With great thanks to beebalm for the beta work!
Warnings: This fic contains potentially triggering material that includes children committing suicide and violent imagery as seen in the original novel.
Once there was a boy named Jack Merridew, and he wore a black beret and could sing C sharp.
It was a fact, a detail, something to cling to in Ralph's memory, even as so many other memories had been sandblasted away on the island by the heat, and the terror, and … And. Ralph's memory didn't always cooperate, didn't want to dredge up bits of his recent past in case he found himself remembering smoke and fear and the night of the dance.
No.
He pushed the memory away. He opened his eyes.
The hospital was painted green inside, like mint ice cream, and it smelled like green, not the heavy green of creepers and fronds and high trees nor the happy green of peppermint candies but the chemical green of bleach and clean. Ralph could never be clean enough. His first days had been filled with sponge baths by lime-faced nurses, too soured by the scarred bodies they tended to have more than token pity on the lost boys. They'd scrubbed his stinking skin and cut his matted hair close to his scalp until he was raw and red in the little green room. When he had his strength and was allowed to walk around, Ralph took a shower every morning in the men's showers, and when he could get away with it, in the evening, too, reveling in the luxury of the white soap over his sun-dark skin.
Sometimes he saw the other boys in the showers, the ones who were allowed to walk around, but they never met his eyes and Ralph began to shower when only the men were there. At first, unaccustomed to adults, he'd stammered in fear at these wet giants with their missing limbs and burned faces and flaccid penises, awash in soap and hot water around him. But the men looked at him, and in their eyes, the ones who still had eyes, Ralph saw himself as one of them.
The war had many casualties.
On the third day after they were brought to the hospital, a man he didn't know came to his room and sat in the chair beside Ralph's bed.
With a smile that said he wasn't used to talking to children, the man said, "I'm Dr. Peters. The other boys tell me you were their leader."
Ralph stared at him a long time before answering. Once there had been a bright day, and a conch shell as perfect a creamy white and pink as he'd ever seen, and they'd all voted him chief. "For a while."
"Did you have a tally of all the boys who were stranded with you? The Captain said there were fatalities."
A hysterical laugh bubbled out of Ralph then, filled with terror and sorrow. He remembered Simon, and Piggy, and the boy with the mulberry birthmark, and he laughed with tears streaming down his snotty nose until Dr. Peters left him there.
Later, a nurse came in with a handful of pills and she made him take them one by one. Ralph fell asleep. He dreamed and could not wake up from the dreams.
Dr. Peters came every few days. He worked at the hospital, talking to the men who'd come back from the war broken in body and in mind. Some had their retinas burned out by atomic blasts, some were dying slowly from the inside from the radiation. Some had watched too many friends die, watched their home cities torched to the ground, and were locked inside their own heads. When the ship came, and the boys were taken from the island, they were brought here with the combat fatigue patients. The doctor told Ralph that Ralph and the others were lucky.
Dr. Peters wanted to talk about the island. He wanted to know how they found food, how they made shelter, how they cared for the littluns. Ralph saw littluns in the corridors, tiny, slumped things in gaggles, with eyes made stupid from their ordeal. Henry had run up to Ralph once, and hugged him, and burst into tears.
"You protected them," said Dr. Peters.
"No," Ralph said, a mulberry face in front of him.
On the tenth day, Samneric were in the showers when Ralph went to bathe. "Maurice is dead … " said one twin.
" … he saved up his pills and ate them all," said the other.
With their hair shorn and bodies naked and clean, Ralph couldn't tell who was who. He took his soap and cleaned himself under the hot spray until his skin was abraded with scrubbing and his tears were washed from his face. Samneric stayed and stayed, but finally, washed clean like lambs, they took their towels and their mumbled apologies and went back to their room without him.
They were supposed to be safe. They were supposed to be saved. Maurice had been rescued, they'd all been rescued, so why was he dead?
On the twelfth night, Ralph couldn't sleep because he saved his pills. He put them under his pillow and crept out of the room he shared with a boy he didn't know who couldn't speak, another atomic zombie. Cool moonlight slanted in through the high, barred windows, turning the mint green walls the color of ghosts, of dead bodies rotted and gone to putrefaction. Ralph walked down the corridors, afraid of the dark and more afraid of the dreams.
He heard a child's sobs, and he tiptoed to a door cracked open, then flung himself back against the wall when he saw the close-cropped red hair. Jack. Jack's room. Jack was weeping.
In the other bed, Roger was asleep, his mouth open and drooling with the numbness of the pills. Once, Roger had sharpened a stick at both ends. Now he was a dumb little boy, snoring while his roommate sobbed in fear and pain.
Ralph almost went inside.
They'd met up on the boat, just for a few minutes, as the sailors had led them off the island into the gut-clenching safety of a heaving ship, but they'd been taken to separate quarters after that, Ralph piled in with the littluns, away from the bigger boys. They hadn't spoken. Two days later, they'd made port, and the boys had been loaded onto another airplane and brought here.
The crying quieted, and the moonlight filled the corridor. Ralph moved on. Eventually he fell asleep in a bright pool of light in the middle of the common room, huddled on a chair that smelled of old cigarettes.
On the fourteenth day, Samneric came to him like matched vultures. Roger was dead. He'd screamed and screamed and refused to eat, and the nurses had put a tube in his arm. He ripped out the tube, ripped open his own skin, and bled out in the night.
"Where was Jack?" Ralph asked.
Two open little 'o' mouths pouted back at him.
"Where was Jack?"
They didn't answer, couldn't tell, their matched oracle broken.
He'd found their room, not far from his own, had peeked in at night where they'd crawled into the same bed, thin arms wrapped around each other for comfort, no way of telling where one ended and one began.
Ralph wandered the corridors every night when he could, avoiding the janitors with their buckets and bleach-stinking mops. He chased the moon as it waned, looking for fat yellow cheese moon, and then horned devil moon, and then slivered fingernail moon, until there was no moon, just Ralph and the darkness.
Once, there was a beast in the darkness, but Simon had said it was a man and a parachute, and Ralph hadn't been there, hadn't torn into flesh as Simon screamed under their spears and fingernails and teeth, that hadn't been him. Piggy had said so. Piggy hadn't been there either.
When he dreamed, he dreamed of Piggy.
Piggy should be scolding him, he thought, but he always just stood there, hands on his chubby hips, watching Ralph with a disappointed stare through his broken specs.
Dr. Peters had a partial list of names of boys who should have been on the airplane. Once there was a boy named Edwin White, who'd lived with an aunt who kept a candy store, and let him eat as much candy as he wanted. Once there was a boy named Simon Fairman, who was dark-haired and kind and sang in the choir, and whose mother came to the hospital and cried big, wet tears into Ralph's hair before she went away again.
Parents came to collect their children, littluns and big boys. Percival's mum was the first. Then Bill's parents. They came, fear on drawn faces. "That one." "My son." "Oh God, oh God, he's not here."
Ralph's father had yet to come. He didn't know about Jack's parents.
The moon came back, and Ralph went to follow her again, tease out her secrets in the night, and sit during the cold, green daylight with Dr. Peters, refusing to tell him about the white skull on the stake. Roger had sharpened a stake at both ends, and Ralph's head would have sat atop it, gathering black flies on his own swollen tongue. But Roger was dead.
Ralph had saved a lot of pills.
No parents came on the twentieth day, or the twenty-first, or the twenty-second.
"They've signed a truce," Dr. Peters said. "Your father is at the talks. You must be very proud."
Ralph played with the sleeping pills hidden in his pocket. "Yes."
In the moonlight, when Ralph went down that corridor, when he let himself, he heard Jack cry every night.
On the twenty-third day, Samneric's father came and swooped them away, a larger, older version of them both, scars on his arms and legs. Their mum was dead, he told them as Ralph watched, and two sets of eyes burst into messy tears.
Samneric's dad rubbed the soft yellow hair growing back on Ralph's head. "Thank you," he said gruffly, but he was looking at Dr. Peters.
They didn't say goodbye.
The night of the day that Samneric left, Ralph walked down the corridor of Jack's room. It was silent, and the silence hurried his footsteps, and he thought he heard the pills rattling in his pocket as he shoved the door open.
Jack sat on the edge of his own bed with a knife. Ralph started back, fear of the blade and the splashing red blood of the pigs running through him like hot rainwater.
Jack looked up from his knife, laying the edge delicately against the flesh of his inner arm. "I can sing C sharp," he said, a child and a savage, a chief and a little boy.
"How'd you get your knife back?"
"They don't see things. The adults. They think we're kids." He pushed the knife, dented his skin in a flat line. Ralph thought he could see blood welling up in scarlet drops.
Ralph was still afraid, afraid of Jack, of the blade, of the silent Piggy in his dreams, but he went into Jack's room. "That's right. They think we're stupid."
"They're the stupid ones. They didn't know. About the Beast."
No paint, skin rubbed as raw as Ralph's, Jack was pale beneath his tan, mouth wrinkled and eyes too full of knowledge to live. He moved the knife slowly across, and back, digging in as Ralph watched, transfixed.
Ralph understood about the Beast. Not the poor wretch on the mountaintop, but the one who'd come to the island inside them, the one who'd murdered Simon and Piggy, and Maurice and Roger as well. The Beast was killing Jack. Would cut his flesh. Would spill his blood.
Ralph dug into his pockets. His palms spilled over with white pills. Jack stopped cutting.
"I can't make it stop," Ralph said. "The dreams … "
" … his face," Jack said. Whose face, he didn't say. It didn't matter. There was too much death between them to be just one face.
Jack didn't say he was sorry. Jack would never say he was sorry. Jack's sins were too enormous for sorry. And Ralph was no one's confessor, his own soul shriveled with shame for all he'd done and all he'd allowed.
Once there was a boy named Ralph who lost everything.
Jack was crying again. Gently, Ralph dropped the pills to the quilt, reached out, touched Jack's fingers, and pried them away from the knife. He set the knife down beside him, away from Jack, and took the wounded wrist into his own hands to study. He'd cut, and Ralph knew that had he passed by, Jack would have kept cutting until his blood poured out like the pig's, like Simon's, like Roger's, but Ralph stopped him and Jack's arm would heal and Jack would be just another scarred soldier.
Ralph didn't know when he started sobbing with great gulps to match the shaking in Jack's frame, couldn't tell when they began to cling to each other, just crying out for all the sorrows of the world. He only knew that eventually, he cried himself to sleep there in Jack's room, and he dreamt of nothing at all.
The End