His body numb, aching and bruised and his face bloody, Jackson dragged himself from the shower block.

He wasn't aware of how long he had lain unconscious on the blood stained tiles. His mind was foggy and light. All he wanted was for someone to wash away the horror and to make him feel secure and human again.

He crawled like a wounded animal, wet and naked, cold and in shock, out into the empty corridor. He moaned a little as each muscle in his body shrieked with every movement. The pain that filled his body was sharp and throbbing. His perception of things was distorted and tumbling. Shadows around him moved threateningly, clawing at him, trying to violate his already spoiled flesh.

It was Raquel, with Toby, Louie and Spider, who discovered him. They'd returned to the prison's interior, having finished up work in the vegetable garden.'

At first Raquel didn't recognise the naked, bloody body crawling towards them – a blackened beast whose face was caked with blood. But those eyes were unmistakable, even though the life in them appeared to be mortally crushed, snuffed out by one man's brutality.

A lump formed in Raquel's throat. He found it hard to swallow. "Oh no! Jacky!" he cried.

The weary, broken figure halted as if it recognised the name. He looked up at the figures before him, wondering what new threat was about to lash out at him, and then his grey eyes rolled to the back of his head. He collapsed to the floor once more.

Raquel moved quickly to the boy's side. He ordered Toby to scoop the unconscious youth up and to carry him back to their cell, where he was laid out on Raquel's bottom bunk.

Raquel covered Jackson with a blanket and then asked the others to leave the cell, and for Toby to go and call one of the guards and have him fetch the prison doctor, Dr Edward Blair.

As he waited for the doctor's arrival, Raquel perched himself on the edge of the bed beside Jackson, and regarded him with open pity. ’What had that bastard, Bubba, done to him?’

Jackson's eyes opened, coming to rest on Raquel's face. His split lips parted, mouthing his friend's name, but Raquel shushed him, begging him to rest. Tears ran slowly down Jackson's face, running in pink, blood stained rivers. The saltiness of them stung his swollen lips. He remembered now, with intolerable clarity, what had happened. It made him feel less than alive, and so beneath contempt that he could not bring himself to meet Raquel's sympathetic eyes.

Raquel sensed the feelings flowing through the boy, and moved to reassure him. "Come on now, Jacky. Look at me." He put his hand on the youth's chin, feeling him shiver all over at the touch. Raquel tried to turn his face, but Jackson stubbornly resisted.

"Look at me!" He demanded. "I'm your friend! Jacky, please ...look at me, please?"

But still he couldn't bring himself to look Raquel in the face. Jackson suddenly turned and hid his face against Raquel's drug induced breasts, where he wept bitterly and deeply.

Raquel ran his hand through the boy's wet, matted hair, offering all the support he could give, like a mother to her child.

"Jacky, bunny, sweet bunny ...I did warn you, didn't I? Don't fight Bubba. Don't resist him or he'll hurt you."

He nodded his head against Raquel's chest. "Oh Jesus, Raquel... What he did! Why me? Why?" he asked in a tortured tone. "Why?" he continued, posing the question that Raquel couldn't answer adequately. He was glad when the elderly but burly looking doctor arrived with Toby, with two guards in tow. From then on, Dr. Blair assumed control.

Raquel was glad when the doctor injected the youth with a sedative that soon put him into a blissful dreamless sleep.

The morning was ripped apart by the shrieking of bells.

‘Always the bells’, Raquel thought to himself as he climbed down from Jackson's top bunk, wearing one of his flamboyant nightgowns.

He was surprised to see that Jackson was wide awake, staring blindly at the mattress of the bunk above him, without so much as blinking, or even noticing Raquel standing there, beside the bed.

"How do you feel, bunny?" asked Raquel. There was no response. "Jackson?" He reached out and shook him gently.

"Fuckin' leave me alone!" he snapped, withdrawing under the covers and turning his back on his friend.

Raquel stood back and regarded him unhappily, hands on his hips.

"Oh come on Jackson! Please!" Raquel's tone was hard and uncompromising. "Don't start feeling sorry for yourself. Don't get into that trap of self-pity. Or else you'll end up like DeVito!"

Jackson threw back the covers angrily, exposing his battered body. His face was badly bruised and his lips were swollen, black and ugly. His chest and abdominal muscles were spotted with black and blue marks.

"He raped me!" Jackson hissed at Raquel. "A man raped me, Raquel! Now I don't know how that would make you feel, and right at the moment, I don't give a shit! I'll fucking feel sorry for myself if I bloody well want to!" he cried.

While inwardly Raquel grieved for the boy's pain, he knew he could not soften. He had to be hard on the youth, or he could well sink into the same sort of oblivion that had swallowed many people.

"Jackson, that bastard raped me, too," he stated angrily. "So I do know how it feels. And look at me now. I'm not letting it hold me back, am I?"

Jackson was a little stunned by this revelation. He studied Raquel's eyes, saw the grim truth in them, and knew that it was so.

"And do you think for a moment that I enjoyed that fat shit of a man touching me? His doughy little fingers clawing at my tits - they're very real, you know, and very tender. I think he liked scorching my nipples with the cigarette more than the rest of it.” Raquel paused for a moment, seeming to shudder with the recalled memory, then he went on: "But when he was through, he let those two mounds of dog shit, the Delvicchio brothers, take their turns with me ...And they were methodical... and brutal," Raquel said, his tone bitter.

Jackson realised for the first time that he knew practically nothing about Raquel de la Rose's past, nothing at all.

"

"Now get out of that bed," Raquel said with quiet authority.

Jackson sat up on the edge of the bed, wringing his hands together nervously "I don't think I can handle this. I can't take much more -its all too much… “

Raquel sat down beside him on the bed, putting a comforting arm around the youth's shoulders, in a reassuring manner, almost motherly. "You'll be O.K., Jacky. You're stronger than you know...”

But the boy shook his head at Raquel, disagreeing. "No ...no," he mumbled. "1 can't handle this. I can't! There's no way I can get out of here, not for awhile yet anyway. I can't get away from Bubba, and there's no way' I'm going to let him take me again. No way! Oh God...! Mum!" He groaned. "She would be so disappointed with me, ashamed of me..." He bowed his head.

"Don't be ridiculous," Raquel said. "None of this is of your making," he pointed out to him. "It's what you do from this point that matters. 'Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you', as a very wise man once said."

Jackson nodded slowly.

"Do you keep in touch with your parents?" Raquel asked, and then sensed by the way Jackson's body stiffened, and how his face came up in a grim, cold expression, that he had found another wound in the boy’s soul. It was something deeply internalised that made the youth pull away from him.

"My mum's dead," he said quietly. "And my father..." He gave a strange, half-amused, half-cynical smile. "It's him I've got to thank for being in here! But I'll get him back for this ... for what he's put me through ... for all that he's: done to me " and then he added: 'To us."

Raquel wondered who the "us" might be exactly, but said nothing, choosing instead to let the boy talk if he wanted to. But Jackson didn't utter another word. He just sat on the edge of the bunk, his eyes alert, his body tense, alive with something alien.

It was as if Jackson had consumed some exotic and powerful tonic. A fire burnt in his glazed eyes and an angry flash of colour blossomed in his cheeks. But despite the swell of fierce and hot hatred Raquel sensed rising from within the boy, he felt bone chillingly cold in his presence.

The moment was interrupted by the dull alarm of a key unlocking the cell door. At that, Jackson's demeanor altered again; being neither defeated nor bristling with hate. He was merely his relatively calm, quiet self, leaving Raquel to wonder if he had not imagined it all in the first place.