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Hap has set a limit: He's not going to jam a tube down her throat and blend up her meals. She may wake up starving but if extending sedation by several days yields significant results, he'll tweak her diet and recovery time. They won't be finding that out for a while. If they can achieve similar success with smaller steps, all the better.

Joan doesn't need to know that. He's indulging himself, telling her anything. He won't have her crafting a lewd story around the bruises on her wrists and ankles should she thrash in her sleep.

"Yes, I do." Sarcasm or not, she's got him pegged there. "We've dawdled long enough."

She hadn't expected him to agree; it puts her on the back foot. She squints at him, clearly at something of a loss, from her low vantage. Her head is craning upward, her shoulders beginning to ache. She lets her head fall back.

"Just get it over with," she says, sneering at the ceiling. "No more mister nice kidnapper."

This change of plans was sprung on him. Down one hand, he needs at least one more day to have everything in order, and he needs her in fitter condition. If this wasn't her doing, he might feel a pang of guilt for leaving her tied up in the dark, not even the night sky through her window for company.

It is her doing. It's her bed to lie in.

"Like I said, you'll want your strength. You've barely eaten today." Not to mention how the machine taxed her system, and the emergency tranquilizer. He'd rather not paint on a soiled canvas. "In your own time, tonight. We'll start... Well, you'll know when we start."

That's that. He has no more goodnights for her; he won't hold her hand. Hap has work to do. Gas needs to be loaded into canisters for the morning interview. He hasn't spoken to that version of Joan in a long time, only at. Instructions, commands, corrections.

She's devoid of friction and color, that Joan. Hap harbors neither enthusiasm nor disappointment over the prospect of their ruenion. He is, however, curious what she will have to say in light of the day's events. It's why he stands in her doorway for a moment, her room plunged into darkness, his silhouette sewn into it by the stretch of his shadow.

It is her venue, then, to hurt. Emotional pain is her only weapon, and Hap is a brittle man. Though he never quite breaks, he often crumbles, but the destruction is entirely interior. She longs, desperately, to leave an impression on him. What if she said something so hurtful that he hurt her? She's already said something so cutting that he cut her.

"Can't jerk off about this with a broken wrist, huh?" She knows he likes restraints, but will that be clear enough in her phrasing? It's something to puzzle, and critique, and wonder about-- she spends all night going over each word of that sentence, committing it to memory, waking up and rephrasing it anew. There's nothing else to entertain her, and sleep dogs her until the last minute.

And then, a burst of color. She doesn't remember the moment when she fell asleep, but she knows that she is. She is. She is, suddenly, wreathed in iridescent flame. She is floating above her bed. Her brother is whole, and alive, his hands bend in the shape of benediction. All the velvet shapes of the world twist together in a kaleidoscopic arch, and in Hap's voice they whisper to her one truth.

Waking hurts, but pain isn't real when you don't remember it. Joan stares vacantly at the ceiling while her nose bubbles with blood. Occasionally, when she breathes, she chokes around it, coughing impassively.

Her innuendo goes unappreciated. Hap doesn't connect Joan's comment to her circumstances, taking it as surface-level vulgarity. A hail mary. It's encouraging, objectively. She's not distressed. He hasn't broken her down to begging. That would be unrewarding — too easy.

A vulgar sentiment of his own.

So Hap puts her out of his mind in all but the medium of toil. Once the canisters are filled and brought topside, along with the tubing and mask to administer the sedative, he continues to work upstairs. Her files need tidying. There's another before and another after to be reflected in the records. New spreadsheets for tracking new data. It does feel like a fresh start, a pleasant trick of the mind played by calling up a blank screen. A promising new step.

Her vitals ebb and flow silently on his second monitor, her ticker tape pulse sliding along steadily. A set of spikes catch his eye, a nightmare or a dream. He doesn't deign to look at her video feed. Once her files are squared away, his dry eyes wander there out of carelessness. He notices her jolting with a cough and remembers with a start about her nosebleeds. He should have propped her up.

Swearing, Hap puts his workstation to sleep and goes to her room. His glasses are tucked into his breast pocket, his utility vest left down below. He hopes she's asleep. He forgot to check before switching off the monitor. He means not to wake her, flooding the room with dim hallway light by opening the door wide. It gleams off her open eyes but by then he's halfway to the bed, grabbing up the vinyl case from his chair.

It's lain at her hip so he can pull the pillow out from under her head and fold it in half.

"Lift your head." Tired, his voice rakes out of his throat, across his own ears.

Somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, the ragged edge of Joan's consciousness allows for a fine point. Coughing phlegm and blood, she finds herself fully awake, her face sticky, her throat half-clogged.

She should do something with this moment, but she can't think of any advantages. Even spitting blood in his face would be futile, somehow beneath her. She finds herself painfully afraid in that half moment, small and stupid and embarrassingly turned on-- sex means she has power, means she's in control.

But her mind is still stuck on that moment, the rainbow wash of color fading away. It's not about winning; she has to speak before she forgets. Her words come out wet: "I'm starting to forget it. Write it down, fucking- help me."

Whether or not she complies, Hap forces her to by wedging the pillow under the back of her head. She's right: Her experience is the priority.

"Tell me. Talk. Impressions, colors, it doesn't have to make sense." He'll remember. It means more work before he can rest, and when it's done the rest won't come easy. Whatever she says will be spinning in his skull with relentless momentum.

It's fine. Joan on the gas won't have the emotional capacity to have to "put up" with a Hap that's had too little sleep. In turn, her docility shouldn't rile him. Much. Prairie had an unnerving quality to her while she was on the gas. Though it never bothered in him in the others, sometimes he resented how pliable she was. Doll-like. Empty. Part of him always wanted her to break through.

Joan screws her eyes shut, like the impression of the dream still lingers on the back of her eyelids. "Hand up, turn left, bend legs, steeple fingers-"

It goes on like this, describing the movements of an arcane dance. She can picture it so crisply, the way her body moved with Luke, but even now it's fading. Some kind of dance made only for two, and she suspects the number of participants are obvious from her words. She doesn't understand it, but there it is: a prisoner's waltz.

Blood dribbles down her chin, pooling in the dip of her collarbone. When she's said every part of the dance, there's only one more relevant detail. "He couldn't tell me 'til I fought back."

Hap's eyes snap to her. She churns his thoughts into a maelstrom. Possibilities and fears clash, the esoteric forks brightly through a crisp fog of the rational. A flash flood panics through his veins, breaching and battering his heart from within. His fingers fumble with the restraint on her wrist and then he gets to his feet and backs away, her a body a livewire.

"Get up. Do it." He'll leave the rest of the buckles to her. Hap can't stay in there with her, unprotected. He can't trust her. He hates her for that, hatred inseparably mingled with this drowning wash of awe and gratitude.

Briskly, he exits, then rushes full-on to his computer to observe her through the camera lens. He murmurs to himself the words she said, "Hand up, turn left, bend legs, steeple fingers..."

Hate hasn't crossed her mind. He's something else, the man who might have scarred her, her captor, the second man in all the world to find her special. And whatever that emotion is called, it's circus peanuts compared to what she feels for a dead boy wreathed in iridescent light.

So she wrenches herself free and begins to dance, though her posture makes it clear that each step is meant for another participant. Her arm curves around an absent companion, moves over their invisible chest. She caresses a man who isn't there, but she knows it's him, the man watching her. At the end, she's breathless with this overwhelming sense of purpose. She speaks into the camera: "We have to practice."

Hap is transfixed, brow knit. This Movement is not like the others. Neither is her guardian. He very nearly wants to meet the boy himself. It's the first chug in a long train of thought that Joan throws herself in front of, stopping dead, when her eyes meet his through the camera. Her voice carries through his computer and, fainter but clearer, through her door.

He wants to trust her. He wants to believe.

A heretofore unused speaker relays his response to her, "Stand in the far corner, to the left of the window. Face it. Don't move."

"Of course you got a speaker," she murmurs, but she does as told. She could strike out and hurt him, and she might, but he has to earn it. She won't fight unless he's earned it-- it has to always be him, or she's not punishing anything, just breaking bones because she likes the sound.

But she puts her hands far apart, just in case he tries to cuff her. She's never likened him to a cop before this moment-- he's far more intelligent-- but she's not risking it.

Making haste down to the lab, he throws on his utility vest on his way back up the stairs. He stops by the desk to confirm she's done as told, grab his polygraph device from a drawer, and then he goes to her room.

"Don't move," he reiterates. Hap locks the door and turns the light on. His chair drags dully on the carpet, positioned to face her bed with a berth of a good two and a half feet. Hap conceals another tranquiliser under his thigh and balances the device on his knee.

"Alright— good." Credit where it's due. She'd do well to keep up the compliance. "You can turn around. Come. Sit."

Joan moves without the carefulness of their previous interactions; she's no longer trying to impress him with politeness. Her capitulation never meant anything to him, and no amount of it would have ever been enough. Had Luke told her that? It feels like something Luke-- the other Luke, the one that still lives-- would say, but she can't remember the words. The sound of his voice is already fading from her memory like those underwater sand castles they used to advertise on Nickelodeon. Floam. Why does she remember the name of Floam and not her brother's voice?

So she sits with a lazy lean, posture poor, hunched over like a boxer waiting to be called into the ring. One hand worries the medal at her neck-- tacky with dried blood, she realizes, cringes, and begins wiping it and then herself off.

"Okay," she says without looking up, "shoot."

Hap is too out of sorts to react as he normally would to her excessive display of languor. It's inconsequential to how she now knows how to move, the purpose with which he just watched her dance. (The Joan he was cultivating is not lost. This is a rough patch. She's in there, still; scattered. Joan has dispersed those pieces of herself out of embarrassment.) Popping an earphone into his ear, he switches the device on and calibrates it.

He shifts in his chair, readjusting — a course correction from leaning forward, towards her. If he didn't have years of training keeping his hands steady, he'd be vibrating.

"Stupid questions. Let's get them out of the way." What's happening is too important to waste time and energy being glib. He'll distrust her if that's what she chooses. "Tell me your name. The color of your hair. Your favorite season."

Joan rolls her eyes, pretending she's not deeply mollified by him calling his own methods stupid. "Joan Agnes Dority, red, summer. August twenty-fifth in eighty-seven."

It's not as stupid as the fact that he has to resort to this, even though there was apparently no other way to get here. The ghost of Luke is as fickle as his sister and more punishing than her captor. Hap at least made it clear what he wanted from her.

He turns one dial, then another, calibrating to her elevated baseline heartrate. It could mean anything. It could mean many things. She can be both excited by her revelation and coiling to spring on him.

"Tell me what you remember about the dream. Tell me what he told you, again."

Joan closes her eyes again, but it doesn't help this time. There's no after-image, no hint of light. She keeps her eyes closed anyway; she doesn't want to look at Hap. "Everything was rainbows. Like he was a prism and the light was shining through him-- but it was flames. He was holding a book, obviously. We were in this room, but we were floating, and everything was so bright. It was beautiful."

Hap watches her closely, observing her emotions and loosening the grip he has on his. Some of the awe he urgently put away shines through. His heard thuds in his ears, warmth climbing up his chest, his throat. He can see the flames around her, growing out of her like wings.

"What did he say? The Fifth Movement, did he call it by name?"

"This isn't part of that," she says, her eyes opening slowly. Hap looks beautiful, resting in the echo of her memory. His hard edges are softened, and he seems like someone she could touch.

She does not touch him.

"He showed it to me. We danced on the roof. I don't- I don't know what it's for."

"Not —" part of it? Hap stops himself, rigidity creeping into him. He can feel an angry scratch at the base of his skull. He won't let it in, and it's not insisting. Not yet.

He readjusts the bud in his ear.

"How did it make you feel, dancing it with him?"

A pause, which she spends staring at Hap's brow, avoiding his eyes. "Important," she finally says. "Worthwhile... Equal to him."

She'd forgotten what that felt like, to have an opposite, an other half.

Hap sighs silently, dropping his gaze to spare her admonishment. He told her several times that she's important. That her worth is in what she is working to accomplish and there could be no higher calling. But he plays second fiddle to a dead boy. His words weren't falling on deaf ears. She was busy listening to someone else.

"How aware do you think he is of your situation here?" He raises his eyes back to her.

She catches his eye, or tries to. Free of his puerile judgement, she feels oddly light. "He knows everything," she says. "He was mad I was trying to get you to trust me. He-" she hesitates, squirms- "That's why I kept dreaming I was dead."

Edited (thought of a better one.) 2024-12-22 06:33 (UTC)

He nods, holding her gaze. So Luke knows there's nowhere to go without him. As long as she's behind a locked door, she can't kill him without killing herself. In this room, in her cell, or even roaming free in the lab, she'll starve to death. (Because if it's possible to dance a man back to life, why wouldn't it be possible to dance him to his grave?)

"He wants you to live." Hap scrapes some of his fascination into a slack smile. The two of them are of a mind on that, if nothing else.

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dw ate my tag???

let us play, ref

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