Jackson woke up the following morning, ready to commence the excavation and exploration of he and Ralph's paradise. He gathered his things into a pile near the bunk bed and went to eat breakfast. When he was finished, and Ralph still wasn't awake, he decided that he was bored, and so he'd go into the backyard and shovel some rabbit manure (read: pet some rabbits). After all, manure transport was one of his weekly chores.
After a debilitatingly long time 'shoveling their pebbles' (it would be debilitating for anybody, those furballs are cute!), he made his way back inside and woke Ralph up.
"Come on! It's almost noon! You can't sleep all day, you know.." He declared. Ralph mumbled, annoyed, in his sleep, so Jackson resorted to the age-old martial art of awakening that his parents had passed down to the four siblings, just so they could perfect it.
"ERR-eerrRErRRERRRRRRRR!" Jackson crowed, bending his arms at the elbows to immitate a rooster as aptly as he could. Ralph responded with a slightly more energized moan, and Jackson's mood went through the roof. He ran into the girl's room and recruited them for the Ultimate Awakening Attack. The three began hopping around the room, imitating roosters, wolves, and all out nutcases as loudly as they were able.
After three glorious minutes of nonstop aural violence, Ralph sat up, pierced each one of them with his eyes (or he would have, if that were an ability he could manifest), and stated as icily as a kind, loving, and generally peace-making oldest brother can, "Alright. I am awake. Leave my room. Now. I will be out in five minutes. If one of you interrupts me between now and five minutes from now, I will cease controlling myself." We all felt shivers all the way down our spines, turned and scampered out of the room, slamming the door shut tightly.
Five minutes later, Jackson and Ralph were on their way to Paradise, Ralph eating toast and Jackson whistling merrily (read: blowing air through his lips while grinning his face off). They clambered under the bushes near their trailhead, promptly covering themselves in muck, and hiked their way down to the pond. Jackson decided to roll up his pants and begin removing the biggest of the rocks from the pond so as to make it more toe-frinedly. Ralph, on the other hand, performed a continuation of Jackson's zoning from the day prior, and chose several more spots for campfires, as well as a spot to build a shed.
While Jackson was removing rocks (or trying to, some of them were far too large for him to be moving on his own), and Ralph dug pits for the burning of detritus, they conversed back and forth about their ideas, goals, and desires for their Paradise.
Ralph, focusing on the money aspects, asked "Where do you think we should put the entrance to the resort? Because wherever it will be, we want it to be pretty enough for people to be willing to pay, but not so pretty they won't want to see more. And how much should we charge for entrance? And when should we start inviting people?"
Jackson, slightly more pragmatic, responded with "Well [grunt], we can't start inviting anyone until we own the land. And we won't own the land until we can [thud!] prove that we've been living here for five years. This is a national park, so I think it's five years, at least. But the most obvious way to show we'd been living here for five years would be to put a building here, and then take pictures every day with the newspaper. Where do you want me to put these rocks?"
Ralph turned, looked at Jackson's small pile of rocks, and thought for a moment. "We could set the rocks up around the fire pits, to add an extra layer of protection. We really don't want to start a forest fire."
Jackson, shock on his face, asked "Is that something we need to worry about? We're pretty close to a marsh, and a river, and there's a pond right here. Even if we did accidentally start an uncontrolled fire, it would be pretty easy to put it out with all the loads of water around here. Right?"
Ralph nodded sagely, "Yes, but even marshes can dry up. And if a fire gets into the trees and everything is dry enough, the tops of the trees will burn, and we can't do anything about that."
Jackson nodded in agreement, and asked for Ralph's help to cart the rocks toward the firepits. They slowly lifted the rocks and relocated them to the outer edge of the pit Ralph had been digging, circling it with a layer of rock and broken concrete slabs.
"Whew!" Jackson breathed heavily. "These are a lot heavier when they aren't in the water! I wonder why that is."
Ralph shrugged, and said, "I'll look it up later. Let's get back to work."
By this time, it was around two in the afternoon, and the Jackson decided to take a quick rest before he began transporting rocks and concrete chunks again. He lay against a tree, listening to the water babble in the brook that emigrated from the pond, to the insects making their noises, and the wind whispering through the trees.
He sat up. That had been an entirely too English sounding whispering. He turned to Ralph and spoke in a low monotone, "Someone's watching us."
Ralph kept digging, but his movements became more efficient, more fluid, until the sound of the blade entering the earth was hardly an (humanly) audible sound at all. Jackson leaned back against the tree, keeping his eyes slit open, and palmed a rock from near his hip. He began darting his eyes around, attempting to pick up as much detail as possible, as the Great Detective Encyclopedia Brown directed. He saw a slight movement of the wrong color thirty yards away through the trees, and focused on it, quickly allowing his brain to reformat the movements into a shape.
A child's face was watching them. His black shirt was the wrong color, despite the decomposing dirt around them all, to blend perfectly with the environment, and his little brother's green shirt was too vibrant, too fake. "The brothers," Jackson monotoned once more. "I hope Kris and Chris aren't somewhere around too."
Ralph looked at him, smirked, and went back to his original, loud digging. Jackson got up, leaving the rock behind, and went back to moving the toe-stub-worthy rocks out of the pond.
A few minutes later, the B-brothers 'snuck' out of the woods, to stand directly behind Ralph as he dug, and shouted together as loud as they could. He jumped into the air, swinging the shovel around to bear on them. Their shouts of glee turned to shock as, once again, their prank failed to elicit the correct response. They both fell back, landing in the wet dirt and screaming. Ralph hopped lightly out of his pit and slammed the shovel down between Bobby's legs, perilously close to his crotch. Suddenly the ground was slightly more damp, as Bobby's pants became the filter through which he watered it further. Jackson laughed, "You know it just rained yesterday? The dirt doesn't need any more.. Fluids."
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
Bobby's face turned ugly, spite, hate, and fear warring for dominance. The brothers were not sure which won as Billy and Bobby hightailed it back to civilization. Jackson laughed again, and Ralph looked at him. "You didn't have to rub it in. It's not their faults that they are more prone to fear. And I didn't even try to intimidate them this time. Honestly, what did they expect when they snuck on someone with a sharp, heavy, metal 'device'? That I'd drop it? That I wouldn't use it to defend myself from an 'unknown' threat? They have some serious learning ahead of them."
Jackson laughed once more, derisively, and commented, "They need to stop being such..." He Paused. "Children?" He laughed one final time. "That is definitely a really strange way to phrase that statement. Anywhozits. Let's get back to work, before they come back with their mom."
They turned back to their work. Ralph had finished the first pit, forty centimeters deep and a meter on all sides, before Jackson even came close to encircling the pit with stones. So, he rolled up his pants and began helping his younger brother lift, roll, and slide the heavy hunks of stone out of the pond. This continued for quite some time; as they worked towards a common goal, their brotherly bond was reinforced and made stronger.
They had been this way their entire lives. When Ralph had gone through his karate phase, Jackson dragged himself along for loyalty's sake. They had both learned it to some degree, but Ralph had always been the more creative, thinking of different moves to try, coming up with altered tactics, fighting against different enemies. When Jackson had wanted to learn Kendo but the bully's in the dojo intimidated him into leaving, Ralph had mowed lawns until he had enough money to afford a pair of boken and quarterstaffs, and then they had spent an entire summer teaching each other two-handed dueling. When Ralph began using household supplies to perform chemical experiments in the forest behind their house, Jackson had been the one to look up bomb recipes online. They had both gotten into loads of trouble, but their friendship had only grown.
Hearing a particularly loud rustling, accompanied by footsteps through the trees, Jackson and Ralph hurried to lay down their latest rock before Billy's and Bobby's mother gave them the ear-lashing of their lives. "I hope they don't try to keep us away from here," Jackson whispered, turning towards the noise she was making. "Although I doubt she could force us, she's making so much noise, getting through the woods must be difficult for her."
They stood a united front against her as she burst through the final layer of undergrowth. The person that stood before them, however, was not someone Jackson recognized. Ralph stepped to the side, grabbing and hefting the shovel before himself. "Run," he hissed. Jackson looked around, confused. "What? Why? What's he going to do?" Then he saw the look of fear on Ralph's face, recognized the unspoken history between the two, and ran.
Ralph chucked the shovel at the approaching foe as his brother ducked away through the trees, and bolted in a different direction. Kyle caught the shovel around the shaft and chuckled. "You two shits are going to get what's coming to you!" He started walking through the pseudo-clearing, looking towards the places Jackson and Ralph had run away to, respectively. "You can't dick my brothers around and not get some sort of actual punishment!" He started swinging the shovel at the brush, chopping through weeds and thistles. "I mean, what kind of ass person scares a couple kids so bad they piss themselves??!" The outrage was apparent in his voice, and Ralph, having circled around the outer edge of the clearing towards their beaten path, watched as Kyle slammed the shovel against a tree and left it there, quivering.
Undecipherable muttering commenced, and Ralph watched as the almost-adult started hefting rocks into the air and chucking them around the area. Ralph groaned in desperation when he noticed Jackson pulling at the shovel, dislodging it. He stepped out of cover with Kyle's back turned, and motioned for Jackson to 'stop' and 'get over here', in that order. Jackson shook his head, glaring at Kyle as he watched the older boy undo all their meticulous efforts. He slid his grip along the shovel, preparing it for a debilitating attack on the person throwing rocks into the pond. Ralph frantically motioned for him to stop, he didn't understand, he didn't know!
Kyle started to turn and Jackson stepped into motion. He swung the blade at Kyle's face, presumably, Ralph thought, to cut him or knock him out. Kyle didn't see it coming at all. He took the shovel blade to the cheekbone, crying out in shock and flinging himself quickly to the ground. Rolling to his knees, he felt for the split in his face, and turned his eyes to Jackson. "Oh, you're going to pay now. I've got a special reward for people who hurt me." He stood up slowly, watching Jackson ready the shovel again. "Have you ever been to Juvie?" He asked. Jackson, goaded by his disturbing tone, swung for a home run, but the strength of an eleven year old versus the strength of a seventeen year old is not exceptional, nor even hardly noteworthy.
Kyle caught the shovel and snagged it from Jackson's grip, pulling him forward onto his knees. After casually tossing it over his shoulder toward the stream, he backhanded Jackson just as casually. The young boy fell back into the dirt and the mud, tears springing unbidden to his eyes. He started to push himself away from where the menacing pre-tween had stood up, sliding quickly along the wet ground towards the woods.
Kyle took two steps forward, then, hearing the clank of metal on rock, he spun quickly, lunging for Ralph and tackling him into the water. The near-man punched the fourteen year old twice in the face, and Ralph lay still, water rushing over the shovel and his body.
Kyle turned back around and started muttering again. "Damned faggots. Have to fucking bury the bitches now." His barely comprehensible speech continued as he stalked out of the clearing after the mud trail of the much younger boy.