FIC: A Feast in Our Street (1/2)
Title: A Feast in Our Street (1/2) - standalone companion to this series.
Summary: The beginning of Karl’s life after the island. (Gen; some Karl/Alex)
Rating: PG Disclaimer: Lost is all ABC’s; no money/ownership here.
Author’s note: This can be read as an independent one-shot, but it is in keeping with a series that was conceived just after, and assumes canon through, the end of S3.
Dedication/Thanks: For
aboutbunnies , who also cared about Karl, dammit.
Comments, feedback, and criticism are always welcome.
Alex thinks staying safe was half the problem. Two or three months at the beach camp revelling in their new freedom, as much as they could, and then… And then Nancy found her way back to them, somehow, stumbling through the jungle, sick and already showing. She didn’t say anything from the moment she arrived, and eight days later she was dead.
Maybe if Alex and Karl were right for each other, they wouldn’t have kept spending every kiss worrying that it would get out of hand. -“All That You Can’t Leave Behind,” 7A
Anna was Karl’s tutor for longer than Sabine was Alex’s. Karl tried to talk Anna out of the project. He got punished when Anna reported him for it. -“Sharper (In Gratitude)”
There will be a feast in our street too. -Russian proverb
Getting off the boat was easier for Karl than it was for Alex. He knew it would be the entire time, although he didn’t say it to her, not with the memory of how he helped Danielle shepherd her onto it. He had vague memories of playing with children who must have been his cousins, of faces attached to the names Uncle Tim or Aunt Linda. He’d had a photo album as a little boy, one his parents put together of life in Portland and that he managed to hang onto until he was eight or nine. Whenever he had a few minutes to himself, he’d slide it out from under his mattress and stare at the images and captions, even though he’d seen them more times than he could count. He still remembered them after the album disappeared: Karl and Cousin Michael’s first snowstorm, Aunt Shelly at Mommy and Daddy’s wedding, Mommy and Daddy teaching Karl to row.
He recognized his aunts and uncles when he saw them in the crowd. They were older and sadder-looking, he couldn’t remember their spouses’ names, his cousins were at school in Portland, but he still knew who they were. They didn’t need anyone to point him out either.
He was glad the officials had released basic information to everyone on the mainland: there were too many things about the last eighteen years that he wasn’t eager to rehash and probably never would be. The questions his aunts and uncles asked him were easier - well, his dad’s younger sister Linda asked too-personal questions and kept calling him Conrad, but she was persuaded to leave after a couple of days. The older sister, Shelly, and his mother’s brother were more circumspect: Was he finding it cold in Los Angeles? Was there something he’d like to do, something he wanted to know about almost anything? He can’t remember what he answered.
“Why’d you choose Karl James Ford?” Aunt Shelly asked him one evening, after they’d had dinner in one of the hotel suites.
It was the hardest question she asked him, although maybe she didn’t realize that. “I didn’t have anything with my last name on it,” he said, looking at his hands. “Ben called me Karl Jacobs.”
Shelly closed her eyes for a minute, and Karl wondered if his father, who looked like Shelly and like him, ever had that same pain-stilled expression on his face. She looked like she was holding something back. “I mean, why Ford instead of… Shipman or Southryn…”
No instead of Hartmann or Why not Mettler? She’d guessed, even if he couldn’t bring himself to say it. He cleared his throat. “There was a guy from the plane,” he said. “James Ford. He was - a friend of mine.”
She nodded and smiled, blinking quickly. “It’s a good name.”
His uncle Timothy was, and is, placid but somehow never seeming entirely secure in the world around him. Karl still isn’t sure what gave him that impression - Uncle Tim is fine, happy with his wife and their paediatric practice and their son - but it was one of the first things Karl had noticed, right after the wispy salt-and-pepper hair Timothy had left and the way his glasses were always a few degrees off kilter. And it was his uncle who lost interest in the ballgame they were watching one evening and turned off the TV, slumped forward and ran his hands over his mostly bald head. He wasn’t looking at Karl and his voice wavered when he said, “How long was Cecelia with you on the island?”
Karl swallowed heavily. “The first year we were there. December, I think.” She was there at Thanksgiving, he could remember sitting next to her and resenting having to eat cranberry chutney, but by the time his father pointed out the longest day of the year to him… She just went to the Staff to rest for a few days, so Dr. Rom can help her get better.
“Do you - do you know what happened to her?”
“She was pregnant,” he said flatly. You’re going to have a little sister, Karl! “The women had - complications.” I don’t want a sister or a brother. It’s only supposed to be me. He’d put a hand to his mother’s stomach, too hard and too big for him to curl up on anymore, and felt a kick.
“What about Frederick?”
“He was there one more winter. Not the next Easter, though.” His uncle didn’t say anything. “Richard told me there’d been an accident.” His father hadn’t been sent out to sea like his mother or anything; he was just gone, and after that… It wasn’t like Karl wasn’t allowed to talk about him or anything, just that no one, not once, replied anything apart from “You’ll be okay.” He gave up, and when Alex asked about his father years later he couldn’t tell her a thing.
A day or two after that exchange he introduced them all to Alex, or to Alex and Danielle, more accurately. He’d gone to meet Alex’s aunts and uncle by himself and been pretty overwhelmed by the barrage of questions and the stares, even if they were all friendly. If he was honest with himself, he resented it a little, but he couldn’t really expect Danielle to let Alex go to meet strangers without her. She’d have to get used to it eventually, he thought, at least to some extent, but eventually wasn’t the same thing as just then. She had too much else on her mind. And so she and Alex showed up outside the suite as agreed one afternoon, one of Danielle’s hands on Alex’s shoulder and the other in what looked like a vise-like grip on her forearm. She gave Shelly and Tim and his wife Caroline little nods instead of shaking hands with them, and made about half a second of eye contact before she started staring them up and down checking them, he knew, for hidden weapons and looking around the room as if she could take it apart with her eyes.
They had an awkward, well-intentioned afternoon tea. Shelly and the Mettlers asked polite questions about Danielle’s family and Alex’s interests; Danielle gave perfunctory answers and then interrogated them. Alex didn’t say much of anything, just sort of blushed and looked down while Danielle sniffed and test-nibbled at hors d’oeuvres before passing the tray onto her. Karl couldn’t really blame them for any of it, but he knew he wasn’t handling things much better than Alex. He was just grateful than his aunts and uncle didn’t seem to hold it against anyone. If anything, they seemed to have a mixture of pity and admiration for the Rousseaus, which was probably the best he could hope for under the circumstances.
It was Uncle Tim who suggested that Karl spend a few months in Oregon, getting his head together and readjusting to things. “I know you’ll probably want to stay with everyone else here,” he said, “but a little change of scenery might be good for you.” Karl had to agree with him. The only survivors who weren’t staying in L.A. County were at least buying winter houses there, and he had a feeling that if he started off there he’d get locked in, never get to know anyone who wasn’t from the island. And he’d have to do that at some point, sooner rather than later.
Alex cried when he told her about it. She’d done plenty of crying over the years he’d known her, especially the last five, but usually it was because someone was dead. He was more than a little daunted himself by the prospect of several months away from her and everyone else, but he knew he needed it. “We can talk to each other every day,” he promised her.
“Just talk?” she sort of whimpered, although the answer was obvious, and he didn’t know what to say to that. He and Alex still kissed sometimes, but the combination of fear and inertia had kept there from being much of a spark or anything more between them since their first months at the beach camp. It was one of the things he’d have to figure out; it wasn’t like she was chained to him either, although he probably could’ve phrased it better to her than that. He wasn’t expecting either one of them would fall in love with anyone else in the meantime. He just needed a little bit of time and space to sort his own mind out, and she did too, whether she wanted to admit it or not.
He wound up taking out a few girls in Portland, ones he’d met and gotten along with. Nothing too serious: going out for coffee or dinner after he’d gotten used to the concepts involved on his own, making out with a couple of them a few times before they realized they’d never understand each other enough to make it last. He thought it was better not to mention any of it to Alex, although he hoped, despite the little spike of jealousy he couldn’t avoid feeling at the thought, that she was doing the same thing.
All that didn’t happen right away, though. It took him a few weeks to get adjust to Portland and to the daily routine of what he supposed was the real world. The perennial grey mist over everything and the prickly, sweet-smelling pine trees that he’d half-remembered seemed like something out of a dream, as did the thick layers of clothing he found himself alone in needing: shirt, sweater, jacket. As strange as it was, though, he settled into a spare room of Uncle Tim’s house and surprised himself by remembering the ins and outs of housekeeping almost immediately.
The society around him had its own quirks too. Ben hadn’t been lying when he said the wider world cared about nothing but - what had he called it? - the almighty dollar. The settlements he’d gotten apparently made him rich, but he had no idea why they thought he’d ever need as much money as they gave him. Granted, there were a million luxuries advertised everywhere, but he couldn’t see the use of most of them. But some baffling things he did have to deal with: the public transportation system, for one, and getting around a metropolitan area much bigger than the entire island. He got very lost more than a few times and wound up calling his aunts and uncle from utterly unfamiliar places, probably giving a good laugh to more than one bus driver and subway attendant in the process, but he figured it wasn’t the end of the world.
Once he knew his way around the place a little better, old things came back to him in fits and starts: a board game they hadn’t had on the island, road signs, spring blossoms. The first time he managed to get to the grocery store on his own, undistracted, he was hit with the memory of going there with his mother, something he hadn’t remembered in… fifteen years, maybe? She always complained about the price of cold cereal, and she thought the kinds he liked were too sugary. He couldn’t remember what they were called, but he remembered a blue box with a cartoon parrot on it, and a bright yellow one with an equally absurd sea captain. He found both and put them into the shopping basket without thinking about it, not caring about the luxury. He wasn’t surprised to find that they weren’t nearly as appealing to his twenty-three-year-old taste buds, but he finished them anyway and he kept the boxes.
It was a surprise to everyone that he knew how to cook. Even more to the point, that he liked doing it: he hadn’t had a kitchen or any ingredients besides what they could forage in years, and he was eager to have the chance again. Once he got the grocery route figured out, he took it up again without a second thought: borscht, cutlets, cabbage pirozkhi. He didn’t remember the exact times and measurements, but the smells and tastes were familiar - better than they were sometimes, really, when a shipment was late and they had to make do. His aunt and uncle got home from work at the same time that day and seemed happily surprised to have dinner waiting for them, but there was something else too. “Where did you learn how to cook this?” his uncle asked.
Karl shrugged. “Anna taught all of us.” Housekeeping, school lessons, language.
“Anna?”
He’d never mentioned Anna to them, he realized. They never asked him anything but the broadest, vaguest questions about his life on the island, and he wasn’t sure why that was, or even what he thought about it. “Anna took care of the kids whose parents died.”
“Was she from the Soviet Union?” Uncle Tim asked.
“Yeah. Is this Soviet food?” He’d never thought of it that way: there was just regular food and survival food, without fancy distinctions within either. Jin and Sun had promised to teach him to cook Korean once he was back in California, but he hadn’t given the details any thought. Apparently everyone here made distinctions, though. His aunt said yes, it was - well, Russian food, Eastern European anyway, and she added that they’d always liked it. He wasn’t completely convinced of that - his uncle managed to spill a lot of the borscht and took extra helpings of the cutlets, and his aunt did pretty much the opposite - but they got by okay. Karl could page through some of the cookbooks they kept on hand if he wanted to try something else.
Uncle Tim was almost silent through most of the meal, and just as Karl was spearing his final pirozkhi he said, “She took care of other kids too?”
Karl put down his fork. “Yeah. Three boys and a girl. They were all older than me.”
“What happened to their parents?”
Ben extracted the kids and left the parents to die. “No one ever said.” He dabbed his mouth unnecessarily. “They died on the island. That’s all I know.”
“What about their children?” said Aunt Caroline.
Luke married Diane. He could’ve said it, although that wasn’t the point. I was the one who warned the beach camp. He kept looking down. “They died too.”
That was the only time he talked about it with his aunt and uncle. The one who pushed him on it was his psychiatrist - everybody responsible for the salvage operation shanghaied the survivors into therapy pretty quickly, talking about post-traumatic something-or-other. There was probably a star by Desmond’s name on that one, and half a dozen by Danielle’s. On his own file he only saw a note he wasn’t supposed to see: N.B. Will have difficulty establishing therapeutic trust due to on-island experiences. -J. Shephard, M.D. He could imagine a similar one on Alex’s: Will find it impossible. He didn’t have much faith in the enterprise at first himself, but eventually he had to admit it was useful, strange to say.
He established something of a routine: therapy sessions twice a week, doing some errands and chores for his relatives despite their insisting that he didn’t need to, going to the gym most days. He’d lost all his strength that last year on the island, like all of them had, and he was eager to get it back, and to re-learn what it was like to be able to enjoy running and swimming instead of just rushing in a panic. He didn’t want to wind up looking like Tom or Pickett or even Ben before he started getting sick, either. He didn’t want to have the first thing in common with any of them.
Beyond all that, there were a decent number of regulars about his age, too. That was another thing he’d missed. Uncle Tim said Karl had a gift for making friends easily. Karl wasn’t sure it was anything that remarkable: you just figured out which people wanted to use you or hurt you - more of the population than his aunt and uncle probably would have suspected, but nothing like as many as Danielle had to - and you avoided them, and the rest weren’t too hard to get along with at one level or another. He wound up being close to the ones who at least understood that he wasn’t going to say much about the island yet, and that when he talked about his family he usually meant the Kwons or Alex and Danielle. They got used to the fact that he liked to hear what they considered the most mundane stories about their own lives, or that if they wanted to know his they tended to wind up hearing about catching poisonous fish by mistake or the time a coconut-smashing contest went completely awry..
Karl’s cousin Michael wasn’t exactly hard to get along with, the weekends and afternoons he came home from his college dormitory. He just wasn’t easy to connect to either, unless you were really interested in video games or what Michael called partying. Karl didn’t know how Michael managed to pass his courses, but apparently he did, and his parents didn’t seem to give him too much grief about it. “My parents were much too strict with us,” Uncle Tim said to Karl one day, out of the blue. “Once they were gone Cecelia just started looking for someone else to make all the hard decisions for her. Benjamin Linus wasn’t the first person who took her and Frederick in.” Karl didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything. “I think Carrie and I went too far the other way sometimes, maybe didn’t give Michael as many boundaries as he needed.”
Karl made what he hoped was a noncommittal noise at that and changed the subject, because he thought his uncle was right on that one. The first time Michael came home for dinner while Karl was there, he waited until his parents left them to get re-acquainted with each other and pulled a little bag with a tin inside it from his backpack. “Did they have any weed on that island of yours?”
“Any what?”
“Weed. Pot. Marijuana.”
“All over the place. Somebody brought it over in the seventies and it spread like crazy.”
Michael looked almost disappointed at that. “Well, I’ve got some here, if you want it,” he said, rolling some dried leaf fragments into a cigarette.
Karl took a few hits more out of politeness than anything else; Michael said it was the really good stuff, which made Karl think the weak version here was probably just leftover cooking herbs. He and Aldo used to slip into the woods sometimes when they were off duty and just start a little fire with the wild leaves. They’d spend the afternoon wasting time, enjoying the feel of the air and the scent of the forest and laughing hysterically at nothing at all. Looking back, he suspected Ben must have known about it - it was hardly a unique form of recreation - and not cared much as long as it didn’t interfere with anything that needed to get done.
Later on, he and Sawyer used to do the same thing from time to time, when they were both feeling too wound up and needed a break. Desmond would join them sometimes, and Karl got to hear the disconcerting sound of Desmond actually laughing and sounding relaxed, and Sawyer giggling at a higher pitch than he would have expected. They stopped for a while when the food started running out, so that they wouldn’t feel any hungrier than they already were. Eventually, though, they took it up again when they didn’t think the hunger could get any worse, just to take the edge off everything else in their lives. That was something he never shared with Alex - Danielle didn’t have much in common with Ben, but she would’ve had Karl’s head for it just as quickly.
Karl didn’t see much of a problem in enjoying a good smoke once in a while, or being a little generous with the alcohol on occasion now that the stuff on hand was drinkable, but Michael didn’t seem too interested in doing much else. There wasn’t anything mentally wrong with him as far as Karl could tell, which took out the one excuse he might’ve made. Well, it wasn’t quite true that he didn’t care about anything else - he loved video games. He offered to teach Karl to play a few of them, but he figured out pretty quickly that that was a blind alley. There might have been some things in the world that appealed to Karl less than sitting in a dark room and staring at the changes on a screen, but there weren’t many.
He had to give Michael credit for having some decent friends, or at least friends of friends who Karl added to his own circle. Granted, a few of them partied a little more than they should have or liked looking at screens more than Karl thought was healthy, but he didn’t expect anyone to be perfect. Some of them managed to teach him how to bicycle, which was easy enough and useful to boot, and to play a little basketball. Aunt Shelly and her kids' insisting on teaching him how to ice skate wound up being a disaster, but Karl didn’t mind.
A good handful of people, mostly girls, liked to go out dancing, and Karl never said no to their invitations. Ben hadn’t seen the use of dancing, but in one of Anna’s rare fits of independence, she insisted that it was a skill any halfway civilized person had to learn, “no argument possible.” So Karl learned to dance, with a half-sullen, half-excited Alex as his partner. He was past the stage of disliking her because she was a girl by then, but a few years shy of paying attention to her because of it. Anna’s idea of proper dancing, he discovered quickly, was a lot more formal than the fashion here, but it was easy to adapt. The girls who went dancing always liked him, although that was probably because there were never as many guys who went, and the ones who were there were either dancing with each other or sitting around nursing beers.
Portland turned out to have a fair number of Russians living in and around it, and Karl found the language coming back to him almost instantly. It had been a long time since he’d had the chance to speak it. He and Alex used to use it sometimes, back when they were still inventing constellations and playing hide-and-seek together, but he’d spent the last two years getting his limited Korean up to speed, and she’d been frantically trying to learn French. Maybe it had to do with learning it younger; it was still far more natural to him than Korean. He took to frequenting places where he’d have the chance to use it: a bookshop whose sign was in Cyrillic lettering, an odds-and-ends little grocery store, a café where they served tea the way Anna always used to. The prospect wasn’t easy at first, but he kept coming back to it, maybe for the same reasons. Some of the women looked like Anna: tall and pale and oval-faced with straight hair and round, pale eyes, and Karl wondered if they had ancestors in the same towns and villages, a thousand or a hundred or fifty years ago. He couldn’t ask.
“She must have loved you,” Aunt Shelly said at one point, the time she asked what happened to her brother. “She must have loved you very much.”
Karl laughed. “She cared about us. She loved Ben.” He wasn’t sure if that was for Ben himself or because she’d believed fervently in the party back on the mainland and it had fallen pieces, but whatever the reason, it was the case. Not that she didn’t have some affection for the kids in her care; she, or Ben, just had strict rules governing how much of it there could be, when and how and why she could show it. Karl never had any illusions about that, even - or especially - as a child, but that didn’t make him regret or second-guess any of the stupid things he’d tried to do on her behalf later on, or make him any less angry about other things since. He wanted her to be in Portland criticizing his blini or deciding she’d rather go to the park than into the Russian church on a Sunday morning when there was nothing else to do, or decide she might as well go into the Russian church in town because she was never allowed to do it back on the mainland and then leave halfway through the ceremony because she was bored and there was nothing to stop her.
Toward the beginning of spring one of the parks had a festival of Russian culture, which seemed to consist of under-rehearsed song-and-dance numbers and food fried in enough oil to kill a whole pod of whales and a hundred booths selling trinkets no one would need. Karl wandered through anyway, enjoying hearing snippets of Russian again, taking in the whole frenzied spectacle. One of the booths was selling painted wooden dolls like the one Anna kept on a shelf, the one they could see was bisected at the waist but that they were forbidden to touch because Anna didn’t want it lost or damaged. They used to speculate about what was inside it: poison gas; a new kind of tiny gun; secret maps; the seeds of a magical plant; special medicine. Karl half-believed the last one, years later, when she brought it to the Staff. After she died he finally opened and found another painted doll inside it, and another inside that, and another: eight generations of wooden figurines, lifeless. The last one didn’t open, he remembered, and he’d sat down at the child-sized table and wept.
His aunt and uncle suggested at one point that he might think about going to college and studying Russian: history, politics, literature. The thought had occurred to him earlier - Alex was starting at a local university part-time in the fall, and if Michael had the brains to get through college somehow, Karl was sure he could manage it. But he’d known it wouldn’t work out - maybe he could pass the degree equivalences and the entrance exams, almost undoubtedly the curriculum would interest him, but even the idea of it hurt.
The other thing they kept hinting at was some kind of science, training to be a doctor or a lab technician or a researcher of something. “That’s what you did on the island, wasn’t it?” his uncle said. “Dr. Shephard said from when you were fifteen or so? Helped out with the medical work?”
Karl wasn’t sure whether to look him in the eye or to look away while he thought about how to answer that. “I helped with the research,” he said after a minute’s silence. “I didn’t help patients.” Timothy and Caroline didn’t say anything. “I talked to Jin and Desmond. They both know some people in the boatyards who might be hiring.” That was Karl’s other main task: helping Pickett and Colleen keep the boats in working order, a job that didn’t come with the same memories attached to it. He’d done what he could at the beach camp, too, fixing the old outrigger when it got leaky and getting together makeshift rafts and canoes. It was worked he’d liked, and he found himself wanting to get into it again, even if he didn’t need the money.
He needed to get back to everyone else, too. It was hard to wrap his mind around the fact that the eight hundred miles to Portland could make for an easy long weekend visit, but it could, and he decided he’d gone long enough without baby-sitting Aaron or fishing with Jin. More than anything else he missed Alex, which went without saying. Her birthday, in April, was a ritual according to Ben’s rules and Danielle’s, and something had felt wrong about not being around for it. Hurley’d tipped him off to a party at his place and told him to send flowers. Karl supposed there wasn’t much else he could do. There were pre-arranged bouquets, but he picked out flowers she’d always liked instead: hibiscus, paper flowers, orchids. He supposed “Happy nineteenth” wasn’t adequate to put in the message space, but he couldn’t come up with any brilliant words for the occasion. In the end, he’d settled on To Alex. Happy birthday - there are so many things I wish I knew how to say. I’m sorry I can’t be with you, but we’ll talk soon. I think about you all the time. Love, Karl. He hoped that would be okay.
It was Alex, and inseparably from her Danielle, he was most anxious to see as he worked out the details of going back. Granted, it made too much sense not to take the Kwons’ offer of their spare room until he found a place of his own, but he was eager to spend time with Alex and see the place she and her mother were living on Santa Catalina island. More than that, he wanted to get used to it, to be there for Danielle while she learned how to live in semi-civilization again and for Alex as she learned it for the first time. He wasn’t sure how he could help, or even if Alex would want him to, but he knew he had to be back, however she’d have him. They’d work out the details from there, although he had his own hopes for them.
He took a train down in the hopes of making the whole transition a little less jarring for himself, watching the terrain change every couple of hours and concluding that this world was every bit as fickle as the island in its own way. Here was a fickleness he could deal with better, somehow; maybe he’d never get the island out of his head, but this was where he was born, where he and almost all the people he knew were supposed to be. Almost all of them. He gave up trying to make sense of it as the night obscured his view and thought about meeting Alex instead.
(To part two --->)
**Graphics by georguuh at over at the Lost Forums.
Summary: The beginning of Karl’s life after the island. (Gen; some Karl/Alex)
Rating: PG Disclaimer: Lost is all ABC’s; no money/ownership here.
Author’s note: This can be read as an independent one-shot, but it is in keeping with a series that was conceived just after, and assumes canon through, the end of S3.
Dedication/Thanks: For
aboutbunnies , who also cared about Karl, dammit.
Comments, feedback, and criticism are always welcome.
Alex thinks staying safe was half the problem. Two or three months at the beach camp revelling in their new freedom, as much as they could, and then… And then Nancy found her way back to them, somehow, stumbling through the jungle, sick and already showing. She didn’t say anything from the moment she arrived, and eight days later she was dead.
Maybe if Alex and Karl were right for each other, they wouldn’t have kept spending every kiss worrying that it would get out of hand. -“All That You Can’t Leave Behind,” 7A
Anna was Karl’s tutor for longer than Sabine was Alex’s. Karl tried to talk Anna out of the project. He got punished when Anna reported him for it. -“Sharper (In Gratitude)”
There will be a feast in our street too. -Russian proverb
Getting off the boat was easier for Karl than it was for Alex. He knew it would be the entire time, although he didn’t say it to her, not with the memory of how he helped Danielle shepherd her onto it. He had vague memories of playing with children who must have been his cousins, of faces attached to the names Uncle Tim or Aunt Linda. He’d had a photo album as a little boy, one his parents put together of life in Portland and that he managed to hang onto until he was eight or nine. Whenever he had a few minutes to himself, he’d slide it out from under his mattress and stare at the images and captions, even though he’d seen them more times than he could count. He still remembered them after the album disappeared: Karl and Cousin Michael’s first snowstorm, Aunt Shelly at Mommy and Daddy’s wedding, Mommy and Daddy teaching Karl to row.
He recognized his aunts and uncles when he saw them in the crowd. They were older and sadder-looking, he couldn’t remember their spouses’ names, his cousins were at school in Portland, but he still knew who they were. They didn’t need anyone to point him out either.
He was glad the officials had released basic information to everyone on the mainland: there were too many things about the last eighteen years that he wasn’t eager to rehash and probably never would be. The questions his aunts and uncles asked him were easier - well, his dad’s younger sister Linda asked too-personal questions and kept calling him Conrad, but she was persuaded to leave after a couple of days. The older sister, Shelly, and his mother’s brother were more circumspect: Was he finding it cold in Los Angeles? Was there something he’d like to do, something he wanted to know about almost anything? He can’t remember what he answered.
“Why’d you choose Karl James Ford?” Aunt Shelly asked him one evening, after they’d had dinner in one of the hotel suites.
It was the hardest question she asked him, although maybe she didn’t realize that. “I didn’t have anything with my last name on it,” he said, looking at his hands. “Ben called me Karl Jacobs.”
Shelly closed her eyes for a minute, and Karl wondered if his father, who looked like Shelly and like him, ever had that same pain-stilled expression on his face. She looked like she was holding something back. “I mean, why Ford instead of… Shipman or Southryn…”
No instead of Hartmann or Why not Mettler? She’d guessed, even if he couldn’t bring himself to say it. He cleared his throat. “There was a guy from the plane,” he said. “James Ford. He was - a friend of mine.”
She nodded and smiled, blinking quickly. “It’s a good name.”
His uncle Timothy was, and is, placid but somehow never seeming entirely secure in the world around him. Karl still isn’t sure what gave him that impression - Uncle Tim is fine, happy with his wife and their paediatric practice and their son - but it was one of the first things Karl had noticed, right after the wispy salt-and-pepper hair Timothy had left and the way his glasses were always a few degrees off kilter. And it was his uncle who lost interest in the ballgame they were watching one evening and turned off the TV, slumped forward and ran his hands over his mostly bald head. He wasn’t looking at Karl and his voice wavered when he said, “How long was Cecelia with you on the island?”
Karl swallowed heavily. “The first year we were there. December, I think.” She was there at Thanksgiving, he could remember sitting next to her and resenting having to eat cranberry chutney, but by the time his father pointed out the longest day of the year to him… She just went to the Staff to rest for a few days, so Dr. Rom can help her get better.
“Do you - do you know what happened to her?”
“She was pregnant,” he said flatly. You’re going to have a little sister, Karl! “The women had - complications.” I don’t want a sister or a brother. It’s only supposed to be me. He’d put a hand to his mother’s stomach, too hard and too big for him to curl up on anymore, and felt a kick.
“What about Frederick?”
“He was there one more winter. Not the next Easter, though.” His uncle didn’t say anything. “Richard told me there’d been an accident.” His father hadn’t been sent out to sea like his mother or anything; he was just gone, and after that… It wasn’t like Karl wasn’t allowed to talk about him or anything, just that no one, not once, replied anything apart from “You’ll be okay.” He gave up, and when Alex asked about his father years later he couldn’t tell her a thing.
A day or two after that exchange he introduced them all to Alex, or to Alex and Danielle, more accurately. He’d gone to meet Alex’s aunts and uncle by himself and been pretty overwhelmed by the barrage of questions and the stares, even if they were all friendly. If he was honest with himself, he resented it a little, but he couldn’t really expect Danielle to let Alex go to meet strangers without her. She’d have to get used to it eventually, he thought, at least to some extent, but eventually wasn’t the same thing as just then. She had too much else on her mind. And so she and Alex showed up outside the suite as agreed one afternoon, one of Danielle’s hands on Alex’s shoulder and the other in what looked like a vise-like grip on her forearm. She gave Shelly and Tim and his wife Caroline little nods instead of shaking hands with them, and made about half a second of eye contact before she started staring them up and down checking them, he knew, for hidden weapons and looking around the room as if she could take it apart with her eyes.
They had an awkward, well-intentioned afternoon tea. Shelly and the Mettlers asked polite questions about Danielle’s family and Alex’s interests; Danielle gave perfunctory answers and then interrogated them. Alex didn’t say much of anything, just sort of blushed and looked down while Danielle sniffed and test-nibbled at hors d’oeuvres before passing the tray onto her. Karl couldn’t really blame them for any of it, but he knew he wasn’t handling things much better than Alex. He was just grateful than his aunts and uncle didn’t seem to hold it against anyone. If anything, they seemed to have a mixture of pity and admiration for the Rousseaus, which was probably the best he could hope for under the circumstances.
It was Uncle Tim who suggested that Karl spend a few months in Oregon, getting his head together and readjusting to things. “I know you’ll probably want to stay with everyone else here,” he said, “but a little change of scenery might be good for you.” Karl had to agree with him. The only survivors who weren’t staying in L.A. County were at least buying winter houses there, and he had a feeling that if he started off there he’d get locked in, never get to know anyone who wasn’t from the island. And he’d have to do that at some point, sooner rather than later.
Alex cried when he told her about it. She’d done plenty of crying over the years he’d known her, especially the last five, but usually it was because someone was dead. He was more than a little daunted himself by the prospect of several months away from her and everyone else, but he knew he needed it. “We can talk to each other every day,” he promised her.
“Just talk?” she sort of whimpered, although the answer was obvious, and he didn’t know what to say to that. He and Alex still kissed sometimes, but the combination of fear and inertia had kept there from being much of a spark or anything more between them since their first months at the beach camp. It was one of the things he’d have to figure out; it wasn’t like she was chained to him either, although he probably could’ve phrased it better to her than that. He wasn’t expecting either one of them would fall in love with anyone else in the meantime. He just needed a little bit of time and space to sort his own mind out, and she did too, whether she wanted to admit it or not.
He wound up taking out a few girls in Portland, ones he’d met and gotten along with. Nothing too serious: going out for coffee or dinner after he’d gotten used to the concepts involved on his own, making out with a couple of them a few times before they realized they’d never understand each other enough to make it last. He thought it was better not to mention any of it to Alex, although he hoped, despite the little spike of jealousy he couldn’t avoid feeling at the thought, that she was doing the same thing.
All that didn’t happen right away, though. It took him a few weeks to get adjust to Portland and to the daily routine of what he supposed was the real world. The perennial grey mist over everything and the prickly, sweet-smelling pine trees that he’d half-remembered seemed like something out of a dream, as did the thick layers of clothing he found himself alone in needing: shirt, sweater, jacket. As strange as it was, though, he settled into a spare room of Uncle Tim’s house and surprised himself by remembering the ins and outs of housekeeping almost immediately.
The society around him had its own quirks too. Ben hadn’t been lying when he said the wider world cared about nothing but - what had he called it? - the almighty dollar. The settlements he’d gotten apparently made him rich, but he had no idea why they thought he’d ever need as much money as they gave him. Granted, there were a million luxuries advertised everywhere, but he couldn’t see the use of most of them. But some baffling things he did have to deal with: the public transportation system, for one, and getting around a metropolitan area much bigger than the entire island. He got very lost more than a few times and wound up calling his aunts and uncle from utterly unfamiliar places, probably giving a good laugh to more than one bus driver and subway attendant in the process, but he figured it wasn’t the end of the world.
Once he knew his way around the place a little better, old things came back to him in fits and starts: a board game they hadn’t had on the island, road signs, spring blossoms. The first time he managed to get to the grocery store on his own, undistracted, he was hit with the memory of going there with his mother, something he hadn’t remembered in… fifteen years, maybe? She always complained about the price of cold cereal, and she thought the kinds he liked were too sugary. He couldn’t remember what they were called, but he remembered a blue box with a cartoon parrot on it, and a bright yellow one with an equally absurd sea captain. He found both and put them into the shopping basket without thinking about it, not caring about the luxury. He wasn’t surprised to find that they weren’t nearly as appealing to his twenty-three-year-old taste buds, but he finished them anyway and he kept the boxes.
It was a surprise to everyone that he knew how to cook. Even more to the point, that he liked doing it: he hadn’t had a kitchen or any ingredients besides what they could forage in years, and he was eager to have the chance again. Once he got the grocery route figured out, he took it up again without a second thought: borscht, cutlets, cabbage pirozkhi. He didn’t remember the exact times and measurements, but the smells and tastes were familiar - better than they were sometimes, really, when a shipment was late and they had to make do. His aunt and uncle got home from work at the same time that day and seemed happily surprised to have dinner waiting for them, but there was something else too. “Where did you learn how to cook this?” his uncle asked.
Karl shrugged. “Anna taught all of us.” Housekeeping, school lessons, language.
“Anna?”
He’d never mentioned Anna to them, he realized. They never asked him anything but the broadest, vaguest questions about his life on the island, and he wasn’t sure why that was, or even what he thought about it. “Anna took care of the kids whose parents died.”
“Was she from the Soviet Union?” Uncle Tim asked.
“Yeah. Is this Soviet food?” He’d never thought of it that way: there was just regular food and survival food, without fancy distinctions within either. Jin and Sun had promised to teach him to cook Korean once he was back in California, but he hadn’t given the details any thought. Apparently everyone here made distinctions, though. His aunt said yes, it was - well, Russian food, Eastern European anyway, and she added that they’d always liked it. He wasn’t completely convinced of that - his uncle managed to spill a lot of the borscht and took extra helpings of the cutlets, and his aunt did pretty much the opposite - but they got by okay. Karl could page through some of the cookbooks they kept on hand if he wanted to try something else.
Uncle Tim was almost silent through most of the meal, and just as Karl was spearing his final pirozkhi he said, “She took care of other kids too?”
Karl put down his fork. “Yeah. Three boys and a girl. They were all older than me.”
“What happened to their parents?”
Ben extracted the kids and left the parents to die. “No one ever said.” He dabbed his mouth unnecessarily. “They died on the island. That’s all I know.”
“What about their children?” said Aunt Caroline.
Luke married Diane. He could’ve said it, although that wasn’t the point. I was the one who warned the beach camp. He kept looking down. “They died too.”
That was the only time he talked about it with his aunt and uncle. The one who pushed him on it was his psychiatrist - everybody responsible for the salvage operation shanghaied the survivors into therapy pretty quickly, talking about post-traumatic something-or-other. There was probably a star by Desmond’s name on that one, and half a dozen by Danielle’s. On his own file he only saw a note he wasn’t supposed to see: N.B. Will have difficulty establishing therapeutic trust due to on-island experiences. -J. Shephard, M.D. He could imagine a similar one on Alex’s: Will find it impossible. He didn’t have much faith in the enterprise at first himself, but eventually he had to admit it was useful, strange to say.
He established something of a routine: therapy sessions twice a week, doing some errands and chores for his relatives despite their insisting that he didn’t need to, going to the gym most days. He’d lost all his strength that last year on the island, like all of them had, and he was eager to get it back, and to re-learn what it was like to be able to enjoy running and swimming instead of just rushing in a panic. He didn’t want to wind up looking like Tom or Pickett or even Ben before he started getting sick, either. He didn’t want to have the first thing in common with any of them.
Beyond all that, there were a decent number of regulars about his age, too. That was another thing he’d missed. Uncle Tim said Karl had a gift for making friends easily. Karl wasn’t sure it was anything that remarkable: you just figured out which people wanted to use you or hurt you - more of the population than his aunt and uncle probably would have suspected, but nothing like as many as Danielle had to - and you avoided them, and the rest weren’t too hard to get along with at one level or another. He wound up being close to the ones who at least understood that he wasn’t going to say much about the island yet, and that when he talked about his family he usually meant the Kwons or Alex and Danielle. They got used to the fact that he liked to hear what they considered the most mundane stories about their own lives, or that if they wanted to know his they tended to wind up hearing about catching poisonous fish by mistake or the time a coconut-smashing contest went completely awry..
Karl’s cousin Michael wasn’t exactly hard to get along with, the weekends and afternoons he came home from his college dormitory. He just wasn’t easy to connect to either, unless you were really interested in video games or what Michael called partying. Karl didn’t know how Michael managed to pass his courses, but apparently he did, and his parents didn’t seem to give him too much grief about it. “My parents were much too strict with us,” Uncle Tim said to Karl one day, out of the blue. “Once they were gone Cecelia just started looking for someone else to make all the hard decisions for her. Benjamin Linus wasn’t the first person who took her and Frederick in.” Karl didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything. “I think Carrie and I went too far the other way sometimes, maybe didn’t give Michael as many boundaries as he needed.”
Karl made what he hoped was a noncommittal noise at that and changed the subject, because he thought his uncle was right on that one. The first time Michael came home for dinner while Karl was there, he waited until his parents left them to get re-acquainted with each other and pulled a little bag with a tin inside it from his backpack. “Did they have any weed on that island of yours?”
“Any what?”
“Weed. Pot. Marijuana.”
“All over the place. Somebody brought it over in the seventies and it spread like crazy.”
Michael looked almost disappointed at that. “Well, I’ve got some here, if you want it,” he said, rolling some dried leaf fragments into a cigarette.
Karl took a few hits more out of politeness than anything else; Michael said it was the really good stuff, which made Karl think the weak version here was probably just leftover cooking herbs. He and Aldo used to slip into the woods sometimes when they were off duty and just start a little fire with the wild leaves. They’d spend the afternoon wasting time, enjoying the feel of the air and the scent of the forest and laughing hysterically at nothing at all. Looking back, he suspected Ben must have known about it - it was hardly a unique form of recreation - and not cared much as long as it didn’t interfere with anything that needed to get done.
Later on, he and Sawyer used to do the same thing from time to time, when they were both feeling too wound up and needed a break. Desmond would join them sometimes, and Karl got to hear the disconcerting sound of Desmond actually laughing and sounding relaxed, and Sawyer giggling at a higher pitch than he would have expected. They stopped for a while when the food started running out, so that they wouldn’t feel any hungrier than they already were. Eventually, though, they took it up again when they didn’t think the hunger could get any worse, just to take the edge off everything else in their lives. That was something he never shared with Alex - Danielle didn’t have much in common with Ben, but she would’ve had Karl’s head for it just as quickly.
Karl didn’t see much of a problem in enjoying a good smoke once in a while, or being a little generous with the alcohol on occasion now that the stuff on hand was drinkable, but Michael didn’t seem too interested in doing much else. There wasn’t anything mentally wrong with him as far as Karl could tell, which took out the one excuse he might’ve made. Well, it wasn’t quite true that he didn’t care about anything else - he loved video games. He offered to teach Karl to play a few of them, but he figured out pretty quickly that that was a blind alley. There might have been some things in the world that appealed to Karl less than sitting in a dark room and staring at the changes on a screen, but there weren’t many.
He had to give Michael credit for having some decent friends, or at least friends of friends who Karl added to his own circle. Granted, a few of them partied a little more than they should have or liked looking at screens more than Karl thought was healthy, but he didn’t expect anyone to be perfect. Some of them managed to teach him how to bicycle, which was easy enough and useful to boot, and to play a little basketball. Aunt Shelly and her kids' insisting on teaching him how to ice skate wound up being a disaster, but Karl didn’t mind.
A good handful of people, mostly girls, liked to go out dancing, and Karl never said no to their invitations. Ben hadn’t seen the use of dancing, but in one of Anna’s rare fits of independence, she insisted that it was a skill any halfway civilized person had to learn, “no argument possible.” So Karl learned to dance, with a half-sullen, half-excited Alex as his partner. He was past the stage of disliking her because she was a girl by then, but a few years shy of paying attention to her because of it. Anna’s idea of proper dancing, he discovered quickly, was a lot more formal than the fashion here, but it was easy to adapt. The girls who went dancing always liked him, although that was probably because there were never as many guys who went, and the ones who were there were either dancing with each other or sitting around nursing beers.
Portland turned out to have a fair number of Russians living in and around it, and Karl found the language coming back to him almost instantly. It had been a long time since he’d had the chance to speak it. He and Alex used to use it sometimes, back when they were still inventing constellations and playing hide-and-seek together, but he’d spent the last two years getting his limited Korean up to speed, and she’d been frantically trying to learn French. Maybe it had to do with learning it younger; it was still far more natural to him than Korean. He took to frequenting places where he’d have the chance to use it: a bookshop whose sign was in Cyrillic lettering, an odds-and-ends little grocery store, a café where they served tea the way Anna always used to. The prospect wasn’t easy at first, but he kept coming back to it, maybe for the same reasons. Some of the women looked like Anna: tall and pale and oval-faced with straight hair and round, pale eyes, and Karl wondered if they had ancestors in the same towns and villages, a thousand or a hundred or fifty years ago. He couldn’t ask.
“She must have loved you,” Aunt Shelly said at one point, the time she asked what happened to her brother. “She must have loved you very much.”
Karl laughed. “She cared about us. She loved Ben.” He wasn’t sure if that was for Ben himself or because she’d believed fervently in the party back on the mainland and it had fallen pieces, but whatever the reason, it was the case. Not that she didn’t have some affection for the kids in her care; she, or Ben, just had strict rules governing how much of it there could be, when and how and why she could show it. Karl never had any illusions about that, even - or especially - as a child, but that didn’t make him regret or second-guess any of the stupid things he’d tried to do on her behalf later on, or make him any less angry about other things since. He wanted her to be in Portland criticizing his blini or deciding she’d rather go to the park than into the Russian church on a Sunday morning when there was nothing else to do, or decide she might as well go into the Russian church in town because she was never allowed to do it back on the mainland and then leave halfway through the ceremony because she was bored and there was nothing to stop her.
Toward the beginning of spring one of the parks had a festival of Russian culture, which seemed to consist of under-rehearsed song-and-dance numbers and food fried in enough oil to kill a whole pod of whales and a hundred booths selling trinkets no one would need. Karl wandered through anyway, enjoying hearing snippets of Russian again, taking in the whole frenzied spectacle. One of the booths was selling painted wooden dolls like the one Anna kept on a shelf, the one they could see was bisected at the waist but that they were forbidden to touch because Anna didn’t want it lost or damaged. They used to speculate about what was inside it: poison gas; a new kind of tiny gun; secret maps; the seeds of a magical plant; special medicine. Karl half-believed the last one, years later, when she brought it to the Staff. After she died he finally opened and found another painted doll inside it, and another inside that, and another: eight generations of wooden figurines, lifeless. The last one didn’t open, he remembered, and he’d sat down at the child-sized table and wept.
His aunt and uncle suggested at one point that he might think about going to college and studying Russian: history, politics, literature. The thought had occurred to him earlier - Alex was starting at a local university part-time in the fall, and if Michael had the brains to get through college somehow, Karl was sure he could manage it. But he’d known it wouldn’t work out - maybe he could pass the degree equivalences and the entrance exams, almost undoubtedly the curriculum would interest him, but even the idea of it hurt.
The other thing they kept hinting at was some kind of science, training to be a doctor or a lab technician or a researcher of something. “That’s what you did on the island, wasn’t it?” his uncle said. “Dr. Shephard said from when you were fifteen or so? Helped out with the medical work?”
Karl wasn’t sure whether to look him in the eye or to look away while he thought about how to answer that. “I helped with the research,” he said after a minute’s silence. “I didn’t help patients.” Timothy and Caroline didn’t say anything. “I talked to Jin and Desmond. They both know some people in the boatyards who might be hiring.” That was Karl’s other main task: helping Pickett and Colleen keep the boats in working order, a job that didn’t come with the same memories attached to it. He’d done what he could at the beach camp, too, fixing the old outrigger when it got leaky and getting together makeshift rafts and canoes. It was worked he’d liked, and he found himself wanting to get into it again, even if he didn’t need the money.
He needed to get back to everyone else, too. It was hard to wrap his mind around the fact that the eight hundred miles to Portland could make for an easy long weekend visit, but it could, and he decided he’d gone long enough without baby-sitting Aaron or fishing with Jin. More than anything else he missed Alex, which went without saying. Her birthday, in April, was a ritual according to Ben’s rules and Danielle’s, and something had felt wrong about not being around for it. Hurley’d tipped him off to a party at his place and told him to send flowers. Karl supposed there wasn’t much else he could do. There were pre-arranged bouquets, but he picked out flowers she’d always liked instead: hibiscus, paper flowers, orchids. He supposed “Happy nineteenth” wasn’t adequate to put in the message space, but he couldn’t come up with any brilliant words for the occasion. In the end, he’d settled on To Alex. Happy birthday - there are so many things I wish I knew how to say. I’m sorry I can’t be with you, but we’ll talk soon. I think about you all the time. Love, Karl. He hoped that would be okay.
It was Alex, and inseparably from her Danielle, he was most anxious to see as he worked out the details of going back. Granted, it made too much sense not to take the Kwons’ offer of their spare room until he found a place of his own, but he was eager to spend time with Alex and see the place she and her mother were living on Santa Catalina island. More than that, he wanted to get used to it, to be there for Danielle while she learned how to live in semi-civilization again and for Alex as she learned it for the first time. He wasn’t sure how he could help, or even if Alex would want him to, but he knew he had to be back, however she’d have him. They’d work out the details from there, although he had his own hopes for them.
He took a train down in the hopes of making the whole transition a little less jarring for himself, watching the terrain change every couple of hours and concluding that this world was every bit as fickle as the island in its own way. Here was a fickleness he could deal with better, somehow; maybe he’d never get the island out of his head, but this was where he was born, where he and almost all the people he knew were supposed to be. Almost all of them. He gave up trying to make sense of it as the night obscured his view and thought about meeting Alex instead.
(To part two --->)
**Graphics by georguuh at over at the Lost Forums.