Chapter Text
Georgie can’t be scared, and so, of course, she isn’t. She’s had monsters at her door and in her home and out in the world trying to snatch up the people she cares about, but she doesn’t feel afraid. Sometimes, when the not-fear gets bad enough, she’ll still get break through physical symptoms, almost like the ghost of her former self is haunting her body. She’ll wake up in the middle of the night and lose her appetite and fidget too much when she tries to record, all symptom and no disease.
When she was a teenager, she used to throw herself sort of madly into a new tactile hobby every time exam season rolled around and completely lose interest once the pressure eased and she no longer desperately needed to keep her hands and mind occupied 24/7. Two months into total radio silence from Jon, Georgie looks around her sitting room full of newly made scarves, shawls, and wall hangings and thinks, maybe, that there is an underlying reason for why she’s suddenly been so obsessed with weaving. Christ, she hadn’t even known she’d had all those materials, but every time she went looking she just found more.
In the absence of fear itself, other emotions pour in to fill the gap, flooding her with anger, confusion, indignation, surprise, apathy, delight, etc. Name an emotion and she will have had it in spades at some wildly inappropriate occasion over the last decade. In a not unpleasant turn of fate, over the last few months her go-to fear substitute has increasingly been love. Warmth, protectiveness, determination, etc. Something goes awry and she just wants to wrap her arms around what’s hers until everything is set back to rights. It is so much more useful than her previously most called upon alternative of anger, she feels far more balanced and proactive. She curls up with her little loom on the couch and lets love lace down and through her fingers, flowing into her newest project. It doesn’t even really matter what she’s making, she just wants it to be soft and homey.
Her phone rings on the floor beside her, and when she picks it up she sees that the screen is alight with Jon’s caller ID for the first time in weeks. A hot spear of care lances through her heart as she immediately takes the call and pins the phone to her ear with her shoulder. “I thought I told you to not be a stranger, Mr. Sims.”
“Ha, yes, you did, sorry, it’s just been, um, a bit chaotic. I’m just back from America, thought I should let you know I’m still alive.”
“Appreciated, if a bit late.” He sounds haggard, more so even than usual. “Did you say you were in America? Sounds exciting, you better have sightseeing photos to show me.”
“I was. China, too, Beijing, though… it wasn’t really a photography sort of trip. More, more work stuff.”
“Ahhh, is that what’s kept you too busy to ring up little old me? International man of mystery Jonathan Sims, traveling the world in the name of chasing leads and outrunning evil clowns?”
He sighs heavily. “‘Outrunning’ is… Let’s say: yes.”
“‘Let’s say?’ What does ‘let’s say’ mean? You know how I feel about keeping things from me.”
He’s quiet for a moment, and Georgie watches the Admiral bat at a spider on the carpet. He never quite manages to catch them, but she’s glad he’s having fun. Jon pipes back up, beleaguered. “I’m not trying to hide anything, it’s just, a bit difficult to talk about, at least over the phone. It’s not relevant, all you need to know is that I’m fine.”
“You don’t sound that fine, mate.”
“Just jet lag.”
She puts down the loom on the couch beside her and properly holds her phone to her ear. “Look, you’re not fooling me, I know your voice when it’s miserable. How about we go for drink tonight? You really sound like you need to unwind.”
“Uh…” He stammers off into silence again, and the Admiral has lost interest in his spider. Georgie dangles a few threads from her finger tips and flicks her wrist to wiggle them around in front of him. “‘Fraid I don’t think I’m up to going anywhere public.”
“What about a night in, then? Like we used to, wine out of mugs and an okay TV show.” The Admiral’s eyes widen and he flattens himself against the floor.
“Um.”
He pounces.
“You know what? Yes, yeah, I think I could go for that, thank you.”
“That’s what I like to hear.” She rises to her feet and shakes her hand until all the cobwebs drop free, her cat rolling around in ecstasy at catching his quarry. Just because it’s easy to play with him doesn’t make it any less fun. “Swing by at eight? I hear the new Westworld’s supposed to be alright.”
“What’s Westworld?”
“Show about cowboy robots, you’ll see.”
“I’m on the edge of my seat.”
“That’s doubly what I like to hear. Alright, see you then.”
“See you.”
She hangs up and takes a nice, deep breath. That’s… relief, she thinks? She’s been wanting to hear from him, to have him over again, so relief would make sense. Doesn’t seem like he’s doing well, but she can work on that. She just wants to get her eyes on him, her hands on him, make doubly sure he’s still in one piece, see he hasn’t quickly blown himself up while her back was turned. Oh, that’s eagerness, isn’t it? She wants to draw him back in.
She surveys her cluttered sitting room and thinks she ought to straighten out the debris of her new hobby into something cozy rather than something crazy before he arrives. If she layers the throw blankets over each other then he probably won’t be able to count them.
She gets two bottles, one red and one white, picks out her two worst/best novelty mugs (a cat wearing glasses and a cat wearing cucumbers over its eyes), and artfully strings up the room with fairy lights. Strands of them hang down from the doorway and she catches herself going on autopilot and almost trying to thread more through horizontally like warp into weft, but, no, that’s ridiculous, she can’t set them up like that. He still needs to get in.
They don’t end up watching more than an episode and a half of the show, which is about what she expected. In her capacity as host, she takes sample cups from each of the wines on offer, but, really, she got them for him, to chemically loosen him up, which begins working after not too long. He slides fluidly from tipsy to drunk at the best of times, and as it stands he does not look like he’s in his best of times.
“A month?” Georgie squawks, lying on the couch.
“God, I know.” He sits on the floor in a nest of pillows and blankets, leaning his back up against the couch near Georgie’s face. “For any of us keeping track, that’s kidnapping two out of three.”
“Well, no wonder you didn’t ring. Where did you say they nabbed you?”
“Uh…” His eyes unfocus and he stares past her shoulder. He points at her drawn curtain. “Just about there, across the street.”
She slaps her hand over her mouth. “Oh God, I’m so sorry.”
He shakes his head. “It’s fine, I told you to ignore me.”
“That is not what you said.”
“It was sort of that, in a way.” He throws back the rest of his cucumber cat mug and pours some more of the white.
“Still, I’m sorry I didn’t do anything, I’m glad they didn’t…” ‘Hurt you?’ They held him captive for a month, of course they hurt him, even if they didn’t draw blood. “I’m glad you made it out.”
“Thanks.” A shallow sip without closing his eyes. “No one else’s actually said that to me.”
“Shit.”
“It’s alright, not like it would really change anything.”
She reaches out a hand to his shoulder and he tenses for a moment before visibly breathing through it and relaxing again. Good. She wants him to like her touch.
He blinks hard and sort of twitches. “Anyway, what’s been up with you?”
A few images flash through her mind. Watching Melanie go from alright to bad to worse every time they speak, her hands itching with the need to do something, thread appearing miraculously in the flat, the Admiral’s whiskers covered in webs, her palms feeling sticky whenever she doesn’t have something to occupy them, shaving her legs for the first time in years the other week and still constantly feeling movement scuttling up them. “Not so fast, you still owe me a kidnapping.”
He shrugs and takes another long drink. “I’ve been overselling it, the last one was barely anything. ‘Abducted at gunpoint in America’ might be a good story if Daisy didn’t already have the ‘gun’ part covered and they weren’t two Brits, and I was basically free to leave after a couple of hours, anyway. All told they were pretty nice. Just a glorified Airbnb, really.”
Georgie gawks. “Do you hear the words coming out of your mouth?”
He smiles. “Increasingly less and less so.” He frowns. “Decreasingly? Decreasingly less? No, that can’t be right, ‘decreasingly less’ would just be more.” His expression drops entirely. “I’m drunk, is what I am trying to say.”
She’ll give him that, but it’s not exactly like he speaks with high regard for his safety when he’s sober. “Right. I know what you’ve said about this before, but I really think you should move back in.”
His eyes slip closed. “Can we not? Just not right now?”
“I’m not even saying I need you to try and quit your job or anything, I just think you’re in a lot of danger and you need to be checking in with someone who cares.”
“I’ve got, I’ve got people, there’s Martin—”
“You say that, but does that work at all in practice? ‘Cause it sounds like he’s nought for three on noticing when you’ve been kidnapped.”
“So are you,” he snaps.
“Because—” she pushes herself up to sitting, looking down at him— “because I haven’t been able to pin anything down with you. If you vanish into thin air then I can’t tell if you’re off getting tortured by some wax or plastic woman or if you’ve just decided you’re back to being the lone wolf.”
“The wolf people actually tend to prefer partnerships.”
“Jon.”
“What?”
She’s up on her knees holding her hands out in front of her. They feel tacky when she curls and uncurls her fingers into fists. He gets to his feet and steadies himself on the armrest as he sways. “What—what is the problem? I don’t get it, why won’t you let me help?” Because, that’s really the issue. It’s not the helping itself, she can do that, it’s all the extra steps he makes her put in. He can’t just let her offer him her spare bedroom, he has to make her wrestle him into it, too.
“I don’t get why you won’t listen when I say no, I’ve told you it’s too dangerous.”
“I don’t care!”
He quirks his lips, too cold to be a smile, but not really anything else, either. “Pot, kettle.” He slips his hand into his pocket and makes towards the door to the back garden. “Don’t worry, something’ll probably kill me soon anyway, I’ll stop being your problem. I’m going for a cigarette.”
She watches as he lumbers outside and slides the glass door closed behind him, and, for some reason, that is what gets her, that, the smoking. She remembers what a devil of a time he’d had trying to quit his first go around, and now he’s, just, just giving it up for no reason! All of that for nothing, back to letting it slowly kill him! Jesus Christ, it’s not even like she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, they’d quit together. And then she’d smelled it in his hair a few months later, anyway. He thinks he’s not capable, that he’s a lost cause from the beginning so any efforts in his favor by himself or others are pointless, but she knows that’s not true. She will only lose him if he lets himself be lost, and, frankly, he’s perfectly aware of that. He simply doesn’t care. He can get better, he can be safe, if he would only. Just. Let her.
She pauses in her thoughts, and she’s gasping for air. She’s shaking all over. She’s seething, her hands buried deep in her bag of thread. When had she even picked that up?
She feels angry. So angry that, as soon as she thinks on it, she’s damn glad he left the room. But… racing thoughts, shallow breaths, trembling. Is she that terrified?
There’s movement at the door to the garden, and Georgie whips her head around to see. He looks—God, he looks devastated. He’s shaking, too, face pinched and eyes red. And—
He’s putting his lighter back in his pocket.
It’s got a spiderweb on it.
She’s never seen it before, but of course. Oh, God, she didn’t say any of it out loud but she still regrets thinking all that, of course he isn’t smoking again for no reason. No one does anything for no reason. Now that she’s seen it so transparently it’s as easy to spot as anything, she can see all the little threads and strands stuck to his hand. He’s been bound to it, had it woven into his being. This thing got its hooks in him and chained him to his doom.
It’s not his fault. He’s just not in control.
He comes back over and sits down beside her. “I’m sorry,” he croaks, clearly choking back tears. “I, I swear I don’t want to die, it’s just—” he presses his lips closed like if he manages to swallow the sob before it escapes then she somehow won’t notice he’s upset. It doesn’t work, not even a little, and he buries his face in his hands, crying to pieces.
Right, that’s it. She knows what to do.
She loves him.
First, obviously, she wraps her arms around him. Tight, encompassing, gentle. She strokes a hand over his head. She strokes a hand over his chin. She strokes a hand over his shoulder. She strokes a hand over his side. She strokes a hand over his knee. She strokes a hand over his heart. She, of course, only has two hands, and as soon as she lets go she will return to always having had only two hands.
Second, she waits until his breathing slows, and slows, and slows. He’s got eight glasses in him, she’s honestly impressed that he’s made it this far without completely passing out, though he is almost there.
Third, she slips one of her only two hands into his pocket and pulls out the lighter. It’s so easy, she just traces her fingers along the spiderweb design and plucks off the threads. She can’t sever them, but now they’re stuck to her, instead. Much better.
Fourth, she whispers in his ear, “Come along, you. You can stay here tonight, up in the guest bedroom again. I want you close by.” He nods his assent, though very sleepily. She doesn’t want to arouse any suspicion just yet, so his compliance is key. She stands and brings up the hand attached to him, and he, obediently, follows. Like her marionette.
He’s unsteady on his feet, but she has arms enough to shuffle him forward without needing to outright carry him.
She encounters a slight problem when they get to the bedroom, as the bed itself doesn’t quite have the right frame for what she’s intending, but that’s amended easily enough, she has plenty of soft woven things. She sits him down at the end of the room and, delicately, peels the strings off her hand and affixes them to the radiator. Just a few moments to make sure he’s positioned in a way that won’t hurt if she leaves him be for a few minutes, then she’s off for supplies.
Jon wakes up in soft daylight and with a terrible headache.
For a moment he thinks he doesn’t recognize where he is, but, no, he knows this room perfectly well. Just not this angle. Did he really manage to go to bed so drunk that he fell fully off the mattress and didn’t notice? Christ, that’s embarrassing.
Or—wait, what? He’s on the floor, but not the hard floor, he’s on a bunch of pillows and quilts folded up into something mattress-like. And there’s… a breakfast tray and pain relievers about two feet away. Well, he supposes he can ask Georgie why he’s laid out on the ground like a Biblically accurate Last Supper in a few minutes, God he’s thirsty. He moves to grab the tray and—hmm.
It’s not that it’s too far away, it’s perfectly within reach. It just appears to Jon at this very moment that his right hand is, possibly, somewhat tied to the radiator.
He blinks at his wrist. His first thought is, At least I’m left handed. His second thought is, That’s not rope.
In all point of fact, Jonathan Sims is bound to the radiator of his ex-girlfriend’s guest bedroom by extremely thick spider silk.
He knew he shouldn’t have ignored the half-aborted weft in the fairy lights.
Shit.