A/N: I didn't write this for a class assignment, believe it or not! I was slightly disappointed with LotF's ending; I kept wondering how on earth they could go back to being who they were, after all they'd been through. So I wrote this.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything you recognize. Except maybe the shirt.
--
His shirt doesn't fit like it did before.
It's a little too big, a little too loose, hanging limply on his skin-and-bones body, feeling unfamiliar and uncomfortable and almost alien.
It's the same with his pants, and the jacket. They're just not right.
Nothing is. Not anymore.
He can barely remember what they felt like before, but he knows it wasn't like this. This is trying to fit into a suit that was tailored for a boy whose measurements didn't read Height: 5'7'', Weight: 58kg, Blood on Hands: 2. This is trying to remember what life was like before, when all he can think about is after.
This is trying to live with a shard of ice in his heart, which slipped in when he wasn't looking, sometime between the hunt that he doesn't want to think about and the arrival home (which he doesn't want to think about, either). And he thinks there might be a pile of ash somewhere in his stomach, too, the only remnant of the wildfire that boiled through his blood.
If he closes his eyes, he sometimes dreams that he's neither before nor after; he's in the middle, and he's a leader, and he's a hunter.
Then he wakes up, drenched in a cold sweat and not knowing what it is he's feeling, while knowing it feels awful.
Just as awful as the suit-that-doesn't-fit, which he's wearing because he has to, because his mother said 'oh but that poor boy wasn't he a friend of yours shouldn't you pay your respects?' And then she'd pulled out the suit, and he'd felt his stomach sink (just like the body – or had it floated? He couldn't remember, and didn't really want to), but he'd agreed, because he had to.
And now he's standing there, in a shirt that doesn't fit, staring as a brown empty box is lowered into the dirt. He meets the eyes of a fair-haired boy on the other side of the hole, and sees something in that gaze that he feels inside himself; something that says this is your fault and this is my fault and we don't really fit anymore, do we?
Jack stares at Ralph, and Ralph stares at Jack; they watch each other over Simon's grave, and they both know that after will never be like before. They know that a savage on an island cannot be a schoolboy in a choir; they know that the blood is stained deep on their hands, and will always remain, red and unforgiving.
But the one thing that they know, most of all, is that nothing will ever fit like it used to.
It's my first story - well, the first one I've posted. So, please review? Thanks :)
