I'm sorry about my absence. I hit a wall, and life got crazy for a while. I'm back, and hopefully it'll stay that way. If you have reviewed my story so far, you are awesome, thank you. I know not much happens during this chapter, but it's a necessary thing, and the next chapter should have plenty of Jason and Ana fluff.


ANA

For a long time, she just sat there and watched him sleep. Watched the slow, steady rise and fall of his chest. Counted the seconds that passed, each one taking him further from danger.

She was exhausted. Her mind was in chaos, shorting out randomly. The future seemed to stretch before her, an unknowable expanse of darkness. It should have frightened her; she should have felt utterly, terribly lost.

But she didn't. She knew exactly where she was.

On impulse, she reached out and laid her free hand flat to his chest and focused on the slow, steady beat of his heart. She might not know what was going to happen to her. To them.

But she knew that she was here to stay.

She blinked, and was surprised to find tears blurring her vision. Stupid tears. There was no reason for her to cry, now. Jason was safe; the bleeding had stopped. He'd been so, so lucky.

He would heal.

But she was still crying.

She rubbed irritably at her eyes. She couldn't waste time or energy on useless emotions; she was running desperately low on both. She had a lot to do before she could finally sleep, and Jason wouldn't be unconscious for very long.

Ana sucked in a deep breath and stood, shaking her head to clear her eyes and her mind. She moved slowly and methodically, straightening and organizing the makeshift triage area, setting aside all the tools that would need to be sterilized and packing the rest back in the med-kit. She cleaned up as much blood as she could, wiping down surfaces and blotting it up off the floor, leaving black stains behind on the cement. It bothered her to look at them.

Once the room was relatively clean, she added more wood to the fire and picked up the lantern. She followed his original path into the mine, straightening and organizing the objects he had knocked over in his haste. The rats had disappeared; probably scared off by all the noise he had made.

When she was done with that, she made her way down what she now considered to be the "storage tunnel," where Jason kept his supplies. She grabbed two water bottles and another blanket and carried them back into the main area of the mine.

And then she sat down on the floor beside the bed and leaned back against the table, draping the blanket over her legs. She smiled at the irony of finding herself in the same position Jason had been just a few days earlier, when she'd demanded that he get up and share the bed with her. When he woke up, he'd probably be a little miffed about that.

But at least, when he woke up, she'd still be there.

She'd made a promise, after all.

And Ana always kept her promises.

THE SHERIFF

Steven Price had always hated snow. It was cold, and wet, and messy, and just an all-around nuisance. He'd lived in this town for almost all of the thirty-three years of his life; it was beautiful, no doubt about that, but the winters were downright brutal. And no matter how well they salted the roads and broadcasted warnings on the local news and radio stations, when the snow started falling, the whole damn town forgot how to drive.

He'd been handling traffic calls all day, dispatching his deputies to help where they could and responding to calls himself where they couldn't, and it had only just started to quiet down a few hours ago, as the wind finally began to calm and visibility improved.

He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, willing away the headache brewing at the base of his skull. It was three days before Christmas. He still hadn't gotten a gift for Tracey or her parents - who were still in town, thanks to this damn blizzard.

He opened one eye to peer at the big, old clock out in the bullpen. Just past five. Jesus, really? There was no way he was staying here for another three fucking hours, not with the phones as dead as they were.

"Time to call it a night," he said to his empty office. He'd leave Barry in charge and stop by Belk on the way home, pick up a necklace or some other shiny bobble for his wife. Maybe a suitcase and some plane tickets for his in-laws.

He was still grinning at his own sense of humor when the shouting started.

Instantly he was on his feet, hand on his weapon as he hurried out of his office and across the bullpen to the hallway that led to the front door. Male voices, high-pitched with fear or anger, their words mixing together into a tangle of incoherence.

"Boys, calm down! That's enough Mr. Foster, now let's just- Redford Bennett, you shut your mouth this instant!" Eleanor was using her teacher voice, the one she'd used for thirty-two years at Crystal Lake Elementary School to gain immediate control over a classroom full of rowdy sixth graders. Steven knew how well that tone worked; she'd used it on him many a time when he was a kid. "Thank you, boys. Now, one at a time, and let's start with you, Larry. You look like you got your head on a little straighter than these two."

Steven walked down the hallway, stopping just out of sight around the corner.

"We saw him, Mrs. K," Larry said. His voice was trembling. "You gotta believe us, he's real. We saw him."

Steven's heart stopped.

A memory flickered, faded and warped by age. A memory that had followed him, throughout all the steps of his life, dogging his heels with unrelenting stubbornness.

A small, pale body slipping below into the murky surface of the lake.

He took a deep breath and stepped around the corner.

All three men were covered in mud and melting snow. They looked like lost dogs, ragged and wet and utterly exhausted. And Steven, whose job it was to care for the lost and the injured of this town, felt nothing but revulsion at the sight of them. Not because of what they looked like, but because of the threat they represented.

"Well, now, what do we have here?" he asked with a long-suffering sigh.

They turned to face him. Larry was the only one who looked cognizant, Red and Luke had that familiar white-faced, wide-eyed expression that Steven knew all too well. Shock.

"He's real, Sheriff," Larry repeated. "He's fucking real, just like I told you when I was a kid."

Steven was quiet for a moment, allowing the full weight of his disappointed-fatherly-figure frown to settle in on Larry Flynn.

"What in God's name have you boys been smoking?"

"Nothing, Sheriff, I swear to God." Larry's hands were visibly shaking. Red and Luke were still silent and pale, but Red somehow found the presence of mind to shake his head once or twice.

"Come with me." He turned, not waiting to see if they followed. He knew they would. They had no other choice.

As soon as they reached his office, the floodgates opened. All three of them started babbling at once, and Steven sat down and listened to them rave about Jason Voorhees for a good five minutes straight before he finally cleared his throat to speak.

Silence fell.

"Alright, now, let me get this straight," he paused for emphasis, and to deepen his frown. "You three boys trespassed onto Walter Garrick's land and hid in his barn for five hours. You then shot someone with a thirty-ought-six hunting rifle, and were subsequently attacked by a giant man in a hockey mask." He leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest. "That sound about right?"

Their faces fell, and Steven almost felt a pang of remorse about his manipulation; he'd been doing this for years, now. They'd never stood a chance.

Larry recovered first. He'd always been the smartest of the group.

"I know what it looks like, Sheriff, but…"

"Mr. Flynn, I've been a police officer for twelve years. I have seen just about everything this county has to offer. Now, you want to know what this looks like, to me? It looks like three of Crystal Lake's most notorious troublemakers smoked a bad batch of crystal and may or may not have murdered an innocent man in the woods. That is, assuming they weren't hallucinating the whole thing." He stood up and leaned across the desk, looming over them. He'd practiced this look; he knew how intimidating he could be. "This is a very troublesome occurrence, Mr. Flynn, and I am not sure you quite understand the consequences of what you are saying."

"But, Sheriff, we didn't smoke nothing!" Larry's eyes darted around wildly, and Steven knew he had them in the palm of his hand; even if they hadn't smoked today, they'd done it recently enough for it to show up on a tox screen.

Steven made a show of looking thoughtful for a long moment, before he heaved a weary sigh.

"Look, boys," he said slowly, "it's almost Christmas, and I know things can get a little hectic this time of year. So, in the spirit of things, I'm going to err on the side of a drug-induced psychosis, and I'm going to look the other way, just this once." He walked around them and opened the door to his office. "But if I hear mention of this again, I will be forced to conduct a full investigation on all three of you, and I doubt any of us wants that, do we?"

He followed them all the way to the front door, leaning against Eleanor's desk to watch as they shuffled out of the office.

"Another Voorhees sighting," Eleanor said with a reproving headshake. "Seems like we get more and more every year."

Steven was well practiced in hiding the panic that arose at the mention of Jason Voorhees.

"Well, the world is full of crazy people; wouldn't surprise me if one of them's wandering around in those woods right this very moment," he said with a humorless laugh. "But, if there is anyone out there, it's sure not some poor retarded kid that drowned in the lake twenty years ago."

Eleanor nodded. "World's a scary place, Sheriff. You sure got that right."

Steven sighed. "I think I'll head out a bit early, Mrs. K. Got some last minute shopping to do. You mind radioing Barry for me?"

Eleanor smiled. "Sure thing, honey. You give those sweet little girls of yours a hug for me, okay?"

"Yes, ma'am," he said. He tipped his hat to her and strolled out of the office with a smile.