Stolen, a friday the 13th fanfic

Title: Stolen
Summary: "Jason can smell her. He can see her. He can hear her running, like a panicked deer who has forgotten the art of silence." A girl, a summer, a song, and a short lesson in behavioral psychology. A relatively nonviolent one-shot.
Disclaimer: I don't own Jason. I also don't own the song Stolen, by Dashboard Confessional, which was the inspiration for this piece of fanfiction.

It would be inappropriate to say that Jason is clinging to the shadows. Rather, the shadows are clinging to him. Just beyond the fringe of tree branches and vegetation, the golden light of September afternoon flutters through a few layers of leaves before stopping abruptly. The oily darkness that wreathes him is almost a barrier in and of itself.

Even the sun is afraid of Jason Voorhees.

The teenagers aren't shrieking with drunken laughter; but then, the sky hasn't grown dark yet. In Jason's understanding—which is often elusive and ephemeral, a series of things he intuits without cognitive recollection or evidence—their bad behavior is inevitable. As the sun sets and the shadows grow, so too will their appetites: for sex, for drugs, for beer that smells like pigswill.

So when they pass around a few bright, clear bottles of water instead, it confuses him at first. Then he reasons—to the extent which he is capable—that they are simply saving their alcohol for later. Vaguely, he allows himself to be captivated by the glint of the liquid, and the way the late light shines through it: amplified, scintillating.

They pour it in their mouths. Jason swallows a grunt, his throat working convulsively. If he'd been a man, he might have gagged. He knows too well how water fills the mouth: flooding in, dark and cold, tasting of slick fishskins and mud. It fills every open space, and he doesn't understand their eagerness to drown themselves.

The teenagers themselves are golden. They shine within tall, straw-colored grass, wearing white and khaki and browned denim. Their hair gleams in shades of copper and wheat, reflecting the rays of the sun. One boy pulls a pale guitar from the pack behind him. Jason waits for discordant twang of the wire, loud and garish in his woods. His gray-knuckled hand tightens on the machete; he grits his teeth and tastes the bitter dust of enamel on his tongue.

The boy runs fingers lovingly across the instrument, and a quiet stream of sound spirals out into the air and hovers there. Behind his mask, Jason's eyes widen, then narrow. He tilts his head, ears longing for a second chance to catch the sound. It has triggered an answering warmth in his chest—a feeling with which he is unaccustomed. Curiosity pours over him; he wonders if hearing the brief tune a second time will inspire the same spreading heat.

He stops suddenly, like a startled animal, and then shakes himself like a dog, eyeing the guitar and its owner distrustfully. The strings are taut with light.

"Tuck. Hey, Tuck."

A girl lifts her head from the grass. Before, she'd been nothing but a pile of shiny, straw-colored hair, smooth and rippling at the ends, reflecting light. Now she looks up, her face splashed with golden freckles, her eyes a shocking turquoise. When she pushes back a handful of glossy hair, Jason sees that her cheekbones and the tips of her ears bear the telltale blush of faded sunburn. Like the brief burst of sound from the guitar, the sight of her pulls a coil of warmth from Jason's chest.

He crouches abruptly. It is a stance he usually uses when preparing to attack, but now the movement is entirely defensive.

What is wrong with him? Is he ill?

He can't remember having ever been ill before. Perhaps he had been as a child, but he doesn't have the presence of mind to think back so far—and might not remember even if he had. Jason is a creature of the moment, and past memories—which he rarely even attempts to access—only seem to manifest as vague, roiling shapes and shadows which he recognizes indistinctly: instincts and gut-responses.

For instance, he is afraid of water. He knows it is deadly. When he thinks of it—when he sees it—he feels heavy and cold, suffocated. If he tries, he can remember the way it cloyed and dragged him down, the cold, stony scent of it when it filled his nostrils. He can't recall why, though.

He hates teenagers. Passionately. Seeing them—hearing them—makes him feel almost as helpless as the water does. Furiously, his eyes burning, he lashes out at them: their mocking laughter, their nasty filth, their grating and garish noise. The way they slobber and sweat at each other, skin on skin, spit and spit. He knows they are responsible for the absence of his mother. He knows they are responsible for how he feels now: cold, damp, somehow both empty and heavy all at the same time, as though he were made from wet stones.

He can't recall why.

So it is with many areas of Jason's life. Only in his dreams is there any clarity, as though sleep distills the memories buried in his head, beyond his conscious reach. Perhaps this vagueness is due to the disabilities he'd had in life. Perhaps it is a result of his resurrection: he is an animal, a machine.

Perhaps it is something he chose, and doesn't know it.

But the faint sound of the guitar in the air—delicate, light—and the bright eyes of this girl, improbable in their vividness, pierce his chest. The feeling is unlike getting shot—something which he knows well but of course cannot precisely remember—or stabbed, or struck.

He wants to growl, furious at the unfamiliarity of it.

We outsiders understand, of course. Poor Jason. He is unable to identify this: the lance in his chest, needle-thin and precise. The poignancy of this girl's eyes, the sweetness of the guitar strains. For the sake of narration, I will tell you:

The girl is Tucker Flock. Everything about her is frank. She is incapable of artifice or guile.

It isn't the color of her eyes that arrests Jason, though that's all his simple mind can grasp. It's the honesty in it, the openness of her gaze, direct and inviting.

In fact, her honesty has gotten her into trouble on more than one occasion. She doesn't understand the value of a white lie, and the drama and manipulation-games of high school—from which she graduated only two scant years earlier—had always been beyond her comprehension. She'd been all but socially incompetent during that four-year warzone. In spite of her natural prettiness—untainted by cosmetics—she'd been too blunt with her peers, naïve in her acceptance of statements at face-value, incapable of deceit or the fine art of manipulation. Incapable of lies.

Which is, of course, all that Jason has come to expect in a teenager's gaze.

A note on Behaviorism:

B.F. Skinner is perhaps the most famous practitioner of this particular branch of psychology. He was, incidentally, a bit of a creep: along with allegations of constant sexual harassment by his female employees, the man has a history of performing research that we would now deem unethical with our soft modern sensibilities.

Nevertheless, Skinner tells us that all animals—including human beings—manifest learning by their outward behavior. First, a stimulus is administered. It elicits an unconditioned response. Let us say that a blood-slick machete is wielded in front of a young teenage girl. This is the stimulus. Her fear is the unconditioned response: natural, unplanned. This fear can be measured, Skinner tells us, by her behavior: her scream, her stumbling run.

The machete itself belongs to a hulking brute in a hockey mask. This monster becomes the conditioned stimulus. When the girl sees the man, she expects that the machete will follow. Now, the sight of the man is enough to trigger the conditioned response. She jolts. Her eyes widen and bulge, no longer coquettish. A scream roughens in her mouth. She turns, trips, flees.

Let us say, perhaps, that she survives this encounter. In the future, large knives will make her break out in a cold sweat. Men who are tall and broad-shouldered make her cringe, and her heart rate increases. She no longer camps in the summertime. Once, even, the sight of a street-hockey goalie sends her spiraling into a panic attack, for which she must be hospitalized.

This, Skinner tells us, is generalization, the process by which a conditioned response is elicited by stimuli that are similar to the original conditioner. This is how the wild dog learns to bite the hand that feeds him. This is how the predator learns to choose its prey, and the unthinking beast learns to hate.

Nowadays, most people believe that Skinner left out the importance of mental cognition in his approach to human psychology. I think, therefore I behave. However, behaviorism is still widely applied in its most basic ways to the study of animals, which allows us foundations for developing theories of humans.

Jason, in his own way, is very much an animal.

Let us change the direction of this case study.

A small boy attends summer camp. His peers—adolescents and budding pre-teens, all of them—mock him, hurl hurtful names and stones. This mockery is the original, unconditioned stimulus. Do you see?

He begins to associate the young teenagers with feelings of helplessness, frustration. He sees the trickery in their eyes, the meanness, the delight. They are the conditioned stimulus; his anger and powerlessness is the response. Do you see it?

He drowns—a result of their cruelty, and the self-absorption of his older counselors. Teenagers have caused his death. They are the stimulus. Rage is the response. Do you see it?

His mother—the only positive influence in his life, the only reinforcer—is taken away from him by more teenagers. The deprivation of something pleasant is referred to, in behaviorism, as negative punishment. Skinner and other behaviorists tell us that punishment is a tricky thing, and often leads to an increase in undesirable behavior.

Do you see it now?

Now Jason, like an animal in a cage with electric currents running through the walls and the floor, has generalized. Like a dog or a rabbit or a lion, he doesn't have to remember the events to have them encoded in his behavior. All teenagers trigger one response. The sight of a beer can, the smell of it—yeasty, thick—can set him off. The sound of their noxious, self-involved laughter. Their swearing, the slick stickiness of their sloppy, slapping, skin-on-skin grinding—the manipulation and seduction in their eyes—

Do you see it?

Jason does.

The girl is Tucker Flock. She has wheat-colored hair, absurdly bright eyes, and a splash of freckles. She is starting her sophomore year at Concordia Community College, where she plans on majoring in engineering. She doesn't have to wear a bra, but when she does, it's an A-cup. Her hipbones are delicate wings.

Most importantly, she's honest.

And alive.

There's a vivacity in her that can't be quelled—a side effect, perhaps, of a clear and open conscience. In theory, it shouldn't be enough to stop him in his tracks. Jason's been generalizing for years. But there are no beer cans, and no grating laughter, and he can't smell a trace of deceit on her, and maybe that's enough to make him pause.

He tilts his head like a confused wolf. His torn nostrils flare behind his mask.

She looks like a teenager, sure enough. But something's missing.

"Yeah, Bobby?"

The kid with the guitar—the one who called her name—he's pretty guileless too, but there's nothing about him that arrests Jason, that stops him in his tracks. Bobby runs his fingers over the glinting strings again, and Jason caves in on himself tighter, one massive, gritty fist digging at his own sternum.

"You wanna sing with me?"

Another girl sits up in the grass. Her hair is an orange and copper mass of fleecy ringlets, and her eyes are warm and honey-colored…but she doesn't interest Jason. He doesn't even spare her a glance, his mismatched eyes focused instead on the one called Tuck.

"That Anathallo song," the redhead orders from her place in the high grass.

Tuck's lip pulls back as she makes a face.

"Barcelona?" Bobby offers.

"Nah," Tuck says. "What's a good September song?"

And she laughs, and tosses herself back into the grass, her hair billowing upward in glimmering sleek streamers. Jason can see the fine gleam of strands that cling still to the stiff stalks of dry grass, like spiderwebs left in her wake. Her limbs, lean and loose at the joint, had collapsed so perfectly to the ground, as though her body belonged there. Jason isn't very good at abstract thought, and so the prospect of imagining something is nearly beyond him, but for a moment he sees the way she would look, running from him: the thin legs flashing up and down, glimpses of the dirty bare soles of her feet, the way her blond-brown hair will ripple with light behind her. He sees how she would look if she were to trip, to stumble and fall. Her knees would kiss the ground, hard, creating hollows in the dirt that would cradle her legs lovingly. She would sprawl to one side, her hip carving a narrow canyon in the soil. Those delicate arms would fling outward and upward, the elbows and wrists loose and graceful. They would be like flags or streamers in the air.

He sucks in air through uneven teeth, and the hissing sound it makes startles him. He is usually so silent.

"That other one," Tuck says. "I can't remember who…?" She hums a few bars instead, and the boy with the guitar tilts his head to one side, listening to the notes emanating from the prone form in the grass. Her voice rises up, threading between the yellowy stalks. "We watch the season pull up its own stakes and catch the last weekend…of the last week," she sings, and her voice is nothing to write home about. She won't win American Idol, or be picked up by a producer who happens to hear the sweet strains of her voice as she's walking down the sidewalk on her way to work. She's throaty and raw, and there's too much laughter in her voice, but she manages to hit all the right notes and there's a melodic clarity underlying it all, a purity of sound. No, Tucker Flock won't win any contests or sign with any record labels, but the same directness that resides in her gaze also floods into her voice. She could make a liar into an honest man just by singing to him.

Bobby recognizes the song and picks up the chords, and in a moment, she's following after him with the rest of the words. Or maybe he's following her. You have stolen my heart, she says, and when she stands up with her arms raised—melts out of the grass and upward like a goddess—it's clear that she's talking to the world. You have stolen my heart.

A few short minutes ago, Jason had been watching his prey like a hungry beast, not planning so much as absorbing, drinking them in before nightfall. The boy with glasses who plays the guitar (weak vision: he will be like a wounded antelope once the lenses are dropped or fractured), the demanding red-haired girl (she takes much for granted and will be easy to surprise), the brown-haired twins with sultry eyes (one male, one female), the blond boy with the sleepy smile (he is unaware of his surroundings). The fine-boned, loose-limbed, freckle-faced girl with the shiny hair and—

From the ballroom floor we are in celebration, she exults: one good stretch before our hibernation. Her arms are embracing the sky. She turns, the tall grasses bowing under her feet. Our dreams assured and we all will sleep well—sleep well. She smiles at her audience, her eyes bright and blue-green.

If Jason were one for irony, he would find the line amusing. Sleep well, as thoughthe exhortation could be softened by song. No-one "slept well" while camping on Crystal Lake, after all.

But irony is beyond Jason—pretty much everything is at this point. The only thing that might possibly be within his grasp is The Girl Called Tuck. He doesn't tend to wonder, exactly, but the skin on his fingertips longs for hers. His hands tell him that her skin will be warm from faded sunburn and the soaked-up light of day, and that it will yield under the slightest pressure. If his hands were to cup the fragile skin behind her knees—and lift—her loose joints would bend gracefully. He could mold her collapsing limbs against his own, around him. He could wrap himself in her.

I am, perhaps, taking liberties. Jason's thoughts are not nearly so succinct. He sees the girl. His eyes take her in even while his chest swells with unfamiliar heat. He kneels. He digs grimy fingers into his sternum. In his head, he sees: the sole of her bare foot, the back of her knee, the bone in her shoulder catching light. He thinks, Wrong. Right. Soft. Bend. Wrong. Want. Warm. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Skin. Soft. Wrong. Touch. Wrong. Mine.

Wrong.

And from where she's spinning, arms wide, face lit up with sun, he hears: You have stolen my heart.

Do not misunderstand. Jason does not want to do the sticky-sloppy-groping-grinding thing, the filthy slobbery habit that teenagers seem so prone to, especially on the shores of Crystal Lake. He has no desire to see sweat bubble out of Tuck's pores, oozing over the sun-blushing skin. He doesn't want to thrust into her until perspiration puddles in the small of his back and dribbles between his buttocks. The idea of feeling her spit on his skin is enough to make him shake like a wet dog, and he recoils from the thought of her jiggling and writhing and panting and bouncing.

No. Those things are dirty, and Jason wants no part of them.

But he would like to catch her by the ankle, gather her bending limbs into his arms like the delicate branches of a blossoming pear tree, and take her back to his cabin. He'd like to sit on the bed and peel away her clothes, to lay her on his lap and stroke her slowly, like a cat. He would like to savor the heat and softness of her—to see the largeness of his dark hands spanning against her fragile ribcage and throat—to discover all the tender corners of her body, all the things that make her. He would like to watch as she grows even more languid against him.

It is the catching of her that captivates him right now. He wants to see how she will react to him. He wants to see if she will cry.

Other girls have cried. They've shed rivers of tears. Some have offered him lies (I swear I won't tell anyone) and some have offered him favors (I'll do anything if you'll just let me go), as though he could be swayed by such things. But the one called Tuck is devoid of trickery. She won't deceive him, or try to manipulate. Jason doesn't think these things, precisely—he can't fully grasp how she is different from the others, and he has no prediction for how she might react instead. He only knows that he wants to see it, that he needs to see it.

I watch you spin around in your highest heels—you are the best one of the best ones, she says.

He straightens slowly from his crouch. His gray hand, with the skin split over his knuckles, moves to the armor of his mask. He can't conceptualize what it looks like—what he looks like—but he knows that when the mask is not in place, people are even more frightened of him.

We all look like we feel.

There's no beer.

Apparently they've left a watermelon hanging in a netted bag off the dock, cooling in the lake, and perhaps the natural sugars get them high because they're all laughing, teasing each other as the sun goes down in shades of navy and pine and gold across the water. Their laughter does grow loud, and foolish, but there's a certain quality missing from it that Jason can't place. Imagine Pavlov's dogs, the first time he tried to condition them to something other than the sound of a bell. Eventually, he'll learn—and this laughter will incite his animal rage just like any other laughter—but for now he tilts his head in bewilderment, waiting for the crack of opening beer cans: a sound which will never come. In the late amber light, her hair is the color of wheat and sand. The shadows form dusky lakes along her collarbone and the backs of her knees.

He bides his time thoughtlessly, carelessly, quietly.

Like a predator, he waits.

They dance. They laugh. Like all their ancestors from around the globe, they sing by the fire, they hoot and howl and strum their instruments, they celebrate to the sound of their own heartbeats. The stars come out, winking from behind a faint and intermittent haze of navy-colored cloud. The air grows sweet and cold, though the warm dirt under their feet hold the memory and ghosts of sunlight. Dew collects on the tent canopies; by morning it will have turned into an intricate lacework of frost.

The laughter becomes softer, huskier. The limbs become languid, the movements almost a lullaby. One by one—at least in most cases—they turn in for the night, surrendering to one of the three tents. From outside, Jason hears some whispered comments, some giggles or snickers, but nothing more. At last, there is only the boy with the glasses, who held the guitar—and The Girl Called Tuck, whose cheeks and ears hold the blush of remembered sunburn. The boy strums a final few notes, a remnant of the song from earlier. Lazily, the Tucker-girl sings.

You have stolen my—you have stolen my heart.

Jason steps forward. Like every other act he commits, it is done without thinking; however, this time he has even let his instinct be clouded. A twig snaps so loudly it startles him, making him jolt and bare his teeth like a dog who has accidentally bitten itself.

The teenagers seem not to notice, however—or if they do, they assume the noise has been made by an animal. They believe it to be a natural forest-sound, and they dismiss it accordingly. Jason considers—in the vague, half-formulated, wordless way of his—coming forward now, machete at the ready, slicing off the boy's head with one clean and effortless stroke before lifting the girl and taking her away.

He tips his head doggishly at the prospect, then shakes himself, disgruntled. He has no interest in killing the boy. Not that he'll hesitate, mind you, if the male gets in his way—but for now, his eyes are trained on one target only.

The girl.

Tucker Flock.

He's been watching her all night, and not once does that strange clarity in her bright eyes fade. There is something about her that is so much more real than anyone else he's seen.

Their voices are low murmurs. The boy and the girl sit side by side, slouched against an old, dry log. Their arms brush against each other, and the night is alive with the breathy sound of wind in high grasses. The boy says something, and kisses her forehead the way Jason's mom used to kiss his, and he gets up and dusts off his jeans and turns to go.

"Good night, Bobby," Tucker says, and her voice is full of sadness that Jason hears and recognizes, but doesn't understand. Something in him reaches for her so instinctively that his hand is up and brushing through the foliage before he even realizes he's moved. And then the boy is gone, and suddenly, there's no reason to wait.

Jason emerges from the trees.

It takes a moment for Tucker to realize what she's seeing. The shape of him is like smoke, vague and shifting, a shadow just a touch darker than all the other shadows. Then the firelight catches the pale oval of his face, and she starts, slamming back against the log in an instinctive attempt to scramble away. The bark scrapes her skin through the thin t-shirt she wears. When she hunches inward, trying to make herself smaller, the wide neck of it slips down one shoulder.

He's huge.

There's something in his hand—a weapon, which glows dully. Tucker is up and over the log, crab-walking, her mouth parted in breathless fear. He moves slowly, steadily, never faltering, and some part of her thinks vaguely that she should scream, should raise the alarm, warn the others, but nothing comes out of her mouth. She's scared, yes, but she's also in awe, and while fear is suffusing her limbs—moving them of their own accord—her bright eyes, which look limelike in the firelight, are steeped with a kind of reckless, disbelieving wonder. More than any of her thoughts about running, or warnings, or alarms—brighter than any of them surges forward one blazing truth:

This isn't happening.

Stones bite into her palms, and they feel real enough. She lets out a half-startled yelp. There is a shuffling in one of the tents, and the masked head jerks to one side, suddenly still and waiting.

"Tuck?" one of the girls calls out, her voice muffled with sleep and cloth. "You all right?"

And in that moment, reality is distilled. Half on her back, Tucker stares up at the man, whose neck is corded with formidable muscle, dusky and gray in the dim shadows. His hands, grimy, with split knuckles, grip the machete comfortably.

And Tucker says, "I'm fine."

He turns back to her, smoothly and slowly. His head tips to one side, like a dog's. Her eyes are wide with fear and she is holding onto the only possible solution she can think of.

"I just rolled into a log," she says, her voice loud and clear and only wavering a little at the end. "Please—stay in your tent and go back to sleep." She forces a laugh that sticks in her throat. "I'm fine."

For now.

She can only think—she can only hope—that if they just stay inside, they will be safe. If they don't see him, if they can't identify him to the police, maybe they'll be okay. While there is no way of knowing that he won't kill her first and then turn on her friends, he seems so intent, just on her.

A muffled grunt. Then: "Okay, Tuck. Dude. Be careful out there."

She holds his eyes, behind the mask. "Nothing," she says quietly, "is going to hurt me."

And Tucker Flock does not lie. In fact, perhaps it is her words that make it so.

He moves toward her again, each step slow and purposeful, and this time she manages to scramble to her feet, backing away from the tents, from the ring of light shed by the fire. He pauses, and advances again, and she holds out a hand to him, palm outstretched in either invitation or entreaty.

He lunges, and she is off like a shot, her bare feet bruising and tearing on the underbrush. She tries to run light-footed, landing on the balls of her feet, making as little noise as she knows how. But again and again, her ankles catch in the brambles and she stumbles into gullies and furrows she can't see. And always, he is behind her: silent, watchful, stalking.

Jason can smell her. He can see her. He can hear her running, like a panicked deer who has forgotten the art of silence.

He would have liked to chase her in the sun, to see her legs flashing in the golden light, her hair like a flag behind her. The moon has its own qualities, though—ones which make his chest hurt. The pearled light gleams on her skin. The stillness, the sleeping animals, all make her panting seem louder, sweeter. He thinks he could pick her out in a crowd just by the whisper of her breathing, the way it rasps in her throat. Her hair is silvered.

For a moment, the animal becomes the shadow itself. He can feel himself all around her, caught up in her freedom, in her flight. He loses himself. He wraps around her: taking in all her limbs like a breath, taking her down.

They roll into a ravine. He can feel the small stones, the sticks that jab into him. At some point, it occurs to him—in the way it might occur to a favored German Shepherd, a beloved and overlarge and sometimes accidentally powerful pet—to perhaps take the brunt of the damage himself, and he awkwardly does what he can to protect her more slender and more fragile and less supernaturally-fortified limbs from bruising and lacerations. He tries, doggishly, to fall under her when possible, and to avoid falling on top of her when possible. Something in him recognizes that his superior mass might cause more damage to her than he'd ever intended—

this time.

They land. He feels dirt under his left cheek, and blood perhaps, and stone. The rumpled velvet of dead leaves. A mocking breeze flirts with the skin at his right temple, his jaw.

He sits suddenly. He wheels back. She's pulling to her knees, even as his eyes gape and maw for some glimpse of his mask, some dirty reflection of moonlight on its face. He's looking for home, for shelter—

But she's staring at him now, and her bright eyes are almost colorless in the swollen darkness of the night, in the shadows. There's fear in her face—he recognizes it, even if he can't give it a name all the time—but there are other things too, like curiosity, and clarity, and truth. She's not far away—but she is very far away—and he holds still, as he had done when her silly friends had started moving in their tent, had almost come out. He holds as still as a wolf in wait, or perhaps he's only as still as a deer that knows it is about to be taken down.

Her hand reaches out. Her fingers are only a breath from his naked face, only a whisper away, a ghost of a possibility, a lost summer, a hand that pets the wild dog, a hand for a drowning child—will she touch him? Will she?

We all look like we feel.

He doesn't need to breathe, and so he doesn't.
He only waits.

Author's Note:

I worked on this one shot forever. A year, perhaps more? I couldn't figure out where it was supposed to go, and I know how readers tend to like these things to go somewhere. So I hesitated, and I waited, and I pondered, and I wrote, and I erased.

And then I had a conversation with the wonderful Red Molly, who managed to assure me that the moments I loved were enough, and reminded me that sometimes readers don't need to know what happens next. That when a moment feels whole, it's whole.

This is for you, friend. :)