fic: jungle rot (lost)
jungle rot
lost. she said, “this place is death,” and after, she died; after, she met a man - he said his name was jacob. charlotte; charlotte/jacob, charlotte/dan. rated pg-13. 2914 words.
notes: IDEK what this is, lol. um, somewhere, somehow, fated_addiction is responsible for this. spoilers generally through the series.
it’s the place that’s said to break
(the lighthouse, interpol)
The first thing she recognizes is the color green. The last thing she can recall seeing is the same. There is green, that impossible verdant shade too sharply hued to be anything but alive.
You never can imagine in full detail what it is you think your personal death will be, and as an extension of that, you can never fully imagine what it will mean to grow old. Maybe that is the most disappointing aspect of death, Charlotte thinks - how incredibly unfinished everything now feels.
In one moment she had blinked and in the next her vision had begun to swim - green, all that green around her, around them - then nothing. Perhaps Daniel had called her name.
Perhaps not.
“Charlotte,” Jacob says, “it’s getting dark.”
He isn’t a real man, and she knows this, and at some point, somewhere after the beginning and after the end (and no one is supposed to know what comes after the end, eyes slip to close, coins left for the ferryman) she ceased to be a real woman.
But first:
“You’re home,” he said. They were the first words he spoke to her, the first words after she had grit out, “where am I?” a heavy emphasis on the I, unnecessary, who else would she speak of.
She could still taste the stretch of blood along the back of her throat, feel the burn of it in her sinuses, head still aching.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” she said, the flat of her hand pressed firm against her forehead.
The man did not approach her. He stood still on slightly higher ground than she sat, his figure at ease among the stalks of green and roughened bark of the trees.
“Where am I?” she asked, quieter this time, her eyes closed. The pain in her head had begun to subside and she was unsure she liked the inference she had begun to draw. Her eyes flashed back open. “Where is everyone else? They left me? They bloody left me, eh?”
“You will find,” the man said, and he took a step forward. A branch cracked under his feet; she realized they were bare. Charlotte remained on her knees and locked up. “That it was you, in fact, who left them.”
Charlotte’s hand dropped to her side. “Oh my god,” she said, “you killed me.”
The man chuckled. “I had nothing to do with that,” he said, almost gently, belying the laughter that had come before.
Charlotte sneered. “Where’s my choir of angels then? The pearly gates? Pretty damn sure you’re the furthest thing from Jesus fucking Christ I ever seen, am I right?”
“You’re not wrong,” he said. He paused. “It doesn’t work that way here.”
“What way is that?”
“Passage on, to what you consider the afterlife. Heaven.”
“I have to remain here.”
“For now.”
Charlotte sighed and fell back, her legs sprawled out on either side of her and dirt etched into the lines of her palms. “But I am dead.”
The man said nothing.
“But. But I can’t be. I can’t be dead. I mean, I’m still - I still hurt, I hurt sodding everywhere, and that’s not supposed to happen, it wouldn’t happen if I were dead, and, and if my body, if I am here, then what about Daniel - what about - what’s there - I,” she stopped.
The man crouched down and looked her in the eye. “You are dead,” he said, “but you are here.”
Charlotte slapped him in the face.
She used to work around those who would dig up bones and dust the earth from the human remains. Some tribes decorate their dead. Everyone knows of the Egyptians. She spent a year in Egypt and she thinks she hated the pyramids, but now she can’t remember, she doesn’t know why she would hate the pyramids, and if she thinks on the subject long enough - hot baked island sun and the granules of sand that manages to find and close each and every pore - she cannot even remember what they looked like, short of their obvious and implicit geometric shape.
Charlotte never thought of the dead as a forgetful breed. But this is misleading, and she knows this; she has become clumsy with fact patterns and the conclusions to be reached.
She always thought of the dead as the buried, as the material for her work and research. She never thought of the dead as cognizant, and maybe this is a mistake in reasoning as well.
Who’s to say this is even real?
This man - “my name is Jacob,” he had told her, and she had not bothered introducing herself in kind - is everywhere, a constant companion, the two of them at the end of the world. He is content with quiet whereas she finds herself restless, in need of noise and conversation.
“You’re not a bloody priest, are you?” she sneers at one point.
The man smiles. “I am not.” His eyes are kind, she thinks; his mouth is not.
“I’ll never see them again, will I,” she says one night. Jacob stares at the fire in front of them.
“That young man was in love with you,” he says instead.
Charlotte idly throws another stick onto the fire, too small to make any real difference, and it is immediately consumed by the flames. “What, you used to watch? Pervert.”
The sun can still burn her body, and it does - pale skin cooked pink, new freckles cropping up to consume her body.
She takes it upon herself to challenge him. She calls it boredom, frustration, an amalgam of both, and one day she lays naked on the beach.
When he approaches, Jacob seemingly takes no notice of her appearance.
“I’m pretty sure the Greeks used to tell tales like this one,” she mumbles. Out of the corner of her eye she can see the bottom half of his legs as he sits. “God of the dead holding a young and fair maiden captive.”
Jacob squints as he gazes out over the ocean.
“I would hardly call you a fair maiden.” Charlotte snorts, does not even bother to feign offense. They sit in silence and the sun begins to wane, a sunset considered.
“Gets cold at night,” he finally says. “This time of year, gets a little cold. Might want to get dressed.”
“What time of year might that be?” she asks lazily, her arms stretched up towards the sky, the muscles behind her shoulders pulled to pop.
“This one,” he says. And she catches him then, or maybe he intended that she catch him and this is all just a trap, and she is the one caught, but his eyes take in the taut stretch of her body and stop at the closed and dark place between her legs, her thighs pressed together.
A new flush greets her reddened chest.
“I saw a boy in the jungle,” she tells him.
“No one else is here,” he says.
“Liar,” she scoffs.
She does not know what he is, man or monster, apparition, same as herself, whatever she is. He never touches her, he never makes a reach for her, and it makes her wonder that if he did, his hand would merely reach past her, inside her, no substance to his form.
She remembers the first day, if there is an order to this things, and when she slapped him. Rough skin had met her own hand and she had felt rather than heard the bite and click of his teeth as her palm smacked against his cheek.
A boy tried to wake her up in the green.
Dan, Dan, Daniel Faraday, white shirt, rolled shirtsleeves, a skinny black tie, a skinny little frame, mop of dark hair, a beard, Daniel Faraday, he had a name, he had a face, his face, what did his face look like -
“Have you ever thought about leaving the island?” she asks.
“I have left the island,” is his answer.
“But you came back,” she says flatly.
“Yes,” he says, takes a pause. “I came back.”
“You didn’t like it out there,” Charlotte says, the same lack of inflection to craft the statement into a question. He neither nods nor shakes his head; he only gestures his head to the right, towards her and he stares at her openly only she is unsure what he is showing her.
“It was nice,” he finally says, and she blinks - then nothing; he turns away.
“Was it always just you here?” she asks as she follows him across the beach. The pastels of sunrise are fading into a solid shade of blue and it is as though she is always tired now, every aching part of her, but sleep refuses to claim her.
“You ask a lot of questions,” he says. He does not look at her as he says it, but he does part a glance over his shoulder after a beat. Charlotte can feel a pout tugging at her bottom lip.
“I - ” she starts, but he holds up a hand.
“I know,” he interrupts, “you were an anthropologist.”
Charlotte’s eyes narrow and she stops in her tracks. “I was actually going to say I was born curious.” He appraises her as though he does not believe that was really what she was going to say, and it makes her feel uncomfortable. She rubs a hand at the back of her neck and it comes away damp with sweat. “But you know what they say about curiosity and cats.”
“No,” Jacob says, “I do not.”
He turns and continues walking. Charlotte rolls her eyes and follows anyway.
“You must get lonely,” she says one day and once upon a time she said the exact same words to the wife of a warlord in western Africa. “Only the dead for company,” she said.
Jacob must not consider it a question because he does not answer. Fair enough, she muses, and the quiet of the cave is near claustrophobic.
“You weren’t lying,” she says, voice uncharacteristically quiet and soft.
“When,” he says. She does not answer him immediately or directly.
“I was raised on this island. I left as a child. But you already knew that, didn’t you? That’s why you said I was home?” He does not respond but instead nudges a log back onto the fire.
“I don’t think I want to be here anymore,” she says.
“That’s not a decision for me to make,” he says. Something snaps inside her and she can taste bile in the back of her throat, pure adrenaline, and if she is dead - dead men tell no tales, dead as a doornail, the dearly departed, this place is death, she said - then how can she still feel this?
“Why not?” she stamps out. Her voice cracks in the middle and she grits her teeth. “I don’t want this. I never wanted this.”
“You wanted to know where you came from,” he says patiently.
“Fuck you,” she says. “You know nothing. You and your fucking cave and your fucking island and you wander around it like you think you’re the second goddamn coming and - ” she takes a shaky breath in, “You’re not real, you can’t be real, I made you up, I made all of this up, and eventually I will wake up because that’s how dreams work, how nightmares are - they have to end, they have to fucking end.”
She finally looks to Jacob, and he sits there still, hands draped over bent knees and she does not understand him, she cannot get a bloody read on him, but she knows, somehow she knows, she has never seen him look this sad.
“This doesn’t end,” he says, and he sounds old, he sounds incredibly old and incredibly tired and Charlotte looks away. For the first time since this began (since she ended), when she first awoke among the green, when she first fell asleep among it, she begins to cry.
Charlotte has never fully understood grief. She has attended numerous funeral proceedings derived from various religious traditions, but they were always strangers placed in the ground. She understands grief even less not that it is herself she is mourning, and her sharp, gasping sobs echo in the cave, but he does not reach for her.
He disappears for awhile, after. When he returns he is no different, she tells herself, and she lets him close the distance between them across the spit of beach.
“Where you get off to?” she asks.
“Doesn’t matter,” he says, amiable and vague.
“Official island business, hmm?”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Other members of the dead for you to attend to?”
He does not answer her.
A boy told her he loved her once only he didn’t tell it to her he told it to them and he said it proud, he wore it like a badge, he wore the word love the same way other people try to wear courage, they try to wear faith, he told them he loved her, he said that he loved her, and she cannot remember, she cannot recall, if she ever kissed him, if she ever kissed him even just once.
The rains are the worst. Charlotte does not know how long she has been here, withering in the ether, the space between coming and going, and she does not understand it, but she has come to find so much quiet dulled misery in this life after death.
Her teeth chatter.
“What did I do to deserve this?” she screeches, the sound muted by the rain.
“Nothing,” he says.
In her mind she wants to slap him. This is what she plans, and she can almost imagine the feel of the sharp sting that will linger along the palm of her hand. Instead she kisses him, she rises up on the tips of her toes and smashes her mouth to his. Rainwater sluices around their mouths, between them as her lips part for air she is terrifyingly aware she does not need. Jacob grabs her wrist tight and holds it between their bodies, her elbow bent awkwardly, as though aware of her original intentions.
He kisses her back. She doesn’t know what he is, but he kisses her back - he pulls at her hair and his eyes remain open, and even now, hands and mouth brutal and unforgiving, malice remains absent.
It is a more animalistic coupling than anything she has ever experienced. He pushes her body face down into the dirt, the mud, and a heavy gasp expands her chest, heart thudding against her ribcage. Her jeans are soaking wet and he yanks them roughly past her hips, her entire body jerking with the force and she almost impales her hand on a broken twig as she scrambles for purchase. His hands are huge and dirty, everywhere; they cover the pale expanse of her belly and the diminished curve of her hip, the ribs that poke beneath near translucent skin.
Her knees sink into the mud when he pushes into her, no prelude, just brute force, and the noise she makes does not sound human.
There is too much rain and she cannot keep her eyes open against it, against him as he moves, and the earth is too wet, too slick for her to successfully push back, to push in tandem with him, and instead she adopts his inertia as her own as he pushes her deeper into the ground.
Charlotte can taste dirt; his mouth open and biting at her back he can taste her.
Her body is cold under him and she comes hard and unexpected, elbows first shaking and then giving out under their combined weight, her breasts flattened and sore, his solid mass bearing down on top of her.
After, she wades out into the ocean. Her entire body is coated in mud, a thick swath of it a stripe across her neck while smeared handprints decorate her torso, her thighs. She aches in a swollen and heavy way between her legs.
She wades out, the surf slapping at her knees and then her hips, higher.
She wades further, water at her chest and then her neck. She spits the water out and her feet can barely touch the ocean floor. She keeps her eyes closed and does not stop. Deeper, deeper, her arms raise under the water, too deep to break the surface.
Then nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
(Later he will find her on the beach, arms and legs crossed, folded in on herself. He opens her up, prying arms and legs apart, skin still damp from the sea and sticky with salt. He will take her again, his mouth slow and wet, gentle, against her flesh, his body still dark with the dirt of the jungle).
There is a boy in the jungle and she has seen him twice now.
There was a boy in the jungle and she thinks he loved her.
She cannot remember ever loving him.
Are you dead too? she asks into the warm bend of muscle and skin behind his shoulder.
Yes, he breathes into the dirt.
She closes her eyes against his back. She is finding it difficult to recall that boy’s name who held her body in the green.
It won’t be long now, he says.
She opens her eyes. Then nothing.
fin.
lost. she said, “this place is death,” and after, she died; after, she met a man - he said his name was jacob. charlotte; charlotte/jacob, charlotte/dan. rated pg-13. 2914 words.
notes: IDEK what this is, lol. um, somewhere, somehow, fated_addiction is responsible for this. spoilers generally through the series.
it’s the place that’s said to break
(the lighthouse, interpol)
The first thing she recognizes is the color green. The last thing she can recall seeing is the same. There is green, that impossible verdant shade too sharply hued to be anything but alive.
You never can imagine in full detail what it is you think your personal death will be, and as an extension of that, you can never fully imagine what it will mean to grow old. Maybe that is the most disappointing aspect of death, Charlotte thinks - how incredibly unfinished everything now feels.
In one moment she had blinked and in the next her vision had begun to swim - green, all that green around her, around them - then nothing. Perhaps Daniel had called her name.
Perhaps not.
“Charlotte,” Jacob says, “it’s getting dark.”
He isn’t a real man, and she knows this, and at some point, somewhere after the beginning and after the end (and no one is supposed to know what comes after the end, eyes slip to close, coins left for the ferryman) she ceased to be a real woman.
But first:
“You’re home,” he said. They were the first words he spoke to her, the first words after she had grit out, “where am I?” a heavy emphasis on the I, unnecessary, who else would she speak of.
She could still taste the stretch of blood along the back of her throat, feel the burn of it in her sinuses, head still aching.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” she said, the flat of her hand pressed firm against her forehead.
The man did not approach her. He stood still on slightly higher ground than she sat, his figure at ease among the stalks of green and roughened bark of the trees.
“Where am I?” she asked, quieter this time, her eyes closed. The pain in her head had begun to subside and she was unsure she liked the inference she had begun to draw. Her eyes flashed back open. “Where is everyone else? They left me? They bloody left me, eh?”
“You will find,” the man said, and he took a step forward. A branch cracked under his feet; she realized they were bare. Charlotte remained on her knees and locked up. “That it was you, in fact, who left them.”
Charlotte’s hand dropped to her side. “Oh my god,” she said, “you killed me.”
The man chuckled. “I had nothing to do with that,” he said, almost gently, belying the laughter that had come before.
Charlotte sneered. “Where’s my choir of angels then? The pearly gates? Pretty damn sure you’re the furthest thing from Jesus fucking Christ I ever seen, am I right?”
“You’re not wrong,” he said. He paused. “It doesn’t work that way here.”
“What way is that?”
“Passage on, to what you consider the afterlife. Heaven.”
“I have to remain here.”
“For now.”
Charlotte sighed and fell back, her legs sprawled out on either side of her and dirt etched into the lines of her palms. “But I am dead.”
The man said nothing.
“But. But I can’t be. I can’t be dead. I mean, I’m still - I still hurt, I hurt sodding everywhere, and that’s not supposed to happen, it wouldn’t happen if I were dead, and, and if my body, if I am here, then what about Daniel - what about - what’s there - I,” she stopped.
The man crouched down and looked her in the eye. “You are dead,” he said, “but you are here.”
Charlotte slapped him in the face.
She used to work around those who would dig up bones and dust the earth from the human remains. Some tribes decorate their dead. Everyone knows of the Egyptians. She spent a year in Egypt and she thinks she hated the pyramids, but now she can’t remember, she doesn’t know why she would hate the pyramids, and if she thinks on the subject long enough - hot baked island sun and the granules of sand that manages to find and close each and every pore - she cannot even remember what they looked like, short of their obvious and implicit geometric shape.
Charlotte never thought of the dead as a forgetful breed. But this is misleading, and she knows this; she has become clumsy with fact patterns and the conclusions to be reached.
She always thought of the dead as the buried, as the material for her work and research. She never thought of the dead as cognizant, and maybe this is a mistake in reasoning as well.
Who’s to say this is even real?
This man - “my name is Jacob,” he had told her, and she had not bothered introducing herself in kind - is everywhere, a constant companion, the two of them at the end of the world. He is content with quiet whereas she finds herself restless, in need of noise and conversation.
“You’re not a bloody priest, are you?” she sneers at one point.
The man smiles. “I am not.” His eyes are kind, she thinks; his mouth is not.
“I’ll never see them again, will I,” she says one night. Jacob stares at the fire in front of them.
“That young man was in love with you,” he says instead.
Charlotte idly throws another stick onto the fire, too small to make any real difference, and it is immediately consumed by the flames. “What, you used to watch? Pervert.”
The sun can still burn her body, and it does - pale skin cooked pink, new freckles cropping up to consume her body.
She takes it upon herself to challenge him. She calls it boredom, frustration, an amalgam of both, and one day she lays naked on the beach.
When he approaches, Jacob seemingly takes no notice of her appearance.
“I’m pretty sure the Greeks used to tell tales like this one,” she mumbles. Out of the corner of her eye she can see the bottom half of his legs as he sits. “God of the dead holding a young and fair maiden captive.”
Jacob squints as he gazes out over the ocean.
“I would hardly call you a fair maiden.” Charlotte snorts, does not even bother to feign offense. They sit in silence and the sun begins to wane, a sunset considered.
“Gets cold at night,” he finally says. “This time of year, gets a little cold. Might want to get dressed.”
“What time of year might that be?” she asks lazily, her arms stretched up towards the sky, the muscles behind her shoulders pulled to pop.
“This one,” he says. And she catches him then, or maybe he intended that she catch him and this is all just a trap, and she is the one caught, but his eyes take in the taut stretch of her body and stop at the closed and dark place between her legs, her thighs pressed together.
A new flush greets her reddened chest.
“I saw a boy in the jungle,” she tells him.
“No one else is here,” he says.
“Liar,” she scoffs.
She does not know what he is, man or monster, apparition, same as herself, whatever she is. He never touches her, he never makes a reach for her, and it makes her wonder that if he did, his hand would merely reach past her, inside her, no substance to his form.
She remembers the first day, if there is an order to this things, and when she slapped him. Rough skin had met her own hand and she had felt rather than heard the bite and click of his teeth as her palm smacked against his cheek.
A boy tried to wake her up in the green.
Dan, Dan, Daniel Faraday, white shirt, rolled shirtsleeves, a skinny black tie, a skinny little frame, mop of dark hair, a beard, Daniel Faraday, he had a name, he had a face, his face, what did his face look like -
“Have you ever thought about leaving the island?” she asks.
“I have left the island,” is his answer.
“But you came back,” she says flatly.
“Yes,” he says, takes a pause. “I came back.”
“You didn’t like it out there,” Charlotte says, the same lack of inflection to craft the statement into a question. He neither nods nor shakes his head; he only gestures his head to the right, towards her and he stares at her openly only she is unsure what he is showing her.
“It was nice,” he finally says, and she blinks - then nothing; he turns away.
“Was it always just you here?” she asks as she follows him across the beach. The pastels of sunrise are fading into a solid shade of blue and it is as though she is always tired now, every aching part of her, but sleep refuses to claim her.
“You ask a lot of questions,” he says. He does not look at her as he says it, but he does part a glance over his shoulder after a beat. Charlotte can feel a pout tugging at her bottom lip.
“I - ” she starts, but he holds up a hand.
“I know,” he interrupts, “you were an anthropologist.”
Charlotte’s eyes narrow and she stops in her tracks. “I was actually going to say I was born curious.” He appraises her as though he does not believe that was really what she was going to say, and it makes her feel uncomfortable. She rubs a hand at the back of her neck and it comes away damp with sweat. “But you know what they say about curiosity and cats.”
“No,” Jacob says, “I do not.”
He turns and continues walking. Charlotte rolls her eyes and follows anyway.
“You must get lonely,” she says one day and once upon a time she said the exact same words to the wife of a warlord in western Africa. “Only the dead for company,” she said.
Jacob must not consider it a question because he does not answer. Fair enough, she muses, and the quiet of the cave is near claustrophobic.
“You weren’t lying,” she says, voice uncharacteristically quiet and soft.
“When,” he says. She does not answer him immediately or directly.
“I was raised on this island. I left as a child. But you already knew that, didn’t you? That’s why you said I was home?” He does not respond but instead nudges a log back onto the fire.
“I don’t think I want to be here anymore,” she says.
“That’s not a decision for me to make,” he says. Something snaps inside her and she can taste bile in the back of her throat, pure adrenaline, and if she is dead - dead men tell no tales, dead as a doornail, the dearly departed, this place is death, she said - then how can she still feel this?
“Why not?” she stamps out. Her voice cracks in the middle and she grits her teeth. “I don’t want this. I never wanted this.”
“You wanted to know where you came from,” he says patiently.
“Fuck you,” she says. “You know nothing. You and your fucking cave and your fucking island and you wander around it like you think you’re the second goddamn coming and - ” she takes a shaky breath in, “You’re not real, you can’t be real, I made you up, I made all of this up, and eventually I will wake up because that’s how dreams work, how nightmares are - they have to end, they have to fucking end.”
She finally looks to Jacob, and he sits there still, hands draped over bent knees and she does not understand him, she cannot get a bloody read on him, but she knows, somehow she knows, she has never seen him look this sad.
“This doesn’t end,” he says, and he sounds old, he sounds incredibly old and incredibly tired and Charlotte looks away. For the first time since this began (since she ended), when she first awoke among the green, when she first fell asleep among it, she begins to cry.
Charlotte has never fully understood grief. She has attended numerous funeral proceedings derived from various religious traditions, but they were always strangers placed in the ground. She understands grief even less not that it is herself she is mourning, and her sharp, gasping sobs echo in the cave, but he does not reach for her.
He disappears for awhile, after. When he returns he is no different, she tells herself, and she lets him close the distance between them across the spit of beach.
“Where you get off to?” she asks.
“Doesn’t matter,” he says, amiable and vague.
“Official island business, hmm?”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Other members of the dead for you to attend to?”
He does not answer her.
A boy told her he loved her once only he didn’t tell it to her he told it to them and he said it proud, he wore it like a badge, he wore the word love the same way other people try to wear courage, they try to wear faith, he told them he loved her, he said that he loved her, and she cannot remember, she cannot recall, if she ever kissed him, if she ever kissed him even just once.
The rains are the worst. Charlotte does not know how long she has been here, withering in the ether, the space between coming and going, and she does not understand it, but she has come to find so much quiet dulled misery in this life after death.
Her teeth chatter.
“What did I do to deserve this?” she screeches, the sound muted by the rain.
“Nothing,” he says.
In her mind she wants to slap him. This is what she plans, and she can almost imagine the feel of the sharp sting that will linger along the palm of her hand. Instead she kisses him, she rises up on the tips of her toes and smashes her mouth to his. Rainwater sluices around their mouths, between them as her lips part for air she is terrifyingly aware she does not need. Jacob grabs her wrist tight and holds it between their bodies, her elbow bent awkwardly, as though aware of her original intentions.
He kisses her back. She doesn’t know what he is, but he kisses her back - he pulls at her hair and his eyes remain open, and even now, hands and mouth brutal and unforgiving, malice remains absent.
It is a more animalistic coupling than anything she has ever experienced. He pushes her body face down into the dirt, the mud, and a heavy gasp expands her chest, heart thudding against her ribcage. Her jeans are soaking wet and he yanks them roughly past her hips, her entire body jerking with the force and she almost impales her hand on a broken twig as she scrambles for purchase. His hands are huge and dirty, everywhere; they cover the pale expanse of her belly and the diminished curve of her hip, the ribs that poke beneath near translucent skin.
Her knees sink into the mud when he pushes into her, no prelude, just brute force, and the noise she makes does not sound human.
There is too much rain and she cannot keep her eyes open against it, against him as he moves, and the earth is too wet, too slick for her to successfully push back, to push in tandem with him, and instead she adopts his inertia as her own as he pushes her deeper into the ground.
Charlotte can taste dirt; his mouth open and biting at her back he can taste her.
Her body is cold under him and she comes hard and unexpected, elbows first shaking and then giving out under their combined weight, her breasts flattened and sore, his solid mass bearing down on top of her.
After, she wades out into the ocean. Her entire body is coated in mud, a thick swath of it a stripe across her neck while smeared handprints decorate her torso, her thighs. She aches in a swollen and heavy way between her legs.
She wades out, the surf slapping at her knees and then her hips, higher.
She wades further, water at her chest and then her neck. She spits the water out and her feet can barely touch the ocean floor. She keeps her eyes closed and does not stop. Deeper, deeper, her arms raise under the water, too deep to break the surface.
Then nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
(Later he will find her on the beach, arms and legs crossed, folded in on herself. He opens her up, prying arms and legs apart, skin still damp from the sea and sticky with salt. He will take her again, his mouth slow and wet, gentle, against her flesh, his body still dark with the dirt of the jungle).
There is a boy in the jungle and she has seen him twice now.
There was a boy in the jungle and she thinks he loved her.
She cannot remember ever loving him.
Are you dead too? she asks into the warm bend of muscle and skin behind his shoulder.
Yes, he breathes into the dirt.
She closes her eyes against his back. She is finding it difficult to recall that boy’s name who held her body in the green.
It won’t be long now, he says.
She opens her eyes. Then nothing.
fin.