"Paint my face, Roger."

"Jack can do it just as well as I can." Roger's voice is barely a grunt. His eyes are glued to the makeshift knife he's sharpening against a rock.

"I want you to do it, Roger. Jack's hands are clumsy."

"You're one to talk about clumsy hands." Roger doesn't look up, so Maurice sits down beside him on his rock. It's one of those silver ones, with those little dots that Maurice learned in science are called mica. The noon sun makes them glitter, and from the clearing they sit in Maurice can see the ocean, which is glittering too.

"Please, Roger?"

Roger finally looks at him. His dark bangs nearly cover his eyes and his face is smudged with dirt. The only article of clothing he hasn't discarded are a ragged pair of underwear. Maurice had seen Samneric shy away from looking at each other's bare bodies, but Maurice finds he can look at Roger as easily as he could when he was clothed. He looks exactly like what Maurice would have expected, after all. Skinny, bony, and dirty. "Fine."

Maurice scoots closer to him, moving into a cross-legged position. Roger gets up. "Where are you going off to?"

"Wet sand," Roger says. The 'Are you daft?' he seemed to be about to add is evident in his tone. He returns with a glob of black dirt in one palm. It's not like the kind of sand Maurice used to see when his mother and father took him to the beach in Blackpool. This sand is obsidian-colored. He vaguely recalled Bill saying that Jack had gotten it by digging really deep.

Maurice leans forward as Roger reaches out to paint a black streak on his face with one finger. Roger's touch is surprisingly gentle, smearing the sand across the top of his face like he's doing an oil painting. He does another bar on the bottom of Maurice's cheek, just under his nose and barely above his mouth. Maurice wrinkles his nose and parts his lips a little to take a breath, and it hits him that he can smell Roger. A musty, soft smell. Somehow it isn't the smell of blood or dirt. It's like a combination of dust and hand soap, Maurice thinks.

Roger is on Maurice's other cheek now. Roger's dark-brown-almost-black eyes are almost looking through him, just concentrating on where to put the paint. Once he finishes the black paint, he takes out his knife. Maurice tenses.

"What're you…"

"Blood," Roger says simply.

"It's supposed to be pig's blood, isn't it? Roger..."

"It's hot. Don't want to go back and kill another pig." But it's not Maurice's skin he puts the knife against. It's his own. He slashes his upper arm, only a little above his elbow. The cut isn't particularly big, but Roger sticks his finger in it and when he pulls it off his skin is stained red. Maurice swallows.

Roger's finger is warm from the blood on it when he makes a mark between the two black ones on Maurice's right cheek, then his left. Maurice studies the markings on Roger's own face, guessing that he applied them himself. They're shaky and uneven, and Roger hadn't done each of his own cheeks separately. His top line of black sand is in a line across his nose. Whose blood did he use on his own skin? If the cut on Roger's arm is bothering him, he doesn't show it, because his face was its normal expression. Half-lidded eyes, mouth a tight line, brow furrowed. He always looks constipated, Maurice thinks to himself, and tries not to giggle.

"Happy now?"

"I wish I had a mirror. Then I could see it for myself!"

"Come," Roger says, getting up. "There's a mirror." Maurice stands up and follows, having to take two steps for every one of Roger's. Roger leads him away from the clearing and into the viridian brush. It's a relief to be out of the sun, but it's still powerful enough to filter through the tops of the trees and dot the forest floor with light. Somewhere a cicada is singing its buzzing, constant song. The ground starts to have a little bit of an incline, and Maurice can't help but wonder what Roger has in mind for him. He doesn't say anything.

They reach another clearing. A green, murky pond marks the middle of it. Water lilies float lazily in it, and a fat, brown frog sits on one, flicking its large tongue out every now and then. Maurice walks up to it, seeing himself appear in the water as he draws closer. He hardly recognizes himself, mostly because his reflection in the pond is green, but his face looks dark and unfamiliar.

"Swell job, Roger." Maurice says, trying to pump enthusiasm into his voice despite the strange feeling rising in his throat. Roger doesn't respond. Maybe Roger can sense it on him, the way he senses fear in a pig. He turns around and doesn't see Roger and for a moment he can feel himself start to panic, but he quickly sees Roger sitting on the edge of the pond, a pile of flat stones in his hand.

He skips a rock across the pond. It lands on Maurice's reflection, shattering it.

A nice bit of nostalgia here. I believe I had a similar scene to this in my old, old, old as shit fic Paradisiacal. Haven't written LOTF since I was about twelve, and damn, have I improved as a writer since then.