#this chapter features: elliot being an absolute mess

[consumedkings-archive]

ancient names, pt. vi

A John Seed/Original Female Character Fanfic

Ancient Names, pt vi: dark, and drenched in longing

Masterlink Post

Word Count: ~4.7k

Rating: M for now, rating will change in later chapters as things develop.

Warnings: Language, some “light” religious blasphemy (it’s Far Cry 5). Strong canon deviance from here on out. Mentions of blood/carnage, the frantic energy of people who both hate and are attracted to each other. Also, for this chapter in particular, the forced use of psychotropic drugs (also canon-typical?? I guess). John being himself. Per usual.

Notes: Hi! I'm going to keep these short and sweet because, basically, I have nothing to say for myself. I hope you guys enjoy! I mean it when I say every interaction makes my day. I swear I'm just as awkward in a real conversation as I sound in these notes and I'm not scary at all, so please feel free to come and say hi!

As always, thank you again to everyone who reads! I am so happy to be back in a writing groove with these two idiots again.

Theirs was a strange sort of allyship.

Tentative, to be sure, and certainly strained. But if four days ago you’d told John that he’d be sitting in a van with Junior Deputy Elliot Honeysett driving him straight to his brother, the man she'd slapped cuffs on and tried to arrest at the behest of a U.S. marshal, he’d have laughed in your face. The idea was ridiculous. Expansively, endlessly, incredibly ridiculous.

And yet, if John ignored the clink of the cuffs binding them together, and the knowledge that this van belonged to a strange, traveling band of cultists, he almost felt like he had been tricked into some kind of fucked-up romcom. As soon as they hit the highway, Elliot turned the radio on to the resistance’s repaired music channels, smoked her cigarette down, and leaned back against her seat as though she had not been viciously threatening to kill him just days ago.

Did she still think that? Did he care? John felt his brows furrow and he turned his head away, watching the treeline. He didn’t think he cared. He would say, so what if Elliot still wants to kill me? She needed him, and that was more than he’d gotten out of her in the whole time that she’d been under his thumb.

He didn’t care if she still wanted to kill him, and the thought that maybe she might did not thrill him, and he was not distracted by the stretch of her midriff when she shifted in her seat, and—

—And these were all things that he didn’t struggle with, certainly, because if asked, John would say that yes, he supposed that Elliot Honeysett could be considered conventionally attractive , but only when she wasn’t baring her teeth like a wild animal, only when she didn’t have a gun in her hands, only when she wasn’t making you say please to save the life of someone you didn’t even know the name of.

So, yes, he supposed, she was pretty: and John did not know why in particular he had to leap through those loops to get to that point silently, by himself, but, here he was.

“Oh, I love this song,” Elliot announced suddenly, turning the volume up and startling John out of the reverie he’d plunged himself into. His eyes narrowed when he recognized the song; the very typical back-water-town radio station playing Guns’N’Roses was not beyond his comprehension, and yet he found himself displeased nonetheless.

“Really, deputy?” John asked, staring at her across the console. “You love this song?”

Elliot dropped her glasses— my glasses, John reminded himself irritably—down the bridge of her nose so she could stare at him over the top of them. “It’s a classic, John.”

The radio blared the chorus of Welcome To The Jungle , and John said, “I cannot take you seriously with this music.”

She laughed, apparently pleased by his disdain, cranked the volume higher. Over the sound of aggressive guitar riffs sliding up and down and Boomer barking excitedly in the back, John shouted, “Why don’t we just alert everyone of where we are, hm?”

“Oh, you’re spoiling the fun.” She turned the volume back down, tsking her tongue, and John rolled his eyes. It was so very typical Elliot, to want to enjoy herself at the exact moment that he was trying to remind himself of all the reasons that he disliked her.

A period of silence stretched between them; tranquil, blissful, just for one moment, before John’s gaze slid back to her. She did look peaceful, at that moment, her ponytail smooth and adjusted, her brows relaxed, coughing occasionally into the crook of her elbow but otherwise breathing fine. Relaxed. At ease—with him, of all people. Wouldn't she be furious to know it?

John’s fingers itched. Soft, he thought, reminded of Joseph’s words; you have to love them, John. It wasn’t his style, not particularly, more suited to persuasion rather than fostering mercy as Joseph did. 

He kept his voice light and casual when he asked, “Where did you get your scars, deputy?”

He watched—and watched and watched —to catch her reaction. He couldn’t see her eyes through the reflective shades she wore, but he did see the way her fingers tightened on the wheel, saw the push and pull of her jaw muscle as her teeth worked in her mouth, grinding, perhaps crushing the words she wanted to say between them. He braced himself for the vitriol; it would certainly be something along the lines of, I got them from Go Fuck Yourself USA, John, I’m the goddamn mayor or any suitable string of expletives.

Instead, Elliot prompted, “Who’s asking?”

John’s eyes narrowed. “Pardon?”

“I said, who’s asking?” she reiterated, not once looking at him. “Is this John Seed, or John Duncan?” Hearing her say the name like this—as though John Duncan were at all comparable to the man that John Seed was—made his chest prickle, anger and disdain welling up inside of him.

“That’s not my name,” John bit out. “Don’t play games with me, deputy—”

“I know your fucking cult psycho-bombing tactics, Seed,” Elliot replied, her voice sharp and quick as a whip. John opened his mouth to protest, but she went on, “You might think you’re being clever, waiting until I crack a smile to ask me an invasive question, but you’re not. First, you ask me where my scars come from, and when I open up about my past traumas—”

“So it’s a trauma,” John insisted, but Elliot was already railroading on; any footing he felt he’d was gone.

“—then you say some stupid shit like, have you ever really felt at home with your family, Deputy Honeysett? I could give you a home, Deputy Honeysett, which you would say, because for some reason you don’t understand the concept of someone being a Junior Deputy or having a first name—”

“It was just a question, Elliot ,” John interrupted, effectively ending her barrage. “I was only trying to make small talk with you. I noticed them back at the ranch, and since we’re in a car for several hours together, I thought…”

Elliot’s lips pressed into a thin line. “There’s your first mistake, then. You tried to form a cohesive train of thought.” Her voice dripped with a honeyed, pitiful timbre, “I know how hard that is for you.”

“Alright, thank you for this stimulating conversation, you literal child,” John snipped out. “And you’re still wearing my fucking glasses, by the way.”

“Take them back, then.”

John stared at her. The idea of putting his hand close to Elliot’s face was not only a dangerous one because it was in close proximity to her teeth—proven by her many run-ins with his acolytes before to be suitable weapons in a pinch—but because he worried.

He worried that the willingness for soft contact would make him soft, the way it had felt when Elliot tucked herself against his chest to combat the chilly Montana evening. He worried that getting familiar and comfortable with a feral and untamed creature like Elliot Honeysett would change him, and to be changed by someone like her —

“Consider them a gift.” He kept his voice clipped. “From me to you. They’re Gucci, you know.”

“Oh, very generous of you, Herald. What, little old me, nobody Elliot from Hope County, Nowhere-Montana, with her first pair of Gucci shades? Why, I’d never .” A little bit of a sweet Southern-belle drawl slipped in there, and John didn’t know if it was because of the dramatics or if it was an accent she’d mostly lost and only occasionally regained.

But his stomach twisted a little when she used his title, the patronizing drip of her tone going straight to the headache blooming behind his eyes. “You know, deputy—”

Instinctively, he paused; he waited for her timely interjection, as she was so comfortable doing, but yet again the moment he anticipated it she remained silent. Elliot arched a dark-honey eyebrow and waited. John cleared his throat.

“I think I’ve never met a more troubled woman than you,” he continued casually. “To suspect me of such foul intentions when I only want to know my driving companion better, I’m genuinely wounded.”

“That’s very sweet of you,” Elliot acquiesced, and for a moment—just one teeny-tiny moment—John thought she meant it; and then she said, “But I’d prefer we not get too friendly, as you were just considering drowning me in a river filled with drugs just a few days ago, and...”

The blonde’s words trailed off. The van rolled to a crawl, and when he looked forward, he saw the remains of the fire assault that they had just escaped a day ago; two Eden’s Gate trucks, and flimsy barricades that had been pushed off of the road. No bodies in sight.

It was almost a relief, if he was being honest—he wasn’t sure how many more flower-stuffed corpses he could see before he finally decided to rip his own eyeballs out.

Any playful heat had died out of Elliot’s expression. She was somber now, the lines of her expression harder than before. In the back of the van, Boomer whined, and John could hear the swishing of his tail against the floor.

“I don’t like that they took the bodies,” she said after a moment.

“Me either.”

The next thirty minutes of the drive passed in strange, awkward silence. Elliot looked like she wanted to say something and wouldn’t; he could feel her gaze dipping over to him on occasion, but each time he thought her mouth was opening to let out what was on her mind, she’d just exhale. By the time they’d cleared the field where the tracks from their last ride had dug in and left the barricade far behind them, dark, heavy storm clouds had rolled in; he rolled his window down and felt the heady pre-storm humidity like a slap in the face.

No good, John thought, a few drops hitting his hand before he rolled up the window. He felt the thunder rumble deep in the marrow of his bones. The rain went from a drizzle to a steady silver sheet, and then to a torrential downpour by the time they’d been driving for just under an hour, and eventually Elliot pulled to the side of the road.

“We have to pull in somewhere,” she announced. “This van is great for toting cults around, but it’s not great for avoiding hydroplaning off of the road.”

“Well, isn’t off-roading your specialty?” John quipped. She shot him a glare, pushing his sunglasses up onto her head and nestling them into her hair.

“Yes, actually, now that you mention it,” Elliot replied tartly, “but not when I can’t see where I’m fucking going.”

“We’re only an hour and a half or so away from Joseph,” John insisted. “You really don’t think you can make it there?”

Elliot heaved a sigh. Her fingers fluttered over her forehead and the bridge of her nose like she had a headache that was a twin to his own, and every time he spoke, he was exacerbating it. That was probably true—and John was happier for it because the times when Elliot had been most compliant were when she was the most genuinely inhibited.

“I don’t like not being able to see who’s behind us or coming around the corner,” she insisted after a moment. “It doesn’t matter how close or far Joseph is. What matters is that there’s a group of nutjobs out there who apparently have insurmountable resources to take over a whole county in a single day, and I will not —”

She stopped, as though to calm herself, and John waited; impatient, but silent.

“I will not,” Elliot finished, “get kidnapped by one more fucking cult, John Seed.”

Lightning crackled in the distance, and the rain pelted the windshield violently. Another rumble of thunder went spiraling above them; Boomer whined, his ears flat against his skull. John could see Elliot’s fingers gripping the steering wheel until they went bone-white, but each time her grip loosened to let the circulation back in through her fingers, they trembled.

“Fine,” John said. “Pull off into the trees up there, then. We’ll take a break and pick up again when the rain lets up.”

“Thank you,” Elliot said, pulling down from the side of the road and winding her way out of sight of any traffic that might be coming; no venom laced her voice, only relief, and there was no follow-up jab, either. Under the shelter of the trees, the rain felt less violent, and already John felt the tension fleeing his own shoulders.

As soon as Elliot turned the van off, the motor ticking absently, John rumbled, “I think that’s the nicest you’ve ever been to me, deputy.”

She got up out of the seat, shimmying her way past the console and into the back where Boomer had been enjoying the right, pulling hard enough to yank John’s arm and force him to shimmy back with her. The gesture was awkward, and he only complied because he didn’t want to be sitting in the front seat with their arms slung at the angle to allow her back there.

“It’s incredible what a little decency can get you,” she deadpanned. She opened the back door of the van to let Boomer out, the dog taking off happily into the brush. Stretching out her legs in the more spacious, empty back of the van, Elliot wiped some rain from her face and made herself comfortable. John settled against the wall of the car, absently pulling at the cuff still locked around his wrist.

“I can be plenty decent,” he replied, almost sly, a little grin ticking the corner of his mouth upward. “But you already knew that.”

Elliot groaned. “You’re still on about the fact that one time in a bar like, three years ago, you hit on me when I was drunk and you might have had a chance?”

“I think we both know there’s a little more to it than that.”

She rolled her eyes. She could not have, perhaps, been more dramatic than she was in that moment, although John reminded himself that he had often considered Elliot could not be more of many things—impatient, infuriating, prone to violence—than she already was, and she had proved him wrong many times before.

“All I’m saying is,” John continued, “somewhere, deep down in that teeny-tiny heart of yours, deputy—”

“One time,” Elliot interrupted, holding up a finger to accentuate the number. “One time, many moons ago, I thought a man named John in a bar was objectively attractive. This was before I knew what your personality was like.”

John laughed. “You don’t need to like someone’s personality to fuck them, deputy,” he said and basked in the way her expression scrunched up, as though a particularly sour flavor had just seeped into her mouth.

“I do,” Elliot replied, “and every day, I thank God that Joey Hudson had the good sense to keep me on the straight and narrow.”

“Amen.”

Her gaze flashed with something that might have been amusement. She coughed into her elbow, turning her face away from him to glance out the window at the trees, their branches and leaves swaying in the wind but becoming more and more still the deeper into the woods they went.

“So you think I’m attractive, then.”

“Please stop talking,” Elliot groaned, head lolling against the back of the driver’s seat. “John, if I tell you that I think you’re handsome when your mouth is closed, will you shut the fuck up?”

John’s mouth curved in a half-grin, his chest welling pleasantly at her words. It may have been more than a little petty, to like the words coming out of her mouth—Elliot Honeysett, who would probably strangle him to death with her bare hands if given the opportunity, admitting that he was handsome.

“I might be more inclined,” he offered, sly. She rolled her eyes.

“I’m closing my eyes,” she announced, kicking her legs out and nudging his foot out of the way.

Absolutely childish, John thought absently and without much fervor, compliantly moving his foot out of the way for her. “Just use your words, deputy.”

“Certainly, anything for you,” Elliot purred. “I want you to shut up.”

He flashed her a grin, leaning his head back against the window. Rain pattered against the glass, and somewhere out in the distance, he heard Boomer’s happy bark as he did whatever it was that dogs did in the woods; hunt smaller things, perhaps.

“It’s nice to want things, isn’t it?”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Elliot did not know how long she had been asleep when she finally woke up.

She knew that she had been allowed to sleep uninterrupted, which was the first red flag—there was no way that John would just let her sleep and sleep and let the day tick them by. As she slowly came to, through the corner of her eye she could see that he’d fallen asleep, too, shifting restlessly against the window.

The second thing she realized was that the rain hadn’t stopped, and the reason that she became immediately aware of it was that the back doors of the van were open. She hadn’t done it, obviously, and she couldn’t fathom why in the world John would leave the back doors of the van open, so then the question in her foggy mind persisted; who?

And then someone grabbed her ankle and pulled.

The back of her head hit the metal floor of the van with a heavy thud , the world spinning in her vision as she was pulled closer to the outside world, even as her legs kicked. Panic rose in her throat, violent and hot, and instantly her hand went to reach for John, his name spilling out of her mouth in a desperate attempt to wake him up.

His eyes fluttered open. Groggily, he said, “Elliot?” and as she was yanked violently down he got pulled, too, slammed forward face-first into the floor of the van, biting out a swear that only barely registered in her mind as she struggled to wake up.

She twisted to look at her attacker—a tall redhead with a nasty scar dragging his lip in a permanent sneer. Elliot recognized him as the same red-head that had been handling Faith for the woman from before, the same man who’d nearly rammed his van into hers on the road just a day ago.

His hand fisted in the front of her shirt; he drawled in his thick, round accent, “Go back to sleep, little one,” and slammed her head back against the floor with purpose, her vision going sticky, staticky black on the edges.

She felt the heavy pain blooming behind her eyes. The weight of it dragged her eyelids down; she swam in inky black, only vaguely aware of the sound of raised voices, the feeling of a damp cloth being draped over her mouth, the sensation of floating, as though she were drifting underwater with everyone else shouting above her; all of these things began to fade, slipping through her fingers like sand until there was nothing left except for the empty, hollow black filling her up.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

“Elliot?”

It was John’s voice, she thought, or maybe not; it was hard to tell. Hands pressed to the tops of her shoulders, the pressure a welcoming comfort. Her chin was tucked against her chest, and she lifted her head—not without significant effort—and opened her eyes.

The world pulsed around her, colors bleeding brightly and violently against her irises. She was in a field—

(I’m in a field? But the floor—)

—and John was kneeling in front of her, his hands coming up to take her face. There was no smugness, no venom in his expression; only concern.

“I was so worried,” John said. “I was so worried about you, Elliot.”

“John,” Elliot said, and when she said his name it felt like the letters were spilling out of her mouth, choking her on the way out. A warm breeze tickled the edges of her vision, and the sunlight hemorrhaged into the grass, into the ground, oscillating in time with her heartbeat. A strange, sticky feeling wound up inside of her.

John said her name again. When she looked at him, his eye sockets were blooming, beautiful purple blooms pouring out of them, brushing his cheekbones like eyelashes. The feeling in her chest deepened; grief, she thought, with desperation, agony, hollowing her out, dread , filling her back up again, nothing but a vessel for the deepest emotions to be carried in.

“I was so worried about you,” John said again. Soft petals tumbled out of his mouth when he spoke. He gripped the sides of her face and pressed their foreheads together, and she started to cry, shaking her head. “My Elliot,” he said, over the sound of her crying, his thumbs brushing the tears from her face, “my Elliot.”

She thought that her skin must be burning, from the inside out, everywhere his hands touched; sliding down her throat, along the slope of her collarbone, gripping her shoulders. Hungry, and burning, lighting her on fire as he murmured, “My Elliot.”

His hands skimmed her face. They felt different, then softer and more slender; she closed her eyes tightly, willing the horror of it to go away, for the clammy terror to slip off of her skin.

“Open your eyes, mor. Did the visions scare you? ” a soft voice asked, the words slinking across her skin, serpentine and cold. She did as she was told, even when she thought, I don’t want to open my eyes, her body operating obediently.

Soft, dark eyes. Wisps of dirty-blonde hair that curtained Elliot’s face. Her head was in the woman’s lap and the night sky stretched, cloudy and endless, above them. Ase smiled at her dreamily.

“I saw your color the minute I laid eyes on you,” Ase whispered. She said the words like they were meant to be treasured, kept between them, only them. Elliot’s eyes fluttered and she tried to will herself to move. Her body was non-compliant, heavy as lead, and the warmth of a tear moving haltingly down her cheek made her skin prickle with goosebumps.

With the touch of a doting mother, Ase wiped the tear from her cheek, the pad of her thumb sliding along the slope of Elliot’s cheekbone, and then brushed the hair from her face. Now, Elliot could see more clearly the way her pupils were blown wide, swallowing up the color of her irises, crushing it in the event horizon of her eyes. She murmured, reverently, “I saw your color, mor, I saw you. Have you ever felt seen? We waited for you, for so long.”

Elliot moaned, misery stinging in the sound. Her lip trembled. She thought, I don’t want to be seen, the way Ase reiterated it making her vulnerable. I don’t want to be seen, I don’t want this. But she couldn’t make the words come out, her jaw hanging slack when she opened her mouth, the knowledge that they had done something to her flickering only briefly through her mind before it was swallowed up by something else.

“I’ll let you go.” Ase’s voice remained silken, spinning around her, weaving a cocoon. “I’ll let you go, mor , but only because I know that you will always come back to us.” She skimmed her fingers lovingly across Elliot’s forehead and whispered into her skin, “Now go back to sleep.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

John found her curled up, her fingers sinking into the earth like she was afraid she was going to float away, and sobbing.

His head was pounding; he felt disoriented, and panicked, the same kind of strange, distant panic that happened when he fell asleep during the day and woke up to it being night. He could only remember the sound of Elliot saying his name jerking him out of his sleep in the van, the sensation of getting pulled forward violently, and the feeling of someone slamming his head into the side of the van.

And then, waking up in a field, in the dark, alone.

He had struggled to his feet when he awoke. He had thought, the handcuffs are off . He had thought, I have to find Elliot. And then he’d started walking, saying her name, until he heard the sound of her crying and found her.

“Elliot,” he said urgently. His mouth felt incredibly dry; he was worried that if he spoke too much, his skin would split. He reached for her when she turned to look at him, and when she saw him she moaned, the sound that came out of her the same kind of sound an animal with its leg caught in a trap would make.

A slur of protests came out of her. A line of no’s that all blurred together, but when brought her to a sitting position she only shrunk away from him a little. He took the sides of her face in his hands and searched her for any sign of wounds or harm that might have come to her: but there was nothing. She was, it appeared, physically untouched.

“Hey,” John managed out. “It’s me, Elliot. I’ve got you.”

She blinked blearily at him. Her face was flushed, puffy, and tears dotted and darkened her lower lashes. Her pupils nearly ate up the entirety of those baby blues; clearly, she’d been drugged. She said, “John?” and he nodded.

“Yes, Rook. It’s me.”

“They did something to me,” Elliot said, her voice rising in her distress. “John—”

“They’re gone,” he said, without confirming her fears. “We have to move, though. Can you stand?”

The blonde hesitated for a moment and then nodded—he supposed she would have to fight through the remains of whatever they had put in her. He stood, taking her hands and helping her as she wobbled to a stand as well. It was hard to figure out exactly where they were, with no road in sight, but the haze of his sleep—which he now thought must also be medically induced—was still weighing on him.

“We have to move,” he said again, Elliot’s fingers clutching his hands so tight it almost hurt. He scanned the horizon of the field, touching on the dip of a hill, a river, and then a treeline. His eyes strained. He thought he might have seen headlights through the dim of them, but it was hard to tell.

It was also all he had to go on.

“Come on,” John said, her hands still locked around his like he was anchoring her to the earth. Unable to guess what they’d drugged her with, he imagined it probably felt like that.

“John,” Elliot said, her voice impossibly small as they began to walk, her steps halting and uneasy, “They did something to me.”

His jaw tightened. He hated this; he hated Elliot like this, emotionally wounded and voice wobbling, because all of a sudden he thought that this was not the Elliot he knew, not his Elliot at all. Where was the venom? The steel? Where had she gone?

Buried, he supposed, under psychotropic drugs, of which he knew not the origin nor the duration.

The rain clouds had moved along; the earth smelled wet, and fresh, the scent of it welling up inside of them, and as they walked his mind felt clearer and clearer. With clarity came the knowledge that they had been trapped; the cultists had had them, and had chosen to leave them alive. For what?

“I know,” John said again, his voice rough with his forcefully-induced sleep. Elliot’s fingers dug into his arm where they clutched, the feverish pitch of her body heat seeping through his clothes from how close she lingered. “You’re fine, deputy, I’ve got you.”

He tried not to think too hard about the voice that echoed in his head, for now.