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Jon waits.
She’s good at waiting now. Good at staying silent, breathing like a still, quiet thing—a frozen lake at night, a stone, a dead animal. Good at watching. With so many eyes in her now, she thinks that may be all she’s good for.
That and whatever Peter Lukas does to her.
She can’t name it even to herself. Can’t euphemise it, either, and so she entombs it in a part of her mind that is also still and quiet, a dead place made to hold something so shameful the only words for it are in dead languages. There are so many dead things in her now.
It doesn’t help that she knows why he does it, that she can see with her unnatural vision deep into where his glandular brain holds the impulses he doesn’t understand, the feral push-pull of repulsion-attraction, the longing to press and press with his thumbs to the breastbone of someone he loves, so their bones will snap and pierce their heart because then, at least, he’d be touching them there.
It doesn’t make her pity him; it makes her hate him more. He repulses her, a push with no counterbalancing attraction, no pull to speak of except the force he physically exerts, to make her heel, to bring her in line.
She tells Elias, Don’t bring him around anymore. She tells Elias, Not while I’m here, please. She tells Elias, I don’t need someone to watch over me.
But Elias only tuts and fusses and kisses her (on her mouth which is now the source of her shame, regression to a younger state when oral fixation was the expression of her neurosis, she has regressed to struggling with food again, too) and agrees that Peter is terrible, yes, but useful. They need him.
Elias needs him, Jon thinks, but the need is not theirs, not shared. Except aren’t they, now, almost as good as one person to each other? To Elias, perhaps, but not to Peter. Jon tried to stop him once by telling him that when he hurt her, he hurt Elias, too. The way he laughed then still sickens her. She’s stopped trying to appeal to his reason.
Instead she waits.
Because for all the dead things rotting inside her, there is something else new inside her, too. A living rage that spews wet and forceful and fomenting under the surface of everything. She feels it most acutely at night, in the quiet dark, while Elias sleeps undisturbed beside her and Jon’s stomach churns with the knowledge that she’s been made a thing, a kicked stone, a dog. She feels her skin where her nails have opened the invisible impressions of his hands, dragging up new eyes with the blood. There is a watcher in her blood that hums with knowledge even Elias cannot touch (for now, for now, while Jon’s body is her own). It wants to watch Peter Lukas writhe and cry and scream.
She waits until he feels safe.
Elias is gone again—gone so often now Jon would wonder if there were someone else, another pretty proto-Archivist just waiting for the first glossy brush of lip and tongue to open up her eyes, too—and Peter is here, like always. She moves on him before he can strike first, down on her knees with her head resting on the couch cushion by his thigh, she tells him she’s going to be good this time. Even good dogs bite. Peter should know that, but he’s too comfortable now, too accustomed to her submission.
His hand is in her hair (she wants to scream) and he grabs her tight and moves her to him, up onto the couch, almost, where dogs don’t belong. He’s going to kiss her, she thinks in a bright flash of fear and sharp anticipation, and when his lips part, her fingers find him first. She shoves three fingers to the back of his throat and snaps them open wide, wide, wide, holding him open. He bites her like he’s starving, but she keeps her hand there, lets the blood pool in his mouth and dribble down his chin, staining his beard and maybe her shirt. She doesn’t care. Elias will come home and find her covered in blood, in sweat, in fear, and she’ll protect her. At the very least, she’ll love her stained.
She can’t hear what Peter is slobbering around her hand in his mouth. He tries to yank her off by her hair, but she’s used to that. He’ll have to try harder.
She tells him, You’re disgusting. She says, No wonder Elias didn’t want you. She fucks her fingers deeper into his throat and feels the tight muscle constrict, involuntary tears overspilling his cloudy eyes (and she hates him more for that; she never cried over him). She says, This is your punishment for touching me.
The queer heat of bile graces her fingertips and she feels his body fight to swallow it back. His hand in her hair is soft now, holding her head like a lover, like he wants this. Like she’s doing it for him, something nice, something like absolution. She pushes deeper, with all her rage behind it, and then the bile is surging in his throat, into his mouth, over her hand and her arm and spilling down the front of him, mingling with Jon’s blood. His throat spasms again around her fingers, working the last of his insides out. Sludge and rot and what remains of a long-broken heart. And he’s crying—a natural release, disgust and euphoria—like a child, shaking.
Jon pulls her fingers out of the sad dog-child-man, wipes the sick off on his cheek, as much as she can manage. His tears don’t move her. He can’t even look at her. She tells him, If you touch me again, I’ll kill you.
And in her heart, perhaps, it’s true.
For now, she contents herself with a long bath.