NOTES:
Greetings, reader! I very recently was introduced to the Friday the 13th movies and became an instant fangirl for reasons that I'm sure you understand if you're reading this. This fic is based primarily on the 2009 remake for a number of reasons, the foremost is the utter wasted potential of the kidnapping part of the plotline. Whether you feel it in character for Jason to have done it or not, I think you'll probably agree it was a waste. I have been STRONGLY compelled by my crazy brain to fix it, and fix it I shall.
Now, I hate basically every person in this goddamn movie aside from Jason, who is a sweet precious cinnamon roll (fight me), including Whitney. I don't care how big a chickenshit (aka rational human) you are, after six weeks of being fed and taken care of and not hurt this girl should not still be freaking out the way she does. She's like every bad horror scream queen stereotype and I just can't. So. My version of Whitney is basically an OC in that she's going to be very different...in as much as I can make her different when all we really see is how she freaks out and runs away. As you'll see in this first chapter.
I have a pretty defined plan for this story, so while there might be an update delay here or there depending on time, this is not going to be one of those four-or-so-chapters-and-forever-incomplete monsters. I'm not positive on the exact number of chapters, or how exactly the POV is going to fall - but I know it will alternate between Whitney and Jason, and it will be finished.
Oh. And yes, there will be smut, eventually.
Enjoy, fellow fangirls!
CHAPTER 1
In the Woods Somewhere
~/13/~
Day 2
Whitney paused to flex her hand, trying to coax the pins and needles to ease where they stung all the way down to her fingertips. She allowed herself a few seconds of this, rotating her hand back and forth. The movement caused the chains to clank in a muted reminder of the precarious nature of her situation – as if she needed one. As if she wasn't staring at the metal cuffs locked in place about her wrists.
Bending her hand down at the wrist she set the edge of the manacle to the wall behind her and set to work again.
Scritchscritchscritch.
The angle was awkward, and her hand was already complaining again. It was slow going – whatever rock formed the wall at the back of her corner was tough enough that even the sharp metal edge of the manacle required repeated and significant force to penetrate the surface. But she didn't stop until she was done and there was a small line scratched into the rock. One down. One more to go. One for each day she had been trapped down here.
The phrase hell hole crossed her mind in a flash of humor as dark as her mood. It wasn't inaccurate, either. She was in a literal hole under the ground where the air was stale and smelled of earth and metal and gasoline, chained to a wall, at the mercy of a killer. If that couldn't be described as hellish, she didn't know what could.
As far as she could tell she had been deposited within a cavernous space that might have started out as a shallow basement. It was certainly far too deep and expansive for any crawlspace. This didn't explain the odd twists and niches, the passageways leading off in other directions, nor the panel of metal mesh that served as the second wall to her corner. It was far more like a rabbit warren than any basement she had ever seen, and the metal grating, tools, and bits of machinery she could see scattered about the rest of the seemingly random piles of stuff were enough to think it was something else entirely. She'd heard there was an old abandoned coal mine out here, long abandoned in the mountains and the woods. Perhaps this was it, connected via digging to the space beneath the house.
The house.
Knowing what she did now, she would never have let Mike drag her inside. She had known before she even set foot inside the crumbling, ramshackle building that they were trespassing onto something they should not – that the ghosts that lined the cluttered rooms like dust would not take kindly to being disturbed. It had felt wrong, disrespectful in the highest sense. Like encroaching on a grave, the site of some horrific, unnamed tragedy. Still she had let Mike lead her inside to investigate.
Why? Why had she gone with him? Had it been because she simply didn't want to be left outside alone? Or had it been to appease yet another subtle dig at her nonexistent sense of adventure? She wished she had refused, threatened to leave without him, or else just done it. Done something – anything – else. She wished she had never come on this trip, never laid eyes on that creepy, sleeping horror of a house. The house where Mike might still be somewhere, broken, pulled apart, blood pooled around him in a still mirror of the life that had left his eyes.
Oh god, this was actually happening. It wasn't some awful vivid dream from which she could wake. This was reality. She wasn't even supposed to be here. She should be at home taking care of mom and studying for her exams…but she wasn't.
Forcing in a measured breath, Whitney set her cuff back to the wall to begin on another tally. From what she could calculate down here with only faint rays of light to go on she had been down here for at least two days including that night.
No.
No, she didn't want to think of that night. Focus on the metal scraping rock, the ache at her wrists or in her belly. Anything else. Keeping track of time would keep her busy, keep her from going insane. Or so she told herself.
The scrape and creak of old wood caught her ear, followed by an unmistakable thump of weight upon earth, and every strand of muscle in her body went tense.
Hurriedly she scrambled away from her tally wall, pressing her back into the corner until she could feel the pattern of the mesh pressing through her shirt. Her hands curled into her chest, as if to form a barrier to the organs that lay beneath, the heart that beat so hard into her ribs that they hurt. Or perhaps just to minimize the tremor beginning anew in her limbs, radiating outward from the cold clench of terror in her belly. Because death was coming.
He was coming.
She remembered the unease she had felt at Wade's retelling of the events of the Crystal Lake camp, the chill that had swept through her, raising gooseflesh across her skin. The fine, tiny hairs at the back of her neck had stood on end as though a chip of ice had been dropped down the back of her shirt. Ghost stories had never been up her alley. Between the covers of a book when tucked inside on a rainy day, maybe, but not in the middle of the woods not half a mile from the abandoned campground not long ago touched by tragedy.
When Mike had teased her about being spooked she had laughed it off, but deep down she had known it wasn't just the guilt and discomfort of being away from her mom that had her itching to leave. She hadn't been able to articulate what it was that was making her feel so jittery and off and so hadn't tried. It had been the sole reason she'd let him talk her down enough to stay. Because grief and stress did things to the mind, and she had had no solid reasons to back up the ominous feeling that had been lingering over her since the sun had set. And she'd actually managed to trick herself into believing it for a little while. Until they had come across the dirt road, the weather-worn wooden sign, and the feeling had risen up again like bile: a deep, black dread that from that moment on she had not been able to shake. The feeling of eyes in the dark, watching. Waiting.
She wasn't sure what changed: the weight of the air, the heavy lay of the shadows in the cavernous space, just that something did. Not half a second before the man – her captor – appeared.
For a moment she didn't see him. Not in the now. She saw then: the blade stabbing up through the creaking floorboards, slicing through Mike's foot, his leg, as he gave startled, garbled yells. She saw the arm bursting through the old wood as though it were rotten in earnest, not simply aged and un-cared for. The head wrapped in stained, filthy cloth like something out of a nightmare lifting from the dark. A massive hand seizing him, dragging him down into hell as he bid her to run in a gurgling shriek as he was pulled apart.
Whitney had still been in shock by the time she'd made it back to camp, half convinced that perhaps it had been some kind of joke. A cruel joke - and one in response to which she would have left immediately - but a joke. That was, until she had seen the reddened, blistered form of Amanda. The other girl had been lying half in and half out of the fire pit having fallen from where she appeared to have been strung up in a sleeping bag to cook like a foil packet, her skin melting, clothing charred to her flesh. The sight of it had been a slow, surreal horror, but the smell…she would remember that smell for the rest of her likely very short life. Burned hair and meat and chemicals all bound together by the dry, overpowering aura of woodsmoke. She would have vomited for certain had she been given any more time to process what she was looking at. But she hadn't, for Richie had been alive and screaming at her, leg clamped in the teeth of a fucking bear trap. Cut down to the bone.
When she thought about it, she could still feel the metal beneath her hands; slick and slippery with blood, the fine shards of bone that flaked away as she did her best to pry apart the jaws of the trap to free him. She could remember the look on his face, the meaty crack like a melon being cracked in two, when she had looked up to see the blade of the machete buried so deep in his skull that it had split between the eyes and nearly to the bridge of the nose.
That had been the exact moment she knew she was neither dreaming nor being outlandishly and cruelly pranked. That moment as she had scrambled backward on all fours and scraped her palms open on the rocks, screaming and sobbing as the hulking beast of a man planted a booted foot against Richie's face and shoved to free his blade. And in that moment all she had been able to think of was the story told by firelight, half for fun, half to scare.
"He came back," Wade had said, and she had seen the dirty, faded sign hanging over the broken down fence and knew. Saw the cluttered, dust-laden bedroom of a long-dead child, the name lovingly carved into the headboard, and knew.
The feeling of dread, the sensation of eyes following them through the trees – they had not been nothing.
She remembered marveling at the sheer size of him – taller than any man she had ever set eyes on and far, far broader. A veritable giant from her position scrambling backward in the dirt. Horror and awe bubbled at the back of her throat, mixing with her terror. Then he had come at her, bearing down on her like some great titan of blood and vengeance. His arm arced up and back, blade gleaming black in the firelight – wet with Richie's blood – and she had known without doubt that she was alone and that she was staring into the face of her own death. She had seen the glint of light on metal, felt the soft brush of air against her face as the blade sliced through the air...and then nothing.
She had blinked through the tears veiling her vision she found the edge of the blade a hair's breadth away from slicing into her cheek.
He had frozen, his entire towering frame gone still as stone. Her surprised had been muted by the terror but she remembered peering up at him, breathless, taking in the heavy, tattered coat, the broad hand gripping the handle of the blade. A piece of sackcloth or sheeting had been wrapped about his head like a shroud, concealing his face entirely but for the hole through which a single eye glittered – and though it was wreathed in shadow she swore she had seen the rage. The empty, soulless fury burning like black coals as he stared down at her. Yet as she stared back, her heart vibrating in her chest like a trapped bird, she would have sworn the fury ebbed, fading into something like...shock?
She didn't know how long they had stayed there, locked in the impasse, as she processed the fact that all along there had been a psychopath stalking them in the woods. But the next thing she knew he was swinging the blade away from her face, slipping it into the holster strapped to one powerful leg. He had bent, seizing her around the middle and lifting her straight from the ground as she screeched and struck out with a sudden burst of all new terror. Ignoring her cries of "no!" he hauled her over his shoulder like a sack of flour and started off, back toward the direction from which she had fled.
While she would have liked to think she hadn't made it easy for him, she knew better. She had thrashed and kicked and clawed like a wet cat, screaming all the while – even though she knew there was no one to help her. He had carried her as though she were made of pillow fluff, not bone and flesh, one arm wrapped firmly about her legs as she dangled there struggling uselessly. Carried her all the way from the makeshift campground and across the old bridge and through the trees without any sign of strain or exhaustion, or even a heavy breath, and without seeming to give a single damn about her efforts to fight her way free.
"No, please," she had begged as he towed her back to the decrepit house. "Please, let me go!"
There was no response. He merely pulled her down through an opening in the floor, as she screamed and sobbed, as she clawed at the wooden frame, as she clung there before he removed her hands and pushed her resolutely on into the tunnel underneath.
There he had chained her, and there she had been.
He came around the corner from the passageway which led to the trapdoor: a great, hulking shadow emerging from the blackness beyond until he stepped through one of the watery ribbons of light struggling in through the holes in the floor above them. Fear flickered through her, a crackle of ice darting down to her toes as he approached, moving with a silence that seemed ill-suited to a man so large. And god, but he was large. Tall and broad and thick with muscle.
She had felt the slope of his shoulder lodged beneath her belly, the flex of an arm like a python about her thighs as she had kicked at him. The shirt he wore – once white, perhaps, or gray – draped a deep, solid chest. The work pants were lose and nearly colorless, but they, and the straps that held the machete in place at his thigh, did enough to prove that his legs were no less powerful. She could see just the base of his neck in the gap between shirt collar and the sack mask, and while the skin looked a bit odd the lines of muscle and tendon there were prominent. His hands alone were nearly twice the size of her own, the palms wide and fingers long.
In one of these she noticed he held a bowl, and she realized he must be bringing her food as he had done earlier. And the day before. Something cold and lumpy in another deep ceramic bowl with a metal spoon sticking out. She hadn't touched any of it – not because she thought he would go through the effort of bringing her all the way here just to feed her rat poison, but because to eat what he brought her felt like an acceptance of how things were when she very much did not accept it.
She watched him narrowly as he sank into a crouch beside her little makeshift bed nest. He was angling his head to look at the bowl he had left for her earlier: still untouched as the one before it had been, and his shoulders seemed to lower just the tiniest bit, as if in disappointment.
That confused her.
Why disappointment? Why not anger? Why didn't he force the stuff down her throat if he wanted her alive as he seemed to, since he kept bringing more food for her to spurn. Yet he had only come down the three times since bringing her. He brought food, checked her water (which she had refused to drink, again, out of principle) and left her to the dark and to the nightmares burned into her mind. Which brought her to the much more important question she had been asking herself since he'd locked the manacles about her wrists: what did he want her for?
He hadn't hurt her, had barely even touched her since situating her in her little corner. In fact, she was fairly certain he hadn't planned to take a captive. When she had first blinked through the darkness of the cavern room there had been no signs he'd meant to bring someone back with him. He had chained her first, forcing her wrists into the old fashioned pair of handcuffs and padlocking her to the rock wall before proceeding to bustle up and down from the trapdoor into the house and back with various objects. The little mattress, the bedding, the crate turned upside down to create a table, the gallon bottles of drinking water, unopened and still sealed – arranging the little space as she watched, paralyzed with her fear. The fact that she had been intended to die with everyone else was no comfort to her. Something had changed his mind, and the sheer range of possible reasons for this was staggering, each worse than the last. A brutal death might have been far better than what awaited her here.
"What do you want with me?" she found herself whispering, almost under her breath. But he'd heard her. She saw his visible eye flick to her face before lowering back to the table to exchange the untouched food for the fresh bowl.
It wasn't the first time she'd asked. She had all but screamed herself hoarse as she'd demanded an answer, over and over from between choking sobs throughout that first day. The response was the same. He didn't speak. Hadn't spoken a single word, uttered a single sound since dragging her here. Merely remained a silent behemoth of intent she couldn't guess.
Her lips parted again, readying a simple please, and immediately bit her tongue. There was no point in pleading for her life. He either meant to hurt her or he didn't and there was nothing any amount of crying, begging, or screaming was going to do to change it.
Without so much as acknowledging she had spoken he rose, becoming once more a tower of menace made flesh, and turned to go.
She didn't know what made her do it. The exhaustion of two days spent in a constant state of fear, the culmination of hunger and weariness and stress, the frustration of being simply kept there without knowing why – or perhaps all of it. Her body simply moved of its own accord, seizing the new bowl of cold sludge in both manacled hands and hurling it across the room where it smashed, an explosion of broken crockery against the rock. And regretted it instantly.
He stilled, head swiveling to regard her over one shoulder with that single eye. Setting the other bowl down on the work table piled high with half-rusted tools he started back toward her as panic rushed in to wash away the burst of rebellion.
"I'm sorry," she blurted, holding her hands up, palms out in a gesture of defensive surrender. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean—"
He crossed the floor in three long strides as she shrank, folding in on herself to create a smaller target. Yet for all the violent retribution she expected in payment for her moment of fight, she received none. He simply seized her by the forearms and pressed her hands down into her lap.
There was no real force in it. It was more as if he were correcting her as one might have a stubborn puppy, and the look he shot her with that single dark eye read quite clearly: Don't do it again. He held her there for what felt like a small eternity, then released her. Tapping the side of the nearest water jug twice with two fingers as if telling her to drink it, he rose a second time and left her, taking the bowl from that morning with him.
She sat there for a moment, stunned, her heart in her throat. Ten shallow breaths later, or perhaps twenty, she picked up the jug, clumsily twisted off the cap, and lifted it to her mouth.
Her empty belly pinched at the sudden introduction of liquid, and she regretted throwing away the food. It had been a stupid thing to do – testing the limits of a murderous psycho who had clearly heard the story surrounding these parts and decided to spend his time stalking campers in the woods like the drowned boy turned ghost of the legends. So incredibly stupid. About as stupid as refusing to eat when keeping up her strength was all she had.
No one was looking for her. They had left no specific destination, and had hiked in. There was no car within ten miles to trace, to even hint where they had gone. She was the only one who could save herself, and she couldn't do that if she was weak and dehydrated.
The next time he came with food – and she dearly hoped he would, that the ill-advised moment of rebellion hadn't discouraged him – she would sit there meekly and eat it like a good prisoner. And then she was going to get the hell out of there.
