The Permanent Efficacy of Grace

8.

It takes a while for things to quit feeling weird. Jacob clearly isn't used to sharing his space, and compensates for his discomfort by being even more sullen and silent than usual, when he's even around. For the most part he seems to be throwing himself into work, isn't around much—for two days he's not even there when she sleeps or when she wakes up, though she suspects he's slipping in in the middle of the night and catching a few hours of rest before going back out.

She leaves him be for now. He's never really been quite what she would call "in touch" with his feelings; the sudden shift in their relationship is hard enough for her to process (and she's quietly freaking out about it and the mystery of the future any given moment of the day), so she's giving him some space to settle. If she gets impatient, she can always corner him, provoke a confrontation—those are usually pretty revealing.

It helps that after that first night she wakes up to a stack of books (the Word of Joseph not included) piled on his desk, Jacob apparently having figured out by now that keeping her occupied is a safer bet than leaving her alone and bored out of her mind. There's no rhyme or reason to the selection—which includes, among other things, Alice in Wonderland, the army-issued Illustrated Guide to Edible Wild Plants, The Stand, and a thirty-year-old textbook on forensic science—but she sees the variety as a plus, and spends many of her waking hours for those first couple of days reading her way through them.

The third night, things take a turn.

She wakes to several loud cracking sounds, a muffled grunt, and as she sits up abruptly in the dark, groping for the nearest weapon and trying to figure out where she is and what's happening, she sees a massive black shadow cross her field of vision. Then, a door opens, and she glimpses light—faint, but enough for her to get her bearings. She's in Jacob's office, like she has been the past few nights, and for now, she's relatively safe. The shadow had been Jacob, passing through the darkness on the way to the balcony. The light is from the distant spotlights always running in the camp below, rolling into the room alongside fresh, cold air—she can't see Jacob from where she is, but she assumes he's out there, the door open behind him. As far as the noises, the groan—it's too dark to tell for sure, but she thinks if she switched on a light she'd see a few fresh holes in the wall beside Jacob's cot.

Just as well. She'd been having an ugly dream as well, she thinks, though in the waking panic the exact details of it have fled. She's just left with the impressions of fear, pain… and a clown, for some reason, though she's never been too bothered by clowns before. She doesn't chase the nightmare, more than content to let it vanish into the ether, and instead gets up to use the bathroom and get a drink of water, since she's awake anyway. Then she heads back to bed to wait.

He's out there, alone and silent in the cold, for a long time, long enough for her to start getting drowsy again, but she snaps back to attention when she hears the door close again—quiet, but she's been listening for it. She thinks there's a slim chance he'll come to her, but as she lies there listening in the dark, she hears him breathe out slowly, then move across the room, so quietly that she doesn't realize he's returned to his cot until she hears it creak slightly as he climbs back into it.

Well. If the mountain won't come to Muhammad…

She hops out of bed. The room is darker now, but she's been lying around awake for long enough that her eyes are fairly adjusted. Jacob must think she's going to the bathroom, because it isn't till she sinks down onto one knee on the cot beside him that he growls out, "What are you doing."

"What does it look like? Don't be stingy with the covers," she says in a half-whisper, tugging at the edge of the rough flannel blanket he's currently holding tight, like if he can keep her from getting underneath it then he can ward her off.

"We aren't both gonna fit," he objects.

"This cot ain't big enough fer tha two of us," she teases in a put-on gravelly voice that falls somewhere between Karl Childers and Clint Eastwood, which seems to take Jacob off-guard—at least, his grip on the blanket loosens enough that she's able to pull it away and slide under it.

"Quit fucking around," he rumbles, but, belying his complaints, he's shuffling as close to the wall as he can get, making some room for her.

It's still not anywhere near enough, and she ends up essentially climbing on top of him aside from an arm and a leg anchoring her to the edge. This is about when she finds out that he's just wearing sweatpants and no shirt, which would be a more pleasant discovery if not for—"Jesus God, you're freezing," she hisses as she sprawls out across his chest. Since she hasn't exactly had access to her usual wardrobe, she's been sleeping in his undershirts, and he hasn't really been around to complain or tell her not to. They're comfortable but thin, and big on her, which means there's a fair amount of skin to skin contact going on (which, again, wouldn't be a bad thing if his skin wasn't practically subzero at the moment).

"Then go back to your bed," he says. "I didn't invite you over here." Again, though, his actions belie his words—he lifts a big hand, slides it under the hem of her shirt to rest it on the small of her back, which is kind of sweet, but unfortunately, his hand is even colder than the rest of him. She squeaks and twists ineffectively in an attempt to escape the ice cube touch while keeping her spot on the cot, and he relents with a scoff, letting his hand slide out from under her shirt and fall to his side again.

"Don't worry," she say. "I'm not staying." She realizes that that spot on his chest that's extra cold and a little bit rough is just his dogtags and briefly raises herself up on one elbow so she can dig the tags out from between them and slide them down their chain to rest on the mattress above his shoulder, where she won't be lying directly on them.

She can't really see Jacob, just shadows and shapes, but she can tell his eyes are on her in the dark. "What, then?"

She gets the tags out of the way and settles back down, feeling his beard scratch at the crown of her head as she rests her cheek on his shoulder. In the dark, it's a lot easier to say, "I just haven't seen you. Wanted to check in." She even manages to make it sound glib—at least, he snorts like he thinks she's just teasing him again, and his hand falls onto her back again, over the shirt this time, still a little chilly but easier to take.

She doesn't ask him about whatever woke up him up, because he's been evasive enough about that kind of thing in the past that she thinks she's unlikely to get a response anyway. She just lies there for a while, crammed onto the cot with him, his hand running heavy, almost absently, up and down her back and his skin warming slowly under hers. She realizes she can feel the jagged ripple of scar tissue under her cheek; she lifts a hand and skates it lightly over his other shoulder, feeling the rough unevenness of more scarring there. He goes tense beneath her touch, but he's not shoving her off, so as she rubs her thumb gently against a pit of a scar just above his collarbone, she asks, "Would you tell me what happened?"

He's still, just his chest rising and falling beneath her as he breathes. Eventually, he says, "Some other time, maybe. Not tonight."

She nods. "Just thought I'd ask. Since it's the first time I've gotten you with your shirt off and all."

A pause, then: "Do you just say the things you do to try and get a rise outta me?"

She wiggles a little bit, like it's possible to get any closer to him. "I honestly have no idea what you're talking about."

He snorts. She chooses to take it as a sound of amusement rather than irritation. They subside into stillness for a while. Rook listens to his heartbeat under her ear, strong and steady and soothing, and thinks about how content she is to be here with him, right this second, and thinks about how she really shouldn't be here. She has a pretty good excuse, but won't for long—the pain from her injuries is gone, she's halfway through her run of antibiotics, and she can tell that the stitches will be ready to come out any day. Jacob talked about her staying here, the implications being for good, but that's just not realistic, never has been. She's going to have to start planning an escape soon. Despite how she may feel at this exact second, she's not safe here.

But if not here, where? she can't help but think. Are you any safer out there, where you've got a target painted on your back that just about everyone wants to take a shot at? There are still a few people that she's sure she'd be safe with, but does she really want to drag them into her mess? Of course she can't stay here with the cult, but neither does she see a clear way forward with the Resistance.

She doesn't realize that Jacob's hand has gone still on her back until he speaks. "Just locked up a little there, Rook. Problem?"

He's right, she realizes: she's gone tense, thinking about the inevitable advance of the future, and of course he's noticed. Normally, she's honest with him in word if not with tone—she tends to misdirect with humor, saying heavy or difficult things in the guise of jokes in order to exasperate and distract him from what she's really saying—but she's reluctant to do even that right now. He's already proven that he's not exactly thinking realistically about this arrangement, what with his I won't let it happen bullshit, so telling him about her qualms will yield exactly zero benefit, and it'll tip him off to the fact that she's looking for an escape hatch.

Of course, he's used to honesty from her, and sudden reticence will definitely strike him as suspicious. She offers him something else instead, something she's been thinking about for a while now, something that he'll buy. "I was thinking we should probably deal with O'Hara soon."

He's silent for a few seconds, then his hand resumes its soothing motion across her back. "You have something specific in mind?"

"I don't know. Are you letting me decide what to do with him?"

"Not a chance."

She lifts her head from his chest, cranes her neck up to try and see his face, though it's too dark to make out more than faint shapes and shadows. "What, you think I wouldn't be fair?" she asks, indignant.

"I know you'd be too fair," he says to the ceiling. "Probably want to take him to the jail, lock him up to await some kinda trial."

Shit. She'd been toying with the idea, and doesn't like that he's plucked it so easily out of her head. "Oh, so that's a bad idea?"

He snorts, and when he speaks, his voice is harsh. "You're kidding yourself if you think due process has a place out here. Even if it did, it'd be a waste of time in his case. I heard about his fucking… haunted house. Even if you want to argue he just used the bodies already lying around… hell, look what he did to you. I've got ten people who can witness to it, but I don't need any of em, because I saw it, and I've spoken to the man. Mad dogs get put down."

"Sure you don't want to just recruit him? Last I heard, you were out one psychotic piece-of-shit serial killer." She's not sure why she's jabbing at him with this, the reminder that she'd killed the Cook, who had been loosely but technically operating under Jacob's umbrella since sometime after he'd targeted Jess's parents (at least, she thinks that was the order of things—her cult timeline is all fucked up). She just knows she's suddenly irritated by Jacob acting like it's different somehow, O'Hara's pattern of killing, like it's any more senseless or less justified than what she and Jacob have been doing up and down the county for two months.

Jacob stills again. "Maybe I should just turn him loose, then," he says after a moment, his voice soft and velvety. A trap. "Just another test, huh? See who's strong enough to stay out of the psychopath's haunted house. Course, you'd be looking over your shoulder the rest of your life, waiting for a goddamn ghost to stick you in the guts again, just for the joy of watching you bleed out."

The way it does sometimes, the contact, the feeling of being caged in, is getting to be too much. She feels like her throat is closing up, and presses her palm hard against his chest. She expects him to make her fight him—payback for mouthing off; he's never been one to respond to mockery with anything but a display of power—but he lets her go right away, quick enough that the usual fear and panic don't really get a chance to set in, and instead of fleeing across the room, she ends up sitting upright on the edge of the cot, talking herself down there.

Jacob lies still for a few seconds as she catches her breath, then, slow, sits up as well, but he doesn't try to touch her or talk to her. He just shifts sideways, putting his back up against the wall and bringing one knee up, leaving the other foot resting on the floor. Once Rook feels like she has herself under control—it's easier since she was able to get away from him as soon as she wanted to—she blows out a long, slow breath, then says, "Bury me."

"What?"

She glances over her shoulder at his dark shape. "He said he wanted to bury me. I—I think. You know, I can't really trust my memories when it comes to… all that, but that's something my brain is just stuck on. I keep hearing it, asleep and awake. I think I'm going to bury you. That, and Keter said he was just bleeding me—all adds up to a slow death, I think."

Jacob doesn't say anything. She's not sure if that's a relief or not. She's not sure she could handle his scorn right now, but then, she knows for a fact that he's been dealing with his demons longer than she's even had hers. He might have some advice. Then again, she remembers, he's not the most well-adjusted individual, so there's no telling what that advice might be.

After another moment passes, she adds, "I mean, doesn't that strike you as seeming kind of personal coming from someone I'd never met before then?"

"Strikes me as the kind of thing that would make perfect sense to a nutcase," he says, and he has a point. She shrugs, then shifts backwards to sit properly beside him. She settles her shoulder against his—he's warmed back up by now—and sighs, thinking for a minute. Jacob doesn't move except to tilt his head back against the wall, giving the impression that he's exhausted. She's sure he isn't getting enough sleep, and equally sure that he'll brush her off if she says something about it.

"I want to talk to him," she says instead. "Before you do anything."

"Thought you might." After hesitating for a second, he says, "You may not get what you want out of him, Rook. He's crazier than a bedbug. Worse every day since we caught him."

"Still. I need to do it."

"I know." He releases a long, slow breath. "Tomorrow."

They sit there a minute longer, arms pressed together. He's warm now, relaxed, and to distract herself from the feel of his skin against hers and the sudden realization that they haven't been this close (at least not while simultaneously being this friendly) since the cabin several weeks ago, she grasps the edge of the rough blanket and lifts it up. "So this is the most uncomfortable blanket I've ever felt in my life. What is it, like some kind of hair shirt thing, or—?"

"I don't know what that is," he says, sounding tired.

"You know, like a form of self-flagellation. Like what monks used to do and shit. A hair shirt."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

She sighs and drops the blanket. "John would know."

"You wanna be with John right now?"

She hisses at the suggestion and scoots forward to the edge of the cot again, and Jacob doesn't move, doesn't try to stop her. "I'm going back to sleep," she announces archly.

"Night."

She hesitates for a second, then thinks fuck it, and adds, "You ever want to join me, I'm game. There's more room over there. And a blanket that doesn't feel like it's slowly scraping you to death."

A beat of silence, then his lazy drawl: "I will keep that in mind."

She has no intention of pressing (there'd be no point, he's about as stubborn as she is, and that's saying something; if he decides to take up sleeping with her then it'll have to be his decision). She crosses through the darkness and gets back in bed, and even though the room is warm and the blanket is soft, and she's tired like she always is of late, it's a long time before she manages to get back to sleep.

She has second thoughts about confronting O'Hara the next day—of course she does—but when Jacob comes to get her, she doesn't say a word about them. This is something that she needs to deal with sooner or later, and putting things off always just makes her anxiety spike. Given that her anxiety has been bad enough lately, she figures she shouldn't invite more.

Despite the low-grade dread she feels in the pit of her stomach, she pauses for a second once Jacob leads her outside the building, breathing in the cold, fresh air. The doors to the balcony have been unlocked since she took up residence in the office, Jacob correctly figuring that she won't risk the three-story jump in a bid to freedom while she's still on the mend, but she's stayed mostly away from it, wary of broadcasting her presence to the Peggies. They know she's here, of course, but with how unsettled everything is… she just doesn't feel like waltzing around in frequent view will help in the long run. Too I live with Jacob now and I'm here to stay when neither of those things are true.

As a result, she's been cooped up indoors for almost a week, so the late October air is bracing and welcome. It's overcast and gray, the brilliant reds and oranges of autumn looking a little more brown in the absence of the sun, and chilly, in the forties, maybe, but in a nice change of pace, the air smells like burning leaves instead of decay, and Rook feels herself seized with the urge to just take off into the woods.

"Rook." Jacob has realized that she's not following him, stopped a few paces ahead, and looks impatient. Nearby, Peggies work diligently, avoiding looking at either of them, which makes her think that he's either told them not to gawp at her, specifically, or that it's just the rule when it comes to Jacob. She guesses it's the latter. He's never quite preened at attention—even hers—the way his brothers do, always treated it as an inconvenience at best and a discomfort at worst.

"Yup," she says, and hurries up a little, glad to note that her increased pace causes her no pain.

He takes her past an array of cages—they look different from the outside, but still, she recognizes them as the ones she'd been kept in several times, notably for that agonizing week with no food. There are people in them, Resistance, Whitetails, and most of them seem too out of it to pay any attention to her or Jacob, but a few recognize her, and she can see the malevolence in their eyes as they watch her pass. She swallows hard, shakes it off.

O'Hara is being held well away from everyone else, in the last of a little cluster of cages at the very back of the property, where the fence abuts the mountains. Rook's step falters when she sees his form, hunched against the back of the cage, but she picks up her pace again before Jacob can notice. Jacob stops a few yards from the cage, plants his feet, waits, and unprompted, she strides past him, right up to the door of the cage.

O'Hara looks muzzily up at her, and he looks bad. His skin is sallow white except for where it's riddled with bloodied bruises, his broad face sags, and his left leg sticks out at an unnatural angle. Through the tear in his pants, she can see grayish skin, the glint of something that might be bone, though she quickly stops looking. She sort of expects the sight of his face to jog something, to unlock those memories hidden away somewhere in her mind, but it doesn't. She's not sure if she's relieved by that or not.

His eyes, already bright with fever, light up further still at the sight of her. "You're alive," he says.

She nods. "Sorry to disappoint." The cage is uncovered, the rainfall of the past few days having rendered the floor of it a muddy mess. O'Hara coughs, then drags his sorry self away from the back of the cage, coming closer. She stays put even as he advances—at this point, he's far from being a threat to her, can't even get to his feet.

"They wouldn't tell me," he says, and pauses to hack out a few more coughs. "But I had hope."

Slowly, Rook squats down, peering closely at him through the bars. After regarding him in silence for a few seconds, his wide, pale, clammy face with its ragged black stubble, she asks, "Did you have a clown nose on?"

He grins, pleased, showing teeth like gravestones, blocky and graying. "It appreciates the act," he says to her, low, confidential.

She draws a long, slow breath, then releases it, trying not to care that the sound is shakier than she'd like it to be. Her legs suddenly feel weak and watery, and her stitched wound is pulsing with a discomfort close to pain, but she tells herself it's all in her head, and she'll be damned if she chickens out. She's afraid of O'Hara, she admits resignedly to herself, even with him so badly incapacitated, but she's not about to let him—or Jacob—see it.

"I don't remember," she admits to him, fighting the urge to recoil and instead reaching out, grasping the bars between them with one hand. The motion draws his eye, and the smile falls abruptly from his face.

"Well," he says, still staring, "why would you? Juiced up. Head full of cotton. Soft and unresisting for the scraping. Like magic."

Rook frowns, watching him, frustrated. She knows she needs to have this conversation, for her own sake if not his, but it's a similar sensation to groping around in a dark room. She just doesn't remember enough to ask the right questions. She casts about, trying to drag up anything she can about that day. Her encounter with him is still mostly a blank, but she has hazy memories of the haunted house and the tormented faces of the corpses populating it. She remembers the jolt of pain as she dropped out of the back of the barn to begin her pursuit of him.

"Why didn't you just do it in the attic?" she asks. "That looked like your… workshop. Why lure me out?"

He lifts those fever-bright eyes to hers again and says, very seriously, "It said you were special."

"It?"

"Everyone said you were special," he says, ignoring her confusion, and his forehead creases in a frown, splitting a few of the crusting scabs lacing through his eyebrow. "But… you don't look special. Mmm. Doubt. Doubt." He hammers his temple with the heel of his palm, twice, then says, "You shouldn't have lived. I shouldn't have doubted it."

"You keep talking about it," she says, interrupting his rambling. "What do you mean? What is it?"

The question pleases him. His expression softens, turns moony and placid, like he's thinking about a lover. "It is," he says, simply. That's not exactly helpful, she thinks, but before she can really express that thought, he goes on, his voice suddenly soft and lyrical. "It has laid in wait for years, sleeping and waiting, waiting and sleeping, but now it's awake. It's awake and it is here to teach us to save us to test us, and to scrape out the unworthy." His hand falls over hers. She jumps a mile, tries to pull back, but his grip is surprisingly strong, and he drags himself close all at once, face to face with her now. His eyes are bright and black and his sour breath gusts at her face as he hisses, "And so… so many are un-worthy."

Surprisingly enough, this is when the fear leaves Rook, helped along by a sudden jolt of adrenaline. Jacob doesn't interfere—she's not sure why, but she's glad—and she wonders briefly what is it about Hope County that draws fanatics before laying her free hand on top of O'Hara's. His nails are black and knuckles are gray with dirt, and despite herself, she feels a stir of pity for him.

The touch surprises him. He'd been expecting her to try to retreat, she can see it in his expression and, almost imperceptibly, he flinches back. His throat works as he swallows once, twice, then he leans forward, forehead to the bars, and whispers, "You have to be afraid. It knows when you aren't afraid."

She considers this for a moment. "Kind of hard to be afraid of you right now," she says at length, keeping her voice low to match his. "But don't you worry, O'Hara. I'm afraid of just about everything else. Think that'll do?"

He closes his eyes in what looks like relief, then a spasm of pain crosses his face. He slips his hand out from between hers and maneuvers his bulk so he can lean his shoulder against the bars of the cage. Rook looks again at his ragged pants, at the damp darkness there and the weird jut of his leg. "That looks pretty bad," she notes.

"Punishment," he sighs, and grasps at the knee of his trousers, pulling them up higher. "I knew the plans for you. I shouldn't have tried to change them."

Rook barely registers the words, her attention fixed on his leg, on the bone jutting out of the shin, the mottled greenish skin around the open wound, the redness racing in stripes up to disappear beneath the torn fabric. Septic, she realizes. He's probably been like this since he was caught almost a week ago. She knows damn well Jacob wouldn't have him treated. No wonder he's feverish—no wonder he's making so little sense. If he was kind of crazy before, he's way too far gone now.

And she knows what she's going to have to do. Really, she's known it since she spoke with Jacob last night, hence the sense of fear and dread. It's the only option, the best option, the merciful one, for him and everyone else. Surely he's in agony already, and she knows Jacob won't allow him medical care. That injury is going to kill him, if Jacob doesn't do it first, and either way, she's sure it'll be a terrible, drawn-out, painful affair. She doesn't have other options.

But she doesn't want to do this. It's ridiculous, she knows—she quit counting the bodies that had fallen at her hands a mere week into the fight. It's not like her to shy away from killing anymore. Moreover, this man had tried to kill her, and had successfully killed many others, she'd seen it with her own eyes. It's hypocrisy, is what it is—she's played judge and executioner for months now; why should she hesitate this time?

But she can't help her reluctance. It feels so unfair, so low-down and dirty, like shooting a defenseless dog. But the alternative will be so, so much worse.

"I already told you," he says, harsh and out of nowhere, his voice raising in volume and making her jump. "It's my punishment. It's done with me. I know that." He sighs, closes his eyes, and for a second, his face looks gray and slack and exhausted. Then he giggles, a rolling, high-pitched laugh, trapped behind closed lips. "Oh, but I wish I could stay to watch what they do to you."

Rook's mouth goes dry. She grips the bars tight enough that the blood leaves her knuckles and despite herself, despite the weak thought this is all the bullshit ramblings of an insane person, she asks, "Who?"

"Oh—everyone," he says, and cracks open a black eye to look malevolently at her. "They all hate you. Everyone. And they're going to rip you to shreds. Just think, Deputy. Where can you feel safe now?"

She swallows convulsively once, twice. She waits for his words to roll off her—she's always been good at ignoring what people say, at ignoring reality itself when she puts her mind to it, but right this second… her skin feels cold, and she can feel that sense of dread already in her just growing. Maybe it's just that he's tapping into her pre-existing fears while her usual defenses are weak, or maybe it's the realization that she's so fucked that even the local serial killer knows it, but his words are hitting home. Her fingers are tight against the bars and she just stares at him, and he stares back, knowing.

"But no," he sighs finally, slotting his eyes shut again. "The clock has run out for me. No more fun. No watching as the angry mob tears you limb from limb. But I suppose it's all right. You can only last for so much longer. I'm sure I'll see you again soon enough."

Rook releases the bars, becoming aware that her palms have grown slick. She wipes her hands on the seat of her pants and nods, and keeps nodding, like if she can just manage to get herself stuck like this, time will freeze and she won't have to make any hard decisions ever again, starting with this one.

Or you could stop being a fucking coward and do what needs to be done. Unable to stand still and just let the wave of self-loathing rush over her, she springs into motion, turning sharply on one heel away from the cage and pacing up to Jacob.

He's standing right where she left him, stone still, arms crossed over his chest as he observes. Only the slightest change flickers across his expression as she approaches him, one eyebrow darting briefly up, a dare. He needn't have bothered.

"Jacob," she says softly, not sure why she feels the compulsion to be quiet but unable to resist it—like she's talking at a funeral—"may I borrow your gun for a minute?"

She expects flat refusal, or at the very least, some interrogation, but Jacob just thumbs the catch on the holster strapped to his thigh, draws the weapon, and hands it to her. She takes it—it's big and red and heavy, bigger even than the magnum she favors as sidearms go, and better suited to his hands than hers, but it'll do. She removes the magazine, checking to make sure it's loaded. She clicks the safety off. She walks back to O'Hara's cage, lifts her hand, and double-taps him right in the side of the head—she knows he hears her coming, but he doesn't bother to open his eyes.

Even once O'Hara's brains are splattered all over the muddy ground, Rook still squats down and reaches through the bars, touching her index and middle finger to the pulse point at the base of his throat, then takes up his limp wrist, checks the pulse there as well, just to make sure she hasn't fucked it all up and made it even worse. When she doesn't feel a heartbeat, she drops him, and, suddenly tasting something vile, spits to the side. She waits to see if more's coming up, but after two months her stomach has become inured to all the violence, and it stays steady. She sniffs, her nose suddenly a bit runny in the cold morning air, then rises to her feet and goes back to Jacob.

She offers him back the gun. "Thanks," she says.

He doesn't reach for it right away, so she looks up and meets his eye, her stare hard and defiant, already preparing a defense in her head—if you meant what you said about me not having the final say on what happened to him you should never have given me your gun; what did you think was going to happen?—but he doesn't look angry. He doesn't look gloaty, either, which is good for him, cause she's pretty sure she'd punch the wind out of him if he did. She can't really tell how he looks, actually. Thoughtful, maybe, though that doesn't seem quite right, either.

Even as she studies him, though, his expression clears, and he removes the pistol from her grip. Almost simultaneously, he curls his other hand around the back of her neck, his rough palm hot against her cold skin, and, somberly, in a move she's only been on the receiving end of from Joseph thus far, he brings his forehead down and rests it against hers.

Instantly, she's uncomfortable. She's not sure what he means by it, but it feels like… like endorsement at best, and a reward at worst. She realizes all at once that she'd been gearing up to argue with him because that's what she wanted, because the alternative is that she fell into acting just the way he intended for her to, something she's been trying to avoid since she first met him.

I didn't kill him because you wanted him dead, or for revenge. I did it because there was no better choice, including doing nothing. She scowls, pulls back a little, and then brings her forehead back against his with a painful little thud—not quite a headbutt, but certainly an expression of displeasure. He doesn't react much—if anything, she just sees understanding in those sharp blue eyes so close to hers—but he does let her go, and she spins away from him the second his grip on her neck loosens, striding quickly back towards the main courtyard.

He doesn't say anything, or move to stop her, but she still throws an excuse over her shoulder, so that it'll feel a little less like fleeing: "I'm going to find Keter," she says briskly; "see if it's time to get these damn stitches out yet." Then she turns a corner, and Jacob and the mess she's left behind her are lost to her view.