Warnings: This chapter contains stuff that may be disturbing to some people. It deals with sexual stuff that in a way is non-con. I don't think you can call it slash because.. you'll see.

2 Inevitable

Exhausted by his sudden outburst Ralph slumped back onto the skins. Jack still looked baffled.

"So you are... going to be.. sane again?" he asked in an unbelieving voice.

Ralph considered this for a moment. He then smiled and nodded. He had had to remind himself that for Jack, this was all so real, that accepting it meant to be sane.

"Oh," said Jack.

"Oh," he repeated in a lack for better words.

"Then... well... good night!" He turned around and after once more looking after the fire he went to sleep. A typical Jack reaction, thought Ralph. Something is troubling? Something requires thinking? Ignore it.

While Jack who had been running and working all day was fast asleep, Ralph lay sleepless in the dark of the shelter. Through little gaps between the palm branches of their roof he could see the way of the pale moon's brightness over the sky. He could listen to the breathing of the world. He felt quiet. Exhausted. Strangely real and awake.

It were the hours of night, when he lay sleepless and watched the far-away sky, when Ralph felt the most real. When his existence and the existence of others was clear and understandable. He liked the cool moonlight, but he never sneaked out to watch it, because he only felt comfortable in the relative security of the hut. They're wasn't really anything out there, but there was the wilderness and in here was at least a faint trace of civilisation, if only a roof of palm branches.

If this was a delusion, he thought to himself, it was at least quite logically build up. For example Jack. The longer Ralph thought about the Chief, the more it became clear to him that every single of his actions, seemingly chaotically and irrational, followed their own logic.

He understood that all the happenings had been predetermined by the fact that Jack was Jack and Jack was only a boy suddenly on his own. Jack wasn't dumb, but he didn't have the insight Ralph had.

Jack had always been the leader. Probably the best in choir, and also the oldest. Jack was jealous. And because he was just a boy – how could he have been something more? – he acted it out and his jealousy was the most important thing in the world.

The Chief had done what his emotions had told him, his natural instinct. And in a world of wilderness, instinct had won over rational thinking and Jack had won over Ralph.

Jack wasn't animal. Jack wasn't cruel, not more than any of them.

Just a kid.

Ralph remembered the time when Jack couldn't kill that first pig.

Just a kid.

It wasn't Jack who wasn't normal. It was Ralph. Ralph who acted more like and adult than like the child he was.

And instinct had won.

And without any adults as their examples, they never grew up. Jack still thought much like the twelve-year-old he had been.

He looked nearly like man, now, with strong build and face that had lost nearly all of it's boyish look. He had already lost the awkwardness of a teenager in the last months. The bony choir boy had gone. Hormones. You might have expected they would make them even more crazy, even wilder. But not much of that had shown. Not much.

It had been predictable as well. With the coming of adolescence, the hormones came. Some of the boys were slower, some faster. Jack had been one of the first, whose voice broke and whose body became more angular. There were no parents so comfort and lead them. There were no women or girls at which they could direct their seemingly pointless new emotions.

As a boy, nearly at the back of his head Ralph had heard talking about this, shamefully, hushed. He had one older brother, already a college boy, who had told him things, shown him pictures of women...

There had also been a doctor, once, not long before the island, who had asked him, very shamefully, if he had already had .. 'dreams'. 'Disturbing' or 'exciting' dreams. He had not. But he believed to know, now, what the doctor had meant, then.

It had been in nights like these, when he lay awake and watching Jack, that he first noticed. Jack suddenly became restless in his sleep, turning and making sounds, like in a nightmare and yet not quite like in a nightmare.

Sometimes he woke sweaty and panting and looked around in confusion. Sometimes he crawled out of the hut to vanish for a short time.

And once he had seen him touching himself...

These strange and intimate happenings should have been embarrassing to Ralph. He knew that. But they were just as unreal and remote as all the rest.

Until the day, when Jack turned to him in his restless sleep.

He had one of these dreams again, Ralph could tell.

He tossed and turned and made sounds like in pain, moaning sounds... Ralph tried to get out of his reach and slid further to the wall of the hut.

But the room was small, and soon the wall was close. No space to escape the restless sleeper.

So Ralph started to slide down, tried to worm his way around Jack and out of the corner.

He could have woken him.

He could have jumped up and run away.

He could have screamed.

But it was impossible. It was impossible to do anything but try to retreat further into the tiny space that was still left.

And then the searching hands finally met him, travelling over his body.

Ralph's thoughts were paralysed.

One of the sweaty arms wrapped around him and drew him closer to Jacks body, just like an embrace. But Jack still seemed asleep and unconscious of his own actions.

Ralph tried to turn around, desperate not to have his face towards the sleeper.

But even in his sleep Jack's grip was strong and firm and it became even stronger, nearly stifling the fair-haired boy.

The sounds of the night became suddenly loud, the breathing at his neck was screaming and the air became thick as water. He didn't even dare to whimper as one hand sneaked down his back and further...

Like the beasts of night would get him if he made a single sound.

Ralph squeezed his eyes shut and make a sobbing sound. His breath came hard and laboured, as always when he had memories like this.

That night was one of the memories.

The Hunt was one of the memories.

Simon's death.

Piggy's death.

But still, that night was the least understandable of all.

Nothing had really happened, actually. Just Jack, touching him with awkward hands in his sleep, and making these sounds and then, after an eternity of terror he just turned round and slept on.

But with the feeling of these fingers still down there, lingering, Ralph felt more violated than he ever could have if anything had really happened.

It was even worse, because he was the only one who knew than something like that had happened at all.

Now, this night lay in the past, and was only a blurred memory.

And Ralph did not hate Jack for it. He did not hate Jack for anything. He never had. First he had been shocked by Jack's actions, then helpless, then frightened, then he had gone mad and now he accepted and understood.

It had had to happen, inevitably.

Because they were boys, just boys.

Just because they were lonely on an island, it didn't mean that they hadn't got to face the terrors of growing up.

Even Jack had, and if it was unconsciously.