The Permanent Efficacy of Grace

2.

Rook spends a day or two hiding out in Holland Valley, avoiding everyone—she's not ready to deal—and tending to the bullet graze on her side.

Eventually, though, avoiding the encounter she's dreading is starting to cause more anxiety than the thought of the encounter itself, so she drags her ass up to Jacob's region. She's not exactly sure what she's going to do, but she figures she can head roughly in the direction of the Veteran's Center while she figures it out.

Jacob doesn't give her the chance to make it up there on her own. She's in his area for maybe thirty minutes before she takes a Bliss arrow to the thigh. She howls and goes down like a ton of bricks. As she grips at her leg and rolls onto her back to face the approaching Hunter, just before the Bliss drags her under, she thinks guess Jacob already knows.

She wakes up in a cage, and it's definitely not a dream this time.

"FUCK!" she barks at full volume the second she realizes where she is, not bothering to get up off her back. She'd hoped—foolishly, sure, but still—that they were past all this.

She sulks for a minute or two, glaring up at the tarp that considerately covers the roof of her cage—she can hear the tap of rain against it, though the ground she's lying on isn't muddy, not yet. It's chilly, and dark enough that she knows it's either late in the day or very overcast. After a moment of wallowing in her annoyance, she drags herself into an upright sitting position and looks around.

Unusually, she's alone in the cage, and she's not sure if that's meant to be a perk or an insult. There are Judges caged on either side of her, and she can't tell if the sparkles drifting around in her vision are hungover from the arrow or if they're from the little clouds of green periodically rising from the wolves' fur, but either way, it's not strong enough to give her the benefits of Bliss. She just has a headache and feels faintly nauseated. Several of wolves are eying her hungrily, but she's close enough to the center of the cage to be well out of their reach, so she doesn't worry. She can see a bandage beneath the arrow puncture in her jeans—great, she thinks, the last thing she wants is for Peggy medics to get comfortable stripping her down, but still, better creepy cultists than infection, she guesses—and her holsters are long gone.

Jacob's nowhere in sight. There are plenty of his recruits, though, swarming around, doing whatever nefarious tasks he's set them to.

"Well," she mutters. "If the mountain won't come to Mohammed…" She has no intention of waiting around for Jacob to show up with his fucking music box, to put her through yet another of his fucked-up trials, so she climbs to her feet. The cage is obviously designed to make the average-sized man crouch, and Rook is taller than the average-sized man, so she's hunched fairly uncomfortably, but she heads to the bars anyway and barks, "Hey!"

She gets a few sideways glances, maybe, but nothing to write home about. She tries again. "Hey, Peggies! Get over here, now!"

And she's got one on the hook. A cultist just a few yards away, bald, bearded, built like a linebacker, turns in her direction. His forehead settles into deep wrinkles as he scowls, and Rook threads her arms through the bars, giving him a wicked grin as soon as she's sure of his attention. "Ohh, yeah, big guy, I'm talking to you," she says. "Get the hell over here."

He pauses, spits a thick wad onto the ground, then swaggers over with that particular gait some guys have, where they're convinced their dick is so big they have to adjust their stride around it. He pauses a couple of feet in front of the bars, spits again on the ground just in front of the cage, sniffs, and says, "You beggin' for something, sinner?"

She just lets her grin widen into shit-eating territory. "Jesus, you fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down, didn't you, Hot Rod?"

He snorts, glances to the side, then all at once he takes the stock of the rifle he's holding and thrusts it through the bars, hitting her in her abdomen—in the exact spot where she'd gotten bullet-grazed just a few days before. She gasps at the sharp flare of pain, recoils reflexively backwards, and lands on her ass on the dirty floor of the cage. The Peggy looks down at her with unconcealed satisfaction.

Fuck, she mouths, and then struggles back upright. Can't look weak, not here. She approaches the bars again, though she keeps a bit of a distance now, wary of that rifle. "Take me to Jacob," she says, working hard to make sure she doesn't sound pained or out of breath.

He snorts again. "You're in no position to make demands, sinner."

"Oh, change the fucking record," she sighs. Her elbows are dirty from her fall to the ground, and she dusts them off irritably. "Everyone's a sinner, isn't that a key tenet of your guys's beliefs? Even the Father is a sinner."

His expression changes from smug to furious in a flash. "You watch what you say."

"I'm just saying," she says insistently. "Sinner kind of loses its power as an insult when all your leaders admit that they're sinners, too. Take me to Jacob."

"You're in no pos—"

"—position to make demands, I know," she sighs. "Y'all need some more creative lines, you know that? Hey, you ever notice that ol' Joseph has lust carved into his skin twice?"

He chuckles. Somehow, she doesn't think he's particularly amused. "Okay," he says, and pulls a key out of his pocket. She backs away from the door, readying herself for him, and when he stoops and steps inside she doesn't give him a chance to prepare for her—she goes after him like a rabid dog, fists hard and mean.

She doesn't actually think she'll make much progress (even if she takes this guy out, she's in the heart of the enemy camp, surrounded by Jacob's soldiers), but she's got a good shot at making a commotion, drawing attention, which is what she needs right now. Provided Jacob is even here. God, she hopes he's here.

But she's underestimated the bald Peggy. He shrugs off the ferocity of her attack, not blocking or dodging the blows, and the second she gives him an opening he hits her, hard, in the wound on her side. He must have seen the way she reacted to it before, and this time the pain is so bad it makes her see white and lose her breath entirely.

Before she can even start to recover, he has her pinned against the rusting bars at the front of her cage, beside the door. She struggles to slide out from his grip, to escape through the open gate that's right there, but either he's stronger than she thought or she's weaker than she believed, because she can't budge him, can't move an inch. He's got his hand against the back of her head, pressing her face into the metal, and she's not sure if it's because of the blow to the ribs or the panic, but she cannot breathe.

He's saying something—she can't focus on his words, trying fruitlessly to squeeze away from his grasping hands. It seems like she's pressed there for a lifetime, suffocating, blinded with an animal fear that rises out of nowhere and that she doesn't have the presence of mind to reason away, when suddenly the pressure releases, and again, she falls on her ass in the dirt.

She scrambles backwards, an awkward sort of crab-walk—away from the door to the cage, but she's not thinking more than one step ahead, and right now that step is put some distance between me and him. As it happens, she doesn't really need to. As she regains her sense of herself, she realizes that Jacob has arrived.

He's hauled the bald Peggy out of the cage and is holding him by his collar like a puppy by the scruff. Rook's eyes find his—he's looking at her, but glances away abruptly as soon as she makes contact, giving the Peggy a hard shake and saying, clearly, a little louder than Jacob usually chooses to speak: "Did I say you could open that cage?"

"No, Brother Jacob," the Peggy says. The change in him is remarkable—the bravado has vanished entirely, his shoulders are slumped, head down, he's practically whimpering.

Jacob doesn't waste much time with him. "You're being reassigned," he says, short and to-the-point. "You'll hear details soon. Get the hell out of here." He shoves him, hard, to the side, and the Peggy catches himself on his hands and doesn't stop, clearing out like Jacob had lit a fire under him.

Rook tracks him till he's out of sight, then seeks Jacob's eyes again. He's watching her, his gaze flinty, and when she looks at him, he lifts a hand, crooks one finger, come here. Normally, she might bristle at the gesture, or tease him for the macho bullshit of it all, but right now the cage is feeling a tad bit small and she just wants to get out.

She gets to her feet, ducks out of the door, stretching out to her full height with a soft, pained groan. The flesh of her side throbs, but she doesn't notice till Jacob's eyes lock onto it that it's started bleeding again, badly enough that it's soaked through the bandage and has formed a dark stain on her purple flannel shirt.

"Aw, fuck," she says, grabbing the hem of the shirt and pulling it away from her skin like she can salvage anything at this point.

Jacob takes her by the elbow. "This way," he says, his jaw tight in a way that makes Rook shoot him a second look even as she willingly matches his long stride. He's avoiding her eyes, and there's tension in his shoulders that she hadn't noticed before. His face is expressionless, which, given that he's usually totally comfortable wearing a bloodcurdling scowl, says plenty in itself. She realizes abruptly that what she first mistook for neutral calm is, in fact, tightly-controlled fury.

Well. She'd known he would be pissed that the secret was out. It was the whole reason she'd come up here in the first place; might as well have it out.

He doesn't appear to have any interest in doing it in front of his subordinates, though. He takes her out of the yard, into St. Francis's proper—taking her to his office, she realizes after a couple of turns. She's only been there once of her own volition, a week ago, maybe, to leave him a quick note. Every other time she'd tried to approach he'd hit her with that fucking song and she'd wake up hundreds of yards away, usually with a vehicle in charred ruins somewhere nearby. She'd taken it as a good sign at the time, but that, of course, had been before everything had gone to shit.

Once they reach his office, he guides her into a chair—the kind without straps, thankfully—then closes and locks the door behind them. She watches him, wary, as he disappears into the bathroom without a word. The silence is disconcerting. She's seen him pissy and gruff before, he's never had a problem reading her the riot act before now, so the quiet is making her nervous, making her worry he's about to go nuclear.

She looks around, searching for a distraction. She'd been trying to hurry last time she was here, hadn't really had the time to take in details. She sees the cot that John had mentioned, a few pieces of discarded clothing lying on the ground beside it, which surprises her a little—she would have expected something more in the way of rigid military cleanliness. (Then again, she thinks, if you can't relax some in the only private space you have because you're part of a literal commune, where can you?) There's an open pack of cigarettes on the desk, which she'd noticed before, but to her he's never smelled or tasted like smoke, so she guesses it's more of an occasional indulgence than a habit.

There's a fist-shaped dent in the plaster wall beside the door. That hadn't been there before.

Jacob returns. Because Rook is nervous and has never been good at keeping her mouth shut in the best of circumstances, and also because she doesn't want to exude the sullen kid waiting outside the principal's office vibe she's pretty sure she's putting out, she nods at the cracked wall and says, "I like what you've done with the place."

Jacob's eyes flash to hers, just for half a second, and Rook realizes she's never seen someone who looks like he wants to hit her more than this in her entire life, John Seed included.

He doesn't, though. He's holding a first aid kit, which he hands to her, and as she takes it she notes that his knuckles are bruised and crusted in places with dark scabs, and also that his hand is shaking. The second she lifts the box out of his grip, he withdraws, runs that hand over his head as he walks across the room, then down his face, leaving it resting over his mouth as he turns again and looks at her.

Rook's sense of self-preservation has kicked in, finally. She stays silent, opens the box then sets it on the floor before working her shirt up carefully, wincing at the sight of the now soaked old bandage. She peels it off, eyeing the wound with dismay—it looks worse now than it had when she'd first gotten it, angry, blood-smeared, with bruising showing up at the red edges. She leans over with a hiss, grabs a sterile wipe pack, and gets to work cleaning her skin up.

If he's bothering to let me use first aid, she thinks to distract herself from the sting of the alcohol, then he's probably not planning to kill me, so there's that.

She rethinks that when Jacob drops his hand and finally speaks, his voice soft as velvet. "Do you have any idea how badly you've fucked up?"

Oh, this is going to be fun.

She takes her time answering, finishes wiping the blood away from the skin around the wound—the bleeding is still going, so she presses a pad of gauze hard to it next to try and get it to slow down before re-bandaging. After she's done about all she can do for the moment, she looks up and meets his eyes, which are cold as ice in that expressionless face. "There should be a we in that sentence somewhere."

He shakes his head and laughs, an angry little sound that sends a chill down her spine. "Always with the smart mouth. Always with the goddamn games. This is not a game."

"You're right, it's not," she snaps. "It's real fucking life. You know what that means? It means we did what we did, and we can't just wish that away, so maybe instead of throwing a fucking tantrum we can talk next moves."

Jacob, though, isn't ready to calm down. "Weeks of training," he snarls. "Months of planning. All down the drain after one dumbass move."

"What are you even mad at?" she demands. "I'm the one taking the hit here. I've definitely lost like ten allies, just off the top of my head. You seriously expect me to believe this whole thing has done anything but boost your cred with your people? I'm a fucking catch."

He just glares at her, doesn't say anything, which tips Rook off to the fact that she needs to be thinking harder about what he has said. "Wait a minute," she says, suddenly frowning. "Months? Planning for what?"

Jacob just laughs again, that angry, humorless chuckle, edged with something she might call despair if she didn't know any better, and runs his hand through his hair again. He doesn't answer, just turns his back, but Rook's already puzzling her way through it.

Months. What did Jacob want, before all this started with me? What was he focused on doing with me before I completely derailed him?

As far as she knows, besides her, there's only one real thorn in Jacob's side.

"Holy shit," she blurts out as the idea occurs to her, too awful to keep it in. "Are you seriously angry because the Whitetails don't trust me anymore?"

"You know, Dep, on rare occasions, you can be smarter than you look."

She lets that one slide, too wrapped up in her own dawning horror to even notice. A memory she'd tried to bury has resurfaced with a vengeance: waking up in a ravine after a session in Jacob's chair, several civilian bodies strewn about in pools of congealing blood, bodies that she hadn't looked at too closely, not wanting to confirm what she dreaded. "Train," she says slowly. "Hunt. Kill. Sacrifice." He turns around and looks at her; she wears her naked revulsion on her face. "Eli?"

"Not anymore," he barks. "Not after your fuckup."

She gladly shifts her focus to the more immediate insult, because if she thinks too hard right now about what his plans were for her and Eli, she might actually lose her mind. "You better stop with that shit," she warns him. "This is not just my fault."

He goes incandescent. "In case you have fucking forgotten," he bellows, louder than she's ever heard him get, loud enough that she's sure the Peggies guarding the gates can hear every word, "I was not the one coming on to you!"

She lets his rage wash over her, lets it center her, and as soon as he pauses, she answers back, her tone low and deadly. "Well, that's bullshit, you've been eye-hatefucking me since that first night at the church and you haven't stopped since. I mean, I didn't force you to jam your tongue down my throat, did I, Jacob? What did I say, before all this started? I said tell me to stop. I laid that out right in front of you. You didn't, and that much, at least, is on you." He sneers, shakes his head, but she's not done. Slouched in the chair, pressing bloody gauze to her gaping skin so hard it hurts, she adds, "You're not even really mad at me, anyway, at least not entirely. You're just mad at yourself."

He blinks at her like he can't believe she just said that out loud, and she lifts her chin defiantly. "You were the one with the job to do, not me. You screwed it up and you can't handle it, so you're blaming me instead."

"Maybe if you weren't so unbelievably incompetent—" he begins.

"I'm pretty good at taking ground from you and your shit-heel siblings," she says coolly. "Also pretty good at completely blowing up your genius plans, totally by accident by the way; I'd say I'm doing pretty well."

"You need to learn to shut up, sooner rather'n later."

"Oh, fuck you."

His glare sharpens. "You wanna try that again?"

"Fuck you, sir."

He lunges at her, but she's been expecting the move since this started and is on her feet and dodging him before he can get his hands on her. There's nowhere to really go, though, and she's dragging a little from pain, blood loss, a fresh arrow wound to the thigh, and a Bliss hangover, so on his next try, he catches her, shoving her so hard backwards into the wall that she hears something crack—hopefully just more plaster—and he crowds her, both hands tight around her neck and thumbs twitching at the base of her throat like he's giving serious thought to crushing her windpipe.

The adrenaline is making it hard to even focus clearly on his face, and her heart is racing so fast she feels like it's going to just jump out of her chest. She bares her teeth and lifts her chin and, hoarsely, wheezing past the pressure on her throat, she says the dumbest thing she's ever said in her life: "Go on, fucking do it. Do it, you coward."

His eyes find hers. There's something wild in them, a loss of control she hasn't seen from Jacob even when they've butted heads before this, and his breath catches like he's preparing for something. She one hundred percent believes that he's going to really hurt her, that she won't have time to regret the reckless words, but they keep spilling out of her, almost in a panic, punctuated by quick, sharp little gasps for air: "You've been on a long slow march to becoming Old Mad Seed for decades now, Jacob, what are you even waiting for anymore? Somebody says something you don't like and you shut them up with your fists, you're just fucking like him, you target the weak, it's your whole thing, so fucking go ahead already."

It's a low blow, they both know it, and Rook doesn't expect it to actually get to Jacob—she's waiting for him to let it roll off his back, or actually listen to her and just cave her throat in, but he doesn't. He recoils, dropping his hands like touching her suddenly burns, and she's startled when she drops promptly to her ass on the floor as the strength entirely leaves her knees.

Jacob kicks the wall beside her with a booted foot, two, three times, then abruptly turns and paces away. The fresh rush of air irritates Rook's banged-up throat, she coughs, wheezes a little, then focuses a moment on taking shallow little breaths till she feels somewhat recovered. Then she seeks Jacob out again—he's about halfway across the room, his back to her, hands on his hips and head down, and his shoulders rise as he takes a deep, steadying breath.

She doesn't want to press the Old Man Seed issue, is kind of surprised at herself for bringing it up in the first place and really doesn't want to get into how he feels about all that. Some of the fight has gone out of her. She's circled back around to the horror, and with it, a new, surprisingly intense sadness. "Eli," she says, her voice coming out a little scratchy, though she's not sure if it's because of the near-throttling or the lump in her throat that has nothing to do with it. "All this time? You were going to get me to—even after we—"

That lump in her throat becomes too tight to speak around at that, and she gives up before she does something mortifying like cry in front of Jacob Seed.

He's silent for ten, fifteen seconds, then says, "I told you it was gonna get bad."

"Yeah, but Jacob," she says, as soon as she can muster her voice again. "Do you have any idea what… Jacob, they would have killed me for that. So did you just not care, or…"

He says nothing, which is frankly worse than a brusque confirmation would be. She focuses on slowing down her breathing, because it's ratcheting up into panic attack territory again, and once she's got it back under control, she says, "Even if they didn't, if I somehow managed to talk my way out of it… I would have… I would have never forgiven you for that. I—I've managed to live with a lot of shit, but I don't think I could live with that, not after how Eli has… and… and before I killed myself, I would have had to kill you. Tell me you realize that."

He finally turns slightly, glancing at her out of the corner of his eye. His shoulders are rigid again, and she sees something in his face, something reluctant, something barely-there that gives her pause—she takes a few more slow, careful breaths, then adds, "Or maybe you're just angry… because you're a little bit relieved the plan fell through, and we don't have to kill each other. Maybe that relief has got you spooked because you thought you had better control over your own shit. But I don't know. That might just be giving you too much credit."

He doesn't respond to that. He just runs both hands over his face and mutters something into them that she can't quite make out—"shit is getting out of hand," possibly—then he lowers his hands, sniffs, and turns again towards her. That mask of calm and indifference she's used to getting from him is back on like it never budged. He says, in his usual soft tone, "I need to go talk to Joseph."

Well. Talking to Joseph is never her favorite thing to do—too much eye contact—but she's hardly going to make him cop to this alone, no matter how upset she is. She starts to get up from the floor, hissing in pain as the motion puts stress on the wound, and Jacob frowns.

"You're not coming," he says, flat, but also like he's faintly surprised that she could think otherwise.

"The hell I'm not, this is my problem too," she says, sounding a little strained.

"I'm not suggesting. I'm telling. Get that wound cleaned up and re-bandaged before it gets infected."

"Fuck you, I'm not your soldier, I'm about sick of your orders," she says, admittedly in a bit of a monotone, because there's little chance he'll listen any better now than he ever does. Now that she's finished the task of getting on her feet, she decides she deserves a little breather, and leans her shoulder against the wall.

"Suit yourself," he says, heading for the door. "You're still staying right here."

"Jacob," she says, feeling a faint spike of alarm and starting to pursue him as she realizes he actually means it. "Jacob, don't you dare—"

He's already out the door. She flings herself at it, grabs the knob right as his key turns in the lock outside. This time, she's the one who screams loud enough to be heard at the gates, "Fuck you!", and a split second later she's given the fist-sized crack in the wall a twin.