Fanfiction: Prisoner's Dilemma (The Quarry)
Glad to see AO3 is back after the DDoS attack! I've actually just finished a fic, but I want to give the site a little time to stabilise before I post it to AO3, so for now this fic is exclusively available on this blog. I'm sure you're all very honoured.
To nobody's surprise, two days after I said I wasn't experiencing the drive to write for The Quarry, I'm posting fanfiction for The Quarry. Travis and Laura have a very weird dynamic, and I hugely enjoyed writing it.
Title: Prisoner's Dilemma
Fandom: The Quarry
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Travis and Laura gen, with Max/Laura references and some slight Travis/Laura implications.
Wordcount: 3,600
Summary: “This isn’t a long-term plan,” Laura says. “You can’t just lock me up for the rest of my life. That’s insane.”
I've popped the 'notes' section under the cut because it contains Quarry spoilers.
Notes: This is set after the potential ending to The Quarry in which Travis takes Ryan's gun and locks Laura in the basement, meaning that Silas is never defeated. The ending can be seen here.
Travis comes back to the cage in the morning, moving quickly and with purpose. He’s still holding the shotgun, although at least he’s keeping it pointed down.
“Let me the hell out,” Laura says, quietly.
He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even meet her eyes. He just moves to unlock the door, and that puts Laura on edge. She backs into a corner of the cage.
He looks at her then. “Thought you wanted to leave.”
“I get the feeling you’re not just letting me go,” she says.
“A lot of people are going to be wondering where their kids are,” he says. “There are bodies all over the camp. If the police find us when they get here, it’s not going to look good.”
“Oh?” Laura asks, her voice hiking in pitch. She looks pointedly around at the bars. “Oh, what are they going to do: arrest me?”
“They’ll probably look into me, after...” He pauses. “But they can’t prove it. Neither of us were meant to be here tonight. I’ve wiped the cameras. We could get away clean, but we need to move fast.”
Images come to Laura’s mind, unwanted: shooting Travis’s mother’s face off, breaking his father’s neck, leaving his werewolf niece floating face-down in the swimming pool. Talking Ryan into shooting Chris. Most of Travis’s family gone at her hands, and he’s the one who’ll fall under suspicion for it.
Maybe that’s what finally drives her to follow him out of the cage.
She doesn’t apologise. But she touches his elbow, briefly. She thinks she might see him tense a little, but it’s so subtle that it’s hard to be sure if he even felt it through his sleeve.
-
Something’s bothering Laura as they walk out into the morning light. Travis seems to think they can get away with this, that nobody knows they were here tonight.
Those counsellors knew Laura was here. Does that mean none of them made it? Did one of the wolves get them, or was it something else?
Her eyes stray to the shotgun in Travis’s hand.
He wouldn’t have killed them, right? He definitely had more than enough of a reason to kill Laura, and somehow she’s still alive.
And then there’s...
“Where’s Max?” she asks.
“Dead,” Travis says.
Laura stops walking. “No.”
“Found him down by the lake,” Travis says. “Looked like a werewolf got him.”
“No,” Laura says. Fuck, it could be true. “I don’t believe you. You - you’re lying, you just don’t want me to get back to him-”
Travis lets out a hard sigh, as if she’s somehow overreacting to this. “We need to keep moving.”
“Show me.”
She left him on the island; he was supposed to be safe. But if he - if he tried to cross the lake, like a fucking idiot-
“I’m the one with the gun,” Travis says. “You’re not in a position to negotiate.”
“If you don’t take me to see him, I’ll make you shoot me with it.”
They stare at each other. Laura feels exposed and vulnerable, putting herself on the table in negotiations, not knowing if he values her enough for the gamble to pay off. But she won’t leave this place without knowing what happened to Max.
“Fine,” Travis says at last. “Better not to leave him, anyway. If they find him, they’ll start thinking you might have been here.”
Her stomach clenches at the thought of having to move his body. “They’ll probably figure out I was here anyway. Pretty sure I exploded my DNA all over your house.”
“Your DNA’s not on file,” Travis says. “I checked.”
Right. Yeah, he’d probably be invested in knowing how traceable she is, given that he abducted her and locked her up for two fucking months.
“Besides,” Travis says, “if they find that amount of blood and figure out it’s yours, you’re not going to be a suspect. They’re going to think you’re dead.”
It prickles the back of her neck. “Only if nobody ever sees me again.”
“You can just let me worry about that.” He adjusts his grip on the shotgun. “Let’s get rid of that body.”
-
It looks like Max tried to swim back to the mainland. She left him in the safest place in the camp, she told him to wait for her, and he couldn’t even stay there until sunrise.
And he’s wearing her clothes, for some reason she’ll never be able to ask him about, so he looks fucking ridiculous.
She closes her eyes, biting back tears. Fuck, she killed all those people to save him.
“Sorry,” Travis says. And that just makes her angrier, because she murdered his family, she never said a word of apology to him, and how fucking dare he make her feel like he’s better than her.
If you hadn’t trapped me in that cage, I’d have come back to get him. He’d still be alive.
She says it in her head; she keeps the words locked up in her throat. Actually saying it would be an invitation for him to throw his family back at her, and she’s not ready to hear it.
He waves her toward the body. “Help me carry him.”
She dives into the lake instead.
“Hey. Hey!” He’s got the gun raised when she surfaces: not pointing at her, but near her. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Washing off.” She swims in a circle, rolls around in the water, trying to get as clean as she can manage. “Max brought my change of clothes over.” It hurts to say his name. “If you want to get away without suspicion, I’m pretty sure you don’t want to be escorting a girl who’s covered in blood and pretty much nude.”
Travis makes a disgruntled noise in the back of his throat. “Make it quick.”
She feels very conscious of her near-nudity when she eventually climbs out of the water. Her skin didn’t feel quite as exposed when there was blood covering every inch of it.
She crouches, reaches out toward Max. Hesitates.
She’s undressed Max so many times before, and the idea of doing it now, as he lies dead and bloodied by the lake - the idea of tainting all those memories-
Bile rises in her throat, and she wraps her arms around her stomach, curls into herself. She manages to stumble over to the lakeside before bringing anything up, but nothing actually comes, in the end, and somehow that feels worse.
When she eventually gives up on trying to throw up, she turns to see Travis holding her clothes out to her. Max’s corpse is lying there in its underwear, humiliated.
But not by her.
-
They wrap Max in a canvas sheet from the camping supplies, put him in the trunk of Travis’s car. Sitting in the car herself, Laura finds herself electrically aware of Max behind her, of the fact that he’s dead and gone, of the fact that she’ll never be this close to him again.
She’s wearing the hoodie he died in, and that makes him feel even closer. She keeps catching herself absently rubbing her fingers back and forth across the bloodied collar.
They drive a long way before Travis eventually parks up near a lake in the woods. He cuffs Laura to the door handle, goes to get Max out of the trunk.
Normally, Laura would complain, would struggle, would make her indignation known. She’s so relieved that he’s not asking her to help dispose of the body that she doesn’t say a word.
-
Travis parks in front of the sheriff’s office. Just sits there for a moment, his hands still on the wheel.
Tempting to throw the door open and bolt. She doubts she’d get far.
He turns to look at Laura at last. Reaches out to touch her face, and she jolts away, her heart suddenly thundering in her chest. She and Max first kissed in his car; he reached for her just like that.
Travis pauses, draws back his hand. “Your eye,” he says.
Oh. Oh, right. So much happened last night that the whole ‘magically regrowing an eye’ thing kind of slipped her mind.
Travis had brought her to the shower room a few times after Max attacked her, cleaned her wounds with gauze, surprisingly gentle. She guesses it’s probably pretty weird to see someone’s eye back once you’ve cleaned out the cavity where it used to be.
He reaches out again, and she tenses up but lets him touch her. He runs his fingers along her cheekbone under the repaired eye, traces the claw marks.
Or where the claw marks used to be, at least. It feels like those might have healed as well. She hasn’t exactly had the chance to look in a mirror lately.
“Want to explain?” he asks.
She shrugs. “Uh, being a werewolf, apparently.”
“I knew they could heal.” He takes his hand away. “Didn’t know it went that far.”
“Yeah.” She takes in a breath, lets it out slowly, resisting the urge to scrub at her cheek. “Yeah, it’s been a weird night.”
The restoration of her eye is one good thing, at least. Not worth it, not close. But it’s something.
-
She ends up back in the same old cell she spent two months in. Home, sweet home.
The difference is that she used to be able to talk to Max between their cells. The cell next to hers is empty now, and she’s not sure how long she’ll be able to stay here on her own before she completely loses her mind.
Maybe she’s lost it already.
“You think you can just keep me in here forever?” she asks, leaning on the bars.
Travis nods, just slightly. “I let my guard down last time. It won’t happen again. Next time you’re writhing around on the cell floor, I’ll just let you die.”
“What difference does it make if I’m in here? Who are you protecting?”
“After you killed my family, you mean?” Travis asks, calm and conversational, and the words lodge in her like bullets. “I couldn’t find Caleb. But I couldn’t find his body, either. So he’s out there somewhere.”
Laura shakes her head. “I won’t tell anyone about him.”
“I don’t know that,” Travis says.
She guesses she could get Travis himself in a lot of trouble, too, given the unlawful imprisonment and the fact that she knows he was at the camp that night. It seems counterproductive to mention that.
“This isn’t a long-term plan,” Laura says. “You can’t just lock me up for the rest of my life. That’s insane.”
Travis leaves without another word.
-
The good news, Laura guesses, is that Travis is a little friendlier than he was during her last bout of imprisonment, even if ‘friendly’ on Travis looks a lot like ‘vaguely hostile’ from anyone else. He’ll let her request showers, rather than deciding the schedule himself; he brings her books if she asks. The books come from his own collection, as far as she can tell, and he doesn’t seem to own anything published in the last century, but it’s something.
Scant consolation when she’s locked in a cell with no release date.
“What will it take?” Laura asks one day, when he comes by to check on her. “Will you let me go if I swear not to say anything? Will you let me go if I seduce you?”
Travis takes half a step back. “Don’t try.”
“Because it won’t work?” Laura asks, tilting her head. “Or because you’re afraid that it will?”
“It won’t work,” Travis says. “Don’t try.”
Laura sighs. Closes her eyes for a moment, braces herself to beg.
“Look,” she says, meeting his stare; his eyes skitter away from her. “If I tell anyone what happened, I’m more screwed than you are. If I say you were there that night, I’m saying I was there that night. I’ll be a suspect, and I’m the one who’ll be convicted, because-” It feels like there’s a blockage in her throat; she has to force the words out. “Because I killed three people.”
He doesn’t say anything. She keeps her eyes on his.
“Please let me out,” she says. “Just let me have a walk, at least. I won’t talk to anyone. I won’t go home. I just don’t want to spend the rest of my life in a cell.”
He’s not going to let her out, she knows. She escaped him once already; he’s not going to let her have the chance again. But she has to try.
“All right,” Travis says, eventually. “We can go for a walk. You’ll stick close to me, and you’ll stay quiet.”
Laura wasn’t expecting that. But she keeps her reaction muted, a shrug. “Okay.”
“‘Okay’?” Travis echoes.
“You’re still keeping me prisoner,” Laura says. “I’m not gonna say thank you. Are we going now?”
His eyes flicker over her. “Not yet.”
She’s kind of hoping for more than that, but he just walks away.
-
It’s a long time before Travis shows up again. He escorts her to the shower room, shoves a bundle of dark clothes and a small box into her arms.
The new clothes make sense; he’s washed her clothes, but the bloodstains are still lingering faintly on them. A part of her is glad he hasn’t been able to get them out completely. Max’s lifeblood on her shirt and hoodie is all she has left of him.
Feels a little weird to picture Travis standing in a clothes store, thinking about what she could wear. It doesn’t look like he’s given that much thought to style, though; the clothes are plain black, totally nondescript.
They’re her size. She guesses he must have checked the labels when he washed everything.
She adjusts her grip to check the box. Hair dye, black.
She looks up at Travis. “Seriously?”
“You’re missing,” Travis points out. “We need to disguise you.”
“You need to disguise me, you mean,” Laura says. “You couldn’t even let me pick the colour?”
“Do you want this walk or not?”
“Fine,” Laura says. “Get out of here and let me shower.”
-
“Okay.” Travis stops in front of her cell. “It’s time.”
“You’re gonna wear that?” Laura asks, looking pointedly at Travis’s sheriff outfit.
Travis looks down at himself, up at her. “What’s wrong with this?”
“Thought you didn’t want us to attract attention.” Her hair’s tied back, so she can’t really see it, but the awareness that it’s the wrong colour feels like an itch; she keeps touching it. “People notice cops.”
“People are definitely going to notice we’re cuffed together if I don’t look like a cop.”
“You’re going to cuff me?” Laura asks. “Seriously? I promise, everyone in the world is going to notice the cop walking down the street and the girl he’s cuffed himself to. If we just go for a normal walk, looking like normal people, nobody’s going to be paying attention.”
“You could escape.”
She’s tired of this argument. “I won’t. You’re a psycho. I genuinely believe you’d shoot me.” His niece, his mom, his dad, his brothers; she’d hesitate to give him another reason to shoot her even if he wasn’t a psycho. “I just want to be outside for a while.”
She’s also really fucking tired of Travis just leaving without any explanation. Has she screwed it up; is she not going to get her walk?
When he comes back, though, he’s in civilian clothes. Navy shirt, black jacket, black pants; maybe he was just following his own style when he bought her the darkest stuff in the store. They might look weirdly twinned, but it’s still less attention-grabbing than obviously being a cop.
“Looking good,” Laura says, raising her eyebrows.
“Shut up.” He turns his key in the cell door. “Let’s go.”
-
North Kill isn’t exactly a thriving place, but there are a handful of people around. Travis watches anyone they pass with an intensity that’s probably going to make some people uncomfortable.
“Relax,” Laura says. “We’ll only look weird if you make it weird. They probably just think you’re my dad.” Something about it catches on her mind as she’s saying it, a question she never bothered to contemplate before. She looks over at Travis. “Do you have kids?”
He shakes his head.
It’s the answer she was expecting; he doesn’t really seem like the fatherly type. Hard to picture him in a relationship, too. But she was kind of hoping to hear that he had kids, that he had more living family left than his missing werewolf nephew.
Maybe it’s for the best. If he did have kids, she’d have killed most of their family members too.
They pass by a general store with a display of newspapers outside. It must have been a couple of weeks at least, but the headlines are still talking about the Hackett’s Quarry massacre. Laura can feel her mind trying to tug her into memories of that night, of Max’s body by the lake, of watching Ryan bleed out and die.
She starts talking to distract herself. “So what if someone commits a crime? You’re gonna lock them up next to me?”
“It’s a quiet town,” Travis says.
She could have guessed that from the fact that she and Max were the only ones in the holding cells for two months. But... “Yeah, but there’s no guarantee you won’t need the cells, right? Honestly, I could do with someone else to talk to.”
“You won’t be talking to anyone,” Travis says. “I can tie you up in the office if I have to.”
Well, that’s successfully distracted her. “You’re planning to tie me up?”
He frowns at her. “It’ll only be for a few days. I’d get them moved.”
Jesus. Better hope the town stays quiet, she guesses.
“I guess someone could hear you if you yelled,” Travis says, reflective. “I’d probably need to gag you. Speaking of which, I thought I told you not to talk while we were out.”
“If it’s any consolation,” Laura says, “I really regret talking.”
-
“You here to take me on another walk?” Laura asks, when he comes by her cell the next evening. “Seems a waste of permanent hair dye never to let me out again.”
She’s not really expecting anything, and she’s startled when he unlocks the door and waves her out. Maybe she built up some goodwill by not trying to escape last time.
He drives her out to the woods, and she’s about ninety percent sure that she’s about to get murdered. But apparently they actually are just here for a walk.
It feels good to be outdoors in the fresh air, even if it’s hard to relax when she knows she’ll probably take a bullet if she strays too far in the wrong direction. She has a suspicion that Travis would be more reluctant to shoot her in the town. In the woods, without witnesses, there’s no guarantee of safety.
They set out near dusk, and it’s getting dark by the time they make their way back to the car. Laura’s always liked the woods, but she has more complicated feelings about them now. She keeps glancing up at the sky, just to remind herself that the moon isn’t full.
-
“I shouldn’t have told you how to cure the bite.”
It’s Travis’s voice, of course; it’s not like she ever hears anyone else’s. Laura doesn’t move from where she is, lying on her back on the bed, eyes closed. “Yeah, you fucked up.”
Silence. She thinks about what he’s really saying. Taking responsibility for Max, maybe, and that helps. But...
She opens her eyes. “It’s not your fault your family died,” she says to the ceiling.
More silence.
When she eventually turns her head to the side, there’s nobody outside her cell. She doesn’t know exactly when he left; she doesn’t know if he heard her.
If he didn’t, he’s missed his chance.
-
“You ready for a walk?”
They’ve settled into a routine, wandering through the town or the woods every evening. If Laura’s honest, a part of her gets increasingly impatient and excited as the day gets later, like a dog trying to drag its owner out of the door. Maybe there’s still a touch of wolf in her somewhere.
She rolls off the bed and yanks on her shoes, and it’s only then that she registers something’s wrong. Travis is holding a shotgun.
Laura goes still. He’s carried a handgun on all their walks before, holstered; she’s used to that by now. But he’s holding a shotgun.
He follows her gaze to the gun. Looks up at her again. “Full moon tonight.”
“You’re still going after Silas?” she asks.
He nods. “Caleb’s still out there.”
Silence. The memories of that night are curling dark tendrils around her: struggling against Max, his hot breath on her face and his teeth in her arm-
“You want me to come with you?” she asks.
He shifts the shotgun a little in his arms. It’s hard to take her eyes off it. “I know you’re handy with a gun.”
Laura raises her eyebrows. “You’re planning to give me a gun?”
“I’m ending this tonight. I’ll take the risks I have to.” He pauses. “You can stay if you want.”
It’s tempting to stay. She could really, really do without ever seeing a werewolf again. But...
“What happens to me if you get killed out there?” she asks.
He doesn’t answer. She can fill in the blanks herself. Nobody else knows she’s locked up here.
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll help.”
“Don’t kill my nephew,” he says.
She thinks about saying something catty, maybe not if he doesn’t try to kill me first. But he’s lost enough, and she means it when she says, “I won’t.”
He hands her a second shotgun on their way out of the station. She weighs it in her hands for a moment, thinks about how she could just shoot him and leave.
She slings it over her shoulder and follows him into the night.
To nobody's surprise, two days after I said I wasn't experiencing the drive to write for The Quarry, I'm posting fanfiction for The Quarry. Travis and Laura have a very weird dynamic, and I hugely enjoyed writing it.
Title: Prisoner's Dilemma
Fandom: The Quarry
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Travis and Laura gen, with Max/Laura references and some slight Travis/Laura implications.
Wordcount: 3,600
Summary: “This isn’t a long-term plan,” Laura says. “You can’t just lock me up for the rest of my life. That’s insane.”
I've popped the 'notes' section under the cut because it contains Quarry spoilers.
Notes: This is set after the potential ending to The Quarry in which Travis takes Ryan's gun and locks Laura in the basement, meaning that Silas is never defeated. The ending can be seen here.
Travis comes back to the cage in the morning, moving quickly and with purpose. He’s still holding the shotgun, although at least he’s keeping it pointed down.
“Let me the hell out,” Laura says, quietly.
He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even meet her eyes. He just moves to unlock the door, and that puts Laura on edge. She backs into a corner of the cage.
He looks at her then. “Thought you wanted to leave.”
“I get the feeling you’re not just letting me go,” she says.
“A lot of people are going to be wondering where their kids are,” he says. “There are bodies all over the camp. If the police find us when they get here, it’s not going to look good.”
“Oh?” Laura asks, her voice hiking in pitch. She looks pointedly around at the bars. “Oh, what are they going to do: arrest me?”
“They’ll probably look into me, after...” He pauses. “But they can’t prove it. Neither of us were meant to be here tonight. I’ve wiped the cameras. We could get away clean, but we need to move fast.”
Images come to Laura’s mind, unwanted: shooting Travis’s mother’s face off, breaking his father’s neck, leaving his werewolf niece floating face-down in the swimming pool. Talking Ryan into shooting Chris. Most of Travis’s family gone at her hands, and he’s the one who’ll fall under suspicion for it.
Maybe that’s what finally drives her to follow him out of the cage.
She doesn’t apologise. But she touches his elbow, briefly. She thinks she might see him tense a little, but it’s so subtle that it’s hard to be sure if he even felt it through his sleeve.
-
Something’s bothering Laura as they walk out into the morning light. Travis seems to think they can get away with this, that nobody knows they were here tonight.
Those counsellors knew Laura was here. Does that mean none of them made it? Did one of the wolves get them, or was it something else?
Her eyes stray to the shotgun in Travis’s hand.
He wouldn’t have killed them, right? He definitely had more than enough of a reason to kill Laura, and somehow she’s still alive.
And then there’s...
“Where’s Max?” she asks.
“Dead,” Travis says.
Laura stops walking. “No.”
“Found him down by the lake,” Travis says. “Looked like a werewolf got him.”
“No,” Laura says. Fuck, it could be true. “I don’t believe you. You - you’re lying, you just don’t want me to get back to him-”
Travis lets out a hard sigh, as if she’s somehow overreacting to this. “We need to keep moving.”
“Show me.”
She left him on the island; he was supposed to be safe. But if he - if he tried to cross the lake, like a fucking idiot-
“I’m the one with the gun,” Travis says. “You’re not in a position to negotiate.”
“If you don’t take me to see him, I’ll make you shoot me with it.”
They stare at each other. Laura feels exposed and vulnerable, putting herself on the table in negotiations, not knowing if he values her enough for the gamble to pay off. But she won’t leave this place without knowing what happened to Max.
“Fine,” Travis says at last. “Better not to leave him, anyway. If they find him, they’ll start thinking you might have been here.”
Her stomach clenches at the thought of having to move his body. “They’ll probably figure out I was here anyway. Pretty sure I exploded my DNA all over your house.”
“Your DNA’s not on file,” Travis says. “I checked.”
Right. Yeah, he’d probably be invested in knowing how traceable she is, given that he abducted her and locked her up for two fucking months.
“Besides,” Travis says, “if they find that amount of blood and figure out it’s yours, you’re not going to be a suspect. They’re going to think you’re dead.”
It prickles the back of her neck. “Only if nobody ever sees me again.”
“You can just let me worry about that.” He adjusts his grip on the shotgun. “Let’s get rid of that body.”
-
It looks like Max tried to swim back to the mainland. She left him in the safest place in the camp, she told him to wait for her, and he couldn’t even stay there until sunrise.
And he’s wearing her clothes, for some reason she’ll never be able to ask him about, so he looks fucking ridiculous.
She closes her eyes, biting back tears. Fuck, she killed all those people to save him.
“Sorry,” Travis says. And that just makes her angrier, because she murdered his family, she never said a word of apology to him, and how fucking dare he make her feel like he’s better than her.
If you hadn’t trapped me in that cage, I’d have come back to get him. He’d still be alive.
She says it in her head; she keeps the words locked up in her throat. Actually saying it would be an invitation for him to throw his family back at her, and she’s not ready to hear it.
He waves her toward the body. “Help me carry him.”
She dives into the lake instead.
“Hey. Hey!” He’s got the gun raised when she surfaces: not pointing at her, but near her. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Washing off.” She swims in a circle, rolls around in the water, trying to get as clean as she can manage. “Max brought my change of clothes over.” It hurts to say his name. “If you want to get away without suspicion, I’m pretty sure you don’t want to be escorting a girl who’s covered in blood and pretty much nude.”
Travis makes a disgruntled noise in the back of his throat. “Make it quick.”
She feels very conscious of her near-nudity when she eventually climbs out of the water. Her skin didn’t feel quite as exposed when there was blood covering every inch of it.
She crouches, reaches out toward Max. Hesitates.
She’s undressed Max so many times before, and the idea of doing it now, as he lies dead and bloodied by the lake - the idea of tainting all those memories-
Bile rises in her throat, and she wraps her arms around her stomach, curls into herself. She manages to stumble over to the lakeside before bringing anything up, but nothing actually comes, in the end, and somehow that feels worse.
When she eventually gives up on trying to throw up, she turns to see Travis holding her clothes out to her. Max’s corpse is lying there in its underwear, humiliated.
But not by her.
-
They wrap Max in a canvas sheet from the camping supplies, put him in the trunk of Travis’s car. Sitting in the car herself, Laura finds herself electrically aware of Max behind her, of the fact that he’s dead and gone, of the fact that she’ll never be this close to him again.
She’s wearing the hoodie he died in, and that makes him feel even closer. She keeps catching herself absently rubbing her fingers back and forth across the bloodied collar.
They drive a long way before Travis eventually parks up near a lake in the woods. He cuffs Laura to the door handle, goes to get Max out of the trunk.
Normally, Laura would complain, would struggle, would make her indignation known. She’s so relieved that he’s not asking her to help dispose of the body that she doesn’t say a word.
-
Travis parks in front of the sheriff’s office. Just sits there for a moment, his hands still on the wheel.
Tempting to throw the door open and bolt. She doubts she’d get far.
He turns to look at Laura at last. Reaches out to touch her face, and she jolts away, her heart suddenly thundering in her chest. She and Max first kissed in his car; he reached for her just like that.
Travis pauses, draws back his hand. “Your eye,” he says.
Oh. Oh, right. So much happened last night that the whole ‘magically regrowing an eye’ thing kind of slipped her mind.
Travis had brought her to the shower room a few times after Max attacked her, cleaned her wounds with gauze, surprisingly gentle. She guesses it’s probably pretty weird to see someone’s eye back once you’ve cleaned out the cavity where it used to be.
He reaches out again, and she tenses up but lets him touch her. He runs his fingers along her cheekbone under the repaired eye, traces the claw marks.
Or where the claw marks used to be, at least. It feels like those might have healed as well. She hasn’t exactly had the chance to look in a mirror lately.
“Want to explain?” he asks.
She shrugs. “Uh, being a werewolf, apparently.”
“I knew they could heal.” He takes his hand away. “Didn’t know it went that far.”
“Yeah.” She takes in a breath, lets it out slowly, resisting the urge to scrub at her cheek. “Yeah, it’s been a weird night.”
The restoration of her eye is one good thing, at least. Not worth it, not close. But it’s something.
-
She ends up back in the same old cell she spent two months in. Home, sweet home.
The difference is that she used to be able to talk to Max between their cells. The cell next to hers is empty now, and she’s not sure how long she’ll be able to stay here on her own before she completely loses her mind.
Maybe she’s lost it already.
“You think you can just keep me in here forever?” she asks, leaning on the bars.
Travis nods, just slightly. “I let my guard down last time. It won’t happen again. Next time you’re writhing around on the cell floor, I’ll just let you die.”
“What difference does it make if I’m in here? Who are you protecting?”
“After you killed my family, you mean?” Travis asks, calm and conversational, and the words lodge in her like bullets. “I couldn’t find Caleb. But I couldn’t find his body, either. So he’s out there somewhere.”
Laura shakes her head. “I won’t tell anyone about him.”
“I don’t know that,” Travis says.
She guesses she could get Travis himself in a lot of trouble, too, given the unlawful imprisonment and the fact that she knows he was at the camp that night. It seems counterproductive to mention that.
“This isn’t a long-term plan,” Laura says. “You can’t just lock me up for the rest of my life. That’s insane.”
Travis leaves without another word.
-
The good news, Laura guesses, is that Travis is a little friendlier than he was during her last bout of imprisonment, even if ‘friendly’ on Travis looks a lot like ‘vaguely hostile’ from anyone else. He’ll let her request showers, rather than deciding the schedule himself; he brings her books if she asks. The books come from his own collection, as far as she can tell, and he doesn’t seem to own anything published in the last century, but it’s something.
Scant consolation when she’s locked in a cell with no release date.
“What will it take?” Laura asks one day, when he comes by to check on her. “Will you let me go if I swear not to say anything? Will you let me go if I seduce you?”
Travis takes half a step back. “Don’t try.”
“Because it won’t work?” Laura asks, tilting her head. “Or because you’re afraid that it will?”
“It won’t work,” Travis says. “Don’t try.”
Laura sighs. Closes her eyes for a moment, braces herself to beg.
“Look,” she says, meeting his stare; his eyes skitter away from her. “If I tell anyone what happened, I’m more screwed than you are. If I say you were there that night, I’m saying I was there that night. I’ll be a suspect, and I’m the one who’ll be convicted, because-” It feels like there’s a blockage in her throat; she has to force the words out. “Because I killed three people.”
He doesn’t say anything. She keeps her eyes on his.
“Please let me out,” she says. “Just let me have a walk, at least. I won’t talk to anyone. I won’t go home. I just don’t want to spend the rest of my life in a cell.”
He’s not going to let her out, she knows. She escaped him once already; he’s not going to let her have the chance again. But she has to try.
“All right,” Travis says, eventually. “We can go for a walk. You’ll stick close to me, and you’ll stay quiet.”
Laura wasn’t expecting that. But she keeps her reaction muted, a shrug. “Okay.”
“‘Okay’?” Travis echoes.
“You’re still keeping me prisoner,” Laura says. “I’m not gonna say thank you. Are we going now?”
His eyes flicker over her. “Not yet.”
She’s kind of hoping for more than that, but he just walks away.
-
It’s a long time before Travis shows up again. He escorts her to the shower room, shoves a bundle of dark clothes and a small box into her arms.
The new clothes make sense; he’s washed her clothes, but the bloodstains are still lingering faintly on them. A part of her is glad he hasn’t been able to get them out completely. Max’s lifeblood on her shirt and hoodie is all she has left of him.
Feels a little weird to picture Travis standing in a clothes store, thinking about what she could wear. It doesn’t look like he’s given that much thought to style, though; the clothes are plain black, totally nondescript.
They’re her size. She guesses he must have checked the labels when he washed everything.
She adjusts her grip to check the box. Hair dye, black.
She looks up at Travis. “Seriously?”
“You’re missing,” Travis points out. “We need to disguise you.”
“You need to disguise me, you mean,” Laura says. “You couldn’t even let me pick the colour?”
“Do you want this walk or not?”
“Fine,” Laura says. “Get out of here and let me shower.”
-
“Okay.” Travis stops in front of her cell. “It’s time.”
“You’re gonna wear that?” Laura asks, looking pointedly at Travis’s sheriff outfit.
Travis looks down at himself, up at her. “What’s wrong with this?”
“Thought you didn’t want us to attract attention.” Her hair’s tied back, so she can’t really see it, but the awareness that it’s the wrong colour feels like an itch; she keeps touching it. “People notice cops.”
“People are definitely going to notice we’re cuffed together if I don’t look like a cop.”
“You’re going to cuff me?” Laura asks. “Seriously? I promise, everyone in the world is going to notice the cop walking down the street and the girl he’s cuffed himself to. If we just go for a normal walk, looking like normal people, nobody’s going to be paying attention.”
“You could escape.”
She’s tired of this argument. “I won’t. You’re a psycho. I genuinely believe you’d shoot me.” His niece, his mom, his dad, his brothers; she’d hesitate to give him another reason to shoot her even if he wasn’t a psycho. “I just want to be outside for a while.”
She’s also really fucking tired of Travis just leaving without any explanation. Has she screwed it up; is she not going to get her walk?
When he comes back, though, he’s in civilian clothes. Navy shirt, black jacket, black pants; maybe he was just following his own style when he bought her the darkest stuff in the store. They might look weirdly twinned, but it’s still less attention-grabbing than obviously being a cop.
“Looking good,” Laura says, raising her eyebrows.
“Shut up.” He turns his key in the cell door. “Let’s go.”
-
North Kill isn’t exactly a thriving place, but there are a handful of people around. Travis watches anyone they pass with an intensity that’s probably going to make some people uncomfortable.
“Relax,” Laura says. “We’ll only look weird if you make it weird. They probably just think you’re my dad.” Something about it catches on her mind as she’s saying it, a question she never bothered to contemplate before. She looks over at Travis. “Do you have kids?”
He shakes his head.
It’s the answer she was expecting; he doesn’t really seem like the fatherly type. Hard to picture him in a relationship, too. But she was kind of hoping to hear that he had kids, that he had more living family left than his missing werewolf nephew.
Maybe it’s for the best. If he did have kids, she’d have killed most of their family members too.
They pass by a general store with a display of newspapers outside. It must have been a couple of weeks at least, but the headlines are still talking about the Hackett’s Quarry massacre. Laura can feel her mind trying to tug her into memories of that night, of Max’s body by the lake, of watching Ryan bleed out and die.
She starts talking to distract herself. “So what if someone commits a crime? You’re gonna lock them up next to me?”
“It’s a quiet town,” Travis says.
She could have guessed that from the fact that she and Max were the only ones in the holding cells for two months. But... “Yeah, but there’s no guarantee you won’t need the cells, right? Honestly, I could do with someone else to talk to.”
“You won’t be talking to anyone,” Travis says. “I can tie you up in the office if I have to.”
Well, that’s successfully distracted her. “You’re planning to tie me up?”
He frowns at her. “It’ll only be for a few days. I’d get them moved.”
Jesus. Better hope the town stays quiet, she guesses.
“I guess someone could hear you if you yelled,” Travis says, reflective. “I’d probably need to gag you. Speaking of which, I thought I told you not to talk while we were out.”
“If it’s any consolation,” Laura says, “I really regret talking.”
-
“You here to take me on another walk?” Laura asks, when he comes by her cell the next evening. “Seems a waste of permanent hair dye never to let me out again.”
She’s not really expecting anything, and she’s startled when he unlocks the door and waves her out. Maybe she built up some goodwill by not trying to escape last time.
He drives her out to the woods, and she’s about ninety percent sure that she’s about to get murdered. But apparently they actually are just here for a walk.
It feels good to be outdoors in the fresh air, even if it’s hard to relax when she knows she’ll probably take a bullet if she strays too far in the wrong direction. She has a suspicion that Travis would be more reluctant to shoot her in the town. In the woods, without witnesses, there’s no guarantee of safety.
They set out near dusk, and it’s getting dark by the time they make their way back to the car. Laura’s always liked the woods, but she has more complicated feelings about them now. She keeps glancing up at the sky, just to remind herself that the moon isn’t full.
-
“I shouldn’t have told you how to cure the bite.”
It’s Travis’s voice, of course; it’s not like she ever hears anyone else’s. Laura doesn’t move from where she is, lying on her back on the bed, eyes closed. “Yeah, you fucked up.”
Silence. She thinks about what he’s really saying. Taking responsibility for Max, maybe, and that helps. But...
She opens her eyes. “It’s not your fault your family died,” she says to the ceiling.
More silence.
When she eventually turns her head to the side, there’s nobody outside her cell. She doesn’t know exactly when he left; she doesn’t know if he heard her.
If he didn’t, he’s missed his chance.
-
“You ready for a walk?”
They’ve settled into a routine, wandering through the town or the woods every evening. If Laura’s honest, a part of her gets increasingly impatient and excited as the day gets later, like a dog trying to drag its owner out of the door. Maybe there’s still a touch of wolf in her somewhere.
She rolls off the bed and yanks on her shoes, and it’s only then that she registers something’s wrong. Travis is holding a shotgun.
Laura goes still. He’s carried a handgun on all their walks before, holstered; she’s used to that by now. But he’s holding a shotgun.
He follows her gaze to the gun. Looks up at her again. “Full moon tonight.”
“You’re still going after Silas?” she asks.
He nods. “Caleb’s still out there.”
Silence. The memories of that night are curling dark tendrils around her: struggling against Max, his hot breath on her face and his teeth in her arm-
“You want me to come with you?” she asks.
He shifts the shotgun a little in his arms. It’s hard to take her eyes off it. “I know you’re handy with a gun.”
Laura raises her eyebrows. “You’re planning to give me a gun?”
“I’m ending this tonight. I’ll take the risks I have to.” He pauses. “You can stay if you want.”
It’s tempting to stay. She could really, really do without ever seeing a werewolf again. But...
“What happens to me if you get killed out there?” she asks.
He doesn’t answer. She can fill in the blanks herself. Nobody else knows she’s locked up here.
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll help.”
“Don’t kill my nephew,” he says.
She thinks about saying something catty, maybe not if he doesn’t try to kill me first. But he’s lost enough, and she means it when she says, “I won’t.”
He hands her a second shotgun on their way out of the station. She weighs it in her hands for a moment, thinks about how she could just shoot him and leave.
She slings it over her shoulder and follows him into the night.