CHAPTER 10
Terrible Thing

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Day 25

He must have done something. Jason could think of no other reason why Whitney was acting the way she was.

She had been talking again; laughing in response to his playfully deeming her young and small. Which she was, though one slightly more literally than the other which was mostly in jest. He had thought she was teasing back – if the moose comment was any indication - and the lighthearted swipes she'd made had sent tendrils of pleasant warmth to coil within his chest. Everything had been fine. Until it hadn't been.

He'd been following a short distance behind her, watching as she walked. He wasn't sure why in retrospect, since her injury had almost fully healed, but he remembered being rather fascinated by the way she moved.

He was vaguely familiar with the idea that male and female bodies utilized motion differently – they were physically different, after all, in frame and shape, size and strength ratios. It was a thing he knew but had never really considered beyond the general acknowledgement. He'd never left anyone alive long enough to study such things. But he'd found himself doing just that: tracing her steps, the subtle caution in them, as though she were subliminally trying not to disturb the peace around her.

Whitney, being female, simply didn't move the way he did. The baggy shirt had eliminated all but the occasional hint of the shape underneath from shoulders to mid-thigh; something he disliked rather more than completely made sense to him. Still, he could trace the sleek lines of her legs as she went; the graceful, sloping transition from thighs to calves and down to slim ankles. There was a subtle sway to her walk centering in the hips which softened each step she took, turning it into something flowing and smooth, not unlike water or song translated to movement and quite unlike the rigid pattern of his own stride. Everything about her was soft, he'd thought; soft and curving and strangely captivating.

He remembered at the time feeling somewhat over-warm, which had been odd enough to distract him. He couldn't recall the last time he had felt truly hot or cold. He sweated, or course, suffered gooseflesh; his body was still flesh and behaved as such, but temperature hadn't affected him since his emergence. Yet he had been starting to feel the almost suffocating sensation of being overheated - the weight of his normally comfortable clothes too much, too close, too constrictive. He hadn't been sweating, though, just...too warm. He had just been wondering whether he should shrug out of his coat when he'd heard the growl.

Dread chased on the heels of his surprise. Of all the animals that dwelt in these woods it was cats of which he was most wary. Even bears were relatively easy to deal with, but the mountain lions could be difficult to predict, most especially when startled. He had the scars to prove it. And Whitney...

Whitney was well within leaping distance.

He had burst into motion, one hand falling to rest upon the machete's hilt while the other snared her around the middle, drawing her backward with the same swift stride he took to insert himself in front of her. She had been almost fever-hot beneath his hand, a supple weight against his back where he'd pressed her flush against him. He had felt the thready race of her breath, the rapid swell and collapse of her lungs beneath bone and flesh and flannel where his palm curved with the shape of her waist, had felt her grip his coat, her sharp intake of breath when he'd freed the blade at his side. The cat's lips had drawn back, teeth bared. It had made the threat to strike, stiff forepaw lifted slightly as though debating whether it was better to fight or flee, and he wasn't certain what made the beast decide to back down, nor had he cared. He had cared only about the girl behind him – the girl that had abruptly shoved herself out of his grasp with a sound like a kitten being strangled. He'd turned around to see her face gone white as death, her bright eyes burning into him with all the fear he hadn't seen since dragging a corpse through the tunnels.

After that it was like the easy conversation of before had never been, as though they had not just laughed together. She was distant, apart, as though she had become separated from him by some sheer, impenetrable barrier he couldn't see, fidgeting and wound so tight that he very seriously wondered whether she was going to twist herself into pieces, and he had no idea what had caused it. She had taken to wearing a mask of her own: wielding false, stunted smiles as if to pretend there was nothing wrong. As if he couldn't tell the difference.

Two days interspersed with wary, panicked looks he couldn't explain. Of words spoken only in need, in terms of yes and no and thank yous graciously given but that set his teeth on edge. Twice he caught the gasping, shuddering sounds of crying and found her face stained glossy with the stains of tears she stubbornly refused to acknowledge. Each time he asked, in his way, and while he knew there was something to be desired in simply indicating the remnants and expecting her to understand, he knew full well that she did. She was not so cruel as to feign ignorance, but nor did she answer. She would only force her mouth into a brittle, wheat-paste curve that in no way reached her eyes and insist she was all right, and no matter how many skeptical, disbelieving stares he pinned her with she never budged.

He didn't understand it. She hadn't been hurt, he'd made sure of that. He could have understood being frightened by the cat, even afterwards, but he was far too familiar with being the source of fear to mistake the direction of hers.

It bothered him. Fiercely. It bothered him that he couldn't ask and therefore couldn't fix it, and it bothered him to be so troubled by it. Her actions, her misery, were her choice. She had no obligation to answer him, no obligation to be all right let alone to act it. She owed him nothing. He should have shrugged it off and let her be. But he just couldn't shake it. He couldn't let it go. Even as he went on his rounds, sun beating down like a punishment, he kept turning it obsessively over in his mind - the same cycle of questions over and over until he thought he might go mad. What had happened? What had he done to push her back into such a state? Why wouldn't she tell him?

Technically, he had already been on rounds early that morning, but he'd had to move - had to put distance between himself and the girl at the root of his temporary insanity. He'd cut their walk short, brought her back, and promptly left, finding he simply couldn't stand to be so close to her when all he could see or feel was how wrong everything was. He couldn't stand to be near her when all he wanted to do was fix it, for things to go back to the way they had been - comfortable, easy - wanted her to say what was bothering her rather than concealing it up behind the bland, meaningless lie of fine.

Oh, how he had come to detest that word. He hated the way she used it as if she was deflecting a blow, as though every questioning look he sent her was an attack. It made him want to grab her by the shoulders and shake her until she dropped the pretense. Until she did something, anything, real even if it meant having to swallow the fear he could thus far only taste. He hated that he kept allowing her to lull him into thinking she was content and happy until something he couldn't see ripped it apart to leave him standing in a crater of confusion and…hurt.

The instant it came to him he rejected it, casting the word from his mind like a venomous snake. He was not hurt. She didn't have that power. He refused to grant her that power. It was merely that her unpredictability was wearing on him, leading to agitation. That was all.

It had to be.

But frustration still slithered hot and blistering between his organs no matter what he told himself.

He paused in his examination of a broken branch, fingers stilling mid-measure of splintered bark and mind stilling mid-fervent thoughts. Had he heard something? He thought he had, but sound could carry strangely with so many obstacles in between. He listened, motionless, waiting, and it came again. A low, broken murmur of voices.

People.

Jason had never been anything but coolly wrathful upon hearing human noise in his territory, but today he was downright relieved. Which was in of itself alarming. Was he truly in such dire need of a distraction? Well…not so much a distraction as an outlet, something onto which he could unleash his frustration. And the answer was yes. Yes, he was.

Still alarming.

They weren't difficult to find. He tracked them by sound alone to a clearing on the other side of the lake. There were three of them: two male and a female laughing and yelling and drinking from brown glass bottles as they slowly set up a pair of tents. A task they would never get to finish.

He didn't pause to study them a while first as he usually would have done. He simply strode into the clearing, seized one of the young men by the back of the head and slammed him into a tree. He could feel the skull give beneath his hand, long-solidified bone seams splitting like those in a plastic globe, and Jason knew the man was dead before he slumped to the dirt. Satisfaction surged in his blood, all brimstone and the icy calm of vengeance appeased.

"Jesus-!"

The word was punctuated by a scream, shrill and scraping like metal upon glass. Jason's jaw clenched, eyes narrowing against the sound as he turned on the remaining pair.

The other man had bolted: a flailing, crashing shape in the brush. But the woman dove instead for the tangle of bags and tent equipment scattered across the ground, a small hatchet gleaming in one hand when she straightened. Clutching it between her hands she hurled it with a grunt, aiming wide if she even aimed at all. He caught it midair, fingers closing at the base of the metal and flipping it with the easy confidence of someone far more accustomed to the handling of such tools.

When he threw, he did not miss. She lurched; one step, then two steps sideways, peering wide-eyed down at the blade buried deep in her chest, splintering sternum. A tiny garbled wheeze slipping from her as she sank to her knees, indicating a punctured lung. Blood followed, trickling along the corner of her mouth. It would be an agonizing death, drowning in her own blood with her chest collapsing upon itself. Jason freed the machete from its straps as he went to her, gripping her by the chin and slitting her throat with a delicate slide of the blade to ease her passing. She slumped, the last traces of light slipping from her eyes, and he shifted his attention to the runner.

Judging from the frenzied sounds the man was making he was bound to exhaust himself sooner rather than later. Jason knew just from listening that he could catch the idiot with little to no fuss by simply following at a walk. But he didn't want an easy kill. He didn't want to wait and stalk from the shadows. He wanted fuss. He wanted blood.

And so he gave chase.

The man was slim, reedy, and by all laws of nature should have been as slippery as a weasel. Terror made him a staggering, blundering mess. Poisoned with adrenaline, he charged blindly through brush and foliage, tripping over every rock and rise in the ground. He seemed to realize that escape was out of reach; that Jason was significantly faster and that even at his best his hope would have been in the negatives. He was simply acting out his death throes before they reached him.

It took almost no time at all to gain, to get close enough to see the darting flash of the whites of the man's eyes as he glanced back over one shoulder. Whatever he saw seemed enough to crumble whatever last remnants of coordination his body possessed for his foot caught on seemingly nothing at all to send him crashing to the dirt and moss in an ungainly, flail.

There was a space of seconds during which time slowed, when the man wrestled himself onto his back and dragged his own weight along the ground as if the action would buy him still one more breath, lifting a hand as if imploring.

Jason's body slowed of its own accord, something about the posture, the hand raised in supplication was familiar…

"Don't," the man whimpered, voice hoarse and trembling nearly as much as the rest of him. "Please-don't kill me-!"

That was all it took to destroy the delicate thread of hesitation: words spoken as though they had the power to subdue or divert him, speaking as though somehow, in some way, words could change anything. As though words could mend that which was broken. That was what people did. They poisoned and destroyed everything around them, and when he came to settle the score they pleaded, wheedled, and reasoned as though they were on even footing. What they could never seem to understand was that he was not their equal, that there was no negotiating. The damage was done and the tithe must be paid.

Jason bore down on his prey and the man's face paled somehow still farther in realization – recognizing the shape of his own death. The scream was just starting to form, a kindling flame, but with a single smooth thrust Jason shoved the end of the machete through the offending throat before it could emerge, reducing it to a fading gurgle.

With a twist of his hand, Jason wrenched the blade free, turning the clean cut into a ragged, open gouge. Blood spurted sluggishly in the absence of the metal, but the eyes of the dying man were already glassy and blank, feeling nothing. Unlike his killer.

For Jason had remembered where he had seen that raised, warding hand before, the body hunched and inwardly curled, cowering at his feet. The white face drawn and bleached of color, peering up at him with eyes wide as dinner plates. He could still remember the sound of her screams, high and sharp and wracked with her terror. He had done that. He had never before felt shame in the things he had done, necessary, righteous as they had always felt. But looking back on it now he was ashamed of that.

"No-don't touch me!"

For the briefest instant corpse upon the earth bore Whitney's face, slender and finely boned, her gold and green eyes. For an instant, he stood frozen, unable to banish the sudden image of his hands – his blades – on her, punishing and in anger.

His stomach heaved, twisting as though to reject contents it didn't carry, useless nausea squeezing unhappily at the back of his throat. The wrath at the new trespass broke like a fever, dissipating from blood and muscle tissue to leave him bone-weary and nearly lightheaded. He hadn't done it - he wouldn't. Not now. Yet it took him a moment to identify it as true. Suddenly all he could think of was the way she had been shying from him every time he touched her lately: her breath catching in her throat as if it might strangle her, her heartbeat spiking. The way she had torn herself from his grasp, backed away and out of reach. Her eyes round and wide as if she had once again become a prey thing.

Had it…had it been the way he'd touched her? That had been a reflexive thing and done with the intent to keep her safe, but clearly it had frightened her.

He didn't know when precisely the promise had been made, but he'd sworn to himself that he would never again touch her in temper. It wasn't about any fear that he would hurt her, he was far too controlled for a slip like that. It was a matter of principle. He didn't have the right to once he'd given her back her life. But she couldn't know that. All she had were the cues he gave, and something about his handling of her must have reminded her that she had every reason to keep her distance.

For a moment, this seemed to be the answer, and he felt satisfied in that knowledge until he realized how very little it actually resolved. It didn't actually make sense. Whitney was clever; she could follow his sad attempts at communication far better than he ever could have expected, far better than he could have had their roles been reversed. Even if startled, he simply couldn't believe she wouldn't see that handling her roughly had only been a result of seeing to her safety.

If there was a part of her that truly thought he still retained the will or capacity to hurt her she would not have grown so comfortable instigating touch the way she had in the time he'd spent as her crutch. She would not have so easily reached for his forearm to brace herself, nor so calmly allowed him to carry her for the distances he had. At first she might have been tense and a bit awkward, but by the time she healed she had come to be at ease there, balanced against his shoulder. He was certain of it. It made no sense that she would forget about it entirely the instant something unexpected happened. No, there was something he was missing - something outside the expanse of his knowledge. Maybe it had nothing to do with him beyond that first initial moment. Maybe he was reading far too deeply into it than was necessary.

Still, of one thing he could be sure. She was unhappy and he didn't like it.

He considered this as he tossed the limp, bleeding body over a shoulder and toted it back to the would-be campsite. Whether there were amends to make or no, he needed to find something to bring the real smiles back, the laughter, the way the bread had done. Could he do that again? It would probably be unwise to steal from the same house so quickly. His occasional payments taken in supplies or fuel were begrudgingly tolerated in trade for being allowed to share - and briefly cross - the borders, and for remaining otherwise left alone. But if he pushed them, took too much too often there was a chance of drawing more or outside attention. Even knowing this he hesitated no longer than a moment before deciding. The calculation weighed the possibility of seeing a genuine smile higher than the risk.

The body met the ground with a hearty thud as he shrugged it off. He dragged it by the arm the rest of the way to a clump of dense brush where the local coyotes often gathered during their nightly runs. He did the same with the other two, piling them loosely together to await their fate of being scented out and eaten. In a few days he would circle back to the spot and bury whatever remained. It would be messy and unpleasant, still it was a considerably easier form of disposal, and one he could only utilize out here in the denser sections where there was little chance of discovery.

Besides, spending less time on body disposal would allow him to get on with the rest of his errands more quickly, and, subsequently, back to Whitney.

In spite of the tension of the past few days he had found himself increasingly disinclined to stray from her for too long, which he could neither fully make sense of nor explain. The only thing he had to compare it to was the hollow, sinking dread he'd felt when he had discovered her gone - and even that didn't really come close. It was as though he simply didn't want to be away from her without any real, solid reason to provide a framework for the want, which was all manner of illogical. She was nothing to him...but clearly that couldn't be true. Such strong responses to loss didn't come out of nothing, and the response to track down and bring an errant girl anywhere but to her death was nothing if not strong. To say nothing of actively protecting her. And yet he had done both. What did that mean?

He had no idea, and the not knowing disturbed things like a quake disturbed the earth. Soundly, and irrevocably, and in ways he didn't know how to process.

Jason set to work on the litter of bags and equipment the campers had brought, sorting through what to keep and what to hide. Things that might have been left by virtue of absentmindedness he could leave and feel relatively secure. The possessions of the occasional singular passerby he could bury with the confidence they would go undiscovered. With so much baggage, however he didn't feel it entirely safe to leave it. He would have to haul a good deal of it back to the crawlspace, add it to the hoard of things down there that would never be used. First, though, he went through the lot of it for things that he might be able to utilize.

One entire duffel bag was full of food - or, rather, what he supposed must be food considering the packaging. Big crinkly bags that were airy light and full of things that rattled when shaken, more of the thin brown glass bottles, still sealed, plastic multi-colored packages containing cylindrical sleeves of what looked like crackers and of chemicals. Somehow, in spite of the appearance, Jason suspected that while technically edible the things there might not actually be considered food where the matter of sustenance was concerned. Still, he set them aside to bring back with him. Another two bags were full of clothing, which he also habitually made to set aside before he reconsidered.

Undoing the snaps, he rifled through the contents, examining a pair of pants not unlike the ones Whitney had been wearing when he had found her. Another pair with the legs cut off, the wounds fraying white. Several shirts far smaller than the oversize plaid thing he'd brought her. Small enough that they might actually fit her. There were other things as well: socks, a little case of toiletries, the tiniest undergarments - or what he thought were undergarments - he had ever seen, a strange elastic and wire device that he had no idea as to its purpose but didn't want to throw away just in case its importance escaped him.

He set the entire bag aside to take back with him, glad of something else he might present as a peacemaking gesture. If she had needed to change once, for whatever reason, she might need to again, and it would be good to have something waiting for her when that time came.

In the end he had six bags to take back, two to keep and four to stow away underground. The rest, the things he could count on to rot and degrade naturally, he scattered - a broken trail of breadcrumbs leading nowhere.

There was no bread this time. But there were muffins, golden and studded with fat violet berries, sitting out on a rack just within reaching distance of the cracked window. He wondered at the ease of it as he snatched up two and deftly eased the window back, at just how convenient it was that the cooling items were set so close to the window that had been left partly open both times he'd happened to come by of late. Perhaps it was better not to examine it too closely.

With a pointed thought of thanks, he circled back around to the campers' bags and headed homeward.

He had taken to keeping a stash of cans up in the kitchen by the hotplate for the sake of convenience, and he took a moment to open one of these and heat it before descending to the tunnel. Most of the bags he left in the cluttered kitchen to deal with later, but the bag with clothes and with potential foodstuffs he took with him, nursing the hope that she might like them

When he entered the tunnel room, it was to find her set upon by tiny furry creatures. The one or two adventurous individuals seemed to have spread the word for the number of rats that now regularly came calling begging for treats and attention had grown. There were currently five little bodies piled on her lap, picking bits of dried banana out of her cupped hand. Another had taken up residence in the other hand, licking at her fingers for salt or lingering traces of sugar, while yet another was nosing about in her hair.

He approached slowly, trying to appear as non-threatening as he knew how. She didn't look up right away, keeping her attention fixed on her rodent companions, but the squeeze of apprehension in his chest lessened when he drew near enough to see her face; for there was a smile there. Faint, perhaps, just a slight upturn at the very corners of her mouth. But it was there, and it was real.

It wasn't until he saw the ghost of it again that it occurred to him just how much affect its absence had made. How much he'd missed it beyond the indication it served of contentment. How much he missed the genial interaction.

He missed the time they had spent reading outside in the afternoons. He had hoped they might start a new book, having finished the last one, but she had been distant even from them. It seemed the rats were the only thing that could penetrate the aura of gloom, and it was quite possible that this was only due to their aggressive persistence. He might have copied them just to see what happened if something in his brain didn't stall at the idea of forcefully imposing on her space by crawling onto her lap and shoving his masked face into her hand. Even if he'd had the courage to do it he couldn't imagine it going over well. Not to mention there was no way he could ever fit on her lap without simply crushing her.

Setting down the bags to one side, he sank into a crouch beside the bedside crate, watching the antics of the rats grabbing and gnawing at their snack with the fervor of starvation. They always ate with such haste, as though every morsel might be their very last. The one at her shoulder had begun chewing experimentally at a piece of her hair and he put down the bowl of soup to reach for it, gently untangling little clawed feet from a reddish curl. He cradled it there in his palm, reaching into the bag of banana for a piece to offer in exchange, stroking down the warm brown fur at its back as it scarfed banana with half-frantic gusto.

"All right, moochers," Whitney murmured, carefully shooing rats off her lap as she did, "no more today."

Following her lead, he lowered his own rat to join the rest. He could feel her eyes on him, a touch of awareness he felt like the brush of something cool, and realized that when he had dislodged the rat in her hair she hadn't flinched away from him. He was right, then - it wasn't that she was afraid of his touch.

He nearly jumped out of his skin when her hand darted out to grip the ragged hem of his sleeve.

"Are you...?"

She was frowning as she peered down at his hand, turning it over in her grasp as though looking for something and not bothering to hide her concern.

Surprised, he blinked down at his own wrist to see the blood there, dried into a flaking crust upon the fabric and smeared across his knuckles. She thought he was hurt - she was looking for an injury. Something in him softened at the thought that she could be miserable and afraid and yet still be distressed at the thought of him injured.

Extending his other hand, he let his fingertips brush the underside of her chin. While he applied no pressure, she startled slightly as she lifted her face to look at him, and he felt the delicate motion of her throat as she swallowed. He waited until she met his eyes before shaking his head in answer. He did so once, slowly, trying to communicate through eyes alone - at once emotive and yet nowhere near expressive enough - that he was not the one to whom that a question as to wellness should be directed.

A tiny furrow appeared between her brows, lips parting as if she were going to speak. Before she could, he released her chin and pointed to her: deliberately holding the indication as solidly as he held her gaze until he watched the bewilderment shift to understanding.

With a flutter of dark lashes, she averted her eyes, drawing them back down to the fabric she still fingered as though it had secrets to divulge. Ever so slightly, her shoulders dropped, and he realized she had just let go of tension she had been holding possibly for days. It had the weight of a sigh, of a long, slow exhale used to steady body and mind.

"I'm..."

A part of him had braced for the inevitable (and meaningless) insistence of fine and was briefly thrown when it didn't come. He had been prepared to insist, to push her as much as he could without a voice, but he hadn't had to.

"I don't really know," she finally finished.

Well...it was definitely more than she'd given him yet. He waited patiently, hoping she might offer more.

"I think I'm just...I don't recognize parts of myself right now and it's freaking me out a little."

Surprisingly, for the vagueness of the statement, Jason found himself empathizing. He might not know to what exactly she was referring, but he understood what it was to be unsettled by change, to be caught unawares and set so off center that it felt like the entire world was thrown off its axis. His own world had been set at an unusual angle ever since having found her; and while he had struggled against it, pulled and yanked like a horse at the bit, but after a point, struggling had become more a waste of energy than anything productive. His life had changed - he had changed. All because of one split-second choice made in a state of shock and confusion. He could choose to rail against it, be angry about it. Or he could accept it. It sounded as though Whitney was in the same place he had been, trying to reconcile what she thought should be and what was.

He nodded, and while she wasn't looking at him she must have caught it out of her periphery. Somehow, she had followed the path of his thoughts, for with a thoughtful lilt she considered: "you know exactly what I'm talking about, don't you? Except for you that's...well, me."

She released his sleeve, dropping her hands to her lap. Once again she was listless and quiet and he frowned behind his mask, once again feeling the unpleasantly sour strain of not-quite remorse nipping at the back of his mind. With a hint of desperation, he produced the muffins. Like an offering before a deity he placed the cheesecloth-wrapped bundle on the crate and waited, tense and holding his breath. She eyed it; a single coppery brow arched in what he hoped was curiosity. When she set down her spoon and reached for it he imagined he could hear the sound of his own heart echoing in his ears it beat so loud.

With a flick of a wrist, she opened it, staring at the contents for a long second that felt like forever. Her face crumpled, and for a fleeting, horrible instant he was sure she was going to cry and his heart plummeted. That was, until she spoke again, a soft, tremulous murmur he wasn't entirely sure he was meant to hear.

"You're trying to cheer me up."

His brow creased with concern. Had she been sad? Because of all the tumult in her head? It had been a statement not a question, yet he nodded anyway, daring to hope.

"Thank you," she said, in a whisper so soft that he only barely heard the words it carried. Yet there was gratitude there. Gratitude and what sounded like relief. Only then did he allow himself to let go of the breath he had been holding.

Sitting back on his heels he watched her slide the bowl of soup along the crate toward herself - watched her cast a longing look of promise at the muffins - and settle in to eat. It was the most enthusiasm she had shown food in some time, which was not exactly a lot, but it was still encouraging to see. She didn't appear bothered by his nearness, and while she did cast the occasional glance his way, the looks were much more along the lines of curious than cautiously wary.

When the soup was gone, she picked up one of the muffins and he noticed how large it was, cradled there between her hands. She had nice hands, he thought, as hands went. Deft and slender with delicate bones. There was a scar just below the prominent knuckle of her left middle finger. A burn, probably, the skin so long healed that what must once have been a red mark had faded to silvery pink. She had broken the muffin into halves, and he just caught the slight tilt of her wrist as if to offer him one before she stilled, uncertain. Her eyes flicked up to his masked face, a quick, brief glance of acknowledgement and…yes, tentative amusement, as she returned it to the cloth wrapper instead. Still, he recognized the thought behind the gesture, if not as much the warm, delicate flutter behind his ribs that followed.

He waited for her to finish eating before gesturing for her to stand, noting her tiny frown of question when she let him take her wrists to unlock the cuffs.

"But I don't need..."

Hushing her with a look, he laid a hand against her back just below the shoulder blades. Then he gently nudged her toward the mouth of the tunnel and outside.

~/~

It was incredible how dark it could get so far from any big cities. The sun hadn't yet fully set, but the shadows fell heavy and deep within the protective enclosure of a wooded space. Spacious paths became close and less familiar and might have seemed oppressive if not for the company.

Her feet made dull, hollow thuds against the wood of the little bridge. The very same bridge upon which she had stood with Mike when he'd told her it had been on her mom's request that he had brought her there. It felt like such a long time ago now. Far longer than a month.

She didn't know why Jason had brought her outside, but she was willing to go with it. The air was so much cooler now than it had been during the day, even underground, and out here she no longer felt like the life was being slowly stifled out of her. She could breathe out here, relish the sensation of the perspiration drying in cold patches at her back and hairline and recover, having just narrowly avoided an emotional breakdown - of which she had already had two in as many days. And over muffins, of all things.

Goddamn muffins.

Although it wasn't really about the muffins at all. It was...well, everything, really.

Apathy and denial made a good solid shield: had done so since she was little, before doctors starting throwing around terms like adolescent-onset anxiety, grief-related depression, and coping mechanisms. Except that she wasn't coping very well this time. It appeared as though the years she had spent leaning on that shield had taken a toll. It had taken quite a beating over the years, she supposed, and with every blow, every additional scrape and dent had weakened it to the point where it could no longer hold. Not that she had realized this until she was throwing up her breakfast into the toilet the morning after the revelation (or whatever the hell it had been).

The protective cocoon of apathy had splintered; every crack a direct path to a nerve now exposed. Her mind - as was made resoundingly clear to her - could no longer block the unpleasantness out and her body had reacted as if it could purge the things she so desperately wanted to reject. She had had the second full-on panic attack of her life there in that tiny summer camp bathroom stall and just like after the first back in her sophomore year of college she was left feeling stripped down to the bone, exhausted and trembling and completely, utterly wrecked.

Jason had noticed immediately that something was wrong. He had before, undoubtedly, but if he hadn't then he would have then when she emerged trembling and sweat-soaked and stinking of the vomit she had no doubt he could smell regardless of her efforts to scour it away with half a tube of toothpaste. She was intimately familiar with how the sour stench permeated a space, emanating just as much from pores as from breath, and she was no exception to that norm. Oh, he had noticed all right, and she had deliberately avoided making eye contact to avoid the questions she knew would be there. Questions that had been there since the moment he had turned around to find her staring at him as though he had just tried to tear out her throat. Questions she couldn't answer.

How could she answer when just to see them - not even hear them, but see them - made the world she understood drop out from under her? How could she answer a question like "are you ok" when she no longer understood what ok was? Yet she had felt it every time he sent her one of those lingering looks cast in concern, somehow louder than any shout could have been and as stinging as a slap - as much accusation as worry or inquiry.

Everything she had done from that point she had done purely out of self-preservation, and it had felt more real, more tenuous and threatening then even the moments spent certain she was looking death in the eye. She had avoided his gaze, disengaged quickly whenever touch was necessary, and acted firmly and decisively as if nothing had changed. She distanced herself, trying her damnedest to exert some manner of control over space, her mind - whatever she had left that was hers - to counteract the feeling of being cut loose and left to tread open water. She wasn't subtle and she was a shit actor, but what else could she do? How was she supposed to cope?

She couldn't get away on her own and he didn't seem inclined to release her, probably because he assumed the second he did was the second she went straight to the police. Not that she suspected they would do anything about it after however many years of missing persons reports and a clear plausible culprit still at large, even with a testimonial from a witness.

So she couldn't run and she couldn't stay, couldn't keep faking her way through the pretense that they both knew was bullshit. She slept fitfully when she slept at all, and when she woke it was with the sensation of blood slick between her fingers and caked in the creases of her palms and she spent uncounted minutes scrubbing her hands with dirt until she could no longer feel it. She knew it was guilt. Guilt tapping into trauma not unlike picking at a scab until it cracked and bled. She knew what it was, but knowing only gave it a name. Knowing didn't block the echoes of old screams from her head.

She felt guilty for surviving, for living when others had not, and guilty for relaxing her grip on the horror of it - for having the audacity to look upon a killer and feel anything beyond all the reasons why she should hate him. She could almost convince herself, too, almost find the will to summon up that terror-founded loathing, even if just a thin, watered-down version of it...then he went and did things like bring her muffins specifically in the effort to make her happy. And so on top of everything else she was left feeling like the biggest wad of human trash that had disciplined a puppy without even explaining what it had done wrong. For all that she knew she shouldn't think of him that way, he kept giving her worried puppy eyes and she knew he wasn't even bothered for his own sake but for her because he cared. Damn it all to hell and back.

Dropping the teetering, shattered shield of fakery had been her own fault because ultimately - reason and logic aside - she cared too. Sure, part of it was the nurturer in her, but it wasn't only that.

Her response to seeing blood hadn't been skewed toward the people he had likely slaughtered before coming to bring her baked goods, but rather toward him, out of the worry that he was hurt. And if that wasn't a sign of a paradigm shift she didn't know what was.

And when he had touched her face, fingertips light at her jaw in a way that had been intimate in ways he couldn't possibly realize, her mind had spiraled to places it shouldn't as though she hadn't just spent days agonizing over that very thing. His steely eyes had been soft and earnest and in the moment it had been so easy to forget was he was. At that point she wasn't sure there was any going back.

The things she'd told him back in the tunnel just now had been the culmination of almost three solid days of introspection forged like steel in the fires of stress and disbelief to be finally tempered by a blunt rationality. They had not been easy to come by, nor to speak, but once she'd gotten them out and hung them in the air she had felt their weight lift almost instantly. It did her good to acknowledge them, even if it meant facing up to the fact that no deed of his had been horrible enough to overshadow the horror she'd had for herself. Once again, she had been reminded that she wasn't the only one whose foundation had been shaken to the core. Nor was he the only one that had been dealing with loneliness.

By all rights she shouldn't have been; she'd had plenty of people in her life. But since taking on Ellen's care, she had essentially cut herself off from every other real interpersonal contact. Her relationships had stretched thin and faded until they finally broke, fraying softly and quietly into the past rather than snapping abruptly loose. Only Mike had been persistent enough to stay and half of that was her own need causing her to cling to him like a barnacle to a sturdy surface. But mom had gotten too sick to do much more than trade the occasional sentence or smile between naps, and Mike didn't understand loss of the magnitude she was currently living with even only in theory. She had woken up one morning and there was...no one. She had been wading through her life; through school and work and everything else surrounded by people - and had been more alone than she was out here in the woods.

Odd, how even in the beginning, excluding the times when she was too afraid to feel anything else, she had never felt lonely here. She couldn't puzzle out why that might be since she hadn't talked about anything really profound with Jason, hadn't talked about her mom or the constant, sharp-toothed shadow of oncoming grief that had been lurking at the back of her mind for the better part of a year. Maybe it was because she knew that if she ever did he might actually understand. If anyone could empathize with the loss of a parental anchor, it would be him. But it was more than that.

There was something about his company that was so simple, so effortless. Normally it required effort. Interaction was always a performance and thereby draining, even if the result was pleasant. With Jason she could just...be, and that was enough. She didn't have to speak, didn't have to perform. In fact, he could tell very clearly when she was doing so and he didn't like it. That was why he'd persisted, asking with gestures and pointed looks. It had been for her own comfort that she pretended, not his, because it was bad enough to be physically attracted to him, but it was another thing entirely to find herself connecting to a mass murderer on a level that made her entire two-and-a-half year relationship with Mike feel like a farce. And a pathetic one at that.

Even now in the cool dark, she balked at the thought. She wasn't ready for that truth, truth though it might have been.

Jason's hand skimmed her elbow, drawing her attention in order to indicate that the path they were on was starting to narrow and to lead them up an incline before moving ahead. It had become almost habit again to flinch away, and while she hadn't this time she did find herself rubbing almost self-consciously at her chin where his fingers had grazed skin some time ago, amazed by how he could instill the sentiment of asking permission into touch.

In normal circumstances, she might have snapped at a man that did something similar, irritated by the high-handed effort to make her look at him. But Jason hadn't forced her to do anything. He had only used his hands because he couldn't simply ask her to look at him. The touch itself had been a literal nonverbal please. She had known that, even in the moment. Yet everything in her had been shaped to view a touch of that kind as something else, something more, and when combined with that gentle concern turning his irises warm she hadn't been able to interpret it as anything but affection. For a quick, quavering moment she had thought...but no.

For the most part she was confidently self-dependent and self-assured, but sometimes she wanted to be taken care of for a change; to be cradled and looked after and treated like something precious. Deep down she was a colossal sap, and therein lay her biggest problem. Jason naturally seemed to gravitate toward checking all these boxes, just not for the motives she had in mind whenever such fantasies took hold. And while logically she both knew and accepted this, ever since her last attempt to run she kept catching herself leaning into it as though he were just like any other boy she'd developed an interest in.

But if he felt affection for her it was only because she was the closest thing he'd had to a friend since he was a boy. That was all. He didn't see her as a woman. He saw her as female and therefore not exactly like himself, but registered nothing beyond the simplest acknowledgement of physical differences. He wouldn't know what those physical differences meant, though. Would he? She supposed she couldn't know for sure unless she asked - which was something she absolutely would not do.

It didn't matter anyway. Whatever the delicate, traitorous little flutter in her stomach might have told her - the way it ever faithfully did in the wake of a new crush - he was about as likely to see her as something sexual as he was to dance a jig in his underwear. So not at all. In that she was alone, and would remain as such.

She trailed at a distance behind Jason as he scaled the shallow incline, every once in a while catching the ghostly white flash of his mask when he glanced back at her; not, she recognized, for any fear she might vanish, but in case she stumbled or indicated any difficulty. Every time she saw it, something throbbed in her chest like a fresh wound. She had been acting like a fucking crazy person lately - a mess of mixed signals and conflicting messages, one day fine the next near catatonic. But he still kept doing what he could to ensure she was ok.

She wasn't really ok, but that wasn't due to any lack of pains taken on his part.

Almost as soon as her legs started to become less than enthusiastic about the steady incline, the ground evened out beneath her. Jason had come to a stop up ahead and was waiting for her. She quickened her pace, lengthening her stride to catch up, only for her feet to come to a stiff, jerky halt before she closed the final few feet between them.

They had come to the lip of a shallow bluff overlooking the lake. The twilit firs had opened up around them, revealing the scorched summer sun as it began to sink behind the tree-fringed horizon. Swaths of violet and rich indigo spread downward like a swelling bruise as the darker tones gradually bled into fiery pink and orange, the shades blending in the runny, artfully smeared way of watercolor paints.

Whitney felt her breath catch in her throat, a soft squeezing pressure at her diaphragm preceding a sudden rush of emotion it took her a minute to quantify. Jason had turned back to her, and though he was backlit and she couldn't make out even the mask, there was something about his posture that was eagerness and latent energy.

Slowly she walked the rest of the way to him, and the closer she came the harder it seemed to become to breathe. She had to be wrong. It couldn't be that he had...

But he had.

She knew he had. She could feel it in the weight of his gaze upon her face, the sense of stillness he radiated - of anticipation - waiting for her reaction. He had brought her out here to see the sunset.

Her throat locked, a spasm in her lungs dangerously close to becoming a sob, and she forced it down on a hard swallow. She didn't remember the last time someone had done something for her just because, purely for the sake of a smile. There had been plenty of words, plenty of condolences and sympathies, plenty of offered comforts both empty and full - there had been offers of financial support, distractions and tasks and promises. But no one had taken her to go look at something pretty just for a little while because she wasn't feeling like herself. No one had thought to, or known to, and she hadn't felt like herself in years...with the exception of these little moments with him.

Wordless, she looked at him. He still angled his head sometimes specifically to use his left eye, and she couldn't determine whether it was habitual or because the right was truly weaker. He did so then, and she could see the question, the hopeful tenderness.

Did she like it? Was she a little better?

She thought back to what she had told him, that she felt as though looking into herself felt like looking in a mirror and seeing someone else's eyes or nose or cheekbones, and how he had nodded. She had seen the recognition in his eyes, the empathy, and understood that yeah, he did understand it. He understood exactly, because he'd undergone the same uncomfortable reformation of self – not when he'd chosen not to kill her, but afterwards, when the realities of that decision had fully struck him. Eventually he had made his peace with it, and that he would choose to risk the comfortable normalcy he had created for himself for her…it meant a hell of a lot.

Emotion surged. Her chin trembled just as it would have before she subsided into an ugly-sobbing mess of snot and tears. But she had cried so much lately that it seemed her tear ducts had either exhausted themselves of the supplies it took to produce tears or they had simply shut down in protest of the abuse. In the end she was biting down on the inside of her cheek purely out of habit rather than out of the true belief that she was about to start bawling. Even still her face gave her away - the skewed mouth or too-wide eyes, or the expression of raw, dumb stupefaction - because the hopeful levity behind the eye-slots of Jason's mask faltered, which really only made things worse. Her own family hadn't been so attuned to her emotional state, and here someone just a few steps above being a virtual stranger could tell simply by the most minute of alterations in expression.

Fuck it.

So she was a sick, twisted person. So she was morbid and possibly deranged. Who cared what anyone might think of her - who was here to judge? Who could judge, really, except someone else in her precise situation, detail for detail? Nothing would ever come of it, and she couldn't keep punishing him just because she responded to certain things in certain ways, couldn't keep punishing herself for doing so. It wouldn't change anything, and it wouldn't make it any easier to bear. And if that made her some variation of crazy, then fine.

Just...fuck it.

"It's beautiful," she whispered, and while she made no direct reference to her state of being, she must have given some silent signal.

He nodded once, in agreement and acknowledgement, before turning his face back to the view. After a moment wherein which she took a breath that rattled rather like a sob in her chest, she followed suit.

The tiny black shapes of bats darted about them like spastic nighttime birds just as they had that first night. Amanda had vehemently not been a fan of them she recalled as she tipped her chin to watch the frenetic movements. Just as with rats, people tended not to like them, viewing them as diseased or malicious when they were neither. She supposed she was simply drawn to misunderstood, scary-looking things...and that was a poetically fitting thought. Except Jason wasn't misunderstood at all, really; he was perceived precisely how he wanted to be, exactly how he saw himself in relation to other people. Aside, it seemed, from her.

"Do you ever get lonely out here by yourself?"

She hadn't really intended to ask it: the question seemed to have been pulled from her, as though the solitude around her had reached down her throat to extract it. The world seemed to yawn wider in the night hours as if the darkness erased the separation between earth and sky until they seemed as one, and therefore all the more expansive because of it. With that expansiveness, this little patch of the universe felt that much tinier. As did she.

His shrug was more felt than seen, a rise and fall of one great shoulder that whispered against her arm - sleeve to sleeve. Whitney was abruptly aware of how close they stood and when the thought neglected to bother her, she just as abruptly dismissed it. If it didn't bother him, it didn't bother her.

She interpreted the shrug as a neutral response, a statement of sometimes. He had likely grown up rather accustomed to being alone, likely missing his mother specifically more than the concept of company in general. Still, she couldn't help but imagine that he must have at least wanted a friend once. The inclination he'd shown toward communication, and to humor, were not markers of an individual suited to complete isolation, and the way he had taken to treating her more like a friend than a captive implied the same. Maybe he had stopped recognizing it as loneliness, or maybe after everything had happened the ability to feel such an emotion had just him for a while, burned away by the trauma. Maybe Jason was an introvert too.

"Yeah," she said softly, "I get it. Thank you, by the way, for bringing me out here." And purely because she knew he would have asked if he were capable: "I feel a lot better."

Though she wasn't looking at him to see the reaction to these words, she could almost feel the coil of uncertain tension he had been carrying around all night loosen.

They stayed that way until the horizon of trees swallowed the sun and only the faded remnants of its brilliance remained. Again Whitney was reminded of how much darker it was out in the wilds than it ever got closer to a city, without all the artificial lights to pollute it. Here the sky ceased to be an endless swath of darkness flat as matte paint on a canvas and became instead a glittering, intricately textured space with the depth of a universe.

At some point, when the last lingering warmth started to ebb closer to coolness, they made the silent agreement to head back; and the sky was so bright and thick with stars that it was almost possible to traverse the spaces where the tree cover was sparser with only their brilliance for light. She almost walked into a tree twice before Jason seemed to accept that she wasn't going to stop goggling at the stupid sky, and finally he took hold of her arm to steer her clear of potential concussions.

His hand was sure where it cupped her elbow, the palm textured with callus and scars she couldn't make out in the dark. A killer's hands - no, working hands - careful not to squeeze but only brace and gently guide. It was somewhat distracting to have it there, though mostly because the warmth of him automatically drew her focus to how much chillier it had gotten now that the sun was down.

Her belly was starting to complain, taking on the gnawing sensation with which it responded to emptiness. She hadn't really managed more than a couple swallows of her dinner, and half a muffin. Which, while delicious, hadn't had the capacity to be truly filling, and had been stolen from some poor neighbor likely now scared out of their wits.

Oh well. Better the sacrifice of baked goods than blood or a life.

If it were her, she would have gladly left out bread and wire and whatever else might be in demand just as the superstitious in old Ireland had left out milk for fairies. Maybe if she asked nicely he might consider re-heating her soup.

She pondered that for a moment before deciding to woman up and ask. The question had been a recurrent chirp at the back of her mind almost since the beginning, but was even more relevant now that had more factual reason behind her suspicion that he might not be all human anymore (reason and fact be damned).

"Do you eat?" Jason paused for half a step so she could move up beside him rather than trailing a bit behind. She could just make out his shrug in the dark. "Is that a no, or a sometimes?"

He held up his right hand, showing her two fingers. The second answer, or so she guessed.

"Because you have to or because you want to?"

He hesitated, and then held up one finger, but the delay had been long enough to indicate uncertainty.

"Not really sure?" A nod. "But you can. That answers my question, I think. You should try some muffin when we get back. They're a little cakier than I like my muffins, but no way I'd ever turn down anything with blueberries."

A hand flew to his face, fingers splayed across the mask as though to hold it to his face. He dropped it almost instantly, identifying the movement as involuntary, reflexive in nature. She could no longer see his eyes to tell for sure, but everything about the language of that reflex screamed fear, screamed shame.

Immediately she felt like the worst kind of asshole. Eating required freeing the mouth, which would require at least moving, if not completely removing, the mask. It had become so synonymous with him - so much a part of him to her mind - that she had almost forgotten why he likely wore it in the first place. Whatever - whoever - had caused it, he had come to associate his own face with negative things. By now the mask - as with the sackcloth before it - was likely as much as comfort as it was a shield. It was his version of closing his eyes in a dark place in preference of a self-imposed darkness, a choice to be fearsome in a deliberate way rather than one he could not control.

He didn't want her to see his face because he feared she would run from it. Or, worse, she would ridicule him for it. She had never seen him show anything like fear, but seeing it made him no more or less than he had been. It only made her sad.

In that moment she very much wanted to find whoever had bullied and more than likely tormented him, taking that inherent sweetness and desperate yearning for a friend and warping it this way. Wanted to find them and slam their heads into a wall until they saw God. Proving the fact that just because she didn't administer harm didn't mean she was above wishing it on others anyway. Her sense of justice was strong and sharp enough to lean more into the realm of vengeance. Apparently, they had that in common. He just acted on his.

"I didn't mean-not eat in front of me, just...take it for later, maybe. If you wanted."

He nodded, perhaps a little too quickly, and she thought he had probably understood that to begin with. Still, reflex was reflex: she understood that well enough.

Deliberately she changed the subject.

"You know what," she said, smoothing over the rough patch with a dose of levity and plain fact. "I do have to pee."

After a long moment of quiet, she heard the rough, husky exhalation she knew was a laugh.

NOTES:

Sorry for the delay! Jason was being a bit of a problem child.

This chapter is me at my best: Queen of Angst. It isn't quite as long as I wanted it to be...but I think it'll work out for the best in the end for a number of reasons. I'm going to stop typing now for fear I second-guess myself and decide not to post it. So until next time!

One last thing, though: thank you so, so much to everyone for the comments and the follows/favorites and for being so goddamn lovely. Bless you.