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ancient names

A John Seed x Original Female Character Fic

Ancient Names, pt. i: of wolf and man

Masterlink Post

Word Count: 4.9k

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

Warnings: Language, some “light” religious blasphemy (it’s Far Cry5), the Seeds being themselves. This is an enemies to lovers (enemies to enemies and lovers?) fic that I started writing because the ending of the game made me too sad and I just wanted to try my hand at writing for a fandom I’ve never done before. This will be largely canon deviant after chapter one, with this first chapter mimicking (hard) a particular scene in the game (if you know, you know).

Notes: Hi! First time posting a full chapter on tumblr and not linking it to my AO3! I hope ya’ll enjoy; I had originally posted the link to this in parts, and then decided with some support to post the full thing on here instead of linking to another source. I’ve never written for Far Cry 5 before this so thank you in advance if you read!

Summary: Once, before Eden’s Gate, before her hands moved with such surety to shove a fresh clip into an automatic, before she got familiar with the taste of blood in her mouth, before she'd gone off to the Academy, before coming back home to this shit show—she had thought John Duncan was attractive.

Elliot spit water out of her mouth, gripping his wrist around her throat, and said with no absence of venom, “Go fuck yourself, John.”

The first thing that she recognized was the desperate need to breathe.

The second was that she was wet, exceptionally wet, her lungs filling with water over and over again, like dying a thousand times without the actual reprieve of death. Two strong hands gripped the front of her shirt, pinning her under the dark surface even as she struggled. Elliot thought, I would rather just die.

She was yanked out as abruptly as she’d come to. Elliot gasped wildly for air, coughing up lungfuls of water, clinging to the arms of the cultist that had been kind enough to pull her out. She realized, too late, that he was probably also the one that had been holding her under.

“... must atone! For only then may we stand—”

The man--a tall, bald, ugly looking son of a gun--pushed her back down onto her feet, facing her back toward the bank. The residual Bliss in her system was dragging her vision, making it pulse wildly on and off, irregularly timed with her own heartbeat, and through the blur she saw two others, pushed towards John Seed.

(John, in his fucking dumbass blue shirt and vest.)

“—in the light of God, and walk through His gate—”

He touched the forehead of the captive to her left.

(John, with his pretentious Eden’s Gate white leather book.)

“—unto Eden.”

Her own special Peggy pushed her forward as John touched the forehead of the captive to her right. She coughed up more water, spitting it out and feeling her stomach lurch as she stumbled forward.

(John, with that stupid fucking lilt to his voice, the lazy cadence of a man who didn’t even need to read the words in front of him because they were already ingrained in his mind.)

He stared at her oddly when she was there in front of him, like a fox in a hen-house; she shivered from the cold water even though the heat of the day had not fully dissipated. He said, slowly, “Not this one,” and suddenly the hands of the cultist were off of her, and he was taking the leather-bound book (she would not call it a Bible; she refused) from John, and he took a step toward her.

Elliot thought, exhaustedly, I could run, I could run right now, but the idea of moving her legs in this water, of stumbling her way through the woods again, still coming off of a Bliss high, made her so, so tired.

And then, with that slick, venomous timbre in his voice, John said, “This one’s not clean.”

He grabbed two fistfuls of the front of her shirt and folded her body down hard into the water. There was no time for her to try and take a breath, or even hold her breath, and Elliot didn’t know what was worse; the very real idea that John Seed was going to drown her in this river in some kind of twisted, evil mockery of a baptism, or the shameful knowledge that her body had crumpled under the weight of his pressure, like a wadded-up newspaper.

Weak weak weak, the voice in her head chanted, while John’s hand moved to her throat and kept her under. Weak weak weak, it said, as she grabbed onto his wrist and dug her nails in as hard as she could. Weak weak weak, it sang when John forced his fingers into her mouth to open it up under the water. She wanted to close her mouth, bite down as hard as she could, but her body’s voluntary reflex was to stay open, gasping for air underwater, like a dying fish.

John yanked her back into the real world just when her vision began to blur black around the edges. Elliot held onto him, tightly, not for lack of animosity but because she did not think her legs would hold her to stand. Blood streaked down his arm where her nails had made purchase. He grabbed her chin and said, “Ah, enough of that sad little whimpering, deputy. You’re pulling right on my heartstrings.”

Elliot swallowed back river water. Wet strands of her hair stuck to her face and tried to creep into her mouth. He was watching her hungrily with those eyes--blue, cerulean blue, too blue to be in the skull of a man like John Seed--like he was waiting for her to say something. Those eyes were wasted on you, John Seed, Elliot thought venomously.

Once, before Eden’s Gate, before her hands moved with such surety to shove a fresh clip into an automatic, before she got familiar with the taste of blood in her mouth, before she'd gone off to the Academy, before coming back home to this shit show--she had thought John Duncan was attractive. Handsome. Charming. A little rich for Hope County, maybe. But they'd locked eyes once before in the bar, and her face had gone so red she was sure he could see it from where he stood.

A man like John Duncan would never have looked twice at a girl like Elliot Honeysett, who had only kissed two boys her whole life and carried herself with almost no amount of sexy confidence. But then he had, waltzing across the bar like he owned the place (maybe he did), planting himself next to her and saying, “Well, aren’t you just the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen coming through this bar?”

She had been so flustered then. Nobody had ever looked at her like they wanted anything from her, let alone that they wanted her at all.

“I’m--I’m sorry, I’m leaving in just… Two weeks...” she’d said that night, tripping over her words and trying to say, in the most efficient way possible that she was flattered, and interested, but also that she wasn’t because she was going to be going off to the Academy and she wasn’t a one-night-stand kind of girl.

He’d laughed and leaned close, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. It had felt very suddenly like the noise around them dimmed so that all she could think about was the smell of his cologne and those eyes, and he said as soft as a kiss, “A lot can be accomplished in just two weeks, beautiful.”

And then her friend Joey had come and grabbed her arm, dragging her off of the stool and saying, “Sorry, but we’re meeting our friends later!” over her shoulder like it wasn’t a blatant lie. Oh, and she’d given Elliot quite the lashing, too, about how good girls in Hope County didn’t consort with rich out-of-towners, and how they were going to be leaving so soon anyway.

Another before. Maybe she still thought John Duncan was handsome; was that a different man than John Seed?

Elliot spit water out of her mouth, gripping his wrist around her throat, and said with no absence of venom, “Go fuck yourself, John.”

She bit the words out with as much animosity as she could muster. The act of it was almost as sweet as slapping him in his stupid face, the enraged expression overtaking his face as quickly and violently as a burning death of a star. His hand on her throat tightened, as though he was prepared to shove her under the water again.

He would kill her, she thought: but he would have a damn hard time doing it.

“Do you mock the Cleansing, John?”

It was a different voice, from behind him now. The rage left his face, replaced by something different. Shame, Elliot thought absently, when he stepped aside and she saw Joseph standing on the bank. He’s the kid who got caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

John began, “No, Joseph—”, but before he could get very far the man was shushing him. Joseph Seed was more dressed now than Elliot thought she had ever seen him in his whole life: not only pants this time, but shoes and a button-up, tied with a vest. His dark hair was slicked back into that loosely-tied bun that he often sported, and those dumb fucking yellow aviators sat on his face.

It’s nighttime, you stupid snake.

“You have to love them, John,” Joseph said, in the way that he did; like he was counseling. Maybe in a way, he was. “You cannot let your personal feelings get in the way of that.”

Something in John’s expression tightened. Elliot thought that Joseph must have meant the vitriol that John felt for her, his hands wadded into her shirt, ready to drown her again.

Before she could think to say anything—maybe get one last lick in, and if the world wasn’t still wobbling around in her eyeballs she might have had the good sense to smash her face into John’s—Joseph ordered, “Bring her to me.”

When the bald cultist who had been dousing her before grabbed her arm, she felt John’s grip on her tighten. Just a little. It said, I don’t want to, and just that tiny gesture before he dropped both of his hands from her made her stomach flip in uncomfortable anticipation.

Fireflies whizzed around her head. The short distance from the water to Joseph felt like a tunnel, the water and the woods and the mud bending around her with him at the center. He opened his arms for her, like a father waiting to embrace his daughter. When she found herself standing in front of him, he took her face in his hands.

He was gazing at her the same way he had when she had first slapped cuffs around his wrists: like she was the only person in the whole world, right there, in front of him, and there was nothing that he wanted more than to just look at her.

And that was how he did it, Elliot knew. That was how he got people to believe him, to follow him, to do these crazy nut-job murders and stealing and--and whatever else they had in store, now that they thought the end of the world was happening and they needed to be prepared for it. He looked at them like they were the only thing that mattered, and they felt special, and loved.

“Regardless of the things you have done,” Joseph murmured to her, his hands large and feverishly warm on her chilly, wet face, “you are not beyond salvation. You are not here by accident, or by chance, deputy. You have been given a gift.”

He paused, the weight between them heavy. Elliot thought, I wish I could kick your stupid glasses in.

As though he had come to fully process what he wanted to say, Joseph finished, “But whether you decide to use it or cast it aside remains to be seen.”

His hands dropped from her face. She almost wanted to cry; she was so cold, down into the marrow of her bones, that even that sickening heat—surely warped by the remaining Bliss in her system, which caused Joseph’s face to shiver in front of her eyes—had been a comfort to her.

John walked up beside her, and Joseph put a hand on the back of his head. “This one shall reach atonement,” he said, “or the gates of Eden will be closed to you, John.”

It was an order. The implication in them remained long after he had spoken them; in John’s face, in the way he leaned into Joseph’s embrace. It was soft. Softer than she would have liked. It was hard to hate them, when they were soft.

“Yes, Joseph,” John replied obediently.

Elliot’s vision swam. She wondered how many Bliss bullets they’d hit her with; it only took one, she knew, but her whole body ached, and there was more than one dressed wound on her body.

Her stomach lurched. Joseph was walking away, back towards his car, and John was watching him. Elliot said, “John,” and the words fell out of her mouth like marbles. She remembered, vaguely, Jerome telling her that they poured Bliss oil into the water during their fake, mind-controlly Cleansings, too.

“What is it, deputy?” John asked, turning to her, his voice light and innocent. “Have a confession to make?”

“How much Bliss?” She spit onto the ground, towards his feet, again and again. The urge to throw up was almost overwhelming her. “How much did you give me, Seed?”

John made a disgusted noise. He put a firm, hard hand on her shoulder, forcing her face back up with the other, making her look at him. His eyes were too blue: more than they should have been, and as Elliot tried to pull her gaze away from his she almost toppled herself.

“Enough,” he replied, “to muzzle you, hellcat. We’ll see if you’re really worthy of atonement, won’t we?”

Her body felt weak. All of the adrenaline was fleeing from her body, and in its place remained only her blood, and the Bliss left in it, seeped in from the water through her open wounds. Elliot took a step forward, and her legs crumpled; she plummeted toward the ground, certain that she wasn’t going to be able to stop herself, but John caught her under the arms at just the right minute. He hauled her to her feet again, and she thought, Just let me lay down, please, I’m so tired.

“You should see how you look right now,” he hissed at her, their faces close. “Falling over yourself, soaking wet, barely put together. You’re—you’re so—”

He seemed to be trying to find the word he wanted to use; maybe the one that would hurt her the most. But for a heartbeat, his eyes just traced her face. Maybe he was angry that Joseph had decided for him to keep her around, when he’d been so clearly set on drowning her.

“Pathetic,” he managed out after a moment, his voice tight.

The words rolled out of her mouth in a tired drawl when she said, “Oh, fuck off, John.”

It would have felt better, if Elliot weren’t drugged out of her mind, to see the expression of absolute indignant fury pass over John’s face. He clearly wanted his words to sting. He clearly wanted to hurt her, but John Seed had never met the likes of her kind, not anywhere outside of Hope County.

“Put her in the car and take her back to the ranch,” he said, letting go of her and letting her stagger to keep her footing. “I’m tired of looking at her.”

One of the cultists grabbed her arm and dragged her to the back of one of the vans she had spent the last four days destroying. She struggled, futile as it was. There was no world where Elliot Honeysett wasn’t going to go down kicking, anyway.

“Where’s Joey?” she demanded hazily, pulling at the man’s grip on her arm. “Where is she, John?”

“Deputy Hudson?” John’s head had swiveled, his eyes narrowing in on her, like the click of a rifle scope. Her fingers itched at the thought. I see you, she thought viciously. I’ll put a bullet right in the middle of your head, just like I did to all of your little friends. “You won’t be seeing her for a long time. Well—”

And he paused, as though deliberating, and then said: “Maybe sooner, depending on how much you act up.”

Dead.

The word rattled around in her head in warning, wiping her expression of all of her anger, and she saw it on John’s face--the smug satisfaction of a man who had gotten just what he wanted in the last minute: her hurt.

The Peggy pushed her into the back of the truck, slamming the doors in her face. Through the window, John peered at her, grinning as he waved.

“Bye now, Rookie.”

Elliot did everything she could to keep her eyes open in the back of the van. She was the only one there, so there wasn’t anyone she could talk to; each time she pinched herself to stay awake, the gesture felt more dull, her body more numb to it as the Bliss from the Cleansing kicked into high gear in her body.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

She had barely ever drank in her whole life, let alone participated in something remotely like Bliss; so when it hit, she knew her best option was to lay down and sleep, feeling the handmade drug wreak havoc on her senses. Her hands had been zip-tied together, and she was still soaking wet and shivering, so when she got down in the back of the van she curled her body up as much as she could to try and preserve what little body heat she had left.

Though she had desperately wanted the deep, dreamless sleep that she was used to getting after drinking even one or two alcoholic drinks, she was plagued with blurry, troubling dreams. John Seed, in a bar, leaning into her like a flower to her sunlight; John Seed, calling her beautiful; John Seed, his hands wrapped around her throat. Leaning in to say, against the shell of her ear, you’re pulling right on my heartstrings.

When she woke, she found herself swaddled in a bed. Her hands were freed, the bandages that she’d left wrapped over her palms and wrists from the helicopter crash wounds taken off. Her wet clothes had been stripped off; an old t-shirt, four sizes too big, and a pair of long grey sweats were on her instead, the top of the sweats rolled over and over to make them not swallow up her legs. The idea that someone in Eden’s Gate had undressed her made her stomach twist uncomfortably.

Despite the heavy blanket, warmer clothes, and the fireplace, Elliot felt a deep chill settle in her skeleton, and she shuddered. Her head pounded. She felt like her mouth was full of cotton. For a long a moment, she stared at the wall, her back to the room, and tried to figure out what she was going to do when she could get to her feet.

Kick John Seed’s stupid face in, for one. His smug, stupid face. It really is a waste, she thought absently, to give him any good genetics at all.

If he really did kill Joey, she would make him pay.

“Have a pleasant sleep?” John asked, his voice crawling out from somewhere deeper in the room. Elliot forced herself to roll over; she hadn’t slept it all off, it seemed, because doing so reminded her that her whole body felt like lead.

He leaned against the doorway, pleased as punch, and watched her with that infuriating little smile on his face.

“Hello, John,” she managed out, her tongue feeling one size too big for her mouth. He pushed himself off from the doorway and made his way over, pulling a chair up to the side of the bed. Elliot managed to get herself to sit up, shuddering again with another chill.

“Did you dream, Rook?” Her skin prickled when he used the nickname that only Hudson and the others used with her. It felt traitorous, to let him use it and go unscathed. “I’d be interested to know what you dreamed of.”

She pushed the hair out of her face. There was no way; John Seed could crawl his way into a frozen hell before they talked about the nuances of her drug-induced dreams. She said sweetly, instead, “Bold of you to come so close when my hands are untied.”

“You won’t hurt me,” he replied confidently. “For one, it’ll take at least another full day for you to get the Bliss out of that system. For someone as tiny as you, deputy, it sure did take a lot of dunking to get you placated.”

“I’d say the adrenaline was maybe outweighing the Bliss,” Elliot replied dryly, glancing around the room briefly. No windows. Typical cultist. “What’s the second thing?”

John leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees. “You just wouldn’t stop saying my name when you were sleeping,” he murmured, like they shared some great and terrible secret, “so I’d wager your feelings for me are a little more complicated than you’d like to say.”

Elliot could feel the heat crawling up her neck and into her face. She felt betrayed by her own mind, her own body. Every time she was around John it felt like this: weak, grasping wildly for control, taking and giving hits wherever she could get them and never getting a full foothold.

“You do haunt the corners of my nightmares, yes,” she replied sharply. “Funny, how drugging and kidnapping a person will do that.”

He laughed. He seemed almost pleased by it. His gaze drifted away from her for a moment, and it did that for a few long minutes between them, drifting and inevitably dragging back to her again, like he couldn’t resist looking at her. John pressed his thumb to his lower lip, tapping absently, before he took in a little breath, and he said, “I remember you, Rook.”

She felt her stomach twist, doing back flips, her heart pummeling the bones of her rib cage. That couldn’t be true; there was no way John would remember her, from all of those years ago, from a single interaction in a bar that lasted no longer than five or six minutes.

“You blushed just like this when I looked at you then, too,” John rumbled, his grin splitting wickedly across his face. “You were so sweet then.”

“I hate you,” Elliot said, gritting the words through her teeth, the way she knew how, baring them like a wild animal. The way her mama had taught her. "I hate you.”

“See, you keep saying that.” John’s gaze was dark, like the water he’d held her under. “But I don’t think you really mean it, Elliot Honeysett. If I remember correctly, you were very eager to spend time with me the first we met.”

Her lids felt heavy. She considered the logistics of lifting her hands and punching him. “I was different back then.”

“Weren’t we all?” John sighed. “Anyway, I’ll let you rest; I just heard you talking in your sleep and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. The doc thinks you’ve got a mild case of pneumonia. Wouldn’t want you to strain yourself, so—”

He came to a stand, smiling at her with that maddening half-smile that curved his lips, boyish and charming and all together not cohesive with his Mega Doom-Sayer persona. John leaned down, and much like he had the first they met, he tucked a loose wisp of hair behind her ear, enjoying that she was too weighed down to fuss. He said, “Sweet dreams.”

“Where’s Boomer?” she asked. Please, she thought desperately, please don’t say you killed him.

“The mutt?” he asked, sighing, and then continued off-handedly, “I don’t know, probably—out, somewhere, scavenging and waiting to get eaten by something bigger.”

She felt a little bit of relief, not that she thought John said that only for her benefit. If he had killed her dog, he might have used it to rub it in her face. He’d have no reason to lie about Boomer surviving.

He turned and headed back to the door, swinging the key around his finger. Tiredly, Elliot said again, “I’ll kill you.”

John’s head tilted as he paused at the doorway. He finally, finally, turned his gaze to her, eyes narrowed. “Oh?”

“If you’ve hurt Joey.” She rubbed her eyes, her body aching dully where she’d been hit by the Bliss bullets yesterday afternoon. “I saw the broadcast. I know you had her, at least at one point.”

John knew exactly what she was talking about: he’d put out that broadcast of how all they needed to do was say yes, and they could all be atoned, too, playing across all of the TVs in Hope County, even in the homes where the families had been killed. It had featured Joey, duct-tape over her mouth and her mascara streaming down her face, a prop on display.

“I know,” John replied, watching her steadily. “It was for you.”

And he left, closing the door behind him, leaving her alone in the dark once again.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

When he went to rouse her the next morning, she was already awake.

Elliot Honeysett was the kind of run-of-the-mill, girl-next-door-in-a-small-town pretty that often went over-looked: but not by John. He had picked her out of the bar, all glowing warm and innocent, blonde hair, cornflower blue-eyes, and a pretty little cupid’s bow mouth that were, surely, a dime-a-dozen in a small towns all across the mid-west. Hope County was not special, by any means, for its count.

But it was special for having her as she was now. The button nose, her soft eyelashes—they belied the little monster beneath. Everyone had a choice, John knew, when faced with immense pressure; they crumbled, or they changed. And Elliot Honeysett had changed, so much so that John hadn’t recognized her on the security cameras he’d had planted around Fall’s End, blood-soaked and dirty and jamming fresh shells into the shotgun she’d peeled off of the body of one of his men after she’d headbutted him so hard he cracked his head in the pavement.

Wild, John thought absently, watching her now, drowning in Jacob’s old clothes. Feral. Not a good girl anymore, are you, Rook?

“You look refreshed,” he commented. She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, and when he walked in, her eyes immediately went to him. “Hungry?”

“I’ve been thinking,” Elliot began. As he made his way over, he studied her.

“A dangerous pastime.”

“Maybe I was a bit hasty before,” she continued, as if he hadn’t said anything at all. John sat down in the same chair he’d sat in the night before, keeping an eye on her hands. “You know, saying I’d kill you if Joey was hurt.”

He acquiesced, very graciously, “It did seem extreme, but I wasn’t going to say.”

“I’ll kill your brother first.” Elliot leveled him with her gaze, her voice smooth still, “so that you can bury him yourself.”

The smile fled from John’s face. Willful and spiteful, the voice in his mind intoned. His eyes narrowed. “And you won’t kill me?” he prompted, tartly.

“No,” Elliot replied, lightly, giving a little sigh. “I don’t think it’d be worth my time.”

The heat flared up inside of him, striking his irritation hot as an iron. He was suddenly reminded of her impudence; it hadn’t arrived, all of a sudden, last night. She’d had it from the moment she came back to Hope County. When he’d given her the chance to bring herself to him the first time to atone, she’d spat into the radio, Come and drag my body there yourself, you lazy hack.

His jaw set. He could make her thankful; if she really wanted him to, if she really wanted to push him there. John stood, abruptly, grabbing the front of the over-sized shirt and yanking her up; there was a little satisfaction when her hands weakly grabbed at his wrists; she looked rested, but she was still frail. “You infuriating—”

“I wouldn’t if I were you, John.” Elliot’s eyes narrowed now. She tilted her chin defiantly, even when, as they were now, he could just throw her back against the wall. And then, as cloying as anything, she drawled, “Joseph would be so disappointed in you.”

The sound of his brother’s name in the sweet, venomous timbre of her voice was like a shock to his system. _Stupid, willful, spiteful— _

She was right. Joseph would be disappointed, if he hurt her. Joseph had never fully agreed to his means, and while he firmly believed that the ends did justify them, his brother did not.

“If your sweet Deputy Hudson wasn’t dead before,” John hissed, “you can bet she’s as good as now.”

Elliot’s gaze flickered over him. Even with the animosity in her voice, in her eyes, he felt her gaze linger on his mouth. It was a tiny, tiny little victory; under all of that wolf, she was still a girl, after all.

The blonde said, a little breathless, “You’re going to run out of things to threaten me with if you keep killing them off, John.”

“I can be creative.”

He released her, brushing his hands off as though to rid himself of any remains of her. He paced to one end of the room, and then pulled the key from his pocket and paced to the door instead. His skull was still buzzing with irritation; the pure audacity, to talk to him like that.

“You might want to rethink your stance a little, Rook,” John said at the door. “You’re going to put people in danger.”

He slammed the door behind him, angrily locking it from the outside and clenching his teeth. Stupid, willful, spiteful, ungrateful. She shouldn’t be so hard to break, not like this, not with the Bliss weighing her down. It didn’t matter how much had time had passed between before and now; at one point or another, the girl in Elliot had wanted him. He knew that she at least felt that for him, before. It should have been easy to get under her skin.

Because it was so, so easy for her to get under his. Those sharp little eyes, taking in every detail they could, trying to find any weakness. She’d already put a little pin in Joseph, saving him for later.

You have to love them, John, Joseph had said.

“John?” Elliot called through the door, as though she knew he was lingering out there. “In case it wasn’t clear, I hate you.”

Yes, he thought absently, making his way down the hall. We’ll see how long that lasts.

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