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CHAPTER 21
Ain't No Sunshine

~/13/~

Day 40

While he had gone many a night under the sky, this had been the first Jason had ever spent under any roof other than that of his childhood home.

He had listened to the quiet, steady pattern of Whitney's breathing, the rustle of cloth when she shifted beside him in her sleep. He hadn't really looked at her much. A glance every once in a while, as though subconsciously he sought to make sure she was still there. But for the most part he simply listened, staring into the fading embers in the hearth as they grew cold, and wishing he knew how to keep the morning from coming.

The painful, needy pulse between his legs had eased after a while, tamed as much by the peaceful contentment in being there with her as anything else. And it had been peaceful, but he was not content.

He had once likened himself to a dog tasting blood, yet he'd been only on the cusp of understanding just how true that was.

He hadn't been able to get the image out of his head: of her moving above him, sinuous and hypnotic, her face contorted in an ecstasy that defied words. Couldn't rid himself of how it had felt to have her guiding his hand against the hot, silken shape of her. How it had felt as she'd shattered under his touch, as she'd folded against him, weak and shuddering and limp. He still bore the scent of her on his fingers. Still carried the weight of her soft, slender shape between his arms. She had been by far the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

When she had pulled herself free, he had been near to overpowered by the need to bring her back to him. It had been her expression which stopped him, which had the sun-warm glow of adoration shriveling inside him like the charred edges of paper cast to the flame. He still didn't understand what that look had meant. She had appeared almost afraid, though he couldn't think why. How could she feel fear after something so wondrous? Then he had begun to wonder, as she tugged her shirt back down to cover herself and retreated up the stairs, if it wasn't fear at all, but something worse.

He was well acquainted with his ignorance, he knew there were things at work here which he was blind to – social customs and expectations that he could never hope to satisfy. He could only assume what they'd done was somehow related to mating behavior as it was in humans. It was the only thing he could think of that explained the powerful, primal need he was suddenly engulfed by to care for her; to see to her needs the way the animals did, in the way of wolves or birds, bringing food and nesting materials, grooming, soothing. He wanted to spend the rest of time right where she was, with her gentle weight draped across him. He never wanted to be anywhere else again. Never wanted her out of his sight, or his reach.

But if that was so, he could only therefore assume that he had proven in some way less than adequate. She was familiar with his shortcomings. More than familiar. Yet she had chosen him anyway, hadn't she?

Unless she now regretted her choice, her actions. Unless she now wished she had never opened the door to let him in from the rain.

He barely understood mating as it was to beasts let alone people, he knew nothing of what humans typically did or thought, or felt, where such matters were concerned. He had no way to know if any of this was even close to what was going on. It seemed wrong to go after her, even in the interest of granting her the opportunity to order him gone. It seemed more wrong to simply go, to not be there when she came down – if she ever did. Instinct bade him stay, intuition steered him toward caution, and each seemed skewed by an all-too human worry. So he had done the only thing he could think of, which was to lean into that compulsion to provide.

He had seen the dishes in the kitchen, caught the smell of food – fresh, not stale – which told him she had eaten before his arrival. She didn't need food. It was possible that use of a bathroom was what had driven her up the stairs. That was what he hoped, at least, and not that she had simply wanted to be as far away from him as she could get while remaining inside and sheltered. Sleep had been the only thing he couldn't account for, and while it was also possible she had found somewhere to do that upstairs as well, the cursory glance he'd taken of the room before settling into the chair had told him this was likely not the case.

Rising had proven difficult. His body had still been strained and burning and he had moved stiffly at first, forced to grit his teeth against the discomfort of trousers much too tight at the groin. But he had managed, dragging his discarded shirt back over his head and setting to reassembling the bedding she had shoved to the back of the couch as best he could. And then he had settled in to wait.

As long as it took.

A part of him had been relieved to hear the faint creak of the stairs. The rest had been anxious and desperate not to show it. He exercised brutal force of will to keep from turning immediately, to give her the choice of how to handle the situation. If he didn't move, he couldn't break yet more rules he didn't know. Could he? Or…had he already in his ignorance?

When he'd heard her steps move around the end of the couch opposite from where he'd planted himself to wait for her, he allowed himself to look.

For the space of several seconds she just looked at him, and while he could not read the exact nuances of all the emotions written across her face, he could tell with almost certainty that none of them were anger, rejection, or regret.

Saying nothing, she sank to the jumble of cushions and coverings he had arranged for her. She had wrapped herself up in the blankets as though cold, and he had been glad of his foresight to place the bedding as close to the hearth as was safe. She had lain on her side, face to the dying fire, her head upon the pillow right beside his outstretched leg. And while she had said nothing of the kind, he had been unable to think of it as anything but accepting – that this, at least, he had done correctly.

He had extended a hand, running his palm back along the crown of her head to smooth the tousle of her hair, and then again simply for the sake of it, stroking as his mother had done to ease his path to sleep when it had been elusive. Her eyes had been closed, but he would have sworn he'd felt her sigh and settle beneath his hand; and the sense of utter fulfilment he'd known then had been nothing short of incredible.

This, he had thought as he'd sat there watching over her as she slept. He wanted this. He wanted her company, her cleverness, the bright flash of her eyes when she teased, her smile and voice and laughter, her sorrow and her temper, her joy, her pleasure, and this. He wanted it forever.

But he couldn't have it. He shouldn't have had as much as he'd been given, purely by logic, and he wished she hadn't given him even that. It would have been hard enough before, but after this...it was going to be impossible to heal.

He had stayed because he couldn't think of anywhere else he would rather be. He had left because he could no longer bear it.

When dawn broke, Jason was on the porch to see the sky warm and brighten, watching weak sunlight begin to stream through the trees as it rose, wishing in vain that he could force it back down beneath the horizon and make it stay there.

He was a mess; a tangled snarl of desire and hope and fear, a knot-work of nerves and worry and dread shaped like a man. A dog tasting blood. Neither noble nor good.

It had never seemed possible for him to want something more than he had wanted his mother returned to him. He had gone so long with that sole thorn of want lodged so deeply within him that he hadn't noticed when it scabbed over, became a scar that ached only sometimes instead of constantly. There was a certain sense in that. Parents separated from their offspring in nature. They died, made way for new life. That was the way of things. It had been more the way his mother had been taken, and how young he had been, than that she had been gone which had hurt so much. He could see that now; perspective a gift of time and distance and the introduction of something to shift his perception on what it was he had so badly wanted in the first place.

Wants could not be evenly laid out and measured. They were not equivalent to each other. They were not static, unshifting things. Jason was no longer the boy he had once been, and while it didn't mean he loved her any less, he no longer truly knew who his mother had been. Had he been able to bring her back, he would have. Absolutely and without question. But if he must choose between giving Pamela back her life and keeping Whitney, he knew what his choice would be…and it would not have been his mother.

But that would have been a far easier choice than the one before him now.

He couldn't bear the idea of going back to what he had been: empty, a ghost, a shell of a soul haunting the surface of an earth that no longer wanted him. Consumed by his aloneness, trapped in the dark. Without her.

So, what, then? Did he drag her back down into the dark underground and chain her there? Force her to stay, a bright bird locked in a cage, and watch her grow to hate him as she once had? He could stomach the thought of her hatred even less than the thought of her leaving, and the idea of forcing her back into chains made him feel physically ill.

She was everything he could not control. He had grown to love her for it, and by the time he had realized it his time with her had already been running out. Even as she had sat with him, touched him, even as she had looked at him with that soft warmth he could almost imagine was love, he had known it would change nothing. He should have been grateful, content, even – he had been granted a taste of pure happiness. For the space of a night he had belonged to her. Like in the storybook read to him long ago; beauty had kissed him, and with her kiss had transformed him. Into what he didn't know. Something different…better. He should have been grateful. Instead he felt as though he were bleeding from a belly wound.

She had a life waiting for her somewhere out there in the world that had long since passed him by, a life that he could never be a part of beyond this point. He was no longer of that world, and however much he might have wanted to be again, for her, he didn't have that power. He got to have known her, but he didn't get to keep her.

So he must bleed.

And thus, the best night of Jason's withered life was also the very worst.

~/~

She must have known.

She must have.

With each day she had been struggling progressively more and more with a choice that should have been becoming easier, not harder. With each day she had felt her barriers sliding, the lines – once so clear –blurring, her perceptions of what she should do and what she wanted to do becoming so helplessly intertwined that she couldn't tell the difference anymore. That alone should have been enough for her to see. She wasn't entirely sure she hadn't.

She had been balanced on the edge of a precipice for far longer than she'd thought – long before firelight and pent-up frustration had mixed and dashed her inhibition to the floor as decisively as any alcohol. A mistake, she had thought it. A heated, impulsive decision made on fuck-it logic instead of reason and an utter lack of self-control. She would regret it come morning. She would regret her haste, her poor judgment, and worst of all, her selfishness.

Whitney was no stranger to regret. She had made plenty of decisions she'd ended up wishing she hadn't when she stood at the epicenter of the results settled around her. She had expected this to be just one more in the string of them. Yet as she woke slowly and dazedly from a sleep deeper and better than any she'd had in three solid years, she knew with crystal clarity that it had not been a mistake.

The first thing she did when she began to slip back into the land of the living was to stretch an arm up over her head, reaching almost entirely without conscious awareness for the body that she remembered having been there. Her fingers curled into nothing but air, and she felt her brow crease with a frown half a second before she wrenched her eyes open, turning onto her side to peer over her pillow to the space of floor where Jason had been sitting as she'd drifted.

He wasn't there. But that wasn't what made her stomach pitch in her stomach. It was that she wanted him to be.

And that some part of her, somewhere, had known she would.

There were so many reasons why she shouldn't. So many reasons she should feel remorse, feel guilt, for what she'd done. Not the least of which was for Mike's sake.

Poor Mike. She had been so hard on him in her thoughts of late, when he hadn't truly deserved it. Whatever else had been true about their relationship at the time, they had still been together technically. His last act had been to protect her, shoving her bodily up into the bathtub to get her off the floor and away from the blade slicing through it. His last words had been spent choked with his own blood, telling her to run. And she'd gone and screwed his murderer – or as good as. But as sorry as she was for his dying, for the waste, for the loss, and after all she had been very fond of him once; she just couldn't bring herself to feel guilty.

Nor could she feel bad for allowing herself the joy she'd felt during her time here. She had not betrayed her dying mother by feeling something other than pain or grief, by doing anything other than fighting viciously to get home to her bedside.

"You can't spend your life in here waiting for me to die."

Ellen would not have held her daughter in contempt for doing just that, even, perhaps especially, if it had involved being so happy.

And Whitney had been happy. Happier than she remembered being since some indefinable point in middle school when she'd still been clinging to the last vestiges of childhood. Happy, and safe, and free. There was an irony there that she was not immune to, but she supposed there was also something poetic in it – to have been set free by the same force that had once put her in a literal cage.

Rolling onto her back, Whitney squinted up into the light pouring in from the tall windows at the back of the room. It was early still, maybe ten, ten-thirty. But she didn't know how long it would take her to get to the gas station, and she didn't want to have to rush.

She had to go. She owed it to Clay to explain, for the sake of the shit he'd seen, if nothing else. But also because he was her brother and she loved him, and she didn't want him to worry needlessly – especially not if that worry made him come charging back into the camp attempting an even more misguided rescue. She had to go, because if Mom was still alive then she needed to be there, for as much time as she had left. And yet as much as those things were true, she realized as she lay there, blinking into the morning sun with one hand resting against the space of floor upon which Jason had sat while she fell asleep, that the feeling she'd had after coaxing Clay to go – the hollow, empty gnawing in her belly she'd had at the thought of leaving – was still there.

She hadn't been able to stomach the idea of going then, and while in hindsight she knew she had already been hip-deep in feelings by then, now…now she was all but drowning in them. Now it was impossible to think of walking away from him and never coming back; and it wasn't because she felt obligated out of some sense of duty a'la an Edwardian gentleman sticking by a girl he'd deflowered (as amusing as that comparison was). She thought she must have known, somewhere, deep down, that once she had refused to leave him the first time, she had been making the kind of choice which would irrevocably change the shape of her future.

There was a reason women tended to link sex and emotion so tightly together. It was an evolutionary necessity to ensure and strengthen bonding. Intellectually she knew that. But she also knew that the presence of one did not negate the other, just as the evolutionary purpose didn't make it less real.

She had been able to tell just by the way he'd held her after, tender and possessive and sweet, that if he did understand mating as it was in animals, then he would be the kind that did so for life. She had seen it in his eyes when she had pushed away, when he had looked at her like she was the only woman he could ever want and he would give everything he was to have her. And all she had wanted to do was sink into his arms, curl up there, and say yes.

The force of her own feeling had scared her. That, she realized now, was what had sent her fleeing before her nerves had stopped singing and her knees regained the ability to hold weight.

She had seen how it would be easy for him to become so deeply attached so quickly; the pattern of his life was spent as a string between moments, as in nature, as in simpler times – or so she assumed – more important decisions were more easily made simply because time was such an enemy. But she had not been raised that way. She had been shaped to question quick decisions made in passion, to pour over potential futures and possible paths to take and the dangers therein. Often to the point where she ended up talking herself out of half the things she wanted. There were reasons for that. Perfectly sound, rational, and important reasons to step back, to exercise thought and planning over impulse…still, she found herself wondering at what point she had stopped listening to her gut.

Whitney rose with a quiet sigh and went to dress, pausing in the midst of pulling on her jeans.

Bruises shaded the outer edges of her knees, dull indigo and relatively painless, but fresh. She straightened, peering down at herself. Sure enough, as she'd suspected there would be, another bruise spread wide across her left hip. It was mild to the eye, identifiable only by a faint, almost rosy discoloration. She felt it more than she could see it, a hint of under-surface ache right where he'd gripped her.

Seeing it brought her a weird rush of fondness. She wasn't sure most people would have approved, but she didn't mind the marks, or the barely-there pain of them. He hadn't meant to hurt her, he'd just been…distracted, and the results had been more than worth the cost.

Unbidden her mind recalled it: the way his hand had molded to her shape, searing against her skin, clutching at her as his back bowed and his silence limned with sound her bones could hear even as her ears could not. The way his bare chest had heaved, deep and broad and powerful, and the way he had touched her, so intent, so reverent. The way he'd looked at her right before she had come apart upon his fingertips.

God, she wanted that again. She wanted what had come before it; time spent in soft, peaceful company with a book and a warm fire on a chilly evening. She wanted what had come after. Closeness and comfort and…love.

And that's exactly what it was. He couldn't look at her like that, like she was home to him, and not love her. She hadn't wanted to see it, hadn't wanted to think about it, because if she acknowledged that then she would have to acknowledge that she might very well be half in love with him herself. And that…actually, she couldn't quite put together why that would have been such a bad thing. Not anymore.

She had been spending all this time under the assumption that she had to make a choice between two separate futures. But what if she didn't have to choose? What if she didn't have to give this up – whatever this was – and still do right by her mom? Could she still have the peace, the chance at a new start, the new, delicate thing there was between them? If she could coax him from killing once, could she again? She couldn't be sure, but even just a thread of possibility was still a calculable amount.

She had an opportunity here that went deeper than her own life and her own wants, and if she could lessen the damage done by so many years of pain and anger even by a little…that was enough for her.

Jason wasn't outside as she'd hoped he would be, though she tried not to let it worry her as she walked to the bathroom building to wash her face and brush her teeth and so forth since all her things were still there. Surely he was just otherwise occupied and not gone because she had hurt him with her badly-timed freak out. After all he'd stayed last night, had gone so far as to make her bed back up for her.

And that was another thing. Jason was clearly a nurturer at heart. He had never taken care of her to get something out of it, but because it was right and because he wanted to. While her modern, independent self might have bristled at the idea that she might need someone to take care of her, after spending so much time removed from the conveniences and pressure of modern society she didn't mind admitting that she kind of liked it. It was like a weird sociological experiment: how long did it take a human to revert back to their more basic needs and impulses. Except that as much as she might like being cared for, she had also wanted someone she could care for in return. And that wasn't bestial nature. That was human.

When she caught a look at herself in the mirror it was as if she was looking back at a moment over six weeks in the past, when she had been a much different person in the exact same clothes right down to the underwear. It was a little eerie, until she looked more closely and noted all the little changes. Changes not just in the state of her clothes – permanently stained and torn in some places – but in her face and bearing. She didn't hold herself the way she had then. She wasn't carrying those invisible marks of marathon exhaustion and early-onset grief. She looked different.

She was different.

Jason was waiting for her when she got back, a stoic great sentinel at the porch steps, and for the first time she allowed herself to fully acknowledge the warmth which unfurled within her at the sight of him.

"Good morning," she greeted, suddenly shy. She wanted to hug him, to fold herself into the steady mass of him, but wasn't sure if that was appropriate…which was stupid, since she'd had her hand on his cock not all that long ago. Still, doubt was pretty normal for this particular stage of a relationship.

He didn't give her a chance to work up the nerve to go for it anyway. As soon as she was close enough to have flung herself at him he extended his right arm, holding out the bag she hadn't noticed he was carrying.

Her bag.

"Where did…?" The question was halfway out of her mouth before she caught it, reshaped it to something she didn't already know. "You kept this the whole time?"

He jostled the bag gently, indicating for her to take it, which she did – her hands sliding against the slippery nylon of the straps. It was hers all right. The faded plum purple backpack she'd found at a thrift store with its broken top zipper which she had replaced with the stupid little dinosaur keychain so she could still work it. It didn't carry a lot, the rest of the things she had brought with her on the camping trip would have been much more useful for her needs as they had been up until now, with clothes and food and camping gear. But if she'd had to choose, this would have been the bag she wanted now.

She peered inside, finding the contents utterly undisturbed. Water bottle, sunscreen, tiny first aid kit, three granola bars, film canister stuffed with ibuprofin, hoodie, vaseline, housekeys, and…yes, tucked inside the interior pocket where she'd put it. Wallet.

"Thank you," she smiled up at him. "This will be a lot of help."

Once again she had the impulse to hug him, and she might have this time, overthinking awkwardness be damned, had she not suddenly had the impression that such a gesture would not, in fact, be welcomed. He stood stiff and straight as an arrow, looming the way he hadn't seemed to in a long time. The tenderness of last night was gone, replaced by an almost formal coolness, a distance he projected like an aura.

Dismay and panic scrabbled at her insides like claws. Oh, Jesus, she had fucked it up. She should have explained, should have taken the time to make sure he understood.

"What's wrong?" she asked, forgetting in her haste to know that he wouldn't be able to answer the open-ended question.

Jason shook his head, a tight, short motion that she suspected was to put her off from asking any more.

Nothing.

Nothing her ass.

"Are you—" she struggled, trying to formulate the tangle of urgent questions in her head into a manageable form that he could work with. "Is it about…last night?"

His eyes flashed, a brief blaze of feeling so convoluted and powerful that it almost took her breath away in the split instant before the blankness slammed back down like wall. And she understood.

The emotion wasn't gone at all. He had simply tucked it behind a shield as solid as the one he wore to hide his face, safe, guarded. He was protecting himself, and she had nothing but empathy for it. After all, she would have been wounded too if he had showed her such intense physical and emotional affection only to go and leave as if it hadn't mattered.

But it had mattered.

"You think I'm not going to come back." It wasn't a question. She already knew the answer. "But I am."

The shield held, but it was cracking. She saw it in the sudden increase in the tension along his neck, as though he were clenching his jaw. There was anger now, too. A hot lash of it.

Don't tell me that. Don't tell me things you don't mean.

Don't give me hope.

"I have to go for a little while," she said softly, holding his eyes while she spoke. Prolonged eye contact was difficult. There was a reason eyes were called windows to the soul; eye contact could be as intimate as touch, even more so sometimes. Such as now. But that was what she wanted. "There are some things I have to do, and I need to convince Clay not to come back. Then I'll come back."

The anger faded, but it was clear he was not convinced. And he probably never would be. He must believe to some degree that she still thought she must pretend her way to the freedom he didn't realize she no longer wanted. She could talk all she wanted. She could talk until she talked herself as mute as he was, but it wouldn't be enough. She had to show him. She understood and respected that. The only thing she regretted was that it left her no way to completely spare him pain until she could.

Mustering her nerve she stepped forward, inserting herself into his space.

"Do you trust me?"

He faltered, the stony façade weakening to the point that she could see the incredible vulnerability beneath. He wanted to, desperately…but he couldn't quite do it. Not completely.

Shifting the bag to one hand, she lifted the other, reaching to trace the tip of her finger along the faded red slash mark beneath the eye of the mask. He couldn't feel it, she knew that, but she had a feeling he knew what she was doing anyway. She flattened her hand, over the cool surface of the hard plastic, studying the unreadable tumult in his eyes.

"I'm coming back, Jason. I promise."

He gave a tiny dip of his chin. It wasn't a nod, not acceptance, not belief; it was acknowledgement, no more. It stung a bit, but she understood.

He stayed as she went about getting ready to go, watching as she brought Clay's bag out to the porch to sit beside her own, waiting as she consumed half a bowl of soup for some quick energy. He watched as she tied her hair up into a sloppy bun and picked up the bags, slinging one over each shoulder. He waited until her feet reached the edge of the steps, and then he moved, a gigantic, silent shadow, to block her path.

He stood close, so close that once it would have had her shrinking away, intimidated. She blinked at him, mouth open to ask, when – not so suddenly as to be entirely abrupt – he tipped his head down, angling until the slight rise where the mask protected his nose met her brow, just above her hairline. It was a gentle touch, and lasted no more than two, maybe three seconds at most. Then he was straightening, moving to the side to let her pass, and he didn't need to speak for her to know that it had been a goodbye.

There were tears gathering hot at the corners of her eyes as she stepped down onto the grass. Everything in her wanted to toss the bags to the ground and launch herself at him, but she couldn't have even if she'd had the composure. By the time she looked up, he had gone. Vanished, ghost-like, into the trees.

She shrugged off another little sting of hurt. What, had she expected him to walk her to the road? Prolong his own pain? Why, when she knew the way on her own. All she had to do was follow the camp driveway and take a right. It was just that she had wanted to prolong her time with him as much as possible, selfish as that was. But she would be back. She had promised, and this was a promise she would keep if it killed her.

Slinging Clay's heavy pack more securely over her left shoulder, she set off. It would be awkward going, but she'd manage. It wasn't that far.

Ok, it was farther than she'd remembered. Either that or two miles was a hell of lot longer than it had seemed before.

The walk wasn't arduous, but it wasn't pleasant. It was awkward going, between the uneven weight of the two bags which forced her to routinely switch them from one shoulder to another to keep her back from seizing up. Then there was the fact that her feet were still a little sore from the other day. The one thing in her favor was that it wasn't hot. Though the morning had been a sunny one, the sun had succumbed to the kind of dull overcast particular to summer. It had actually gotten to the point where she'd had to extract and slip on the hoodie from her bag.

It was strange, she felt as though she was trying to walk away and hold on at the same time, though not to anything in particular. It was an odd, uncomfortable feeling that she very much wanted to shake, but didn't quite know how.

The town of Crystal Lake was located roughly four and a half miles down the road from the camp end of the lake. It was the kind of tiny, sleepy town that managed, somewhat miraculously, to eke by on the graces of summer tourism. The only reason it continued to survive was due to novelty and because there happened to be vacation cabins up in the hills nearby. People found it an interesting spot to visit for its somewhat spooky reputation even though local law enforcement forbade trespass onto the lake on grounds of it not being safe from all the mining activity of decades past. Although distance was definitely a contributing factor, the biggest reason she was grateful she didn't have to go all the way to town was because of the inevitable small town curiosity and questions that she was simply not prepared to handle.

Hi there! Oh, not much, just spent the last six weeks up by the lake – it's so pretty up there this time of year. What? Oh, yeah. I mean, half the time I was locked up underground at the mercy of a serial killer who didn't actually hurt me and who actually turned out to be super sweet and stupid sexy. Crazy vacations, am I right?

Aaaand hello, loony bin.

The gas station where she had directed Clay was one of those final way stations before a long, unbroken stretch of road. The kind that primarily served people just passing through, truckers, campers, travelers, and the like, and maybe the odd local now and again. Due to this, it probably spent much of its time empty.

That was what she'd thought it was at first, as she rounded the final bend and saw the old, rickety building standing seemingly on raw tenacity alone. That was until she drew nearer and saw the truck parked by the ice out front, hidden behind the pumps.

She craned her head as she walked, searching for her brother. The creak and slam of a car door drew her attention, and then there he was, jumping from the cab of the truck and running at a dead sprint toward her.

"Whitney!"

Emotion surged like bile in her throat, hot and sour-sweet and thick. She staggered forward, her stomach pitching just under her ribs like she was seasick, and for a moment she thought she was going to start sobbing. Her body listed forward as she reached for him with both hands. Then he was there, his arms around her, if a bit awkward with the extra bulk of the bags, and gripping so tightly she was rendered both breathless and near to bursting all at once.

For all the good, for all that her ordeal had become less of one, she had not emerged from it entirely unscathed, and for the space of a few seconds she was a little girl again who just wanted her big brother to tell her it was going to be ok. And it would be. She was fine and he was here, safe, out of danger. Any real relief in their last reunion had been choked out by a threat that no longer existed – so long as he stayed well away from the lake – and she could allow herself to sink into it now, bury her head in his shoulder and breathe the paint-and-motor oil smell of his clothes, and be at ease.

"Oh my god, Whitney…" Her brother was not so at ease. His voice retained the same tense, urgent pitch of fear and adrenaline from the other night as he kept stammering. "I didn't think—I thought…god, are you ok?"

He pulled back to look at her, cupping her face between his hands and looking her over as if he expected to find her haggard and stressed, or wounded. His hands were cold against her cheeks – cold with stress. A trait that ran in the family, unfortunately.

"I'm ok," she reassured him, gripping him lightly by the sleeves.

He didn't seem to hear. He was still looking her over, a strained, almost feverish look in his eyes.

"I knew something was wrong when you didn't show up. Everyone said you were probably fine, that you'd just run off with Mike, but I knew. I just didn't think—"

"When I didn't show up where?" she interrupted gently, hoping to soothe the fit of words he was stumbling through with the rolling, uncontrolled force of a seizure. She might have been annoyed with him, after all she was the one who'd spent days locked up in a tunnel for christ's sake, but she didn't really have it in her to be mad. He was worried, and to his perspective he'd had good reason to be.

"The…"

Clay's verbal stream of thought ground to a halt as he focused on the question she'd asked. The ardent urgency in his face eased, but the furrow between his brows only deepened; and suddenly something about the way he was looking at her, the way he continued to look at her as his hands fell from her face to her upper arms as if to steady her, made her entire being ice over.

All of a sudden she had the very real compulsion to run.

"To the—"

He paused, jaw working as though he were having difficulty forming it around what he was trying to say. Then, he inhaled sharply.

"Mom's gone," he blurted, so fast that she didn't realize what he'd actually said until he was halfway through his next statement. "I got a call about the funeral and so I went, but you weren't there and no one knew where you were…"

She'd stopped listening.

Gone.

Mom was…gone.

A part of her had known, she thought. It had been a fool's hope to imagine a prospected three weeks at most would last a full three more beyond. This was really only confirming something she had, in a sense, already accepted as a likely probability, and yet the world still pitched around her as she reeled as if from an uppercut to the chin.

"How d—did…"

"In her sleep. Fatima said she went in one morning and she was…"

"I'll still be here when you get back."

That was what Ellen had said to her, to encourage her stubborn daughter to go on a weekend trip, a break from the sickroom and the gathering clouds of slow, impending death.

"My little worrier."

But she wasn't going to be there when Whitney got back. She wouldn't be there, in her bed, always tired, always hurting, always with a soft smile lighting the eyes she had given both her children, wan and paper-thin at her mouth – but always with that hint of spark.

That smile was gone now. And Whitney hadn't been there.

She expected the sharp, shredding wretchedness of guilt, to feel the drag of growing sobs in her diaphragm. She expected the wrathful misery of loss. But it didn't come. Because somehow she had known, and she had known that while it wasn't what she would have chosen, it was ok.

"That's how life works, Whitsie-bat. We don't always get to choose."

Mom was all right now. There was no more pain, no more living a shell of a life absent the things she truly enjoyed, no more seeing her children strained and sad and fighting. Having her daughter there to be weepy and fuss would not have made Ellen any happier, or die any easier. The only regret she could truly allow herself was for the worry she might have caused by not coming home when promised, and now that Ellen was no longer alive to worry, she hoped that worry was as free from her as the pain.

"Come on," Clay urged. His grip slid to one of her elbows, coaxing her forward with a gentle pressure. "Let's go."

Her legs moved automatically, allowing him to guide her the rest of the way down the road. She lifted a hand to her face, rubbing almost absently at her eyes. It would hit her harder later, she knew, after it really sank in and began to feel real. But while she was a little teary, mostly she was just tired and sad, and relieved.

The sudden burst of total clarity was somewhat unexpected, though.

They had reached the truck, Clay was just opening the cab door to usher her in, when she stepped back, pulling her elbow from his grasp.

Clay paused, surprised, and turned to look at her. "What's wrong?"

He frowned, worry drawing hard lines at the corners of his mouth. He was eyeing her again, and not just her face this time. And the look on his face…

"Are you—did he…"

She knew full well he wouldn't understand the repulsion that had just overtaken her, that had driven her to reel back from him as though he'd backhanded her across the face. She knew what he was implying, what he was asking without putting it to voice.

Did he hurt you?

He couldn't possibly understand just how awful – how wrong – it was to associate such a thing with the sweet, gentle man that had touched his face to her hair to bid her goodbye, fully expecting never to see her again.

"I'm fine, Clay," she snapped.

His far too earnest eyes widened, startled by the sharpness of it, the biting edge to her tone. She was almost surprised by it herself. Almost.

"Hey," he murmured, his voice lowering, softening with the intent to soothe. His arm went back around her, slipping beneath the coarse cloth of her backpack and pulling her into his chest. "It's ok. You're safe now."

She twisted free, stifling the urge to punch him straight in the solar plexus.

"I was safe before," she corrected bitterly.

"The hell you were," Clay's brows lowered, his own frustration rising to match hers. "I have been out looking for you for over a month—people here were telling me not to even expect to find your body. I've heard the stories, you're lucky to be alive."

"You don't kn—"

"Why didn't you let me get you out of there?" he demanded, volume rising to a soft shout.

"Because he would have killed you."

Clay rocked back slightly on his heels, not expecting quite the level of venom she'd just hurled at him.

"The only reason you are still alive right now is because I stayed. If I hadn't, he would have run us down and probably torn your fucking spine out. You're lucky he didn't do it anyway."

Clay bristled, but she could tell he was very aware that she was right. He had been hopelessly, ridiculously outmatched. "I could have—"

"No," she said flatly. "You couldn't. And you didn't need to."

His expression twisted, dark with disbelief, anger, confusion. "Why are you arguing with—fine, just…never mind that now," he huffed, trying to tamp down his frustration. "You're safe now. Let's get you home."

Home.

Home, where her brother had left, where her mother had been sick and died. Home, where her life had boiled itself down to a mindless trudge of work and school and caring for someone no longer fully there with her. A home that hadn't felt like home for years. She didn't want to go back there, to that place synonymous now almost solely with sad things. If she went back, all she would do was suffocate in her own misery. She didn't want that. Mom wouldn't have wanted that.

She wasn't going back.

As soon as the decision formed she felt as if something as immense as an entire brick wall had been lifted from her chest, as though the barbed wire wrapped thrice around her heart had been peeled away.

"I couldn't find the keys for your bike," she said mildly, succinct and clear, sliding the strap of his knapsack from her shoulder and holding it out to him. "But you probably have a spare. It's still at that house so you can pick it up whenever, just stay off the lake property."

Clay reached for the bag out of reflex, his fingers closing around the top loop while his mouth dropped open, utterly thrown by her sudden switch in subject.

"I…what?"

Turning on her heel, Whitney slung her own bag more firmly over her other shoulder and strode straight into the convenience store.

A tinny recording of a chime – if something so wizened and unsettling could be called a chime – sounded overhead as the door swung shut behind her with a mournful, drawn-out creak worthy of only the best campfire ghost stories. Glancing around, she grabbed a basket and headed down the closest aisle, determined to comb the rickety but immaculately clean little store as thoroughly as she could for supplies. She'd get food, too, but first she wanted something very specific.

Weaving her way through the aisles she scanned the shelves until she found what she was looking for.

Pads.

God bless this gas station.

She heard the creepy door chime again, followed by Clay hissing her name. Which she ignored.

"Whitney!" Right behind her now, and close to irate. "What are you doing?"

She turned her head back to the shelves. "I'm not going home, Clay," she told him calmly, adjusting the handles of the basket to sit in the fold of her elbow so she could reach for a box of pads and toss it in.

"What do you mean you're not going home? What are you talking about?"

Sighing, she turned her head to meet his eyes. "Look, Clay, I love you," she told him patiently, "thank you for coming to find me, and for trying to look after me." Impulsively, she hugged him, folding her free arm around his waist and squeezing. "I appreciate it, I do. But I'm not going home."

Stepping back, she offered a smile and turned back to the shelves.

"I'll be ok, I promise."

Maybe it was a little on the dismissive side. Maybe she was being a bit of an asshole about it. But as much as she might love him, as grateful as she was to know that he clearly loved her enough to have dropped everything to come looking for her, they were never going to be what they had once been. Too much had happened, and not enough had changed. She was whole and healthy and in full possession of all her faculties. That was going to have to be enough.

"You're not making any sense," Clay persisted, following her down the aisle and pausing behind her as she reached for a package of baby wipes. "What are you planning to do? Where are you going to stay? What about—?"

She kept walking, tuning out the flurry of questions he flung at her while she perused the second half of the aisle for anything useful, pausing as she came to the tiny section at the very end housing medicated creams, lubricant, and condoms.

Chewing at the inside of her lip she considered the small selection of packages. Was she a horrible person for thinking about this right now? Somehow she thought her mom would probably be thrilled that she was so actively engaged and enthusiastic about anything, even – maybe especially – a guy. Which just left her standing there flexing her hand, recollecting what Jason had felt like under her palm and trying to gauge size. It was hard to know for sure, the pants had been a hindrance, though they'd worked well enough in her favor in the moment.

She reached, deciding as she did to play it safe and get a pack each of average and large.

"Whoa—whoa."

Clay's hand closed around her arm, tight under the elbow, and yanked her bodily back a step until she was facing him. He was staring at the sleek black packaging clutched in her other hand, the mix of bewilderment and dawning horror on his face almost comical. Or it might have been had she not been on a fast track to annoyance, and had she not known he was five seconds away from being a self-righteous ass.

"What the fuck is this?"

Three seconds: a new record.

"Let go of my arm," she ordered calmly.

"What the fuck—"

"Let go of my arm, Clay."

"You ok, there, miss?"

The new voice came from somewhere behind her. Clay's eyes jumped to a point over her head and she twisted to see the man standing at the other end of the aisle, an open cardboard box balanced in one arm and eyeing Clay with an air that was openly disapproving and more than a little hostile. He was an older man, approaching his sixties, with closely cropped silver-white hair mostly hidden under a faded ballcap. The badge pinned to his dusty blue coveralls read Steve, and underneath that Manager.

Adjusting his grip on the box, the man addressed her again, voice gruff and with an underlying slant that sounded vaguely New Yorkish to her ear. "He givin' you trouble?"

Clay's grip eased, his hand slipping almost cautiously from her arm, moving the way one might have to keep from provoking an aggressive dog. Which was probably wise. Though the man's face was careworn and his hair long past merely gray, he was stocky and wide-shouldered, reminding her almost of a pit bull in stature.

She almost laughed. He thought Clay was her piece of shit boyfriend. There was such irony there it was almost priceless.

She didn't laugh. The man might be fit enough to take her brother, but he still hadn't needed to interfere and had done so anyway. She smiled instead, though she didn't pretend to be any less annoyed or tired than she felt. Hiding it would only make it seem like she was trying to cover for said piece of shit boyfriend, which was exactly not what was happening here.

Oh, god, the irony.

"I'm fine. My brother and I just haven't seen each other in a while and we're…finishing a fight."

That wasn't entirely true, but when she considered how long it had been since they'd talked before her untimely quasi-kidnapping and how pissed at him she had been, it certainly wasn't a lie, either.

"Thank you," she added graciously

"Hmph," the man grumbled slightly under his breath. "Well, holler if you need."

After shooting one last warning glare at Clay, he went back to whatever he'd been doing, an opening Whitney graciously took to drop the packs of condoms she'd been holding into her basket. Which instantly shook Clay out of his wary stupor.

The horror was back, this time laced with an anger that twisted his features into something almost masklike. She'd never seen him so livid before, not even when they'd fought at their absolute worst.

"Is that…that bastard," he spat the word as though it were poison on his tongue, "forcing you to—I'll kill him. I'll—"

"Shut up!" she barked, then hastily lowered her voice. "No one's forcing me to do anything."

Jesus, she really did not want to have this conversation.

"When I asked you before if he—if he'd hurt you I thought you got mad because you didn't want to talk about it, but…" Clay was staring at her with a realization still only in its infancy, but growing fast. "Are you…?"

Something in her face answered the question he hadn't been able to ask: too morally offended by the idea to verbalize it, as if to do so would destroy the off-chance that it wasn't true.

"God, Whitney," he breathed, his face going white as a clean sheet and wan with disgust, as though the idea of his sister with the hulking, vicious brute he remembered made him nauseous, and that she had done so voluntarily just made it worse, and she wanted to slap him. As if he could judge her any more harshly than she had judged herself in weeks past. As if she hadn't already chastised and punished and raged at herself to the point of making herself sick.

"We are not about to pretend you have any right to dictate who I do or do not sleep with."

Her hands were shaking; fury slick and cold like sweat down her back, thick and stifling in her throat. The metal handles of the basket were digging into the flesh inside the bend of her elbow, for no other reason than that she was clenching all her joints together.

"I found you chained to a wall under his house," Clay said sharply, emphasizing each word as though in order to remind her. As if she could have forgotten at some point in the last three days where he had found her and why she had been there. "He's—"

"I know what he is," she hissed between her teeth.

"He's a goddamn monster!"

"Stop it!" It left her as a yell, high and echoing in the empty store. She didn't really even care if she was overheard, but dropped her voice back to a soft hiss. The subject of their conversation wasn't exactly one she wanted overheard. "Just—stop it. You aren't the one who gets to be pissed about this!"

His mouth dropped open, temper hot on his tongue, and she stomped on it.

"You aren't the one who spent six days thinking the next minute was going to be the one when you died. You aren't the one who tore your own skin open trying to get free or considered starving yourself because you thought that maybe it would be better just to die already and get it over with."

Her face was hot, her vision gone blurry at the edges. She could tell she wasn't going to cry; though there was tightness in her chest it wasn't the shuddery, unstable kind that preluded tears. No, she was just royally fucking pissed.

Clay's face had gone, if possible, even whiter. He looked like he actually might vomit, which just agitated her further.

"You don't get to come in here and lecture me like I haven't seen people stabbed and cut open and die in front of me. I know what he's done, and I know what he is. And he is not a monster."

There was a sharp stinging in her eyes and she turned her head quickly.

She was not going to cry right now, god damn it. She'd bite her own tongue off first.

"God, Whitney, I…" Clay faltered, clearly floundering for something to say. "I didn't mean for it to sound like—" He wisely chose not to outline what he'd made it sound like. "I'm sorry. I just…I don't understand. You just said you'd thought about starving yourself, and now you're defending him for putting you through that? Do you know how you sound right now?"

Her laugh was utterly empty of humor. "Batshit insane," she said frankly, "trust me, I know."

"You sound like one of those girls that think they can fix a guy who smacks them around and throws plates at their head."

"Oh jesus christ, Clay," she cried, temper flaring. "I know we're basically estranged, but I thought you'd know me a little better than that."

Turning abruptly on her heel she set off for the next aisle, snatching several packages of trail mix and throwing them into her basket as she did.

"Ok, ok," Clay followed, hands spread in a placating gesture. "I'm sorry, but come on. What the fuck else am I supposed to think? He chained you to a wall."

"All right, first of all," pivoting sharply she held up a quelling finger, "stop throwing that around like it makes a point. It doesn't mean what you think it means. Second of all, he never put a hand on me unless he had to, and most of the time it was because I was picking a fight."

"You can't—"

"And," she continued, talking over his protest, "he never—ever—hurt me."

At its most literal and technical, that wasn't true. Even now she was hyper aware of the hem of her shirt where it covered the bruising at her side. Still, for all she might sound like one of those girls making excuses for a piece of human garbage, pretending she could change him, she wasn't one, and it wasn't because she didn't want to face reality.

Jason had hurt her neither willingly or knowingly even once. The harm he'd done out of ignorance he had learned from and never repeated, the rest was simply a result of being so much stronger than she was, and she could not in good conscience blame him for gripping a little too hard in the throes of the first orgasm he'd ever experienced. Especially not when she'd kind of liked it. Not the bruising, but the being the one to overwhelm him to the point that he forgot how to control himself.

Jason was neither thoughtless nor abusive, and she would not tolerate the insult he had done nothing to deserve. Call him what he was – a murderer – and she wouldn't refute it, because that was the truth. But it was the only condemnation he'd earned.

Clay sighed, looking tired, as though his adrenaline had finally worn off. "Whits," he began softly, the childhood nickname delicate and frail as a flake of snow. "Just because he hasn't yet…you can't be sure he won't."

She smiled in spite of herself. "It's the only thing in the world I can be sure of."

His eyebrows rose, hapless and so wearily bewildered that once again she found herself on the verge of laughter.

How did she explain this? It wasn't exactly a simple story, and the moral gray area was so thick it was downright murky – like the water at the bottom of a lake. How did she explain that while yes, he had killed people, he found no joy in it, no satisfaction; that when he killed he did so as efficiently as possible, that he would not have killed at all if people would simply heed the warnings and stay away. How did she explain that while none of these things excused the taking of a life, they did matter?

"If he was ever going to hurt me, he would have killed me in the beginning and been done with it. But he didn't, and once he didn't it's like he knew he had an obligation to treat me a certain way. He fed me, took care of me. I'm not sure he wouldn't have just let me go if he thought he could. And after," she took a breath to brace against a sudden rush of emotion, "after you left, three days ago…I chose to stay, and he knew he couldn't chain me again, even if he'd wanted to. And I didn't stay just because I didn't want to see you with your brains smashed on the floor."

All right, maybe that hadn't been the best way to word things.

"Then…" There was something almost desperate in Clay's tone. "Why?"

Why.

How did she even begin to answer that question?

"You only know what you've seen—maybe what you've heard from rumors. You've only seen him angry and afraid. You haven't seen him sitting under a tree just to watch birds or breaking up crackers to leave for the squirrels. You haven't seen him go out of his way to bring me books or make sure I have things I need, you didn't see…"

A tremor had entered her voice, but she didn't fight it any more than to pause for a steadying breath.

"You didn't see the way he looked at me when he left you on the floor and came to make sure I was ok. He would have done anything I asked him to. That was why he let you go. He thought you were trying to take me away—which you were. He thought he was protecting me. From you."

"So he's, what…in love with you?"

Yes.

"I don't know."

Clay turned, angling his body slightly away from her as he raked a hand through his hair, leaving it tousled and mussed as though he'd just woken from a troubled sleep. He was shaking his head faintly, a subconscious reflex he was clearly not in control over.

"I can get feeling sorry for him," he began slowly, "you've always been compassionate. You're a good person, you can't help it."

She had never really seen herself in that light, but she was pretty sure in this context it wasn't really a compliment.

"But I can't—I can't understand how…" He paused, obviously struggling to find the words he wanted. "I never thought I would hear you defend a murderer. You've always been so—not black and white, but sure about right and wrong as you see it, and murder seems like it would be pretty up there in the wrong category. How is that just…not a problem?"

"Do you blame a dog for biting, or do you blame the people that kicked it over and over again and taught it to?" She posed it as a question, but it was the kind of question that didn't really seek an answer.

Frustration hardened Clay's frown. "He's not a Rottweiler."

"A kid then," she amended with a dismissive jerk of her chin. "Do you blame them for being violent, or do you blame the people that taught them it's better to hit first?"

"This isn't the same thing."

"It's exactly the same thing," she argued, vaguely aware of the store manager passing some distance to their right, keeping a watchful eye on them. "He was a little boy who'd been bullied his entire life, told he was a freak and that he was ugly, a monster."

It was gratifying to see Clay fidget at his own word thrown back at him. Bitterly so, but gratifying nonetheless.

"Then he's pushed into the lake, almost drowns, sees his mom go crazy and kill people, then sees her die in an awful, brutal way. He was left alone and traumatized with no one to take care of him. He thought he was doing what she wanted and there was no one to teach him any different. He didn't know what else to do. What would you have done?"

"I wouldn't have killed people," Clay grumbled.

"Easy for you to say!"

For a moment they just stood there in terse silence, the rift between them stretching wider than it had ever been. She didn't like it. Not just the rift itself, but feeling mad and strained. She was tired of burning through stress like a marathon runner burned energy, and she was tired of fighting. Even with him. Especially with him.

"I'm sorry about Jenna," she offered. Clay's jaw worked, possibly to hide the slight waver of his chin. "I didn't know her, but she tried to help me. She didn't deserve to die that way."

He didn't say anything, just stood staring down at the shelf in front of him with an intensity that might have set the rows of donuts and snack cakes on fire if left there long enough.

"I can stop it."

She didn't quite know what made her say it. She didn't know, not for sure – it was a guess and nothing more. But her hope kept it from tasting like a lie.

Clay shot her a glance too dark to mirror his question. "Stop what?"

"The killing," she murmured. "If I stay, there's a chance I can keep anyone else from dying."

She expected him to reject this immediately, to insist that was a job for the police (or a firing squad). But when the protest didn't burst immediately and vehemently from him she realized that he had been oddly quiet about that in particular, not even since she had gotten there today but before. Which made her wonder if he'd had some less than stellar encounters with local law enforcement during his search for her – encounters that might have compounded with what he had witnessed for himself. He probably understood a little better now why the threat of the cops hadn't really been much of a threat at all.

Not that it much mattered whether he rejected this or not, or even if what she said was even true or not. She was staying either way.

Instead, her brother just regarded her with a weary incredulity. "How could you possibly know that?"

"Because I stopped him from killing you."

The silence which followed this calm statement was heavy, charged like the air right before a thunderstorm.

He'd heard her. She could tell by the way his jaw set, the shallow cleft in his chin – inherited from the father she'd never met, or so she supposed – ever so slightly deeper than usual. He was thinking, turning her words over in his mind like he would have a wrench if he'd had one.

"He's just a man, Clay," she said softly. "He might have PTSD and a bit of a blind spot for what we consider social normalcy, but he's not a psychopath. He doesn't torture and kill because he likes it. All he wants is for people to leave him alone."

The smile found her, though she hadn't expected it, a little achy at the corners of her mouth and where it echoed in her voice.

"He's sweet and he's gentle. He likes to watch small animals, and listening to me read. He thinks my hair is pretty. I ran into a cougar this one day—he literally put himself between it and me to keep me from getting mauled." Clay glanced at her again, and she felt her smile turn a little wry. "I can't think of someone like that as a monster."

At first Clay did little more than absorb that, head tipped down as he paced down the aisle away from her for a few steps, then back, passing a hand over his face.

He wasn't comfortable, that much was plain – not with any of it. He didn't agree with the choice she was making and didn't like what it would mean, but she had a feeling it was more to do with the pressure he felt to take care of his sister, and guilt over having not done as good a job of doing so as he felt he should have, than it was the ambiguous nature of the moral questions at play.

Oh, she didn't doubt that he genuinely thought murder and kidnapping and holding someone captive were all inexcusably wrong and couldn't understand why she wasn't conceding to that reality he had thought they shared – that they did share. She didn't disagree with him. It was just that…well, things weren't that simple. In fact, for all that she might have thought otherwise not all that long ago, she wasn't sure anything was truly that simple outside of the odd rare occasion. Whether she had managed to convince him of that with the examples she'd given, to say nothing of the background, she couldn't say.

Finally he turned back to her, the horror and doubt and frustration he'd worn like a winter coat gone to leave a beseeching plea.

"I can't just leave you here," he told her quietly. The rest went unspoken, but she heard it nonetheless.

Out in the middle of nowhere. With him.

"Yes, you can," she said, at once firm and gentle. As Mom had told her once: you needed neither volume nor force to be understood and obeyed, you just had to hold your ground until the other will broke against you like water around rock. "And you're going to have to find a way to be ok with it."

He hadn't opened his mouth to, but he looked like he wanted to argue. She sighed and looked away, her eyes automatically seeming to find the front windows and locking there, watching the quiet road, the empty parking spaces and unattended gas pumps.

"Mom's gone. You're out living your life—or, you will be. I drove my friends away because I couldn't maintain more than a few relationships, Mike is…gone now. All I had was school and work, neither of which I can just pick up where I left off. I wanted—" She broke off as what she had been about to say struck her, truly struck her. "I wanted to help people. It's why I was getting my nursing degree. But I'm not sure how much of that came from actually wanting it and how much came from seeing Mom and needing to feel like I could fix it."

It was not an entirely comfortable revelation to have, definitely not in front of someone else. She would have to process it in a bit more depth before she tried to do anything with it, but now wasn't the time.

"I didn't have anything else," she admitted. "But now…I feel like I'm somewhere I can actually do something good, something important. I can help someone. Truly help. Maybe not like I'd thought, but maybe better."

When she looked back at her brother he was shaking his head again in that absent, unknowing way. "But why you, Whits?" he implored her, "why does it have to be you?"

She laughed then, a little dry, perhaps, but the amusement was real.

Why her, indeed? How many times had she asked herself that same question in the past six and a half weeks? How many times had she wondered why? Why she was still alive? Why any of this had happened? Why two people so perfectly positioned to loathe one another had ended up so fond of each other? She had no answers for any of those questions. But for this one, she did.

"Why not me?"

Clay's laugh was a bit more on the bitter side, accompanied by tipping his head back to look up as if pleading with the sky for assistance – or sanity. It was a familiar gesture, a set of mannerisms she had seen many times before when she had won an argument, or he had simply given in with begrudging surrender. Of course, it might have said, dripping with sarcasm hot enough to scald.

Regardless of whether he believed the things she'd told him, he wasn't arguing with her anymore. Much of the fight had left his eyes and the set of his mouth, yet the frown was still there, a cloud of doubt dark between his brows. He really was thinner than when she'd seen him last, over a year ago now; even here in a well-lit store there were shadows cutting below his cheekbones. He truly had been worried about her.

The rush of affection she felt for him was limned with sadness, but it was warm and steady. Whatever else had happened between them, he was still her brother. The same brother that had picked up when she called to cry about homework and difficult classes and drama, about boys, about everything. She had learned too late that he was no more perfect than she was, and possibly far less capable of dealing with mental or emotional strain, and that neither of those things were his fault. He was human, just as she was: trying to do the best he could with what he had, sometimes succeeding, and sometimes failing.

Closing the several feet of space between them, she reached up and took his nose lightly between her index and middle fingers – the way he'd always done to her when she was little. It had almost always preceded a tussle, either wrestling or tickling or an unholy collision of both.

Pinching gently, she told him: "you're my brother and I love you. I'll always love you. I don't expect you not to worry, but I do expect you to trust me."

She released his nose, but before she could lower her hand to the edge of the basket Clay caught it in his own. For a moment he just stood there, her hand in his, as he studied her face so thoroughly she felt like she was being memorized down to every excruciating detail.

"You're not going to change my mind," she cautioned him, and was caught off-guard by his smile. Small, and more than a little bit crooked, but a smile.

"Not my stubborn little sister," he said fondly.

A moment later and his smile faded and he was looking at her now with a resignation she hadn't really expected to see.

"You like him, then."

It wasn't a question. She had no idea why hearing it made her want to cry, or why it felt like such a relief to say it to someone other than herself, even someone who might judge her for it.

"Yeah," she whispered, "yeah, I do."

Nodding once, Clay gave a heavy exhale, squeezing her hand between his. "Ok, then." Tugging faintly at her hand, he jerked his head toward the door. "Come on, leave that here for a minute."

Though her eyebrows rose in question, she followed, leaving her basket on the floor just inside the door before stepping back outside. He led her to the truck, letting go of her hand in order to reach into the bed. He rifled around for a moment: she heard the metal slide of a zipper, the rustle of fabric.

"I brought you some things. Thought you might need some clothes," he said, and as she leaned up on her toes she saw him removing things from one duffle bag into another. "There's cash in here, if you need it, and a phone. There's a number in it that you can use to get a hold of me any time."

With another slide of zipper he lifted the second duffle out from the truck bed and held it out to her. She blinked at him.

"I…"

She wasn't sure what she had been about to say – that she couldn't take money from him, or maybe that he didn't need to give it to her. But something in his face made her pause before she could. She was reminded of his leaving, back when Mom's diagnosis had come through and the shock had landed with the buckling snap of a bad fall. How she had seen his going as running away from his own life, and how similar it felt, in a way, to what she was doing now.

"I guess we're not so different after all," she mused.

He laughed quietly, and maybe a little sadly. "I guess not."

She reached, her fingers closing around the duffle's padded strap, and took it from him. "Thanks, Clay."

"I'm sorry," he began, and when she looked up at his face it was to find his brow furrowed and his eyes over-bright. "For not being there. I wasn't what you needed. What Mom needed. I'm sorry."

For the second time she reached for him, slipping her free arm around his back and pulling him into her. She felt him fold around her, felt the low tremor in his chest that said he was trying not to cry.

"I know," she assured him, rubbing soothingly at the space between his shoulder blades. Because she did know. She wouldn't say it was ok, because it hadn't been. Nor would she say she forgave him. She would, someday, when the hurt wasn't quite as fresh. But for now, it was enough that he had said it, enough that she had heard it, and it was enough for him to know she understood that he meant it.

She felt him rest his chin against her head, the way he always had with every greeting and every goodbye since they'd stopped sharing a roof, and drag in a breath that trembled slightly.

"I'll be staying at the house for a while, until everything's all sorted out legally. I'll take care of all that, since you did everything else. You can come get your things and anything else you want whenever you can. Or I can pick you up…or you can just let me know what you want and I'll bring it."

She was glad he hadn't asked if she wanted to keep the house. The only house she would have wanted was their grandparents', which had been sold years ago when they'd died. Maybe someday the new owners would move and she could think about it then, but for now, she didn't want to think about houses or legalities or paperwork.

"You going to sell?" she asked, drawing back to look at him. A piece of his hair had flopped over his forehead, both too long and too short at the same time. Unthinking, she lifted a hand and smoothed it back.

Clay shrugged, looking like he needed to sleep for a week. Which, he probably did. "I don't know," he admitted, "part of me doesn't want to. I missed so much—"

"Don't do that," she chided sternly, "don't use living there to punish yourself. Mom wouldn't want that, and I sure as hell don't want it."

"No, I know. I won't."

She wasn't entirely sure she believed him, but that was a battle for another day. "Good, because I'll beat your ass raw if you do." He snorted, but didn't argue with her. Proof that he might be pigheaded sometimes, but he was still smart. "Do you need anything from me for the will?"

As the oldest, Clay was the executor, but she would never claim to be knowledgeable in any kind of law.

He shook his head. "I don't think so. But I'll let you know if I do."

"Ok."

There was a moment of empty quiet, not quite awkward, but near to it. Glancing to the store windows, Clay asked her, "do you need help carrying or…getting back?"

She stared at him, impressed. As stubborn and unmoving as he had been about it, he was already trying.

"No," she assured him. "I've got it. Go back to wherever you've been staying and get some sleep. And maybe eat something? You look like you need it."

He rolled his eyes at her fussing, but agreed. "If you need anything," he told her, hand on the door of the truck, "call."

"I will."

He studied her then, eyes soft on her face. "I love you, Whits."

"I love you too, jerk."

If his laughter trembled slightly, she pretended not to notice.

With a promise to talk soon, Clay started the truck with a reluctant clunk and roar of an old engine. When he waved as he backed out of the spot, she waved back, and when he pulled out onto the road and set off, she watched until she couldn't see him anymore.


NOTES:

Holy dialogue, Batman.

As much as it sucks – which it does, royally – this quarantine business is doing WONDERS for my productivity, as evidenced here.

Dialogue is usually not as difficult for me as this was. Actually, correction: it's not the actual dialogue that's hard, it's what comes between the dialogue. For someone who writes like I do, very descriptive and flowery, it's hard to navigate a scene that's pretty much just two people talking at each other without adding in just a bunch of superfluous filler action. I hope I did all right here…I've looked over this stupid chapter so many times already and I just want to fucking post it, but I have a feeling I'm going to look back at it someday and cringe.

-sigh-

Also, is it even logical? I feel like Clay would have fought Whitney harder if he wasn't nursing some serious guilt over being an absentee brother. Maybe not? What do you all think?

I'm pretty sure the clerk/attendant in the movie is probably really the owner and is just being a dick, but in my headcannon all the cameos would have been previous Jason or F13 actors. Trilliumwoods and I have had many a discussion about this exact thing. The farmer should have been Ted White and I will go down with that ship. The lady with the dog should have been Betsy Palmer (if she was still alive), and either Adrienne King or Amy Steel should have been Pamela. I'm basing the shop owner loosely on Steve Dash, who was the first actor to portray grown-up Jason – although technically yes he was only really credited partially, he did pretty much all of the work and went to the hospital for this job, so as far as I'm concerned Warrington Gillette can suck it.

I feel like this chapter just kind of…not fell apart, but got weirder and less interesting as it went on. I know that's because the flow is so different because SO MUCH TALKING. But I'm really on super happy with the first half. Which is fitting for the theme, I suppose. I'm already working on the next one, which I hope will be more satisfying.

The response to the last chapter was so damn positive, and I'm so, so happy and gratified and excited. Get ready for more that, folks, it's gonna get fucking steamy.

For now, a gigantic THANK YOU to you, my readers. Thank you for reading, for your support, and for the sweet, wonderful, life-giving comments. You are all so awesome. I love you to pieces.

Take care of yourselves. Be well, stay sane.

Until next time. 3