"JJ!" BREE GASPED OUT AS SHE SWAM TOWARD HIM. It did not take her very long, and she was under him in no time. Now, all she had to do was keep him afloat until John B came for them in the lifeboat. That was proving to be a little bit more difficult a task than she thought it would be. It had been a while since she treaded water for that long even without having to hold another person's weight. "Stay with me. John B's coming. John B's coming, okay? John B! Help!"

She sighed in relief when she heard the engine of the lifeboat on the other side of the ship. The blood from JJ's head wound was starting to drip into the water, and she was a little scared that it might attract sharks to them. She heard Kie's voice, causing her head to shoot up. "Hey!"

"JJ! No! No! No! No! No! JJ! JJ!" the Routledge boy yelled when he saw the blonde boy in the water as they pulled around the edge of the boat and toward their friends. She tried to swim, but her legs were starting to give out.

Once the boat got close enough that they could grab them, She used what was remaining for her strength to lift the top half of the blonde boy out of the water so that John B could lift him out. Then, Pope, Kie, and Cleo helped her into the vehicle as well. "Grab him."

She finally collapsed on her back, spitting out the dirty salt water that had filled her mouth. After about two seconds though, she crawled over to the Maybank boy and started shaking him violently.

"Come on, J. Wake up," she muttered to him, and a couple of the others were huddled around her, waiting to see if their friend was alright.

All of a sudden, the engine of the boat started sputtering, and the vehicle started to slow down, causing all of them to furrow their eyebrows at him. The Carrera girl questioned, "What's going on? What's happening?"

"We're stalling out," the brunette boy answered.

"You serious? We're sitting ducks. We gotta go," the Heyward boy yelled as they all started shouting at each other. Pope pointed to Rafe on the boat who was pointing a gun straight at them. They were not yet far enough away that they were not in the range of fire. He could definitely hit them from there. "He's pointing at us. Hurry!" Finally, John B got the boat working again, and they sped away from the ship. He and Bree went back to trying to get JJ to wake up.

"Please wake up. JJ, wake up! J! Please! Please!" the Callaway girl sobbed out because she was terrified that he was not going to wake up and that that man might have hit him a little too hard on the head. He could not leave her. She needed him. As if someone heard her and answered her prayers, the blonde boy started coughing up water.

"There you go. Yeah, yeah," the brunette boy encouraged with a smile, happy that his best friend was alive. "Cough it out. Cough it out, baby. No CPR needed, huh? Hi."

The Maybank took a couple deep breaths as he sat up and looked up at the brunette girl once he had calmed down a little bit. "'Sup? What the hell happened?"

"The blunt end of a machete," she laughed out before reaching down and wrapping her arms around his torso. She was so freaking happy that he was alive, no matter how pissed at him she was.

Cleo called over to him some advice that no one in the world would ever have thought of. "Next time, duck."

"I'll try to remember that next time. Thanks."

They drove until they saw land, and the boys helped haul the boat onto the beach while the girls sat and watched them. From what Bree had seen when she scanned the area, they seemed to be on some deserted island or private land that no one else was on. John B raised his eyebrows at the blonde boy while they were walking back onto the beach. "JJ, you all right there, buddy?"

"Yeah. Still a little dizzy," the other boy answered before plopping down next to Cleo and Sarah. He glanced at the brunette girl, and they made awkward eye contact before looking down at the ground. "Okay, anybody know where we're at?"

"Deserted beach. Unknown island," Pope answered as he sat down alongside Bree.

JJ nodded slowly, rolling his eyes slightly. He leaned back on his elbows and stared up at the sky as he said, "All right, I'll take that as a no. Plan A, huh, Pope? That went well."

"This is the lowest we can go," the Heyward boy pointed out because they kind of had lost everything. Now, they were on a deserted island, going full Gilligan's Island. "We literally have nothing else to lose. The cross, gone. "

"The gold, gone," Sarah added.

The blonde boy nodded before standing back up and propping himself up against a tree, staring out on his group of friends. "Seriously, if we had a nickel for every time we got beat up, I'd say we're at a dollar fifty."

"Yeah, you're right. But, I mean, we've... We've had some good stuff happen, right?" the Routledge boy asked, and when they all looked at him with confused expressions, he continued, "Um... Uh, the boiler room. What? If the boiler didn't explode, I wouldn't have gotten away from Rafe. I couldn't have gotten the Zodiac and gotten us out of here."

"That wasn't luck. That thing was gonna blow the second I stopped feeding it," Cleo informed him, shaking her head at his statement because it was not true. He probably knew that. He was just trying to convince them to believe.

"Stealing my thunder, Cleo," the brunette boy told her, and she shot him a fake apologetic look. He looked over at his other friend. "Okay. Pope, you're related to Denmark Tanny. That's crazy."

Pope scoffed, "And I lost all his inheritance."

"You know what? Guys, this is it. This is the Pogue life," John B announced, standing up in front of all of them and holding his hands out, gesturing to the whole island. "We are in the Caribbean. It's our own little slice of paradise. With my best friends, with my family. I don't know. I wouldn't wanna do it with anyone else. Look, and while you guys were complaining about every little thing... JJ? I was looking at those burly lefts."

"There's some slabs out there," JJ admitted as he stared out at the waves crashing along the shore, referring to surfing along them.

John B shrugged with a smile as he turned to the next person to convince. "Just a few. Kie, see that? I know you wanna get out there."

"No boards."

"Well, we can bodysurf till we make some boards," the Routledge boy responded, and he was trying to make the prospect of spending possibly the rest of their life on an island. Bree was not totally opposed to the idea, especially since she had absolutely nothing to go abc to on Outer Banks. Al of her family was there. "Pope? Come on, man."

Pope nodded slowly, smiling out of the horizon as he propped himself up on his hands. "They do look pretty tasty. There's nobody around. We could squat here for a bit. Kind of belongs to us now, huh? Seven-way split?"

"Poguelandia. I claim thee Poguelandia," the Maybank boy told them regally in an awful posh British accent before going back to his normal voice for the next part. "I like the ring of it. I'm gonna make a flag. It's gonna have a chicken on it. With a coconut bra, smoking a J...in Crocs."

"I could use a J," the brunette girl replied. That was one thing that she was probably going to miss, along with alcohol. She doubted there were any pina coladas on that island.

"Let's get to work. Let's start working on provisions. Set up shop," John B ordered them playfully as he gave Pope a fist bump. He leaned over and whispered something in Sarah's ear.She whispered something back, and he said, louder this time, "Welcome back to the Pogue life."

After that, they all started smiling at each other. JJ, who was standing above Bree, reached out his hand for her to take as if he were offering some sort of truce. "Full Pogue?" She grinned before putting her hand in his and repeating.

"Full Pogue, baby!"

AUTHOR'S NOTE

and that's a wrap on season two. i'm locking in on writing season three as we speak.