Warning. This chapter is exceptionally dark. I would not recommend reading it if you're under a certain age. You know who you are. Again, I did include a mature warning on this FF, and I hope that people keep that in mind before reporting me.

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Jackson's lungs heaved, his stomach clenching as he retched his breakfast onto the roots of an ironwood tree. As soon as he had been able to get up, he had turned away and had run as far as he could, as fast as he could. There was something.. Wrong with Kyle. There was something.. Not right. Something indecipherable that simply made Jackson feel off. And so when he had seen Ralph coming to his aide with the shovel, he had scrabbled against the muck, clutching for purchase.

His vision went dark, and he closed his eyes, leaning his head against the tree for support. He counted to ten, breathing deeply, all the while attempting to listen for

sounds of pursuit. He stood up and a wave of dizziness washed over him. He turned back to the tree and retched again, but nothing came up this time but his stomach acids. Noting that he was incapable of moving freely, Jackson crawled as near the swampy, unstable ground as he could, and proceeded to slide himself into hid and cover himself with the rotting, reeking muck.

'It's a good thing,' Jackson thought weakly, 'that some retching is caused by imbalance or movement instead of intestinal distress.' His thoughts began to wander, and he closed his eyes to stave off the dizziness.

Several minutes later, the sound of cracking boughs and violently moving brush became audible. Kyle pushed himself through the bushes, leaving a visible trail behind himself. He took a moment to catch his breath, and noted an odd, memory inducing acridity in the air. He knew that smell from throughout his past. Someone had retched nearby. "Puke," he growled, looking around. Sampling the air to bring him closer to the source, he noted the small puddle amidst the tree roots, and grinned, ferally. He wasn't very far behind, now. He grinned and waded back into the defending underbrush, whacking and snarling at the plants, all the while following what looked to be a decently traveled path.

Jackson woke up two minutes afterward, his dizziness much abated. After his short reprieve, he began jogging through the marshland woods, attempting to find some way to get out of the tiny wilderness he was lost in.

Walking in a straight line was apparently not working, or at least, it was appearing to not work. He'd been moving constantly for over five minutes, and he knew that the pseudo-wilderness preserve wasn't more than five kilometers long, and that included the marsh, woods, lake and park on the other side of the lake. The brothers' Paradise was on the near side of the lake, giving them a maximum of two and a half kilometers of ground to cover. "If he happened to be walking in a massive circle" Jackson thought, derisively.

He looked toward the sun to orient himself, but he hadn't ever needed to orient himself via the sun before (at least, not near his home. The location the children's father had taken them to for navigational learning had been over one hundred-twenty kilometers away). Since he had no prior experience with it, he didn't exactly know which cardinal or intercardinal direction to follow to get back, and he had no way of knowing even the general direction of home.

He took a deep breath, and continued to utilize his only method of navigation. 'Try to walk in a straight line,' Jackson thought. He laughed quietly, angrily, and continued on his way, listening for the slightest sound of ambush or tracking, squelching his fear and anxiety into a part of himself that he didn't usually access.

He came upon the edge of the marsh again, suddenly, slipping into it. In his struggle to get out of the murk, he lost his shoe and started yelling at the mud. Reaching as far into the muck as he could, he found the toe and began working it out of the viscous semi-fluid. Suddenly, a cracking branch was heard and he panicked, wrenching his arm out of the swamp.His shoe came with his arm, but his arm dangled uselessly by his side as he spun around. Kyle stood there, grinning in his eldritch way. Jackson spun his body to fling his mud-covered shoe with his now useless arm and turned to run.

When he turned, however, he realized desperately that he stood on the edge of a peninsula, as it were, over-looking a significant portion marsh. The closest dry land was ten meters away, in the form of a (possibly) solid log. He shifted back around, warily, staring at Kyle in defiance. The older boy was looking back, shock quickly making way for hate as he wiped rotting muck from his face.

"And now we have it," Kyle said, dramatically. "The moment we've all been waiting for! I'm going to make you squeal like a pig. You're going to wish you'd never been born." He laughed. "You might even make your own end." His hair-raising behavior made Jackson almost prefer drowning in muck. Then his hair-raising behavior made Jackson actually prefer drowning in muck.

The older boy lunged forward, grabbing Jackson in both his arms and squeezing him until it hurt to breathe. Jackson struggled futilely, and Kyle pushed him down onto the ground with a hand, using the other to rip off Jackson's remaining shoe. The young boy started crying and wheezing, struggling with all his strength for release, but Kyle had the upper hand completely. He grabbed a pant leg and started yanking it down, and Jackson, hands in his belt loops, started screaming.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

Kyle grabbed at the other pant leg and yanked it down as well, and then pawed at Jackson's underwear. The younger boy wriggled and squirmed, but all his effort did nothing but cause a lecherous sneer to appear on Kyle's face. Kyle punched the younger boy in the back of the head, stunning him, and then stood up. He unhooked his belt, and slid his pants down to his knees. Jackson started moving again, away from Kyle, away from everything. 'I would rather die,' he kept thinking, repeating the thought in his mind over and over again.

Kyle grabbed Jackson's leg and pulled him back towards him, and then knelt with his legs on either side of the younger boy's waist. With a sharp jerk, he pulled Jackson's underwear down and then leaned forward to get a good look at the child's assets.

Jackson was nearly incoherent with panic, with fear, with shame. His greatest hope was to get out of this, whatever this was, alive and intact. But his goal did not go as far as that. If nothing else, he wanted to get away. No matter the cost, he wanted to not be there any more. He reached out with his arms and grabbed detritus, rocks, small branches, and dirt, pulling them toward himself so he could pull himself away. With adrenaline bursting through his system, he had just started to inch away from the bestial pervert when his weight was removed from on top of the younger boy's body.

He jolted forward, not caring where he was going, not caring what direction or how far, and he didn't stop until his actions began to do nothing more than splash water up onto the 'shore'.

Sobbing, barely breathing, and largely incoherent, he turned over and waited for his doom. He could go no further; depriving the enemy of his goal was all Jackson could hope to achieve any more.

He then proceeded to watch as Ralph beat a bloodied and pulpy meat-sack into the ground. Kyle was no longer recognizable as something that once lived, let alone was once human. Ralph continued to destroy the previously threatening figure, transforming it into something a cannibal would not even desire. The blood and gore, viscous tissues and pulp, mixed with the rotting dirt and began soaking into the black marshy topsoil.

Shaking, Ralph set down the bloodied, dented digging tool and took a deep breath. 'This was the worst of days,' he thought. There wasn't anything he could do about it now. He was a killer. He turned hesitantly to Jackson, hoping beyond hope that his innocent little brother hadn't lost his innocence.

It seemed he had. Jackson's eyes were wide open in shock. 'Well,' Ralph thought, 'watching your older brother kill someone will do that to you. But then, so will almost getting raped.' He started to Jackson, pity and hesitancy both clear on his face. It was then that he noticed the muck closing around Jackson's shoulders and neck.

"Jackson!" he shouted. "Don't worry, I'll get you out!" He rushed to his brother's side, kneeling quickly to pull his brother out of the muck. He grabbed a fistful of Jackson's shirt and yanked, tearing it slightly. He shifted his grip so that it wouldn't tear further, and attempted to lift slowly and surely, just like their father had taught them to pull weeds from the ground that were prone to tearing. He quickly realized that his strength was not sufficient to pull his little brother out of the mud, and he lost it.

"No!" he screamed. "No, this is NOT going to happen! I won't let it!" He leaned back on his heels, and started beating the ground. "Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!" He slapped Jackson in the face.

He stopped for a moment, took a quick, deep breath, and then turned and ran from the clearing. Jackson's eyes, still wide open in shock, began to move. He felt the sucking mud, slowly descending him into the depths, and began to feel the terror, more sheer horror than he had ever felt before, more than over what Kyle had been attempting, more than he had felt while watching his brother enda person's existence, more than everything.

These three events compounded, the stress and fear and horror and anxiety and terror all came together and bound themselves around Jackson's spirit into a knot of something so strong that he passed out, only to awake moments later as he felt the murk creep past his chin and over his eyes at the same time.

Shaking in his reeking fear, he knew he had been abandoned. Rescued, yes, but abandoned by that same rescuer, that self-same person who proceeded to beat a human being until they died. All he wanted was to be home. He didn't want to deal with all of this anymore; he simply wanted to safety of his home, of his room, of his bed.

He closed his eyes and slept.

A/N: Sorry again for the split chapter. I'm trying to write days as chapters. I might rewrite things if that doesn't turn out to work as well as I'd hoped.