Summary: Nina gets hypothermia while dumping her latest kill, and she had a conversation with Eyeless Jack when he helps her warm up.
Word Count: 3.6k | Ao3 Link
Nina stepped back to admire her work. The man she'd lured into the woods with sweet words and tight clothing was lying dead in the snow. Blood splattered around him, staining the ice around him. She was feeling nostalgic, and she'd cut a big grin onto his face. She had mostly stopped with that part of her MO. It was a relic of her days lusting after Jeff, and she had much, much better things to be doing with her time. However, she was sure that the world would be better off without this particular dirt bag, and if the world wasn't going to express its joy, she would.
Nina sighed. She didn't particularly care for disposing of bodies. It was the worst part of killing someone, no doubt. This one, at least, would be be easier to get rid of then most. The bright side of walking deep enough into the woods that no one would hear him scream was that the river wasn't much farther. She considered the body again, crossing her arms over her chest. She hadn't really noticed before, but it was absolutely freezing. Did she really have to dump the corpse? It would a hassle to cut up the body and throw it into the river...
Just thinking about it made her tired, and she was already cold. If she left it, though, someone might find it. And not only would she have to move from her cozy corner of woods, they might mistake it for a one of Jeff's kills. The thought was enough to twist her face into an ugly sneer. She wasn't going to let Jeff or this dirt bag get any more attention. She finally forced herself into moving, going through her usual post-kill search. This time, though, she also took his coat, torn and bloodstained as it was. Nina's clothes, while colorful and flattering, did absolutely nothing to keep her warm in the frozen forest. She shrugged the coat around herself, ignoring the stench of blood and cigarettes.
Nina stepped back from the body, leaving it in a heap, while she savored the new warmth. She would have to cut into the body at some point- snap. A twig breaking, quiet, but in soundless forest, it was like a thunderclap. She pulled out one of her knives, still bloody from her latest kill, and looked around for the source of the sound. Standing directly behind her, was a dark figure in a blue mask. It stared at her, not moving except for the crawl of black tears down its face. Nina huffed, a cloud of white billowing in front of her face. Jack. She'd run into the demon a few times before, though she tended not to stick around him very much.
"Jack." She greeted, trying to hide how much he'd spooked her. She might be a serial killer, but she was still human, and humans didn't like sticking around things that would gladly eat them. Jack was creepy even by her twisted scale. Although, since he was here... "He's all yours." She stepped back, gesturing at the body. At the very least, she could get out of disposing of at least some of the corpse. It was also probably a good idea to keep on friendly terms with the cannibal demon.
It dipped its head to her, and she stepped out of the way, nearly tripping over her own feet. She cursed. It was really too damn cold out here. At least she didn't have to get blood out of carpet this time. At least it wasn't bloody carpet. Nina backed up a little farther. She had heard stories about Jack's eating habits, and despite her instincts screaming at her not to, she wanted to see for herself. Jack hunched down in the snow over the corpse, straightening it out from the pile she'd dumped it in.
He pulled off the backpack he was carrying and pulled out several containers from it. Not exactly what she expected from a demon. She also didn't expect for it to pull out a scalpel and surgically extract the organs. The whole process was a lot less messy than what she had imagined. He was done surprisingly quickly. It obviously knew what it was doing. Jack packed the organs away, and stepped back with a nod. It was, after all her kill. She shuffled closer.
"There's a river not far from here." Nina explained, though she wasn't sure how much Jack actually understood. She kicked the corpse, cursing it for existing, and making her haul it around in subzero conditions. Before she could pick it up, though, Jack did. It nodded toward her, and after a moment, she started walking. That was nice of him. Maybe it was a thank-you for allowing him to take the corpse's organs? But it wasn't like she had any use for them, and it was easier to clean up this way.
When they got to the river bank, Jack also helped her carve up the body. It took less time that it normally would for her to dismember a body of this size, even though her movements were stiff and clumsy. Seriously, she almost cut her finger! It was hard to practice good knife safety when she couldn't really feel her fingers. She shrugged it off. She would be out of the cold soon. She just had to stand up. Nina pulled herself up from the ground, feeling like someone was poorly puppeteering her limbs. She grabbed the nearest body part and hurled it into the river. She hadn't bothered to weigh it down. It'd be fine, probably. How many people were hanging around a river in the middle of winter?
Jack stood back, watching as she tossed the pieces, one by one, into the river. Nina paused a few times, before she catches sight of the dissembled corpse and gets reminded of what she's doing. She was shivering so hard that her teeth are clacking together. She really, really hates getting rid of bodies. At least, this is the last part. She grabbed the man's head, and stepped out toward the river. She gets closer and closer to the edge. Too close. Nina stumbled over her already cold legs, and plunged in.
The river is the coldest thing Nina has ever experienced. It ripped the breath from her lungs, and she lost her grip on the head. It's cold enough that Nina can't even think, can't struggle. The surface of the water glittered above, not far away at all. And yet, she can't bring herself to even think about moving. Nina is suspended there for one terrible second before she feels hands on her shoulders. She kicked off the bottom, and Jack hauls her out of the river.
If she had thought that the woods were cold before this, it's nothing to compared to how they seem to determined to suck the heat from her now. She can't feel her body. It's like she's been frozen out of it. Jack's hands are still on her shoulders, and it's tugging her away from the river. She tries to follow its lead, only to stumble and collapse into a pile in the snow. Nina doesn't even register the difference between the snow and the air. Everything is freezing, all of it feels the same. She's vaguely aware as Jack crouches down in front of her.
"Nina? Nina, look at me." It commanded. His voice is nothing like Nina expected, mostly because she didn't think that he had one. "Did he have a car?" Nina blinked at Jack, brain struggling. A car? She didn't need a car, and wasn't Jack blind? He repeated the question twice before it broke through the ice on Nina's thoughts. She gave it the keys for the truck that her victim used to drive them out into the woods.
"Do you know where it is?" Jack asked. Nina nodded, and with some help, stood up. She led the way back into the clearing where she killed the man, following her own steps back. She paused for a moment in the clearing. Jack urged her on, and they continued through the forest. Nina got the feeling that she should be going faster, but it was all that she could do to push through the snow. It was like the forest was determined to steal everything from her, like it wanted her to lay down and stay down.
After a while of trudging, the man's truck appeared. She wasn't sure why it was so far off the road- something about him trying to show her its off roading abilities?- but she was glad she didn't have to walk any farther. She just about collapsed at the sight of it. Jack noticed, and pressed against her slightly before grabbing the keys out of the pocket of the coat, somehow picking the right pocket on the first try. Nina didn't even know what pocket the keys had been in, despite being the one wearing the coat. Even thinking about it made her head ache like Toby had taken his axe to it. She was so sick of being cold, of stumbling over her own damn feet.
Finally, she was back in the truck. She slid into the back seat, because that was the door that Jack had opened. Nina desperately hoped that at least a little bit of heat would have lingered in the car. However, since today had been going so amazingly for her already, it was just as cold as the woods. Any warm had long been lost, thermodynamics stealing it away while she was away. Damn it. It was such a small thing in the grand shit show that this whole day had been, governed completely by logic, but it still felt like she'd been slapped. Before she could complement it any further, though, Jack stepped into the car after her, slamming the door shut after itself.
"Take off your clothes." He demanded, and it was sudden enough that Nina was snapped out of her self-pity. She gaped at the demon. Out of all of the things that she thought that he might say, that was nowhere on the list. It was closer to Mars. She hadn't expected a demon to be interested in something like sex. Well, at least not Jack. It seemed like it was content just eating people not finding pleasure in them. (It would be pretty weird if Nina wanted to fuck a pig or something). Once she got over her shock, though, she was absolutely pissed. Really? It wasn't like she hadn't considered it, but now? In a icy car, after she fell in a river disposing of a body? It didn't even have the decency to be nice about it. If he thought that she was just going to roll over like some well trained dog, he had another thing coming. Killing that asshole had done nothing to relive how shit Nina's day had been, and she had a half dozen knives on her.
"What." She growled, reaching for one she kept tucked at her hip, just covered by her hoodie. Jack tilted its head. She'd managed to startle it, somehow. "What? You want me to take my clothes off?" Jack shifted, making himself smaller and holding up his hands.
"Your clothes are wet. You have hypothermia. Keeping them on will make it worse. I will turn on the heat in the car, but clothes come first. then I will look for blankets." It explained softly. Nothing but pure logic shown through. Nina glared at him. It was right, but that didn't mean that she had to like it. He seemed to notice this, and added, with the closest thing to humor that she'd heard from it. "Eyeless Jack, remember?" She huffed something that was too tired to be a laugh, and let it crawl past into the front seat.
She shucked off the clothes as fast as she could, regretting, not for the first time that evening, her decision of tight clothing. It was a pain to peel away from her skin even when she had full control of her fingers, without being soaked to the bone and utterly exhausted. By the time that she was down to her underwear, Jack had gotten the heating on, filling the car up with the gentle sound of fans working. Already, she had stopped shivering. She tried to kick the pile of wet clothes farther under the seat in front of her, but hit a box that had been tucked under it.
Nina pulled it out, and of course he had a cold weather survival kit. She couldn't even be incredulous at how she'd managed to kill a walking stereotype because she was too busy pulling out the blankets. Jack handed her a towel he'd found in the front, and she dried her hair while he climbed into the backseat again. Nina patted down her hair with the towel, though it wasn't much use, considering that it was half frozen already. She wrinkled her nose at the smell of the towel- it had probably been left in the truck the last time it was cleaned.
She could always take a shower later. Jack shrugged off its hoodie, and offered it to her. She immediately shrugged it on. Should she be embarrassed about wearing someone else's clothes, especially when the person in question was a demon she barely knew? Maybe. On the other hand, she was sitting bare naked in a truck that was far from being warm enough. She couldn't care less. The hoodie was thicker then it looked, and if it had hung loosely on Jack, it absolutely swallowed her. She wrapped up in the blanket afterward, tucking her legs under her. Nina was still freezing her ass off.
"You need to warm up slowly." Jack offered. She blinked in surprise. It was still a shock that it could even speak at all. She nodded, but didn't say anything further. He took this as permission to continue. "If you warm up too fast, you could go into cardiac arrest. We'll focus on warming up your core."
"You know a surprising amount about this stuff." Nina said softly. Although, it wasn't as bad as it could've been, thanks to Jack knowing exactly what to do. And that was strange. Apparently, he hadn't always been a demon, but Nina, herself, didn't know hypothermia first aid. She hadn't even been able to recognize the symptoms. She really was lucky that it had been there... Bu why in the world would a demon know about hypothermia first aid? Jack hummed in response, filling the silence before he finally spoke again.
"I wanted to be a doctor." Nina shuffled herself to face Jack more fully. She took in the unnaturally long limbs, the baggy sweater, the blue mask and the black tear streaks. It hadn't always been this way?
"You were..." She trailed off. Saying something like that aloud, to his face nonetheless, felt offensive on a level she couldn't even describe.
"I was. I had just finished my last set of finals, actually. And I was going to celebrate, when..." It reached up to touch its mask, the sticky stream of tears running down its face. Nina had lost any chance at a normal life in her pursuit of Jeff. But she still had her own body, a physical tether to her humanity, no matter how monstrous she was underneath. Jack didn't even have that. It had also been her choice, and hers alone. She got the feeling that Jack hadn't made a choice.
"I'm sorry that happened." Nina wasn't good at feelings, as a rule, but she did her best to be sincere. Jack shrugged.
"I've made my peace with it." That level of bitterness suggested otherwise. She let it go, though. There really wasn't any reason to push. She barely knew him, even if he had been kind enough to save her from freezing to death. She didn't know how he would react to being pushed. Nina curled tightener into herself. She'd started shivering again, even though it was objectively much warmer then when she had gotten in the car. "You got too cold for your body's heat regulation system to work properly. Shivering is a good sign." Jack filled in.
"How did you know that?" She asked. It tilted its head at her, conveying confusion without words. She hummed for a moment, stalling. "You knew that I was shivering. But you don't have eyes?"
"I can hear the way your skin brushes against your clothes. It's very quiet; I wouldn't be able to normally. I can also tell your blood pressure and your heart rate." Nina stared at it for a while. She thought that there was nothing left to surprise her- Jack was far from only her only encounter with the supernatural- and yet. "It helps me get around, even if it's not a replacement for sight." Nina hummed in response. God, she was tired, though she was still way too cold to fall asleep.
"How much longer is this gonna take?" She complained, tossing her head against the car seat. It wasn't like she could stay here forever. Jack shrugged in response, and Nina sighed again. There wasn't a sigh in the world that could make this suck less. She was going to get bored with nothing to do... and Jack was right there, and being talkative. She'd already pushed her luck so much, she might as well keep going. "You were way less messy when you were taking that guy's organs then I thought you would be."
"I want to specialize in surgery, and I obsessed over making my surgeries as technically perfect as they could get. Steady hands and clean cuts. Between that and the knowledge of anatomy..." Jack trailed off with a sigh. "It's been helpful." That was a strange way to put it. If Nina didn't know better, she'd say it was almost regretful. Except, knowing better only applied to her, and she certainly wouldn't pull someone she barely knew out of a freezing river.
"Do you regret your kills?" She asked. Almost immediately afterward she slapped a hand over her mouth. That was probably like, the most offensive thing she could've said at the moment. Jack, as much as it could, stared at her. Oh, she'd probably just royally fucked up. She stared at him, frozen in more ways then one. It sighed, and looked away from her.
"...To some degree, I suppose I do." He said finally, the bitterness from before in full force. "I'm not doing it for fun; I need to eat. My kills are simply a part of a cycle that is greater then any of us, that has been going for ages, that will continue. But if I had the choice? ...I wouldn't kill them. All I ever wanted to do was- was to help. There have been so many innovations, Nina, that help humans live. We've done terrible, destructive things, as a species and as individuals, and yet we've put so much effort into making sure people we don't know survive."
Nina didn't comment on his use of we. Jack was more human then she would ever be. Despite all of the terrible things she could imply happened, it still believed in humanity. The conviction in his voice made her insides burn with shame, thinking of the owner of the truck, his body pieces floating somewhere far away. She didn't regret her kills, not when there was so much scum in the world, but it wasn't like she tried particularly hard to make sure she was hurting bad people. She cleared her throat.
"Y'know, if you're around, you can always take what you need from my kills." She offered, instead of thinking on Jack's words any further. That was a spiral for a late night in the far future, hopefully never. the conviction that it said them, especially to her, was... She shook her head slightly, refocusing on Jack instead. It might've been her imagination, but she could swear that he was smiling under his mask.
"I'll take you up on that."
They moved on to lighter topics after that, trading stories from their days on the run. Neither brought up anything from Before. It wasn't the right time, and maybe it would never be. It was okay. They were here, in the moment. Occasionally, Nina had to re-dry her hair as the ice in it melted, which got annoying, to the other she gave up and wrapped her hair up. Eventually, Jack determined that her temperature was high enough that she wasn't in any danger of heart failure, and he left. It almost forgot its hoodie, but Nina remembered at the last moment to give it back. He paused for a moment.
"You can't just leave in a blanket, and your clothes aren't dry enough to wear..." Jack mused as it slipped the hoodie over its head. Nina almost protested, since she was in a heated vehicle and all. Before she could, though, Jack wriggled the sweater he was wearing from under the hoodie and handed it to her. She hesitated only a moment before putting it on herself, and she was immediately glad that she did. It was so much colder without the hoodie.
"Wait, won't you want this back?" She called from out of the driver's window. Jack shrugged.
"Give it back the next time we meet." With that, it disappeared back into the forest, as quickly and as thoroughly as if it had never been there at all. Nina smiled to herself. Next time? She was looking forward to it.
I'm typically what's considered an old gen fan, I believe? (I've been in this fandom since elementary school bc of unsupervised internet and now I'm 24), I believe this fandom should really embrace making OCs, rewrites, making AUs or whatever. Because that's what this fandom really was. Everyone had their own canon of events, it's more or less a lot of "fanon" is what people agreed upon.
I've had my own creepypssta AU for YEARS now and I've added and expanded with these guys a lot over time. I think this fandom just to take a step back to breath and chill. Like, even then. The whole popularized version of Jeff isn't canon. The real canon is Jeffery Hodek, not Woods. But people have their own verison and that's a-okay. I tend to stick with Hodek more because I find him more personally interesting. In fact, I have TWO Jeff's in my story. The Hodek and Woods variety, but they are their own characters because I'm attached to both verisons.
Let's just take a chill pill, y'all because hoo lord I've seen some tension here. I say this as technically a veteran fan (good lord it's been years bro i feel old LOOOl)
