#hunters room in canon doesn’t really stand out or have anything that screams he’s particularly important to belos | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

jackiesarch · 3 years

Text

come undone.

my half of a trade with the wonderful @red-nightskies! thank you so much for letting me write your sweet anna — it was a blast getting to know her!

word count: 3.7k

warnings: minor character death, canon typical violence, some language

summary: there’s whispers among the resistance that staci pratt is being held at the grandview hotel. anna reid thinks she knows who she can trust to help her free him.

This is the last safe moment: Anna stepping over the fresh corpse of a bat wielding Peggy, her chest heaving with exertion. Getting to the top floor of the Grandview Hotel unseen and unheard had been surprisingly easy. Even now, as she stands in front of the closed door of Room 306, she can’t help but be impressed by her own handiwork.

The oak panel in front of her is intimidating. She isn’t sure why. She’s checked every other room in this building, has moved through the halls and the staircases with such brutal efficiency that she should be pleased to be standing here, staring at what is undoubtedly the easiest part of this entire operation. But she isn’t. If anything, Anna finds she’s uneasy.

It feels too simple.

The Peggies have never made anything particularly easy for her. Sure, she can take down an outpost in her sleep these days or clear a roadblock in the blink of an eye, but Eden’s Gate rarely ever provides easy access to their special targets — to their leverage.

It’s part of why she’d gone to the Whitetails when the quiet whispers about Staci’s location had turned into real leads. Could she take down the guards and liberate her friend on her own? Maybe. Would she feel a hell of a lot better with an army waiting in the wings? Absolutely.

She stares at the door to the room again, her stomach twisting at what she might find behind it. Staci’s alive — that much she knows, that much a group of Eli’s scouts had been able to confirm. He’s alive, but who is he? Anna knows firsthand what Jacob does to people, knows the frantic, red-bathed horrors he puts people through to break them. Staci’s alive, but he may not be the man that flew them to Joseph’s compound all those weeks ago. It’s a thought that terrifies her.

He’ll be alright, Anna. It’s what Eli had said as he outlined the plan in the Wolf’s Den. A simple extraction mission: in-and-out, with backup waiting in the wings.

If he’s anythin’ like you, he’ll be alright. We’ll fix him up.

Slowly, Anna reaches for the doorknob, Eli’s words playing on repeat in her head. He’s right — Staci’s not beyond saving, not yet. They can fix him. Make him whole again.

She doesn’t trust easy, but she does trust Eli.

The cold metal of the handle makes her shiver as she twists it. There’s a click as the latch releases, and suddenly the door opens, creaking on its hinges as it swings into the room. All at once, she’s hit with the sickly, metallic smell of blood. It’s no wonder — the first things she notices are the smears of it on the wall, on the floor, on the discarded rags that litter the room.

The second thing she notices is Staci. He’s strapped to a chair in the middle of the room, bound by his wrists and ankles to the arms and legs of it. His head hangs heavy, chin resting against his chest like it might take all the strength left in his body to lift it in her direction. He doesn’t.

“Staci?” Anna says quietly, clearing the room with a quick glance. “Staci, it’s me.”

He doesn’t answer. Anna can only barely make out that he’s still breathing, and the movement is one that both comforts and scares her. She takes cautious steps into the room, reaching for the radio on her hip as she does.

“Eli—it’s me. I found him,” she says, finger gripping the transmit button on the radio so hard her whole hand shakes. “He’s alive. I’m getting him out. Send the Whitetails in to secure the lower floors. Anna out.”

If there’s a response, Anna doesn’t hear it. She finds herself standing in front of Staci without realizing she took the steps there, finds herself leaning down and grabbing his shoulder to shake him without consciously telling herself to do it.

“Hey,” she whispers, her grip on his shoulder tightening. Anna shakes him again, a little harder, in a desperate attempt to rouse him. “Staci, hey—“

Staci jolts so fast it makes her stumble backwards, heart suddenly thundering in her rib cage. His head flies up, his eyes wide and bloodshot, and Anna watches him gasp in a breath that it looks like he’s desperate for.

“Anna?” he croaks, eyes flitting back and forth between her in front of him and the room around them. “That really you?”

It takes a half-second longer for her to recover than she’d like. Anna scurries forward, slender fingers grasping at the restraints keeping him in place.

“Yeah, it’s me. It’s me. I’m getting you out of here.”

The bindings are tight, but she manages. First she frees his wrists, angry red marks dug into them with how tightly the straps had been pulled. His ankles come next, and Staci kicks his feet out a little before, with Anna’s help, he tries to stand. It’s not surprising that he’s weak, stumbling as he brings himself to full height. How long have they had him tied up there? How long has he been forced to sit?

She’s about to reach for her radio again, ready to tell Eli she’s on her way back to the Wolf’s Den, when the vague feeling of uneasiness from before returns with a vengeance. Anna looks around the room, frown pinching her face.

Something is wrong. The hotel feels too quiet, too safe. Why can’t she hear the Whitetails filtering in to secure the building?

And then it happens.

It feels like a slow-motion shot in an action movie. Staci opens his mouth to say something to her just as the only intact window in the room explodes, showering them with shards of broken glass. Half a second later, he crumples to the floor.

Anna’s breath leaves her lungs in a short, sharp burst. She knows better than to scream if they’re under attack, knows better than to draw all the attention to their position. Still, watching him go down like that, she has to say something.

“Staci?” Anna says, her voice unsteady as she stares down at his limp form. “Staci!”

He doesn’t respond. A pool of red forms under his skull and spreads out in a circle, inching towards her faster and faster like spilled paint on a dirty canvas.

Anna whirls around, eyes snapping in every direction as she reaches for her weapon. There’s no one in the room with them, no one in the hall, and no one down on the balcony below the window when she cranes her neck out to check. Off in the distance, she can swear she sees a glint of metal — a hunter? A Peggie with a sniper rifle? By the time she blinks, though, it’s gone, and Anna ducks her head back into the room, turns herself back towards where Staci lays. She takes a half-step forward, drawn to him as if he isn’t well beyond saving.

Then pain blossoms in her shoulder so suddenly she thinks she might be sick.

Anna stumbles back, her hand flying up to grasp at the place where sharp bursts of agony are starting to spider down into her chest, her arm, the very tips of her fingers. Liquid warmth spreads over her skin, and when she looks down, Anna finds her hand coated in her own blood. It seeps out of a ragged hole in her shoulder, and it finally registers with her that she’s been shot. Someone, somewhere in the mountains, has fired two precise shots off into Room 306 of the Grandview Hotel: one to hit Pratt, and the other meant for her.

The shock of the wound hits her all at once, sapping the strength from her muscles and forcing her to sink to her knees in the middle of the room. Anna just barely manages to brace herself as she hits the floor, her good shoulder sliding along the hardwood as she collapses onto her side.

Her thoughts are scattered, but the few cohesive ones left desperately trying to connect in a way that doesn’t quite add up. Who shot them? Why? It feels too convenient to be a well-timed accident, too ridiculous to be a case of mistaken identity.

Muffled footsteps in the hallway shatter her focus just as she’s about to consider the very obvious possibility that this is Jacob’s handiwork. Anna stills her ragged breathing as best she can and tries to listen as whoever is in the hall grows closer.

It’s hard to make out specifics with the doorway to her back. Forcing past the steady ache in her shoulder, Anna trains her ears and tries to catch the disjointed pieces of conversation.

“They’re both down,” she hears. It’s a man’s voice, a familiar one, and with her back to the doorway she struggles to remember his name. Briggs? “Pratt‘s dead. Deputy Reid...”

Briggs trails off suddenly. There’s a hissing, scratching noise — the sound of a radio transmission? — but Anna isn’t able to make out the response.

Help me!, she wants to scream. Help us! Her mouth opens to get Briggs’ attention, but nothing comes out. It’s as if the pain has stolen away her voice — her last chance at salvation.

“Right. We’re headin’ back,” Briggs says into his radio. There’s a pause, and Anna desperately tries to work out how to get his attention. “Tell Eli it’s done.”

The floorboards creak again. Footsteps sounds against the hardwood outside the room and fade away slowly, until all Anna can hear are the far away sounds of someone taking the stairs down to the second floor. There’s a distant shout; she can’t make out the words, not with the ringing in her ears, but it sounds like someone gearing up to leave the hotel.

Tell Eli it’s done.

Understanding hits her hard, like she’s been broadsided by an armoured truck. This hadn’t been Jacob and his lackeys at all. This wasn’t a well-planned take down by Eden’s Gate, wasn’t a terrible misunderstanding. Eli and the Whitetails had planned this.

She’s been betrayed.

Thoughts ping around Anna’s head. An in-and-out mission. Rescue Pratt. Escape unnoticed. A simple extraction job. How many times has she done something exactly like this? How many times has she liberated a captive Whitetail whose name and face she didn’t recognize?

How many chances have they had before this moment to take her out? Why wait this long?

The answer to her own question isn’t far out of reach. In fact, he’s sprawled out on the floor across from her.

Staci.

Better to kill two birds with one stone. Why waste time on a second covert mission when they could take down two of Jacob Seed’s most dangerous, involuntary weapons at once? It only makes tactical sense, she thinks. They were being proactive. Smart.

Vile. Heartless.

She doesn’t mean to look at Staci. She doesn’t mean for her gaze to linger on his cold, expressionless face, but it does, and she finds she can’t tear herself away. Anna more dead people than she has ever dreamed of, has watched the light leave so many pairs of eyes that she can no longer keep an accurate count. It’s the nature of the situation in Hope County — or at least, that’s what she tells herself to get by.

But this man was her friend. He was her friend, and he was kind, and now he’s dead; and it’s her fault. It’s the only thing Anna can think as she lays there, memorizing every line and every freckle of Staci’s face. She trusted Eli, trusted Tammy and Wheaty and all the other Whitetails.

She played servant when it was convenient for them, and Staci is dead because of it.

For a moment — a burning, bitter moment — she’s young again. There’s no electricity in the hotel, but that doesn’t stop the coloured glare of neon lights from registering in Anna’s mind.

She’s at the Grandview, she knows she’s at the Grandview. Every muscle in her body screams it to her as she tries to claw herself closer to Staci on the dirty floor. You’re here, she tells herself. You’re here, this is happening now, this isn’t then.

Her name is Anna Reid. She’s thirty years old. She’s been shot in the shoulder, and she’s bleeding out on the floor of the Grandview Hotel in Hope County, Montana.

Memories swirl in her head like funnel clouds. This is the Grandview Hotel, and she is dying here, but it doesn’t stop the images of the rundown gas station and its flashing neon sign from filling her mind.

Her name is Anna Reid. She’s nineteen years old. Her best friend has been shot, and she’s bleeding out on the concrete outside of a Shell station.

Anna squeezes her eyes shut against the onslaught of things she has tried so hard to forget. The images feel like they’re burned on the back of her eyelids, like she can’t escape them no matter how hard she tries to flee.

“No,” she gasps out, eyes flying open again. She’s met with Staci’s face, with the clean, dark circle on the centre of his forehead. “No, Claire—Staci, Staci, not Claire—”

A choked sob tears its way out of her chest. Her wounded shoulder has turned her arm to dead weight, and she can’t pull herself across the floor any further with just one hand; even the few inches she’s managed have turned her fingernails bloody and broken.

“I’m sorry,” Anna whispers, tears staining her cheeks. “Oh, fuck, I’m sorry.”

She doesn’t know who she’s apologizing to. Claire? Staci? Herself? All she knows is that the words come without her help, unbidden and spilling out of her like the blood spills from her shoulder.

My name is Anna Reid, she tells herself. I’m thirty. This is the Grandview Hotel in Hope County. I’m sorry.

It becomes a mantra, four sentences that she repeats over and over keep herself present. Anna forces herself to keep her eyes open, even if it means watching Staci’s body grow colder and colder — if she doesn’t, she thinks she might lose herself to the nightmare festering in her head.

Anna Reid. Thirty years old. Grandview Hotel. Anna. Thirty. Grandview.

Hours pass like that — or maybe it’s minutes, maybe seconds. Anna doesn’t know. All she knows is that the edges of her vision are starting to darken, that the blood pooling on the hardwood and soaking into discarded rags is no longer just Staci’s, but hers too.

Her shoulder feels dead. Heavy, too, as if the simple burden of having it attached to her might be what finally pulls her under, and part of her begs it to. She’s bone tired — the kind where every tiny movement feels like it’s being torn out of her, the kind where blinking is a burden and her battered body screams at her to rest. She’s tired of running, tired of fighting, tired of being hunted. She just wants this to be over and done with.

And then she hears the noise.

Creak.

For a moment, she thinks she’s imagined it. After all, she hadn’t raised hell getting inside the hotel — in fact, the plan had gone off without a hitch, quickly and quietly. The only ones who should know that she’s bleeding out on the cold floor of a dirty room are the people that put her there: the Whitetails.

Creak.

The noise comes a second time, louder, and this time Anna knows she hasn’t dreamed it up. Someone is outside of the room. One of Eli’s strays, come to finish her off? A friend-turned-foe with a pistol gripped tight and mercy on their mind?

Worse still, one of Jacob’s Chosen?

Whoever they are, they’re watching her. Anna can feel the stare on her back, burning the proverbial hole through her bloodstained clothes. The door is open, she knows, because she’s the one that left it that way.

The silence is deafening as Anna waits for them to make their move. She should be scared, she thinks. She should be paralyzed with the fear of imprisonment, of death, of whatever else might happen to her when the terror waiting in the doorway finally finds her.

Instead, she just feels numb. Nothing.

Agonizingly slowly, the steps grow closer, louder, until Anna can see the outline of a single steel-toe boot in the corner of her failing vision. They’re familiar, somehow, as if she’s seen those same boots before.

Where? Who?

The wearer takes another slow, measured step, until suddenly they’re consuming the whole frame of her vision. Until Staci’s body is nothing but an obscure, blurry background that her tired brain desperately tries to block out.

Anna can’t help it. Her focus drifts to the combat boots, to the old, cracked leather that’s stained dark with mud and darker still with something worse.

Some desperate part of her thinks she should move, thinks she should try to wrangle speech from the bottom of her dry throat. She doesn’t.

He speaks, and she and all she can do is listen.

“Wolves finally getcha, Dep?”

The boots were a clue, but there’s no mistaking the voice. It’s the strangest mix of rough and soft, an instant contradiction that matches the rest of him. And hasn’t he always been that way? Twisting her mind into something brutal and sharp with a song while he whispers praises into what feels like her soul? Withholding food with one hand while the other touches her with surprising gentleness?

If Jacob himself has come for her, then she’s finally facing the end.

The numbness is still there, choking the fear she knows she should feel as he nudges her in the ribs with the toe of his boot to see if she’s still alive. Anna barely reacts. She’s dizzy and heavy with blood loss, and even if she wanted to — well, she isn’t quite sure she could make her body do anything more than it is in this moment.

Jacob moves her around on the filthy floor like it’s easy. A push on the shoulder to get her onto her back, a steel-toe nudge to her good arm to get better access to her wounded upper half. It’s as if she’s a marionette being manipulated by its puppeteer, she thinks hazily.

No, not a marionette — the movement’s not quite that gentle. It’s as if she’s a rag doll in the hands of an over-eager child.

Suddenly, without warning, a bolt of white-hot pain streaks down her wounded arm, shoulder to fingertips. Anna has been hurt before — constantly, even, since she came to Hope County — but none of it compares to the burning, stabbing sensation she feels when Jacob crouches at her side, peeling the strap of her bloody tank top away and pressing his fingers against her bullet wound. She barely suppresses a shattered scream. The noise comes out as a high-pitched, broken whine instead, and for a minute, she’s almost positive she sees a flash of something sympathetic cross his face.

Anna thinks she should be furious with him. She thinks she should kick and scream and fight with all the strength she has left, should give him hell for making her suffering even worse.

Instead, she’s grateful.

Something about the pain splinters the blanket of numbness she’s felt since the moment the sniper’s bullets made impact. For the first time since she hit the ground, she feels.

“What’d I tell you, huh?” Jacob mutters, leaning back on the balls of his feet. Anna watches him wipe her blood on the ragged knee of his jeans. “Eli and his people. Cowards.”

Another pain stabs its way through her, but this time it doesn’t come from her injured shoulder. This time she feels it deep in her chest, a pang of betrayal that makes her hurt in an entirely new and unexpected way.

Cowards. A few months ago, she would’ve scoffed at that. A few months ago, she had scoffed at that. Now, she’s not so sure Jacob’s wrong.

There’s a shifting noise, the sound of crunching joints and slipping fabric, and the next thing Anna knows Jacob’s face is filling the frame of her vision. She strains her eyes, forcing herself to focus on him.

He watches her curiously. The steely blue gaze she’s used to is the somehow both the same as always and entirely different. It’s strange, Anna thinks — there’s a softness in the depths of his eyes. A fondness, even. This man, capable of such dangerous and depraved things, has looked at her and begin melting.

She doesn’t quite know what to do with that.

The blood loss makes it harder and harder to focus. Before she knows it, she’s following the lines of his face, tracing the roughness of scar tissue before her vision swims again.

Jacob is an enigma. He’s a cipher, a secret code she hasn’t been able to break. One moment, he’s twisting her consciousness and using it against her to make her a weapon, and the next? Well, the next moment, the cracks start to show themselves like ice before it crumbles.

Pain launches her out of her thoughts. Her tired body is being jostled, being scooped up like she weighs almost nothing, and it takes a few seconds for Anna to realize Jacob is carrying her. He’s warm, tempting to lean into, and so she does — her head sinks to the side, right against his chest.

“They’re not your friends, sweetheart,” Jacob rumbles, the sound coming more from inside him than it does from his mouth. “Makin’ you play servant girl? Leavin’ you to bleed out once you serve your purpose? Don’t sound like friends to me.”

She doesn’t have the strength to argue with him. All Anna can do is blink, eyes thick and heavy and desperate to shut so she can rest. Between flashes of her eyelids, she sees stairs, sees the tacky decoration in the hotel’s front lobby, sees the shape of Jacob’s truck in the distance.

“I’ll fix you up, honey. Get you back on your feet. Show you who your real friends are,” he muses, more to himself than to anyone else.

Her vision swims again, and this time she doesn’t have the strength to fight it. Anna feels herself go limp, sinking further into his arms, and welcomes the dark curl of unconsciousness into her mind.

“Thank you.”

The words are all she manages before she teeters off the edge into a heavy, consuming sleep.

#anna reid #far cry 5 #fc5 #fc5 fic #jacob seed #staci pratt #friends ocs #my writing

46 notes · View notes