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Mark Hoffman knew cooking well. It was something that tied him and Angie together since they were kids. He had a structure throughout his time in the academy, coming home and making something for himself, making extra for Angie. When she was with that wreck of a man, he’d get shit coming over to drop off chili. Baxter would yell that she wasn't cooking enough, wasn't doing enough for him. All while slightly emasculating Mark for the crime of caring about his sister. Mark wished he bashed his head in then and there.
Once she was gone, he had nobody to cook for anymore. His interest dropped off, replaced by the alcohol. His urge only came back the night of the pendulum. He’d gone to the grocery story store as an easy alibi, bought all the ingredients for the same homemade chili the dead man had lost his mind over. He went home, threw all ingredients in a pot, and sprinkled cheese on top while watching the news, waiting in a smug suspense for the call. It was a sick excitement he had for the inevitable words ‘Seth Baxter is dead’ . Someone would tell him that and he’d have to feign his shock. For some reason, he really thought he was going to get away with it.
He knew it was twisted, but becoming an accomplice brought a skip in his step at work. He started cooking again, brought in food to the station, potlucks and deserts. Rigg had lost his mind over a special caramel snickerdoodle cookie he’d make every holiday party. His cooking was something that made people appreciate their food and their lives more, like a Jigsaw test with less blood. And of course, it was all a part of his grand scheme for validation. Riggs' usually stressed demeanor cracked into a smile whenever he saw the box of fresh bread on the office table. It felt good to just try and get him to loosen up a little, lord knew he could use it. Unlike John, he didn’t pretend to be cut off from selfishness. He could acknowledge if something secretly made him feel good and vindicated, from cooking to killing.
In the beginning days of apprenticeship, he’d been lazy, working essentially two jobs. He'd treat it as a side hustle, hitting drive throughs and delis on the way to the warehouse, whatever was fastest. But the days went on, the nights went later, and the quickly digesting fries and processed meats weren’t quite cutting it. John would leave his bag of food on the bench, not even touching his sandwich. As the doctor visits increased, his appetite decreased. Mark started cooking meals again the worse it became. He brought him soup. Lasagna. Stir fries. Roasted vegetables. Pastas with extra cheeses. Containers of meatloaf he’d left in the crockpot while at the precinct. He wasn’t visiting daily after all, he had time to go home and take that moment to himself. While John wouldn’t ever admit it, he enjoyed Mark and Amanda's company and compassion. Amanda loved him like a father, but to Mark he was someone he could care for again.
After the nerve gas trap had wrapped up, Mark arrived at the warehouse to transport the unconscious young boy into a safe. He had to make a second trip to the car to hand John a nondescript tupperware of potato soup with melted cheese and bacon flakes.
“Good luck, John,” Mark looked him in the eye before leaving.
“I don’t depend on that, Detective,” was his response. It was true. Everything was so pre planned, there was no need for luck. God forbid Mark worry a little. He’d almost walked away, until John gently took his hand and kissed it, like a royal greeting a woman.
“Thank you,” John said, “Go, make an alibi for yourself. I’ll signal you when the safe is open, you’ll need to pick me up.”
Hoffman nodded, and gave a slight wave goodbye as he headed out.
“Throw out the container when you’re done with it.” He added. God forbid they link him to the Jigsaw scene over his fucking tupperware.
The last time he saw Kramer alive, he knew it could be the end. There was still a tiny sliver of hope he held onto, that he could somehow calculate his way out of a DIY brain surgery. Having a tumor the size of a baseball in your head, turns out, did not lead to great medical decisions. While the plan was a desperate last ditch effort to survive, Hoffman realized quickly that John had planned for his impending death from the start. Every scenario was considered. Especially the worst case.
When he was called in for the autopsy, it was early in the morning at the precinct. He had taken a moment after the call before going down to the morgue. Deep breaths, realizing there was undeniably more than he was told. John had told him so much of his future plans, plans that he’d kindly dubbed the Fatal Five and the Insurance Scam. One for framing, one for simple revenge. So much for it never being personal. This tape, he knew, was not connected to either of those plans, this was a message meant for only him.
Mark took in John splayed out on the table. The assistant handed him the evidence. It was his stomach, turned inside out, the stomach that held food Mark had made. Inside the meaty pocket lay his last message.
He listened. There were rocks in his stomach the second he heard that familiar, slow voice say ‘Are you there Detective’ . He kept a stoic face around the morgue assistants. It was for him, and him alone. How did John manage to swallow this in his state? He could have hidden this tape anywhere, placed it in a bag, hidden it in Marks glovebox, ship it to him in the mail in a lockbox that could only be unlocked by a piece of John's corpse. No, this was deliberate and calculated. John wanted Mark to see him like this. He wanted him to see his guts, his heart and split apart ribs. Why, Mark couldn’t fathom. But he took it in anyway. If the pathologists weren’t around, he’d put his hands inside the open hole and just let the blood cover his forearms, consuming all that was left of the man who mentored him.
“Let me have…” Mark started, struggling to find an unsuspicious way to say this “…a moment with the body.”
“Are you sure?” The assistant asked, “we have more to analyze.”
“I’m.... religious,” Hoffman lied, thinking it was a flawless excuse, “even if he’s doomed, I like to give respect to all of God's bodies.” What a lie to tell.
“Sure. Let me know when you're done detective,” the assistant scoffed, with the inflection that he was about to take his break early. He was suspicious, Mark didn’t care. He was the heir, he was king now. He could fool all of these people. He could be innocent forever, flawlessly calculated like his mentor. He was not at all delusional.
Mark waited thirty seconds after the door closed before letting his hand slip underneath the curve of the exposed ribcage, stroking it as if it was the outside curvature of his chest. He never got to stroke him like this when he was alive. He wrapped his other hand around the muscle of his heart, torn between wanting to pump it back to functionality or running a stake through it.
He put his palm to his guts, the other hand to the towel covering the waist. He wouldn’t. He wasn’t that far gone. But he did stare briefly, letting the other hand graze his upper thigh. He slapped the thigh lightly, putting his head down, and let the blood on his hand wipe off on Johns quickly graying skin.
He’d seen corpses of course, the insides of them, the puke and piss of a body panicking near its final moments. He knew the stench. This was an observation of a different kind of corpse though, not unlike Angie. Angelina's corpse was the tragedy of a life cut short, John's corpse was a carefully constructed clue, just like everything else in his life. Even if he really thought he could survive a homemade surgery, he planned for every outcome. When he swallowed that tape, he knew he was dead already, he knew he'd be on the autopsy table within a day.
People told him at Angelina's funeral that she wasn't fully gone, as long as he’d remember her. A coworker that Mark knew she hated told him that her spirit would always be around him, as an angel on his shoulder. If that were true, he now had a devil, one who was pulling strings to keep him compliant. His spirit must be so smug right now.
“Damn you, Kramer.” He hissed, hands slipping around both lungs. The awareness crept in, guilt for his near lust of a corpse. Some fucking catholic he was. As if the entire faith didn’t lean on worship of a martyred body. Of sticking fingers between a man's rib cage and feeling the sacrifices made inside his flesh and blood that you consumed. John Kramer was his sacrilege.
He slipped a finger up the bottom of John's exposed trachea. He wouldn't be doing this without John's influence. Sure, maybe he did enjoy the brutality of death before apprenticeship, but he wouldn’t be feeling up a ribcage in a fit of desire right now if John had never found him. He would probably have just kept the memory of Seth’s pained dying screams and use it for masturbation material for the rest of his life. A souvenir hoarded like the memory of your best fuck. Now, instead of his magnum opus, he looked upon it as inferior work. His scalpel was the wrong brand, his pendulum inferior, the voice modulator not up to par to the real thing. He would've been content with that as his masterpiece, but John asked for more work to be done, then so be it. An artist who made one flawed counterfeit painting, commissioned by the original artist to create more, demanding he do better.
He pulled his hands out of the cavern that used to be John Kramer, inspecting to make sure the organs didn’t look tampered or fingered. His heart panged realizing he couldn’t take any of him home. He wanted to keep a piece so badly, a tooth or a heart or a finger. Instead he stuck a gloved hand calmly into his own mouth, licking up the last physical trace of the man who was going to be spiritually haunting him for the rest of his life. He stuck a finger calmly back between the heart and lungs, dipping in for one more taste like a child, sucking on his finger again for the salt and lead taste. He couldn’t take a huge bite of him like he wanted, he couldn’t scrape out the organs and curl up inside him. He scoured his insides like he was a treasure hunter, trying to piece together what could possibly go missing that nobody would notice. The muscle of his abdomen. A tooth. The membrane left behind when they removed the brain. He had a perfect slab of meat before him and was forbidden from digging in. The pathologists would notice anything being tampered with significantly. He cupped his hand on the side of the exposed muscle, and scraped up the loose fluids like scraping the end of the ice cream bowl. His glove picked up flesh and fresher blood, and he licked his hand from wrist to tip. It tasted like bile. It slid down his throat and Mark swore it was covering his teeth and tongue. That's the last piece of you that I get to take.
Hoffman picked up John's limp hand one more time, kissing it. He placed it back down, and left him one last kiss on the skin of his forehead, then peeled the skin back to kiss the exposed skull. Mark envied the men who got to crack his skull open and weigh his brain. He ran his finger over the corpse's lips one last time.
They had kissed on the lips before. It was early on, before the bathroom was in full motion. It was the week John had a very intense doctor's visit, where the cancer jumped from treatable to terminal. The meeting with his medical insurance had also gone to shit. John was in a state of manic denial, on edge for days while drawing blueprints in the warehouse. He was rash, still calculated but jumping to action or conclusion, ripping things out of Amanda's hands or snapping at Mark.
He confronted him eventually. In a rare human moment, he had reassured his mentor that it was going to be okay. He'd taken both John's hands and put them to his chest. John looked up at him, the Jigsaw persona faltering for just a second, leaving only an old man terrified of death. Mark had cupped his face in his hands, then kissed him, months and years of tension between them coming to a head.
The more the cancer took over, the less John would care about intimacy, but in that moment they had kissed like teenagers just finding out something about themselves. Kissed like someone was going to walk in at any moment and get furious. Kissed because John was terminal and Mark was doomed. For one moment, it was like they were the only two killers in the world. John pulled away, held his head in his already feeble hands, marveling at his future prodigy. He gripped the back of his hair, exposing his neck, taut but controlling, the hands of an engineer.
“I have so much to show you, Detective,” John said, holding his chin with both hands, the ‘- before i die’ implied.
“Teach me,” he’d whispered, a beg and a whimper.
They didn't address that night again. No matter how many times John had pet him or lingered his touch just a little too long. John would grab him just to keep him in place afterwards, wanting Mark to learn his method of discipline. It was hard to focus on watching a trap unfold with your mentor's hot breath down your neck, hand tight in your hair ensuring you don't look away. That was as close to a kiss as Mark could receive, so he took it.
Hoffman removed his finger from John's lips, careful not to wipe the fresh blood on anything. He removed both gloves with a snap. He took two clean ones out of a box on a nearby desk, shoving the two bloody ones into his pocket.
Moments after, the door swung open.
“Done giving grace?” the pathologist was smiling under his mask. Mark didn’t want to justify that with a response.
“I’ll take the tape, process it as evidence.” Mark zipped it into his evidence bag, torn because he wanted to keep the stomach for himself too.
“We’ll let you know if we find anything else, Detective.” the pathologist responded.
“Jigsaw was a clever man, he could hide a clue anywhere in his body you know.” Hoffman gave a wink to the lab assistant, and walked out, his smile fading immediately.
The echo of the tape stuck with him, ‘You think you will walk away untested.’ What else had John prepared for him? What strangers had he blackmailed to eye him up and watch his every move? He knew Jill's involvement, but there had to be more.
It was strange, the way that giving up wasn't an option despite the mastermind, the one who cared the most, being dead. His biggest traps were yet to be built, and he wouldn’t be around to see it. Mark had a playground carousel to grease so it spun smoothly, a bathtub that still wouldn't produce water, and a new puppet that was having an issue with its mouth not moving in synch to its given tape. He had work to do. He had a creative output and a checklist. He had people to fix, to teach. He still had five people to kidnap, the ones connected to the FBI agent, and they did not live close to each other. He had an entire insurance sector to kidnap in two months, and nobody else was going to do it.
Whatever discipline training he had in his future, he'd take it like a collared dog. John's hands pulled the strings of his puppets from the dead, pulling at his leash like an omnipotent demigod of karma.