This probably deserves explanation considering it's actually been over a year since I last updated this. It's been 5 months since I finished this chapter and I posted it on tumblr but never updated it here. I don't know if I am ever going to finish this story to be quite honest with you I have no idea where it is going. I might pick it up again in summer idk. Quite frankly, I am just gonna post it here and see what happens. My apologies.

The black metal was only cool for so long. It began to grow tighter, Dan's body unconscious once more, curled into the corner. Phil didn't want him to wake up. He didn't want to face the truth. He didn't want to face the truth the same way he didn't want to face the gang. Hence why he was sat upon the top of the fridge, his knees tucked into his chest like a small child. He couldn't remember whether the jeans had come pre-ripped or whether he had ripped them along the way and he guessed, in a way, it didn't matter. The rips were part of the jeans no matter where they came from. The same way the anxiety that bit at his chest was part of him whether it came from before or after.

And there was a before and after. With capitals. The before that always seemed to glow golden, dust floating through the air, red blood spilling onto dusty pages, the grass that was green instead of yellow, whispers of I love you through the clearness of rivers. Words that were meant at the time, but were disregarded in hindsight.

Hindsight.

Hindsight changed everything. Changed beige memories to ones that glistened, that were lined with silver pages, which sparkled in the mind like a pearl. Then again everything was a pearl when you compared it to what he had then.

After. The constant darkness, the walls dripping dry ink, the stars swallowed by the sky, the tapping of a war that was already defeated, the fear scratching at his chest like a cat at a door. But he wanted to get out too. Everyone did.

He could see it in the faces of the people who gathered around the gallows, the tears that were choked back but also the edge of jealousy, they wanted to go too. How to single handedly wipe out a species. Fear. People will do anything to escape fear.

"How did you even get up there?"

Rowan.

"A reckless spirit, a hopeless mind."

"Oh wow poet Huck is back huh?" He tilted his head, "how did thy reach such heights?"

Phil tilted his head towards the box abandoned of the floor.

"Ah." He said, climbing onto it, stretching an arm out for Phil to catch. Clambering onto the fridge with more flailing of limbs that one would expect from a fully (self) trained operative.

"I can't do this, Ro."

"What?"

"Pretend like this is something you can help me with."

"Huh, you mock me huh? I'm a great help I'll have you know."

"I know you are, but –" Phil started crying, the only moisture absorbed into his body spilling straight from the crevices of his eyes. "I am so sorry Ro, I am so so sorry."

Rowan wrapped his arms around Phil, rocking him gently, "ssh- shh it's okay."

"It's not!" Phil shouted, feeling Rowan's muscles flinching against his skin.

It was a harsh strike, a red cut across the face. And Phil wanted to reach his hand out, stick a plaster across it like they were back at primary school. Like a kiss and all better now could solve everything. Could solve anything. But it couldn't. And it never could. They weren't at primary school anymore, he wasn't Phil he was Huck and he was Rowan. Phil was floating in a dark sea and the waves were growing choppier and choppier, he wanted to fight, he wanted to flail his arms about and swim but they were stuck to his sides and the waves were coming thick and fast, water pouring down his throat and in his ears and his nose and he was drowning, being turned inside out. He was dying.

He opened his mouth and told Rowan everything.

The boys stood around in silence. The darkness dripped down the walls, gloopy, like thick syrup. But still not as thick as the silence as the looks the passed between each boy.

And Dan carried on screaming.

It had been so long since anyone had made that amount of noise. It seemed to echo through space and back to earth, brushing the dust of each of the boy's faces, cracking rocks out in the desert. His eyes were wild and wet, tears streaming and face shaking as if he could see something, something in the gloopy darkness that the others were missing. He raised a shaking finger towards the night, towards the rim of the hatch and with a flash his eyes turned blood red.

Dust splattered up the sides of their trousers as they ran. They ran indiscriminately. Not the careful and controlled way they had been taught in a class that seemed so far away now, a class with perfect little white lines painted around a track and plenty of water, a class where the only worry was the scream of the gym teacher. They didn't run strongly or purposefully. They ran wildly, like death was on their heels like his great black cloak was stretching across the desert. And maybe it was. For death didn't lurk in cracks anymore, a small snap of the head and a scent of a death. No death didn't linger outside of church doors waiting for a victim, or in the dead of the woods if ye shall dare enter. Death was everywhere. Death was the sun and the moon and the stars and the sand between the toes, the gnarled old tree and the last sip of water. Death was now. And she was coming.

A scream pierced through the air.

Rowan shook, frozen to the spot. He turned his head, slowly, almost comically if this were a romantic film starring Jack Black or Ben Stiller but it wasn't. It was messy and raw and dark and the man Phil loved had bright red eyes.

"I can explain." Phil rushed, throwing himself of Dan as if it would erase the memory of what they has seen. As if it would erase the glowing eyes. Cedar looked shocked. He opened his mouth and his tongue was thick and dry and words spilled off it like there was water to waste.

"So explain" And Phil recognised a spitting anger in his voice which had never been there before. Never been there in the nights of laughter on the couch, dreaming about what the stars might resemble. All those years fearing the responsibility of becoming a leader and now he was facing a mutiny. He turned to Rowan, to the face that had never been anything but gentle and kind. But now it was a harsh as the stone walls, and truth changes a person. Lies can only last so long.

Phil looked at the ground. He wanted to see the salt tear drop, for it to reach a dramatic moment in the film where the music goes low and sad and you shift a bit closer to a loved one and take their hand. Phil wanted his dramatic, sad moment because that meant it was just a moment. That meant that Dan's tracker was fixable, removable that this was just a sad part in a happy story that ended with a Christmas meal and a roast turkey. He had seen the films where they cut open the arm, pull out the tracker, a bit of blood. Job done.

But how to remove a tracker from the brain?

Phil couldn't speak.

Forrest spoke, his voice cracking, though not from fear or sadness or anguish or anger, although those coursed through his veins, but rather from a lack of water. In his jumper filled with holes, and with his taunt and dirtied face Forrest looked no older than twelve. Phil wished he knew how old he actually was. I caused that. Phil thought. I drove him off, he should have gone with Ash and Yew and now he has no water. Now he has no life. Now he will die.

"We rescued Gin from the building." Forrest started, focusing on a particular patch on the darkened wall, "and when we got him away we realised he was different" Phil felt his heart drop. "Not really him, you see, it's the eyes, they don't move the same, they don't recognise us." Forrest took a breath. "There was a machine, big and white like something from the future. And well..." his eyes shifted to look at Dan who was shaking uncontrollably behind Phil "And well we think they've messed with his mind, extracted the information, that they know all about us. And that they've installed a tracker into it, in order to find us and kill us."

Rowan took a step backwards against the wall and Cedar took a step forward.

"We have to kill him" he wasn't irrational. He wasn't crying or shaking. He was calm and collected and firm, like a sergeant major. He had the look not of a murderer, but someone who knew the answer, who knew how to fix this problem, someone who knew how to survive.

"No!" Phil yelled, throwing himself even further across Dan's body, "I won't let you"

"Huck…" Said Rowan softly, his eyes the same but his mouth was moving like a serpent and Phil wanted to shriek and cry and rock his head against the wall like Dan, he wanted to be the one possessed, the one tracked, the one in the firing line. He knew that the boy wasn't Dan, and he wasn't Yew, he was neither the boy under the moon nor the boy with a gun and a smile, who could race across the keyboard like he was under attack. He was something else entirely, a vein throbbing in his forehead as he twisted and shook under Phil's bodyweight.

"Huck we have to!"

"No!" and he was crying now, his eyes dry heaving without any result, sobbing and wrenching and screaming with no water. His throat was on fire. His stomach hurt and his face was merely sandpaper against the rock floor.

"Phil!" Rowan shouted.

He had no idea he remembered.

He turned to look, he turned to look at the boy who had sat beside on him on that first day in reception, his sandy blonde hair falling over his face. The face of an angel, a cherub. He'd been offered a modelling contract once, but Phil knew everything. He knew that as much as he was golden on the outside he was inside too, but he knew of his devilish smirk, of his pranking abilities. He knew that he could run like the wind and read a whole book in one night, that he couldn't tie his shoelaces until he was twelve but he knew pi from age five. And as Phil was looking at him, this whole boy, this complete boy. Not a tree in a forest. Not a simple 'Rowan' picked as a disguise. But another person. A person from the past, who fit him like another half.

"James?"

"We have to Phil."

And he was all Phil now. The armour of Huck had fallen, clattering to the ground with an important kind of bang, with a symbolic finality. He was Phil with the soft black hair and the star wars obsession. Phil with the kind eyes who played tag in the long grass and loved mainly red Legos. He was Phil, a whole person. Not a half, not a tree in a forest of many, but a star in his own universe. It was falling apart.

Phil let go of Huck. And Phil let go of Dan.

"I'm sorry, Gin" he said. Dehumanisation. That's how we kill people.

Dan was swimming now. No longer floating, the cold, cold water seizing his muscles, wrapping itself around his skin, around his arms and dragging him down into the depths. And for the first time, Dan fought back. He was no longer unwilling to move, staring at the ice and waiting for it to crack, he wanted it, he wanted survival, and he wanted to make it. The fire of a thousand suns burned in his veins and he felt his foot kick, breaking free of the chains. He felt his arm move, as he sunk, down, down, down. Into blueness, into shadowed darkness and nothing. He could see the pinprick of sunlight. And he wanted it. He wanted it more than he had ever wanted anything in his life. He kicked again, he thrashed again, he opened his eyes fully and felt the water burn. And he felt alive. He could see the surface. He was going to get there, he was going to get there. And he could hear the words more clearly now. The voices of boys wrapped around his ears like conch shells whispering to him the secrets of the sea. They were arguing and he could hear them, no longer dreams and waves but actual voices. The ice was so close now, the sun beam was no longer a pinprick but a stretched flood light. With one final push, he reached out his hand and slammed it against the ice.

His eyes shot open.

"Phil?"

Thank you for reading, have a nice day!