Work Text:
“There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching.”
— Susan Sontag
There’s an old thrill she gets every time she sees a corpse.
If questioned, Eleanor deflects and says something about adrenaline, the fight-or-flight impulse, emotional contagion. It’s half-true. She feels the victim’s agony and terror like a razor plunged deep in her gut but accompanying it is a heady pulse in her very bones. It’s want: to know what it looks like to pull a body apart like the bodies that sometimes arrive on her table, eviscerated and mangled; to maybe feel it for herself. The obsession—and obsession it was—has made her heart pound ever since she was a girl. She used to insist that blood made her ill, just to explain why she always turned away from the sight. She avoided living wounds of any sort.
A high school friend had fractured her leg at a park once, and Eleanor had stood stock-still staring at where the bone protruded from the skin. She thought she might cry from the fullness she felt in her chest. Later, she found her panties soaked, and, like a compulsion, she pushed her hand between her legs and got herself off with her teeth sunk into her left arm until she tasted blood.
She feels that same fullness in her chest whenever she looks Amanda Young in the eye.
As a rule, they don't talk about it. Eleanor doesn't even stay at the warehouse most of the time since she has an appearance to maintain. But on the weekends that she tells her roommate she's visiting friends upstate, she packs an overnight bag and makes the long trek out of the city.
She’s doing a private study. The little group has a one-of-a-kind library of tapes recording about forty-two of Jigsaw’s tests. Compiling her notes on the footage alongside the post-mortem information that she has access to through work, she’s hoping to “make a study of human behavior in extremity.”
It gives her an excuse to watch it all. Even more importantly, it gives her an excuse to be around Amanda.
The first evening at the warehouse is always the best. Logan, who’s pretty decent in the kitchen, makes stew or else some sort of casserole, which they all eat in the corner they’ve set aside as the living room. Lawrence supplies sixers of beer and a bottle of whiskey. They’re all hard drinkers.
There’s a TV, switched eternally onto the Hallmark channel (Adam’s fault), and a low shelf of books. The puppet sits on top of the shelf, head tilted to one side against the wall and staring vacantly across the room.
They talk, play cards sometimes. Lawrence and Adam occupy one of the sofas, the latter’s feet in the former’s lap. Eleanor and Logan take the other sofa.
And through the warmth and talk and the odd semblance domesticity, Amanda’s eyes on her: hard and uneasy and shy, somehow all at once. She sits in the living room’s only armchair, her T-shirt too large, her knees pulled to her chest, chewing absently on the leather bands on her wrists.
Several times, she laughs loudly, usually at Adam’s expense, and Eleanor shivers. It’s a hoarse witch’s cackle. She suddenly can’t look at her, or else her thoughts will be scrawled across her face.
As a rule, they don’t talk about it.
They don’t talk about Eleanor knocking on the door to Amanda’s tiny bedroom at the far end of the warehouse that night, or about how Amanda answers immediately. They don’t talk about Eleanor’s hands on Amanda’s waist, the way she rips at her belt, the way Amanda shoves her against the wall, rough hands heavy on her wrists. Eleanor bites Amanda’s lower lip until they taste blood.
Afterward, when they’re squashed together on Amanda’s bed, Amanda twists one of Eleanor’s red curls around her finger, and Eleanor tries to ignore how her pulse kicks upward.
“How long you stayin’ this time?” Amanda murmurs.
“I have to work Monday,” Eleanor says by way of a reply.
“And you’re going to watch all of those tapes we’ve got?”
“As many as I can,” she says.
And Amanda hums and doesn’t reply. The lock of hair untwists from her finger and falls back onto Eleanor’s bare shoulder.
Eleanor returns to her pullout bed twenty minutes later. It’s very cold out in the warehouse.
Too often, Eleanor feels like an extra thumb during her weekend stays at the warehouse. Everyone has their place, their particular job to do, but she finds that too much time sat in front of her laptop with the pile of homemade DVDs to the side agitates her. On her first break that Saturday morning, she finds herself rattling from one end of the building to the other until, inevitably, she joins Amanda at her workbench. Today she's bent over something that looks a bit like a large fish hook. She’s completely absorbed, and as Eleanor sits there, coffee mug clutched in her hand, she remembers an abortive date at sixteen that consisted of her watching the guy play video games all afternoon.
“What’s what for?” she asks.
Amanda jumps a little like she’d forgotten Eleanor was there, then holds up the hook for Eleanor’s inspection. The blade is slightly serrated.
“It’s gonna go through the roof of the mouth. And some sort of weight on the other end of the pulley to lift him.”
Eleanor hums.
“Sure that won’t hit the brain?”
Amanda frowns at it, thumbs the edge.
“Shouldn’t,” she says, but then she motions Eleanor closer. Obediently, she leans forward and allows Amanda to take hold of her chin and gently turn her head so she’s in profile. Cold metal touches her cheek as Amanda lays the hook along the side of her head. She hasn’t let go of Eleanor’s jaw yet, and Eleanor is very aware of the calluses on her fingers and her palm, the woodsy smell of her deodorant. The hook warms against her skin, the curve framing her cheekbone. Amanda’s eyes are hard and heavy on the side of her face.
“No,” she says at last. “Should be okay.” And the hook leaves her cheek, and her hand leaves her jaw.
Eleanor swallows and licks her lips. Part of her is calculating the odds of getting Amanda to fuck her on the workbench, but she knows it would probably ruin the moment if she tried. Besides, the other woman is now busy with her work again, rifling through pages of diagrams, and it would probably be death to interrupt. Eleanor takes a big gulp of her coffee and tries not to feel so disappointed.
#
Amanda isn’t sure what to make of their new anatomical expert (apprentice? mole? hanger-on? lover?). Ever since she picked Eleanor up that rainy night—her red hair dripping, hands up, peering in growing shock at Amanda’s face through the windshield—she’s begun to fear the moments in which they’re alone together as much as she anticipates them.
Amanda lives in a world of metal. Blades, gears, engines, wires. Needles. The one photograph she keeps of John, she keeps in a rectangular metal frame that she keeps in the top drawer of the filing cabinet beside her rickety bed. She doesn’t look at it often. When she catches herself grieving, as she still does from time to time, she throws herself into her work. She designs trap after trap on the nights she can’t sleep. On the really bad nights, when she doesn’t dare step outside her bedroom—for fear that, from there, she’ll step outside and get her hands on heroin again—she draws reverse bear traps. Each hinge and rivet from memory.
Her hands are hard, callused, rough. Her arms are worse: that's where the scars start in earnest, the neat slits on the insides of wrists, and then the ugly pinpricks where the needles went in. She’s pretty sure the needle pit did something to one of the muscles in her right upper arm, because now if she lifts it past a certain point, she feels an awful wrench in her back that can lay her up for an entire afternoon.
And, of course, the twin scars on either side of her mouth.
Eleanor is soft. It was a shock to Amanda’s system, the first time she touched her—smooth skin that smells like coconut; rich, glossy hair. Her mouth is soft, too, and she grinned the first time she kissed Amanda, like she was getting exactly what she wanted. Whiskey on her breath, lipstick smeared on the corner of Amanda’s mouth, the side of her jaw.
It’s addictive, and Amanda has been alarmed to find that she waits for the weekends when Eleanor visits with bated breath and her heart pounding in her ribcage.
She won’t come, she always thinks that Friday night after dinner, when she’s sitting in her room and waiting for something to happen. She’s lost interest and she won’t come this time.
And then, like clockwork, the knock comes.
Now, she watches in her periphery as Eleanor saunters back to her laptop and her DVDs. It would be plain to anyone watching her that she doesn’t have a purely academic interest in the test footage, but it’s especially obvious to Amanda, who knows from personal experience what Eleanor Bonneville aroused looks like.
Most of the videos only last about five minutes tops. She watches each one about twenty times, typing notes on her phone. Even from here, Amanda can see that her lips are parted, her legs are crossed. Trying to be professional, only partially succeeding. She wonders if her nocturnal visits are partly an attempt to take the edge off. Briefly, Amanda entertains the fantasy of crossing the floor to kneel in front of her, open her mouth with her thumb, and kiss her lower lip, suck on it until she moans.
As though she can feel Amanda looking, Eleanor glances up and winks at her. Amanda looks away again.
There’s another reason she can’t stop watching her as she watches the tapes. Somewhere, buried in the footage pile is her test. She doesn’t know if she wants Eleanor to see it. She knows she doesn’t want Eleanor to see her as anything but what she is now. She doesn’t want her to know the frightened junkie of years and years ago, back before John gave her her life back and she found some semblance of control.
She feels a little sick.
She forces her attention back to her work and pushes the prospect from her mind.
Eleanor knows far too much about what they do. She can remember the details of tests that Amanda had personally overseen and somehow forgotten. She’s younger than the rest of them but is happy to sit with Lawrence and Logan that evening and hold a lengthy conversation peppered with medical jargon, sipping Jack Daniels and apparently unaware they’re the only ones talking (across the warehouse’s tiny living room, Adam winks at Amanda and texts her another meme).
Eleanor knows far too much, and Amanda knows that she ought to feel more uneasy about it. As it is, she’s uneasy because she’s not. Is she getting soft?
What would John think? she wonders, and immediately clamps down on the thought before it can hurt her to the point of ruining the evening.
Eleanor laughs at a very scientific joke that Logan has just cracked and tucks a red curl behind her ear, and Amanda feels her belly burn and the world slide to the left.
She mutters an excuse that she’s not sure is heard and slips outside for air.
After about a minute, the metal door screeches behind her and Adam joins her.
“You pussy.”
She arches an eyebrow, which he mimics.
“She’s hot,” he continues, “not a hammerhead.”
Amanda neither looks at him nor replies. Her breath makes clouds in the chilly autumn air.
“... and Lawrence and I might have made a bet on when you two are going to make it happen,” he adds.
“No, you didn’t.”
“No, we didn’t, he said no, but if I’m right, I’ll just steal the money out of his wallet.”
She can’t help laughing at that.
“So, babe, if you could get it in by next month, my bank account will thank you.”
She snorts and rolls her eyes. Briefly, she considers telling him that she and Eleanor have been hooking up for the last two months, but the prospect of stringing him along for four more weeks is too good to pass up.
Besides, part of her shrinks at the idea of giving it voice, this thing she and Eleanor have. Things that don’t officially exist can’t be taken away.
“It’s not like that,” she says at last and pretends not to hear Adam say Bull. Shit.
That night, Eleanor comes to her door again, this time holding a strap-on in her left hand. The dildo is a bright, flirtatious pink, and Amanda can’t help her burst of laughter when she sees it.
“Don’t tell me you packed that on my account,” she says.
“Oh, don’t worry.” Eleanor puts the strap down on the filing cabinet by the bed and pulls off her striped sweater. “I packed it for very selfish reasons.”
And Amanda can’t stop herself from striding over, yanking her back around, and kissing her the way she’d imagined earlier in the day, lower lip caught between her teeth until it bleeds.
Afterward, Eleanor sits between Amanda’s legs and traces the fading reddish lines from the harness, first with her delicate fingertips and then with her mouth.
“You’re gonna get me going again,” Amanda says, even as she tangles her fingers in Eleanor’s hair. Eleanor looks up at her with a devilish look in her eye.
“Now wouldn’t that be a shame.”
She puts her mouth to Amanda’s cunt, and Amanda resists the impulse to close her eyes. Jesus only knows when this chapter’s going to close, but when it does, she knows she’ll kick herself for missing the slightest moment.
#
Eleanor works through lunch on Sunday but pays for it when, two hours later, Lawrence brings her a sandwich right as she starts the tape of his and Adam’s test. She doesn’t have enough shame to hit the pause button, but she can feel her skin start to crawl as they both watch the grainy black and white footage in silence. Eventually he puts her plate down at her elbow, but he doesn’t leave.
“How’d it feel?” she asks after another couple of minutes passes. “To be in it?”
“Don’t really remember,” he says.
She turns to look at him.
“Oh come on.”
He shrugs.
“Is it that surprising? Memory changes over time. Your perspective alters. And trauma does funny things anyway.” He lapses into silence, but just as Eleanor turns her attention back to the screen, he adds, “Some days all I remember is the pain. And some days it’s Adam. And some days it’s my daughter. She must be in middle school now, at least.” He coughs.
Eleanor watches the two figures on the screen. The lights have just come on, and they’ve just found John lying between them.
“How did that happen?” she asks. “You and Adam.”
“Well, trauma’s a great bonding activity,” Lawrence says, so blandly that it takes Eleanor a second to realize he’s half-joking, and by then it's too late to laugh.
“Did it work?” she asks after another minute and looks back at him.
He squeezes her shoulder in a fatherly sort of way and leaves.
An hour into the tape, Adam and Amanda return from their grocery run, laden with paper bags. Eleanor is pretty sure that only two-thirds of what they've bought was on the list, and she wonders vaguely why they’re allowed in public without supervision. She pauses the tape and offers to help them unload everything, but Amanda waves her off. Her T-shirt shows off the hard muscle in her arms; Eleanor pretends to read back through her notes and watches them make their trips.
Adam passes by where she’s camped out on the sofa and spots the tape paused on her computer. There’s an almost imperceptible pause, and then he pulls a Sharpie out of his pocket and scribbles his signature on the open DVD case.
“There ya go,” he says. “Hock that and you’ll make a mint.”
“Much appreciated.”
She catches Amanda’s eye over his shoulder and her smile freezes. She’s watching them—no, watching the screen—with the air of a mouse who’s just spotted a hawk overhead. She’s absolutely still, as though the slightest movement will give her away.
Adam looks from Eleanor to Amanda.
“I’m gonna take a nap,” he announces and beats a quick retreat.
There’s a long stretch of silence as they just look at each other. Amanda begins chewing on the bands around her wrists. She catches herself doing it and then turns on her heel and goes into the tiny kitchen. Eleanor follows without a moment’s hesitation.
“Are you okay?” she asks from the kitchen doorway. Amanda is hastily putting the last of the groceries away. She doesn’t look at Eleanor.
“Is this about the tapes?” Eleanor guesses.
Amanda closes the refrigerator door and put all her weight on the handle. She looks even smaller than usual. Eleanor thinks of Adam’s brief pause before reverting to his usual jokes, and Lawrence’s stiffness.
“I don’t have to watch yours if you don’t want,” she says at last.
Amanda doesn’t turn to look at her. She puts her forehead against the fridge.
“I don’t know what I want,” she says at last. Her voice is hoarse, uncomfortable. “I was... different. Back then.” At last, she turns and folds her arms tight across her chest, a defensive position. “You’re gonna see me.” She puts a hard emphasis on the word see.
Slowly, giving her enough time to react, Eleanor steps into the kitchen and climbs onto the counter adjacent to the fridge.
“Tell me no,” she says, “and I won’t.”
Amanda looks up at her, face sick and hopeful all at once.
“That’s the thing,” she mutters. “Don’t think I want to.”
Oh.
Feeling as though the bottom has just dropped out of her stomach, Eleanor swallows and rolls her shoulders back. She knows she ought to say something, but her mind is an absolute blank.
After a long moment, Amanda sighs and leaves the kitchen. Eleanor listens to the thump of her boots on the floor, heading across the building for her room.
Forty-five minutes later, Eleanor steps out of the warehouse for privacy and calls to say she won’t be coming into work tomorrow after all.
#
After dinner that evening—which had been strained due to Amanda and Eleanor’s lack of interest in making conversation—Amanda hears a knock on her door. Lying on her bed and scrolling through old conversations with Lawrence, she half-considers ignoring it, but the knock comes again, this time accompanied by the sound of Eleanor’s voice.
“Amanda, can we talk?”
Something hot and nervous flutters in Amanda's chest. She puts her phone aside and, summoning her courage, she opens her door.
Eleanor stands there, shifting her weight from side to side. She’s wearing a gray college T-shirt and a pair of plaid boxers, and her hair is loose around her shoulders. Amanda resists the urge to reach for her, as she’s grown accustomed to doing.
“What do you want.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t say anything back there,” Eleanor says. “I guess you kind of took me aback. And I... I was wondering...” She holds out her hand, and Amanda recognizes a DVD case. The label on the spine reads YOUNG, AMANDA.
“I was wondering if you’d like to watch it with me,” Eleanor says.
Amanda blinks.
“And if you want to stop,” she says, “we can stop. And if you want to keep going, we can do that too. I just want it to be your choice.”
Amanda studies her: the earnestness in her eyes behind her glasses; the nervous way she catches her lower lip with her teeth.
“Okay,” she hears herself whisper.
Amanda never had much experience with slumber parties, but as they sit on Eleanor’s pullout bed in front of her computer, she thinks that this must be something like one. Eleanor goes into the kitchen and comes back with the Jack Daniels and two glasses.
“You’re sure about this?” she asks as she settles beside Amanda on the bed. Amanda nods and takes a sip of her whiskey.
Eleanor loads the DVD into her computer and hits play.
Amanda has no interest in the video. She knows everything that happens; there’s no need to go over it all again. Instead, she leans her cheek against the pillow and watches Eleanor watch the video. The light from the screen flashes across her face, and when Amanda looks close enough, she thinks she can see a version of her old self reflected in Eleanor’s green eyes: trap locked heavy over her head, her own eyes huge and terrified. Eleanor doesn’t take any notes. She drinks her whiskey and drinks the images that flicker past. Mouth slightly open. There’s a small dark scab on her lower lip where Amanda bit her and drew blood the night before. She remembers how Eleanor had moaned.
The old Amanda screams from the computer, and Amanda sits on the couch and watches Eleanor take it in.
Another fifteen seconds and it’s over.
Most people are so ungrateful to be alive. But not you. Not anymore.
Eleanor exhales hard and downs the rest of her whiskey. She doesn’t immediately look at Amanda, which in turn makes her gut clench, but there doesn’t seem to be any discomfort in Eleanor’s manner. Amanda sips her drink and wills herself not to panic, to let her process. The whiskey is sharp and bracing.
“Do you think it worked?” Eleanor asks at last. She sounds almost conversational.
Amanda nods. Then she hesitates. “D’you believe me?”
And Eleanor nods back.
“The human body breaks really easily," she says. “You learn that real quick in the morgue. We get twisted into the wrong shapes. But sometimes you grow in the wrong shape, and you need something to snap you into the right one.”
Amanda blinks hard, praying that the tears that sting her eyes aren’t visible.
“Did you join him because it worked?” Eleanor adds.
She swallows and doesn’t immediately answer. After a second, Eleanor cracks a grin.
“’Cause I think it’s safe to say that you don’t have the, uh, reaction to this stuff that I do.”
Amanda allows herself a laugh.
“That’s a classy way of saying I don’t have a guro fetish.”
“Okay, you said that, not me.” Eleanor laughs and cocks her head to the side. Her grin fades to something softer, gentler, and Amanda shifts.
“What made you do it?” she asks. Amanda closes her eyes. She sighs.
“He helped me," she whispers and then coughs. "And I didn’t know what else to do afterward. If I was with him, working with him, helping him in return...” She forces herself to speak around the hard lump that’s building in her throat. “Then I didn’t feel like I was going to...”
Eleanor pushes her glasses further up the bridge of her nose.
“Like you weren’t going to use,” she says gently.
Amanda nods and downs the rest of her whiskey. It burns her throat, stings the inside of her nose. She doesn’t dare look at the woman beside her.
After a moment, Eleanor asks, “When was the last time you used, if you don’t mind me asking?”
Amanda swallows.
“Since I joined him.”
“He hasn’t been here for years,” Eleanor says.
“What are you trying to say?”
“I’m saying... maybe don’t attribute your victories to a ghost. And contrary to what the state of New York thinks, you’re not a ghost.” Her throat bobs and her eyes run over Amanda. “You’re alive. And...” A small smile plays on her mouth. “Most people are so ungrateful for that, aren’t they.”
Amanda is dimly aware that she’s trembling. Struggling to keep her breathing even, she reaches for Eleanor’s wrist but changes her mind at the last moment and laces their fingers together.
“El...” She can’t manage anything more, or she’ll lose it.
Eleanor squeezes her hand.
“Close your eyes,” she says.
Amanda just looks at her, drinks her in, like if she looks away Eleanor will vanish.
“Close your eyes,” she repeats.
One last, hungry look, and finally Amanda swallows and obeys.
She feels the soft brush of Eleanor’s fingertips on her cheek and her temple as she tucks a lock of hair behind her ear. Her fingertips are followed by her lips on her cheek, and then she kisses her mouth. For once, Amanda doesn’t freeze up. She melts into her, reaches blind up for Eleanor’s other hand to take that one too. Her skin still feels incongruously soft against her own, but it doesn’t frighten her the way that it usually does.
Eleanor’s mouth on the side of her throat. Their linked hands waver back and forth as though they’re waltzing—she hasn’t danced in Jesus only know how many years, she realizes with an odd start, but somehow she can imagine dancing with Eleanor. Even odder is the realization that she wants to try.
She gently pushes Eleanor back onto the mattress, and the motion upsets her still partially-filled glass. The whiskey soaks quickly into the sheets, and Amanda curses, but neither of them makes any motion to clean it up. She only has one thought, one need, and that’s to touch as much of Eleanor as she can—as though, by some transitive power, touching her can smooth some of her own scars.
“Hey—” Eleanor lays her fingers against Amanda’s mouth, holding her off by about an inch. “I’m not going anywhere, you know.”
Amanda frowns.
“You’ve got work,” she says.
“So we’ll have lots of phone sex until we figure out how to fake my death,” Eleanor says easily, and Amanda can’t help spluttering what might well be a giggle. “And you can text me, or call me, even if it’s just to tell me about your day, even if it’s boring.” Grinning, Eleanor strokes Amanda’s hair back from her face, cups her cheek. “If you wanna get rid of me, you’re gonna have to kill me.”
Amanda shakes her head.
“You’d be into it.”
Eleanor nudges her nose against Amanda’s.
“You’re not losing me,” she says. “I promise.”
And Amanda swallows, finds Eleanor’s hand, and nods.