#aleisha talks

Jack notices. He pretends not to for a moment, his gaze straying to the boys crouched by the spit but the trembling persists. After a moment he hesitates, irritation and reluctance crossing his face, and shrugs out of his tog.

He throws it at you, the cloth lands haphazardly across your shoulders. Immediately a couple of the hunters snicker.

Heat surges under Jack’s skin, a humiliating flush he loathes for how it so readily exposes him. He regrets the gesture at once; the tog already feels squandered, his own skin prickling now with the cold he’s just relinquished. He misses the warmth.

Then Maurice, who carries a bit of home with him regardless of their painted masks and sharpened sticks, opines, “My mother says it’s a gentlemanly thing to do.”

The rest of the camp recedes into ambient noise, fire crackles, a littlun whines and someone jostles past with a holler. None of it matters to Roger.

What matters is that Jack is speaking to you.

And not just that — he’s putting on a performance.

Not delegating instruction, or delivering the curt, utilitarian directives he employs when bossing around the others, but speaking in a way that suggests that you’re an audience worth captivating. He recounts the hunt: a reconstruction shaped for dramatics, broad in wild gestures, and elevated in pitch. He lowers himself, demonstrates the stalk before the inevitable lunge at an imaginary animal. His hands carve shapes in the air, delineating the pig’s imagined path. It’s a crude pantomime delivered with a relish that indicates he’s embellishing events instead of actually recounting them, exaggerating the smaller parts to put on a good show.

You’re wholly absorbed in whatever he’s putting on. You lean forward like the sheer proximity would enhance the image he is fabricating, your eyes tracking every movement with a hungry intensity. 

“I can’t believe I missed it,” you bemoan. “I should’ve been there!”

Jack grins and readily agrees, “You should’ve been there. You’d have seen. It was perfect.”

“…Will you go again?”

Jack nods resolutely. “Of course, I will! First thing tomorrow.” Then he waits to see your reaction.

“Then I’ll come too!”

There is nothing in your tone that mitigates the force of that declaration, unshaped by the usual caution: you don’t temper your desire to fit the expectations of the group when you declare it so plainly.

There is a ripple of reaction, a sharp bark of laughter, a mumbled remark, but Jack doesn’t dismiss the proclamation.

Instead, he appraises you. And this is where he expects Jack to say no, you’d only slow them down. Jack isn’t the sentimental type, he doesn’t invest in what doesn’t serve him. 

But he doesn’t, what he says instead is—

“Perhaps,” Jack says.

Perhaps.

A door left ajar, and you beam at it as though it has been flung wide.

Roger decides he’s seen enough to know that this isn’t a passing anomaly. There’s a clear pattern and it needs to be dealt with accordingly. 

—

Roger isn’t impulsive, so he doesn’t seek you out with immediacy. Curiousity is a slow accrual of pressure with him. He watches you over the course of the afternoon, noting unremarkable details that could collectively amount to something. 

When the others shoulder the pig, you take your place among them without protest, but your hold slackens sooner than theirs, fingers adjusting, readjusting, the strain finding you a little early. The carcass swings with its own weight, and you lag by a fraction, never enough to warrant comment, but always enough to be recorded by Roger.

Your contributions arrive, they aren’t absent — not when not contributing to the structure Jack had was a surefire way to earn his ire, so you narrowly avoid it. You give what’s required and no more, your effort tapering at the edges where theirs seems to hold fast.

You complain as the others do, your voice wriggling easily into the general litany, the interminable drag of it all. The grievances are communal, you don’t stand apart in your diatribes any more than you do in your labour.

And you laugh too easily.

This, Roger finds especially vexating. Your laughter spills out at the smallest provocation. And yet Jack doesn’t seem to mind. If anything, your laughter appears to encourage him, to draw him further into his own performances.

You listen.

Is that it, then? Is that what Jack likes about you?

Roger’s head inclines slightly, he isn’t convinced. He’s quieter than you, when it counts. Doesn’t cut in, lets Jack run on without interruption, without having to fight for it.

You don’t do any of that.

It’s a nuisance, is what it is. 

—

By the time he approaches you, the camp has thinned into its evening configurations. The fire has burned lower, its earlier exuberance reduced to a steady glow. The littluns have drifted toward sleep or quiet whimpering. The older boys linger in loose, half-drifting clusters, their bodies slack-limbed and food-dulled, energy seeping out of them into a sun-drunk listlessness.

You are alone, sitting a little apart from the others, sequestered on a large boulder and looking at the unfurling chaos from above. You are picking at something — a stick, perhaps — stripping it of its bark in absent-minded strokes.

Roger watches you for a moment before making his presence known, he doesn’t announce himself, but interposes himself into your line of sight and waits. 

You look up.

“Roger,” you greet, lips curling into an amicable, tempered smile. There’s a modicum of confusion present too, like you can’t figure out what he’d possibly want from you.

Uncommunicative by nature, he remains silent, considering the sound of his own name in your mouth.

You have returned to your mindless task of chipping away at the remnants of bark. Once again, you look entirely ordinary.

And yet Jack will seek you out tomorrow.

Roger knows this with a certainty that feels, in its own small way, like a warning.

“Come here,” he says.

You look up, startled, then squint slightly as though trying to determine whether this is a request or an order.

“Why?”

Roger does not answer. He turns and walks.

There is a pause in which you might decide not to follow. He does not look back to check. The outcome interests him, but he won’t go out of his way to court it.

A moment later, he hears you shuffle behind him.

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

You leap up to your feet, and follow him, keeping your pace. Roger adjusts his stride minutely, to ensure you must exert yourself to keep up. 

The path he takes isn’t one the other boys favour. It veers away from the well-trodden routes that connect fire, shelter, and shore, slipping instead into a denser part of the island where the undergrowth thickens and the light fractures into uncertain patches. 

He stops.

You nearly walk into him.

“We’re here.”

Then he steps aside.

The pit is not immediately visible. It is obscured by a careless arrangement of branches and leaves, a half-hearted camouflage. Roger nudges the covering aside with his foot, divulging the dark hollow beneath.

It is deeper than it first appears.

You peer into it, frowning.

“What is that?”

“A pit,” Roger says.

“I can see that,” you reply, a flicker of irritation imbues itself into your voice. “Why is it here?”

He shrugs.

“There are traps round here.”

You crouch at the edge, leaning forward to get a better look. The light does not reach the bottom cleanly; it gathers instead in dim layers, the canopy of trees above shades it, casting an illusory depth.

“There’s something down there,” Roger says.

You glance up at him.

“What?”

He points.

Your notice of it arrives only after an uncertain adjustment of the eye. There, at the pit’s lowest hollow, rests a small and only partially revealed object, its presence obscured by the close embrace of packed earth. From your vantage it withholds any clear form.

“What is it?” you urge again.

“Why don’t you go and see?”

You blink.

“You want me to climb down there?”

“I should have thought that obvious.”

There is a silence in which the request might congeal into something more obviously unreasonable. Roger watches your face, waiting for the refusal, any instinctive self-preservation that should assert itself any moment now. 

Instead, your mouth inches into a half-smile.

“That’s it?”

He feels like he must have frowned.

You grin, similar to the unguarded one you offer to Jack. It catches Roger off guard.

“Alright then,” you say.

Before he can figure out a way to respond, you swing your legs over the edge and begin to lower yourself into the pit.

For a moment, Roger just watches.

You descend with an awkward determination, your footing uncertain but persistent. The sides of the pit are not smooth; roots protrude, offering precarious handholds. Dirt loosens under your weight, falling in small cascades that patter softly against the ground below.

Roger doesn’t offer assistance.

You reach the bottom with a muted thud, knees bending to absorb the impact. For a second, you remain crouched, orienting yourself, then you straighten and look up.

“Well?” you call. “What am I supposed to be looking for?”

Roger does not answer immediately.

There is something about the way you stand there, confined within the circumference of the pit, that sharpens his attention. You look diminished and contained.

“Just pick it up,” he says finally.

You roll your eyes and turn to locate the object. It takes you a moment, but then you crouch and retrieve it, brushing away the dirt.

“It’s just a rock,” you say.

There is a note of disbelief in your voice, you had clearly been expecting something more.

“Bring it up,” Roger says.

You look up at him.

There is a beat.

“Help me up, then.”

Roger makes no move to help.

You stare at him.

“You need to help me,” you reason carefully, voice wavering. “How else am I supposed to get out of here?”

Another silence.

“Very funny,” you say, but there is no humour in it.

Roger does not respond.

You wait.

Your voice follows him, rising, shifting from irritation to something harsher.

“Roger, don’t— you can’t be serious?! Roger!”

—

Roger doesn’t think about the time much on the island, it’s not like it matters much. But it’s long enough for the light to shift, for the heat to dull into something less oppressive and sweltering. 

When he returns, it’s with no real sense of urgency.

The path is the same. The undergrowth does not resist him. The pit reveals itself as before, its careless covering disturbed.

He approaches the edge.

And pauses.

You’re not where he left you.

He lifts his dark gaze, scanning, his attention unspooling into the dimming island. The horizon is in the act of undoing itself, light seeping away like a secret reluctantly surrendered. Tree trunks conspire with shadow, bleeding downwards into the earth until the ground becomes indistinguishable.

Then, from somewhere behind him:

“You’ve got a lot of nerve coming back.”

Your voice.

Roger turns.

You stand a few feet away, besmirched with earth and sweat. The evening light finds the streaks upon your skin and the dull sheen of exertion. In your hand, the small rock is still clutched, a token wrested, your fingers close round it.

You look apoplectic.

Not the petulant irritation he has seen flicker across your face before. Your eyes are bright with it, like a bolt of lightning with nowhere else to go. 

“How did you get out?” he asks.

There are scrapes along your arms, dirt ground into your skin, evidence of effort that must have been prolonged. The sides of the pit are not easily climbed. It would have required determination. He should have accounted for how persistent you always were. 

There isn’t much left to say. Roger never has a lot to fill the silence with — that’s usually left up to others.

He is curious when you take a step toward him and then another, and then you’re sprinting towards him and he belatedly registers alarm. 

You close the distance in a single rush and drive both hands into his chest. The impact jolts through him; Roger stumbles back, feet catching on a gnarled root half-buried in the soil. He goes down awkwardly, the air knocked loose from him.

The rock is still in your grip.

You raise your hand, lancing it down. Roger rolls, narrowly avoiding the blow, and the stone scrapes empty air. You lunge after him again anyway, face tightened with indignation.

You manage to land a hit this time.

It’s not a large rock, but it doesn’t need to be. The sound it makes is enough. Roger cries out, an involuntary sound, and something in his expression fractures into a thin, venomous sneer.

He catches your arm as you draw back for another strike and twists. Pain flares hot and immediate, but you refuse the instinct to let go. Your grip tightens instead, knuckles tightening, even as the strain forces a sound out of you that is closer to shock than anything coherent.

The rock falls out of your hand.

You are shaking slightly, still carrying the aftershock of a paroxysm of anger that hasn’t been properly expelled from your body. Your breath comes quick and uneven, unable to settle into anything you can control. 

You look nothing like you did earlier, standing at Jack’s side. Nothing like the rapt attentive, cheeky figure you present yourself as. 

A shed carapace implies growth with the creature outgrowing its old constraints. But this feels more like being flayed, the outer layer gone with nothing to replace it, left with a sensitivity that is intolerable and a barrage of sensation that arrives amplified. The torrid heat is unbearable against your skin, the ground bumpy under your feet. 

You are now left wordless and furious and trembling with rage.

Roger lunges for the rock and you dive to where it is, already prepared to intercept, your hand crashes down over his with such a blunt force that his knuckles are driven straight into the dirt, skin grinding against soil, your fingers locking over his in a grip that is more of a refusal to concede even the illusion of him having it. He jerks, the motion ricocheting back through you so that the two of you are tethered by this contested rock, the object shifting, chafing between your palms. It never settles in one hand, as if it resents being claimed at all and then, you relinquish it abruptly.

Your hand leaves the rock mid-struggle and finds him instead, surging upwards into his hair, closing there, a fistful wrenched tight and yanked, hard enough that his head snaps back violently, his body dragged after it too unprepared.

He barges, an attempt to break the stalemate through impact. You answer immediately, hurling back with equal disregard for form, the exchange devolving into unadorned, a contest of refusal to lose, each of you endeavouring to impose direction on the other without the courtesy of any actual fighting technique. He tries to turn, to slip the axis of his body out from under your hold, but every effort is interrupted, each yank forcing his body to comply with a trajectory he wants to avoid, his hand is still clamped around your arm, nails digging deeper and frantic now, more punishing, as he tries to peel you off piece by piece.

You refuse to yield to him, not when he started it. You pull again.

And this time it works.

You drive him.

It’s hardly efficient but there’s a relentless, forward insistence that denies him the time needed to recover, each step you force him into is misaligned, his attempts to brace undermined by the lingering imbalance, his shove back lacks the foundation it needs to matter.

He’s off-centre now, irretrievably so, his off-kiltered body doesn’t answer him with his earlier precision, each correction compounds the error instead of rectifying it. You see it happen: the resistance thinning and his footing giving way beneath the constant pressure you refuse to ease up on.

And you don’t hesitate, not even for a second.

You give him one hard shove, everything in you thrown behind it, an unbroken act of force that leaves no room for you to think on.

He goes down awkwardly, it happens too fast.

Roger lands badly. 

The impact jars through bone, a blunt, internal shock that steals the air from him more effectively than any blow. For a moment he doesn’t move, the shock keeps him rooted, body folding in on itself in the abyss-depth of the pit. He feels numb for a while, conjuring up an emotion takes its time. 

His tongue presses, once, against the tender rise on the inner wall of his cheek where you’d struck him. A trace of iron seeps across his palate, there’s no gush of blood, only the faintest metallic taste. He holds it there a moment longer than necessary before letting his tongue withdraw, leaving the swelling to continue its discreet ascent.

Roger gets to his feet, with no urgency, one hand brushing dirt from his thigh while the other hangs loose at his side. His leg answers with a low, stubborn ache, lodged deep and spreading, dulling rather than sharpening. He shifts his weight once to settle it, then again, until the discomfort folds into the rest of him and is no longer worth attending to. He doesn’t bother calling out for you. He already knows you’re not there.

He finds his footing in the shallow grooves cut into the sides, the marks crude but serviceable, each one holding just enough to bear his weight. His heart strikes hard against his ribs, a rapid, insistent knocking. So Jack had not been humouring you. 

He hauls himself upwards with controlled effort, arms tightening, shoulders drawing in. His breath comes quickly, short bursts escaping one after another, his eyelids flickering with an involuntary energy that borders on anticipation. The dirt gives slightly beneath his hands, loose and shifting, disturbed where yours must have scraped and pressed in search of hold. He digs his fingers in deeper, as if he could excavate your fingerprints from the soil, he imagines the same dirt under your nails from when you had clambered out as there is in his. 

He sinks his fingers deeper into the wall of the pit, past the friable crust into the denser, cooler earth beneath, where the soil yields with a reluctant give and then holds him there. The grooves are unmistakably yours, each one a record of effort from your earlier clambering. He fits his hand into them, aligning palm to hollow, fingers to the shallow impressions left behind, like the ground still retains the warmth of your tightened grip.

The dirt works its way under his nails, settling into the same narrow crescents, the same spaces where yours must have gathered as you hauled yourself up. He considers that briefly, the shared grime and the matching traces. His thumb presses into one of the deeper marks, testing its shape, testing the amount of pressure and doggedness it must have taken to carve it there.

For a moment he doesn’t move. His hand remains planted, claimed by the impression left behind.