#FINALLY some jason descriptions I've been dying to mention his big brown eye from the second movie

[whereisyourstar]

Yes. Promise.

Part 3 of the Stand By, Hold Back, Be Patient series

Part 2, Part 4

Rating: SFW

Word Count: 4.4k

Warnings: Descriptions of blood, fear, mentions of past animal abuse/neglect, heavy handed dream imagery

(Take all ASL represented with a grain of salt, I'm the furthest thing from an expert)

He reacts as you'd expect, which is to say he doesn't. Just stands there between two trunks and stares. Like yesterday, when you left him in your rearview mirror, you see the details of him so clearly. At this distance, you wish you couldn't. He's dressed the same as before, the clothes rumpled from use and too few washings, and the mask is ever-present, but you can see the stains too easily. Old, dried blood on his gloves, and matching splashes of it on his sleeves, in spots around his stomach. What you can see of his pant legs tells the same story—these clothes have seen a lot of killing. There's also dirt and stains you don't dare give a name to, but the fact that he doesn't wash his murder outfit is less upsetting than the fact that he has one.

You'd closed your eyes when you washed your hands last night, scrubbing at whatever encrusted filth was left behind from the machete's grip until your skin was raw. That same grip catches your eye from its place on his belt, dark and obviously rusty brown even from this distance. So it was blood. You know that now. It doesn't help abate the overall sense of unease.

But you're not dead twice over now, hopefully three by the time you get to make good on your plan to scurry inside. And, though you're still paralyzed with fear, with that dread of anything can happen right now, your researcher brain is tired of having questions with no answers. Why are you not dead.

You're summoning the courage to just say it when Jason slowly lifts his arm, bends it at the elbow, and snaps his fingers at you. The actual snap is deadened by his glove, but the motion is unmistakably…a fucking snap. You just stare at him—is he trying to, what, set you on fire with his mind? Trying to beckon you to him? Because one is slightly more plausible than you would have thought a month ago, and the other is never going to happen. You stay exactly where you are and watch as he purposefully drops his arm, then lifts, levers the elbow, and snaps all over again.

Something in your brain stirs at the movement, forcing a connection between what's on the other side of the door and the man in front of you.

"Dog?" you ask, quiet even to your own ears.

He nods with that same deliberate slowness.

"Oh my god," you whisper and press the entirety of your back against the door, more for support than outright fear. That's ASL, that's language. From him. And obviously he understands speech, else he would have just killed you and Heracles on the porch that night, but you assumed the lack of communication was just…part of the silent, scary murderer shtick. If there's one sign, then there can be others, and while your sign isn't great—and out of date besides, you have no idea how much of the language is still kicking around in your brain from the singular class you took in high school—maybe there's something you can do with this. The chance is worth it when you lift your hands and haltingly sign while you say, "Yes or no, you're Jason Voorhees."

The mask tilts to the side and god he really is too close, just a dozen or so feet away, then he lifts his hand and signs yes.

Okay. Well. You'd already been pretty sure you were dealing with a Jason, but the confirmation doesn't hurt. And you've learned something, he either had yes and no in his sign arsenal already, or he's understanding the connection between what you're saying and what you're doing with your hands. Good information, solid information, and now…now you can have a conversation. "You're the one, um. Killing people? Around here?" Another yes, so drawn out that it borders on parody. You know how fast he can be, you've experienced that firsthand, so you don't understand this reticence today. Is this just how he acts when he's not immediately focused on murdering? "Are you the only one? Doing the—the killings, since the 80s?"

The question confuses him—you watch his shoulders heave around a breath. But he does, after thirty seconds that stretch for an eternity to you, eventually sign yes.

That means that the man in front of you is either well into his seventies, and you've certainly never known a retirement age man to feel that solid, or the ghost/undead/phantasm theory has more credit than you thought. If he's even telling the truth. It's not like he has any reason not to lie to you.

You're not breathing correctly and you realize your fingers are completely numb. If you didn't have the door to hold you up, you know you'd be a trembling pile by now. This is—it defies thorough explanation, because you're curious, and mystified, and a little grateful to have your questions answered in any capacity, but mostly you're just scared. This is real, this hell week has been real, and it's not going away. Your foot crinkles the plastic of one of the bags as it tries to hold your failing balance and you remember. A glance to the right, loath as you are to take your eyes off him for even a second, and you see your truck, left unlocked and open in your flight last night, now closed. Seemingly untouched otherwise, which is…

You crouch for a second, eyes forward once again, and scoop the bags off the gravel of your walkway. They feel just as heavy as they did last night. "This was you?" You indicate the bags and remember your wild swing with them too late. As ineffectual as that hit had been, what if he sees this as you arming yourself? He hasn't touched any of his weapons—not that he'd need them if he wanted to harm you, you have the bruises to prove that—and maybe that's the point of the slowness. To lull you into a false sense of security before he uses all that speed and mass to crush you? But then it comes back to you being laughably easy to kill, he doesn't need tricks. If you're certain of anything, it's that if he wanted you dead right now, you would be.

Immune to the panic in your mind, Jason just signs yes. You don't know who else would have done it—some helpful stranger in the night, which is improbable, but not as much as it was before this week started—but again, it's good to have confirmation. It's hard to bite down on your instinctive why, to demand an explanation. You remind yourself to stick to yes or no questions, this needs to be as simple as possible to be effective. You've been signing every question you ask verbally, going so far as to fingerspell Jason's name, but he doesn't appear to have picked up anything else.

"Thank you," you tell him, and saying it is so normal that you almost apologize for hitting him next. The trees past your walkway, technically still a "yard", look different in the golden daylight, but that machete gouge is still there in a nearby trunk. Then, the question you most immediately need an answer to: "Are you going to kill me?"

The risk is somewhat calculated. You're the one with the ability to put a door between you and this man-ghost-creature, and whatever else he's capable of, there's no way he's getting through the solid oak, so if he reacts badly to the question…you have a decent chance of getting away.

Yes, Jason signs, then no. Unhurried in every motion. He hasn't moved an inch this whole time.

Your mouth is suddenly very dry. "Maybe? Or…you don't know."

Yes. Then, blindingly fast after the sedate pace he's set, he signs again: Dog. He's clearly running out of patience with your questions, the sound of his breathing filling the space between the two of you. Considering his answer to the last one, his patience is something you don't want to run out of, so you have to acquiesce.

"Heracles." This is fingerspelled too—creating a sign name on the fly after years of absence from the language is not a task you're up to. "My dog, Heracles. Yes?" Jason nods for this one and, horribly, steps forward.

It's a single step, but your heart leaps to your throat and sticks there. Your flinch back knocks the bags against the door and you hear Heracles, who up to this point has been perfectly patient, bark on the other side of it.

"Wait," you instruct, and goddamn if it doesn't work a second time. You're more forceful with this one, less of a screech and more of an order, which feels like it could have broken very badly for you. Every decision you've made thus far feels like it's on a knife's edge—you've just been incredibly lucky to this point, but now you think you know what he's after. That makes a difference.

Jason obeys. He doesn't move at all, you don't even think he's breathing. You can use that. With your hand pressed to the doorknob, you say, "You can see him, I'll let him come out. But only if you promise me that you won't hurt him." And you make the sign for promise, finger to the lips, then down flat on your fist. Jason watches the movement closely, you catch his mask dip down a touch to better view your hands—which in turn makes you realize that he's been staring mostly at your face—before he slowly mimics it. Yes. Promise.

What's the promise of a murderer mean to you? What should it mean? Probably less than it actually does to you. Because he spared Heracles' life in that first encounter, then saved him from the forest—regardless of your intention—to bring back to you. And Heracles, brave, terrified Heracles, had been more or less fine with him at the end there.

So you open the door and take your eyes off Jason for a second time to beckon your boy outside. His too-small eyes in his over-large head are so full of trust when he looks up at you, tail wagging at both the sound of your voice and your nervous smile down to him. "Come on, baby, come outside. Good boy, good—oh!"

Heracles unceremoniously shoves past your legs and bounds over to Jason without a care in the world. His tail is high and wagging, ears pricked up, and some honest to god pep in his step. You're left to just stand there and watch while Jason folds himself down to one knee on the forest floor and runs an affectionate, filthy glove over Heracles' back.

It is, frankly, the strangest, most confusing, and nicest thing you've ever seen. Heracles has always been perfectly affectionate with you from the get go—you'd had his head in your lap within a minute of visiting him at the shelter, his bandaged tail steadily thumping. It had been a shock when this sweet dog lifted that heavy head to growl savagely at a male shelter worker who happened to pass by, even with the warning you'd had about his history. You knew he could like men, he'd stopped growling at one of your roommate's partners just before the two of you left the city for good, but you'd never seen him like this. Wriggling happily while this stranger who, you cannot stress this enough, has been seconds from killing you twice now thunks his sides with massive pats.

It feels stupid to think it, because Heracles is a dog and not a rational judge of character, but Jason can't be completely, senselessly evil if Heracles likes him this much.

"I've never seen him like this with a stranger before," you say. You've moved closer without realizing, now about half a foot away from your open door. Jason's mask tilts up when you speak and watches your hands. "Sorry, I'm trying to understand, but—he was terrified of you last night. What happened in the woods when you went after him?"

Jason doesn't answer you with sign, which gives you a better idea of how much he actually knows. Instead, with that same deliberateness he doesn't seem to need to use with Heracles, he takes the cuff of his leftmost glove and pulls it down to expose a pale wrist. He presents the wrist to Heracles, who sniffs with such abandon that it makes you laugh a little. The mask snaps back up and it takes all the nerve you have left not to jump.

"Well," you start, a little unsteadily, "the method clearly works."

You watch the two of them for a few minutes and, against your will, you start to feel…secure. Jason's downright playful with Heracles, constantly patting him and letting himself be subjected to a happy dog's lack of personal space. Even when Heracles plants his paws in the middle of Jason's chest and jams his nose against the mask, which makes you nervous, because the first rule of someone having a mask is to not touch the mask, all Jason does is hold very still for inspection. All's clear, apparently, because the final sniff is punctuated with a huge, goofy dog smile that makes your overtaxed heart thump in a nice way for once.

Eventually Heracles gets bored of Jason's scent and comes back to you. You drop to your knees for him, don't even think about it, because his presence is perpetually comforting and you could really use some comfort right now. There's definitely a smell to him now, the faintest stench of old blood and fresh air on his fur that isn't as terrible as it should be. You try not to think about it as you scratch your nails over that spot he likes and give him a peck between the eyes.

Heracles doesn't react to Jason moving with near-silent steps to follow, eyeing you the entire time like you're the dangerous one here, so you don't either. With Jason crouched behind Heracles, and you sitting on your knees before him, you're both in a kind of neutral territory. You're not about to tell Jason to leave, and he can't kill you—you hope—with your dog right here. "He is such a little mama's boy," you say by way of explanation. "But you can keep petting him, if you want."

It's heaven for a dog. Two people, four hands, and nearly uninterrupted attention. After barely a minute of silent, dutiful petting between the two of you, Heracles flops down onto his side and just basks.

"Greedy little thing, isn't he?" All affection in the way you say it, punctuated by his tongue lolling out into your lap while you rub his ear. "He deserves it, though. He's had a hard life." You catch the mask glancing your way in your upper peripheral and you rush to explain. "I don't know all the details, only what the people at the shelter back in the city could tell me, but he was…really badly abused before they picked him up. His last owner, or whoever, clearly neglected him…you might have seen it, he's missing some teeth. And his tail's a little crooked from where they snapped it. Right—yeah, right there." Jason's glove hovers above Heracles' tail and stops midway, where there will forever be a bump. It's strangely satisfying to see that giant hand curl into a fist when you confirm the spot. That's how you feel about it too. "He's nervous around strangers now—" no need to upset him by singling out men in particular, just in case "—which is partly why I brought him out here with me. No neighbors, present company excluded."

Before you can worry about that being taken the wrong wrong way, you look up and realize that Jason's already staring at you. He's hunched over to pet Heracles and even from this vantage he's just big. Big hands, big shoulders, big presence. This close, and with the unclouded sun up high, you're treated to a few snap observations. He's obviously bald where the mask can't hide and every inch of visible skin is suntanned, but not in the way you've known people who work outside to tan—there's a dullness to his skin that makes you think of death, some primal human pattern recognition in your subconscious noticing the wrongness of him. Nothing with skin like that should be moving, you're sure. More than that, there's something different about the actual shape of his skull itself that the mask's straps exacerbate, but that isn't what makes your breath catch in your throat.

You can see directly through the eyeholes of the mask and are struck by an alert, richly brown eye and its sagging, paler sibling. All the usual micromovements of the brown eye are not mirrored by the other and your brain supplies several unbidden theories—birth defect, blinded by a victim, price of living this long.

You know you've stared back at him for too long when his breathing starts to grow louder, the sound of it rattling out from behind the mask, and you barely have a moment to remember to be scared when he signs you.

Heracles makes a displeased whine at the lack of attention and flips all the way onto his back, hind legs kicking until Jason finally puts a giant palm on the offered belly and starts to rub. The sound of Heracles' tail thumping against his leg pulls you back to yourself. "Me?" He nods, doesn't look away. "What about me?"

Dog, yes, he signs. Then, a more forcefully pointed finger: You.

If you survive this day, you vow to teach him question words. Guessing, or just the stress of the last twenty minutes, is giving you a headache. Forcing connections again, you try, "You…want to know why I'm here? Living here?" Another nod, and he could at least look a little gratified that you're catching on to his thinking like this. You have to look away, back down to Heracles and his blissed out face in your lap, to answer. "Same reason, I guess. I'm not as good with people as I used to be, and it's…quiet here. The quiet's nice."

It's the right thing to say, you know as soon as Jason starts to nod, unprompted by a question for the first time. And oh if that doesn't give you an idea, and the idea is emboldened to action by the way Jason has been putting up with Heracles' tail surely thumping a bruise against his leg. "I want to ask you something," you start, sure of yourself for the first time all day. "You don't have to say yes or no right away, definitely take time to think on it, especially if you plan on, uh, letting me live through the night. But I have an opportunity that I don't think many people get when they come to this area. That is, I want to ask if you'll allow us to live here. Heracles and I." The lack of immediate reaction gives you a chance to push your case as far as it can be pushed. "All he wants is room to roam, and all I want is to be away from the world, which I think…is what you want too. You'd probably prefer not to have neighbors, but we'd be good ones. Promise. And," the clincher, the real point of it all, "Heracles really likes you. And I think you like him."

Your sweet, boxy dog chooses that moment to snore, alerting you both to the fact that you've pet him into complete contentment. This means you have a close, personal view of Jason's eye widening when he returns his attention to Heracles, his hand beyond gentle on the sleeping dog's belly.

Then Jason stands in one smooth movement and uses every inch of his height to loom over you. Fast, faster than you expected, catching you off guard despite having already been looking at him. His breaths fall heavy, heavier than they've been all day, and when he touches the handle of his machete you think, Oh, he's still going to kill me. How quickly you allowed yourself to feel safe with Heracles here, how quick you were to conflate Heracles' protection with your own.

He points like he's stabbing the air. First at you, then at Heracles, then at the house at your back. He nods. Lifts the machete an inch out of its sheath, enough for the steel to gleam, and points at you again. Signs no. Then, deliberately staring you down, signs yes-no. Maybe. The implication is clear—stay here, keep your promise, and he won't kill you. Whether that's a probationary decision or the way you just have to live your life now is unclear, but it's a hell of a lot more than you were expecting out of this day. As far as dealings with landlords go, you've had worse.

Then he's gone. Just turns on his heel and stalks back into the woods without a second glance. You're left with your mouth hanging open, completely struck.

You do, eventually, keep the plan and scurry back inside. It becomes clear Jason's not coming back when Heracles snorts himself awake, sniffs the air, and trots into the house of his own accord. So you follow him in, close the door gently behind you, turn the lock, and just…breathe. Long, uninterrupted inhales and exhales until they stop shuddering on the end.

"You're all right," you say to the silence of your home. Then, to Heracles: "I owe you one."

You owe him more than one, which is why you put chicken on your grocery list and underline it twice. Putting your bank account into the red to get your boy, who just saved your life for the foreseeable future with his ability to charm murderers, a treat is more than fair. Your paycheck will be hitting soon, signaling the end of the month and the oncoming loveliness of full spring, so the nasty email you'll get from the bank is worth it. As if you'd be scared of an email after the week you've had.

Vowing to do some work when you return, and after checking with the store in town that dogs are allowed—you can't bring yourself to hate that you're the kind of person that brings your dog everywhere now that your dog is a literal murder deterrent—you harness Heracles up and step outside. The two of you walk to the truck, and save for a moth that found its way inside when the door was open last night, you're uninterrupted as you coax the engine to life.

No figures in the rearview. No growling from Heracles while the trees steadily thin out until there's actual road, not just dirt, under your tires. And where town has always been more or less safe, if more crowded than you'd like after acclimating so naturally to isolation, the eyes of passerby feels heavier than before. Like they can see the deal you've struck with the beast that murders their friends, their neighbors, and you've been tainted for it. That's entirely in your head, you know, but it doesn't stop you from wanting to explain that you're not actually glad to have an understanding with a serial killer. It's still a relief to get back in your truck and know that you don't have to be back for at least a few days.

The forest accepts you back, and it feels different too. The trees press in just as much, scratch the side of your truck with their errant limbs, but there's no sinister edge to it. In the orangey afternoon light, the birches and oaks and trees too old for you to name, look golden.

You're back in the house, knife unstrapped and tucked away, and unpacking the groceries when you realize you're half-planning what cassettes you're going to get for the truck when the paycheck comes in. You like Joan Baez as much as the next person, and though one album over and over is getting old, that's not what stops you. It's the promise of having a tomorrow that does it—that you're planning for it, and the tomorrows after, in your own small way. It's how you realize that you believe Jason.

That night, when your eyes are too tired to squint at your computer screen any longer, you perform your usual lock checks. Your face gets washed, you change into whatever's comfortable and clean enough to sleep in, and you pull back the sheets on your bed. Heracles, ever your stalwart companion, spreads into the space with an appreciative sigh. After so long cramped onto the sofa with you, you suppose he's earned the right to take up more room on the king mattress than you do.

Sleep comes in waves over you. With heavy snores somewhere near your mid-back, and a light wind sighing through the trees outside your shaded and curtained window, you drift off without fear. When you dream, it is of turbulent water stretched far past the horizon, and a small boat in the middle of it. Angry waves crash in every direction except for where the boat touches, its simple, unpainted wood reflected in a circle of smooth water. A hand reaches lazily into the water and skims the surface, unafraid.

You scoff at yourself in the morning, rubbing sleep out of your eyes and replaying the dream in your head. You don't even like water, the ponds and creeks you grew up with held little except the promise of mosquitoes and alligators, so you're not sure what your subconscious is trying to tell you with this one. Still, it stays with you all through the morning routine, and as you sit down to get to work, you silently open a document and type out the scene as clearly as you remember it. Just to exorcise it from your brain, you tell yourself, but you save it to a new folder called Am I losing it. Just in case.