Jackson woke up curled into his brother, breathing in the rank scent of rotting dirt. Jackson scooted away from his brother and pulled his blanket off of himself, slithered out of the bed and dropped to the floor.

He cracked open his door and looked around for any observers. When he discovered none, he crossed the hallway into the bathroom, and cranked the hot water, washing the dirt and rooted seedlings from his body. When all his crevices were cleaned (as well as he could clean them, at least), he crossed back into his and Ralph's room.

"Ralph," he began, shaking his brother, "it's time to wake up."

Ralph blearily looked at his little brother, and mumbled something in his pseudo-sleep. Jackson shook his head, smiling, and shook him again, harder this time. "I want to know what happened, Ralph. Why were you so upset yesterday?"

Ralph shot up, staring intently at Jackson's face for a few moments. Jackson watched as a plethora of emotions rushed through the visage before him, unable to identify a single one. "Ralph, I ... "

Ralph cut him off, and said, "Before I answer any of your questions, I need to know what you think happened yesterday."

Jackson frowned. "Well." He paused, tilted his head and squinted. "Kyle was going to hurt me. And then you saved me. And then I was drowning. Then I fell asleep, and woke up to you, crying. That doesn't make any sense. But it's what I.." He paused again, searching for a word. "Saw? Observed? Experienced? Something similar to all those words, but not them, I think."

Ralph sat, open mouthed, in shock. "What I experienced was not so different. He was hurting you, I killed him, then the mud was sucking you in. I had gone to get a branch so I could pry you out, but when I came back, you were gone!"

Jackson's eyes widened, and said, "Where did I go? How did I get there? Was I sleep walking? What about Hulking? Could I have done that, and then sleepwalked home? Why don't I remember walking back?"

Ralph barely considered it before denying its possibility. "No, there was a bunch of mud missing as well. Like you had pulled up the mud that had been closest to you. So if you had pulled yourself back and wandered back, you would have left a trail, there would have been mud covering any branches you brushed against, and considering that there wasn't any mud on any branches at all, and the fact that I was gone for less than ten seconds, you couldn't have gotten out and away without me at least hearing it- You."

Jackson pursed his lips and thought some more. This made absolutely no sense. He climbed up on the bed next to his brother and sat down. Directly in dirt. "Oh gross," he exclaimed. "We slept in this?"

Ralph nodded, "Yeah, there's a lot more too." He threw back his blanket and uncovered a bedspread, unevenly covered with several inches of dirt.

Jackson stared, unnerved. "Even if I was silently and amazingly dexterously running through the woods, to get far enough ahead that you couldn't hear me and also not touching any branches, how much mud was missing?"

Ralph scoffed at the poorly formed question, but he understood the intent. "I dunno. It seemed like you could have stood knee deep in the hole it made, and it was maybe a meter in diameter? Sloping sides.. We need to do some math. You're clean though. How much mud did you wash down the drain?"

Jackson paled. He hated guessing on calculations, and that's exactly what they'd be doing. "I don't know," he complained. "Maybe a liter? I hate estimating! I hate Fermi! He's the absolute worst! If you can't be precise then there's no point doing math!"

Ralph nodded, conciliatory. "I know you feel that way, but we have to figure this out. Get that big brain of yours going."

Jackson nodded, and instructed his brother to gather the dirt on the bed, as best he could, into a bucket.

He sat down at his desk, and thumbed through his files to the geometry section, slid out the calculations for the volume of shapes, and said. "You described it as being knee deep to me, a meter in diameter, and sloping to the edges. Right?" Ralph grunted affirmation, trying to hold his breath against the repulsive dirt.

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"That's alike enough to a cone for me." He slid his eyes down the page, quickly locating the equation on question, and then transcribing it to a free sheet of paper. "Since we want numbers as close to reality as possible, we'll only guess on the variables we know the least about, and we'll do the calculation several times, with slightly different numbers each time, so we can make a sort of continuum of answers. In the meantime, you measure the dirt's volume and add the liter from the shower. And don't forget to add water. This dirt was mud."

Ralph continued nodding throughout, and then went into the kitchen to locate a dustpan and broom.

Jackson grimaced. He really did hate estimating. There was something so. Not clean, not pure. Something ideologically unpleasant about estimating. He shivered. It was better to get it done fast, then.

He looked over the calculation. V= pi*radius squared*height/3. Thinking out loud, he started muttering numbers and variables, writing down the parts of it, stopping at first to measure the height of his knees, and finally coming to the first conclusion. V=~eighty-seven liters.

Jackson stood up, taking the paper into the bathroom. "Your first theory makes sense. I must have found my own way out of the swamp. The math says we should have around eighty-seven liters of mud. How much do we actually have?" He asked Ralph.

Ralph nodded thoughtfully. I only filled up a single bucket with the dirt. It's a five gallon bucket, so.. Do you know the conversion rates?"

Jackson shook his head, but it was easy enough to look up. They had, at most, twenty liters of dirt. "Let's add water until it become's the consistency of the marsh?" Jackson suggested. They added four liters of water until it reached the consistency of the marsh.

"Hmm. Well, there you have it. Apparently your tracking skills are not up to par any longer." Jackson laughed.

Ralph, a furious look on his face, walked out of the bathroom and sulked in the front room for the next hour.

Jackson cleaned up the mess, and stripped the sheets off the bed for cleaning.

Afterwards, he followed where his brother had gone and sat down next to him. "I'm sorry," he apologized. "I know it was really bad for you. I think I was trying to lighten the mood. We still need to figure out what happened."

Jackson's sorry attempt to apologize fell flat, and Ralph said so, "You can't create levity when making fun of someone about something they feel bad about". He sighed, squirreled away his emotions, and continued with the prior conversation.

"We have about a third of the mud from the marsh in our room. We don't know where the rest is, or how you lost it, and that's the most relevant detail. What should we tell Mama and Papa?" Ralph guided the string of conversation.

"If there's no way we can discover what actually happened with what we know right now, then I guess we should focus on something else," Jackson acquiesced. "And since we don't know what happened, can't we just tell them that? Someone attacked us in the woods. We ran away and barely escaped. You stayed behind to fight him?"

Ralph nodded, "That would explain why you got back first. But how did you get inside without being noticed? And why were we in the woods in the first place? And why was I crying?"

Jackson's eyes closed as he thought. Then he sat forward and exclaimed, "You thought I had died!"

Ralph looked at him steadily. "So? You don't have to..."

Jackson grinned, "It's the best explanation, right? I was running away from 'whoever it was', we got separated when you tried to distract him, and I went home, leaving a trail leading deeper into the marsh. You searched for me for hours, but you couldn't find me, while I had made it home already, climbed through a window, and fallen asleep due to sheer exhaustion!"

Ralph nodded slowly, beginning to smile. "And you climbed through the window in the first place because you were so tired that you didn't want to bother cleaning off, which you knew they'd make you do if you came in the front door!"

Jackson grinned at his brother. "Done." They shook on it, went over the story several more times, and then went to the kitchen to eat some food.