WARNINGS: This chapter contains references to violence.

...

When the rebels didn't take him back to their camp, but instead tied his hands behind his back and pointed their weapons at him while their leader, Clay, glared daggers at him, the Doctor knew that he'd guessed it right.

That they aren't after him, probably don't realize how special a creature he is by now.

The jungle is so black at night, free from moonlight, but the rebels are carrying flashlights – given the situation, the Doctor might even have expected torches.

For a few seconds, Clay looks the Doctor straight into his eyes, his gaze glowing like coals with the intensity of his anger. He confirms what the Doctor has been suspecting – has been afraid of – as he speaks.

"Where's the girl?"

The Doctor tries the solidity of the bonds around his wrists. Rope, thick, but better than handcuffs. There's nothing to do against metal, but ropes can be cut, gnawed, burnt away.

Right now though, at the crossroads of about half a dozen crossbows, the Doctor feels the time is not for foolhardiness.

"Gone," he says, his lips turning into a grin he knows would look ugly and insane, would probably make him feel ashamed if Rose could see it. But there is no one to impress in that jungle – only rebels, who claim to hunt down barbarians, but who themselves look rather barbaric enough to fool anyone.

A pucker of displeasure bars the young man's reddish brows.

With a wave of his chin, he sends a couple of patrollers deeper into the jungle, and the Doctor has to struggle to keep his cool, not to throw panic-laden glances in the direction where Rose went.

"She can't be far," Clay says. "You wouldn't have split up until the last moment. And she's limping. My boys will bring her back quickly."

He sighs.

"Doctor, you sure haven't been straight with me."

"There's no way to be straight when someone's taking you down crooked streets," the Doctor says. "If it's all as you told me, and you and your clan are leading a good and honest struggle against a corrupt government, I fail to understand why you'd put so much interest in a plain English girl not quite twenty."

The words put fire into his heart, but they're the right ones. His best chance now is to persuade the rebels that Rose is in every regard ordinary. Maybe there's been some mistake; maybe, by losing his temper like he did, after they shot her, he put into their heads that she was valuable. That he was – what? His escort, and she was worth money where she was from.

That's flimsy and the Doctor knows it, but he isn't above hoping.

"Ah," Clay smiles, but only for the sake of evasiveness. It doesn't reach to his eyes, which still betray the frustration that's starting to darken into rage. "Trust me. That story's a better introduction."

"You don't say."

Red swamps the Doctor's sight as Clay smashes his fist against his jaw, flashes of pain flying to his brain.

With his hands tied behind his back, there's no way for him to find his balance and he tumbles backward. A tree catches his fall so he doesn't sprawl on the ground, and after a while, he manages to reach a sitting position. The ground is tingly with dry, tall grass, and he can think of all the crawling things he might have disturbed in their habitat.

When he opens his eyes again, the redheaded young man looks unforgivingly at him, with a tremor on his hairless lips. Is he too young to grow a beard yet?

With all that happened as he first got here, with Rose getting shot, the Doctor's had no time to wonder that all these 'rebels' look so young. All Rose's age, or barely older.

They're like the children turned savages in that book, stranded on a desert island. Cut off from the world. Not so much a group of anarchists opposing the system, but a new system, with its own rules and tyrannies.

And so, even before Clay starts telling him what they really are, the Doctor's shaping his own idea, the truth emerges shiny and slick from the lies.

"There's no war, is there?" The Doctor says. "No barbarians." He starts laughing at how obvious it sounds. "Twice now, we've been running around in that jungle, and there's no one but you, no government agents waiting to take you down."

"You're talking about what you don't understand."

"Always, when I'm in strange places. But I assure you, Clay – I'll understand if you explain. I'm not so thick for a man in a suit who wanders into jungles. Take my word for it."

Clay appraises him, and looks wary at the absence of fear on the Doctor's face. That's why he punched him, the Doctor can tell. Violence between two men is always about defining what roles they're going to play. It was meant to send a message, one that doesn't need alien technology to translate into all languages.

It meant Clay was taking his place a notch above the Doctor in the food chain.

Unfortunately for him, violence is the one language that the Doctor doesn't speak.

"We were rebels," Clay says, puzzled and a little annoyed that the Doctor isn't cowering at the sight of his fists. "There was a war."

"And you lost," the Doctor assumes.

Clay's eyes wander away for a while. The two men he's sent after Rose haven't come back yet, and he looks eager to dismiss the rest of his group. Maybe he doesn't like to speak the real story in front of them. Maybe they've all gotten rather fond of that game – playing make-believe, that they're still revolutionaries, hiding in the jungle from an omnipotent government, with the weight of righteousness and justice on their side.

What more can they ever have been than children playing war?

"Go on," Clay tells his men, "she can't have gone far. Split up if you have to."

He looks back at the Doctor when all the men are gone, and it's only the two of them, in the night-blackness of uneasy silence.

"I was sixteen when we started," he says. "We were working, already, had been for years. Unions were illegal but we started one, in secret, trying to think of ways we could stand up for ourselves. For our rights. We were entitled to that, don't you think?"

The Doctor doesn't answer. What does that boy care, what he thinks?

"Anyway. The boys gathered around me, they listened to what I said. I don't really remember how it came out that we had to start an actual rebellion – that we were never going to get what we were due so long as those multi-billionaire tyrants were in power."

"So you ran from your families and hid here?"

Clay laughs. "The camp you saw is what remains of our factory. The government wanted to make an example of us. They took down everything around it. There was never a city here," he says, looking at the roof of trees above them with a sweeping glance, "the factory was always isolated. But there were houses, a few shops. Some of the boys' families were living here, in factory-funded buildings. All gone." He shakes his head. "The government annihilated everything living when they found out about our little rebellion. 'You want to live without a government?' they said. 'Be our guests.' And they left us there, to die, to scavenge, banned from life in society."

"What do you mean, to die?"

"You and your friend have wandered into a forbidden area," Clay says. "You can imagine why we were skeptical about your just losing your way and landing here. If we were to get out of this jungle, to get too close to civilized land, we'd be shot dead."

"But there's food to live on," the Doctor says. "Resources."

"Rare. Not much grows in here that isn't poisonous to humans. And anyway, there's no point. No future. Even if we could grow food, we couldn't grow as a community. That's the whole scheme behind their punishment."

Then, all the pieces of the puzzle come together, and the Doctor realizes what has been hiding in plain sight, what feels so inherently wrong about that group.

"They left you without women."

"A perfect retribution to illustrate the barrenness of our ideals."

The Doctor closes his eyes. He sees those boys playing again, with Rose, their blend of possessiveness and awkwardness around her.

Boys who have never grown into men, and who never will, so long as they're still hiding under a blanket with a flashlight playing make-believe, hiding from the truth.

"And you think that's your best option, is it?" The Doctor can't help but snarl a little. After all, that boy did send his friends after Rose, and his patience can only stretch so far. "To keep on pretending you're fighting an invisible enemy? Who are you fooling if not – yourselves," he realizes. "They don't know the truth, do they? Not all of them."

Clay bows his head a little, a lock of auburn hair falling over his eyes. He isn't pleased with the situation, with how little good some old-fashioned violence seems to do in the end.

"I'm their leader," he says. "I have to protect them."

"How many know?"

"Not that many. It's better for their spirits if they think of the camp as a haven rather than exile. If they think we're actually doing some good, fighting the good fight."

"And you don't think they'll find out?"

"We've staged some pretty realistic attacks," Clay says, a streak of defensiveness in his tone. "Some men sacrificed a lot for it. Even limbs, sometimes."

The Doctor laughs.

It's only as the redheaded boy's face fills with horror at the sound that he hears the judgment in it.

"So you go on, planting bombs against your own people, all so they can cling to the idea that there's a war on? You don't think there could be better ways of handling this?"

"Like what?" Clay raises his voice, but the Doctor can tell it's only a desperate fumbling for control.

"Oh, I don't know. Organize elections. Become a democracy. Make what you can of the soil you have to grow food. Start the society you and your boys thought was worth this whole struggle to begin with!"

"You don't understand. We're isolated. We might as well be cursed. The land –"

"You look at this," the Doctor embraces the vast stretches of green with his gaze, "and tell me this land is barren?"

Fire seeps into the Doctor's voice. He's angry now, not just because of Rose. He hates waste more than anything, and the sight of those youths who are destroying one another out of brute fear not to have anything else to destroy, is enough to push him over the edge.

"What did you think was going to happen if your revolution worked out, Clay? Did you just picture taking down the government and all your problems would go away? What about the system you'd have to install? Did you think about that? Did you think about how to right the wrongs of your so-called tyrants, or did you assume someone cleverer than you would take the reins? Yes," he says at the expanding anger on the boy's face, "try punching me again. See how you like it."

"We didn't –"

"You didn't know," the Doctor says. He has been able to show compassion on worse beings than this. "You were children. You didn't think that you could make anything out of what you'd been given. That if you turned this place into an actual community, that you'd prove the government wrong. That people might try and escape to this place, to join you, that you might become a hopeful alternative to a land of repression and tyranny."

"Is that why you're here?" Clay says.

The features of his face are still heavy with suspicion.

"Did you come to see what had become of us? Are you here to –" But he can't quite come out with the word 'help'.

The Doctor inhales sharply. "My friend is hurt. If you want my help, then you have to call back your men and stop chasing her right away. You have to return to your camp and let me go, unfollowed. I'll know if I'm being followed. If you let me go to her, alone, and tend to her for a while, then I can give you my word to come back and help you start something here. Something real."

Silence sinks between the two men, and only the noise of the crawling beetles and flying insects fills the air.

Clay runs his thumb over his knuckles obliviously; maybe they're bruised from punching the Doctor. Maybe he doesn't punch people all that often.

But something's wrong, and the Doctor can tell, fast, that this won't be a win.

"No," Clay says, more to himself than to the Doctor. "No, you're just trying to take this place from me."

"Why would I want it?"

"They're my people."

"They're their own people, don't you think?"

Clay hits him again, this time, using his boot, which delivers a clean dazzling blow to the Doctor's face.

A hot fluid streams down his lips and he recognizes the saltiness of blood. That face doesn't need a broken nose, he thinks. The back of his head slams into the bark of the tree, and the ants and caterpillars that had been getting used to his presence crawl away in surprise.

"This is a harsh jungle," Clay says, "but it's our jungle."

The Doctor quotes on a weary tone, "Till the grownups arrive, we'll have fun."

"Excuse me?"

But before the Doctor can explain, a couple of boys emerge from the trees at some distance and Clay turns back to look at them.

"Well?" He speaks with a more dignified tone; a leader's tone.

"We, uh – we've been trying to close in on her, but I think we lost her trail."

"Well then, get back on it."

The two boys glance at each other then both stare at Clay with an air of bovine incomprehension.

Do these people even know how to track people? The Doctor wonders.

If Rose can only get to the Tardis, she'll be all right. She knows how to treat a flesh wound. He closes his eyes and pictures it, Rose digging into the medical cabinet like a hurricane. Please lord please let him find the Tardis a complete mess.

He swears he repents for telling her the Tardis was an ancient technology to be treated with respect, and that even she couldn't get away with trying to make it feel domestic.

Fool you've been, he tells himself.

It's not the Tardis that Rose has been taming.

Reluctantly, not wanting to show weakness in front of their leader or their prisoner, the boys draw back into the jungle, and the Doctor and Clay exchange a fierce burning look.

Rose better be safe into the Tardis by now.

Because if they get her, if those foolish human boys put their hands on her, he's going to show them just how wild he can get.

These boys aren't the only ones who can play savages.

…

End Notes: The title and the Doctor's quote are borrowed from William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Please let me know what you thought of the chapter in the comment section. Take care!