A/N: Written for the Diversity Challenge, B69 – write a post-canon fic.

And this was giving ideas for a larger fic. Whoops. At least my muse is starting to learn self-control. I hope.

The Wildness from the Wilderness

School was suddenly a more savage place.

He went back in the fall, almost a year after that ordeal on the island: that wild island. He went back to a school that was far away from his old school, from his old schoolmates, from his old friends he could not think of as being friends anymore.

And far away from a tombstone he still could look at without shedding tears and feeling needles scratching at the walls of his heart because he'd deserved better. He'd deserved to get away school.

But distance didn't matter. The memories, the reality, still followed. And they couldn't run from the international story it'd become. Everyone knew his face. His name. His story. He had no peace from it.

And worse, that time on the island had left something wild within him.

They all got therapy. They were all "fixed" – or so the authorities seemed to like to believe. But though he couldn't forgive them, he followed their doings. Partially out of fear. Partially out of curiosity. Partially because they were the true link to that part of his life – them and that undeserved body rotting away beneath the tombstone. Partially because his life now seemed so unreal – when they weren't stripping themselves of their humanity and the advancement of civilization.

When he'd awoken in the hospital room, it had seemed like such a foreign place. The television, a few machines – things he'd recognised vaguely but for the life of him couldn't remember how to use. Someone had taken pity on him and turned the television on, but it had seemed no alien than when it had been turned off. And the shows had changed too. Things he didn't know, didn't recognise. Things that might have seemed less strange if he'd watched the transition as opposed to jumping straight in to it.

Things that might have been less strange after the wilderness.

But that didn't matter. The wilderness had come. It wouldn't just go away. It was there, inside of him. That wildness. That terror. That insanity. That hurt. The technology of his current life was so strange…and uncomfortable. How there was more to the world than what he could see. More than he could control.

Like every teenager he'd have spent hours glued to the television box before, but now it frightened him too.

And he frightened people too. He would have to have been blind not to see it. The apprehensive looks his parents were always giving him. The ones torn between curiosity and derangement from his new classmates – his classmates that were like little pots about to boil over and he could see oh so very clearly how it would be when they did.

And he had to keep himself from boiling over as well, but when people near him recoiled and even more apprehensive than usual glances followed, he'd know he'd overstepped those self-appointed boundaries somewhere.

Those boundaries he drew from remembering how things had used to be before the island, before the wilderness.

But it was a struggle now, because he knew the wilderness, the wildness. He knew it. And he had to supress it because he also know it had no place in this civilised society.

But it was so hard to supress it.

And, sometimes, more and more, he found he needed somewhere quiet and filled with nature to go wild.

And places like school and other buildings and home were just like cages where he couldn't. A prison where his soul scratched at the walls of his body and struggled to be released, to find released…

And where everyone around him grew up and started thinking about controlling other things, he was struggling with the wildness inside of him. A wildness he was getting better at hiding, but was becoming stronger….

Waiting for the day he'd, finally, visibly, snap.

At school because that was where those feelings, those reminders, were strongest. A pudgy, quiet boy everyone picked on. Those feral, wild grins hidden beneath polite or reasonably biting words. He laughed; often he laughed, but rarely aloud. He knew far more biting things.

The teachers had had trouble prying his teeth out of that boy's arm.

And he'd have trouble rinsing his mouth of the taste of skin and blood that clung to it. And forgetting it.