A/N: Saw and its characters do not belong to me. They belong to Leigh Whannell, James Wan, Lions Gate, Twisted Pictures, Greg Hoffman, Oren Koules, and lots of other lovely people. But none of those people are me. This is set a few days before the events of Saw III, and is mostly so I can get the characters' voices back in my head.
She gave herself the night watch. He hadn't said he needed her, but the sparse, eerie light of machines surrounding John's bed smoothed some of the lines from his creased, parchment face. With his stern eyes closed she could watch him as long as she liked without needing to explain or struggle to give him a question she did not already know the answer to. She sat down lightly in a black folding chair by his face, tilting her head to watch his sober mouth in the blue, flickering light of the monitor. His sleep was guarded, his arms had been folded on his chest. As Amanda reached across the gap, her fingers shook. She passed her hand in front of his face, as though closing his eyes in ritual, and let it hover over his clenched hand. His hands were what fascinated her most. They were rough and cracked and they had almost torn her apart, they built rigs and tightened screws and aided the piercing eyes in testing people like her, and then they had pulled back, lifted her once off the floor when she cut too deeply and she could only feel them properly when he was asleep, or in the haze of morphine Jill forced on him when she couldn't hear him keen in pain any longer. Then John's fingers stirred, turned her hand this way and that and brushed her knuckles and traced her rough black polish and her callouses and sometimes he would murmur something out of a dream. Amanda chose to believe it was her name.
"Let him sleep, honey."
It was Jill, stirring from a rocking chair behind her, her long hair tangled and her eyes heavy with worried seconds of half-sleep. She leaned across the gap Amanda had withdrawn from, rearranging wires and tubes and needles and injecting something clear into the wasted muscles of his shoulder.
"Steroids." she said in her direct, steady voice. "For the hemorraging."
"He told you about the headaches." Her eyes remained on John's face, as he winced in his sleep and turned his face toward his wife. Her voice sounded weak and hollow, and she was glad John was not awake to hear it.
"He didn't have to." she could feel Jill's eyes on her face. It was a look she had felt a hundred times before. Not so harsh as calculating, not so yeilding as questioning. It was an appraising look that did not challenge, but when she gave it in her clinic Amanda felt the hackles rise on Cecil's neck, on Xavier's, on the ones who wanted so badly to lie to her. It was a look that never failed to draw Amanda's eyes like a magnet, drew the truth out of her like poison from a wound.
It was the kind of look that made her think of Gideon.
Now Jill finished tampering with John (she did not know why she thought those words, as if anyone who could touch him and bridge that gap of a hundred years was shutting her out), and she sat down again in her rocking chair. She took Amanda's forearm in two fingers, slowly and almost absently drawing her wrist into a weak pool of light. It took her a moment to realize what Jill was doing, and she jerked and almost cried out. Jill's hold was a vise as she said "You should let me clean these. They look inflamed." in her simple and drawing voice.
"They're fine." she protested weakly as Jill stripped off the bandage. Whether is was guilt or admiration, jealousy or obligation, love or fear, she never quite knew, but Jill seemed to drain the fight out of her, and made her feel meek, tired, and a faint shade of something that might have been shame. She kept her eyes on John's face until Jill's look drew her upward.
"There's something he's not telling you." It was not a question, it was a relation. Amanda shrugged.
"He's dying," she whispered, as Jill ran her stinging swabs over the slices in her wrist, they had spiderwebbed like broken glass. She swatted angrily at the tears in her eyes, "He shouldn't keep secrets from me anymore."
Jill sighed, heavily, as she covered the cuts with vitamins and bound them up again. She did not tell Amanda as she touched her how deep her veins were buried, how close and frail her bones set, how afraid John was that his last secrets would fold her glass, bird's skeleton and break her heart. She did not tell her that she did not think she would survive very long, that she would be forced into Jill's memory and out of all others'. She had always thought Amanda was a lost soul, and even if Jill survived a struggle that threatened to claim and crush her, she did not think Amanda could.
When he started to talk in his sleep, both women rose, but Jill returned to her seat in a feeble sort of way while Amanda watched intently, listening for the sound of her name or the sound of Jill's. She seemed to hear Jill from underwater as Jill eased her back to her chair, her back folding. She tilted her head against Jill's belly as she stretched, and Jill had a sudden desire to seize her by the hair, press her ear into her womb to make her listen to the emptiness there, to have her understand what it meant, what all this was for. Amanda wished she would.
Jill left the moment undisturbed. She gave no outward sign of that shared thought, the name that she had heard in John's murmur, Gideon...
Instead, her hand moved unconsciously to the back of Amanda's neck and clasped there, communicating nothing but that deep-rooted steadiness that Amanda loved and feared so. Amanda's bandaged arms hung loosely over the seat of her folding chair, her bruised knuckles brushing the floor. Jill found herself scanning the girl's body automatically, looking for fresh track marks, bruised shadows under the eyes, any signs of wasting, and she found signs. The only poison in the veins of her lost soul was what Jill had nothing for, what Jill herself was still drawing out like a knife from between her ribs. Her hair was lank, some of it was coming loose as she combed it absently.
Amanda folded her legs under her, crossing her bandaged arms across her stomach and hiding them in her thin shirt. John should not see them. Not as he was. She let her mind drift to how he must have been with Jill, with his blue eyes sea and not frost, glowing and appraising and not piercing, judging. He was mercy and now he must be justice. Did part of her pity Jill, who begged for no further part in these games, but who could not tear herself away from death? She, after all, had never died, and so she had never been reborn. Jill was John Kramer's wife, not the feral girl who gave every cell of her body to the man they called Jigsaw, and not the broken one who gave her heart to the wasted man dying in this anonymous room. She had never been reborn for this new man to claim her. She was in his shadow world. She was behind them.
Yet his wolf girl's chopped and scattered thoughts returned to the times he had moaned Jill's name while he slept. Was he remembering the way he touched her face when they first met, the night he proposed to her under the fireworks, the feel of her soft weight yielding to him and to his son, the dusk he carried her to the hospital and killed the man he was?
And what, but for Amanda, might that son have been?
Amanda jumped. She was standing, with John's hand cradled in both of hers, held gently against her cheek. She hadn't noticed that Jill had gone, but now Jill set a cup on the night table and put both hands firmly on her charge's shoulders, guiding her to the nest of blankets on her rocking chair and pushing the cup into her hands. Amanda looked up at her, in a blank sort of reproach. Jill gave her a weakly wry smile.
"Don't think I can't tell when you're not eating," she told her seriously. "I know the signs."
"I haven't been-" her hackles rose.
"I know that." she threw a blanket over Amanda's lap, and made to brush off the mothballs. "John drives himself to collapse. These days it's easier than ever. He makes it so easy to trust, doesn't he, but when he can't run anymore..."
"He makes it, too easy to..." she broke off, and Jill didn't even shrug as she covered Amanda's shaking hands with hers, and tipped the soup into her mouth. She straightened, brushing her eyes, and swung her flannel coat over her shoulders.
"I'll tell you to sleep, but as I know you won't..." she fussed with the blanket, and placed a paper cup and a syringe by the girl's feet. "You know what to do."
Amanda nodded mutely, a thoroughly perverse part of her picturing the night the woman before her felt the death throes of John's son, how the pain that ripped her must have cracked the foundations of that cool, all-embracing calm, how the dark brown irises must have been swallowed up by the dilations of fear, as her labor gave her nothing but death. How she longed just once to see the woman John adored broken, open, the windows to her soul not closed like shutters behind her penetrating appraisal, but her secrets ghosting from her pleading face, searching for someone who would ask her to give them everything.
Like John, Amanda liked to keep things in order. She liked to keep things neat, and tempered as the edge of the steel knife that cut the subjects' puzzle pieces, all but the one...
No, she wouldn't think about him now. She was distilling her thoughts, trying to make them pure, and devoted. Let go. Salvation is out of your hands.
You will give everything to me, every cell in your body...
She said these things aloud, murmuring them as she pulled her razor across her bedstead to hear it ring, as she bathed it and dried it in clean cotton, as she let it tug and rip at her skin as she drew it across her thigh. She sighed as the blood trickled from the neat, symmetrical slices on her legs, and as her fingers moved in rough and ceaseless circles in her cunt.
Every cell in my body...
Her fingers worked in short and shallow thrusts as the blood trickled in streams up her legs, staining her, marking her. Her muscles twitched and stiffened, her blood whining as her face grew hot, her blood making shallow pools in the hollows of her hips.
Every cell...
Her eyes flew open as the curtain rustled, almost soundlessly. She knew when she was being watched. She had always known. She reached her left arm over her head, fumbling on her nightstand for the first thing her fingers tripped across. The set of keys flew to the curtain and clattered feebly to the floor, but she did not stop again to listen if her intruder was gone. She shut her eyes, pressed her strokes harder and harder, her breathing hitching as she again steadied her thoughts, centered them on the blue eyes that had honored her, the hands that broken her down and built her up. How she wanted to yield to more than he would ever ask, or ever give.
Her fingers plunged, her heart was pounding in her ears as she came, hard enough to shake her thoughts apart. Her whimpering reached a pitch, and as it receded she turned her head slowly, pulling her white cotton towel over her legs as she stared an impotent challenge into Hoffman's eyes. She supposed they were blue, like John's, when she had first caught them, but they did not have the same kind of resolve. They did not pierce the same way, but scanned, and something had flickered out behind them. Something that had not been tested. They seemed oddly colorless now.
"He's sleeping," she snarled, "Jill came in to see him. Gave him steroids and morphine. And food."
He blinked, breaking their stare, but watching her frozen, her face red and shining, her hair tousled, because she was afraid of what he might do if she turned her back. Her eyes not leaving his face, she dipped her stained hands into the bowl of alcohol above her head.
"Fuck do you want, Detective?" she hissed. She didn't want the fabric of her work jeans over her open wounds. She needed to clean and bind up the gashes before she gave John more medicine, before she called the others for their help with Morgan and Lynn and Troy. She narrowed her eyes. Get out. Get out. Getoutgetoutgetout...
The pool on her right hip trickled as she moved and the drips began to pepper the floor, marking the line in the sand as he took one step, then two, toward her bed. She tried not to wince.
"You forgot the dishes," he reprimanded her hoarsely. Her keys hurtled back to her, landing on the towel covering her stomach. "It's your turn."
She scowled, and sat up, clumsily pressing the towel to her with one hand, tossing her keys in the other.
"You're just shoving oatmeal through the bars. Go away. I'm busy."
"Obviously," his face was impassive, but the sneer was in his colorless eyes. "You missed your chance to kill him, so now you've gotta keep him alive."
"Only because you're shit at it." she imagined clawing at the lightless mask of his face with her bloodied nails.
He shook his head minutely. In his mind he set spikes on the girl's temples, the very spots where her voice gave him migraines. "I thought you liked when he put lives in your hands. Not very responsible of you to just let him starve, is it?"
She stared.
"John wouldn't like it."
"Fine. On my way out."
"I'd start putting spackle on those, if I were you."
"Get out." She dropped back irritably onto her mattress as he backed out of her corner, but did not pull the curtain shut behind him.
He was right, her cuts had been getting too deep. Already her head ached as though she had swallowed ice, but most of the blood had been soaked up in the towel. She patched up the torn flesh, wrapped it in cotton, and abandoned her work jeans thick with dirt and rust and grease for black leggings. She'd feed Matthews and then John and then bed up in Jill's rocking chair. Troy and Morgan could wait. They still had time. They had a little...
"Alright. Gimme." she held out her hand for the garage key from John's desk without looking at him. "Let's get this over with."
He held the key tight for the moment it took for her to turn her face over her shoulder and scowl, "You want him alive, or you wouldn't have been bitching about the rotten meat."
"I want his bones to heal so he can stand on them for an hour." He corrected her indifferently, "Whether he lives or dies, that's always been his choice."
"So you don't give a shit?" she surprised herself with the question. She would have killed Matthews with her choice, but Hoffman knew him, had partnered him, had helped him put men away, had watched his son grow up. The son Matthews would never see again. A numb, sick sense of unease was rising in Amanda's mouth, and she swallowed compulsively as his head tilted and his colorless eyes scanned her face, registering her shock, her disgust, and her fear, undisguised for just a moment as she paused before the door. Then the windows shut behind the brown eyes and the blue.
Hoffman shrugged.
"You can't." he said finally. He shouldered open the door.
A retching, sputtering sound reached them from John's bed. The garage key slipped from Amanda's hand as she hurried to him.
"Amanda, leave him. We've got work to do."
She waved her middle finger over her head before shutting the door to John's study behind her with a snap. Hoffman tossed the key between gloved hands, waiting. There was nothing they could do for these seizures. As long as he wasn't walking when they happened, there was nothing Amanda could do for him but be the first one he saw when he came around. But that was all she wanted. She thought she balanced the board John held. She thought herself tested, and rehabilitated, and safe. She wished herself loved.
Hoffman thought of what would happen in the days to come. Amanda could regiment and imitate. She could not create. And a puppetmaster must never stop creating, for if one thread dropped, all came undone.
So he would not drop this thread, but instead cut away the marionette.