Hush

Jack: Fearless fighter

Jack wasn't drowning any more, he stood looking around dumbfounded as he tried to recall what had just happened. He remembered Ace taking him overboard into a scolding hot lake and seeing him in the lake as something unnatural. He had been drowning as Ace dragged him deeper, and blacked out as his body went into shock from the pain of boiling alive. So how then had he come to be standing awake, and not in any pain at all?

'Something ain't right.' He said to himself, alone. The smell of stale air making him pinch his nose, as he stood facing a familiar room. And when the scene before him registered in his confused thought process, he stepped back and shook his head.

'Do you remember?' Ace came from the shadows, and Jack turned to see him, as he had been in the orphanage, a young lad about nineteen years of age, rather handsome and a smile loaded with mischief. Jack's eyes roamed down to his hands, seeing him unarmed then turning back to the scene before him.

'I don't want to.' Jack admitted, 'but I do.' He hadn't the mental capacity at this moment to fight with Ace. His thoughts felt too jumbled.

'You have to watch it happen.' Ace explained casually stepping beside him as though he hadn't just possibly succeeded in drowning Jack.

Jack looked at him. 'What happened up there?' he asked. 'You tried to drown me.'

'I told you I'd get you home, it was a way through and I took the chance, the boiling and drowning part wasn't real.' Ace explained, 'this world, all of it is based on illusions, Jack.' He nodded to the scene. 'Do you really think this is real?'

'No,' Jack replied sombrely, 'but once upon a time, it was.'

They watched silently as a young Jack, seemingly dazed and sleepy pushed open the door to the room and slowly and quietly entered into the darkness where his mother lay sleeping.

'What you did was,' Ace trailed off, watching as young Jack stood by his mother's bedside watching her, a slight sway in his stance as he stared quietly in the dark at his mother's beautiful, serene face deep in sleep.

'It was an accident.' Jack finished, glancing away.

'The action is there.' Ace nodded to the scene, 'if you miss it, it will replay until you witness it all.'

Jack shook his head. 'I don't want to see.'

'If what you say is true,' Ace said quietly, 'about it being an accident, then you know you were not at fault.' His eyes never left the scene.

Young Jack had began murmuring under his breath, too quiet to stir his mother from her sleep, and Jack, as he stood witnessing was unable to stop himself saying the words from his memory, for in that moment his eyes went blank as though he were no longer present as he recited the words of his past.

'I'm sorry Mum. I tried to make them stop, but you keep allowing them to hurt me, you are hurting me. You keep inviting pain into my life, I just don't want pain any more, don't worry, they said it won't hurt much. I drugged you first.' Jack's eyes blinked and he stared at the scene as though he hadn't noticed himself speak the words of his past. He stood rigid with his fists clenched as he saw himself take a pillow and cover his mother's face, so drugged was she that her struggle was weak against his twiggy build, he watched as her fight gave way and her body convulsed once, twice, then stilled, and he continued to hold the pillow over her long after.

'Cruel.' Ace said simply glancing back to Jack. 'But what about your dad?' He didn't seem to care that Jack was crying silently, that his fists were balled so tight his nails cut his palms. 'Your dad was a strange man wasn't he,' Ace offered when Jack said nothing. 'Seemed when you turned eleven he changed, huh.' Ace looked back at the now fading scene of young Jack's memory.