you guys be the bomb dot com. i know this took forever but i pushed on and got it done.

Soundtrack: Colorblind - Counting Crows

Disclaimer: i own iT ALL. jk.

Note: This is more graphic than anything before so uh there's that. also i apologize if this feels fast-paced but i need to keep it moving. otherwise it would be really boring so.

Warning: bad stuff. aka sexual content (yeah i went there). rape scene, so heed caution. but you guys really should've seen this one coming.

Read on \m/ ~

The Thief (Fagin)

"I am covered in skin

No one gets to come in

Pull me out from inside

I am folded, and unfolded, and unfolding

I am

colorblind."

She knew that if she opened her eyes, it would all come crashing down.

There was the formidable truth that it was over, the entire chase and the fleeting hope of being rescue. The mere idea of rescue seemed comical, like an old medieval belief long ago discarded and proven useless. That was how everything felt; heavy, dense, and dark. As water heaves and pools in the burning lungs of a man drowned, Louise's heart plummeted into her undying grief. She grieved for rescue, yes, and for the life she had now given up on living. But she grieved especially for Jack, for his soul so lost in a sea of savagery, and for poor Roger—poor, poor Roger—who seemed to completely unsure of himself that it tore Louise to shreds.

The sunlight teased her closed lids, awakening her from a daydream where cobalt eyes glistened and pink lips rose in a slight smile—"I'm Ralph."

She tried to relentlessly forget. Forgetting made that nearly intolerable ache within her heart dim if only slightly. But forgetting wasn't easy; those wide blue eyes and silken blonde locks stayed, lingering until Louise awoke breathing his name and gasping at the eerily distant feeling of his lips against her hot and damp skin. But she only awoke to the darkness of Jack's cave, clawed with the marring shrieks of the passing night over and over until there was nothing left to see. She awoke cold and breathless, tangled in her own bondages—two hastily tied creepers bound against her ankles and her wrists. They feared not for her immediate escape; there was nothing to escape to. Only darkness.

Louise shifted, feeling the searing pain of chaffed skin beneath tethered creepers. She noticed that her torso was no longer bare; a tattered choir robe had been draped hastily but with obvious care around her naked skin. It was warm and thick and somehow eased her fraught emotions. Her stomach roared in raging hunger from within her, but was quieted by the despondence of her doused hopes.

Oh god, she thought, peeking through cracked eyelids at a beaded sunset. I miss him.

And how she did.

She missed him as though some unknown part of her been excised, removed, and clumsily disposed of. It was as if her heart had torn at the very fibers that held it so loosely together. The pain, the unbelievable pain of losing Ralph fell close to unbearable. Her world shattered. Her mind ached more than her beaten and battered limbs. And that god awful image of her angel's deadened gaze as Jack drew that glinting knife across his neck was something that only endured through her empty mind.

But she knew it was not love. From the moment Louise registered the exact loss of her blonde companion, she realized there was no love in it all. Love could not possibly exist on such a wretched and foul place, let only to be willingly tainted by the sinful desires of young adults. Love was the thing that stemmed into greatness. Love was the founding notion of all things pure. Love was not the soiled and bloodied experience she had undergone on her island.

Even so, she adored Ralph. Adored him though she knew his head stood like a treasonous traitor on a crudely sharpened stick just outside of her cave. She could hear the other savages as they passed by it, gaudily mocking his death or audibly shivering. It seemed some had not realized the extent of Jack's absolute power until Ralph's terrible demise.

A shudder of footsteps echoed from outside the cave, entering only as a shadow. Louise lifted her tired head, straining in the naked darkness to see the face of the silhouette that now stepped perilously close. She could only hope that it wasn't Jack, come for his final appeasement. He had not yet taken her, nor allowed any of the other savages to take her, but she knew it would come soon. He could only restrain those filthy desires for so long. That much was apparent.

Her heart slowed when the figure finally moved from the quivering darkness and into the slanted light of the sun. Brown curls stuck to a creased and damp forehead as bright eyes turned to sorrow. There was a halved coconut shell in his shaking hands, no doubt for her.

Maurice. The Judas of her descent.

Words bellowed from within Louise, but she refused them to be released. None of these demons deserved her speech. None of them had the patience to pry and hear her voice. Not even Maurice.

Louise drew back, mustering a fearsome glare, although the moment his eyes met hers her facade collapsed and she nearly came to tears again. They leaked at her dark gaze, prickling her strength and fraying the dignity she somehow gathered. Maurice stood stoically and helplessly, obviously wanting to soothe her but unsure how to go about it. After all, he was the first savage to visit her in her conscious state since Ralph's death, which had been his doing to begin with. What was there to say?

Leaning on his heels, he stared nonchalantly towards the crooked wall behind Louise and coughed.

"Chief ordered me to bring you water," Maurice said quietly, his voice only a tremor against the undeniable stretch of silence that smoldered them both. His hands shaking, he knelt down beside the unspeaking girl and raised the bowl, hoping she would open her pursed mouth to drink. She did not. Maurice sighed, suddenly full of swelling silence.

"I-I know you won't believe me." His heart faltered as her eyes lifted, blue and dark and swirling in contempt. Maurice swallowed. "But I am truly...truly sorry." A pause. "About Ralph."

He stayed for a moment, holding that bowl with water to Louise's lips, waiting and waiting for even the slightest sign that she wanted to survive, that she was willing to drink. But her mouth remained closed, her eyes empty, and although Maurice hoped and yearned for her to live, he knew she would refuse life as Jack had refused Ralph.

After a silent breath, the boy arose, staring pitifully down at the decaying spirit of a girl on the floor. It was pathetic, really, how Jack had broken her for his own boundless power. But that was how things happened under Jack's dominion. They weren't schoolchildren any longer.

Maurice drew his stinging eyes away from the girl that was once a friend and moved out towards the gaping mouth of the cave, back into the hell Jack named paradise. He didn't see the spilling tears of Louise as he left.

Jack prowled far from his cave's waiting entrance where his new toy lay bound and broken, defenseless and helpless against his gleaming reign. He had never felt so elated in his entire life. His heart was torn in a terrible mixture of lust and euphoria, both dangerously volatile emotions, both things that could both dominate and deter Jack from the true matter at hand: what to do with girl.

There was the obvious thing, of course, of taking her for himself. But after that, after he desecrated the one thing Ralph preserved right up until his grotesque end...then what? Kill her? Allow her to live amongst the savages? Keep her as a prisoner? Jack shook his head, trying and failing to piece coherent thoughts within his scattered mind.

A darkened hunger flared from beneath Jack's heart, leaking down into his blood, and he was suddenly very aware that he had Louise all to himself. Sure, there was Roger, but he could be subdued. He would wait for his turn with the girl. He would remain loyal to Jack, just as he always had. And as usual, Jack would disregard heed and take what he wanted himself. He had never been a sharer.

Slowly and with purposeful malice in each step, he skulked back towards his sleeping place. The sun was just beginning its lonesome descent back beneath the slurping waves of the blackened sea, curling its tendrils of light across the bleak expanse of sky. Salt tinged the air and burned Jack's lungs, reminding him instantly that his island was indeed part of him now. The salt and the sun melded with his freckled skin and icy gaze; they were one.

As he approached, he nodded curtly at the two guards that stood stiff but boyishly stoic at either side of his cave's entrance. Their eyes widened, obviously unsure of the intent of his endeavor, but the Chief struck a finger at both the boys—their names always escaped him, they were all the same—to leave, and so with silent confusion but earnest curiosity, they dispersed from his cave and wandered down towards the jagged clearing, glancing back in hushed murmurs as the redhead entered his home.

It was black, save the slither of the setting sunlight that flitted in through the bellowed entrance. Jack smiled grimly, his body suddenly awry in awfully delicious thoughts. The lack of light was no matter; it was not a necessity for the certain pleasures he would be exploring tonight. Despite the cave's hollowed darkness, there was no mistaking the paled shadow that lay crumpled and bound on the hard, cold ground—like an animal.

Grunting, the redhead discarded of the sudden burn of abhorrence he felt for the unnervingly still girl below him. She did not flinch as he approached, rather stared, although her eyes wilted at the very sight of him. He had refused to wash his hands of Ralph's blood for this very reason, and as her eyes lingered on the red that stained his fingers, he had not the tolerance to spurn the smile that slipped upon his lips.

He met her eyes—vivid, damp, and wondrously wide with fear—in the darkness and grinned, feeling Ralph's crumbling blood sear through his flesh. It was as if the blonde himself was cursing from wherever the hell his damned soul had finished.

Jack crouched and heard the girl's shallow breaths suddenly quicken, drawing closer to the pathetic sound of Piggy during one of his 'assmar' attacks. Sniggering, he lifted her chin with two soiled fingers, forcing her gaze to clash with his. Forcing her to look into the eyes of a killer. Forcing her into undoubted submission.

"Well, well," he began, his eyes passing over as though she were a slab of meat to be bargained with. "Looks like our little girly's finally awake. Did you have bad dreams?"

Tears itched at Louise's burning eyes and a landslide of bitter words pricked at her unmoving tongue. Her hands jerked instinctively, as if to slap him or recoil from his looming embrace, but they were useless tethered together by the creepers. She promised herself she would not speak, would not move, nor subside to anything, no matter what threat Jack wavered. If death came, then so be it. There was nothing to live for anymore anyway.

Her silence irritated Jack quite obviously, for he growled savagely and thrust himself closer, his hands reaching to roughly palm one of her breasts. She winced, but no other sound escaped her. And the tears that now spilled from her eyes were involuntary and irrepressible.

Jack seethed.

"Did one of my savages cut out your tongue? Speak, you little whore, and maybe I'll go easy on you."

Louise shuddered. Her heart screamed at her to say something, to beg for mercy, to do what Ralph's pride wouldn't let him do. But it appeared that Louise had her own stubborn pride to bargain with. She remained unspeaking, still, and void of any emotion at all, except of course for those tears that streamed continually without consent. They, however, seemed not to appease her hungry chief at all in his crusade for a reaction.

Jack's eyes looked heavy—heavy and laced with a thirst for blood. "Never mind that. I've come to make a deal. You like those, don't you?"

His cruel smile sent her skin ablaze with chills. At her refusal for a reply, Jack continued in his icy, bitter voice.

"You're my slave now. I can do whatever I want. Blondie's not here to stop me."

He smiled mindlessly as he said this, his hand dipping beneath the choir robe to touch the bare skin of her breast. She whimpered noticeably and drew back, arousing an instant cackle from her tormentor. No, she couldn't stay silent for long. Not if Jack had his way about it. She would be screaming in some way or another.

But Jack was here to negotiate. Smiling, he slowly—and with lingering purpose—removed his hand from her naked chest and readjusted the robe, as though he actually feigned some concern for her dignity.

"But I am a merciful chief, Louise, and I am ready to make a deal. Are you prepared to agree with me?"

Louise only stared, too stunned to speak and to angrily obstinate to force herself to do anything other. Jack ignored her defiance and pressed himself closer, eliminating any distance between their shivering bodies.

"You can willingly join my tribe. We'll have an induction. You will be forgiven for your treason against us with that traitor Ralph. But you will still be my slave. And you will submit yourself to me in everything."

Jack waited for an answer, for a nod or sob at his statement, but again, her lips did not move. This was already taxing his energy. He sighed once more and chose to continue.

"Or—" the Chief allowed the word to hang, suspended between them so that the severity of her choice weighed heavily against her spirit. It seemed to work, for as Jack licked his lips and permitted his hands to stray along her bruised thigh, Louise shuddered and turned her head away, tears still brimming from her broken gaze. "You can object to me and be my prisoner. The boys can have you whenever they want, after me of course, and you will nothing more than a thing. You will live your days out in here, never seeing the outside again. So, little whore, I think your options are rather...limited." His smile drifted to complacent desire, and for one bleary moment, it seemed as though he was content to wait for her answer.

But her answer never came. She tilted her head, casting a skewed gaze at the boy that shadowed her frail figure, but her tears were the only emblem that she carried any emotion at all. Her face, much like her withered heart, was gaunt and drawn, pale from the events that drained the very color from her flesh. Jack waited and waited and waited until the silence screamed from all around him, and it was then that his patience was doused.

Clutching a fistful of her matted hair, Jack drew Louise's head close, ignoring the involuntary wince that escaped from her lips. His fingers tightened, suddenly angered by her defiance. He would not let Ralph win. He would not let his trophy crumble.

"I will you have you, whether you're willing or not." The redhead paused, overtaken by the flame of desire that welled up from within his burning skin. He refused to shroud it, instead beckoning its fire to swell. The game of lust had finished.

Pressing himself closer, Jack licked the girl's ear, making long, soft groans against her soft flesh. "I hope you realize that I did give you options."

He trailed sloppy kisses along the slope of her jaw, suckling and biting until he could feel her chest heaving with sobs. Jack smiled. Louise understood what was going to happen.

Wordlessly, he pressed his dry lips to her wet cheeks, tasting the incriminating mark of her salty tears. It was the beautiful flavor of defeat, and nothing had ever tasted more wonderful. She shivered beneath him—not in ecstasy, but rather in fear—as he shifted his entire weight onto her, practically crushing her tiny form from beneath his muscular spindly shape. He waited a moment, knowing the punctuated pause would force the girl from intransigence to restless unease, and from the way her body began to convulse like some sort of dying insect, it was apparent that his momentary cessation had the desired effect.

Louise's lips fell open in a grueling attempt to draw quickened breaths, but Jack turned her own pathetic terror to his advantage and captured her parted mouth with his own, slipping his tongue between her chapped lips and moaning as she cried. She was unresponsive, which had been expected, but Jack hardly minded—she would pay for her refusal to comply later. At that moment, Jack's mind only had the capacity to focus on the unworldly feeling of her hot, wet mouth melded with his. Her tears caught between their lips, staining the already soiled kiss with sorrow. Jack bit at her lip, hoping once more to produce a reaction similar to Roger. Louise only cried.

Jack's calloused palm groped heavily beneath the threadbare linen of Louise's choir jacket, his fingers squeezing and scratching until they circled her breast. He elicited a hollow groan, breathing his hot breath into her quivering mouth. Frustrated by his nagging desire, Jack neglected the girl's shaking sobs and tore the jacket from her shoulders, exposing the naked chest which he had so mercilessly made vulnerable only hours before. But now his eyes weren't the only the thing to fume in hunger; his lips made their maddening trail across her bruised skin, leaving purpling flesh flared with the swollen stain of his mouth. He allowed himself to linger across her breast, tasting each gentle indent with his tongue, knowing that the shivers Louise exhibited were only of terror, not in pleasure. His hands were hard and rough, his mouth forceful and dry, his very body burdensome to Louise's slight figure.

But the newness of her body could only entertain the Chief for so long. Soon enough, her bare breasts and unmoving lips proved not to satiate his growing arousal. With a grunt, Jack's hands slipped from their hideous work upon Louise's breasts and ravenously dipped to her ravaged skirt, plucking the remaining buttons off with little resistance. As though her body betrayed her mind's descent, Louise's limbs fell slack, and although her hands shook to tear and scratch and maim the repulsive creature that hovered before her, she knew a struggle would only irritate her punisher past the point of mercy.

Not that she expected mercy at all.

Louise, swallowing her sobs as bitter tears leaked from her stinging eyes, fell still—utterly and completely still—as Jack nudged her somewhat stiff legs apart with the mere push of his knee. Her heart screamed. Her mind was fuming with dirty, awful thoughts. Her fists clenched beneath his horrible body until her fingers turned blue at the strain. And her entire being recoiled at his foul and sour breath, rancid and hot in its descent to her slanted face. But Louise Darmer did not resist the Chief as he forcibly steadied her naked, shivering hips with his unkind hands. She did not squirm as he snickered from above her, allowing all his rotten features to gleam in his triumph. She did not yell when he looked at her as though she was some sort of stuck pig, some kind of meat to be bought and sold and devoured as so. And she did not attempt to fight him as he plunged into her without mercy, without consent, and without care.

But she did allow herself to cry. And she did permit the hole within her heart to grow until it was eaten away with hatred and anger, until what once was mended together fell apart once more. As he thrusted into her, buckling himself as each groan unfolded into euphoria and each moan forced Louise to hate him a little more, she almost felt as though she would have been torn in two fragmented pieces, severed from something once complete. Louise cried and wanted to stop him, but she knew she could not. Everything ached. Her soul was rotting within itself. But there was nothing she could do.

Jack finished, exhaling a low, rasping groan, biting down onto the girl's bruised shoulders as his body reverberated in silent, ecstatic tremors. His entire self was on fire, and as Louise whimpered audibly from below his hulking form, his flesh and blood ignited in a flame more ravenous than anything he had ever known. Exhausted, he lay there upon her, knowing his weight caused her pain, and gorged himself in the beauty of his long withheld release. Breathing heavily,

After a moment, he arose, spitting on Louise as he raised himself from her splintered and swollen body. He cared not for the blood that trickled onto her thighs, nor for the cries of pain that still lingered at her throat, nor for the fact that it was obvious he had not been the first to ravage the girl. His heart thundered for a second in the knowledge that Ralph had her first and that perhaps she'd enjoyed that—but Jack was not the type to grow jealous over such things. He had her now—body and soul—and what mattered more?

Smiling tiredly, Jack languidly stretched his shoulders and gazed down at the the weeping girl.

"Next time," he began, his voice gravelly from his pleasure. Louise shivered. His smile grew. "—you better be eager. And you better speak. Until then, you're to have no food."

As he crossed to the cave's entrance, he took one last snide glance and sniggered, "I suppose it appears I've taken Ralph's last claim to chiefdom."

For nearly five setting suns, Louise starved.

She sat as numb as her pale fingertips and screamed at her growling hunger, bidding her time as though it were some clock to meddled with. Every night at dusk the hunters would come screeching to the platform at Castle Rock, bearing a dead boar dripping with crimson blood. The smell of its wet and succulent flesh was all but maddening for the girl. But it was always just out of grasp.

To further her torment, Jack brought Louise from her hellish sanctuary and out to dinner every night. He forced her to sit and watch as the others bore into their greasy meat, biting and gnawing and laughing all the same. Some stared upon her with pity, and guilt would veil their sorrowful eyes. But they never ceased to eat, nor offered any, nor combated Jack's cruel punishment for her defiance.

But still, Louise remained silent and unwilling.

After the feasts, Jack returned with Louise back to his cave. She remained bound and tied, like some sort of raging animal, although it seemed as though her hunger was the only savage thing about her. Jack would sometimes bring out his paint—a mixture of white and black clay with pig's blood—and paint his flaking flesh with the thick substance. And so Louise would sit, deaf to her hunger, dying within the shell that was herself, closing her eyes and seeing only Ralph's severed head thrust upon his stick.

Jack hadn't touched her since their first encounter. Perhaps it was guilt, maybe his own pride, but he was waiting for her to succumb and collapse. Although her hunger tore tatters within her body and her mind melted and fell to the glue of starvation, Louise promised herself not to comply. Ralph hadn't, and she wouldn't either. She would rather die of starvation than allow that filthy beast to touch her again.

The days passed and soon Louise barely recalled what it felt like to be filled to the brim with food. She only felt the heavy emptiness inside her, an emptiness that was slowly starting to feel full—as if the mere thought of food was enough for her groaning belly. She lay staring at the sun from the cave's entrance, knowing that an escape was pointless at this point. Her limbs shook; sweat dribbled down from her creased forehead.

But she would not give in.

She hated herself already for what Jack had done.

She hated him more than she had ever hated anything in the entire world.

She hated him and this island and all thing awful things that went with it.

Louise turned her aching head at the sound of footsteps, but found it was only Maurice, come to give her daily bowl of dirtied water. As he approached, his face set sullen at her dying figure, she reached greedily for the bowl within his hands and gulped the water voraciously, indulging in the sweet feeling of the cool liquid filling her hollow stomach.

Maurice stood awkwardly at her side, staring at her as though she was some sort decrepit human, void of sense or reason. The irony struck her like a knife.

Glancing nervously behind his shoulder, Maurice crouched down beside the girl and took her bony hand, disregarding her narrow, thin fingers that clawed so desperately within his grasp.

His eyes were dark.

"Lou," he whispered in urgency. The use of her pet name combusted within Louise—it had been so long before she'd been called anything but 'little whore' or 'tongueless bitch'. Maurice licked his lips and continued gravely. "You will die if you don't speak. He will let you starve. And I—we don't want you to die. You've...you've...you've changed." His voice broke, catching at an unnaturally high note. Maurice dipped his head and swallowed a breaking sob, refusing Louise's blank gaze.

He was crying.

When he raised his head, his shadowed eyes turned wide and wet.

"You can't just give up," he said quietly, squeezing Louise's hand. Her heart swelled. "You can't just let him win like this. He...he may have hurt you...I don't know...but you gotta get back up. You gotta live."

And then he left.

It was an oddity, why that Maurice, the boy who sent Ralph spiraling to his demise, would care a thing for the girl that he condemned. For one acrid moment, Louise's heart ignited in anger; Maurice was the reason she was there, tied and bound and starving and sick. He was the cause of her own collapse, of her bitter end to that horrible and beastly Jack Merridew. Maurice was her Judas. But her anger dissolved into a pithy memory of a boy untying chaffed bonds from her wrists, releasing her from instant peril and into the wild night that would be her last with her Chief. There was a time at which Maurice saved her, when he was the only boy that proved compassion for anything. And it appeared that his own stubborn empathy was clinging like torn leaves to the naked branches of a winter tree.

Maurice, despite whatever loyalty he held for Jack, remained human. And his humanity beckoned Louise to try. For the first time in the longest while, it seemed as though someone cared for Louise to live beside her own pride. And that infinitesimal slice of hope wooed a flame of life.

It was past the sun's sinking gleam when Jack returned to the cave at long last. Louise rested against a jagged point on the wall, easing her hunger with thoughts of her coming night. Her belly rumbled no more; it seemed her hunger had been consumed by itself, and now she could feel her insides swelling and toiling as the emptiness within her devoured all that was full. Her limbs fell heavy and slack, like a ragged doll tossed about in a rainstorm, but her mind was as calculating and cold as the blue gaze of her new master.

She could feel the weight of his incriminating stare as he sunk to his knees, exerting a rather inflated sigh. The paint beneath his icy eyes flaked off in the island's crippling heat so that his face held the appearance of an old peeling wall. It was a ghastly thing, the way he kept his eyes steadfastly upon his slave as he mindlessly reached for his knife, no doubt to sharpen his blooded spear. This was not unusual—the feigned silence between both Louise and Jack—and simply indicated another normal evening where neither of the young adults would be speaking to the other. Jack sharpened his spear, never casting his gaze towards the splintered shards of wood that fell in flurries on his bare calves. His eyes always fumed in that formidable hunger, like someone who had tasted a food and not been quite fully satiated.

Swallowing the lump of nerves that accumulated in her throat, Louise brought her gaze towards the slouching redhead and blinked. Her limbs groaned in pain as she finally coerced herself to move, her knees shuffling against her ankle's restraint. She crawled over towards him, quite pathetically, all the while mentally berating herself for such spinelessly selfish behavior. Despite the alarming glint in Jack's eyes as she neared, Louise felt no fear, nor bravery, nor the tinge of wary anticipation.

She only felt hatred, swelling and bursting within her, not only for the beast who lay lazily pressing his knife to his spear, but for her own self. She was trading pride for food. Dignity for her life. She was doing what Ralph himself refused to do.

As Louise reached him, Jack tilted in his head in lustful curiosity, pausing his work to study her waning features. If she was afraid, she allowed no fear to leak into her face; her expression was hard, gaunt, and hungry—whether it was a hunger for Jack himself or the food he had forbade her escaped him. He didn't care. He knew that Louise was broken, in spirit and body.

And now she was his. Willingly.

Louise felt her knees collide with Jack's, the thin hair on his legs sending a spiral of shivers along her shaking spine. Their eyes locked, dark in understanding, and for one moment, Louise consumed herself in unadulterated fury. She couldn't do it. She couldn't barter her virtue as though it were some good to be bought and sold. She wasn't a pet that came crawling to its owner when hungry. She was a girl. A living, breathing girl. A girl who deserved more than to be bound and devoured and tortured.

But the hunger within her returned with a biting ferocity, engulfing Louise in its wrath, and so when Jack released his knife and brought two fingers towards her chin, drawing her near, she did not struggle. She only stared, her eyes black, her soul writhing and screaming from within her rigid body.

Jack smiled. "So, my little whore, will you speak for me?"

Louise stared into him, and she saw only his sweaty, dirty face as he clambered over her, thrusting in and out, in and out, wallowing in her screams.

She shook her head and swallowed her dignity, shamming confidence instead.

And so, her voice hoarse and rough and tired from its weeklong silence, Louise finally said to Jack Merridew, "I—I am here."

Of course, she meant it literally. She meant it as though to remind herself that this was her reality, this cave and this boy, and it was something she could not escape. Jack seemed amused by her choice of words, although appeased all the same. Spreading his legs, he used his other hand to pull Louise into him, forcing her narrow knees right snug in between his thighs.

Suppressing the groan that itched to escape, Jack lowered his chin onto the curve of her neck, biting savagely into her soft flesh until crimson blood trickled onto his cracked, dry lips.

"Tell me," he murmured, moaning at the sinful taste of blood against his tongue. His hand dropped from her chin and trailed towards the subtle slope of her breast, groping and squeezing until Louise's breaths came hard and broken. Jack grinned. "—how are you fairing? I'm curious to know if you've learned your lesson, Lou."

Gritting her teeth, Louise breathed silently into him, feeling the length of his arousal against her naked knees. The choir jacket seemed suddenly too thin, and all at once, she was aware of the weight of his hardened muscles and tanned arms shuddering around her delicate frame.

Burying her entrenched resentment, Louise allowed herself to fall into his starving embrace, her body warm and stiff against his tautened torso. Her lips found his neck, grazing his flesh with tentative fervor, as if to requite the vicious mark of affection Jack left burning on her throat. He tasted like ashen blood and briny seawater, a fusion that renewed a vitalized sensation of hunger within the girl.

Breathing hotly against his scorching flesh, Louise murmured, "I've learned my lesson, Chief."

Her submission only proved to induce ravaging thirst for Jack. Smiling, he took the corner of Louise's choir jacket between his famished lips, dragging it off from her shoulders until they lay naked and scathing beneath his blazing gaze.

Jack withdrew from their caustic embrace and shoved the girl down so that she was beneath him. Tearing away the bonds that drew her chaffed, aching wrists together, he pillaged her skin, kissing and suckling as strenuous heat erupted between them, showering their bodies in distinctive carnal instinct.

Louise took her shivering fingertips and wound them within Jack's wild flames of hair, tightening into a taut grip as his lips, slick and warm, traced their way along her bare skin. Soon she felt his hands upon her shivering hips, and as he tugged the ragged material of her skirt away from her flared skin, she made an effort to press her body close to his, beckoning his warmth and prompting yet another hoarse groan.

His hands were everywhere all at once, but Louise remained eager, feeling the burning hunger within her stomach suddenly diluting her pride. She whimpered in feigned tremors of ecstasy, moving quavering hands from blazing red hair to the remnants of torn schoolboy shorts. Her fingers arched over the curve of his ass, feeling the iciness of her heart tighten in weary anticipation. And as she slid that threadbare material from his damp skin, as she lifted her lips to his for one last brusque—if not chaste—kiss, her entire world imploded, shattering a scrambled picture of a life once lived into a realm of broken glass.

She felt him against her.

Blonde hair, plastered against sweaty forehead, cobalt gaze skewed in ecstasy.

He groaned—a long, dry thing.

His lips against her neck, whispering for more, begging for her heart, pleading for so much more than she could give him.

He was not gentle. He tore through her—again. She ignored the pain and tried to enthuse him, raising her hips as if to ignite his euphoria. It seemed effective.

"I'm so sorry," she thought, daring not to speak, twisting his blonde curls within her trembling fingers. "You will die because of this. Because of Piggy. Because of me."

He finished quickly and had few words to speak. He panted for a moment, resting his heavy head upon the softness of her chest, allowing the cool dry hum of her heart to ease his enflamed nerves. She said nothing, had no reaction, only lay still and quiet and listening.

She could not hear him as he spoke silent thoughts—"I am going to die but I will die for you. I will die for Piggy and I will die for Jack—

After an idle moment, Jack lazily raised his head and smiled hungrily, blazoning Louise with a cruelly satiated gaze—the stare of a Victor. It disgusted every fibre within her, but all was done now. She had given in, betrayed Ralph's legacy, betrayed her own legacy—

"Tomorrow morning, you will eat," Jack said simply. And then he arose and left, presumably to bombard his cohort Roger with the news of her defeat. The thought brought stinging bile to her throat and tears to her eyes.

What had she become?

—You will survive—

A monster as bad as Jack?

You are the last semblance of sanity—

A savage, a marauder of carnal desire, fixing only to promote herself?

You are so incredibly special. You could never understand how special you are.

Louise grit her teeth, swallowing drunken tears. No. She was not weak. She was no savage. And she was no whore.

She was strong. And she was going to live.

You will live. Because you can."

A/N: on a happier note, i feel as though i should have this story finished by...December?

i mean, taking into consideration my terrible updating habits

but uh, i got it all figured out

so that's pretty neat

FINI :D