Due to the Hunt’s influence and her naturally good immune system, Daisy hasn’t been sick in nearly a decade.
After she escapes the Buried, she’s not only free from the Hunt’s influence (both positive and negative) but is also physically very weak.
Several weeks after escaping the coffin, Daisy (who has been sleeping at the Archives, as is Jon) wakes up cold around 2AM. This is strange, since Daisy is usually the kind of person who gets hot during the night and kicks off all the blankets. She chalks it up to losing body mass and retrieves a quilt she’d brought just in case and drapes it over herself.
Usually, Daisy leaves one of the lamps on in the Archives and keeps the door to the room she’s sleeping in cracked because it freaks her out to be in pitch blackness, but during the night it goes out (the lightbulb burns out from being left on so much).
During the night, Daisy finally starts to get symptoms of her cold: a stuffy nose and a scratchy throat.
When Daisy wakes up again around 4AM, she’s back in the Buried. It’s pitch black, her nose is full of dirt and her throat hurts from breathing it in. She lies there under the earth, knowing that at any moment, it could decide to start crushing her again.
After a little while, she eventually realizes that she’s not in the coffin, but in the Archives.
She stays up the rest of the night, not wanting to go back to sleep.
The next day, she asks to stay in the room while Jon does various Archival work, and eventually, she starts to nod off while she listens to him.
Daisy wakes up from her dozing, and realizes that it’s time to eat dinner.
They order takeout, and Jon asks after her health after she has a sneezing fit (he wouldn’t be concerned but seeing Daisy outright sleep while he was working was definitely odd).
She tells him that she’s fine. When he continues asking, she tells him to leave it alone.
Jon, respecting her boundaries, leaves it alone, but tells her that she can come to him if she needs anything, of course.
She is exhausted by the time that it’s evening, but still manages to stay up until late in the night. She nods off at the desk she’s working at, and has a series of nightmares about the coffin and wakes up a few hours later at 3AM, feeling absolutely miserable with a headache from lying on the desk and an ache in her back, not to mention her cold.
She gets up, shivering and feeling like shit, at least wanting to have nightmares in her cot if she’s not going to be able to stay awake.
As she’s walking to go to her cot, she passes by Jon’s office door and sees that the light is still on, leaking out from under the door.
She goes in quietly in case he fell asleep at his desk, but she walks in on him rubbing his eyes under his glasses, still working.
From the doorway, she tells him to go to sleep. He insists that he still has things to get done.
She goes into the room, trying not to nod off sitting in one of the chairs until it seems like Jon is done with whatever he had to finish up.
When she notices that he seems to be starting a new task, she walks over to the side of the desk and tells him to come on.
Jon is like “what??” and Daisy is like Come on.
She basically escorts him to his cot (“I’m surprised you’re not frogmarching me.” “Don’t give me any ideas.”)
When they arrive in the room he’s sleeping in, Jon sits down on his cot and asks Daisy what she’s going to do, since she wasn’t sleeping either.
Daisy is too tired and sick to keep up appearances (and knows she can let her guard down around Jon) and admits that she’s sick, and hasn’t been sick for years and forgot how fucking miserable it is.
Jon asks if that’s why she can’t sleep, and she tells him simply “Nightmares”.
Jon tells her that he has them too, that sometimes he prefers to sleep at the desk in his office because waking up on his stomach in the dark reminds him too much of the coffin even if it gives him a terrible crick in the neck the next day. Daisy feels uncomfortably seen, as she did exactly that earlier (not that it’d helped).
Daisy tells him that she’s still trying to catch up on the Archers, and after a moment, Jon hesitantly tells her that if that’s all she’s doing, she can stay in the room with him and listen if she wants.
(This is a big ask for both of them, since the suggestion itself is not really a suggestion but a request from Jon who feels he shouldn’t need it, and a suggestion to Daisy who also feels like she shouldn’t need it.)
She agrees and sits down with her back against the cot, starting an episode of The Archers. After a few minutes, she feels Jon’s hand creep out from under the blankets and the tips of his fingers press against the back of her shoulder where it’s pressed up against the thin mattress.
After listening to a couple episodes of the Archers, Daisy finds herself nodding off through the third one she puts on, and has to rewind it more than once.
Eventually, Jon says “this is ridiculous. Could you please get up here?” but the hesitance in his voice makes the command sound more like a request.
Daisy, who is literally sick and tired, reminds Jon that she has a cold and that if they sleep in the same bed he’ll probably catch it.
Jon tells her that he’s not sure if he can get sick anymore.
Daisy relents and climbs up into the cot with him. Luckily the two of them are skinny enough that they fit, though it is a bit of a squeeze.
After a few pretty awkward moments of the two of them pressed up together, breathing in silence Jon tells her, “You could leave the Archers on. If you wanted to.”
Daisy turns on the episode of the Archers, setting the sleep timer, and falls asleep so quickly that she doesn’t remember anything past the intro.
When she wakes up the next morning to faint light streaming through the high archive windows, her sleep nightmare-free, she’s still sick but she feels much better than yesterday. There’s a hand on her waist, and she can feel Jon’s forehead pressed into her back, hear his still-sleeping breaths.
She feels more rested than she has any morning after escaping the coffin -- and maybe more than any morning since she started hunting.
She reflects on the drive that would have her up early every day, unable to resist the pull to start the hunt as soon as possible -- and she thinks she prefers this.
She turns over and goes back to sleep.