He nods.

"...keep finding people like that, somehow. With integrity."

He slides the steel into the forge.

"Thanks."

"Ce n'est rien. It fits."

The other side, now.

"You made me your art. Body and spirit. Here I am in your workshop."

He watches the steel as it begins to glow.

"...tell me about being him. If it doesn't hurt too bad."

He tells him.

Some people find fame a crushing burden. Jean Dulac was never one of those people. Jean drank it up like water, basked in the public eye like the sun. He loved the flashbulbs and the autographs and the interviews, laughing and waving, being seen on the street. 

Beyond that, though, he loved the work. He loved the stage, the camera; he loved to shimmer, reptilian, into another being's skin, wear their words and their mannerisms and their hopes and their joys, catch the eye of the audience and throw it like a juggler's ball. A crowd was best, because every crowd was in love with him -- or they hated him, and that was just as good, when they loved to hate him -- but he'd settle for the camera, because it bought him his best role.

And it was his best role: being Jean Dulac. Beloved, brilliant, beautiful Jean Dulac. Scandalous, sometimes, as long as it kept him in the public eye, but not cheap scandal. He could never bear to be tawdry.

He goes back and forth between them, the art and the fame, like they're all one thing: the glory of it, the poetry, the fierce and burning joy.

He drinks it up, as he works.

He has to work slowly, take breaks. He’ll take the metal out of the forge, and beat it into shape for a minute or two, and then set it back in and sit down and listen, rolling his shoulder and stretching his hands.

He asks a question, every so often — chases down some detail of a particular anecdote — but mostly he just works, and rests, and works, and listens.

The time he can work shrinks and shrinks, as he goes. He spends longer and longer seated.

He listens closely, silently, to all Jean Dulac was, what the revenant in front of him has lost.

And then, too soon, he stands up, and tries to lift the hammer, and finds his arm shakes too badly to aim it.

“—fuck.”

He throws the hammer to the ground, arm dropping limply to his side, and collapses into his chair.

“Fuck. Shit.”

“I’m not — I’m not ready for this part, man. I’m not ready.”

And his voice shakes, too, because he’s afraid.

"I played in Il trovatore once," Jean remarks, abstractedly, from his spot on the grass. "Do you know it?"

He shakes his hanging head.

"There's a famous song. The Anvil Chorus."

He hums a few bars.

"It's staged with gypsies striking their anvils. Twenty, fifty of them, to the rhythm. All at once, you understand? And the director, he told us -- the master blacksmith, he holds a little hammer, he taps the metal."

Jean taps his fingers on the back of his hand, demonstratively.

"Then the apprentices, one by one, full force." The hand knocks, sharp against the knuckles.

"To save his strength, oui? They learn, he rests. Easy."

Hope.

“…c’mere,” he says, pushing himself up, hands on his knees. “I’ll show you.”

He pulls himself up and comes closer.

(He doesn't touch the tools, without permission.)

Jigsaw’s tools are sized for Z’s hands, but there’s a smaller hammer that fits comfortably in Jean’s. The spare glove he has in the back, meant for someone else, fits him fine.

He teaches him how to strike. He adjusts his posture freely with both hands, moves the hammer in his fist and the arm that lifts it, points out when his angle isn’t right or when he’s failed to let gravity swing the hammer for him and his back tenses under his palm.

The longer they go, the less he has to correct him. He can take his own place and tap the work, watch his other pair of hands complete the blow.

None of it is easy: not the weight of the hammer, not the pull of his skin when he lifts his arm above his head, certainly not Jigsaw's hands on him. Every blow that lands jars him out of time and place, sends him for a fractional second into metal cuffs and collar, pulling against them, helpless.

He learns quickly, makes mistakes once. The metal takes shape under his hammer.

They’re done shaping before it’s dark.

Jigsaw picks the long, curved blade up with his tongs (oddly shaped, flat at both ends) and turns it, looking at it straight on for the fifth time, checking for warps and wobbles.

“…yeah. Got it this time.”

It's fine art. It stirs him, deep in his belly.

"What will you use it for?"

“A ladder.”

A week later, Jigsaw has his third victory.

A man reports waking up in an abandoned silo, gagged, doors locked, with a simple directive from the tape recorder beside him: climb out.

A third of the way up, several rungs were missing, replaced with one long blade. Without his weight on it, there was no way to make it any further.

The worst part, he says, was the ladder back down.

Camillo watches the interview and finds his pocketknife, refreshes the cuts on one thigh.

Then he goes to the pharmacy to refill Jigsaw's anti-nausea medications. It's been worse, lately. Intercranial pressure.

Jigsaw, who has been sick all morning, still notices something is especially wrong. It’s hard not to.

When he gives him that autograph, he includes a Signal number.

“…she knows about all of it. Tell her whatever you want.”

(He looks at him in a way he hasn’t before.)

"Thanks."

"Listen. We need to talk."

“…listening,” he says, stock-still.

"You're  -- not going to like this."

Fingers on his thigh, through his pants, pressing.

"And I know that -- what you're doing -- is important to you, and I know this, this will--"

"You've got to stop driving. I know you had another seizure in the bathroom last week. They're only going to get worse. You're going to kill someone."

He knows how ridiculous it is to say.

Better than he thought it would be.

Also, worse.

“I can’t,” he says, immediately, as someone with a mission, someone with a workshop full of horrors fully inaccessible by bus, someone who needs to move long distances in the night with heavy cargo unseen, and then—

“I can’t.”

(As someone who is dying, piece by piece, who sees the hacksaw come to take the first part he really can’t bear losing.)