For a month, things seem to have gone off without a hitch.

The media frenzy about the dead actress — and the images of her bloodied limbs and her slit belly, circulated in darker places — actually work in his favor. Their contentious relationship ensures that when someone thinks of her, they also think of him, and plenty of people are thinking of her lately.

He is asked about her, again and again, because everyone loves that little moment of redemption, of shared humanity in the face of inhumanity overcoming the petty squabbles of the rich and famous.

He's so grieved, of course. One of the finest actresses of her age. Cut off in her prime. What wouldn't he give. He knows his lines.

She haunts him. Not literally, which would have some poetry to it; in the back of his eyeballs, projected out where she doesn't belong. Madeleine McBride, larger than life, all over his world, and he doesn't care for it. This, he supposes, is why death brings such fame. Someday it will be his.

As he leaves a rehearsal late one night, there's a sudden gentle prick in the side of his neck.

Someone kneels on his back, hand over his mouth, until his consciousness fades.

Ah. Now he feels important.

When he wakes up, the room is dim. The light is above him — the edges of the room fade into shadow.

He is sitting up — or, at least, he's in a chair, held upright. There's something around his neck, holding him in place. Something tight on his shoulders, on one forearm, on the other wrist, on his ankles. Something close to his face, reflecting his breath.

He thinks his sister has thrown her arm across his neck, for a moment, before he orients and goes still.

This is it. He knows this style.

More details resolve into view.

There is a television monitor in front of him, barely visible, off. A mesh screen below his face. On the rim of the screen, two of something, pointed at him.

One of his arms is looser than the other. It feels like the cuff isn’t quite secure on the chair, like he could pull it free.

Good. All right.

He's memorizing, mostly, mapping out the shape of the room, as he begins to work his arm free.

When he lifts his arm, the pin pulls.

The CRT monitor flickers to life, and so does a timer, bright red digits floating in the blackness.

29:59.

29:58.

hi, jean.

The speech is clipped. The voice, even transformed, is flat and cold. The face, unmasked, is blurred unrecognizable.

i don’t like copycats. not when they don’t get how this works. you don’t get it.

you have to give them a choice. they live, or they die. you didn’t give her a choice.

i don’t want that on me. that’s not fair.

you’re not gonna die today. can’t confess if you’re dead. but i’m gonna give you a choice. so you get it. 

you’ve got a lever next to you. every time you pump it, some of the stuff in that jug — look up — pours out on your chest. you get half an hour before whatever’s left comes out those sprayers by your face.

you can get it all out if you try. i checked. you check, if you give a shit.

make your choice. see you in an hour.

No.

Jean begins by struggling: systematic, not random, testing his bonds. He wouldn't care to dislocate a thumb or a shoulder, but he will if it helps him. Perhaps his captor has been careless.

Jigsaw is not careless. Jigsaw is very careful.

The ankle cuffs are locked down tight, and the straps cinched down on his shoulders and across his collarbone combined with the heavy metal collar locked on his neck keep him quite firmly fixed in place.

He could, probably, tear the ligaments of his thumb to pull out of the metal cuff around his left wrist, if both upper arms weren’t kept in place with leather ones. He doesn’t have enough freedom of movement to reach his other hand, and even if he could, and could get enough leverage to pull and pull and twist and crack, he couldn’t pull his arm back to escape.

His torso, at least, is mostly free to bend, below the shoulder and above the ankle.

The chair itself appears to be bolted down to the floor. His movements pull at the assembly of chains and tubes above it, and the jug rocks above him, its contents sloshing behind the translucent plastic.

27:20.

27:19.

He can guess at what's in that jug.

(Not his face. Not his beautiful face.)

It's a simple motion, really, to pull the lever.

A pump shifts, somewhere behind him. Liquid runs down a tube, and down a short, widening chute that looks much like a dustpan, and then splatters on his chest.

For a moment, the acid feels like nothing at all. Then it itches. Then it burns.

It’s dilute enough not to eat through to muscle, or even to fat, with the first splash. But it strips away the top layer of skin quite efficiently, and leaves it raw and glistening and red.

There’s quite a lot of it in that jug.

Jean is very still, while it eats at him.

(His beautiful face. This mustn't touch it. It's his bread, his canvas, the best part of him.)

He must do it again, and so he does, and he knows it will hurt.

Acid splatters his chest again, runs down to his navel.

Where his skin was untouched, it itches, then burns. Where it was already raw, the pain comes right away, blinding and inescapable, persisting long after the splash. Hairs are singed away. Beads of blood well up where the skin hardens, contracts, splits.

He doesn't scream. He doesn't move at all.

After a moment, he breathes, because if he loses consciousness his timer will run out. His chest moves with it, and it brings fresh pain.

He must do it again.

This will damage him. He will bear the scars of it for the rest of his life. He --

The pain continues. It intrudes on his thoughts. It isn't relevant.

He'll never be able to appear in the nude again. His dress will be restricted. His motion will be restricted, with scars that bind and pull.

He must do it again.

He does it again.

This time, the pump has been well-primed, and there’s more. It splashes on his chest and his belly and it runs down his sides.

The little droplets that fly towards his face are caught on the mesh, and go no further. Because Jigsaw is very careful, and he is fair.

The remnants of skin near his breastbone bubble and blister and bleed. Vivid lines follow his rib cage. In his navel, liquid has begun to pool, and it bores into him like a nail.

It doesn't occur to him to scream.

Breathing. He must breathe.

There's nothing but that, for some time: the pain, and the breathing.

His beautiful face.

The pain.

The timer.

(The pain.)

His face.

Jean pulls the lever. Gently; as if it will help.

It pours over him again. Every time, worse.

The very center of his chest, over the bone, has stopped hurting.

Acid runs onto the tops of his thighs, through the metal grill of the seat.

The light shines much brighter through the jug, less occluded.

He can smell himself, dissolved.

Pain.

Worse: damage.

For a time, it is impossible to act.

The sprayers watch him, as he watches the timer.

It would be easy, he thinks, to let it blind him. He'd never have to see his face.

19:34.

19:33.

15:48.

15:47.

8:20.

8:19.

It is possible.

It has always been possible. He knows precisely how to move his fingers; he can activate each muscle individually.

For love, he thinks, for the love of the stage, of beauty; for the sweet sound of applause, for the curtains and the music, for the camera and lights, flowers, laughter.

How can he choose this? Don't make him choose. It will hurt.

7:15.

7:14.

3:30.

3:29.

It has always been possible to choose.

For love, he thinks, for the love of the game, and he pulls the lever.

The last wave of acid cascades over his chest.

Bare yellow fat shines brilliantly in the halogen light.

He is vindicated — complete — he has won. He has chosen.

Only a few drops remain.

He pulls it -- again, and again, and again.

The last drops splatter, one at a time, on the bleeding ruin of his chest.

00:03.

00:02.

00:01.

00:00.

Mechanisms click. New pumps prime.

The sprayheads beside his face hiss with air, and then go silent.

Above his neck, he remains — has become — whole.

Jean lets himself stop breathing, in favor of analgesic oblivion.

(It doesn't last long. Pain rouses him.)

Time passes, as he fades in and out of consciousness. Half an hour, one would expect.

A door behind him opens, then clicks closed.

He doesn't speak first. It's not his scene to direct.

The fear is present. And the pain, of course.

A pair of gaunt, pale hands slip a blindfold over his eyes.

Something new pours over his chest — water? Something else?

Whatever it is, after the searing pain of anything touching his wounds, the pain ebbs, somewhat.

He screams, for his audience. 

He’s glad he kept his voice fresh for it. 

It happens again, and again, and again, before a pad is pressed down against the worst of the burns and a bandage is wrapped around his chest.

(It was promised he would survive; and Jigsaw is very careful, and he is fair.)

He screams and sobs and chokes until his voice begins to go. 

Once it’s hoarse enough to be perfect —

“Please let me live.”

“I told you. Not gonna die today.”

The voice is distorted, mechanical, passed through some kind of filter.

“Do you get it?”

He does. 

Is it best to say it?

(Pain.)

 No. A little tension. A hanging thread. 

“Please,” he repeats. 

“Do you get it,” he repeats, unmoved.

Well, all right. The climax now, then.

"Yes. I do."

“Good. Next time you want to kill someone? Leave me out of it.”

There’s a pause. A hand, turning his head side to side.

“…got all of it,” he says. 

He respects that. It’s audible.

"Yes," he says, ambiguously, voice at an orchestrated tremble.

(It was a beautiful trial. Jigsaw should know.)

"Make it right," he tells him. "When you wake up. Tell them I don't kill like that. Tell them I was fair."

A needle in the side of his neck.

He's so grateful. For the guidance; for the relief.

The world fades out.

When he wakes, he’s being loaded into an ambulance, from a roadside he doesn’t recognize.

He asks for his sister, again and again, as he fades in and out of consciousness; as they transport him, as they give him painkillers.

They find her, eventually. For a while, she holds his hand, and there is more pain.

Then he is lucid enough, and stable, in a hospital bed, and he begins to ask for the press.

The hospital does not particularly want to accommodate a press conference at this time — and, while he is stable, his doctors strongly advise him to wait to speak to the press until he's had time to rest, to heal, to save his energy for the skin grafts and the physical therapy and the psychological recovery. He hasn't even had a chance to talk to the police, yet, who are very eager to see him.

Perhaps the press will be more enthusiastic.

In the meantime, he watches the IV drip. It fails to take away the pain.

Jean is very famous, as is (at this point) the Jigsaw Killer, and the hospital PR department caves quite quickly to the pressure and comes to an agreement with his agent and the various news outlets now clamoring for a spot at his bedside.

Jean is asked — because his agent knows the kind of man he is — to curate the final list.

He says yes to nearly all of them, except for a few outlets too petty to be more than an insult. He likes a sea of faces.

It will be live, of course. He likes things live. This isn't even a novel preference.

Before the conference, he wants hair gel and a hand mirror. Bedhead takes work.

These can be provided for him, but his doctors would really prefer he not raise his arms that far. He can give someone directions.

He runs through three nurses' patience.

And then his court, yes?

His court arrives, with cameras and microphones, arranged like so many bouquets among the real flowers sent by well-wishers.

He speaks to them.

He tells them about the torture, briefly but stirringly. Not too gruesome for a television audience; no one will be tempted to cut.

"It was to teach me," he says. "Because of Madeleine. He didn't like how I killed her."

"It was my mistake, of course. Clumsy of me. I didn't understand his art."

And then, of course, the riot.

The hospital is forced to clear the room, for fear that the crowd — shouting over each other, crushing and pushing, swarming like hornets — will manage to injure him further.

After that, they can no longer keep back the police, who are now even more acutely interested in taking his statement.

Jean -- against all advice from his sister and the rapid succession of lawyers she hires him -- will be happy to speak.

To the press, live.

The police can listen if they like.

While the police are occupied discussing this bizarre offer, the hospital intervenes once again. While they cannot for many reasons move him to the psych ward at this moment, they can send the psych ward to him.

The psychiatrists and social workers ask if he's speaking under duress, ask if these were facts he heard first from the Jigsaw Killer, confirm once again in a desperate reach for a saner version of events that he is oriented to time and place and person.

He is lucid and lovely and insists -- in between pauses, as the pain rises and ebbs -- that it would be terribly inelegant for the Jigsaw Killer to ever trouble him again.

"He's a great artist, you know," he remarks once, abstractedly, gazing down at the wreck of his own body.

By the time he has driven off the psychiatric team, the police have agreed (lacking a better option) to his unconventional demands with regards to their interview, provided he arranges the press coverage himself.

They will, however, be arresting him. In practice, given the extent of his injuries, this involves stationing an officer in his room at all times, and cuffing him to the rail on his hospital bed.

The handcuff is more distracting than he would have anticipated. He struggles to focus on his comments to the press -- on his own inadequacy, on the elegant poetry of Jigsaw's design, of the body as artistic medium, on how he regrets the death of Madeleine McBride.

She was alive. She was beautiful. She should have had a choice -- to make art with him, or to die.

It's still eloquent, of course.

Jigsaw, as a rule, avoids the news. This has been an exception.

He sits knees up on his couch, watching a livestream from Jean Dulac's hospital room, trying to wrap his head around the situation.

"What did you do to him."

Camillo has popcorn. Sometimes you have to have a sense of humor about things.

"I have no idea," Jigsaw says, helplessly. "This is all him. I said to say I was fair."

"I think you maybe scared the crap out of him."

The image of the guy in the hospital bed is pretty horrible. The fact that his boyfriend tortured Jean Dulac makes the whole thing too surreal to really land. Camillo passes the popcorn; Jigsaw should consume more melted butter.

Jigsaw takes the popcorn, and eats one cautious kernel at the time, eyes still locked on the TV.

"...and I think he still doesn't get it."

"Yeah. Because it's insane, and he's traumatized, babe."

He's trying out the babe thing. Feels weird. Maybe good.

"Seemed obvious to me," he says, in the tone of someone who is suddenly very aware that he is an atypical person.

"I hope he'll forgive me," Jean is saying, to a very tired reporter. "I should never have forged his work."

Weeks pass. Jean's skin, deep grafts and donor sites both, heals slowly, under the watchful eye of his doctors (and, incidentally, one cop).

The police, much as they would like any useful information about Jigsaw's appearance, his voice, his stature, his location, fail to get any.

The fan mail is not exactly pouring in for Jean Dulac, world's most prominent superfan of the Jigsaw Killer, but there are plenty of people who are still convinced that he's been traumatized into a false confession, or even false memories. (Although that contingent shrinks every time he gives another very lucid, very incriminating press conference.)

After four weeks, he's healed and stable enough to be moved. His lawyers plead with him not to say anything foolish at his arraignment.

Jean Dulac says a great many foolish things at his arraignment.

He looks frail and noble, every inch the tortured martyr, as the judge orders him to stop talking about how much he admires the Jigsaw Killer.

He is remanded to state custody with astonishing swiftness. His lawyers begin work to convince future judges that he is not competent to stand trial.

Jean would like to fire these lawyers.

It is, legally, impossible to prevent him from doing so.

As many murder defendants are, he is placed in protective custody. For 23 hours a day, he is alone in his cell.

Jean becomes intimately familiar, in this lonely time, with his inner editor.

The impulse to meditate on Jigsaw -- to scrutinize his art, to review it again and again in his mind -- is with him always. The inadequacy of his own work, in comparison, looms large.

(Madeleine, too, is with him. So imperfect an ending; so impossible to correct.)

He's allowed a newspaper subscription.

In the first month of his isolation, there's a story about Jigsaw's work. Unfortunately, the newspaper available to him is reputable enough to publish very few details. Woman found, strangled by "device", video found at the scene. There's a brief quote from the other living victim about the necessity of more funding for the police, and a mention of Jean himself and his "mental breakdown".

Jean nurses a hatred for the other living victim, the ungrateful whore.

He spends a great deal of time imagining the device, imagining himself in it, until it begins to feel like memory. He only wants to understand the art of it, the poetry.

The commissary sells paper, stamps, envelopes. He writes to every address he knows, long rambling paeans to Jigsaw, trying to explain, trying to make sense of it all.

Some of the letters, inevitably, are leaked. The online debate over Jean's sanity swings back and forth, the most represented positions at present being "he's lost it" and "who cares, he stans the Jigsaw Killer".

Jigsaw flips through screenshots on his phone.

"...I think he's my problem now."

"This is the victim you're concerned about."

He used to like Dulac. The guy was hot in X-Men, and the tabloids were pretty sure he was gay. And now he's encouraging Jigsaw.

"They all matter. Just...most of them are dead. Can't do anything else for them."

"Well, I'm not going to tell you he's not your problem. Put on a hat, you're going to freeze."

He used to call Z a living hot water bottle. Jigsaw doesn't stay warm so well.

Transportation to court from jail is a humiliating gauntlet.

He's woken up before dawn, like everyone else, shuffled down to the bare and freezing concrete room where they all wait, shackled, for transport.

When Jean is strip-searched, it's in front of all the other inmates going to court that day.

He has, he supposes, no reason to feel shame. Is a sketchbook, filled, less worthy that it is not blank?

He feels it nonetheless.

He's put in 3-point restraints — shackles on his wrists and ankles, a chain running between them.

The guard who comes to take him to his transport van is a little early, walks a little quickly, breathes a little shallow, eyes a little wide.

The guard will forgive him for being distracted.

This is, he thinks, the first matinee of the last great performance of Jean Dulac.

He's locked in the back of the transport van without any other guards. Unusual, for a murder case. Unusual, also, for such a high-profile prisoner.

The van speeds off.

Partway to the courthouse, the van veers off its route, onto a side road. As soon as it's out of sight of other cars, the driver floors it — not just off the main road but off the side road, too, down the strip of cleared land where the power lines run, into the dark.

The guard throws open the doors on the back of the van, rushes in to free him, gestures wildly with his gun.

"Out. Out."

Ah. A bullet by the side of the road?

Dramatic, at least. And a way out of these damn restraints.

"Very good," Jean says, languidly, and strolls out, with all the ease of motion he can muster.

The guard rushes up to him once he's a few steps from the van and, hands trembling, unlocks his restraints, shoving a piece of paper into his hands.

Stepping back, he raises his phone, takes a shot with the flash.

A second passes — two — and the guard's phone lights up with a message, and he sobs with relief and scrambles back into the van, shooting off down the road, leaving the chains behind.

He stays there, for a while -- reeling with confusion, looking at the chains.

Then he remembers the paper, and reads.

It's very dark, but there's a streetlamp close enough that it's just readable.

CLOTHES UNDER THE STREETLIGHT

KEEP STREET ON YOUR RIGHT, WALK HALF A MILE

GO UNDER BRIDGE

SIT TIGHT

(BURN THIS)

Is it truly possible?

Stripping is not so easy as it once was. His arms do not care to raise above his head; the skin of his torso screams to him when he twists. But he manages, and the clothes under the streetlight fit him well enough.

He stands there, in the pool of light, and looks left and right.

Each choice is fearful. Only one holds hope.

Under the bridge, among the pull tabs and the cigarette butts, he sits tight.

(The lighter is in a pocket. The paper burns quick and bright. He holds it to the end, lets it scorch his fingers with its death.)

Some time later, when dawn is beginning to break, an engine rumbles to a stop on the side of the road.

A young man, tall and wan and quite thin, makes his way down the slope to peer under the bridge, adjusting his beanie.

"Here for pickup."

He's missing what they gave him in prison, by then. The pain is false, now, a trick of the brain or body, but it's no easier to bear.

"Here I am," Jean says, and he's proud that he can still stand without a hand to the ground.

He climbs the hill together with him, takes a moment to lean on the side of the car, and then pops the trunk.

"Gonna need you to ride in back."

It's cleared for him, at least, aside from a few auto maintenance tools and a thick blanket folded to the side.

He looks at the small space, and at the hand on the trunk, wan and bruised at the wrist.

It is very difficult, he finds, to climb in.

How did he choose? He knew this, once, learned it with acid and a timer in the dark. How to do it again? Why so many choices?

The great artist is putting himself in danger. They must go, before someone sees them. Each moment of hesitation is unacceptable.

"Yes," he says, but he isn't moving.

Jigsaw takes pity on him.

He puts a hand on the back of his neck, and one on his shoulder, and he moves him.

In a fight between Jean and Jigsaw, if it came to that, Jean might win. Jigsaw stands a good head taller than him, true, but that ravaged body -- Jean is hardly in fighting shape, but he'd stand a chance.

The fight, though, is with fear, and Jigsaw's art is the mastery of fear.

The trunk of the car is not so terrible. The blanket is soft beneath his head.

It's a long drive. Hours.

Music echoes back to the trunk from the front seat. Grunge, mostly. A little industrial metal, a little alt-rock. Occasionally, there's a tuneful mumble behind the track, someone singing along.

The car comes to a stop, eventually, after a long stretch on gravel.

As he usually does, in solitary circumstances, Jean contemplates art.

The music gives him little insight into Jigsaw's process, so far. He imagines it, anyway, overlaid on the chair, the chains, the acid. Perhaps it will illuminate.

The trunk pops open, and the light of the morning pours in.

They're out in the country. It's still, and cold, and quiet.

Jigsaw comes around to help him out of the trunk.

He comes out into the clear light of the morning, and he looks at his rescuer with awe.

His specific condition is even more obvious in the light of day. No eyebrows, no hair under the hat, deep dark hollows around the eyes.

He looks back for a long moment, meeting his eyes, searching.

“…stick behind me for a second. Gotta take down the security.”

He heads for the door.

Jean is fascinated, of course, by this security, attentive with every fiber of his being, alive to the possibilities.

(He stays well behind Jigsaw.)

He cracks the door, barely, and kneels down to unhook something at the very bottom before he pushes the door open. Takes down a tripwire across the hall. Stops by the stairs, as they enter the living room, slides off the wood of one step, switches off the pressure plate underneath.

He stops, briefly, after each one, mouths the list to himself, shorter each time.

Any one of these --

He follows.

They enter the living room.

It’s bare, but it has a futon and a couple of papasan chairs, a camp table unfolded between them.

“We’re good now.”

He stops, picks a phone up off the camp table

got him

thanks

putting him on

and then tosses it to Jean.

The phone is already ringing. He picks up. "Hello?"

"Chérie!" -- and his face lights up.

There's an exchange of code words, and a lot of yes, chérie, no, chérie. Some I'm sorrys. Some I'm sorry, buts.

Mission accomplished.

He wanders off into the kitchen. Comes back with coffee. Sips his own mug, very slowly, while he waits.

The coffee has some time to cool.

"Thank you," he says, when he's done.

He nods.

“I changed you. So you’re my problem now.”

The answer is overdetermined.

"Thank you. For changing me."

He transforms, for a moment, and glows like he’s been snapped and shaken.

Like it’s everything he wants in the world.

Yes. It's like a screaming crowd, but cleaner -- like the keen eye of a director whose vision he respects -- this is what it is, to be the artwork, beheld. The creator to his creation -- and he saw that it was very good.

The light reflects in his eyes.

“…can I see it?” he asks, following up immediately with “No’s fine.”

No is absurd. He's entitled.

He stands up, but his hand hesitates at the hem of his shirt.

"--I let them graft it. I'm sorry."

He blinks, takes a moment to follow the logic.

“—no, that’s— that’s part of it. That’s you living. Hang on—”

He drops onto one of the chairs and starts unpicking the laces of one of his knee-high boots.

-- would it be overstepping? -- the tableau is too compelling.

He kneels, to help.

He lets him. He watches his face, his hands.

When the shoe comes away the sock under it is obviously not quite filled.

Under the sock, the forefoot is missing, terminated with a dark scar. The sleek black plate underneath where the toe should be extends back to the heel and up the calf, straps holding it in place.

“There’s mine.”

It balloons immense in his mind, the significance of it, the moments that must have led up to this loss.

"You chose it?"

“Yeah. Drove my car off a cliff. Didn’t think I’d survive.”

He looks down, flexes the remainder of his foot.

“The frame got crushed, and I couldn’t get my foot out, shape that it was. Couldn’t get to my phone, either. And I smelled gas. So I had a choice.”

"C'est beau."

“…kind of was. Don’t think I’ve ever loved being alive as much as I did that night.”

"This is why. For love. I didn't understand, before."

He remembers, and stands to undress.

“…you do get it.”

At least, the part of it that matters most.

Jean pauses, hem half-lifted, to gesture at his face.

He snorts.

"Yeah. Fair."

His shirt comes off, then.

The scars cover most of his torso, wrapping around onto his hips and beneath his waistband. The ordinary features of a human body -- the nipples, the navel -- are gone, replaced patchwork with scars and off-color expanses of skin. Much of it is mottled in texture, or an angry red, or both.

He reaches out and touches them.

Just with a finger, tracing different textures down from the collarbone, and then with a whole hand flat on his stomach.

It's like the butt of a lance -- not painful, but a dull impact to the soul, something that bruises and knocks the wind out of him.

He's very still under the touch, for a moment, before he moves to shuck his pants as well.

His fingers follow the long, faint lines of solitary drips down to the donor sites on the fronts of his thighs.

"Do they hurt?"

"There? No. Not any more."

"Show me where."

So he shows him, taking Jigsaw's fingertips and moving them: raw places, where healing skin has split or stretched or grown inflamed; splatter-spots too small to graft but still too large to heal entirely; flat stretches of skin, expertly stitched, that still protest their displacement with imagined pain.

It's a map of his torso, really, traced out like constellations in the night sky. This is what hurts, right now.

He's transfixed.

When it's done he retraces the spots with his fingertips again and again, like he's trying to commit them to memory.

"...didn't think I'd get to see this in person," he says, eventually.

"It must be terrible. Never to see."

"I get to see the dead ones, sometimes. But the one who lived is...not a fan. Don't exactly blame her."

He takes at least a minute by the clock, thinking this over.

"I can see a certain beauty in that," he allows, eventually.

"...yeah?"

This angle doesn't seem to have occurred to him.

He's trying to reason it out himself.

"Some art is -- deliberately repulsive. Intended to evoke disgust in the viewer."

"...not really how I'm relating to this, but sure."

To misunderstand this is horrible.

"I'm sorry. Please -- explain."

He leans back in the chair, and stares up at the ceiling, and thinks.

"I'm... I want them to want to live. As bad as I do. That's all. I want them to not take it for granted. And if that makes them hate me, then...sure. I put you in a situation that could've killed you. I made you walk twenty feet over needles. Makes sense you're not wild about me. I don't want them to hate me, just, you know. Shakes out that way."

"Kind of nice for somebody to appreciate it, though. Like I did."

He's intensely attentive, as if he might be called on to recite the words back at any moment.

"Yes. I see -- yes."

Jigsaw has occasion to recall some wise words spoken by a friend.

"...did a number on you, huh."

This, too, is the price of doing business.

"Yes," he repeats -- grateful, a little smug.

"So," Camillo says to Jigsaw -- later, conversationally -- "I came home from the grocery store and Valentine was descaling the plumbing. So I asked Cato what was up, and you know what he said?"

"What," he says, nose almost touching his sketchbook.

"He said that someone broke Jean Dulac out of jail."

Camillo puts his hand over the sketch.

"...fucked up," he says, making absolutely no effort to make it sound genuine.

"He did, like, fully murder someone, you know. He was in jail. That was reasonable."

"I'm not that worried about him going in for round two."

"People do normally go for jail even for just one murder."

"Yep," he says, unconvinced for personal reasons.

Camillo shifts to a more pragmatic tack.

"He really doesn't seem like the stablest guy around."

"Kind of substantially on me," he points out.

"That is true."

"Are you just going to keep him in a kennel in your basement or what."

"I'll feed him and brush him and take him for walks."

"You can't take him for walks. He's, like, top ten most recognizable guys in America."

"Shit."

"...his sister's trying to work something out. Kinda feel like I owe him a place to stay in the meantime."

"Can you at least get me his autograph."

"Obviously."

(Camillo might catch him just looking at him, for the rest of the day, when he thinks his back is turned. He keeps two fingers hooked around his like a promise.)

Jean will find Jigsaw's workshop, at a lower bound, habitable.

There's enough furniture to live on, and enough groceries to feed him, and enough space that he doesn't have to keep away from the windows or never step outside. Jigsaw will order things for him, if he asks, and wander downstairs with wood shavings on his clothes to make coffee.

Loud music and the sound of power tools echo down from the second floor at odd hours. Sometimes the futon in the living room turns into a bed, when Jigsaw has lost track of time or has exhausted himself too much to drive home.

The traps aren't as necessary, now that there's a full-time resident. He shows him how to disarm and re-set them anyway.

Jean watches and listens attentively, and finds that reverence prevents him from touching the traps, even to disarm or re-set them. If Jigsaw forgets and leaves one set in an inconvenient location, he'll wait -- in a room, or a corner of a room -- very still, entirely patient, as long as necessary.

Otherwise, he finds it remarkably easy to live an unremarkable life. He eats through the groceries, in a systematic and nutritionally balanced sort of way, without any real attempt to cook them. He asks for books, and reads them; asks, once, for a music player, and listens to music on it. He exercises.

For large parts of the day, he lies on the floor, staring up at the ceiling, imagining what lies beyond it.

All in all, it's more pleasant than solitary confinement. On the occasions when Jigsaw makes an appearance, it's something more than that: something sacred.

He passes through, one day, with a towel around his neck, holding a bar of steel.

"I'm gonna be out back all day. You want company?"

Jean gets up from his supine position to follow him at once.

"Out back" includes a small outdoor forge and anvil, which seem to be the center of today's activities.

Jigsaw fiddles with the valve of a propane tank.

"...what was it like being Jean Dulac?"

Past tense, yes. He chose his love and he lost it in the same blow. Was that, too, part of Jigsaw's design?

"It was -- very agreeable. To be on the stage, I think, is the finest of life's pleasures."

The forge lights. The rock wool begins to glow.

"...you didn't have to confess. Could've got some private security and stayed out there."

It's a question.

"And leave your record blemished?"

He has a set of stretches for the sake of his scars, prescribed during his brief encounter with a physical therapist. He sits down on an available tuffet of grass and begins working through them.

"I mean. I think it's good you did it."

He slides on the heavy leather glove lying on the anvil, and picks up a pair of tongs.

"Don't totally understand how it was worth it, for you."

"A matter of integrity, I suppose. One artist to another."

He turns to the other side, feels how it hurts when his skin pulls taut across his ribs.

"My art was my life. Yours, perhaps, something more."

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.)

"I know. I'm sorry."

It's been eating him alive for a week, because he knows the offer he should and shouldn't make: I'll drive you anywhere you want to go, any time.

For Z, he would have made it.

He knows he would have, too, from the look on his face.

“…fine. I’ll park at the shop tonight.”

"Thank you."

It should be inevitable, that one day he'll ask too much, draw one boundary too many, and he'll lose Jigsaw, too.

It's not inevitable at all. He'll probably lose him the other way, first.

And then he’s back to curling up by the toilet, until the meds kick in.

He leaves early, and slams the front door on his way out.

The music in the shop is louder than usual, that night, but doesn’t quite cover the dubiously craft-related sounds of smashing glass.

Around midnight, he comes downstairs with his bleeding hand wrapped in a rag.

Jean is listening to Coriolanus on his little music player. He hits pause, interrupting Richard Burton mid-line.

"I can help you wrap that."

“Thanks.”

He pulls the first aid kit out from under the kitchen sink, the one Camillo insisted he install.

“Stupid way to hurt myself. The nurses are going to give me so much shit.”

"What happened?"

“Apparently if you smash a bunch of shit on the floor and you pick it up with your bare hands…”

"Unfortunate. Yes."

He appears to be making a mental note of this outcome.

He unwraps his hand.

There’s still a little crystalline splinter of glass in the top of his palm, above a shallow slit down the center that resumes bleeding sluggishly as he opens his hand.

“Fucking…immunocompromised. Piece of shit body. Gonna need to wash it out.”

"Yes. Would you like me to clean it? I do well with tweezers."

“Yeah. Thanks.”

There’s a pair of tweezers in the kit, along with the wound wash and the antiseptics and the bandages.

Jean turns on an extra light and bends over his hand.

As promised, he's steady and delicate with the tweezers, plucking minuscule shards from the wound.

He hisses and bites his tongue when the splinters of glass scrape inside the wound.

But he seems almost disappointed, when he looks down at the clean slit in his palm and sees nothing left.

“…steady hands,” he remarks.

"Clean living."

Jean turns on the tap for him.

He puts his hand under the water, rubbing away half-dried, sticky blood with the fingers of his other hand.

“…can I get you to drive for me, next time?”

He watches pale pink water run down the drain.

"It would be my honor."

Jean rips a paper towel off the roll for him.

"Is it likely to be soon?"

He dries his hands, blotting his palm carefully.

“Not sure yet. Don’t have anybody in mind.”

"You've been in the workshop anyhow. Do you begin with the subject, or with the sculpture?"

“Kind of depends.”

He holds his palm out to be bandaged.

“Like, Leg Lock was done before I even knew I was going to use her on anyone. But Flashdance was all for you. Wouldn’t have come up with her otherwise.”

He kisses the outstretched palm, instead of bandaging, bowed like a courtly gentleman over it.

His lips come away with flecks of blood.

“…gotta wash that out again,” he mumbles, as he stares at Jean’s face, intact and beautiful at such a price.

Jean, unsure of the symbolic significance of this, will nevertheless help him wash it out again. 

“…may I see?” he ventures, as he unwraps a bandage. “What you’re working on?”

He nods.

Once his hand is wrapped tight, he leads him to the stairs, and then up the dim staircase towards the light.

Jean follows, filled with holy dread. 

Halfway up the stairs he halts, struggling to take another step. 

Jigsaw walks a few steps ahead before he notices.

He turns — looks —

and then turns back, ascends to the top step, and sits to wait.

The staircase soars precipitous before him, sheer as a rock face to be climbed with ropes and crampons. 

He thinks about a field of needles and a woman's broken body. He thinks about the silence of a crowd, taut like a harpstring for him to pluck. He thinks about how eager he was for the last drops of acid on his breastbone.

He takes another step.

There are more above him.

Jigsaw waits, and he watches, sat on the top step, elbows on knees, bent like a gargoyle.

This, too, he has to choose. Every step.

It doesn't become easy. Each step is as impossible as the last.

When he reaches the step below Jigsaw, he's dry-eyed, numb, in a cold sweat.

He stands, and takes one step back, and he holds out his hand.

The choice is like every choice before it.

He doesn't touch Jigsaw's hand until both feet are on the landing.

(It feels like flying.)

For a second, he closes his hand around his, and he smiles.

The bandage is soft against his palm.

Then he lets go, and turns to proceed towards his other work.

(The room is large and bright. On a table nearby, the ghoulish masks meant to destroy the head, one bloodied and one still virgin. On a shelf, tubing and pumps and plastic, a box with one sprayhead still inside.)

The chair is empty, but assembled, now. Blades frame the space where a face should be.

He's dizzied, still, by his own victory, by the smile.

It takes the edge off the terror, as he stares about, wide-eyed.

The hammered collars on one of the shelves look familiar. The box of assorted kitchen knives, not so much. The drafting table in the corner is covered in scattered papers, and in the other corner there’s a box full of broken glass, mostly swept off the floor.

And in another corner, there she is, upright and unbolted with the jug in her seat, the chair that held him.

“Mostly done with this one,” Jigsaw is saying, hand on the assembly of knives, checking for stability.

He can't look anywhere else.

The lines of her are lovely.

He turns, when it’s quiet — and watches him, watching her.

“…want to learn how to set her up?”

Impossible. Unthinkable.

The rush he feels, at the idea, is like nothing else.

"Yes."

He shows him how to take her apart, first. 

The shackles, the collar, the leather cuffs, all come away from the chair, unclipped and unbolted. The pump assembly on the back unscrews, and the tubes detach from the sprinklers on the screen, which itself comes away. After he removes a support or two, the legs fold in, and the back leans back upright, an artifact of whatever she was before she was Flashdance.

He doesn't have it in him to touch any of it, not today.

He watches, though, and he asks questions, keen and thirsty: how does that fasten, what is this part for, did you make this piece or buy it.

He’s quick and thorough to answer. When he made a part, he tells him how he made it. When he bought one, he tells him where. Many of the simple, sturdy metal parts were made, often from scrap metal or pipe, and some of the others were salvaged, from the scrapyard or the street — only when he can’t reasonably do either does he make a purchase.

“It’s not like I don’t have cash on hand, now,” he says, “but I’m used to it. And I hate paper trails.”

Often, an unusual part reinforces part of the chair he thinks might break away with sufficient effort by the occupant, or it’s part of the automation, or of the adjustment — things have to be adjustable. He doesn’t generally have measurements for his targets, and sometimes things need to be used twice.

He’ll show him, until he understands, how something fastens, beckon him to come lie beside him and watch the motions forward and reversed.

Soon, Flashdance lies in pieces on the floor.

He imagines Jigsaw reaching inside him, unlocking his ribcage, unspooling intestines in heavy piles on the floor: a has-been actor, disassembled, ready to make over into something new.

"She's broken," he remarks, softly, to himself.

“Not broken. Just need to get her back together.”

He makes an attempt to sit up straight again, from his position leaning on an elbow on the floor.

He has to steady himself, immediately, with one hand on the arm of the stripped chair.

“…might…need to do that in the morning.”

Jean offers him a hand: easily, like it costs nothing to touch him.

It helps him to pull himself up.

“…jesus,” he mumbles, to himself. “Really can’t go until 2 AM anymore.”

He’s achieved his goal, though. As he drifts off, covered in an old blanket on the futon, he doesn’t think about the car parked in the driveway at all.

Jean, who sleeps very little that night, is also not thinking about the car.

They’re delayed, in the morning, by a wave of nausea, Jigsaw bent over the kitchen sink with his eyes shielded by his arms, waiting for the meds to kick in.

Then it’s time to see how fast Jean can make the stairs.

Not fast.

Hardly even faster. What's different is the regularity: he knows this battle, now, and he takes it step by step, unflinching, throwing himself into it, suffering with his whole body.

It takes him maybe ten minutes to reach the top.

This time, as before, Jigsaw is there at the top to catch his hand.

Then they return to her side.

He runs him through reassembly.

Most of the metal supports back on, first, to hold things still. Then the pump assembly back on — he’ll teach him how he wired it, later, he promises. Then lean it back, more supports, here.

There’s a chain already dangling from the ceiling to hang the jug. Jigsaw sends Jean to fill it with water in the upstairs bathroom.

This is difficult.

He brings it, anyway, the perfectly ordinary jug sloshing with liquid, occluding the light just like --

-- he brings the jug.

He takes it from him — “Good. Thanks” — and, after checking the seal on the tubes coming from the bottom, hangs it from the hook, connects the pumps and flips some switches.

Then he pulls his shirt off.

“You can’t put them in shirt on. Fabric holds the acid, makes the burns way worse. Not survivable.”

His ribs are all visible. The chemo port stands out stark under the skin below his collarbone.

He knows, then, something he should have known before: he doesn't have long to learn.

And something else -- 

"You checked?"

(You check, if you give a shit.)

“Researched. Tried some experiments. Don’t have to use bodies on it, not if you’re being smart.”

He sits down in the chair.

“Shoulder straps, first. Makes it easier to manage the other stuff while they’re knocked out. I was glad I had those. Couldn’t test it that well on myself.”

He comes closer, and he touches her for the first time, and he fastens the shoulder straps.

He pushes against them, testing the hold.

“Arm cuffs next. Then ankles and wrists — find the right point to attach the ankles, there’s a couple.”

He binds him in, arms and ankles and wrists.

It's like seeing double: Flashdance, once, from the inside, seared irreparably behind his eyes; Flashdance, twice, alive before him, holding Jigsaw in her embrace.

"Like that."

“Yeah,” he says, pulling against the cuffs, checking them all over, one by one.

“Collar’s not adjustable. So there’s a couple sizes on the shelf. Find the one that fits.”

He can size it by eye, with a glance at Jigsaw's throat.

He touches his collar, anyway, before he brings the right one.

He pulls against that one, too, when it’s on and bolted back. Just to be sure.

“When you bolt on the screen, make sure the tubes are really tight on the sprayheads.”

He’s completely helpless, and he knows it. Jean could find the acid, wherever the remainder is in the workshop, and force Jigsaw to make his own terrible choice.

This is not what Jean is thinking about. He's thinking about how a wrench works, and making the tubes really tight on the sprayheads.

(He's thinking about how it felt, when he met Flashdance, when she held him like this and changed him.)

The screen goes on. He has the whole image now: how it looks from the outside.

He lifts his right arm, and the pin pulls.

There’s a secondary screen on the back of the chair, one he could never have seen, the timer in miniature. It begins ticking down.

29:59.

29:58.

“Timer on?”

It feels like falling, looking at those numbers: like falling, and it doesn't stop.

There are people who skydive.

"It's on."

He laughs, dizzily, pulling again against his restraints, looking up at the jug swinging above him.

“Fuck. Scares the shit out of me even when she’s not loaded.”

He takes hold of the lever, and pulls,

and startles with a sharp gasp when the icy water crashes down on his chest,

before he laughs, and drips, and laughs, and laughs.

"Do it again," he says, like a child -- and, then, reverting to his native tongue, "Encore."

He does it again.

He breathes into it, this time, the gasp and the shiver, and goosebumps raise like welts on his chest and arms.

"Étais-je aussi beau?"

He kneels by his side, watches the water drip to the floor.

“That’s French,” he says, hand still tight on the lever.

"Yes," Jean agrees, vaguely, and he looks up at the jug, waiting for the next flood.

He looks at him, out of the corner of his eye,

and then pulls again.

No gasp, but his whole body shivers, this time. There are no hairs to raise.

He wishes he could bear it himself. He knows he can't -- knows that the next best thing is to watch it, feeling the touch on Jigsaw's body as if it were his own.

How many more? Twice? He thinks it's twice.

"Like that. Yes."

He pulls again, and it crashes and runs down his chest, pools in his navel just like it did in Jean’s, makes his skin pale and then flush.

He jumps out of the seat, a little, every time, even knowing it’s coming, back arching. Maybe that’s why there’s no restraint at the waist.

He didn't move like that. He was so still. Was that worse?

"One more."

He squeezes the lever, and then pauses.

“…do you want to see the bad ending?”

He needs it -- but --

"--no. Just like it was for me. Please."

He nods — as well as he can, restrained as he is —

— and pulls, shoulders tugging against the straps as the water pours over him, gasping and shivering —

— and then pulls again, again, again, milking out the last drops onto his chest.

It's --

-- he moves, in a haze, to release Jigsaw, to bring the workshop's ratty towels. He dries his body, kneeling beside him, and he kisses him where the water touched, in the center of his chest.

By the time he’s dry, his expression has softened, a bit, into a lazy smile.

“Cold plunge,” he says, and he ruffles Jean’s hair gently with his hand.

Jean smiles up at him: adoring, affectionate, like he smiles at his pretty reflection in the mirror in the morning.

Then he bends again, solemnly, and he begins the work of drying Flashdance herself.

He slides out of the chair, and he watches him, knelt beside him on the floor.

He's meticulous, and he's reverent, and he freezes, sometimes, when his fingers brush her.

He makes a full circle around her. When he's finished, she's dry, alone on the flooded floor.

He watches them both together, just a moment longer, before he takes one of the ragged towels to start mopping up the rest of the floor.

He doesn't try to help. He just sits there, spent of willpower, damp at the collar and cuffs, not bothering to suppress the shivers.

He puts his hand on Jean’s back, when he’s done, between his shoulder blades, feeling him shiver.

“…done for today, huh,” he says.

"Is it enough?"

He turns up his pretty face, looks helplessly into Jigsaw's hollow one.

(Is it fair?)

He thinks.

“…yeah. Today, it’s enough.”

And then it’s turn to help Jean up, and take him down the stairs.

Camillo drives Jigsaw to chemo. Camillo picks up garlic scapes at the farmer's market for Valentine. Dorothy texts Camillo about a job opening she saw, and Camillo texts back not really looking right now, but thanks! :)

Camillo drives Jigsaw to the hospital, late at night, and yells at the doctors to give him some better fucking painkillers. Camillo sits in the ER waiting room, when Jigsaw can't stop vomiting enough to keep water down, and looks at the pictures of Six Flags with Z and doesn't cry. 

Jigsaw suffers.

Being poisoned every week is taking its toll. He can't miss driving, because piloting a vehicle would be far too much propriocepting. The morning before chemo, which used to be the easiest time of week, is now the most miserable, as his body responds in advance and leaves him sweating on the floor.

Everything hurts. His skin hurts, his head hurts, his hands and feet hurt worse than anything unless they're too numb.

He begins to struggle, again, to get out of bed, on the worst days.

His doctor thinks it might be best to give his body some time to recover.

"You need to get your job back," he says, the morning after, curled up on the couch in his apartment, facing the back cushions.

"Plenty of time for that," says Camillo, from the floor where he has been relegated for leg-jiggling sins. "And it's not like Valentine charges me rent."

“I’m serious. You can’t spend the whole next year watching me die.”

"It's not like that," protests Camillo, whose plan is precisely that.

"I know — you miss him. And this is fucked up. And it's hard."

"Please go on...a fucking lunch date, or something. Talk to somebody from school. Teach a kid algebra."

Everything he can think of to say is cruel. His best friend is dead and his boyfriend is a murderer and he swore an oath not to tell anyone either, how is he supposed to have an interaction deeper than good morning? What's the point of building a life when, inevitably, the police are going to trace the murders back sooner or later, and Jigsaw will probably be too dead for it to matter but Camillo, complicit, will have to deal with the fallout?

"I don't really feel like doing that," he says, and manages not to finish up by asking if Jigsaw is planning to torture him into it.

"...okay," he says, because what else can he say?

He tries to start the same conversation, an hour later, and catches himself halfway into asking.

The next morning, he calls the office back.

Off chemo. On radiation, starting in a week.

If he encourages Jigsaw to give up earlier, to go on palliative care, will the months he loses save lives? Or will the relief to his ravaged body give him more energy for what he does?

It doesn't matter. He can't fuck him over.

Camillo bakes a whole batch of cupcakes so that he can put a candle crookedly in one and give it to Jigsaw. Congratulations on finishing chemo, good luck with radiation.

Encouraging him wouldn't matter either way. Jigsaw chose to live. No matter how much it hurts.

He blows out the candle, and won't let go of his hand for a long time.

Then, the next day, he takes a rideshare back to the workshop.

There he will find Jean Dulac, in his basement, eating butter with a fork.

There are two options here and he hates both of them equally.

"Is that good?"

"Excellent. Very straightforward source of fat."

This is a level of being a macro guy he hasn't actually witnessed before.

"...do you want takeout. Or something."

"There's plenty in the fridge," he says, confused.

Jigsaw goes to look in the fridge.

The fridge contains a perfectly normal subset of the groceries Jigsaw has previously ordered to this location. There's an open container of yogurt, half a head of celery, that sort of thing.

Jean finishes off his butter and starts munching on some okra.

Z would have interfered in this situation.

Jigsaw feels this is, at its heart, not a problem. Guy has other priorities.

He will, however, offer him half a sandwich.

This is not in Jean's nutritionally balanced diet, but it's fine. He's flexible. He'll account for it when he's deciding what to eat tomorrow.

"Can I see her again today?" he asks, once his mouth is no longer full of sandwich.

"Yeah."

He stands to head to the stairs.

"You can see her when I'm not here too."

"--oh, I don't know," he says, obviously caught by surprise.

"Just be careful with her. And don't dig around in stuff too much."

He starts the climb.

Jean walks up the stairs almost like a normal person.

He still has to stop, at the summit, and rest.

"Getting used to it?"

Not 'getting easier'.

"I'm quite all right."

Jigsaw finds this implausible, but isn't about to interrogate it.

He makes his way across the room to Flashdance.

And Jean follows, as closely as he can bear to.

(How beautiful she is. What an honor, to see the master in his studio.)

He puts his hand on her, and turns back to Jean.

"What do you want to know today?"

"--I want to know everything. How you design, how you edit. What makes work good, and what makes it great. I want to know where the choices are, every decision you make that would have been worse a different way. I want to know how you hold a wrench when you're lying on your back and I want to know whether you choose names last or first. I want you to show me what's a matter of taste, good or bad, and what's a matter of practicality. I want to learn your process and I want to make my first five hundred mistakes."

He's a little breathless, by the end of it.

It's not, strictly speaking, an answer to the question.

But it does suggest what he wants to come, in the end, from being Z's hands and feet and eyes.

"...I made this all up. I don't know what's great. I just know what I do."

"But I'll show you what I can."

"So — first — I've got a couple plans for her I scrapped..."

He heads for the drafting desk.

"Pre-paradigmatic," Jean agrees under his breath, following behind.

He has to leaf through a lot of scattered papers, though mercifully he does not always draft as much out as he should. Jigsaw is not much of an improvement on the organization front.

Eventually, though, he works out a couple of papers.

The first has the figure in the trap (5'6"? written by the curve of its back) bent forward instead of lying back, chin on a block, sprayers still arranged in front of the face. Its legs are shackled down to the boards it kneels on. The pumps and circuitry are all contained neatly in the block that supports its chest. Rather than one chute, an arc of sprayers follows the back, two-abreast.

"I thought about this a lot. Back's supposed to be a safer place to get large burns. But it was going to be a serious pain in the ass to make adjustable. I'm not about to eyeball somebody's thigh length from red carpet shots. And I wanted you to be able to see everything that was happening."

"Thank you," he says, immediately.

(It's so good, to have seen it all. He's never once stopped thinking about it.)

He doesn't know how to reply to that, so he nods, and he doesn't.

"And I was thinking about what to do with the tank."

He uncovers another two papers. In one, the jug of acid is a more straightforward pouring water jug, with a tube protruding from the bottom, attached to the lever with pulleys such that pushing the lever forward tips the jug forward as well.

"Simple to set it up this way, but if you really went for it on the lever — you'd get it all at once, and the momentum might get your face splashed. Not fair, not making the choice even when you know how bad it hurts, and  — one wash wouldn't do enough damage with the dilute stuff I was using, and if I didn't dilute it that just fucking kills you if you don't do it in one pull. Doing it with pumps gives me a little more control."

He knows exactly how badly it hurts.

"What makes something," he asks, once he can ask again, "fair?"

It's a very important question. He sits in the chair by the drafting table and takes a moment to think about it.

"Few different things. That one, splashing your face because you pulled too hard, is — if you do everything right, if you do what you need to even when it hurts, you don't get the bad ending. Razor wire thing was bad even if the door wasn't locked because — the more you wanna live, harder you're trying to get out, the worse it is for you. And it's also — the instructions need to tell the truth. If I tell you your face is safe if you empty the jug, that has to be true."

"It has to tell the truth," Jean repeats, carefully, "and there has to be -- a chance to win? A path to victory -- one path to victory?"

He doesn't understand about the razor wire. He will -- soon, he will find a way to ask.