Work Text:
After Laney ported her out to deliver a letter and an apology four years in the crafting, Jill sat at a bench in Sally-Anne’s fish shop and realised she didn’t know what to do next. She had been a gleeful scientist, once - still was, in the depths of her heart - and then she’d been weighed down for years, smuggling secrets out in invisible ink and living with a hundred choices haunting her steps.
But she’d left her job, walked away from Rivertown the moment she let the lab door close behind her and realised that she was remembering, not just cataloging the stolen hours of her life from hidden notes. She had her cats to reclaim, a sister to check into and a few friends to reassure - but there was no soundproof door and labelled lab coat waiting for her. If she picked up a pipette or test tube again, it wouldn’t be on the Bureau’s paycheck, even if they’d been willing to offer her another job. For the first time in years, there wasn’t a promise to keep.
She thought, vaguely, that she should feel light. Unburdened. Her life hadn’t been cold, exactly, but there had always been a weight on her shoulders - when she could remember it. It had been a burden she’d accepted with open eyes but that hadn’t made it easy to carry, and she had thought on sleepless nights that once it was over, somehow, she would be relieved. Lightened, full of potential.
Mostly, she just felt tired.
Exhaustion dogged her steps, restless sleep and a heavy heart. Her hands shook as she prepared her morning injections, though never enough to be a true problem. She thought idly one afternoon about all the old, half-dreamt plans that were open to her and had to sit down heavily, dread clawing up her throat at the sheer thought of where to start.
George sat down next to her one morning, the fish shop lit with a pale pre-dawn gloom and the golden glint of light through the protective barrier spilling through the propped open door. They sat for a few moments, pressed shoulder to shoulder, cradling steaming mugs in peaceful silence.
“It’s alright to be done,” George said finally. There was a weary note to her voice, like this was an old thought, twisted and beaten into shape. “It’s alright to walk away and say, I’ve done my bit. And maybe you’ll pick it all up again - whatever it is - and maybe you won’t, but it’s alright to walk away and it’s alright to rest.” She hesitated. “It’s - it’s alright not to know who you are, when the job you had to do is done and you’re left with the pieces.”
Jill doesn’t need to ask to know what George is thinking of: they haven’t talked about it again, but she remembers with a chilling clarity listening to the other woman speaking calmly about her village leaving her out to die, the dragon she’d killed. Jill may not be someone George confides in, quite, but she’s a scientist. She observes, and she can see how desperately George wants to not be someone who’s first instinct is to brutally effective violence. She can see how George carefully doesn’t flinch when anyone other than Jack calls her the Dragon Slayer.
(Jack is careful not to, unless he’s making a point to someone else; he is one of two people who know just how much her title weighs on George, and he’s the only one who has ever stood with her by the graves of the people who’d raised her and left her for dead)
Jill takes a shaky breath, pressing her hands tight around the mug. They smart with the heat, and she presses them closer still, letting it ground her.
“I - I don’t know where to start. Picking up the pieces.” She laughs wetly. She’s cried more in the past few weeks than in the past few years, and she hates that she can feel a corner of herself judging it, fretting about whether it will be noticed. She doesn’t have to hide anymore: she can talk about how much she hated Thorne and his slimy confidence, about the confusion of half-dating Jerimiah because he was the only person she could really talk to for years with all of her memories intact and he was intelligent and wry enough to be vaguely her type (though she doesn’t particularly want to talk about this to the attractively competent woman sat next to her, for reasons Jill is carefully shying away from contemplating), the way she’d felt like she was haunting her own life for years, spending half of her days with an echoing gap in her head filled only with a few scribbled hints smuggled out under her shirtsleeves.
She can talk about how many people she’d watched fading under her hands, lab rats to a cause who cared more about recreating what had been done to them than finding a way to help them. She can talk about smuggling them out, not knowing if she was condemning them to a harsher death or giving them a chance, about how she’d ended up volunteering at Wen’s partly because she wanted to do something productive with her evenings that made her talk to a few people and partly because she couldn’t stand sitting at home, dwelling on how many people she hadn’t been able to save. She doesn’t have to meticulously consider her words, ensuring that she doesn’t slip, that she doesn’t say something she shouldn’t be able to recall and tip off the Quiet Branch that maybe their lab rats have broken out of their cage.
This was something she had realised early: they might have been the scientists in the lab, but they were an experiment too. Thorne had been monitoring them for safety, for effectiveness, for their use of the (generous) research budget - but he’d been watching the long term effects of a forgetting field, too. He’d dangled offers over their heads that he’d calculated they couldn’t refuse, and it hadn’t just been because they were the right people for the job. If he’d had to make two scientists conveniently disappear…
…well. Better not to axe the ones who’ve had enough time to build up a network, whose sudden loss might raise question, the ones you’ve already invested resources into.
Jill helps in Rue’s infirmary, mixing remedies she learned at Annie’s side and giving as good as she gets on the snide commentary. Jack is there too, more days than not, whenever he has a snatch of time between shifts and the first time they overlap she ends up berating him into sitting down, Farris, because he’s working himself to the bone and that’s one thing, they all are, but there’s no need to be foolish about it and on an inured leg besides.
Rue looks grudgingly impressed.
On the second day he brings her down a mug of coffee, carefully balancing a tray as he hurries down the stairs. She takes a sip and frowns at him, wondering how he’d known exactly how much milk she liked (not to mention the dusting of chocolate powder stirred in). He shrugged, lopsided smile and a nervous hunch to the shoulders.
“I asked Rupe. He’s - he notices that kind of thing, so I asked.” She wonders what else Rupert has told them, what stories he’s shared, but she doesn’t ask. They’re friends, and Rupert understands the dangerous game she was playing - she knows none of them hold it against her, but sometimes she wonders if they should. If she’d told Jack the first time they met where to find his missing friend, would they have escaped without notice? Would he have taken a bullet to the leg, a curse digging in barbed hooks and refusing to let go?
Jill has always been curious, asking question after question. She’s grown to hate questions that start with what if; she has too many keeping her awake and no way to answer them.
Rupert tells her one evening how he’d guessed that she had a way to get a message out, and she has a panic attack, clutching the table and gasping for air. Jack talks her through it, Rupert fretting beside him, and she spends most of the night in a haze of retrospective terror. She hadn’t realised how sloppy she’d gotten; the danger is past, now, but the realisation of how close she’d been to being caught out keeps her awake. She can envision in perfect clarity how Thorne would have handled the matter. She suspects she would have been wiped, like George was; neater than a death, which would need explaining and Bureau records. Perhaps she would have been turned loose, or perhaps she would have been locked away in her own little lab, a test subject and prisoner.
Perhaps he would have used it as an experiment all of its own - if you execute someone whilst they’re forgotten, does it break the spell? Would her sister have recalled Jill’s name the moment she was snuffed out, or would it have been permanent. She has another panic attack at the fleeting thought of what would have happened to the cats?, because she knows they’re safe, she knows, but she can imagine so clearly how they wouldn’t have been. When it passes she stares at the ceiling and laughs to herself, horrible choked up sobs, because how is that the thought that undoes her? She can imagine her own death, her own erasing from history, but the thought of her poor cats waiting at the door for someone to come home who doesn’t know to do so is what drives her to frantic despair.
It gets easier, they tell her - bluntly from George, who has long since decided to ignore anyone who might question her right to be injured, and warily from Jack, who is still painfully working his way through old guilts and new challenges, and quietly from Rupert, who has spent months with missing spaces in his memory and had to trust the coded notes he’d left himself to tell him what to do, who has a taste for what she had lived with for years, who has been the one to stand in front of a rift and say close it, close it now because no matter how deep it cuts he can’t save one person at the cost of the rest.
It will get easier, she tells herself firmly, factually, but it will take time, and that is okay. Some days she believes it; some days she doesn’t.
There had been a girl living on the other side of a buried laboratory door for years, reading smuggled reports from a version of herself she didn’t know, and Jill is mourning her now - she had felt that blow every day, walking back through a door and feeling memory slot into place. Jill on the outside had never promised to save a life and failed, seen the light leaving someone’s eyes and known I can’t even tell your family to grieve, and that was an innocence she’d regained every evening, shattered every morning. She’s grieving for a part of herself she’d lost years before, all over again and for the last time.
She mixes remedies under Rue’s watchful eye and browses the stalls of Rivertown, pauses to pet a stray cat and to buy a cup of spiced milky tea from a stall, and is easily tempted into trying buttery cookies flecked with cumin. She balances a tray of them back to Sally-Anne’s and the council of war taking place, doling them out to delighted grins, and lets that be enough for the day. She reminds herself sternly that she’s allowed to take it a day at a time, and sleeps in until the sun is streaming through the window in the cramped room she’s sharing with George, bedrolls tucked into opposite corners and a pile of shared books between them.
There’s still a fight to win, a golden barrier around the town and a people declaring that they have a right to their lives, their homes, that the people who live in the shanty towns are still people. Jill has never been a fighter - rather, she has fought, plenty, with her hands steady on pippettes and diligent notes, blithe smiles and a sharp brain, but never with a weapon held in calloused hands - but she won’t sit back and watch these people die, so she goes out as a field medic.
She helps to drag Red home, and thinks what if I hadn’t been there? She tries not to dwell on the answer, but Jill has always been keen on answering questions.
That night she sits up late again, hands scrubbed clean. She had so many dreams, discoveries she wanted to make, a vision of shelves of research and publications. She thinks she’ll want that again, but not yet. She’s considered going home, but the thought of those familiar streets and walls is horrifying; this is the first time in years that she’s been able to be all of herself outside of a hidden lab, and Saint John’s Port holds a lot of memories, many of them unkind. She thinks about tilting her head back to the breeze when Laney ported them out for supplies, for allies, for finding all of Jill’s scattered dead to put to rest, new horizons opening up under her feet.
“I think I’m going to take a vacation,” she says, dropping down next to George. It’s another early morning, though the light this time is the soft glow of sunlight not the rippling gold of the Elsewhere. “It’s been four years, I think I’m owed one.” George grins.
“Yeah? Where you going to go?” Jill shrugs, pressing her hands around a steaming mug.
“Anywhere. I’ll rattle back to Saint John’s Port eventually - got to visit my sister and reclaim my cats - but for now…I just want to see what I can find.” There’s a pause, peaceful. There are questions brimming in Jill’s throat, and she glances sideways. “I - would it be okay if I wrote?” George knocks their shoulders together.
“Sure. Send ‘em care of Marian, she’ll make sure I get them without anyone else taking a look. Try to leave a forwarding address when you can.” She grins again. “After I’m done with my degree maybe I’ll take a vacation too, so you’ll have to send me all your recommendations.” Jill laughs.
“Let me know when you plan to go, and I’ll tag along as a tour guide.”
She sticks around a few more days, until the wounded are either healed or stable, back to manageable levels for Rue and the Academy Nurse with their cast of assistants. Sally-Anne and Rupert pack her bag full of supplies and gifts, a tube of sunblock and a carefully wrapped loaf of bread, two new notebooks and three different maps. George wakes early to wave her off, and the others crowd in over her shoulder too, blinking blearily and murmuring their best wishes before peeling off to whatever is on their list for the day.
Jill hitches a ride on a truck heading out towards the Forest and spends her first three nights getting rained on. It’s cold, damp, and miserable, and she feels a lightness rising in her lungs. She has a brief crisis, curled up in a room in the Waypost, guilt tight around her throat at the realisation she’d gone a whole afternoon without thinking of her losses, those lives going still under her fingertips. She lazes by a lowland river for two days until the midges get too annoying, meanders her way on to find a new place to stay. She sits on a fallen log by a bend in the river and weeps for the years lost, and another on a different day to watch a heron stalk its prey just because she can, because its something new and fascinating. She sleeps as long as she wants, lets herself dawdle over meals and sit for lazy afternoons reading. It gets easier, they’d promised, and it does.
What if, she thinks peacefully one morning, sketching an unfamiliar flower to look up and write to George about, I could be this happy for the rest of my life?
She knows the answer: she can’t be, that there will be bad days and mishaps, anger and tears. But it feels like something that’s within her reach, now, warm on her fingertips. So many lovely questions in the world, and this just one more - one more experiment to plan, trial and error, her old ghosts laid to rest and the rest of her life spread out ahead.
What if I could, she thinks, and turns the page.