LOTF: Before and After

Phase 3: Chapter 21

As exhilarated as he was by Jack's touch, Ralph couldn't shake the nauseous feeling from his gut.

"What about Emma?" he found himself asking.

"What about 'er?" Jack shrugged as he turned his gaze back up at the roof, tension filling his words.

"You're still with her, aren't you?" Ralph questioned.

"Yeah" Jack admitted, sending a strong dose of hurt and uncertainty through Ralph's body. "But it isn't the same" he added after a moment.

"Same as what?" Ralph forced Jack to admit.

"As this" the blond confessed, begging himself to keep his gaze fixed on the roof, to avoid Ralph's betrayed and pained brown eyes. "I don't know what it is with us. And I like Emma, but she doesn't make me feel like you do. She doesn't know me, and if she did, she wouldn't still be with me. But you know me, most of me. And for whatever twisted reason you got going on in that perfect head of yours, you still want me. You know what I am and yet you don't look at me the way everyone else does."

"You're not a bad person" Ralph said quietly as he tried to contain his emotions.

"Liar" Jack replied, continuing to stare at the ceiling.

"I'm not—" but Ralph stopped himself from speaking. Deep down, he wondered if part of him was lying. Jack may not have meant to kill Simon, he might not have been involved in Piggy's death, but he did coordinate an attack on Ralph's life. Up til now, Ralph tried not to think about what would've happened if the marines hadn't shown up when they did. If they arrived even five minutes later. What would Jack have done? He'd never knowingly killed another person. Ralph and Jack were friends before; before everything fell apart. But would that have counted for anything?

"Did you really believe what you said?" Ralph found himself asking after a few long minutes of thought.

"What are you talking about?" Jack wondered, missing whatever was going on in Ralph's head.

"All that shit about never getting rescued. About eight million islands and why should they find this one. About telling Peter we were never going home. From day one, you insisted we had to learn to live with ourselves... out there. Did you really believe that or did you just want to believe it?"

"What's that got to do with anything?" Jack diverted the question.

"Everything" Ralph turned his head to look at Jack's motionless body, the latter's head stuck on the roof above him.

"If you haven't noticed, optimism isn't one of my shining qualities" Jack responded after a moment spent thinking on it.

"You still didn't answer my question" Ralph insisted, his need to know fueling him with the confidence to keep pushing.

"I really believed it" Jack sighed.

"You really thought—"

"Yes, I didn't think any of us were gonna get taken off that island" Jack cut in to confirm. "I thought that was it, the rest of our goddamn lives. Why do you think I was so determined to hunt?"

"Carelessness?" Ralph guessed honestly.

"Shut up, dipshit. That was rhetorical" Jack scoffed. "You saw rescue as our best chance of survival, while I saw hunting as our only chance of survival. I thought you were wasting time. We weren't anywhere near an actual continent. Hours gone from home and still hours to go before we reached the U.K. Smack dab in the middle of fucking nowhere. The odds weren't in our favour, man. So to answer your question; yes, I really thought I'd never see my family, or my house, or the academy, or America ever again."