After Before and After

Phase 4: Chapter 36

"Shit" Jack Merridew cursed as he urgently paced back and forth across his hotel room floor that Friday night. "Shit!" he added more forcefully.

"Relax" Roger Conroy responded boredly from where he casually sat in the center of Jack's bed.

"Relax?" Jack questioned aggressively, turning abruptly to look at the other boy. "You're telling me to relax? How the fuck do you expect me to do that knowing what's gonna happen to us when its our turn, huh? Relax, my ass" he spat.

"Sit down, you're stressing me out" Roger requested rather flatly.

"No" Jack quickly answered, "were we in the same courtroom today, you and I? Did you not see the way that uptight prosecutor hussy made one stupid rivalry Larry had look like a trial run for murder? What happened to Captain Benson aside, Larry was one of the good ones! His record is cleaner than most of ours. Can you imagine what that pretentious bitch has in store for me and you?" Jack continued to panic.

"No" Roger answered simply, "and I'd rather not imagine it."

"Ignoring it isn't going to make it go away, Rog" Jack insisted, "she's going to obliterate us. We have no chance of getting anything less than five years, I'm sure of it. She's going to eat us alive. She's a cannibal; an evil, vindictive, hungry canibal."

"Don't give credit before its earned, Merridew" Roger sighed as he said. "We were thirteen. Even if she does win, they're not gonna put us in prison. Trust me. Worse case scenario, we get sentenced to one of those cozy psychiatric facilities with shower heads that don't come off the walls and windows that don't open and flavored jello on demand and TVs in every room and copies of every board game ever made."

"I can't be locked up, Rog, not in jail or anywhere else" Jack insisted nervously, "I just can't."

"Relax, lover boy, I'm sure they'll let Langley visit you in the psych ward. They'll even let you touch each other, not like in jail" Roger tried to assure him.

"Doesn't matter" Jack turned away with a dismissive hand wave. "Ralph and I aren't--"

Roger raised his eyebrows as he waited for Jack to finish his sentence, but he didn't. Instead, he turned back around to look at Roger.

"Aren't what?" Roger finally prompted.

"Aren't anything" Jack finished, "we aren't anything anymore. That isn't why I can't lose this fucking trial, man. I can't do the whole lock-and-key, constant supervision, the same breakfast at the same time every morning shit, alright? I won't be some caged animal in a zoo pen, no matter how many fucking TVs there are."

Jack wandered around less urgently now in the quiet moments before Roger spoke. "You miss it."

"What?" Jack stopped and turned back to the other.

"The island" Roger clarified, "you miss it. Total freedom, no rules, no adults, nobody to tell you what to do, no expectations, no consequences."

"Don't you?" Jack found the strength to ask, knowing that in doing so he was admitting that Roger was right, that he was saying the one thing he never thought he could in this version of the world.

"Sure, I guess" Roger responded with a shrug. "But I don't miss barely surviving, and having no idea if we were going to eat each day or not. You gotta admit, it was pretty lonely out there."

"It's pretty lonely here too" Jack replied before he had a chance to think it through. And as soon as he saw the pitiful look on Roger's face, he regretted it. "Since when do you feel anything, let alone something as trivial as loneliness?" Jack redirected the focus of the conversation.

"I feel things" Roger countered to Jack's surprise, "I just don't care enough to talk about or show it."

Jack wasn't sure what to say, or whether he should say anything at all. So instead he just plopped down onto Paige's bed, across from Roger.

"So what do we do?" Jack wondered aloud.

"Nothing" Roger answered, "there's nothing we can do to stop her from dredging up our records."

Jack sighed in defeat as terror filled his mind. Roger was right. There was nothing they could do, and that terrified him, to know that his life was in someone else's hands.

"You'd really rather still be out there?" Roger broke the silence to ask as he laid down on Jack's bed, staring up at the ceiling of the hotel room.

"I'd rather be lonely than powerless" Jack answered as he laid down too. "And here, I'm both."

"So why end it with Ralph then?"

"What makes you so sure I was the one who ended it?" Jack questioned curiously, turning his head to look at the other lying on the adjacent bed.

Roger turned his head to see Jack too. The former simply raised his eyebrows knowingly.

"He was gonna end it if I didn't" Jack turned back to the ceiling when he answered.

"What gave you that idea?" Roger wondered.

"He won't be able to forgive me, trust me."

"Christ, what'd you do this time?" Roger scoffed almost jokingly. But Jack wasn't laughing.

"Nothing" Jack sighed heavily, "...yet."