The Permanent Efficacy of Grace

17.

Jacob takes the lead at a rapid clip as soon as she joins him, clearly focused on getting them out of there as quickly as possible, and really, she wouldn't be surprised if Jess slipped her ties sooner rather than later, and so she doesn't argue. They cover a mile in complete silence, in record time, passing through several streams and backtracking a couple of times to disguise their trail. Soon, they happen upon a cabin cloistered away in a clump of trees—no vehicles in the drive, windows dark, chimney cold. Jacob, still in stony silence, stomps up the stairs.

He's got a cut down the length of his forearm that she'd noticed as they hustled away from the encounter, but as it hadn't been bleeding too terribly, she hadn't said anything. She thinks he probably wants to take care of it now, so joins him in checking out the cabin. The front door is locked, but the first window she checks is open, and wide enough for them to both shimmy inside.

Once they're in, Jacob shuts the window, locks it, and draws the curtains. He then goes around the cabin, checking the locks on the other doors and locking up the windows, while Rook pokes around to make sure they're alone.

The cabin has the telltale signs of abandonment or evacuation—empty wires protruding from the walls, a few mismatched and barren pieces of furniture left behind but no personal effects, no clothes, no photos, no electronics. The power is still on, though, she discovers when she goes to the bathroom to check for first aid, and so is the water.

There's not a full kit, but someone's left half a bottle of antiseptic and a few spare bandages in the bathroom drawer. It'll do, in lieu of anything else.

She meets Jacob in the kitchen, flipping on the light as he finishes securing the cabin and drawing the last curtain. When he looks at her, she can tell he's pissed, but she's suddenly feeling too drained to do much more than hold up the crude first aid supplies she's found and say, "Let me see your arm."

She realizes as he lifts up his arm, angles it so he can see the inside of his forearm, and blinks at it that he'd had no clue he was even cut. Okay, so why the pit stop? She'd have thought he'd want to get them secure at the Veteran's Center as soon as possible.

He just jerks his chin towards the counter and says, "You first."

Oh, right. The second he says that, she feels the stinging at her throat from the numerous cuts she'd sustained, and reaches up reflexively to touch her neck, feeling the stickiness of clotted blood, the crust of scabbing on the shallower wounds. Jess had probably nicked her five different times, though none did lasting damage.

Jacob scoffs, and at first she thinks it's because she'd failed to remember that she was suffering minor wounds, until he reaches pointedly out to her and touches her coat around her hip. She looks where he's indicating, and it's only then that she notices that blood has soaked through her shirt and coat both. The atonement wound, she realizes, and out loud, she says, "Oh, fuck."

"C'mon, get everything off," Jacob says, turning away to rummage through his pack. Maybe it's just having focus on something to do, but his obvious anger, whatever its source, seems to have reduced to a simmer now.

Rook strips off her coat to see a much larger stain spread across the side of the black shirt underneath it, and now that it's been pointed out for her and she has five seconds to catch her breath and think about her own body, she feels it, a vibrating sort of pain rippling through her side, over and over again. "Son of a bitch," she says under her breath as she starts unbuttoning her shirt. Jacob shoots a narrow, inquisitive glance over his shoulder. "Well, it hurts now," she complains in answer to the question that look asks.

"Tsst." It's a scornful little sound. He probably thinks she's a fool for forgetting about it in the first place, but she'd been happy with that order of events. Now, her side hurts, her neck stings, and her arms and legs are sore—she thinks tension might account for those last, since they hadn't moved nearly far or fast enough to make her muscles ache, unless she's deteriorated further than she thought.

Gotta start working out again, she thinks as she gets her shirt unbuttoned and strips it off, peeling back her bandage to look at the damage.

It's not… terrible. The bullet graze had looked worse after that Peggy had punched her in it—Jess's kick probably hadn't been a direct hit, because it's bleeding again, but doesn't look particularly bruised or angry. The bleeding, too, has slowed some, though it's still oozing in places. Thanks for resetting my recovery time, Jess, love you too, she thinks sourly, and goes to the sink to run the cold water and try to rinse the blood out of her shirt before it dries and sets. Her wardrobe in Hope County is already extremely limited; she doesn't want to sacrifice a piece of it unless it's beyond hope.

"Quit that and get over here," Jacob orders.

"Just a second," she says waspishly, squeezing pink liquid out of the shirt a few times until the worst of it is gone. She drapes it along the sink after that, figuring that fighting infection is probably a little more important and she can get back to it later, and goes over to Jacob.

He grips her by the elbow as she approaches, seeming unfazed that she's just in a bra, jeans, and boots (and frankly, given that she's got smears of blood all over her and probably still has sticks and leaves in her hair from being knocked over onto the forest floor, she doesn't blame him for not being too distracted), and guides her up onto the countertop. She sits on the edge in front of him and doesn't need to be asked to lift her arms up so he can tend to the worst of it.

First he swipes away as much blood as he can with wet gauze, then, once the area is relatively cleaned up, he dabs at the raw flesh with cotton soaked in disinfectant. When she hisses at the sting, he gives her a reproving look and says, "Well. Don't get snuck up on by your former soldiers and this kind of thing won't happen."

"She snuck up on you, too," Rook says, eager to seize a distraction, even if it's not strictly true.

"She did not," Jacob says, his brows furrowing a little, presumably at the puckered mess of her side. "Too angry at you." He sets down the bloodied cotton and caps the disinfectant. She thinks he'll move for the bandages next, but he surprises her by placing his hands palm-down on either side of her legs and then lifting his head to look at her, close. His stare is serious. "You should have let me kill her."

Rook can tell right away from the manner of his approach (and the fact that he's not yelling at her) that this is different from their usual head-butting over being on opposite sides. This isn't just what's-good-for-the-cult versus what's-good-for-the-Resistance, and so she manages to choke back her instinct to make a glib response. She meets his eyes as honestly as she's able and says, "She's my friend."

"Hmm." It's not a happy sound, and she sees that anger return in the tenseness of his shoulders and the hardening of his stare, though his voice is as calm and controlled as before when he tells her, "Be that as it may. She's a threat to you."

Again, she has to discard a few potential replies—chief among them if she was a real threat, I'd already be dead—before she settles on the right one. "For how long?"

That seems to surprise him. He's been more or less in her face; now he retreats an inch or two, giving her a little room to breathe, to think, and he begins to shake his head, stopping the motion before it gets very far. "What are you…?"

"Even if you think she's genuinely out to kill me and wasn't just beating me up to soothe her hurt feelings… do you think she's gonna catch me out in the open again before the apocalypse?" she presses.

Jacob blinks. His hands slide off the counter, uncaging her as he stands up straight, which just makes her sit up straighter, look more intently at him. He seems uncertain now, and disgruntled, and if he was anybody else she bets he'd leave rather than continue this conversation. He's Jacob, though, so he stays put, albeit silently, without seeming to have a response to her question—or, more accurately, to the acknowledgement in it.

Fine, she thinks. If he doesn't want to jinx it by saying it out loud, I'll go on ahead. "The way I see it, after Whitehorse and the others left, there are two options to explain why this county isn't crawling with backup by now. One: y'all killed them quickly after they left. Snipers planted outside the exit road, taking `them out once they got past where I could see and hear, or Burke—don't tell me Faith's not still puppeting that man, not after what I saw. He could have stolen a service weapon and turned it on them at any point after they went."

"Hmm." This grunt is a little more pleasant than the last one, means something along the lines of not half-bad, his eyes on her cool and guarded, like he doesn't want to give anything away. She shakes her head anyway.

"It'd be simple, but I don't believe it."

"Why don't you believe it?" he challenges her, lifting his chin, a bit of his old arrogance coming back into him.

She refuses to get riled. "Because Eden's Gate has kept this county completely cut off from the outside world for over two months, Jacob. Nobody out, nobody in. I might have been brand new to the area that night we arrested Joseph, but I've been living here long enough to make friends with some locals, get a feel for this place, and it's not some backwoods ghost town nobody ever visits. People have family nearby, people make trips out to the supermarkets, people order delivery. People drive through to avoid the occasional traffic jam on I-90. There's normally an ebb and flow that's been completely cut off for these last few months."

Jacob folds his arms over his chest. "And?"

"It's like I told you before," she says, and she feels a weird calm settling over her as she actually speaks the ideas out loud for once—or the first time, at least, since their little scuffle on the river banks what seemed like forever ago. "If all was well out there, someone would have noticed that something weird is happening here. Even if you killed the first person to come sniffing around, someone else would notice that they were gone, and it would just snowball from there until, once again, I'd expect to see this place raided by the National Guard. But they're not here. Nobody new has shown up this whole time. What's more, I've heard things."

"Things."

She nods. "Where we've busted your jammers on the radio towers so we can actually hear past your broadcasts. Nothing concrete, and I never seemed to catch more than the end of any given announcement, but I sure have heard the words 'nuclear war' thrown around a lot lately."

Jacob raises his eyebrows. "That right?"

She nods, taking a slow, tired breath and sighing it out again. "Coincidence, maybe, or maybe Joseph's a real prophet. I don't know and I don't much care, but I've spent a while trying to ignore the reality that Eden's Gate wouldn't have had any luck cutting us off from the rest of the world if the rest of the world didn't have bigger fish to fry."

His expression doesn't change much from its neutral scowl, but she sees his chest rise, then fall, then he steps forward, curls an arm around her back to press her head to his shoulder. She allows it, reaching up to clutch his arm and leaning into him for a second, reading in the embrace a confirmation of her guesswork—and there's something apologetic about it too, though she doesn't think Jacob Seed has had too much to do with whatever the idiot nations of the world are squabbling about now. She feels heat rising to her eyes, and she closes them to try to avoid tearing up, though if there's ever a time to cry, it's probably now, now that she's finally starting to believe that the world is about to end.

She doesn't stay like that for long—mostly because she really wants to—straightening up and sniffing hard. She rubs the tip of her nose with a knuckle, avoiding eye contact for a moment as she blinks the sting out of her eyes, then, quietly so it'll be less evident if her voice quavers, she says, "We should probably finish up."

When she chances a look at him, his face is still unreadable, but he nods and finds the bandages. As he's cutting them into strips, his eyes safely off her, Rook watches him. The tense lines on his face have smoothed out as he busies himself with the next task on the list (she can relate, she's built like that too, soothed by doing something that will make things suck even a little bit less), and as she watches him, she feels the sad, anxious hitch in her breathing fade away, that tightness in her throat loosening up in just seconds. It's something she's been dimly aware of for a while, that, provided they aren't fighting, just being around Jacob is enough to calm her down, but she still marvels a bit at feeling it in action.

"You could always take a picture," he says dryly, interrupting her little reverie.

She smiles. "I like looking at the real thing."

He clears his throat and drops his gaze again. If he's uncomfortable with the open affection, that's all he shows of it—he picks up the bandages and rips a long strip of medical tape off the spool with this teeth, and she moves her arm obligingly clear so that he can start dressing the injury back up.

"I've just been thinking," she starts.

"Lord," he mutters between his teeth, so quietly she wouldn't have heard it if he wasn't so close.

She snorts at the grumpy act (that's all it's been with her for a while, an act, as if he wouldn't just demand that she continue if she stopped talking then and there) and says, "First of all, I know I've been… not myself… of late." She catches a flash of blue as his eyes cut up into her, sharp and sudden, and she drops her gaze quickly so she can pretend he's not staring at her and continue without feeling too shy about it. "It's been a few… really hard blows at once. You know, accepting them. I've been under strain and my weak spots have been showing, but I can do better. I'm going to do better."

"You know, that's not—" he starts, then cuts himself off. She looks up and their eyes meet for a half-second before he shifts his gaze away now, returning it to her half-bandaged side and resuming his task for a moment before he continues. "We've all seen what you can do as a soldier," he says, his voice deceptively mild and quiet as he fastens another strip to her side and secures it in place. "And what you did these past few days…" He pauses, his mouth firming into a thin line and his brow furrowing as he nods. "That took strength." She's silent, watching him as he finishes up, and only once he's done does he meet her eye again. "You've earned your place," he says simply, but his jaw seems stubbornly tight, his eyebrows slightly arched like he's daring her or anyone else to say otherwise.

Looking at him, she wonders if he knows he's talking bullshit, or if he's just tricked himself into believing it by now. The thing is, from talking to dozens, hundreds of Hope County residents, she knows that the usual rules for the cult don't apply to the Seed family, though she doubts any of them acknowledge it to one another. She just doesn't know if they acknowledge it to themselves. Of course, Rook isn't family—family-adjacent, at best—but she knows that they bent rules to allow her in, and that she has not been (and likely will not be) held to the same rules as the rest of the cult. At the very least, she isn't capital-s-Strong, is nowhere near Jacob's super-soldier, and she wonders if he knows that and is blithely taking advantage of the fact that he's a Herald and can have things the way he wants, or if he's fully in denial.

It doesn't matter, really, and she's not about to bring it up right now, sensing that it could start a fight that she's not sure she can handle at the moment, given how brittle she's felt ever since she walked back up to St. Francis's with the resolution to bargain for the most she could get with the only thing she had left: herself.

"Rook," Jacob says. She realizes she's been staring past him, and snaps back into herself with a little shock, shaking her head like she's clearing away cobwebs and giving him a small, impersonal little smile.

"Sorry," she says. "Is it done?"

He's watching her warily. If she didn't know any better, she'd think he seems a little worried, but all he says at length is "For now." When she raises an eyebrow, he adds, "I want Keter to look at it when we get back. Maybe put you on antibiotics again—I don't want it goin' hot like the last time."

"Yeah, me neither," she says wryly. He nods and reaches over, starting to put things away, but when she catches his wrist, he scowls at her. That's one of his friendlier scowls, though, the what-is-it? scowl, and in response to the question his expression is asking her, she pointedly lifts his wrist up until the cut running down the back of his forearm is fully on display.

He sighs. "It's a scratch."

"Jess is the type to poison her weapons when she's got time."

"I'd know if it was poisoned."

"I'd feel better if you let me take a look at it."

He sighs, but he shifts his weight again so that he's standing in front of her, and he hikes the arm up a little higher, planting the opposite hand on the counter right next to her and leaning in close—presumably to give her easier access, but there's something like a dare in his eyes.

She's perfectly up to whatever challenge he thinks he's presenting. She ignores his face so close to hers, ignores that she can feel the heat coming off his body in the cold of the cabin and that, while he's not quite between her legs, he's touching her knees, and she digs up more cotton scraps to soak in antiseptic to tend to the injury.

"What's the second thing?" Jacob asks.

She meets his eyes, which is a mistake—it seems like they keep swapping comfort levels, taking turns avoiding each other's gaze when it seems like the other might be seeing too much, but he's certainly staring intently at her now. It takes her a second to remember to speak. "The…. second…?"

"You said 'first of all.' It implies there's a 'second of all.' What's the second thing?"

She has to refocus on the bottle for a second as she pours antiseptic on a wad of cotton before she can regain the train of thought he's referencing. She lands on it a moment later, but begins dabbing at the smeared blood along the long line of the cut before speaking up. "Second of all, you've been…"

The words fail her a lot more quickly than she expects. She falls silent, but Jacob makes no move to speak up and relieve the pressure on her—on the contrary, she feels the weight of his eyes on her, steady and unyielding.

She draws a breath and tries again, and although the words come in starts and stops, they come. "I didn't expect I'd need… help… like this… from you. You've had my back consistently this whole time—ever since I got stabbed, you've just… looked out for me. I wanted to thank you for that. I didn't… like I said, I didn't expect it."

She's finished cleaning and disinfecting the cut, and it's a good thing, because before she can reach for the bandages, Jacob puts that hand down, too, on the other side of her so he's once again hemming her in and leaning into her space, but more importantly, without his injury to distract her, she reflexively looks right into his face.

He looks… not angry, not exactly, but he doesn't seem happy. Once he's got her attention, he says, "What did you expect? That I'd throw you out on your ass to fend for yourself?"

His voice has that deceptive softness to it that he used to use to talk to her when she was back in his cages, which clues her in to the fact that he's perhaps a little angrier than he's letting on. Good. She's working an angle here, because approaching this topic head-on will definitely make him clam up and go all weird and unapproachable for several days. She looks him in the eyes and, the softness of her tone matching his, she says, "Isn't that what you'd do with any other recruit?"

"Do you see me inviting any other recruit to live in my goddamn office?"

"No," she says. "And I don't see you carrying any other recruits to the med bay, or letting them take weeks of downtime to heal up, or letting them share your bed, occasionally."

She sees something dawn in his eyes a half second before he tenses up and shifts his weight, but before he can move away, she very casually places the heels of her hands on the backs of his, not quite holding him in place so much as pointedly reminding him that she'll notice if he tries to run away now. She still sees the discomfort in his eyes, but something else flares in them, too: the recognition that he's being challenged. He stays put.

"I don't see you setting up special meetings with Joseph for anyone else, or punching John, or talking anyone else down from a freakout, or acting as a human wall between them and anyone who might marginally be a threat," she adds.

"Is this going somewhere?" he asks brusquely. She gazes at him—he's all but glaring back, his brows furrowed into an alarming-looking scowl, but the tips of his ears are red, and if it wasn't for the beard and the heavy scars, she thinks she might see the blood rising in his face, too.

"I'm not trying to make you uncomfortable," she says softly. "I just want to be clear with you. I know that historically, you've protected your family. You know, the people you… care about. I just want to acknowledge that I… I'm grateful that you've looked after me, too."

The scowl softens incrementally as she sees something like clarity light in his eyes. At this point, he does lean back, and she lets his hands slide out from under his as he stands up straight, though he makes no move to step away from her. He makes a little scoffing sound that takes her by surprise, then he asks, "Why the hell are you talking like that?"

That surprises her, too. Her brows shoot up, and she asks, "Like what?"

"Like I'm an asshole. Like some deadbeat, or… a kicked dog that'll go running if you raise your voice." She tilts her head a little, inquisitive, and he points a thumb at his chest and says, "I am not fuckin' squeamish about what we have, Rook. If I was, I'd've killed you long before we got in this deep."

Her eyebrows climb even higher. This, she hadn't been expecting. "We don't talk about it," she points out.

He shakes his head, incredulous. "Do we need to? I figured after everything that's happened, it's all pretty set in stone."

"Believe it or not, people in this county kind of see you as pretty cold-hearted, and while I do know that's not always the case, you're such a fuckin' stoic that yeah, I wouldn't mind checking in with you about where we stand now and again."

He exhales a pissed-off little breath through his nose, folds his arms, and glares at her, actions that are somewhat offset by his next words—he's not loud about it, but that coolness is completely gone from his voice, which takes on an annoyed, almost sarcastic tone as he says, "I care about you, Rook. I want you to stay, Rook—in the mountains, with me, for as long as we've got before this fucking… collapse kicks in, if it ever does. I told Joseph—"

He cuts himself off, glances away and shakes his head, and chuckles, an irritated little sound, before he manages to get himself together and meet her eyes again with renewed calm. "Everything you just said," he says levelly. "All those things. You're right. I don't do that for anyone else. And you—well. I didn't think you'd stick around for as long as you did after you left your infirmary bed if you didn't give two shits about me. And I know you wouldn't have joined Eden's Gate if you weren't at least a little invested in this," he says, gesturing between the two of them with an abrupt little motion. "That's why I didn't figure we needed to discuss it. I thought we were on the same page."

Her brain is just blaring white television static as she stares at him, eyes large and unblinking. She'd had an angle at the start of this—gently introduce the relationship talk without spooking him—but she's lost control of the situation much more quickly than she thought she would. After a few seconds of them wordlessly staring at one another, effectively stalemated, she shuts her eyes, sucks in a huge breath, and then releases it slowly. After that, she says, "Can you understand why I might want to actually talk about where we stand now, and what we might be looking at in the future?"

She can tell by the look on his face that he really can't, or at the very least, doesn't want to. Fine, then. I'll be the one to say it.

"Jacob, my name is mud with the Resistance, now more than ever. You and your siblings seem happy to have me in the cult, but let's face it, almost everyone in Eden's Gate has a family member or friend I've killed or maimed."

"If we say you're in, you're in," Jacob says stonily. "Nobody'll do a goddamn thing to you."

"Yeah, but that's my point," she says, trying to fight back her frustration, or at least keep it from becoming too obvious. "It's all dependent on you. And any second you could say oh, never mind, changed my mind and feed me to the wolves. I'm not saying you would," she says quickly as he opens his mouth to argue. "After everything, after all that you've done, I trust that you won't. But I'm in… kind of a vulnerable position here, so you'll have to forgive me if you telling me only now of course we're in a relationship, we've always been in a relationship sort of throws me for a loop."

"You're in a vulnerable position," he repeats, clearly hanging onto his patience by a hair. "Rook, I've spent most of the last few months waiting for you to get a clue and move on. Waiting for you to wash your hands of me. If you're worried that, what, I'm going to ditch you now that you're locked into the Project? Well, guess what: I'm worried that you're going to ditch me because I'm a mean, ugly son of a bitch who's too goddamn old for you—"

Rook slips off of the counter, lightning-quick, and although he cuts himself off and takes a quick, startled step back, she closes the little gap between them and flings her arms around his neck. He stands still, lets her hug him tight, and then crosses his arms around her upper back even as he grumbles, "Careful. You'll start bleeding again."

She laughs, a half-choked little sound, and slides her hand up the back of his neck, gratified by the way she can feel his breath hitch before she stands on tiptoe and meets his mouth with hers.

It's fairly chaste, close-mouthed but warm, affectionate. Jacob's shoulders are stiff beneath her wrists, though, and she breaks away after a moment, not wanting to push him further than he's willing to go. She settles back down onto her heels and looks at his face.

He looks wary. "What was that for?"

"I'm not leaving you."

He shakes his head, scowling to cover his confusion. "Wh—"

"I'm tired of leaving things unsaid, so I just want you to know. I'm with you. I'm staying with you, for as long as I can. Do you believe me?"

His expression clears. "Don't ask me that."

"Do you trust me?" she persists.

"Do you trust me?" he counters.

She thinks about it for a moment, thinks about all the quiet, subtle ways she's seen his loyalty to her build, and then she nods. "I do. And I'm not leaving you."

His breathing picks up. She feels the palm of his hand on her hip, hot through her jeans, and he nudges her backwards—she moves obligingly till she hits the counter, climbing backwards onto it, and he crowds closer until he's tight between her legs, his chest brushing against hers. He grips her hip hard like he thinks she'll slip away, but his other hand when he brings it up to stroke the edge of her face is almost maddeningly gentle.

He says, "You don't have to stay."

"I know that," she says. "I walked right out of the Veteran's Center the other night."

A flash of impatience. "Not that. With me. Even now—if you're worried you can't leave because Eden's Gate will turn on you, I can fix that."

It's her turn to be impatient, and she knocks her forehead against his lightly but firmly. Pay attention. "I'm telling you. You keep letting me go. I keep coming back."

"You came back to make a deal," he says stiffly, but he doesn't pull away—even so, she tightens her arms around his neck.

"I came back so I could stay with you," she says. "And this, Jacob—this is exactly what scares me. It's not that I think you're going to kick me to the curb because you're bored. I think it's because you can't accept…"

She can see in his eyes that he doesn't want her to finish that thought, so she trails off with a little sigh. She circles around, approaches it from a different angle. "Your family loves you. Everyone can see that—we can all see that. I just… I want to know why it's so impossible to think that someone else, someone who isn't them, could love you too."

He sighs, a long, quiet sound. On the tail end of it, he mutters, "I'm not leaving you either."

It may not be an I love you—she knows him, after all, well enough to know that he's squeamish about love and calling it what it is, in offering it and definitely in receiving it, which is why she pulled up just short of saying it explicitly as well. It's something, though. It's the first thing to a real commitment that either of them have spoken out loud, and although she can see his point that the things they've done mean a lot more than anything they can say, it still feels significant.

She leans back so she can nod her agreement without bumping into him, and removes one hand from his neck so she can very seriously offer it to him. He glances down at it and scoffs a little, but she wiggles it insistently. "Shake on it."

Again, if he was the kind of man who rolled his eyes, they'd be rolling now, but he lifts his hand from her hip and obliges her with a handshake. She cracks a smile then, a genuine one. It feels like the first one in days.

His face does something complicated—something that looks sad, maybe, or maybe just worried. Before she can quite figure it out, he says curtly, "You know you can do better. Right?"

Oh, for the love of—they had just gone over this. Rook tries not to show her frustration, especially since she knows this is part and parcel of who Jacob is and always has been, that meat mentality, that he's nothing but fuel for the grinder, but she knows some of her impatience must be showing as she drops his hand and says, "Oh, sure. Let me just go shack up with Joseph. What the hell, man?"

Jacob glowers at the mention of his brother—she doesn't blame him, wishes she'd brought up Faith instead, Joseph is the ultimate buzzkill—but stiffly, he says, "I just want you to be sure."

She's so annoyed by this that she wants to laugh—what the fuck does he think we've been talking about—but senses that it'd be exactly the worst move. Instead, she gives him a narrow-eyed little look, just shy of a glare, and grips him by the shoulders again. He lets her pull him close willingly enough, but it's perfectly clear that for right now at least, he isn't going to be the one to make the move.

Fine. Then I'll do it.

When she kisses him, he's unyielding, his shoulders still tense beneath her hands. He kisses her back, but it's impersonal, like making out with a statue. That's fine. I've got all day, she thinks, and wraps her legs loosely around him, pulling him even closer, so his body is flush with hers. She drags her hand up the back of his head, scratching lightly at the skin there with her nails, and is pleased when she feels him start to thaw, unwinding in her grasp. First his arms go loosely around her, then his kiss becomes more energized, more interested. Then he pulls her even tighter against him, and she can feel that all of him is more interested and—embarrassingly—she moans a little bit.

That just seems to encourage him, and he drags her off the counter, into his arms. She locks her legs around him to anchor herself in place, squeezing tight enough to get a little growl from him that goes straight to her belly. She'd missed this, touching him however she wanted to, the warmth of him, his solidness, and now that they're not in the dead center of the woods…

She thinks he's on the same page until he abruptly breaks the kiss, and she makes a little sound of protest that is next-door to a whimper—again, embarrassing—before checking to see what's drawn his attention. He's frowning at his arm… or, no, the spot on her side right above his arm, which she realizes after a moment of thinking past the haze is the wounded patch he just finished bandaging. "Shit," he exhales, and leans slightly back to meet her eyes. His pupils have that blown look to them, and she knows hers must look exactly the same, a thought that makes her breath hitch in her chest.

"You're just gonna start bleeding again," Jacob says, his voice a low rumble, but his disapproval is evident. She just stares at him for a second, speechless, until he moves as if to put her down, then she presses hard down on his shoulders and locks her legs in place, resisting gravity with all her might.

"You had better be fucking joking," she says flatly. He groans, his grip on her tightening again as he buries his face in her neck, and she feels the press of his mouth at the point where her neck meets her shoulder, followed by the pleasant scrape of his teeth. She draws a hissing breath, then bends to speak low, directly into his ear. "I'll heal. Now, let's go, soldier. Time to finish what you started."

She feels a little snap of pain as he bites down on her shoulder—it'll leave a mark—and then he leans back again, meeting her eyes as he slides one hand up into her hair. It seems like she can feel the hoarse gravel of his voice in the pit of her stomach when he says, "You'd better be fucking certain about this, Rook. No taking it back."

If he intends the for words—an echo of what he'd said to her the very first time they'd indulged in an extremely ill-advised make-out session beneath the falls—to make her second-guess herself, then he's got another think coming. She feels excitement kindling into a heat in her chest, and she kisses him again, hungrier this time, more ferocious, and he returns her intensity exactly in kind. She stops for just a second, barely pulling back, her lips brushing his as she tells him, "There's a bed in the other room."

She doesn't need to tell him twice. He doesn't set her down, holding her tight and carrying her to the room beyond. He doesn't bother to kick the door shut behind them.

It's tempting to just stay shacked up in the cabin forever, or at least for the rest of the day, but once they've gotten it out of their systems—temporarily, at least—Jacob reminds her that "Roosevelt's kid" may well be looking for them and might well have the Whitetails in tow, and after taking a second to figure out who "Roosevelt's kid" is (of course, Jacob isn't on a first name basis with Dutch and probably doesn't much care what his relationship to Jess is), she agrees that they should head back to the Veteran's Center. It's mostly because she's hungry, but she doesn't think she needs to share that with him.

They don't run into trouble on the way home, whether because Jess had decided she'd had enough or because they'd successfully thrown off the trail, but by the time they reach St. Francis's, Rook is already regretting not persuading Jacob to just stay in the cabin with her for the day. She knows damn well he'll get caught up in work as soon as they cross the threshold, which will inevitably annoy her, since she's already scheming about how to get him alone up in the office. Sure enough, as soon as they walk through the gates (the recruits in the courtyard doing that conspicuous not-staring thing they do whenever she and Jacob show up anywhere together), someone flags his attention.

He changes direction, and rather than trail behind him like a well-trained puppy, she decides to follow her rumbling stomach instead—it's lunchtime by now, the whole excursion having eaten up a solid eight hours, and she's suddenly starving. Of course, she's never been to the mess hall before, and after a couple of false starts, she's seriously considering asking a stranger for directions (no time like the present to start integrating with the cult she's apparently joined, after all, she thinks wryly) when she spots someone familiar.

And he spots her, too, if the way he locks up is any indication. After studying him for a thoughtful second, she lifts her hand and waves, a little olive branch, and Pratt relaxes and comes over to her.

"I was looking for food," she says as he approaches, "but this place is a fuckin' maze. Help?"

"Yeah," he says, looking like he's not sure whether to be relieved or on his guard. "S-sure. I was just… just heading there myself."

He sets off, and she follows, though she realizes before long that he's not letting her walk behind him, slowing his pace until they're in step and cueing her from there. During the short walk to the mess hall, she notes other things that clue her in to the fact that this is not the same slick, cheerful, carefree guy who'd had as much a hand in her training as Hudson had. Aside from the notable new stammer, his eyes are constantly moving, checking corners, doorways, windows, assessing every person they pass as a potential threat, and his stance isn't the same lazy saunter from before Hope County, much more upright, rigid, and tense now. Additionally—and this isn't from his expression or tone of voice or anything more than just an impression she gets, a vibe he puts off—he seems angry. She'd never seen Pratt angry in the few months they'd worked together before all this, but now he seems like he's just at a constant simmer, like it'd just take one wrong word to make him blow.

It's not exactly a surprise, and she certainly doesn't blame him, but it does make her wonder why he chose to come back here, to St. Francis's, Jacob's domain, when he could have just as easily gone somewhere else—if he's too scared of the Collapse to leave the cult entirely, she's sure Faith or John would take him, and they wouldn't come with the same baggage. She figures Jacob is just the devil he knows, but before she can decide how to ask, or whether asking would even be wise, he turns an abrupt corner and the cafeteria opens up in front of them.

Unlike many of the other areas in the Veteran's Center, people here are clearly relaxed, and people are louder, enjoying the food, the rest, jawing with their buddies while they have some downtime. As Rook and Pratt enter, though, the cheerful din quiets to a murmur that strikes her as borderline hostile, and as her step hitches reflexively in response to the ugly air filling the room, she catches quite a few unfriendly stares leveled her way as well.

It's not unexpected, of course. She knew she'd be meeting with this response the second she stepped out among the non-Seeds of Eden's Gate, and now that she's well and can probably hold her own in a fistfight if she needs to, she has no intention of just continuing to hide away in Jacob's office, or behind him when they're out and about. It's part of why she'd decided to head here to the mess hall, in addition to being hungry: she's ready to rip the band-aid off as soon as possible, but as she fields the dirty looks, she finds herself intensely grateful that she isn't completely alone.

And Pratt seems entirely unfazed by the looks, shooting back his share of glares. She's faintly surprised to see that most of the people who are staring at them quickly turn away, returning to their business, and after a second, Pratt, not bothering to lower his voice, says, "Come on."

Rook is suddenly burning with curiosity about Pratt, feeling all the questions she's been shoving away while his fate was still in question bubble up to the surface at once, but she smells cooked meat, and her stomach chooses that second to produce an unholy gurgle. She realizes suddenly that not only has she not eaten in the eight or so hours she's been awake, she also skipped eating all day yesterday, and as far as the day before that… that was the day she'd met with Joseph and his siblings, and she can't remember eating anything past breakfast. No wonder she's ready to eat a house.

In light of that, she decides it'd be a good idea to just follow Pratt. He leads her down a cafeteria-style line of simple, standard fare—grilled chicken, brown rice, steamed vegetables, lots of brown bread that looks freshly-baked—and she does what he does, grabbing a tray and filling it up, though she probably gets twice as much as he does (as much because she's hungry as he doesn't seem to be, at all). There's a kitchen behind the buffet, and she catches the recruits working back there staring at her like she's something they found at the bottom of a dumpster, but she figures if they wanted to risk poisoning her, they'd have done it back when Jacob was fetching single servings for her, rather than tainting the communal dish. She offers a little index finger salute to a particularly unfriendly-looking man near the sinks, and when he flips her the bird in response, she smiles.

Pratt makes his way to the end of a long table near the edge of the room, a good eight seats down from anyone else, and she notes as he sits down that he's put his back as close to the corner as he can and he has a good view of the door. She's not super keen on having her back to the door either, now that she thinks about it, and so instead of sitting across from him, she takes the empty seat beside him.

For a few minutes, everything—the changes in Pratt, the hostile environment, the dizzying, happy feeling of relief she's been carrying around all morning since she and Jacob hammered a few things out, and certainly any sense of decorum—fades into the background as she eats. She eats steadily and she eats fast, and although she's sure her stomach has shrunk after long stretches with no food, she almost clears her plate, leaving behind just a few bread crusts and some chicken bones. Once she's satisfied, she leans back with happy sigh and says, "Hunger is the best spice, they say. They're right as hell."

Pratt grunts. Rook glances over to see that he's just picking at his food, preoccupied with glancing around the cafeteria. After a second, she leans in conspiratorially and whispers, "You think we're about to get jumped?"

"No."

"Hmm." She leans back again, straightens up, and looks around herself. They're still getting the occasional glance, and some people got up and left shortly after she and Pratt arrived, but everyone else here seems to have resigned themselves to sharing space for now. She thinks he's right, that they're not in imminent danger, but that doesn't seem to have calmed him down any.

She can tell by his brusqueness, too, that her old habit of joking around with him as a means of conversation isn't going to work anymore. She looks at him for a second, noticing not for the first time that he's changed physically, too, his hair and beard longer and more scraggly than she's ever seen them, making him look almost like a proper Peggy. He's thinner, too, the muscles on his arms shaved down close to the bones of his wrists and elbows, and the shadows under his eyes are about as dark as Jacob's, even though he's a much younger man. Despite their shared history, their shared bond—outsiders, coming to the cult the same way, both deciding to stick around for their own reasons—she's struck with the realization that she's practically talking to a stranger by now.

In light of this, she takes a moment to think things over, trying to figure out the best approach. After a moment, quietly again, but this time without the mischief, she says, "Where were you these last couple weeks?"

His eyes twitch, something that's not quite a blink—more of a flinch. After a second, he redirects his gaze towards her, and it's almost scornful. "Down in Jacob's Gate."

"Stationed there?"

He shakes his head, makes a negative sound as he casts his gaze back over the hall. "In a cell."

"Like Hudson?"

"I don't know," he says irritably. "What was Hudson like?"

Rook shrugs, not taking his bad mood personally—if anything, she deserved to have her head bitten off by him for the rest of the time they knew one another. If she'd been quicker, smarter, he'd have been free long before this. "In a cell," she says. "In John's Gate. Being tortured and used as broadcast fodder."

She sees Pratt flinch again, and kicks herself. Of course. She remembers his "apology" that Jacob had blasted through the speakers at all his outposts in the early days.

"Doesn't matter," he mutters before she can decide what to say next. "She's dead anyway."

She feels a flood of adrenaline at that, her first thoughts a confused muddle of oh God, they did it after all, they killed them on their way out, but he glances quickly sideways at her and adds: "Or—she will be, soon enough."

Rook tries to make herself relax a little, but her heart is racing now and she doesn't think she's playing it very cool. "Right," she says. "The Collapse."

"The goddamn Collapse."

Rook pushes chicken bones around her tray with her fork, just to have something to do with her eyes and hands. At length, she asks, "You believe?"

He gives her a little sideways glance. Come on, now. "You do, too, by now. Don't you? Or do you think the Guard is just dragging their feet because they're shy?"

She shakes her head at him, returning his glance with a frown. Point taken. "So why hasn't anything happened yet?" she asks, wondering if he might have more insider knowledge than she does after being stuck up here among the Peggies, day in and day out, for months. She'd largely been with the Resistance, and with Jacob, who at first wasn't forthcoming about Joseph's plans and later made it clear that he wasn't told many specifics and didn't ask. Of course Jacob wouldn't ask—his job, as he viewed it, was to take care of his, and everything outside of that was irrelevant and largely uninteresting—but she thought that maybe some others would, and they would know more overall.

Pratt, though, is shaking his head. "It happens when it happens. You can't rush God, Rook." There's a little edge of mockery to his voice that sounds like the old Pratt—at least, it would if she didn't hear the blind, heady fear underneath it.

She sighs out a short, impatient breath. "I can't stand this fucking waiting. Surely someone knows what's going on out there. What if it's actually fine and this is all just more cult shit?"

Pratt shakes his head. "Better quit with that talk, Rook. It'll drive you crazy. Besides, you know as well as I do you're just scrambling for excuses. You remember Whitehorse talking about good police work? Occam's razor?"

Rook's mouth twists into a frown. She does remember. The simplest explanation is usually the right one. Pratt, seeing her answer on her face, asks, "What's simpler? That Eden's Gate has so much money, power, and influence outside of Hope County that they've kept the whole world out for all this time—the rest of the department, the Feds, the National Guard, hell, even my mom? Or that they haven't done anything outside of the county at all, and that the world is just in too much crisis to pay attention to our little drama here?"

"I wouldn't call either of those explanations exactly fuckin' simple," she says, talking over his last couple of words, irritated. She doesn't know why hearing Pratt backing up the cult, backing up Joseph, bothers her so much. She knew he wasn't secretly staying behind just to spring her from the Project's trap, and she knows that for whatever reason—Stockholm syndrome, maybe—his loyalty is to Jacob now. Still, hearing him say it, it feels too final, like a key turning in a lock. This is it.

Pratt, looking sidelong at her, appears somewhat sympathetic, though still angry. It's a weird blend, and she's not sure what to do with it, so she shakes her head like she's shaking off her disappointment and changes the subject: "So you've just been cooling your heels up at Jacob's Gate for a month? What's it like? Cold and boring, I bet."

His expression turns chilly at her glib tone, which she regrets immediately. Stiffly, he says, "Yes. Cold and boring." He turns back to his food, moving it around his plate with his fork for a moment while she silently scolds herself for not being more sensitive with a guy who's got one foot in sanity and the other on a banana peel. Then, he says, "I think at one point the plan was to just… leave me."

That gets her eyebrows up, and she stares at him, though he steadily isn't looking at her. "For a while after I… after the last time I saw you. They just locked me in a room with no food. Water, but no food. Jacob himself told me it was… punishment. For helping you. After that, they locked the doors, and there was nothing. Nobody came by. It was just me, alone, in that room." He stares across the hall, his eyes distant, seeing nothing. "I don't know how long it lasted. I just know that at a certain point, they started bringing food again. After I'd… calmed down enough to accept that I wasn't going to die, they took me to a cell with some other prisoners, Resistance, and I had people to talk to again. That's the way it's been ever since."

There's a long period of silence until he seems to shake off the memory, and his eyes shift sideways to her, briefly. "I've always gotten the feeling that you had something to do with that, Rook."

She doesn't know what to say to that. She doesn't know if there's anything to say to that. Loosely, she can make the timeline work—Pratt going in the hole after freeing her after the third set of trials, a week later, her making out with Jacob for the first time, Jacob likely realizing (consciously or unconsciously) that if he wanted a repeat he probably shouldn't starve her friend to death and bringing Pratt back to the land of the living—but it doesn't make her feel good, because he would never have been there in the first place if he hadn't risked his skin for her. They're not square, because she can see that his time at the Gate has done some damage, though she'd bet some of that already existed from just adjusting to life at the Veteran's Center, under Jacob.

She feels the old familiar flare of anger—how could they do this? How could he do this?—but it's distinctly tired now, beat-down. Is she even allowed to be indignant about the cult's bullshit anymore, now that she's sold out to join them?

Before she can figure out how to find her way back from all that, conversationally, Pratt is standing abruptly, along with everyone else in the room. By the time she's located the source of their attention—Jacob, striding fast past the threshold—he's already muttered "at ease" and they're sitting down again, with the exception of Pratt, who stays standing, hands clasped in front of him. Rook doesn't bother to get up (Jacob isn't her boss, after all, not yet, anyway) and instead snatches an untouched piece of bread from his tray, ripping into it as Jacob approaches.

He ignores her for the moment, leveling his stare instead at Pratt and, free from scrutiny, she leans back and watches him. It's uncanny to her how smoothly he can change, how he can switch over from the Jacob he is with her—ornery, to be sure, but he looks and talks to her like she's a person—to Brother Jacob, Herald of Eden's Gate, big boss of the army they've built. His eyes get colder and more careless, his voice quieter and more toneless, and he looks at people like they're things, assets or liabilities. Rook, who has never managed to even tone her own personality down for more than a few hours at a time, isn't sure whether this ability to just change is more worrying or impressive.

He's looking at Pratt in that icy, assessing way now, although she notices that his stare is missing the disdainful quality it had always held before. Recognition of Pratt making the right choice, she supposes. After a minute, he simply says, "You can go."

Pratt grabs his tray and fucks off. Jacob takes the seat he vacated, beside Rook, dusting off the surface of the table before leaning onto his forearms and scanning the hall with what appears to be great focus. It doesn't escape her notice that he is not looking at her, despite having presumably come here in search of her.

She gives him until she finishes her slice of bread, and when he fails to say anything by the time she's done, she prods him a little. "So, what's the word?"

"Joseph's been in touch."

She winces. That wound is still fresh, and they're still carefully stepping around mention of his family as much as possible, but given that she's just officially stepped into the cult, and the Seed family is the cult, she'd known it couldn't last. It explains his reticence, but if he's bringing it to her at all, it means it's something they can't ignore. "What does he want?"

He turns his head and meets her eyes, looking wary, like he's not sure how she's going to react, and says, "He wants us to come to dinner. All of us."

"All of us meaning…?"

"You, me. Faith, John."

She tilts her head back and stares at the ceiling in silent agony. She thinks it shows maturity that she doesn't shout "fuck" out loud. After a second to process the information, she asks, "When?"

"Tonight."

She swivels her head abruptly towards him. "Seriously?" He grunts in a little affirmative. This time, she does say "fuck," although it's quiet, drawn-out, and more of a peevish whisper than anything.

Jacob says, "He's worried about how things went. He wants to smooth things over. Welcome you to the family properly, he said."

"Well, that doesn't make it sound like he's planning to have you all gather round and drink my blood at all," she says. Jacob snorts, but she's a little too preoccupied to take pride in making him laugh like she normally would, chewing at the edge of a thumbnail as she faces the prospect of a family dinner with the Seeds.

The Peggies, she realizes as she looks out over the mess hall, are not not looking at her and Jacob. They're just trying to be subtle about it, but she's definitely catching her share of worried, uncertain glances now that she's watching them back. Maybe they think the Resistance has planted her the same way Jacob intended to. Maybe they think Jacob's in imminent danger, being this close to her so much lately.

I should kill him, she thinks. Then I wouldn't have to spend time with his family.

"Rook," Jacob says. His tone isn't questioning at all, but it's a question all the same.

Ripping band-aids off, she reminds herself, and sighs. "I guess we should get it over with. But I'll tell you right now, John better watch his fucking back."

"I'm sure he will."

"And if anyone tries to get me to eat 'sacred herbs,' or I see a weird-looking knife, I'm defecting to the Resistance immediately. Fair warning. I'm not doing any creepy fuckin' rituals."

"Hmph," is all he says to that, but under the table, he moves his thigh sideways to rest against hers. She presses hers back, hard.