Minor CW for this chapter- drug use (Bliss) and some dubcon-ish thoughts on Jacob's part. nothing that I'd expect to be particularly triggering but forewarned is forearmed.

Hunting Party

4.

They're both silent for a long time after the brief altercation at the creek bank, and that suits Jacob just fine. Things had been getting much too chatty for his comfort, anyway, which is why he'd instigated the little scrap, in hopes that it would put the old wall up between them, a wall that had somehow deteriorated over the course of the night.

The way she'd kissed him had thrown him off a bit, even if he has no intentions of showing it or admitting it. He wasn't sure if anyone had ever done that before—kissed him in such a way that he didn't feel like they wanted something from him. It was strange territory. He'd been eager to get back to something more familiar.

This, the tense silence—this is familiar.

He focuses on tracking the creature through the woods. At a certain point, it turned north again, which makes sense—the initial signs of it are so far from any roads or homes that it probably would have never turned out to be a problem, had it stayed put.

Dep keeps up, doesn't make much noise, doesn't ask any more questions. She's not the worst backup he's ever had, even if he's positive there's a significant portion of her that wants to see his ass dead right now.

They've gone about a total of five miles when they run into a black bear. Jacob spots the huge shape moving in the dark right around the time the Deputy's hand closes urgently around his wrist.

"I see it," he says, his voice so low he's not sure if she can even hear him.

The bear is a dozen yards away, and doesn't seem to have spotted them, but that could change any second. They could kill it, probably pretty easily, but the gunfire would draw attention, and Jacob wants to do this thing quietly.

Dep tugs on his wrist. He turns to look at her, and she points to the left, where he sees a tree stand about ten feet downhill from them. Not a bad idea. The bear can climb, obviously, but if they can get up there without it noticing… he twists his arm around so she loses her grip on him, grabs her now-free hand, and moves as quietly and quickly as possible towards the tree stand—he doesn't have to pull her, she's right there with him, but he holds onto her anyway. Once they reach the ladder, he guides her hand up, up to a rung before letting it go, and that's all she needs. She's clambering up the ladder in an instant, Jacob right behind her.

As soon as he's secure on the platform, he turns, seeking out the bear again. It's nearer, and probably knows they're there, but doesn't appear to have taken much notice of them—it's ambling along the forest floor, snuffling at the leaves, in no hurry at all. Jacob lifts his rifle, trailing it on the bear, just in case, though he's starting to doubt he'll have to use it.

The Deputy, crouched behind him, absently rests her hand on the center of his back as she peers over his shoulder, watching. He can feel the warmth of her even through his jacket.

The bear takes a long time to leave the area. Even after it's out of sight, they don't move for a while, staying put in the tree stand, waiting to make sure it's not coming back.

"Okay," Jacob says eventually. "Let's go. Can't be much further now."

"Not worried Baloo might have friends?"

"What the hell are you—" he starts, then his foot misses the ladder rung, and he falls from the tree stand.

"Jacob!" He has just enough time to think that he's never heard her sound that scared, not even after he'd fucking abducted her, then he lands hard on his back on the ground below.

It's not as bad as it could be. The ladder is on the hill side of the stand, so it's only about an eight-foot fall, and it's early October, so there are a lot of dead leaves on the ground to soften the impact. Still, it knocks the wind out of him pretty good.

Dep hits the ground about two seconds after he does—she'd jumped rather than take the time to climb down the ladder—and she doesn't try to stick the landing, falling to her knees beside him right away. "Jacob," she says, sounding panicked, reaching for him and then jerking her hands back like she's afraid that touching him might somehow make it worse. "Jacob."

He closes his eyes and frowns and lifts his hand, holding up an index finger: just a second. His diaphragm is half caved in and he can't really say anything at the moment. Just that little motion seems to soothe her worry somewhat—she quits talking, and he can just hear her shaky breathing.

He manages to pull in one breath, and after that, it gets easier. After maybe a minute, he asks, as casually as he can manage, "How old are you, Dep?"

"How… old am I?" She sounds baffled. He just waits, eyes still closed, and finally, she says, "I'm twenty-five."

"Ah." He chuckles quietly. The sound is still a bit strained. "Well. Enjoy it. Everything'll get worse with each year that passes from now on. Hangovers hurt more. Your joints deteriorate. Falling out of a tree stand is… fucking terrible."

She laughs. The sound of her relief is sharp and clear; Jacob can feel the buzz of it in his bones. He opens his eyes again as she takes his hand and tugs on it. "Here, let me help you up."

"Just… give me a minute." He's pretty sure nothing's broken or twisted, but he's still a little winded, and he's not too big to admit he's not in a rush to get back on the move, at least not till he gets his breath again.

Dep gets her feet under her, though she stays crouched and doesn't let go of his hand. "That's okay, I gotchya. I saw this in a movie once." She reaches for his shoulder and he realizes, with a sudden flare of alarm, that she's going to try to lift him, get him in a fireman's carry.

He's pretty sure she's just teasing him, but she has a tendency to take jokes too far and he is not willing to bet that she'll curb herself in time. "If you try to pick me up," he barks, his voice rough, "it will be the last thing you do."

She laughs again and gives up the pretense. Before he quite knows what's happening, she's lying down in the leaves beside him, her arm across his shoulders, where it won't aggravate the more battered parts of him, and her body warm against his side. She rests her face in the side of his neck. Her nose is cold.

"I won't tell anyone you fell out of a tree stand," she mumbles against his skin.

"Appreciate it," he grunts, more than a little sarcastic.

They should be moving. These woods are unsafe, especially at night. This job is taking too long as it is. The tension from the little tussle earlier is completely gone. He should get up, put some distance between them, figuratively and physically, but—probably because of the hit he'd taken—he doesn't really care what he should do right now. He stays put, even lifts his hand to close it around her wrist. Might feel to her like he's holding her in place.

She lifts her face, just a little, so she can talk quietly close to his ear. "I've been thinking about the Biblical Jacob. You were named for him, right?"

He grunts, a half-assed affirmation in response to her question. He and his brothers were all named for Biblical figures. He doesn't think about it that much.

"Yeah," she continues, "I was thinking about the bit where he spent a whole night just… wrasslin' an angel. The Angel of the Lord, if the Protestants are right. The whole night. We all knew he was a stubborn son of a bitch, working seven years, then seven more just to get the woman he wanted as a wife, but grabbing hold of the Angel of the Lord and refusing to let him go, even with a bum hip? That's gumption."

He can see patches of blue-black sky through the trees. They're far enough from any unnatural light source that stars, tons of them, are clearly visible. "What are you trying to say?"

She laughs softly. "Nothing. It's just what I was thinking about."

"You Christian?"

"Raised that way."

"But not anymore." It's a question voiced like a statement.

She's silent for a long time, enough that he thinks she's not going to bother answering. Eventually, very quietly, she says, "I'd like to be."

Jacob doesn't have a difficult time filling in the gaps of what she's leaving unsaid. She probably thinks she doesn't deserve the sort of grace religion offers. She'd revealed a lot of herself earlier during her little outburst, more than she'd meant to—he could see it in her face. If he had to guess, he'd say she'd never killed a person before she came to the county, and now? Dozens are dead at her hand, each one by a more creatively brutal means.

She's choking on her own guilt, ignoring the buildup of trauma (until one day, she won't be able to anymore). He hasn't gone through exactly the same thing—Jacob believes that although he didn't kill anybody till he was eighteen, in his heart, he's always been a killer, even as a child, constantly having to grapple with the rage and violence that lived in him so he didn't end up in a psych ward somewhere, completely neutered by drugs. He's seen it in others, though, watched fresh-faced rookies in his unit spin slowly out of control as the pressure got harder and harder to handle.

She's certainly under pressure, so of course, she's acting out, starting a self-destructive pattern, just like all the rest. Some people do drugs, some smoke, some drink. Some kill more people, building up the callus, hoping it'll help. The Deputy, well—she drapes her arms around the man who's kidnapped and starved and brainwashed her. He feels something tugging low in his gut at the thought. His hand tightens on her wrist, and she draws a quick little breath and presses closer.

Dangerous. He could just roll over, cover her body with his, pin her wrists hard to the forest floor above her head. He could take her right here, right now, and the easy possibility of it is making him feel a little lightheaded. He's almost relieved when he hears it, a harsh, awful sound—a moose, screaming, some distance away.

He lets the Deputy go and sits up abruptly—she's moving in unison with him, meets his eye when he glances at her in a silent question. She shrugs, though she looks wary, and gets to her feet, dusting leaves off of her clothes.

Jacob takes a little longer getting up, moving slowly, waiting for any stabbing pains that might indicate that the fall had hurt him worse than he'd guessed, but no, everything's working fine, if all a little banged up. By the time he gets on his feet, Dep has retrieved his rifle, which had gone flying around the same time Jacob had. She holds it out it to him, he takes it, and then she hauls ass up the ladder again, reaching up onto the platform with one smooth move to grab her bow, then jumps back down to the forest floor.

He tilts his head in the rough direction the moose call had come from. She moves past him to take the lead, and he falls in step behind her, and if keeping up with her quick pace leaves his battered lungs feeling a little strained, he's not about to say so.

He smells the Bliss a little before he feels it, that over-sweet vanilla-and-blossoms odor. It's not long before the little starbursts of white light start appearing in the air, and he glances at the Deputy to find her looking back at him with heavy-lidded eyes.

"Well, shit," she says lazily, no fear or urgency in her tone.

He agrees. He knew it was coming, but being Bliss-addled will make this fight that much harder. Still, the Bliss is already intense enough that he doesn't care, and isn't worried. He knows that once the Bliss is out of his system, he'll hate that it got to him in the first place—he fucking hates what it does to him—but he's not worried about that right now, either.

"You ever done this before?" Rook asks him.

What, hunted? he thinks.

"Hunted a fucked-up Judge creature," she says, and fuck, he hadn't meant to say that out loud.

She laughs, looks slyly at him over her shoulder. "Your Bliss tolerance is dogshit," she tells him, sounding delighted, and he guesses he was talking without meaning to again. "Mine, on the other hand," she continues, leading him uphill, "is—I think—halfway to decent, given that your sweet sister doses me constantly while I'm in her region. You need to tell her to cut that shit out. I think my kidneys are starting to fail." She doesn't sound particularly concerned by the idea.

"I try to limit my exposure," Jacob says, the words falling more easily from his tongue than words usually do. "I don't like the way it makes me feel." He realizes even as he says this that it's a lie, of course he likes this. The relentless press of things to do, the never-ending grimness he carries along with the knowledge that the world is ending soon, the achiness in his torso from the fall—they're all gone. It's all a lie, he knows, they'll be back the second he's Bliss-free, but for now, he's free of pain and worry. How could he not like it?

Rook laughs, a hearty, wicked sound, and the warmth he feels building in his chest in response to it surprises him a little. When did he start liking the sound of her laugh? He doesn't remember. "Oh, you are gonna be high as fuck!"

The moose calls again, nearer. Right. He shakes his head a little bit, trying to clear the sparkles from his field of vision, just ends up stirring up more. Rook spins around so abruptly he bumps into her. She laughs again, one hand lifting and her fingertips brushing his forearm. She doesn't recoil from the gnarled and pitted scars riddling his skin, doesn't seem put off at all. Must be the Bliss, playing tricks on her.

"Listen. I have fought one of these things. A cougar, in the Henbane. The Bliss makes it weird."

Her hair catches the moonlight, drawing his eye. Before he can even think about it, he's caught a thick strand between his thumb and two fingers, letting it slide through them like ribbon. Then he does it again, because he hasn't felt anything that soft in… he doesn't know if he's ever felt anything that soft.

"Stop that," she says, but she's laughing again and she doesn't swat his hand away and he doesn't think she really wants him to. "Listen."

"I'm listening," he replies mildly.

"The Bliss makes it weird," she repeats. "Like… it was a cougar, but it was also six cougars, and it was also a bear, and other things."

"Other things," he repeats.

"Other predators." The moose bays, and the sound is close. She turns, frowning, her hair slipping out of his grasp as she moves, then she looks back, squeezing his arm emphatically. "If they surround us, we gotta work back to back," she says. "I don't want to take the chance that the Bliss will turn us against each other. I don't want to shoot you."

"Yeah, I don't want to shoot you, either."

She grins at him, bright, practically glowing. He doesn't care that he's going to regret telling her that later. It's the truth, anyway. He hasn't wanted to shoot her for a long time now. Doesn't necessarily mean he doesn't want to hurt her. "Right," she says, "good, agreed. Once it starts getting weird, we put our backs together. Fight it that way. Okay?"

"Yes, ma'am," he says, just to fuck with her a little, and it pays off. Her grip on his arm tightens, her stare sharpens, and for a second, he could swear she's going to jump his bones then and there, moose be damned.

She doesn't, though. He sees her close her eyes, she swallows, and then shakes her head, like she's trying to recover from a glancing blow. After that, she drops his arm, turns away, and mutters, "Let's go."

Oh, she likes that, huh?

Good to know.

He follows after her. Shortly afterwards, they find the moose.

It's a big, ugly thing, clouds of green coming off it in puffs. Its eyes glow red, a less pleasant side effect of the Bliss. It sees them, lets out an enraged roar, and turns its body in their direction, striking the ground threateningly with a hoof.

Rook moves fast. One second, she's just standing beside him, the next, she's loosing an arrow he hadn't even seen her draw. It hits the moose's shoulder, then, as the thing screams in rage and starts to charge them, Jacob is taking aim directly between its eyes. He fires.

It hits. He sees the impact. The moose barely stumbles, keeps coming, then Rook collides with him and knocks him to the side as it thunders past, trying to swipe at them with its antlers.

He whirls, drops to one knee, takes aim again. Another arrow goes flying, hitting the moose in its haunches, and as it slows and wheels around, Jacob fires once more. The bullet hits the thing in the shoulder. He thinks. Kind of hard to tell, since the animal explodes into a green mist immediately upon impact.

Jacob lowers the scope from his eye and frowns. He waits, but the mist disappears without revealing some new creature, the way he's used to it happening in the Henbane Region.

"It's about to get weeeeiiiirrrrd," Rook sings under her breath, sounding a little nervous.

"About to?" Jacob mutters, then Rook grabs his shoulder, and he turns to see eight of the fucking things, spread out on the ridge just above them. They look pissed.

"Okay," he says quickly, his shoulder knocking against hers. "Start in the middle. You work left, I work right. Don't stray."

"Already on it," she says, and sends an arrow flying at the moose in the center. It explodes into a green cloud on impact.

Jacob gets to work. Between the two of them, they take out six before the charging animals reach them, and, with seconds to spare, he grabs Rook by the arm and drags her out of the way with him. The pair of moose barge past them, and Rook's hands are on him, pulling him up and around as the moose start to bank in opposite directions. In unison, he and Rook fire opposite shots, him right and her left, and the final pair vanish in more clouds of green.

There's less of a reprieve this time. More green mist starts materializing in bursts all around them. "This is when the bears show up," barks Rook, and if he didn't know any better, he'd think she sounded excited at the prospect. "Stay close, please don't—"

"I won't wander, Rook, don't you worry," he drawls, dragging back the bolt on his rifle even as he turns and puts his back to hers.

The next few moments pass in a blur of green. Each cloud gives way to a new moose, which, when shot, turns into a predator—a bear here, a cougar there. Once, a turkey, which he'd say was a nice change except it got close enough to scratch the shit out of his arm. The butt of his rifle kicks back into his shoulder, over and over again. He knows that Rook is shooting, too; he can feel her elbow bumping into his ribs periodically as she draws her bow, and, far from being annoyed, he relishes each impact, glad for evidence of the damage she's doing.

It's slightly slow going—they keep grabbing at one another, jerking each other around, throwing each other off, sacrificing effectiveness in favor of not losing contact as one or the other has to dodge a fresh attack, but they're steadily picking the things, off one at a time.

"Shit!" she barks after a little while.

"What," he says sharply, his tone conveying the sentiment you better not be fucking up back there.

"Outta arrows," she shouts, as if he's not right behind her. "No biggie. Keep shooting!"

"Can do," he says, and takes out another cougar. Not two seconds later, her pistol fire fills his ears.

In short order after that, the predators are gone. Jacob reloads even as he looks around, spots one last judge moose running along the tree line a dozen yards away.

Rook moves to stand beside him, lifts her gun. He takes aim as the moose screams and veers towards them, and in unison, they pump the fucking thing full of bullets—for the last time, it turns out. It loses its footing, crashes down onto its face, and slides to a stop just a few feet away from them.

The air is thick with gun smoke and Bliss. Rook stands rigid, tense, staring at the moose's body with wide eyes, like she expects it to jump back up and charge them again, and Jacob doesn't blame her, but given the lack of green clouds spawning from its body, he's pretty sure it's dead. Sure enough, in fact, to walk over and kick its snout with his boot.

It doesn't move. He shrugs—that's that—and walks back over to Rook. "Dead," he says simply.

She has a fresh split in her lip and her face is a little dirty. She points at his arm, he looks it over and shrugs—it's bleeding, but not gushing, he'll find some way to clean and bandage it later. After seeing for herself that he's not badly hurt, she grins at him and says, "That was fun."

He raises an eyebrow. "You got a strange idea of fun."

"Oh, come on, it was a rush, and we didn't have to kill any people. It was a walk in the park." She's breathing kind of heavily, but still smiling wide.

"Well," he says. "Fun's over now."

Then he draws his knife.

He sees the fear flash across her face, sees her take a quick step back from him, and it gratifies him. He gives her a small smile, then turns and heads back to the dead moose. He keeps his knife razor sharp, and it sinks into the moose's neck with practically no effort on his part.

As he starts sawing away, he hears Rook approach him from the back. "Uhhh. Jacob. What are you doing?"

The blood leaks out onto his hands, still hot, steaming in the cold air. He can smell it, sharp and metallic in his nostrils. "Meat's all gone to shit—Bliss's ruined it—but m'gonna take the head," he says, working away. "Put it on John's dining room table."

She laughs out loud. "That's disgusting!" She sounds overjoyed; despite her words, he'd guess that she loves the idea. She comes a little closer, crouches down near to him, though he notes that she still maintains a foot or so's distance. "Look at those antlers. That thing's gonna weigh eighty pounds."

"At least," he says, sniffing.

"You up to carrying it till we find a truck or something?"

"Yep."

She falls quiet, just watching as he works at the moose's thick neck. The spine is a little tricky, but the serrated part of the blade makes quick enough work of it, and after a short time, the head falls away from the rest of the body. He wipes the blade on the grass, then his hands—it doesn't get rid of all the blood, but his skin isn't dripping anymore—then reaches for the antlers.

Rook is up in a flash, grabbing the antlers on the other side, and he glances at her. She catches the look, gives him a dismissive little frown, and says, "I wasn't really gonna make you carry it alone, come on. It'll be easier this way. The look on John's face—" and she breaks into a cackle as they lift the head from the ground. Jacob says nothing, just sets them on a path back the way they came. She's right, it's much easier, less of a chore divided between the two of them.

She doesn't have to stick around. They both know it. The moose is dead; the safest thing for her to do at this point is vanish into the trees. Neither of them says anything about it. They just carry the head through the woods, trying to find the nearest road.

"So let me ask you something," she says after they've gone a few hundred feet.

"Hmm," he says, his tone not particularly encouraging, because who knows what she's turning over in that weird little mind of hers.

"Where are the children?"

"What?"

"The kids."

"I heard you, I just—that's an odd question."

"Is it? Because I've been here for over a month, and I haven't seen any children. Kim Rye's pregnant, but that's it. It's weird. This is the biggest county I've ever been in, there should be kids."

Jacob thinks about it for a little while. "Well. There are some children at the compound."

She turns her head, looks skeptical. "I didn't see any."

He scoffs. "You've been there once, in the middle of the night. Of course you didn't see any. There aren't that many, but they're there."

"And the rest of the county?"

"Pretty much everyone who had children started moving out once we moved in. Worried about what might happen."

"Smart move."

"I agree," he says. "There's no reason for children to be here. Not during the Reaping."

She's silent to that. They go on for a little while, long enough for him to reflect on how bone-tired he is—if he wasn't moving, he'd be drowsy as hell, it must be two in the morning at this point and the older he gets the harder all-nighters hit him—and then she tilts her head back and groans.

"Ughhh, I'm so hungry."

"You eat today?" he asks idly. John had insisted on them having dinner together at his ranch, venison and greens. It's been a good while since then, but not enough for him to feel the gnawing at his stomach that he hates so much.

She takes a long time to answer, long enough for him to shoot her a narrow look. She should be more on top of her meals, especially after she'd gotten a good taste of starvation from him. Finally, sounding a little sheepish, she admits, "Addie made me an omelet. Mid-morning, I think."

"Dep."

"Don't even tell me you're gonna disapprove of me skipping a few meals," she says, joking, but with a dark little edge to her voice.

"I'd have just thought you'd be keeping a closer eye on yourself these days."

"Yeah, thanks." She sounds bitter, but the bitterness is gone in moments when she adds, lightly, "I would kill for some McDonald's."

"McDonald's?" He can't hide the disgust in his voice. She laughs in disbelief.

"Oh, are you telling me you wouldn't go for a big sloppy burger right now?"

"From McDonald's? I don't think so."

"Since when did you get on a high horse about food? There's no way you don't live off of MREs, and I have multiple sources that say your family is terrible at cooking."

"Who says that?" he demands.

"People."

"What people?"

"Uh-uh. I'm not telling you that. I'm pretty sure you'll try to kill them."

She's right, but he's not going to admit it. He says, "I can make you the best burger you've ever tasted."

"Really."

"Serious. Keep it simple—meat, garlic, and steak sauce, charcoal grilled. Guarantee you've never had better."

"Maybe I'm just really hungry, but that does sound good," she confesses after a moment. "But someone in your family is bad at cooking. Who's the culprit?"

He pauses for a second, wondering idly if it would be a betrayal to talk shit about his family, but eventually decides, no, it's just the truth. "All of them, really."

The Deputy snickers. He continues: "Faith never got a chance to learn. John has always been able to pay someone to cook for him. Joseph cooked for himself for a long while, but I gather it was always pretty basic stuff. He gets a little over-confident sometimes, these days."

She laughs again, sounding truly delighted. "I knew it; y'all are a mess."

"And you?" he challenges her.

"Hell yes, I cook. Fancy stuff, too, sometimes. I can make you coq au vin like you've never had," she brags. "And, oh, my god we have to stop talking about this because my stomach is going to eat itself."

This is all getting too chummy, so he's plenty happy to let the topic lapse, especially since they've happened upon another small stream. He bends his knees to set down the moose head, and she follows suit—he can see her out of the corner of his eye, looking curiously at him. He doesn't bother to say anything to her, just ventures into the stream, crouching to rinse the blood from his hands and wash off the scratches on his arm, then he splashes some water across his face.

The Bliss has been fading, slowly but surely, as they left the Judge Moose's den, but after the icy water hits his skin, he's pretty sure it's gone entirely.

He looks back at the Deputy, thinks about telling her she should go—but she's looking through the trees, and only glances at him for a second before returning her attention to whatever had caught it. She lifts her hand, pointing, and says, "Look."

He obliges. Through the trees, he sees a cabin, dark inside and out.

He rises, shakes the water off his hands, and asks, "You think it's unoccupied?"

"Most in the county are, from what I've seen." She pauses as he wades back to shore, then says, "I'm pretty worn out. If there's no one in it, it could be nice to get a few hours' sleep before morning."

She's not wrong. Jacob is feeling pretty tired as well; the prospect of a roof and a bed is a tempting one. He says, "Might have Resistance in it."

"Might have Cult in it." she counters. "Let's check it out, at least."

"All right. Right behind you."

A/N - the movie Rook was talking about was Ever After because of course it was

next up: sleepover. shit gets a little weird. go figure.