she says. Her voice is wet. “John. Maybe… Let go of the gun and turn around, please.”

He turns. He’s got his gun in his hand still. He’s pointing it at her. He looks at the way she’s pointing hers right back at him. A two-handed grip now, training always so close to the surface.

“But Kate,” he says with a smile, “ - are you free yet?”

“No,” she says, and she can hear how small and childish she sounds. Then: “Would you do it?” And she jerks her chin at the gun in John’s hand.

His voice is soft when he answers.

“Would you?” 

“I told you I would. I told you. Remember?”
He chuckles a little. She can see his shoulders move with it.

“I do. I remember.”

Then he, in a movement almost too fast for her to track, cocks his gun. Raises a brow.

She pulls the trigger. He pulls the trigger. She twists to the side. He just smiles.

She dodges his bullet. She can feel it streak past her ear, renting air. Hear it lodge in the wall behind her.

She hits him right in the chest. That’s selfish. It’s so fucking selfish. If she had clocked him in the head he would have died straight away, but she can’t bear that, can’t bear to ruin his face. She wants to remember it whole.

He falls backwards with the force of the shot, hits his head on the wooden headboard. She scrambles up on the bed, wrenches his gun away from him and throws it across the room. 

She looks down at him. He’s conscious. He’s looking back at her. She puts down her gun and places both her hands over the gaping wound in his chest. It’s a completely fucking vain, idiotic thing to do: blood is pumping wetly between her fingers in pace with his heart.

“Do you think you can be forgiven?” he asks her, spitting red. The question is full of urgency, like it’s important to him. 

She wants to do it. She wants to lie to him. But she can’t. 

Not to him.

So she says nothing, just holds his heart instead, and she won’t cry until she’s absolutely certain he is gone. 

And he goes quickly. He goes with his eyes wide open, stops breathing with something like rage, suddenly, between two beats.

She does indulge then. She weeps. Great hulking sobs, desperate, gasping, grasping. Just for a few minutes. She considers him, pale and still and empty, and thinks of all that he was. He was so much, so much, most of it bad. It’s awful seeing him like this, then. Like nothing. Dead.

Then she wipes her eyes. She gets off the bed. She finds some of his clothes, and dresses quickly. Jeans and a shirt. Clips the radio on, tucks the gun in.

She needs to move. John’s men will have heard the gunshots, she doesn’t believe for a second that he’d actually sent them all completely off the big property. 

But first there is something she must do.

She turns her back on the bed. She doesn’t look again. She staggers out of the bedroom, down the hall, and into the office. It looks the same. The satellite phone is still there. She picks it up, and dials a number she hadn’t even realised she’d committed to memory.

Just a couple of signals, and then an answer.

“Who is this?”

“Guess what,” she says, and she laughs and she cries.

A space of a few breaths, then his voice, tired, broken, strong.

“Kate?”

She’s genuinely surprised that he knows her by her voice. That he remembers her.

“Yes. Kate,” she wheezes, hisses, sobs down the phone. “I am a wolf now.”

“Kate…”

“…and do you know something, Alejandro?” she interrupts, clenching the phone so hard her hand hurts, her wrist, her jaw. 

“What is that, Kate?” and his voice is even quieter now, resigned, like he knows precisely what she will say. “Tell me.”

She says it anyway.

“Being a wolf hurts.”

“I know,” he says, but she isn’t listening anymore, she throws the phone towards the casement window, sees it smashing the glass and hears it hit the ground below.

Joseph, she thinks. Joseph is left.

She turns, leaves the room, runs down the stairs. She’s angry. She’s furious. She shakes with it.

He did this. He did all of this.

She’s going to go kill him now. She’s going to kill him, and finish this mission. At least that will be something she can claim. A beginning and an end. A success against bad people, for once in her life.

She fails. 

The bombs fall and she fails.

She thinks of him often, in the ensuing years. John. She’s got nothing else to do, does she? All she’s got is underground light and the same walls and Joseph’s blinding fervour. The world burning up above, and Joseph burning her down here.

So she travels deep into her mind, and lazily she picks away at the threads of John. 

She thinks of the vistas he showed her. From the clock tower. From the plane. Of the gifts he gave her and the harsh payments he exacted in turn. 

She thinks of the smile he smiled at her up in the tower. It was true, wasn’t it? 

Sometimes blue bleeds into hazel, and in the darkness she herself smiles, through tears, and she is so happy that she can still feel something down here.