Chapter Text
In the middle of her work day, Daisy Tonner was hit with a terrible headache.
At least, that was the best way she could think to describe it. It wasn’t pain so much as tremendous pressure on the inside of her skull, an overwhelming wave of conflicting information and emotion manifesting all at once.
When she unbowed her head and looked back out the windshield of her car, she was surprised to see the streets of London laid out before her. It was the same view that had been there before the headache, traffic trudging past the place she’d pulled over to eat her lunch. The normalcy felt disorienting on a level she couldn’t place.
She bared her teeth at the pressure and confusion, a growl rising in her throat. She’d had a shorter temper since being Sectioned, and when she was angry she felt safe, powerful. The pounding adrenaline was all she was, all she ever needed to be. She wasn’t supposed to draw on that feeling; she couldn’t remember why.
It took a long time for the feeling in her head to start to resolve into images- memories, but ones she didn’t recognize. Predominant were a pair of faces. She didn’t know the people they belonged to. She knew them better than she had anyone in her life, and she needed to see them.
Daisy grabbed for her phone, and felt distantly surprised by its buttons and bulk, even though it had always been like that, since she’d bought it as an indulgence with one of her first paychecks. The date that glowed onto the screen seemed to rattle through her brain like a marble down a track, somehow coming out the other end with the knowledge of how to find the people. Her people.
The first was in London, she felt sure. She could picture the building and had a vague sense of where it was, but no address. She started the car and set out.
-
The building was a school. No one was in evidence at the moment, lunch already over and the end of classes a couple hours out, but Daisy knew her quarry was inside. She drove around the block twice, giving out a handful of parking tickets and a warning for jaywalking, before parking across from the school to wait. Ever since signing her Section 31 no one had seemed to care much what she did as long as she did something, and showed up whenever someone called in another potential Section 31.
She sat back in her chair and tried to sort through the churning confusion of her mind. It felt like her attention was being drawn in a million directions at once, not enough to keep her from performing rote tasks like driving but too much to consider the reasoning behind her own actions. A handful of other images had cleared enough to ferret out by the time the school’s bell made her jump and the building started to disgorge teenagers, but nothing useful. Nothing that meant anything to her.
Her attention was fixed on the crowd as soon as the doors opened. The faces in her mind were adults. A teacher, maybe? She scanned the hordes of students anyway.
When she spotted the person she sought, if felt like a jolt of electricity down her spine. It was one of the students, a girl in a hijab, gesturing and smiling with her friends. Basira, her addled mind supplied. She could see the woman in her memory in the line of the teen’s nose, the cant of her shoulders; despite the age discrepancy, they were the same.
She wanted to go to her, but had no idea what she would do after that. Some part of her cried out that Basira needed her and, more importantly, she needed Basira. The teen making her way down the sidewalk didn’t look like she was in need of anything: her smile was genuine, her clothes well kept, her cheeks round and healthy. The woman in Daisy’s mind was grim and drawn.
Daisy watched until Basira vanished down into a Tube station. The girl was fine; she couldn’t go around accosting random teenagers because of memories- she felt sure they were memories and not some sort of delusion, though she couldn’t yet say why- she couldn’t trace the source of. She was fine. Nothing was going to happen that would prevent Daisy from coming back when she knew more. She was fine.
She repeated it to herself as she started the car, as she drove away. Her muscles were stiff, and her eyes started to water with the desire to go back, to seize Basira in her arms and protect her from- what? She couldn’t picture the threat, only gory snapshots and pressing terror. But the Basira in those memories was an adult. Whatever the memory- premonition?- was, Daisy had time.
Right?
She was only able to tear her thoughts away when she realized her limbs had moved automatically to follow the sense of the other person. It was a man, just as grim and drawn as the memory-Basira, with the addition of dozens of scars she couldn’t consider without an almost debilitating wave of guilt. She wondered if she’d find him like that, or as bewilderingly youthful as Basira. She couldn’t conjure up a name to match the face.
She could barely stand to stop at the station long enough to clock out, grateful her surveillance of Basira and grappling with the desire to follow her had taken the rest of the work day, allowing her to pursue her other target without delay. As she pointed her car away from London the thought of pursuit made her blood jump, her thoughts fixed even more singularly on the man in her mind. Her mouth watered at the thought of finding him.
-
The sun was low on the horizon as she arrived in Bournemouth, not setting yet but turning everything orangey-gold in slanting lines. Once there, her precise destination was as vague as before; she was grateful, as she steered her car idly through town, eyes alert, that the vehicle was done up to blend in, painted normally and with the police lights discreetly tucked away.
She tried to picture what the man might look like, if he was as young as Basira. Would he have the scars? She supposed some of them, the pockmarks dotted over his face, might be from acne. He wouldn’t have the gray streaked in his hair; would he have the glasses?
When she did spot him, she almost didn’t realize it. He was a boy, long and lanky, and the clearness of his skin jarred with every image of him she could pull out from the writhing mass in her head. Eyes behind chunky glasses skimmed over her car disinterestedly. Despite the evidence in front of her, she found herself unable to picture him unscarred, memory overlaying reality.
She turned the car around after he passed, waiting long enough that his back was nearly a speck in the distance, before starting to creep along behind him. School was well over now, but he still had a backpack hiked up on his shoulders, head bowed as though counting the cracks in the pavement.
She couldn’t help comparing him to Basira. She’d wanted to keep the young woman safe, but that was nothing compared to how she felt about this boy. Something about Basira, maybe the way she held herself or the flashes of interaction Daisy couldn’t untangle, implied that Daisy’s help and protection was appreciated, but not wholly necessary- a feeling of reciprocity. Basira could, she was sure, mostly take care of herself. She felt no such surety about the boy.
There were other differences. Where Basira had smiled and chatted, the boy was alone and scrawny in a way that couldn’t be entirely attributed to the ravages of growth spurts. His face much more closely resembled the drawn countenance of his elder self. His shoulders hunched and gave the sense that if it was windier he might simply be blown away. Something about him dredged up the horrible memory of her Sectioning scant months (and yet a lifetime) ago, Isaac descending that impossible staircase, invisible force compressing her chest. The scar on her shoulder seemed to burn.
He didn’t notice his pursuer, and she didn’t know whether to be confident in her own skill or worry about his lack of awareness.
As she contemplated this, a pair of boys rounded a corner, an intrusion on the streetscape that had been only the boy and Daisy. She was too far to hear, but one of them called out to him, half a block downhill. She pulled over as her prey (no not that never that but why) turned and slumped back up to meet them.
The new teens were taller than the boy (she fought the urge to call him her boy, still couldn’t find his name) and looked a few years older. He didn’t make eye contact as they conversed, hands fixed on the straps of his bag as they postured and gesticulated. Her stomach clenched as she sensed where things were going, but could do nothing as one of the older boys’ faces morphed into a frown, then a mocking smile as he reached out and shoved her boy down the hill. He went down hard, tumbling and rolling a short distance down the pavement before coming to a halt, and something about that, seeing him suffer and being able to do nothing, felt sickeningly familiar. As the older boys ran off laughing, she barely felt herself stepping out of the car and crossing the street. There was a fleeting impulse to give chase, to make them pay, but she choked it down and focused on her true target.
He didn’t seem to hear her lope across the street or register her presence at all until she was crouched next to him. She could smell blood.
“You okay?” she asked, the act of speaking feeling bizarrely unfamiliar.
He started, meeting her gaze with wide eyes. “Um, fine!” He shifted, winced, and the source of the blood-smell revealed itself to be his knee and shin, a long scrape marring the knobbly limb poking out from his shorts.
“Sure?” She extended a hand, pulling him to his feet. He opened his mouth to reply, but seemed to reconsider as he wobbled on the injured leg. Blood dripped into his sock. “I have a first aid kit in my car, we could get that bandaged up,” she added.
The boy grimaced. “You don’t need to trouble yourself.” Contrary to his words, he looked down with some concern, though it seemed to be focused more on the stain spreading on his sock and threatening his shoe than the injury.
“No trouble. Car’s just over there.” She darted over to his other side, wrapping her arm around his waist so pressure was taken off the leg and walking before he had a chance to deny her a third time.
“Thanks,” he muttered. His eyes stayed fixed down, the hand opposite her still clenched around the strap of his bag.
“No problem.” She smiled to see she’d managed to park so there was a bench right next to the back end of her car. “Here, sit down.” She rummaged around in the boot while Jon- Jon! That was it!- perched on the edge of the bench, looking like he was doubting his decision to follow her. His eyes darted to her clothes- she was still in uniform, she realized, it felt so incongruous to helping Jon she almost forgot- and he relaxed slightly, before she could see his thoughts slowly build his anxiety back up and the cycle began again.
“Stuff like this happen a lot?” she asked as she got him to pull his leg up onto the seat of the bench and he squirmed his backpack off to make the position more comfortable.
His eyes darted. “Uh, yeah, I guess. I’m pretty clumsy.”
He didn’t know she’d seen the bullies, then. “Your parents worry about you because of that?” She carefully cleaned his leg with alcohol wipes, and frowned at the length of the gash and the bits of ragged skin still clinging to the edges of it.
He grimaced. “Don’t have parents.” (Had she known that?) “I live with my grandmother.”
She hummed, pulling out gauze and bandages as she waited for the momentary awkwardness to pass. “You like your grandmother?”
“I guess.” He gave her on odd look. Daisy wasn’t entirely sure why she was asking, so she just kept wrapping his leg. “She’s fine.”
She hummed again. The same protective impulse thrummed in her chest. Jon looked uncomfortably down at his leg as she started fixing the bandages in place. Did he look happy? Cared for? She got the sense that he wasn’t. “Are you happy?”
“What?” His gazed jerked up to her, eyebrows furrowed. Daisy set the first aid supplies aside.
“Are you happy, Jon?”
His shoulders hunched in, but then his eyes went wide. “How did you know my name?”
She considered him for a split second: the too-large secondhand clothes, the protruding bones, the way he’d tried to cover for the bullies and implied it was a regular occurrence. She’d already gotten closer than she had with Basira. She’d convinced herself that Basira would be fine. But Basira had seemed happy. Jon seemed to shrink from attention, was still out wandering the streets as dinner approached instead of at home. Sure, the early fall weather was still pleasant enough, but he still had his bag; had he even stopped home when school ended?
She thought of the coffin. Did Jon know exactly how dangerous the world was, beyond bullies and scraped knees? Whether he did or not, the mixed-up headache-pressure part of her mind felt sure that that part of the world knew about him. It also felt, down in her bones, that it was her job to keep him safe. She owed him that.
Jon’s arms were still behind him, holding onto the edges of the bench seat to steady him as she worked on his leg. It felt like the most natural movement in the world to take the handcuffs from her belt and click them shut around his skinny wrists, hand going up to his back to steady him as the loss of support tipped him backward. He needed to come with her, but she doubted either Jon or his grandmother would be easy to convince on that point. Her blood throbbed urgency.
He gasped in a little breath. “Hey!”She pulled him up so he was sitting balanced on the bench. His eyes were wide and slowly growing scared. “Am I- am I under arrest? I didn’t do anything!”
Daisy glanced at the empty street, mostly shops made ghostly by the ending of the tourist season. Jon’s voice was growing louder and shriller, and he was starting to stand. She swept her arm under his knees and picked him up. The boot was still open.
“Hey!” he yelled, then, breaths coming shorter and shorter as he started to panic, “Stop! Help!”
There was a fair bit of gauze remaining in the first aid kit. She stuffed some into Jon’s mouth, using another piece to tie it around his head. Jon grunted, flinching back from her. She gently pushed him so he was lying down in the boot. He rubbed his face against the carpeting for a second, trying to dislodge the makeshift gag, before he tried kicking out at her, then sitting up and climbing out. She could see the whites of his eyes all the way around his irises (why was that, of all things, familiar?) as she grabbed the roll of bandages and started to tie his ankles together.
When Jon was secure, unable to sit up unaided without any limbs free, Daisy stepped back to the bench. She quickly tidied away the first aid kit, then set it and his backpack alongside Jon in the boot. There was a pleading edge to his muffled noises and she closed him in, and the last she saw before the latch clicked was wide, teary eyes. They tore at her heart, but she felt sure this was right even if she couldn’t articulate why. She would unravel the mess in her head and once she understood she could explain it to Jon, and he wouldn’t be so frightened anymore.