CHAPTER 8
Shadow on the Run
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"Richie's gonna call bullshit—!"
"Bullshit!"
"Richie's called bullshit!"
While Whitney had long since tuned out the mix of aimless chatter and competitively blatant insults, the sudden caustic crowing of the two boys snagged her from her meditative study of the dry grass underfoot. And she meant that – boys, specifically, not young men. Not men at all. Not when they acted as though they were still fresh out of high school.
She had only been in the company of these people for half a day and she was already exhausted. Not that she should have expected any different, still she was left trying to remember why she was there in the first place.
"Hey," Mike's voice – now familiar to the point of mere tonal recognition – made her start. Her chin jerked up half by reflex, though she hoped her eyes were clear when she looked at him. "Where are you right now?"
The smile was quick to form, too bright with far too much teeth, not that he noticed. "I'm here," she insisted, looping her arm loosely through his, which was something of a task while walking. "Right in the middle of nowhere."
There was something caustic in her remark which broached the realm of even the most sarcastic humor. He didn't notice that, either. He had just wanted affirmation, attention, regardless of what it cost her. Not that it was maliciously intended, but sometimes Mike had no more sensitivity than the fresh collage frat boys his friends seemed to wish they still were.
For what had to have been the tenth time since that morning Whitney wondered why she was still with him. She knew why – it was an absolute even split between noble suffering and emotional selfishness. On the one hand, she very typically didn't want to pull the trigger for all the cringey reasons imaginable – she didn't want to be mean, didn't want to disappoint him, didn't want to fight, reasons ad nauseam – even at the cost of her own wellbeing. On the other hand, she also wanted any shred of emotional support she could scrounge for herself, even if it meant stringing on a dying relationship. Selfish, absolutely. But right now it was all she had.
She was here right now in the middle of nowhere because she had promised her mom she would get out of the house – the same house that she would much rather be in right now. That she would take some time for herself – time she didn't want. That she would spend time with other well, lively people – which was a need Whitney could acknowledge, if only grudgingly. She was here because between work, nursing school, and taking care of mom she hadn't had much time to spend on maintaining relationships. She had paid for it, as friends dropped away and drifted into things of past, though rather than discourage her this had only resulted in her considering whether those friends had been friends at all or whether they simply weren't right for her life as it had become.
But for right now she was here with him – rickety support crutch that he was – and his friends, listening to Amanda and Richie spew gross excuses for romantic things at one another.
It wasn't the sentiment she objected to, or the public display of it. Heaven knew she was as much a proponent for people being less sexually stunted and unhealthy as anyone else. No, it was the specific people she didn't care for. About as much as she didn't care for hearing couples calling one another mommy or daddy.
Ugh.
To put it as bluntly and simply as possible, they weren't her kind of people. They were partiers, overtly and loudly social – not to mention somewhat ingenuine – whereas she was the opposite, the outlier dragged into the fold by her mutual knowing of Mike. She knew full well they didn't care for her either – quiet and uptight and boring. It was just one more among the reasons they shouldn't stay together. He so wanted her to hang out with him and his friends and to be happy there, when she knew she never would be. Yet here she was, putting on her smiles and talking the talk she knew he wanted to hear anyway. She shouldn't complain even in her mind. It had been her choice to come; she could have told him no, but the reasons had seemed so sound at the time. Now she was wondering at what point this had become about him rather than getting her away from the sickroom.
She didn't really want to be home, either. Well, she did...but she didn't. There was a part of her – a part the rest of her would rather not recognize – which vehemently did not want to be home staring at her textbooks without taking in any of it, waiting for her mom to die. As loud and pervasive as her need to absorb every sliver of time with her was, Whitney could not quite let go of that selfish desire to just run away, bury her head in the dirt, and pretend her world wasn't being torn up by the roots.
Once they found the clearing, the task of assembling tents managed to quell some of the noise in her head, encouraging her to focus on physical labor and problem solving rather than thoughts. At least for the time being.
Until night swept in to force her problems into sharp perspective.
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Trees sped by, the blurred columnar shape of one bleeding into the others as she ran past them. She scaled a shallow rise gnarled with the knucklebone knots of roots in three leaping strides and darted on into a wide patch of brush.
There was such a difference between now and the last time she had run through these woods, and not only in that she was adequately fed and rested and thereby slightly better off in terms of endurance. She was more familiar with the terrain. The trees and foliage no longer felt oppressive and cage-like looming around her. While it was most likely true that Jason had kept her well away from any roads or paths, the possibility of finding one no longer seemed akin to scaling the side of Mount Everest. The fact that this wasn't a mad, panicked-animal dash certainly helped, too.
The chain thumped uncomfortably against her breastbone with every stride where it looped crosswise over her torso, dragging heavily at her right shoulder, but she endured. It was better than carrying it in her arms. At least this way she could actually run with proper posture even if it did feel like she was weight training. She was regretting not sparing a few minutes to work out a way to bring some water with her, though. A half full jug would have been too bulky and cumbersome to carry even if she'd managed to find a bag to carry it in, but maybe she could have searched in the kitchen and found something else – a bottle or a jar—damn! There had been an entire box full of mason jars on the workbench. Conveniently forgotten until it was of the least help to her. Typical.
Whitney sighed, rolled her eyes at herself, and turned around. She doubled back for several minutes, zigzagging through a copse of gigantic firs and avoiding the soft places where she would leave obvious tracks. Even these little things might do nothing. She had no idea what Jason's true tracking abilities were, and she may very well be wasting her time, but she had to try – to be quiet and quick and do whatever she could to make herself more difficult for the apex predator to find. She had to try.
She realized that she could have gone through the camp. The road that led out from the cabins was mainly dirt now, any gravel left was surely from long summers past, but it was still a road, and must have led to a paved one. Which in turn must lead to civilization. Eventually. But she might be completely wrong; and even if she was right, wouldn't he expect her to go that way? It didn't seem wise to risk it. Not that just diving into some random stretch of woods was wise by any means. It had still felt like the safer route.
Confusion continued to swirl about her head in a fog as her memory kept swinging back to the moment when the lock fell: when she had sat, frozen upon her little mattress torn violently between shock and a soaring, disbelieving hope.
Had he truly forgotten to set the lock? She couldn't imagine him forgetting such a thing. Not patient, deliberate, methodical Jason. But what else could explain it? What else but the highly unlikely chance that he had done it deliberately. As a test to see if she would run? Or...an invitation to set herself free? Neither made sense: and for the longest time she had simply stared at the pool of chain desperately trying to scrape together and idea of what to do. She had to leave, didn't she? She had to at least attempt it, even if it was a test, even if it meant losing some of the niceties of the past few days.
Didn't she?
Why the idea had brought guilt curl smoke-like in her chest cavity was unclear. Nor had she liked it. Yet she had still lingered there on her makeshift nest as her uncertainty spiraled into a far more troubling doubt.
She was disturbed by her own hesitation; disturbed that she could not identify whether the cause was fear of being caught and what it might bring, or of something else. Although what else could it possibly be?
It had been hours now since she'd left: since she'd finally gathered up the coils of chain and slunk up through the trapdoor and out of the house, breath trapped and shivering in the back of her mouth the entire way. It was nearly twilight now, the sky streaked with glorious swaths of pink and orange, which tinted the tufts of cloud in brilliant cotton candy colors. She was still free, still pacing herself between stints of running and swift walking, all the while doubts darted about in the back of her mind with all the too-random insistence of pesky flies.
Should she have stayed? But why, out of pity? Out of some do-gooder urge to change things, as if such a thing would ever be possible? Of course she felt awful for him: he had watched his own mother's head being severed from her body, leaving him utterly alone in the world. What must that do to a child? The pieces of her so inclined toward helping and healing had hurt for his hurt, natural empathy blazing as she was yanked back and forth between her disgust at the ones responsible for the torment he had suffered and a convoluted amalgamation of pity and protectiveness that she had no business feeling. He was not a puppy to rehabilitate, not a broken bone to be set and mended. And none of those things that had happened – nor any others – made him her responsibility. Even if she was right in her suspicion that he was just in need companionship and affection, she was in no place to give it. She had her own life waiting for her, responsibilities, and...and he had kidnapped her, damn it! That negated everything else.
At least it should have.
The trees gave way around her and she slowed, stopped, turning in a tight circle as she surveyed the space around her. She had come upon a trail edged by slender birches, their white bark all the more ghostly in the growing gloom. Something about it was pinging the bell of familiarity in the back of her brain, and when she followed the trail to her left for roughly four yards, she found the little clearing dappled with clusters of short, wild plants. The ping climbed to a full-on chime.
It was difficult to tell for sure – Jason was clearly well accustomed to cleaning up the messes left in the wake of the carnage he wrought. The tents and bags were gone, the charred ring of the fire pit had vanished from the knotted base of the tree, but she was almost eighty percent certain it was their camp.
She took a step closer, her curiosity as strong as it was morbid. Were there still holes where the tent stakes had been? Would she be able to find the charcoal remnants of their fire? Would there be anything left to hint that five campers had been here, if only for a few hours, or had it all been obliterated – wiped away as though they had never existed to begin with? A metallic glint caught the edge of her vision and a chill rippled up her spine. The bear trap had been reset, dusted with leaves and broken branches artfully laid to mask it from view whilst still leaving the teeth free to clamp down on the next unsuspecting leg.
Her hand clutched tight to a loop of chain, palm slick with sweat that felt far too like the blood that had coated her fingers. Stomach heaving, she turned on her heel, walked straight across the trail and dove back into the woods at a jog.
The shadows had lengthened, deepening as the sun sank gradually lower and dragged the light with it. She had a rough idea of where she needed to go and where she was in relation to it – certainly far better than she had expected to having happened upon the campsite – but she was not above admitting that there was a sizable gap in her knowledge and without the aid of light the going was bound to get difficult. Her body had been giving signs of strain for a good while now, and its protests would only be growing louder from here on. Not only that, but it was going to get harder to tell whether or not she was leaving a trail, and while she wasn't positive how well Jason could operate in the dark she was more inclined to assume he'd be unhindered and move her ass rather than risk it. She needed to take advantage of the light while she had it.
Almost without her having to think it her body picked up the pace, strides lengthening, breath automatically adjusting to increase the power and thereby the speed. When she came to the stretch of seemingly flat and even ground, by instinct she ran as fast and hard as she could convince her muscles to go. She made it almost all the way across the clearing, successfully dodging an old, rotted stump and a patch of rock-studded earth without a hitch.
As a matter of fact, everything about this dramatic venture had gone far too smoothly. Something that became very clear to Whitney when her foot descended and the rotten wood beneath it gave way.
She went sprawling, back and shoulder screaming as she hit the ground and what must have been half a felled, decomposing tree. Scrambling to right herself, she hissed at the shock of pain that radiated up her leg. Limping, she staggered forward, feeling the tight twinge in her ankle.
"Shit!" she spat her frustration. If it wasn't sprained it was as good as, and she was screwed. Although not as screwed as she would have been had she planted her foot in a trap – which she very well could have.
Shock and adrenaline mixed horribly with a sour shot of relief. Jesus Christ on a cupcake, she was an absolute idiot. All this time she had just been running around out here not considering what horrible deadly things might be concealed from sight. How close she might have come to losing a leg...or her life. Even after having the blatant reminder shoved directly in her face.
God damn idiot.
She reached forward, straining for the nearest tree at the clearing's edge and seized it. Digging her fingertips into the peeling bark she drag-hopped her way into the woodsy shadows. Leaning against the tree for support, she tested her weight again, slowly, trying to gauge whether she could get away with wrapping it. Although what with was a question for the ages. It didn't matter anyway – the ankle and part of the corresponding foot were already too swollen to carry her far.
Focusing hard on the sounds around her she listened, hoping to hear the running water of the stream. Breeze rustling leaves. The annoyed chitter of a squirrel. The musical chorus of frogs. Yes, good – frogs meant water.
Whitney hobbled forward, following the sound, and if the chain roped around her had been a burden it was nothing next to this. Though she did her best to keep weight off her right foot by moving between tree trunks as though they were gigantic crutches, using it was inevitable and with every anemic half-step she felt the throb travel progressively farther up her calf. If she could just get to the stream she could use the cold water as a natural ice pack, at least to keep the swelling from getting worse if she couldn't bring it down.
Furiously she swiped back the hair plastered to her sweaty cheek and took another lurching step into the trunk of a tree, feeling the skin under her left thumb sting with a slice of bark. Perfect. Honestly, did anyone naturally have luck this bad? It was like some rigorous karmic deity was set on thwarting her at every turn.
What the hell, universe? What. The. Hell.
Several agonizingly slow steps later, she had to stop. She still could hear no water sounds, only the voices of the frogs bouncing off the foliage to sound closer than they truly were. She braced her shoulder against the tree and lifted the coils of chain, adjusting them so the metal links crossed her chest the opposite way. Her back ached from the uneven weight and from the fall. There was dirt and wood rot all over her butt – which she couldn't see but knew was there. She was dirty, greasy, and tired, any minute now it was going to start getting cold, her foot was throbbing, and she wanted to go home. Why couldn't everything just stop being a colossal asshole and let her go home!
The sharp snap of a twig rent the quiet like the burst of a gunshot and she jumped.
She hadn't been afraid before, but now she could feel the cold trickle of it in the beads of sweat trailing down her back. There were other things in these woods besides frogs and squirrels; things she was in no way equipped to handle.
It must have been that her internal prey drive had skyrocketed. Nothing else would have explained why she spontaneously sensed she was no longer alone. Sure enough, no sooner had she twisted to peer into the shadowy trees did she see Jason burst from the edge of the clearing all those yards behind her, and her insides became a riot of relief and resignation.
She knew the instant he caught sight of her – knew it by the slight upward jerk of his head, the angling of his great body as he made for her. He wasn't running, but then he didn't need to now, with her thoroughly hobbled by her own graceless stupidity. Instead he simply strode toward her, all long, powerful legs and single-minded focus; swift and sure, and radiating tension. Instantly she remembered that first night when he had borne down on her with the machete. Yet it wasn't the same, and that had nothing to do with the lack of weapon, or of murderous intent.
She watched him draw near, booted feet swallowing up the space between them – stepping over felled branches and sweeping aside drooping limbs as though they were substantial as spider webs – and was startled by the odd flutter somewhere below her sternum; a soft lurch not far off from...anticipation?
She blinked, startled, and stepped back, wincing at the dull throb in her foot. As if her sign of pain had been a shout, the pace of his stride increased alongside his urgency to get to her.
Just like that, everything shifted, her mind transposing the scattered fragments of fear into something altogether different. The menace he once exuded had left him long ago, but now she saw something else in the way he stalked her like the predator he was. As he drew near enough for her to see the intensity glittering behind the holes in his mask she realized with a breathless jolt that she wasn't sure he was going to stop when he reached her. For a brief, bewildering instant she thought he might seize her, haul her up against the nearest tree, and...
One arm extended, heavy hand closing around her upper arm. It was gentle, if firm, and nothing he hadn't done at least a dozen times before, yet it made her flinch as though struck. Automatically she moved to step back and her swollen ankle twinged, threatening to buckle.
She swayed and his grip tightened, his eyes raking down the length of her. It was purely clinical, trying to locate the source of her flinch, yet she felt the weight of his scan like a physical touch.
After the quick assessment, he took her by the other arm and lifted her straight off her feet. Her stomach flipped, and she was almost disappointed when instead of tossing her over his shoulder as she expected he simply tucked her into the crook of an arm, hand splayed beneath her knees to support her weight as though she were a housecat.
He turned to begin the return trek through the undergrowth and she didn't fight him. She did, however, wonder what had just happened.
In the beginning she had been almost certain he intended to rape her. Why else spare her and keep her like he had? A man as large as he was surely had the testosterone levels of a freaking bull. She had been afraid then, as most women would have been. But the contrast between how she had felt about the idea then – of rape, and specifically him being the source – versus how her stomach had clenched at the split-second image of him pinning her to a tree and stepping between her knees just now was alarming, to say the ever-loving least. Had she actually thought he intended to drag her off like a caveman and have his way with her? Where in the holy heck had that come from? Why would she think...but that wasn't the real question here. The question was why had she not been repulsed? She knew what that warm flutter low in her belly meant, and it coincided with neither fear nor revulsion.
Shaken, her hands tightened convulsively where they had automatically lowered to grip his collar, wincing at the sting as the cut in her palm pulled and began to bleed. His shoulder tightened against her side and she knew it was in response, knew he had smelled the blood and that the subtle quickening of his stride was a result of this. She was excruciatingly aware of him in ways she hadn't been just minutes ago, and in ways she was intensely uncomfortable with. The bunch and shift of muscle beneath his clothes as he moved. The way his other arm hung at his side, empty, unneeded in bearing her weight. But she had already known how strong he was; had known it since the beginning. She knew how he moved. So why was she so hyper-aware of it now?
His eyes kept flicking to her as he walked – darting, snap-quick glances that she had a difficult time interpreting. Confusion? Uncertainty? Something else entirely? It was as though he half expected her to break her acquiescence by doing something underhanded and nasty like whack him over the head and start running again. As if she could have done either effectively.
She saw the tiny frown line crease above his left eye she understood. Worry, yes. But not that kind. No, he was worried about her stupid self with her scraped palm and busted ankle and – probably – the biggest case of crazy-eyes he'd ever seen a person produce. He probably thought she'd hit her head, too, and was concerned for her health while he toted her back to her prison. Because that was all he ever did: patiently, resolutely return her as one might have a pet that kept venturing into the neighbor's yard.
Housecat indeed.
A short, strangled noise emanated from somewhere south of her throat. Something both cackle and sob, and yet neither at once. Again she saw his eye flick to her and Whitney was almost positive his brows had risen with alarm behind the mask – which only made the collision of despairing hilarity that much worse.
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Jason knew no words to describe the convoluted chaos that blazed through him when he came back and found her gone.
When he'd left her he had been unquestionably rattled, raw and vulnerable as though his soul had been flayed open by old memories that still stung and bled when dredged up. He had rushed to get her situated, his hands unsteady at metal links that slid and writhed like the coils of a grass snake as the space in his chest seemed to close in with every breath. There might have been tears on her cheeks, but he couldn't remember. He hadn't been able to look directly at her, hadn't been able to meet her gaze again after everything. His head was full of screams and his lungs full of water that wasn't there. He had fled the instant he could, and in his haste and desperation had clearly slipped. Both chain and girl were gone now, with not even an indent in the striped mattress left behind.
He had never told anyone what had happened. Any of it. No one had ever asked. No one had ever had a real chance to, if they would ever have cared, and he had not the voice to do so anyway. But he thought she had cared...otherwise why look at him like that, sad and solemn. Hadn't she? Hadn't that been why it had felt like seeing a glimmer of his own pain reflected back at him through the lens of her too-bright eyes?
Metal winked; a shining bright spot amidst stacks of leather, paper, and laminate. He bent, enfolding the padlock within his palm and felt it snap shut, heard the click of the mechanism catching as it had not done before. Hours ago. Hours wherein he had thought...
Every organ he had seemed to sink with disappointment, not merely his stomach. The disappointment, in turn, annoyed him.
What, had he thought she would just stay put? As if she hadn't proven time and again that if given a mere inch of opportunity she would slip from the captivity she made no pains to hide that she detested. She was not a dog, she was not trained to mind – had no incentive to mind – and whatever her tears or spoken sympathies might have implied, she felt no affection for him. There was no reason for her to stay. Why should he have hoped for anything else?
The annoyance flickered, a dying light beneath a gust of something he didn't recognize. Neither sadness nor grief, nor anger. He felt...hollow, empty. Had he hoped for that? Affection? Had he hoped that if he gave her an opening she might choose to stay with him?
The frown creasing his brow deepened. Was this the result of choosing not to kill? Or was it more than that, more than simply not taking a life? Was it the life itself; or rather, whose life?
Jason rarely thought about what his life would have been like had things happened differently. In his mind there was little point in dwelling on might-have-beens when there was no possibility of making them real. Recently however, he had found his thoughts straying that way more than once.
He didn't know enough about what life was like for normal children, let alone normal adults, so it was hard for him to feel as though his imaginings weren't pure fantasy. Yet in his mind his mother would still be alive, the house as it had been then: a clean kind of chaos where everything was in its proper, messy place. Things would be just as they were and they would be happy. Logically he knew this wouldn't have been possible, that with time would have come natural change regardless of how hard he clung to what was. But he didn't know what to conjure in its place. He had no way to imagine what else could have been instead, where change could have taken them. He had been too young to absorb enough of the world to do so. Too young and too sheltered.
Had the events of those years ago not happened...would he have met Whitney? He supposed whatever events had brought her here would still have occurred, but what if because he had never drowned and mother had never died she and her friends decided to go somewhere else instead. Would she ever have had a reason to come to this place were it still an operating camp? Would there have been any reason he might come across her if she had? What would mother have thought of her?
The question came out of nowhere, completely blind-sighting him. What would his mother think about this attachment he had clearly developed? Would she see Whitney's presence there as a good thing, or a threat? A threat, his mind supplied immediately, and when his response to this was not the firm decision to eliminate said threat he felt his breath seize in his chest. Felt, for a moment, as though he were drowning again. Never once had he thought to disobey his mother's wishes. Not when he'd been little, not after she was gone. Granted, she had never explicitly ordered him to do what he did: it was all self-mandated; a duty assigned out of assumption and inherited rage. Still, over the years his certainty that he was doing what she would have wanted only solidified, grew stronger, deeper, to the point where it felt like a given order.
His thoughts circled back to those moments sitting by the lake spent reliving the events that had ended – and begun – everything. Even now with the buffer of hours he felt the rawness hovering close to the surface. It was a dull, panging ache not unlike the results of a kick to the chest. There was a part of him that wanted to blame Whitney for it – blame her questions, her curiosity about matters that didn't concern her – but he couldn't bring himself to commit. It wouldn't have mattered if she was there or not; prolonged closeness to the lake was like sticking the tip of a knife into a healing wound and wiggling it around. The only thing he could blame her for was her trespass and even the window for that had passed him by. Ultimately, the blame was his. As with a number of other things.
Things like disobeying. Because he had disobeyed, it was just that a guilty little part of him simply...didn't care.
He rose with a fluid surge of energy, not bothering to close the trapdoor when he emerged. He wasn't sure why he felt such a powerful need to have her back. After all, he wasn't going to do anything with her. All he was going to do was drag her back to the tunnel and tuck her securely into her corner. Yet the thought of anything else was something he could not stand. It wasn't entirely a comfortable feeling, but he didn't have time to analyze it now.
When he came to the edge of what remained of the porch he paused. The first time Whitney had run she had run like a prey animal that had forgotten the safety which lay in silence: all base fear and need. This had not been like that. He wasn't sure she had run at all, for as he scanned the ground that lined the edge of the rotting wood he saw no impression to indicate where she had stepped down to launch into a sprint. He had seen her run: even hindered by the weight of chains, dehydrated and exhausted, she had been deer-quick and savvy enough to duck and weave in attempts to lose him. Given the time and space to move freely, she very well might have simply walked to the trees before darting away. He would find her, of that he had no doubt. But it might take time he couldn't afford to spend.
He had to move quickly. The sun was already sinking low in the sky and the longer it took him to find and follow her trail the higher the risk she was lost or hurt, or killed. The big predators would be coming out soon to hunt, and she had nothing to protect herself. Nothing but him.
Crouching, Jason studied the ground, fingertips brushing dry, patchy grass and dirt. He found a shallow half-moon divot in the earth and traced the curve with his thumb, considering the size. The heel of a shoe: minimal tread, recently made. Lifting his chin, he scanned the ground around it until he found another – this one nearly a complete, the toe half of the same shoe. His head rose, his eyes following the line made by the two prints to a point at the tree line.
There.
He rose and followed the invisible line, eyes trained low to spot any other signs left of her passing. She had been careful, he noted, for what trail he did find was faint and widely dispersed, often requiring more intent scouring than he usually needed to track a human. She must have made efforts to hide her tracks from him – a suspicion only verified when her trail abruptly turned in on itself to head back the way she had come, doubling back in the hope of confounding him. Clever. Not quite clever enough to work, but that was to more a credit to his skill than any fault of hers. Quite the contrary, if his worry hadn't been climbing by the second he would have admired the display of wit under stress. But just now it was causing him stress – so much that he wasn't sure he wouldn't wring her foolish little neck when he found her. Of course he wouldn't. Doing so would defeat the entire point of this endeavor. Yet with every minute she spent out here alone in the growing dark the greater her chances of coming to some disaster.
He had never experienced worry like this before. In small, fleeting doses occasionally yes, but never so much so thickly, building until it pooled so heavily in his throat that he was choking on it. A worry so distressing on its own that he had no room for any distress at its existence. He had no time to question, no time to analyze the reasons why it was so important to get her back. No time to wonder what would happen if he didn't, or why. In the moment, none of it mattered. Nothing mattered but the signs of her passing; partial imprints of footsteps, mussed leaves and grass, bent twigs, fine cottony threads caught on the peeling bark of a birch tree that he very nearly missed altogether.
He bent to examine them against the pale backdrop of his fingertips and sure enough found them to have belonged to her shirt. At once comforted that he was still on the right track and aggravated that he still had not caught up he kept moving, working down the length of a man-made path for several yards before turning a complete one hundred and eighty degrees to dive back into the green.
Perspiration was beginning to rise, dampening his palms and brow and between his shoulder blades in a way it never had outside of his drowning dreams and with it, the anxious dread that he didn't want to examine enough to name. So help him, when he found her he was going to make her regret putting him through this.
A sound caught his ear, abrupt and out of place in the dusky quiet: a noisy rustling like something dragging through the undergrowth.
For a split second he was torn. If he followed the sound and it turned out to be nothing, he risked losing the trail, risked having to waste precious time and light picking it up again. But if that sound had been Whitney being hurt or worse and he delayed...
The muffled curse solved his dilemma. He abandoned the tracks he had just been poring over, surging headlong through the trees in the direction from which the sounds had come not bothering to lessen his natural quiet to warn of his approach. She deserved to be startled, the little idiot. Fear tangled with the worry and flooded his veins like fever, spiraling into a trembling, irrational anger. He charged into a tiny clearing, noting the clear marks of heavy footfalls in the spongy grass, the shattered remnants of a fallen tree that had rotted from the inside out and now lay in a scattered shambles where someone had fallen. His eyes rose as if pulled, piercing through the fringe of trees to settle on the narrow white face peering out at him.
The anger twisted into so swiftly into relief that he felt nearly winded. He headed straight for her, hardly having to order his feet to move, and when he finally reached her – when his hand closed around her arm – the relief crested in a way that felt nothing like the victory he might have expected. All halfhearted mental threats of neck wringing and punishment had gone from him, leaving only the barest fragments of the annoyance that had bitten so sharply before. None of it seemed to matter, because he had found her and she was safe. Injured, it seemed, for she staggered when she took a step back as though there were an arrow shaft in her leg. But safe now. With him.
What an odd thing, to be the source of safety for someone. Him: the hunter, eradicator, the threat in the dark. It wasn't something he ever could have expected.
She hadn't struggled when he seized her – something else he might have expected – made no effort to evade him. He held no illusions that she would not have fled had she felt the need, even on her obviously injured foot. She had let him fold her into the bend of his arm and carry her back without so much as a hint of protest, curling her fingers into his collar not to push at him, but simply to hold on. He might have thought her merely resigned, knowing her ploy for escape over, except that he couldn't quite shake the feeling that there something else there. Neither could he shake the way she had looked at him as he crossed the distance between them.
It hadn't been fear. He knew what her fear looked like, smelled like, sounded like, and it hadn't been that. But fear was the closest thing he could find to call it. She had stared at him like a deer – felled but not yet dead – like he was the wolf coming to tear out her throat. It hadn't been fear, but it hadn't not been fear. Whatever it was, it was still there, a sort of wary alarm bright in the whites of her eyes every time he snuck a glance her way, and he could feel her soft shape trembling against his shoulder all the way back to the house.
The warm copper scent of the blood at her palm strengthened when he lowered her to the little bed, the cut there pulling open anew when her grip tightened at his jacket. He couldn't think why. Surely she knew he wouldn't drop her. He caught her hand in his before she could tuck it away somewhere, examining the shallow rend in the skin at the base of her palm. It was a surface cut, nothing serious. Releasing her hand, he reached down toward her right foot, grasping the ragged, dirty hem of her pant leg. Whitney flinched, but didn't move to extract herself or shove him away, and he folded the fabric carefully back to reveal the red and swollen ankle. He didn't know what to do for that. Clearly it needed tending, but this was not an injury he knew how to treat. The precise kind of injury he had hoped to avoid by freeing one of her hands when out walking.
Pointedly he gestured to the ankle, hoping she could tell him what to do for it. When his eyes met hers, he found yet more of the fear that wasn't fear, and felt an uneasy chill rippled across his skin – the sudden sense of something shifting that he could neither identify nor follow.
Seemingly understanding what he wanted, Whitney cleared her throat.
"Take—um, we'll have to take my shoe off..." she began and he immediately set to work on the laces, not noticing the awkward flutter of her hands or the stiffness in her spine as she leaned back against the wall.
Successfully sliding the shoe and grimy sock from her foot, he looked to her for the next instruction.
~/~
All things considered, Whitney thought she managed to pull off a decent impression of nonchalance.
She had spent the entire trip back to the tunnel stewing in a pool of her own out of control emotions, wheeling wildly from panic to confusion and likely hitting every note along the spectrum in between. It had been reflexive, surely. Automatic. For a moment she had experienced a clean separation of brain and body, and while the former could tell the difference between a normal man and a serial killer, the latter – it seemed – could not. It had merely recognized the presence of a tall, strong male in the absolute prime of his possibly undying life and responded accordingly. She was determined to think no more of it, not to analyze or pick apart something that had meant nothing, because it had been nothing.
That had proved something of a challenge, though, since – spooked as she was – she now found herself physically reacting like a trauma patient to everything he did, to the point where it took digging her nails into the shoulders of his coat to keep from flinging herself away from him when all he'd done was adjusted to put her down. To the point where her wince as he pushed the leg of her jeans from her busted ankle had had nothing to do with pain but just incredible, overwhelming awareness.
They were back to their comfortable posts as captive and captor, back to the weird state of normalcy they had carved out of craziness, she in her corner and him looking over the scrapes she had acquired not unlike the way he examined the bruises beneath her cuffs every few days. But it wasn't quite…normal. The biggest difference lay in the chain still coiled she had long since removed from around herself. She had thought it would be the first thing he did, secure the thing – and with it, her – to the wall and seal her lack of freedom in literal stone. But he hadn't: it still lay in a puddle of links on the mattress. She supposed it must be because he assumed she wouldn't be stupid enough to try anything with him crouched right there next to her. Which would be a correct assumption.
She'd had to guide him through removing her shoe and finding something upon which she could prop the foot to elevate it. Ice, she had guessed, was out of the question but she had asked all the same; and he'd left her for long minutes, chain still in place coiled over her shoulder because clearly she wasn't going anywhere. The steep increase in her own helplessness was unpleasant to the point of agitation.
He had returned some time later with an old cooler, which he set down on her crate next to the first aid kit and proceeded to kneel upon the ground at the base of her little mattress.
With implicit gentleness the fingers of one large hand tucked beneath the slope of her calf, coaxing her to extend her leg at the knee to rest her heel against his thigh. She had made a feeble attempt to retract her foot from his grasp, whereupon he shot her a sharply quelling look that she interpreted to read: you got yourself into this and you can deal with the consequences. She meekly surrendered while he opened the cooler to extract a dripping washcloth. A cloth which he wrong liberally of cold water and laid carefully across her swollen ankle.
Any desire she might have had to make things difficult for him was entirely nonexistent now. It did no damage to her pride to admit that this was mostly because he was, in a way, helping her: following her instructions to the exact syllable to care for her angry ankle and even going so far as to clean the split in her palm with water and plain antibacterial soap which stung like the dickens. Quite frankly, the fact that he'd come after her at all when he really hadn't had to was enough to quash any attitude she might have given him for spoiling her attempt at escape. He could just as easily have left her to her fate. She wanted to be free? Fine, then. She could be free to fall in the dark and break her neck, free to stagger around in unfamiliar woods until she inevitably perished from exposure. All along he must have known true escape was impossible, that she would never make it far enough on her own to be a threat to him. Technically speaking, it had been as much a rescue as anything else. An extremely atypical one to be sure, but still. She was grateful.
"Thank you," she said, decision made to be gracious, as was appropriate. His chin tilted slightly as he blinked at her, clearly not having expected what he evidently found an out of place comment. "For coming after me," she clarified, "and for this."
He seemed to remain nonplussed, yet he managed to insert just enough judgement into his stare to make her squirm. Still his hands were careful as he removed the cloth from her ankle, returning it to the cooler to extract a second which he wrung out and laid across her foot. Such large hands, yet he was unspeakably gentle with her when she really didn't deserve it. Was he overcompensating? Afraid to hurt her by accident because he was so much bigger than she? Or was he simply a gentle soul beneath all the layers of pain and anger? He skimmed his fingertips over the bones in her foot, feeling for breaks, or so she suspected. There were none, but something inside her still softened at his taking the time to look. He then followed the curve of her heel, bypassing the swelling to trace the bones in her shin, up toward the knee. It was then that she recollected the spill she had taken on their walk earlier, that he had watched her shake out this very same knee and deem it fine. Observant of him. But then, she wasn't exactly surprised.
Apparently satisfied, he gestured for her hands and began his routine checking of her wrists. Releasing the cuffs and unwinding the ace bandaging to examine the skin beneath, though he did not, she noted, replace either manacle between checking. For the first time in weeks she was completely unbound, which felt lovely...and strangely vulnerable. The only reason he didn't was because she couldn't go anywhere.
"I'm not going to run again," she blurted, not realizing she had come to the decision until the statement burst free.
He sent her another look, this one decidedly disbelieving. Yet it wasn't the exaggeratedly snide, raised-eyebrow-with-a-side-of-smirk kind of skepticism. It was flat, simple. It wasn't necessarily intended to be read, wasn't given as a means of communicating the sentiment. He simply didn't believe her and she could tell.
"Yeah, I wouldn't trust me either," she remarked with a pointed glance to evidence of her foolishness resting in his lap. "But I won't. There's obviously no point. I'll never get far enough away that you won't find me, and even if I did chances are I'd just get myself maimed."
Something wry in his gaze told her that he didn't disagree with that statement and she nearly laughed. Biting the inside of her cheek to curb the impulse she ducked her chin and hid behind the fall of her hair, averting her eyes down to the neat bandage wrapped about her palm and covering the cut there. She could clearly see the difference between the skin that had met the touch of soap and the skin that had not. There were as clear line just at the top edge of the bandaging where clean gave way to the rest of her grimy hand.
Well...now was as good a time as any. Plus, being hobbled as she was, he might be that much more likely to agree.
"I know now really isn't a good time to ask for a favor," she began uncertainly. She didn't look at him – not out of any attempt to come across as harmless or submissive, but simply because she was anxious and didn't know what else to do.
He made a small sound. A short huff of an exhale that might as well have served as an exasperated: what?
She took a breath.
"Um, next time we're at the bathrooms, could I take a shower? I'm—well, I've been ok so far, there's soap at the sinks, but I feel like my skin's going to rot off if I don't shower. And I need to wash my clothes or I'm going to get...get sick."
He sat back to study her, and she felt the muscle beneath her foot heel tighten as he did – which had the strange effect of increasing the nervousness that really had no place here. Why was she nervous, exactly? The worst he could do was deny her, and while sure at some point that would cause problems, for the moment it wouldn't hurt her. Yet her pulse had spiked, fluttering wildly in her throat like a trapped insect with every ticking second he spent regarding her in motionless silence. Weighing her request.
Again the burden of her own helplessness pressed in on her, restlessness piling atop the nerves until she felt herself actually twitching in attempts to alleviate it – wringing the hem of her shirt between her fingers at the spot where a new tear had formed.
She had been helpless since the beginning; she knew that. But the injury made what had been a situation she could grudgingly accept into something borderline unbearable. It wasn't that she couldn't walk on her own, because she could. It wasn't because she couldn't run, because that was pointless anyway. It was because she had taken advantage of a mistake made in a state of emotional weakness. Forced him to come after her to save her ridiculous hide from potentially much worse than she had gotten – regardless of whether he had done it for this or for other reasons – proving herself to be as untrustworthy as she had been at the start. He had no reason to allow her this, no reason to do anything for her. His tending to her stupid foot was more than she deserved and it was her own stupid fault. That, she realized, was the source of her nerves: the fear that she had irrevocably ruined the tentative equilibrium they had struggled to find.
He reached for her, long fingers surprisingly dexterous as he brushed the messy curtain of hair back from her face. They grazed her cheek as he did and she felt the callus lining his fingertips, rough and rasping against her skin. It seemed an oddly affectionate gesture, especially considering the circumstances. Or perhaps it was merely curiosity, seeking an answer to a question. He either needed or wanted to see her face and therefore he moved the obstacle in the way, yet the softness of it seemed to belie an intent that reached beyond mere curiosity.
He didn't touch her often – not since she had barked at him not to all those days ago. To physically move her, yes, or to treat her growing collection of scrapes and handle the manacles, but never without any obvious purpose. Never just...because. Automatically she lifted her gaze to his, sliding across the stoic shield of fiberglass to the eyes beneath. Even set so deeply in shadow as they were underground she could still make out the color of them, the lack of crease to indicate anything outside of mild scrutiny.
Whitney rarely felt physically small. She had been taller than average from an early age and her school days had been rife with teasing because of it, not to mention how difficult it was to consider dating when not even a single prospect came up past the point of her chin. It was less prevalent in adulthood, but it was still a rare thing to come across a man who truly made her forget her own height. Even Mike, who had managed to beat her by a full three inches, had merely felt suited rather than truly larger. Jason, by contrast, made her feel downright delicate. Just having his hand next to her cheek, broad and strong, was enough to render her slender and willowy and all manner of other flowery descriptors that had no place in real language.
Before she had time to register how uncomfortable this should probably make her, he had lowered the hand, nodding, and she found herself somewhat winded by her relief.
"Thank you," she half-sighed, to which he merely used that same hand to point down at her ankle which, she gathered, was a clarifying concern. Would she be able to maneuver on her own enough to do so with her injury? She expected so, after all she had proven relatively capable of limping around, and there were plenty of surfaces to utilize as crutches in the bathroom. "I can manage," she assured him, "it's just..."
She hesitated then, nervously scraping her lip between her teeth. Lifting her hands and jangled the cuffs and chain with a quiet rattle.
"I can't with these on. Which is why it's not a good time to ask."
Jason snorted, and when she looked she saw the crease of humor at the outer corners of his eyes. Unexpectedly she experienced a swift impulse to smack him as she might have smacked Clay for doing something bratty.
"Ok," she snapped, "I know I'm useless and can't run, you don't need to rub it in." He made the low, rasping exhalation that she knew to be a laugh, and pressed her lips together.
Well, she thought, at least he wasn't too pissed to laugh at her. That was absolutely a good thing.
The next thing she knew Jason was carefully moving her foot from his leg so he could stand and he was extending a hand to her, clearly with the intent to help her up.
"Oh," she blinked, taken aback, "I didn't mean right now, I can wait..."
He gave a small shrug as if to ask why not now, and she supposed he had a point. In theory, she should probably wait until her ankle had healed up a bit, but the prospect of being clean – really, truly clean – was far too great a temptation to bring it up.
Bracing herself back against the wall, she mused: "any chance there are some extra clothes lying around? Mine are...nasty."
His hand dropped slightly, retracting the offer of help up, and at first she assumed this to be a flat no until she realized he was considering the question. Half a second later he had extended his hand again, palm out toward her this time telling her to wait. Then he turned and bustled out into the tunnel again. About half an hour later he reemerged, a small bundle of fabric draped over one arm and looking pleased with himself.
She folded the clothes against her chest with one arm and gripped his offered hand to hoist herself onto her good leg. He helped her hobble up the shallow incline to the trapdoor, cupping one of her elbows as she clung to his other arm. As always he went through first, heaving himself up with near effortless ease before dropping to a knee and reaching down for her, hands bracketing her waist to lift her out. Half by instinct and half by routine she braced her empty hand against his shoulder, startled anew at the lack of the clanking metal she had grown so accustomed to and trying not to notice the way the outer seam of his trousers strained over the length of his thigh, the muscle bunched and powerful.
Rather than have her hobble, Jason merely adjusted his grip around her, once again tucking her against the crook of his arm to keep her off her injury. He carried her the entire way – from the house and across the campground to the bathrooms – going so far as to ascend the concrete step to bring her inside, though it required him to duck an inch or so to keep from smacking his head against the door frame.
He put her down just inside the door, close enough to the line of sinks that she could reach out and grip the edge of the counter for support. He lingered there for a moment, looking more ungainly and awkward in the bright, cramped little building than he ever had before, giving Whitney the impression that he was trying to determine what, if anything, he should do now. Did she need more help? Should he just leave?
"I think I'm ok from here," she assured him. When he continued to linger, she added, "I'll yell if I need help. Ok?"
This appeared satisfactory, for Jason turned to go. He paused again in the midst of ducking his head, reaching up to pluck a clean towel from the shelves and handing it to her.
He hadn't needed to – she would have been able to grab one herself – but still the gesture had been intended as helpful and she treated it as such, smiling softly as she took the proffered towel.
"Thank you."
With a tiny little half-shrug he ducked outside, no doubt to station himself against the outer wall.
It was an effort to cross the narrow bathroom, and she was grateful that the sinks reached the entire way across the space. She managed to hobble to the opposite side where the building opened up at the end of the toilet stalls into the showers where a wide, plywood cabinet stood. Though she had begun to formulate a few wild dreams that there might be a little forgotten bag of toiletries beyond the cabinet doors, it had been far outside of her reach with her tether and so had not been able to look. When Jason threw it open, she discovered her hopes had not been in vain.
While the cabinet was mostly empty, there was a round red basket inside piled with a full-size bottle of shampoo and one of conditioner, two different kinds of body wash, lotion, toothpaste and several extra brushes. There was a wide-toothed comb and a round bristle brush, bobby pins, powerful sunscreen, and – tucked behind all that – a hair dryer. It looked as though someone had brought enough supplies to last them several weeks and had either left them by accident or with the intent of returning to use them up.
Whoever had left the toiletries behind Whitney was grateful to them, though she did try not to think too hard about the likely long dead girl as she picked up the basket and toted it into the showers. Unlike the communal ones in her high school gym, the showers here were separated into individual stalls. Each had been hung with an opaque plastic curtain – though one of these was missing, the plastic little more than shreds left clinging to the rings as though it had been torn away – and each contained a little shelf on which to set soap and the like.
Getting out of her dirty clothes was easy enough until she came to her pants. Being unable to put weight on one foot made shimmying out of them an exercise in balance and in leaning far forward without tipping forward and getting a face full of cement. Finally, she was able to extract herself enough to step out from the puddle of grimy denim and turn on the water.
For a split second after she twisted the knob she was convinced nothing was going to happen. But after a few seconds spent with bated breath there was a faint rattle of old pipes and jets of water streamed down from the shower head.
She was downright giddy when she stepped inside the cramped little space, as steam curled about her limbs and heat soaked through her skin. It felt so good that the utter ecstasy of it nearly hurt. It didn't matter that the water pressure was weak or that she had to either prop herself against the wall with a hand or a shoulder to keep the weight off her angry foot. For generous minutes she simply stood there, turning back and forth under the hot water and basking in the heat and prospect of being clean before she even thought about picking up the soap. When she did, however, it was to work up a thick layer of suds and scrub them into her skin and hair until she tingled all over.
The body wash she selected was lovely and lemony without being overpowering, and with a faint touch of mint that – whether it did or not – seemed to flush all the dirt and oil and grime from days and nightmares from her pores. By the time she was done, her skin was a burnished lobster pink and her hair hung in lank, damp coils about her neck: clean, and possibly the happiest she had been for a long time.
The clothes Jason had found for her were ill fitted. The leggings were all right, though they bunched a bit around the knees. The shirt, however, was a monster of plaid flannel worn so thin that its very molecular structure seemed to have changed until it was an altogether different kind of fabric. The hem hung to mid-thigh and the sleeves had to be rolled back twice to free her hands. Still, it was soft, comfortable, and would breathe, so it didn't occur to her to be disappointed. She donned them, dragged a comb through her hair, and limped outside where Jason waited for her.
He was standing with his back against the wall just outside the door rather than out away from it like he usually did. For all the vigilance this suggested, he held his hands loose at his sides, his face tilted up to the leaf-dappled stretch of sky above him where a pair of little brown and cream birds flitted and cheeped.
It was an odd, still moment: one wherein which she didn't see a killer, or a captor. Just for a moment she saw nothing but a man. A large man in a mask who carried a big fucking knife at his side, true. But the kind of man with the patience to tote her around, to wait for her – who gave her the impression that he wouldn't have complained even if he'd had a voice with which to do so, though she had no evidence to substantiate that. A man with the capacity to be perfectly content spending his waiting time watching birds. For the first time since that horrible beginning, she saw someone neither dangerous nor threatening. Just someone who knew his place in the world and was completely comfortable there. It was so completely opposite of the person she remembered cowering from in the beginning that in the moment she spent staring she felt as though she had been picked up and enthusiastically shaken as a dog might a soft toy: her brain transposed into a little ball rattling around in her skull.
All people were complex. This just proved it to an extreme.
As she emerged he angled his head to look at her and his eyes narrowed ever so slightly, creasing at the inner corners. A frown.
She looked down at herself, holding her dirty clothes out and away from her body. "What?"
He pushed away from the wall to approach her. Pinching the sleeve of the shirt between two fingers he pulled it straight out from her arm to indicate the sheer volume of extra fabric there was, and she shrugged.
"Better too big than too small."
His eyes flicked up from the sleeve to find hers, regarding for a moment before lowering them again to the shirt, whereupon they took on an almost disapproving cast. Funny, she would have thought he would prefer she be in looser clothes.
He reached again, plucking this time at the excess fabric that gathered around her middle, and all of a sudden she was very much aware of how close he stood, the heat of his hand through the flannel worn thin by years of wear and washing. Aware of the fact that she wore no bra. The one she'd had had been far too grimy and stained to put back on. He either hadn't known to bring one, or there was simply none to bring – quite possible considering it was likely a man's shirt she wore – and until she found a way to wash her clothes more thoroughly than beating at them with a rock and body soap, she would have to go commando. A concept that hadn't bothered her much when dressing.
It bothered her now.
Releasing a soft, toneless huff Jason let the fabric slip from between his fingers and Whitney found she regained the power to breathe again.
~/~
She was different. Jason couldn't pinpoint what it was that made her seem so aside from the lack of dirt, but she did.
The clothes were far too big for her; the shirt alone nearly swallowed her. He rarely kept clothes, as they were almost never big enough to fit him. These had been the only things he could find amidst the detritus from the last camp he had deconstructed and simply hadn't yet had the time to be rid of. Yet they seemed to make her happy, for all that the shape of her was all but disappeared beneath the excess fabric. He shot another subtly examining look at her from across the cavern where he stood taking stock of his remaining supply of trap-making materials.
She was sitting comfortably on her mattress with her injured foot propped up the crate and cushioned with a folded blanket. She had rolled the gigantic plaid sleeves up nearly to her shoulders and was rubbing something that smelled spicy and floral from a little yellow bottle over her arms, humming to herself as she did.
Quite happy, then. Fascinating what water, soap, and new clothes had the power to do.
He glanced down at himself: at the thin, ragged shirt, stained by earth and sweat, the pants so faded that they no longer so much as resembled the color they had once been. At the coat with shredded sleeves and fraying hem. He had never cared much, or perhaps because clothing that fit him so rarely happened his way he had simply convinced himself he didn't. He remembered very clearly how mother had touted the virtues of cleanliness, and that however much he had struggled or complained – if only in his own mind – he remembered feeling better after every bath, with every shirt and sweater worn fresh out of the dryer. He did wash, every once in a while if he got overly grimy or bloody. If he turned slightly to the right he would see the lump of orange-brown soap he used sitting on its dish waiting to be carried to a fast-moving part of the stream.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Whitney set the bottle aside and lean back against the wall, the movements soundless without the chain to frame each one with a rattle. He hadn't cuffed her again upon bringing her back, having not seen the need. The chains, after all, were more of a product of convenience than necessity, at least when he was near. Though he wasn't yet sure he believed her claim that she wouldn't try to run away again, he had to agree that for the moment she wasn't going anywhere.
It was interesting: he'd thought her such a fragile thing at first, even when she'd fled and fought him, when she kicked and cursed and spat insults. But she wasn't. She was hardy and determined, if perhaps a bit hardheaded. In truth, he thought he rather admired her, if that's what the strange sense of kinship he felt was. Each of them had had the choice stolen from their hands, and each of them were making due, weren't they?
"Are you ok?"
His response was a visceral jerk, as though her voice had reached out like a hand and gripped him by the shoulder. He blinked; suddenly realizing that he had been staring, and felt oddly as though he had been caught doing something bad. Yet she was merely peering at him from over the folds of the blanket she'd wrapped around herself, an old, faded quilt he had found tucked away in a box upstairs.
"You were just sort of...standing there," she explained, though she needn't have, a hint of concern about the furrow in her brow.
He felt an odd pressure in his chest, an uncomfortable wrenching twist of emotion as he looked at her. He knew so little about her. Oh, he knew what face she made when she was displeased, how she would lift her chin and narrow her eyes ever so slightly when she was being stubborn. He knew that she favored her right hand and her left foot, that she preferred the shade to direct sunlight. He knew she loved books and liked the rats and was thereby likely kind-natured. But he did not know where she came from, where she lived, whether she still had a mother of her own – wherever home was – waiting for her to come home. It wouldn't have affected any choices he made, but that he couldn't so much as ask made him frustrated with his limited means of communication more than anything else ever had. It felt wrong somehow, to demand so much and know so little.
"...Jason?"
Her frown had deepened slightly, her fingers sliding across the open book to grip the front cover as though to close it. As though she meant to get up and walk across the space to go to him. To comfort him. His brain shied from the idea before it could fully form, shoving it away on instinct.
He nodded once, pointedly, and the frown line eased. He turned back to his box of twine and wire and forced himself to focus on his task. The thinner gauge wire was running low; he was going to have to steal more from one or several of his neighbors tomorrow. He exhaled heavily, not enjoying the prospect of what would surely be a time-consuming hunt. The farmer's barn was the obvious first choice but there was no guarantee of finding the precise thing he was looking for in that mess. This wasn't to say Jason's own living and storing spaces were the picture of neatness, but they were his messes – he knew where everything was amidst what looked to be disorder. Someone else's messes were just plain different.
By the time he had determined what he needed to scrounge up, Whitney was curled up - foot still propped on the crate – buried under the quilt. Presuming she must be asleep, he crept quietly out through the tunnel and up into the house to wait out the night.
NOTES:
My apologies for the delay - it's been a very busy month.
Other than that, all I'll say is shit's getting real.
Until next time!
