Chapter Text
For the last few days on the island, Roger appeared to have been avoiding him. Lately Maurice only ever caught a glance of him while hunting. And when that was over, and Maurice tried to summon a conversation, Roger squinted at him accusingly before disappearing into the trees.
It very well seemed, Maurice thought glumly, that Roger would rather die than talk to him.
“Why d’you wanna chat with him, anyway?” said Robert, because he didn’t understand. Nobody did. They didn’t understand that people died from loneliness, that if they were to starve Roger of human communication he would die and the hunters would lose their strongest soldier and they’d never catch a pig ever again and the rest of them would all die of actual starvation because Piggy kept eating all the fruit.
Robert had looked at Maurice strangely as he tried to explain this, as did Jack.
“I’m the strongest one,” he protested, paint cracking around his nose.
Maurice considered it. “Well,” he began, then no more, because despite it only being morning, somewhere across the island Ralph was blowing the conch.
Roger came to the meeting, like always, and like everyone else. There was a radius around him that yawned wide and empty, and though it wasn’t really so much wider than the space all the older kids kept for themselves, Maurice was tempted to close it.
He didn’t bother. Lately he’d made a habit of looking like an absolute nutter around Roger in his efforts to rekindle their dwindling relationship, and Maurice was starting to suspect that it was only driving him further away.
“And another thing,” Ralph was saying loudly, over the sound of Jack’s voice already shrill with irritation, “all of you are forbidden from climbing the trees!”
For the first time since the original idea of a beast arose, the littluns raised a bit of an outcry.
“How will we get fruit?” someone whined, clutching onto another arm.
“How will we look for a ship?”
“How will we get sticks and leaves and stuff?”
“What about when it rains?”
Ralph’s brow steadily progressed from slack to taut as he gazed at the circle of flushed, sandy faces glaring back at him. He raised the shell, but it took a stretching moment for the assembly to fall silent.
Jack cleared his throat and reached for the conch, the red lightening from his neck now that he was no longer the only one protesting. “Well, I think—“
“Wait,” said Ralph.
For a second, Jack faltered, before initiating the world’s briefest tug of war that ever was in which he surrendered before his obvious loss could come to fruition. He scoffed at the ground as Ralph, with the conch safely in his arms, easily smoothed away the bafflement from his expression.
“…Alright, listen,” he started, addressing the littluns in particular. He completely missed Piggy’s encouraging nod from the side. “I know you all like to climb trees. You wouldn’t do it so often otherwise. But it’s getting—sort of ridiculous, how often you all need to be rescued.”
Somehow, this was the first Maurice was hearing of it, and by the faces of the rest of the hunters, it seemed so for them, too. Still, he wondered if this little speech included Roger, and conjured up a vision of Ralph rescuing him from a tree like a prince would to a maiden trapped in her tower.
Someone glanced at Maurice then; he hadn’t realised he’d made a noise.
“I wouldn’t be against it at all,” Ralph went on, “if you lot were any good at it. Or if I knew you could get down yourselves. But, anyway, you get hurt too often, and there’s no proper reason for you to go up there in the first place.”
That set the littluns off again.
“But the sticks—!”
“The rain!”
“No, listen!” Ralph raised his voice when a lift of the conch received no answer. While the noise simmered, it didn’t go silent as usual. “What, what did you say just now? No, I mean before. We don’t need the trees to look for a ship, the ship’s the one looking for us. That’s why we light the fire. And the island is full of sticks, they fall down all the time, and so do the leaves. Why do you only care about the shelters now? We use those for the rain, not the trees, they hardly cover anything. Oh, will you—“
Impatient, Jack pulled the conch away, and a startled Ralph let it go with trailing words.
“Right,” Jack said, as he often did, because he’d once confided that he still had no idea how one started a speech. “I think we’re all in agreement that this dumb tree rule is pointless and a waste of time—“
Maurice watched with delight as Ralph’s cheeks went scarlet. Then he peeked over at Roger through the slim gap between the crowd. He seemed wholly unaffected by the entire thing, despite the affront on his tree rights.
“—and we should bring back voting for the rules, like we did at the very start. Honestly, we ought to vote for all the rules, even the old ones. Especially the old ones! We can have a,” Jack searched frantically for the word, “a revolution!”
Piggy made a strange noise. “You mean reformation—“
“Shut up!” Jack grinned wickedly at the others, his excitement reflected back at him in the awed eyes of the littluns. They were on his side. Maurice had once thought it impossible. “Hands up, who thinks we should vote for the rules?”
Ralph gripped Jack’s arm as nearly everyone’s hand shot up, including Roger’s, Maurice noted keenly, save for a few. Without the conch, the chief’s once careful expression now looked childishly irritated.
“All right,” Ralph’s mouth twisted, “fine. But before we vote on the tree thing, can I explain why I’m banning it in the first place?”
“Yes,” Piggy answered faintly.
Jack turned his nose up. “You already did.”
Ralph shook his head, blond hair whacking his face like a lion’s mane. “I wasn’t finished. And Jack, you aren’t the one having to climb trees all the bloody time just to fetch—“ he scowled when the crowd started up again. “For god’s sake! Aren’t you hearing me? I don’t want you lot to get hurt!”
“Ralph’s right!” Piggy was shrieking, leaping to his feet. “Hey! Quiet! Quiet, all of you! Listen to the chief!”
Nobody listened to him, of course, not when Ralph was still yelling from the head of the platform and Jack was echoing him in a strange falsetto, but Maurice enjoyed the effort. That was, until Piggy focused on one of the small boys seated on the log between them, whose wailful bellowing went silent beneath his beady eyes.
“Aren’t you the one who thought you’d broken your arm?” Piggy’s angry, fat cheeks made him look a bit like a particularly vicious edition of Maurice’s dead pug. “Why should you be allowed to go climbing trees like—like a monkey, if you don’t even know how to?”
At this, Maurice leaned over and covered the young boy’s reddening ears. “You’re horrible!” he cried, although he suspected the effect was diluted by his snickering. “He’s only little!”
“Well. Well,” Piggy stammered, “that’s just my point! He’s too little to go around climbing trees and falling off ‘em. What if he does break his arm? What’ll we do then?”
“We can just give him yours,” Maurice sneered, but his voice was drowned out by a weird, blubbering noise that somehow managed to be louder than the rest of them combined. It went on for seconds that prolonged almost into an entire minute, wavering between pitches and dying away with a half-hearted stutter.
In the silence, every eye turned to Jack on the platform. He lowered the conch from his lips and managed to look only marginally embarrassed.
He turned to Ralph and cleared his throat. “So, about the vote—“
“No!” Ralph grabbed the conch with one hand and shoved a surprised Jack away with the other. “I don’t care. I’m sick of it! Nobody is allowed to climb the trees anymore! You voted me for chief, so now you’ll listen to me.”
Even hidden away beneath his dark, green paint, Jack looked very bright. His hand clenched into a fist at his side. “But the—“
“Shut up!” Ralph snapped, but he seemed flustered at his outburst. He looked at the littluns and made a point to speak in a deliberately softer voice, yet it sounded cold. “How often do you come calling for me, or Piggy, or Simon? It’s easily over five times a day. And it’s dangerous, don’t you understand? What’ll happen if you don’t manage to find us before the sun sets?”
They looked at each other nervously. Maurice was noticing that Ralph really liked to ask questions.
“And another thing. What’ll happen if we aren’t able to help you? What if I get hurt, or Simon does? He’s hardly any bigger than you lot.” Maurice caught Simon’s cheeks as they darkened. “I just don’t see the point in it at all!”
“What about the hunters?” Jack demanded suddenly. “You know, some of my hunters use the trees when we—er, hunt. Like Roger, and, and, well.” He crossed his arms. “Like me, sometimes.”
“You don’t bring back meat very often, anyway,” said Ralph, unfazed by Jack’s indignant splutter, “but… oh, all right. I s’pose that’s fair.”
A chorus of gasps rang out.
One small boy had scrambled to approach Ralph, and now tugged tearfully on the bottom edge of his school shirt. “So… he can climb trees, but not us?”
Ralph seemed to sense the outrage his answer would bring the littluns. To his credit, he hardly faltered. “Yes! You’re too young, don’t you understand? Why do you call for me to come rescue you and not another littlun? We’re older. Of course we’ll do things you can’t.”
In the following silence, Jack spoke loudly. “So, the vote—“
“No! There won’t be any voting about it.”
Jack’s expression became the most perplexed it ever had been, which said something. “Wait. But you—“
“I’m telling you I’ve made up my mind!”
With that, Ralph shoved the conch into Jack’s chest, where it nearly tumbled to the floor. He marched a few steps away before whirling on his heel and retrieved the thing again with a jutted lower lip. “And don’t ever blow the conch again, you’re dreadful at it.”
Now, even Piggy seemed surprised. “Wait a minute, Ralph—”
But Ralph was already a distance away from the platform, and Piggy belatedly chose to trot after him.
“Wow,” chirped Maurice, stretching his legs out, bare feet numb against the heat of the sand, feeling satedly entertained. “What now?”
The assembly’s focus searched Jack for an answer. Without the conch, it seemed authority turned, by default, to whoever was left standing.
“Er, I guess,” he seemed baffled yet somewhat pleased, “we ought to do the vote anyway.”
But the conflicting paths of Ralph’s very stern deduction (There won’t be any voting!) and Jack’s awkward proposal seemed to invite too much individual thought and decision.
At once, the littluns all burst into tears.
Relieved of his fire duty but not too eager to return to hunting just yet, Maurice settled by the lagoon’s edge, the water soothingly warm where it crept past his ankle and stretched up to his calves.
He peered intensely at his reflection, eyeing the messy, knotted mess of hair dry like wheat perched atop his head. For a while now, it had been bothering him, getting caught as he raced through the jungle while hunting. If he looked hard enough, he might start to hear his mother’s voice, fond in its disapproval. He felt her cheek pressed against his hair, her lips against his temple.
He continued to stare at his thin, rippling image.
Then something hit his head.
“Ow!” Clattering against the ground was a smooth, white pebble, slightly chipped and reflecting the light in pinkish tones similar to the conch.
Maurice craned his head back, saw nothing but an open sky, then twisted around.
Beneath the shade of the trees overlooking the lagoon stood Roger, unmoving and staring his way.
“Roger! Hullo!” Maurice’s face broke into a startled smile and he waved keenly, before he evaluated the previous few seconds. “…Did you throw something at me?”
Roger squinted. Maurice figured he couldn’t hear from so far away,
Maurice held the thing up. “Did you throw this rock at me?” he repeated slowly, although it was hardly any louder.
Roger continued to stare.
Making up his mind, because he was more enthused by Roger’s voluntary presence than he was bothered by the steady throbbing of his skull, Maurice rose from the pool and quickly approached, Roger keeping very still.
And now they were both staring at each other.
“Hullo,” Maurice said again, stomach silently seizing in horror at how dry it came out. He cleared his throat and held the stone between them. “Did you—“ he began, but the question evaded him.
Not before taking a slow survey of their surroundings, Roger peered at the pale, glassy thing in Maurice’s palm. He looked annoyed.
Maurice quickly shoved it into his pocket. “Nevermind!” As if Roger would admit to lobbing a pebble at his head, who was he kidding? “Did you—did you want anything? Did you want to talk?”
Roger’s expression was indecipherable. “Did you throw something?”
For a moment, Maurice believed him to be a mind reader. “What?”
“Nevermind,” Roger echoed. His dark eyes seemed at war, darting about Maurice’s warming face, but then he shrugged. “Do you want to help me?”
By now, the sun’s heat doubled. It did that sometimes, because of solar flares or whatever. “Sure!”
They were back to staring at each other.
“What with?” Maurice was eager.
Roger grasped his wrist casually. “Come along.”
[ … ]
“He just hasn’t been listening to me at all,” Piggy was saying through what sounded like a pout. “Sometimes I wonder if he hit something on his head. It’s damn strange…”
Through the gaps in the bush, Maurice could see Simon tying the stems of some flowers together. “... that Ralph’s worried. What with the littluns running about…”
Maurice startled slightly when something cool and round was pressed into his hand. A small, uneven pebble.
“Look,” Roger said quietly, closely.
Together, they laid low beneath a bush, hidden by the thicket. Roger cradled his own pebble lightly in the hollow of his palm, bracing his elbow against the ground and bending his forearm to toss it through the clearing. It traced an even arch in the air to where it plonked against Piggy’s pink shoulder, which rose to his ears as he shrieked like a bird. His arms flapped about in surprise.
“Brilliant!” Maurice hushed with awe. Roger didn’t look half as intrigued, but he supposed it wouldn’t be as impressive if you were the one doing it. Roger did impressive things all the time, like climbing trees. Would he teach him now, if Maurice asked nicely?
“Your turn,” Roger nodded.
Eager to impress, Maurice closed one eye, screwing his mouth to the side. He was slightly taller than Roger, enough so that he couldn’t press his arm against the ground as comfortably as he did. Instead, Maurice settled for slightly raising it by his head, ignoring the sharp pricks from the bushes’ small thorns as they brushed by his skin.
The pebble outlined a clear path just as the point of Maurice’s elbow knocked fiercely enough against the ground to send a bloody earthquake reverberating up the skeleton of his arm.
He let out a strangled yelp and clutched it immediately, cursing everything in existence with all the fruitful language he had. Which was, admittedly, not much.
“What was that!?” squawked Piggy’s voice.
Roger was looking at him like he was an idiot.
“Might’ve been a pig,” said Simon, sounding amused.
“I hit my funny bone,” Maurice hissed.
Roger turned away. “It’s fine. Aim for Simon next,” was his suggestion.
Maurice raised his head weakly. “Simon?” Though Simon was not a hunter, he still wore the remains of a choir uniform like them, and to throw rocks at him was basically blasphemous.
“He nicked my bird,” said Roger.
“Your—?”
“You two!” Suddenly Piggy stood above them and trembled with fury. Simon held the bush open with complete disregard for the thorns, peering down at them curiously. “Have you been the ones tossing rocks about and bonking people’s heads with them?”
Maurice glanced at Roger, red-faced.
“Well?”
“No,” said Roger.
Piggy glared at him.
“We were just sitting here,” Maurice tried to bat his eyelashes, except it came out as very slow blinking. Now Roger was glaring at Maurice, and for what?
“Can either of you be serious?” Piggy looked astonishingly tall from this angle, and like he was about to hit something. Or them. “You ain’t fooling anyone! I swear, I’m going to go straight to Ralph and tell him that…”
Roger was slowly sitting up. Maurice wished Piggy were wearing shoes, so that he could tie the laces together and make his escape. As it was, his smelly feet were unshielded, centimetres away from Maurice’s poor, lovely face.
“…tellin’ lies as big as the island—ow, Jesus!”
A pebble fell against the ground, small and glimmering in the light.
Piggy’s face paled before turning a deep red. Maurice didn’t understand what had happened, not until Piggy whirled around and started screeching at the shadows.
At first he suspected Roger of throwing the thing, except he looked just as surprised, and slightly awed. How would he have managed it, anyway? Maurice was fairly sure that you couldn’t throw a rock one way and have it move the other. Unless it moved like a boomerang, which he was skeptical of…
But what did it matter? Maurice would never skip a morning prayer again. Miracles were real.
Now Piggy’s fuel had run out, and he was turning around, the anger clearly fizzling away into his otherwise typical awkwardness. And having him yell at them was one thing, but a conversation was a whole lot worse.
Roger and Maurice shared one look before bolting.
[ … ]
“Alright, stop, I’m tired,” said Maurice, doubling over. Roger did stop, which was nice, but he turned around and bore into him a very judgemental look. Maurice didn’t much like being judged, so he distracted himself by regaining his breath.
Then something began to wail in the distance.
“What the hell’s that,” muttered Roger.
Maurice could conjure only one answer, and at once he was out of breath again. “It’s the beast!”
“Clearly not,” Roger spoke cuttingly, “it’s too high pitched.”
“What else would a beast sound like?”
“Nothing like that. That sounds like a baby.”
“Maybe the beast recently had babies,” Maurice argued. “Or could it be—your bird, or whatever?”
Roger looked offended, the curve of his mouth approaching a scowl. The wailing went on.
“Or not,” Maurice said hastily. “But should we take a look?”
There was a part of him that would really have liked to: for one, it gave him and Roger something to do, and lessened the chances of him marking his departure with his suspicious squinting. And secondly, if it was the beast’s babies, which Maurice was inclined to believe, maybe they could raise them to be really strong and protective of their group, as pets. The babies could even learn to use their spears. And they could battle the beast to the death for them, like the circle of life.
There was another, dimmer piece of Maurice that was frankly a bit terrified. He steadily ignored it.
“We?” Roger echoed flatly.
“Well, yeah,” Maurice frowned, “two brains are bigger than one.”
Roger’s mouth opened, then opened a little less. “…What?”
“What?”
“Do you mean two heads are better than one?”
“That’s the same—“ the wailing intensified. “Oh, do you want to go or not? We don’t have to,” he added, when Roger answered with nothing.
He was battling over something in his head, looking off into the trees towards the sound. The branches, catching the light and reaching like tendrils, loomed over and made his silhouette look shadowy and small.
“If it’s a trap of some sort, I will have my revenge,” Roger said suddenly.
Maurice thought this was very random, but the awful noise was really growing persistent. Like an airhorn, or a particularly grating trumpet. “Er, okay, that’s fine. That’s—good!”
Roger stared at him for a long moment, before pushing his way towards the noise. With no small amount of excitement, Maurice trailed after him, chatting all the time about beasts and storks and babies. There came a point where the wailing stopped, and so did Roger, again looking about himself. The trees closed in, pushing them closely together.
“Are we lost?” asked Maurice.
“No. It’s here,” said Roger.
“What? What?” Maurice frowned into the claustrophobic dark. The sky was distant, and daylight could only brush by them. “I don’t hear it anymore.”
“Listen.”
Maurice strained his ears. He leaned in, grinning when Roger pushed him away by the chest. Then he heard it: the sniffling.
They looked up, and Maurice shrieked. The small face of a littlun peered through wet eyes at the pair of them, his body for the most part obscured by the foliage. His brow was curtained by tangled, dark hair, and his lower lip trembled as he breathed heavily.
“BRING ME DOWN!” he wailed, that horrible noise, bristling all the leaves.
Maurice exchanged a quick glance with Roger, before laughing. “Are you serious, that screaming was all you? How’d you even get up there? That’s…” he eyed the bottom of the tree trunk all the way to the littlun, “wow.”
The littlun continued to sob, loud and ugly. “Bring me down! Please please please, I don’t want to be alone…”
Becoming slightly unsure, Maurice glanced at Roger again, who had crouched down, taken something, and now aimed it at the littlun. In his hand was yet another pebble, delicate and reflecting the light. Maurice found it strange for one in the jungle to be so smooth, when he only ever found the pretty ones by water, but he thought nothing of it as the pebble tapped the littlun’s foot.
The babyish wailing became furious, and Maurice could only watch in complete surprise as the littlun rose before leaping off the tree, colliding hard against him.
Roger idly watched as the two collapsed in a heap.
“YOU’RE EVIL!” the littlun yelled, raising his head and glaring at Roger, cheeks and eyes pink from all his crying. “They were all right! You’re mean and a bully!”
“Why did you jump on me?” Maurice whined, clutching the shoulder he’d landed on. The littlun scrambled away, herding himself back against a tree.
“You—you laughed at me,” he mumbled, sniffing. “You’re both bullies. And mean! And rude! And—“
“Okay,” Maurice interrupted, sitting up with a wince. “Sorry,” he added, before he could stop the habit.
The littlun narrowed his eyes, before scrubbing away his lingering tears with an arm. “I don’t forgive you,” he said petulantly. He looked at Roger. “And I hate you.”
But Roger was frowning up at the tree. “What were you doing up there?” he sounded suspicious.
For some reason, the littlun’s cheeks burned somehow brighter. “…It was the others, they helped me up there, and then… and then… oh, they left me!” He began to cry again.
Maurice was feeling unbelievably awkward as he got to his feet. Roger, on the other hand, appeared uncaring.
“The chief said you weren’t allowed to climb trees anymore.”
“I know,” said the littlun with a heavy lower lip. “But this was important.”
“Why was it important?” demanded Roger.
“What was important?” asked Maurice, lost.
The littlun darted a look between them. “He said… he said…” he shook his head wildly. “I can’t tell you! They’ll hate me! Forever and ever and ever—“
“Uh oh,” said Maurice.
“—oh, but they do hate me! They left me! They left me all alone in the tree and then told me to shut up because of Ralph and then they left me and took my pebbles and now,” the littlun clutched his thin wrist, shaking it aggressively, “AND NOW MY HAND HURTS!”
“Because you jumped out of a tree,” said Roger.
“YOU HIT ME WITH A ROCK!”
“It was a pebble! And it barely even touched your foot!” Maurice leapt to defend Roger’s honour, and hesitated only slightly when the littlun’s scathing glare turned to him. “Oh, c’mon, just—come here, show it to me.”
Despite all his whining, the littlun shuffled forward obediently.
Maurice took and squinted at his hand, small and sunkissed and calloused, likely from climbing trees. It looked a little red, but that was hardly unusual. “Looks fine to me,” he said. “You’re fine! Just dramatic.” He ruffled the littlun’s hair and pushed him around, grinning as the young boy began to complain again.
“Aw—!”
Someone broke suddenly through the thicket behind them.
“Oh,” said Simon, staring wide-eyed at the three of them and particularly at Maurice who had leapt behind the littlun with a scream. “I thought—um, nevermind. Hullo. Have you seen Ralph?”
Roger turned expectantly to the littlun, so Maurice did also.
“Um,” his gaze was fixed on the ground, “no.”
Roger and Simon were both staring blankly at the littlun, so Maurice did also.
“Oh,” said Simon, again. His fingers tousled the small wreath of flowers circling his wrist, and he glanced at the two hunters. “Right, okay.” Then he awkwardly turned to venture back into the darkness.
“Wait!” The littlun stumbled over roots and fallen branches hurriedly. “Wait for me! Don’t leave me with them!”
Again, Simon’s eyes roved over the lot of them, only the taut line of his body betraying his unease. But patiently he held out his hand which the littlun took in his own, and led him towards what Maurice inwardly thought seemed like the beast’s lair for how dark it was.
“What time is it?” he asked once they’d left, canting his head back to squint at the sky. What little light they’d had before had become hardly as strong as a lamplight.
Roger didn’t answer. With the same vicious dislike he’d been glaring at the tree earlier with, he now set fire with his eyes to the path Simon and the littlun had just taken.
“What’s your problem?” Maurice blurted out before he could stop it.
Roger tightened his fists. “I don’t have a problem.”
“Mmmmokay…” There was something nagging at Maurice, incredibly bothersome. He racked his mind for something to say. “Hey, aren’t we supposed to be hunting right now?”
They looked at each other. Elsewhere on the island, the conch was blown.
Calling Ralph nice just because he tended to have a more pleasant expression than the rest of them was like calling the Great War a disagreement. The word hardly resembled the full truth, but it did maybe kind of sort of vaguely paint his picture.
So it was a bit of a surprise when the chief herded everyone around on the sand—not the platform as usual, which was a little further down the beach—and stared down at them all like he was about to pick them off one by one and march them into the water to watch them drown.
“Someone here did this to me,” said Ralph, pointing at a purpling bruise on his jaw. He turned his finger on the seated crowd, and it was strange seeing his anger directed at someone(s) other than Jack, although his gaze lingered in that direction. “One of you. Who was it?”
“It wasn’t me!” Jack yelled out, contrary to what Maurice (and Ralph, judging by his immense look of disbelief) was thinking. “I’ve been with the hunters all day!”
“What were you doing?”
“Hunting.”
“Then where’s your stupid pig?” Ralph demanded.
Jack’s neck flushed red. “It—you called us down here! And anyway, I wouldn’t want to touch your ugly face, not even to punch—“
“Are you stupid? If someone had punched me, I would’ve known who they were. This was from a rock,” hissed Ralph, holding the conch close against his side while he gestured at the bruise with his other hand again. “Thrown from the top of a bloody tree. You were the one who wanted me to let you and your stupid hunters climb those stupid trees in the first place—“
“That doesn’t matter, because it wasn’t me!” Jack eyed his hunters, visibly tallying them. “And it weren’t any of my hunters, either. We were really close. To getting to a pig, I mean, before this useless assembly.”
Maurice ducked his head. Beside him on the ground, Roger was wiping away sand off the pebble he’d thrown at the littlun then retrieved.
“You left the fire unattended,” glared Ralph.
“What?” Again Jack surveyed the hunters as a collective, carving lines upon his brow. “No, I didn’t. There are twelve of us, and only nine were out with me.”
Ralph scowled. “So why was there nobody watching the fire when I went up the mountain?”
Piggy pushed himself up from the ground, gazing at Ralph, who only glanced at him disaffectedly. “Well, Ralph, let’s think about this,” he said.
Ralph snapped, “Think about what?!”
Piggy cautiously took the conch from his severe hold, and cleared his throat. “Who on this island can climb trees without needing your help? Or Simon’s?”
Jack’s mouth opened and closed.
Piggy didn’t wait for an answer. Instead he slowly looked over the crowd, as Ralph had done, except he looked more lame doing it. “Who on this island has thrown rocks at people before?”
Maurice had a feeling about where this was going.
“Who’s the only person in this whole assembly holding a rock?!”
After a brief moment of confusion, every eye turned to Roger.
“What?” asked Maurice, looking around. “What? It wasn’t him, he’s been with me the whole time!” And now they were all looking at him, too.
Piggy cast his finger wildly in their direction. “It was them! Ralph, they threw a rock at me, too. My shoulder, look at my shoulder,” and he stepped backwards into Ralph’s space, whose focus was sharply fixated on the pair.
Maurice leapt to his feet. “Wha—that wasn’t us! Someone else threw a—it wasn’t even a rock, it was a pebble!”
“Well, I’ve had a long and thoughtful think about it,” said Piggy, raising his nose, “and you obviously planned it. There was probably just another one of your hunters, up in the trees. You’re all the same.”
“That’s not true,” cut in Jack. “There were ten of us hunting. I made sure there were only two left for the fire. Aren’t you supposed to be good at math?”
“But they weren’t at the fire,” said Ralph.
Maurice scratched his head, and looked at Roger. “But it wasn’t my turn! I’ve already done it with Walter today,” who thankfully nodded in agreement.
“So why didn’t you come hunting with the rest of us?” And now Jack looked mad as hell.
Darting another glance at the impassive boy beside him, Maurice hid the growing warmth of his cheeks with his shoulders, which slightly hiked up. “I got distracted!”
Ralph raised his eyebrows. “By what?”
Maurice could only look around helplessly.
“By the temptation of bullying people, clearly!” Piggy raised the conch above his head, and opened his big mouth loudly. “Alright. Who else has had a rock thrown at ‘em in the past by Roger and Maurice specifically?”
A lot more of the littluns’ hands were raised than Maurice expected.
“Who’s had a rock thrown at ‘em today?”
Now, nearly everyone raised their hands, except for Jack and a few hunters, and Simon. It took Maurice a moment to remember himself and pointedly raise his own hand; another moment, and Roger did too.
The littluns began to whisper between themselves.
“Y’see?” Piggy pushed the conch back to Ralph, although he went on talking. “This has been going on for ages. You said it hit you from a tree, didn’t you? The littluns can’t climb those without your help, and they haven’t bothered you today.” Someone began to cough violently. “But Roger can, and he probably helped Maurice do it!”
“That makes zero sense! I—we were hit too!” Maurice felt his expression cloud with upset. His wavering focus landed on Simon, who, as it unsurprisingly turned out, was the person having the coughing fit of his life. He narrowed his eyes. “Hey, what about—“
“That’s enough,” intervened Ralph, having grown more resigned than angry. Speaking to Jack, he said, “They weren’t out hunting with you?”
Jack’s eyes jumped back to the pair, and he was silent.
“Well,” Ralph seemed uncomfortable meeting Maurice’s eyes, but eventually managed it. “I don’t think it was you two who hit me, but…”
Maurice was distracted by the wide-eyed littluns, who were eagerly egging the chief on.
The line of Ralph’s mouth slanted with something like sympathy. He kept glancing between Maurice and Roger and Jack, gripping the conch. “Well,” he said again, “you have been throwing rocks at people, so…”
The littluns all snickered amongst themselves, except for one.