The Permanent Efficacy of Grace
6.
She's been hit by a truck, one of those big Peggy numbers that hauls bliss and blows up if you even look at it funny. It's the only possible explanation for how she feels. She doesn't even bother to open her eyes before croaking, "Ow."
She's still breathing, though; that's something. At the sound of rustling (and at the sudden awareness that that and a soft beeping are the only sounds she can hear, which is cause for alarm; she's used to the constant background flood of crickets and birds and frogs and distant gunfire), she cracks an eye open.
The room is dingy, gray, windowless. Harsh fluorescent lights glare overhead. The rustling she'd noticed is a Peggy, standing from a nearby chair, but even as Rook lays eyes on her and tenses up, the strange woman slips out of the room, which allows her to relax just long enough to put together the rest of the details. She's in an infirmary bed. A finger monitor connects her to a machine keeping time with her heartbeat, the source of the beeping she's hearing. Plastic tubes are taped to the back of her hand and the crook of her elbow, leading to various drip bags full of clear fluids. Her other hand, she realizes when she reflexively lifts it to worry at the hand tube, is shackled to the bed.
"Shit," she mutters, the word coming out as a rasp. If the presence of the Peggy hadn't been enough, the shackle is confirmation—somehow, Eden's Gate has gotten hold of her. She has no idea how. Last thing she remembers is going to sleep at the McCoy cabin. Bliss, maybe? Bliss doesn't usually come with memory loss, but maybe with enough of it…
Her train of thought is interrupted when another person comes through the door, a young woman, light hair tied back, wearing black pants and sturdy rubber boots and a white tank top under a green camo jacket. It isn't until she speaks that Rook realizes, with a jolt of surprise, that it's Faith Seed.
"Hey, there, sleepyhead," she greets Rook in her sweet voice, giving her a tired-looking smile. "We were wondering when you'd wake up."
Rook says nothing right away, just stares. The only time she's seen Faith outside of the Bliss was that first night, at the church, when Faith was fully immersed in her role as Herald, and her subsequent appearances to Rook had followed that general pattern. Seeing her like this, in practical clothes, wearing shoes for once in her life, comes as a little bit of a shock. Her pretty face is clear of makeup, as always, but outside of the Bliss, Rook can detect bluishness to the skin under her eyes, a slightly exhausted cant to the line of her mouth.
Her surprise finally jars some words out of her, although she knows objectively it'd be better to stay quiet till she knows what this is. "You're wearing shoes."
Faith giggles, moving to the foot of Rook's bed and wrapping her hands around the metal frame there. "Well, it's the mountains. The terrain is much more treacherous up here. When it isn't sharp or rocky, it's muddy. Or worse. I mean, think of all the wolves he's got running around up here."
Rook blinks. "We're in the mountains?" Where's Jacob?
Faith seems surprised to see her surprise, though she smooths that expression away in the work of a second. She asks, "What do you remember?"
Rook toys with the idea of lying—she doesn't like admitting that she's in the dark, especially to her enemies—but she's already tipped her hand, and she doesn't see how faking it will help her here. Faith might mess with her a little bit, take advantage of her ignorance, but Rook thinks she'll probably do that whether Rook admits to it or not.
"I went to sleep in the Henbane," she says. "Woke up here feeling like I'm dying. No idea what happened in-between."
"You don't remember being stabbed?" Faith says, her eyes a little too wide and too aghast for Rook to buy the put-on shock, the horror.
She doesn't quite roll her eyes, preoccupied with the task of trying to figure out if she feels stabbed. Her limbs feel weak and ghostly, and her head aches, but most of the pain seems to be radiating from her torso. At the thought, she gingerly passes a hand over the graze wound that's been giving her so much trouble lately, but to her surprise, it doesn't react with a flare of pain to the light touch the way it has been. She's wearing a sort of shapeless gown, so she can't really easily reach under it to feel, but through it she can feel the thickness of bandages, which she follows to the other side of her belly, to a pain that feels a little rawer and sorer than the old wound.
She meets Faith's eyes. "Here?"
Faith nods.
"Any organ damage?"
"I hear they removed your appendix, but that was a consequence of infection from your other wound. The knife didn't hit anything vital."
"Who did it?"
"You were tracking a killer, remember? He'd been slaughtering our people, and yours. Using their bodies—"
"—for that fucking haunted house," groans Rook, rubbing at her eyes with her one free(ish) hand. "Yeah, okay, that rings a bell." It's weird and dreamlike, doesn't hold the sharp quality of her regular memories, but she remembers the barn now, and the grotesque human dummies.
"You followed him all the way up here," Faith says, tapping Rook's toe through the lightweight knit blanket covering her bottom half. "And when Jacob found you, you'd been drugged and stabbed. You gave him a real scare, you know."
Rook, struggling to remember anything else beyond a few blurry recollections of interminable hiking through the mountains and woods, makes the mistake of distractedly making eye contact. There's a shrewd, searching look in Faith's eyes, and when Rook reflexively scowls—she feels like a butterfly pinned to a page, and it's not a good feeling—that look clears away into something like understanding.
Whatever, Rook thinks, made even more irritable than usual by the steady ache in her guts. Not like the whole county doesn't know by now, anyway. "Where is he?"
"I believe," Faith says, her tone light and deliberate, "he's with the Father right now."
"Talking out my fate?" Rook asks rhetorically. "Because that worked out so well for everyone last time." The end of her sentence vanishes into a grunt as she tries to struggle upright, but her stomach lights up with pain, making her gasp, and Faith is quick to jump to her side, splaying her hand over Rook's collarbone and pushing her back down with fingertips that feel too sharp.
Despite everything, her voice stays sweet. "No, Deputy. You need to rest."
Rook simply doesn't have the energy to fight (and Faith is a lot stronger than she expected, that or she's gotten a lot weaker in her downtime). She lets Faith pin her to the pillow and looks up at her clear and unlined face. "So is that why you're up here?" she asks idly as Faith uses her free hand to draw the blanket up some. "They want you to just keep me whammied on Bliss so I'm no trouble while they decide what to do with me?" She's being kind of an asshole, but Faith is kind of an asshole herself, so she doesn't feel bad about it.
"Of course not. Don't be silly," Faith says, tucking the blanket back in place. "Jacob wanted someone here to keep an eye on you while he was gone, and you're not going anywhere near the Bliss till you're finished with this run of antibiotics. Nobody's sure what sort of reactions that might cause."
Oh. Rook immediately gets stuck on Jacob wanted someone to keep an eye on you, and as much as she warns herself not to read too much into it—Jacob's always been rigid about watching over her, from the start, and back then, at least, it certainly wasn't out of concern—but she can't help the hopeful little flare in her chest. You gave him quite a scare, Faith had said; also that Jacob was the one to find her. Rook just wishes she could remember it, remember how he'd been—had it been a Joseph is weirdly fixated on dragging you into the cult so I can't let you die sort of thing? Or—
Her train of thought breaks when Faith leans over her, ostensibly to reach one of the machines Rook is hooked up to, but she puts a lot of weight into the hand resting on Rook's collarbone, pulling a pained little grunt from her and making it harder to breathe. "Morphine, on the other hand," Faith says, and Rook hears a few chirps from the machine as Faith adjusts the dose, "well. Morphine should work out just fine."
Rook doesn't want morphine. She wants to stay awake and alert, think this through, ward off any threats, wait for Jacob to come back and see if she can get some actual answers from him, but she feels the drug flooding her system in seconds. Faith leans back, the pressure of her hand easing on Rook's chest, and Rook laughs, though the sound is half-formed even to her own ears. "You're an asshole," she says, or tries to—her tongue feels stuck to the bottom of her mouth—and then she's gone again.
Jacob doesn't get back to the Veteran's Center till late, late that night, and he counts himself lucky—he got the sense that Joseph could have gone on all night, but his congregants had been getting restless, and he'd been obliged to release Jacob and start a service. Jacob guesses the Faithful are good for something, after all.
He goes straight to Rook's room. Faith is still posted up there in a chair by the door, not asleep, but from the glazed look in her eye, she isn't far from it. Jacob's arrival pulls her back to herself, though—as he pauses in the doorway, she stretches her arms over her head, heaves a jaw-cracking yawn. "Oh, you're back."
He nods and glances at the bed. Rook is totally still but for the faint rise and fall of her chest, but that alarming gray cast to her skin is finally gone. Still, he'd prefer it if she was awake. The stillness and silence of her is strange, far from what he's used to with her.
Faith, showing her uncanny tendency to figure out what he's thinking without him having to speak a word of it, says, "She woke up briefly a few hours ago. She claims she doesn't remember most of that day. Whatever he dosed her with must have had an amnesiac effect. Seems to be doing better, though." With a sort of deliberate lightness, looking at Rook's sleeping form in her bed, she adds, "She called me an asshole."
Don't fucking smile, Jacob thinks, but still has to pretend to scratch his nose to make sure his face doesn't betray him. Faith says, "She was asking about you. She wasn't happy that you were with the Father."
Jacob grunts, moves a little further into the room. "Well. She wouldn't be. Last time it happened didn't end well for her. You can go now, Faith. Get some rest."
"Is that your way of telling me I look tired?" she asks, tilting her head in a guileless way he doesn't buy for a second.
"You do look tired," he says absently, approaching the bed—Rook's blanket is hanging low off the end; he pulls it up and tucks it under her feet.
Faith giggles, different from her musical stage laugh, a graceless little snorting sound she wouldn't be caught dead making around her followers, and counters, "So do you. Any plans to sleep tonight, big brother?" He doesn't think the question warrants response, so he doesn't bother. After a moment, Faith adds, "Anyway, I'll be up the rest of the night, probably. I have to go down to John's."
"What did he do?"
"Nothing, as far as I know. He's asked me to speak to some of the people he's hosting in his bunker, that's all."
"Ah." Jacob understands. A lot of people don't take kindly to being recruited. Some of those people respond a little better to Faith's sweetness than to John's intensity—and for the stubborn holdouts (most of their number at this late stage), Faith's presence implies a threat of lobotomy via Bliss, which has a tendency to make even the most rabid Resistance members think twice.
"No rest for the holy, it seems," she says, yawns again, and then gets up to leave.
She's already out of the room when Jacob says her name; she peeks back around the door frame immediately, face open and curious. He looks at her and has to force the word out—it's quieter, sounds a little hoarser than he'd like for it to: "Thanks." He doesn't just mean for doing him the favor of watching over Rook while he was away, either. As Joseph's most devoted sibling—certainly more devoted than he is, anyway—she could be giving him a world of shit over this whole thing if she wanted to, and he wouldn't be able to offer up much of a defense. She hasn't spoken a single critical word, hasn't even shot him a disapproving look. It means something, enough for him to voice gratitude that usually would stay unspoken.
She nods, her expression shifting just slightly into something pensive, maybe a little bit sad. She lingers for a few seconds, and finally, she says, "I think we all love her. You know? In our way. Despite everything."
Again with the mind-reading shit. Profoundly uncomfortable, Jacob breaks eye contact and clears his throat, staring down at the tops of his boots until he hears her tap the door frame and softly say, "Bye, Jacob" and leave.
The sense of relief he feels when he's finally alone with Rook, listening to the slow, steady beep of her heart monitor, nearly brings him to his knees. He shakes his head viciously, getting himself under control, and briefly passes a hand over his face. "Christ," he mumbles. What a night.
Before he can do something humiliating, like touch her (he can hear her heartbeat on the monitor; he doesn't need to touch her to know she's alive and doing fine), he heads out to the hallway and summons a Chosen, asking for a few things before returning to the room and settling in the chair Faith had vacated. He's sticking around at least till she wakes up, but he has no intention of being idle. No rest for the holy, Faith had said. Certainly none for the wicked.
That's how it comes to pass that when Rook wakes, by his estimate sometime around 3 AM, Jacob is reviewing long-neglected reports from his top people—updates on the Judge training, a few supply inventories for the bunker, a proposal for two new beacons, things of that nature. He cycles them along his clipboard, making notes as he goes, peering through the plain pair of reading glasses he hates but has needed since about age thirty-eight, when he realized that words on a page just looked like a blurry mess to him unless he squinted, and the squinting was getting increasingly less effective. He's making some progress—he should have handled all this as it came in, never should have let it pile up like this, but he's been gone a lot this week, training and sparring for much of the rest of it, with zero patience for paperwork.
When Rook wakes, it's violent. One second she's sleeping; the next, she jerks upright, the shackle on her wrist clattering against the bed frame and the monitor picking up speed as she looks around blearily, wildly, for danger. Her eyes land on Jacob's and he can tell that for a second, she doesn't recognize him, still in the tight grip of sleep. His heart thumps hard in his chest for a moment and his first thought is to wonder how often she wakes up like this, trying to scramble away from a threat that follows her even into her sleep. Then she freezes, and he can tell she's placed him, is trying to figure out what his presence means.
"S'okay," he says mildly. It seems to be the right thing to say—she relaxes, in little increments, the monitor slowing as she carefully lowers herself back down to a resting position, watching him the whole time. After that, a silence looms over them both, and it's uncomfortable, feels unnatural now that she's conscious, but Jacob has no idea how to break it. He's used to her being the one always ready with something to say, is frankly more used to reacting to her nonsense than starting a conversation himself, at least outside of his scripted talks, his program (which has been off the rails for weeks when it comes to her), so for lack of a better idea, he stays quiet and focuses his attention on his work.
Predictably, she speaks first, though it takes her longer than he thinks it should. "How do I look?"
Christ. He knows the question is her idea of a joke, but she really has the shittiest sense of humor. He lifts his eyes just long enough to give her a perfunctory once-over before returning them to the clipboard. "Like you almost died."
"So basically the same as always. That's good."
"I've never seen you get quite this close." His tone is a little terse, and she peers sharply at him.
"Are you mad at me for getting stabbed?"
"I'm mad that you let that infection progress as far as it did," he says, flipping a page.
She laughs incredulously before cutting herself off with a little gasp of pain. The injuries don't stop her from talking back, though: "That was healing up just fine before you had me abducted and left to the mercies of that dumb shit Peggy."
"I pulled him off you," he reminds her.
"Yeah, but by then the damage was done, wasn't it? And you try getting decent medical treatment when your people are all convinced you're a secret time bomb two seconds away from snapping and killing them all, if not just an outright spy because they all think they know exactly what's going on between you and the guy they all hate the most."
This little screed appears to take it out of her, and she pants a little bit at the conclusion, shallow little breaths to keep from jarring her wounds too much. Jacob absorbs the words stoically, trying to figure out if there's an underlying accusation, if she's blaming the way her people are treating her on him. After a moment, he concludes that she's not, that she's just stating facts. And in the interest of facts: "John mentioned witness reports of your people firing on you," he says, abandoning the pretense of work altogether and peering intently at her over the top of his glasses. "That true?"
She lifts both hands in a what can I say gesture, giving him a wry smile that doesn't seem to contain all that much humor. He feels a sneer catching at his mouth before he can control it. "Nice teammates you got there."
"In their defense, they do think I'm fucking the guy with the brainwashing op and the wolf army."
"No defense. Not after all you've done for them."
She gives him a funny little look, like she's not sure she heard him right, but he hasn't said anything untrue and just stares back at her, which seems to make her uncomfortable, because she settles gingerly onto her back and talks to the ceiling instead. "It's not like they're a regimented army acting under orders, anyway. More like a loose collective of individuals. You know, all feeling differently about different things. I'm sure most of them wouldn't shoot at me."
Jacob is shaking his head, though she can't see it. "Loose collective," he repeats. "That's why they're falling apart." She gives him a narrow little look, like she's not sure if he's just saying it to mock her—which he really, truly isn't—and he nods at her. "Oh, yeah. Ever since you went underground they've been hemorrhaging. Losing ground, equipment, people—all of it, in droves. You're right, they're not an army, an army knows it needs a good commander to give it some direction, and they just tried to kill theirs. Ignorant pieces of shit."
She doesn't seem to know how to respond to that. She starts to say something, "Are you—?", but she changes her mind abruptly, and turns her attention instead to the shackle loose around her wrist, rattling it against the bed frame. "Take this off me," she says irritably.
"Why?" he asks, not moving. "So you can go back to them, get shot at a couple more times, maybe even hit this time, before you admit to yourself that they've really turned on you? Fuck 'em, Rook. They deserve to be left to rot."
She'd laid back and put her free arm over her eyes, exasperated or maybe just tired, but she pops back up at his conclusion. She's never been one to shy away from a fight, after all. "Maybe that's exactly what I want to do. Why do you care? It's none of your business if I want to go get shot."
"I carried your ass in here half-dead, fulla holes and burning up with infection, I'd say at this point it's a little bit my business."
"Yeah, well, why the fuck did you do a stupid thing like that?" she snaps. "Would have solved a lot of your problems if you just left me to die. Hell, mine, too."
"If you wanna die, I can make that happen," he says steadily. For some reason, that makes her laugh, a short-lived cackle that tapers off into a moan of pain. She lets her head fall back to the pillow and mutters something he's not sure he hears right—fuckin' romantic, maybe?—before subsiding, staring at the ceiling again.
In the ensuing silence, he pulls his reading glasses off and digs the heel of his hand into one eyelid, then the other, feeling the weight of the last few shitty days hit him all at once. He's tired, and this isn't going the way he thought it would. He didn't mean to start arguing with her, least of all when she's still in her hospital bed, barely alive, but then, he never does. One of the many, many, many reasons this thing of theirs is the dumbest idea that either of them have ever had: they can't seem to be in the same room without constantly bitching each other out.
He wonders if she's wishing he'd leave. He's about to offer—better yet, just get up and go—when she starts talking to him again, though she's still not looking at him: "So. What did Joseph say this time?"
He hesitates. "A few things," he says eventually, evasive. He always feels weird and uncomfortable relaying his little brother's thoughts on things to people. It's bad when it's the avid faithful (he finds himself annoyed by the reverent, empty looks on their faces as they listen to him) and worse when it's her. This time is no exception. Maybe it's because Joseph's her enemy, and Jacob feels the natural urge, increasing every day, to make himself into a sort of wall between them. Maybe it's because he doesn't think she needs to know that he told Joe that over his dead body would he be sending her back to John, or anyone else this time. Whatever the reasons, she's going to be getting a heavily redacted version of events.
(Joseph had reacted with surprising forbearance, given that Jacob had practically yelled at him—not quite in front of all the inhabitants of the compound, but he definitely hadn't been watching his volume, so some of them heard. It probably helped that Jacob still had her blood all over him. Despite Joseph summoning him almost immediately after the event, Jacob hadn't been willing to leave the infirmary till all the various operations were done and the doctors declared her out of the woods, earlier today. By that point, Faith had arrived—at Joseph's behest, he thought, he hadn't called her, but it was true that he felt better about leaving Rook under Faith's watch than just about anyone else's—and Jacob went to Joseph's immediately, not stopping to change or eat or sleep. He'd wanted it on the record that the Junior Deputy was at the Veteran's Center to stay, and to his relief, Joseph hadn't argued, though Jacob got the sense that he was being placated, that they would revisit this conversation once things had calmed down. He doesn't really care, that's a problem for later, for now she's with him and she's safe.)
"Well," she says now, "do I at least get a few days to heal up before I have to go back to John's?"
"You're not going to John."
"Don't send me to Faith. Earlier today I thought she was going to smother me with the pillow just cause she was bored."
"You're staying right here."
At that, she does look at him, sharp, suspicious, like she doesn't believe him. "Well, yeah, I'm gonna have to for a few days, and then—"
"No."
She stares for a second, then starts to struggle upright. He wants to tell her to knock that shit off before she busts a stitch, but she's an adult capable of making her own decisions (and he also doesn't think she'll listen to him unless he goes over and physically holds her down, which he doesn't want to do right now, doesn't want to touch her), so he holds his tongue. She manages to get herself in a quasi-sitting position, using the pillow to support her back, and after taking a second, her hand fluttering over the injured spots, like she's making sure everything's where it's supposed to be, she says, "And Joseph's okay with that?"
"For now."
"How about later?"
"I'll deal with later later."
Her eyes slide shut, and when they open again, there's a hard little light in them that he doesn't like the look of. "Hey, not to be a bitch about it, but do you remember the last conversation we had?"
"I do."
She gestures at him with an open palm, a sort of see what I mean? When he says nothing, she goes on: "I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna hang out here just cause you changed your mind for now, only to get the boot the next time Joseph says so, rinse and repeat, ad infinitum. I'm not your goddamn puppy. What are you smiling at."
He is smiling, he realizes, just a little one, more wry than anything else, and reaches up to pass his hand briefly over his eyes again. When he looks at her again, he sees that she's starting to get mad, so he assures her, "I'm not laughing at you. Just…" I have no idea how to put this. "We," he begins slowly, finally, "are gonna have to figure something out, because after what happened, and who all saw it, I don't think we can pass as, uh, sworn enemies anymore."
He's achieved the impossible, it seems: Rook is tongue-tied. She clearly has no idea what he's talking about. She actually stammers for a few seconds, gets exactly nothing out, and then subsides. He gives her about ten more seconds to see if she'll be able to come up with questions for him, and when she does nothing but stare, he figures he'll take advantage of the quiet, puts the glasses back on, and returns to work.
Maybe ten seconds after that, the power of speech returns to her. "You," she says, low and measured, "are the most infuriating man I have ever met in my life."
"Mm-hmm," he hums absently, lifting the clipboard and turning it sideways to better examine a diagram of a proposed beacon structure that Morgan is claiming is more ergonomically effective, whatever the shit that means.
"And maybe the stupidest."
"You've met my youngest brother and Staci Pratt so you know that one ain't true."
"I'm about to climb out of this bed and fight you."
"You want your ass beat and sent back to death's door, then come on over here."
"Jacob."
"What."
"You need to explain to me what the fuck is going on."
He levels an exasperated look at her over his frames. "Well, what part isn't clear to you?"
"Literally all of it!" she exclaims, flailing her free arm around like she's indicating the whole world. "You're sitting over there acting like it's a done deal but from my perspective we're in the exact same spot as we were when you sent me away last time! Nothing has changed."
He sighs, removes his glasses again. "Your side doesn't want you anymore, and my people… saw me… work hard to keep you alive. For lack of a better way of puttin' it, you're stateless, and I lost any deniability I still had when it comes to you. I'd say those are some big changes."
She shakes her head. "What does that mean, deniability when it comes to me? You trying to tell me that you love me?" He'd have expected a question like that coming from her to be light, teasing, but her tone is flat and sounds bitter.
He scowls. "Don't be an idiot."
"I'm trying, but none of this makes sense to me. Like, okay, what happens when Joseph says, hey actually, she can't stay with you, I want her at my compound where I can proselytize and keep an eye on her?"
His mouth tightens and he shakes his head. "Not gonna happen," he says firmly.
"How do you know that?"
"Cause I won't let it."
"Are you telling me you'd pick me over Joseph?"
"I won't have to."
"How do you know?"
"Because I'm not gonna let it happen."
"You should have just let me bleed out."
"Don't act like a damn child."
"I'm serious. Finding out for sure whether or not there's an afterlife has got to be more rewarding than this circular bullshit."
"Maybe if you just took my word for it—"
"Jacob. Listen." He listens, though it seems to take her a few seconds to get her thoughts in order. "This is my concern. Like, I have a million concerns, but this is the important one right now. Last time, Joseph did make you pick between him and me. You picked him. You wouldn't even hear me out. It's not like I don't get it, I do, but once bitten, twice shy and all that. If it happened again, I don't think you'd have my back."
She's not the only one who gets to say outrageous shit just to get a reaction, so he says, "What would convince you? You want me to marry you?"
Her eyes get huge, and she starts laughing, high-pitched and hysterical, though it doesn't last long before she doubles over, her hands on her abdomen. Jacob watches on, unsmiling and unmoved, as she takes a few painful breaths. Finally, she recovers enough to say, "I honestly don't think that would work. I don't think anyone can compete with your brothers."
He thinks, half-shrugs. "Faith does."
"Okay—a, don't lump me in with your sister—"
"You started it," he mumbles.
"—and b, I don't believe you. Like, if someone handed you a gun and said you had to shoot either Faith or John or they were gonna drop an a-bomb on everyone, you're really telling me you'd consider shooting John for even a second?"
"I'd have already replaced the bullets with blanks, since we're in hypothetical bullshit land and I can just make anything up," he says impatiently.
"I give up," Rook says abruptly, and flops onto her back with her arm covering her eyes, only to moan, "Owwww" as the impact jolts her injuries. Jacob blinks. She's usually like a dog with a bone in an argument, refusing to let it go for anything, but even as he feels the faintest stir of worry, she announces, "Maybe I'll come back to it when I don't have stitches everywhere but right now I am too tired and if I keep going I think I'm going to start crying out of sheer frustration."
"Good reason to stop." Jacob's fine with this outcome. Deal with it later has been his game plan this whole time, and now that she's on board, they can finally get around to openly ignoring the uncomfortable truths about her presence here, with him.
She lays there in silence for a while, eyes hidden by the crook of her elbow, and he hears her breathing level out. He watches her, thinking she's probably on her way back to sleep—her body's been through a lot, he's kind of surprised she's stayed conscious this long—but after about five minutes, sounding drowsy, she asks, "Did I kill him?"
"Did you kill who?" he asks patiently.
"O'Hara."
"You did not."
A pause, then she removes her arm from her face and looks at him, frowning. "Well, what happened, then?"
He bares his teeth at the memory. "After he stabbed you, my hunters took a shot at him. Missed him, spooked him. He took off into the woods."
"He's still on the loose?" she demands, struggling upright once more, her voice cracking a little on the last word.
Jacob scowls and points his pen at her. "You see, this is the kinda thing that had you chasing a killer all the way across the county instead of resting and trying to get your hands on some medicine. The whole… cop thing is blown to hell here, Rook; catching him isn't your job anymore."
"You're being unfair. I don't even remember deciding to do it so it shouldn't count." He scoffs; she doubles down. "But based on what I know about myself I'm gonna guess that I figured that if I stopped or called for backup he'd just get away."
"So you followed him up here, getting worse with every step, he stabbed you, and then he got away."
"And you just let him go? I don't buy it. What happened?"
"Why don't you go back to sleep and let me worry about O'Hara."
"Because if I don't know there's no way I'll be able to go to sleep."
"I wish you knew what a pain in my ass you are."
Her silence in response to that is unexpected and unwelcome. He can see the exhaustion flicker across her face a split second before she lies back down, and it makes him feel like a total piece of shit, like he's kicking her while she's already down. That's normally not something that would bother him, either, but he's been thinking a lot about what she said, about him being like his father, and he doesn't know what to do with that, doesn't know if he should do anything, but it's still just been sitting there in his mind, uncomfortably present.
He yields. "My hunters caught up to him after less than an hour."
Her breath hitches. "They kill him?"
He makes a negative noise. "Too easy. I figured you should have a little say in what we do to him, too, so he's locked up now. Securely. O'Hara can wait." He doesn't mention that his instinct had been to flay the man, starting with the face, and probably would have by now if he hadn't been keeping his vigil at the infirmary. (He still hasn't ruled it out.)
She's silent again for a minute, then, sounding plaintive despite clearly trying not to, she asks, "Why are you all the way over there?"
The question gives him pause. He stares, but she's gone back to watching the ceiling like it holds the answers to life's mysteries—nervous, he realizes, not wanting him to see too much of her face. It comes to him that she doesn't like asking for his attention, at least not his positive attention. She'll argue with him till she's blue in the face, she'll take a swing at him without hesitation despite him being bigger and stronger and better-trained than she is, but he's noticed it before—she treads lightly around the potential for his affection, like a dog expecting to be kicked.
It's the kind of thing that usually strikes him as chickenshit, and maybe a few days ago, he'd have kicked, but he's got some new perspective now about her that he doesn't see the point in ignoring, so he just answers, "Thought you could use some breathing room."
"Well, I think you should come closer."
"You scheming?" he asks, gruff but standing up anyway.
"Totally. Always," she says, encouraged enough to shoot him a little glance as he picks up his chair and carries it over to her bedside. "Soon as I figure out how, I'm gonna put you in this thing—" she lifts her shackled wrist demonstratively—"and make a daring escape."
"You do that," he replies gravely, settling the chair down beside her bed, on the side where she's not chained up, and sitting back down with a sound that's half-sigh, half-groan, feeling every single one of his forty-seven years in his joints and back.
"You don't have any confidence in me at all," she accuses him, wriggling a little closer to the bed's edge, closer to him.
"Not much," he agrees. She snorts, letting her free arm fall over the bed's edge. She's not reaching for him, not exactly, but he watches as her index fingertip first grazes his knee, then rests there—just that small, single touch, but it seems to have a reassuring effect on her. She breathes in, then exhales, long and slow, and falls asleep again almost immediately, which Jacob thinks is funny until he follows suit less than five minutes later.