you're the second best killer that i've ever seen (shannon/various) pg13
title: you're the second best killer that i've ever seen
fandom: lost
character(s)/pairing(s): shannon/various (sun, sayid, others that shouldn't be ruined)
rating: pg13
word count: 1133
spoilers: set mid-s6. no finale spoilers, which means forget everything you learned there
summary: this is the real story of shannon rutherford’s life: you only wanted to be beautiful, and that’s exactly what you got. and then it was over. but it doesn’t stop there.
This is last.
You’ve never been one to dwell. You have a past, just like anyone, and you try to forget it, just like all the rest. Before Sun there was Sayid and before that- Well. It doesn’t matter, now does it?
(You’re not avoiding the subject. Really.)
And when the evils of your life are invisible? Even better. It’s easy to romanticize the things you don’t see with your own eyes. To pretend that this is just another James Bond movie with a female lead, and you’re the Bond girl that he (she, you correct, always she) fucks until the end credits roll, on endless stretches of secluded beaches as the tide rolls in.
Sun is too pretty to be a murderer, you decide one night, your palm cupped to fit her cheek snugly. But she is sexy enough to be an assassin, and this is how you justify it. This is your euphemism to end all euphemisms. Because, if she’s a murderer, then you’re just the girl who doesn’t care enough to stop kissing her, stop your hands from ripping the buttons from her blouse and latching onto her collarbone. Then you’re just a killer-fucker, the leggy Bonnie to her petite Clyde, and that just doesn’t sit right with you. Especially since this isn’t the first time. (This is turning into a pattern and you don’t like it one bit, only so far as it gets you what you want; her, and before that, her.)
So you put up blinders. And they work just as they’re supposed to. Perfectly, actually.
(Maybe too well.)
You don’t see the blood under her nails when she slides her fingers into your blonde hair.
You don’t smell the gunpowder when you kiss her palm.
And when she comes, you don’t see the face of every man she’s ever killed. Just hers, open and blissful and beautiful.
But there is one thing to be said for her virtue versus others that will go unmentioned: at least she never shot you.
All you can think about is how this doesn’t feel like a second chance.
So you sit on a floral duvet and pink, feather pillows fluffed around you, and wait for her to come back to you. She never disappoints.
This is first.
When you were young, you didn’t think. You didn’t worry about falling in love (because you did it almost every day), or how much you’d hurt people, or that your fears choked you blind, made you crazy with insecurity.
This is the real story of Shannon Rutherford’s life:
You only wanted to be beautiful, and that’s exactly what you got. And then it was over.
But it doesn’t stop there.
This is between.
At first you don’t know what’s happening. And then you do, and you wish you didn’t.
Locke is standing there, poised over a dozen corpses of the freshly dead (you recognize some of them, too many), like he’s about to pull a rabbit out of a hat and he’s just waiting on the drum roll. But he isn’t Locke, not really. You’re pretty sure even he wouldn’t be this cruel.
“I don’t have anything to offer you,” Sayid says, calmly, like you were strangers who’d never met and would never meet again. You suddenly feel cold. “I only wanted my wife.”
Not-Locke laughs and laughs, pleased by his own cleverness. (You knew there was a reason you tried to shoot his head off once.) If this is a joke it’s the worst one you’ve ever heard.
You’re not the one he wants, not the one he expected to be given as a gift for loyal service. Before you there was another, and after you the same, and you should have known you were just the B-plot in someone else’s tragic love story.
Nadia. The name tastes like bile in the back of your throat.
You hurt all over. It aches to be brought back from the dead, maybe like it aches to be born, and you want to cry more than you’ve ever wanted anything. You want to be held by a mother you never met and rocked in warm, pink arms until you hiccup your last. But you can’t cry without functional tear ducts and you’ve been gone for a while; you’re all rusted inside. Instead you get a grieving widow leaving sympathetic fingerprints on your cheeks, trying not to look at the body of her husband as Sayid’s retreating form steps over him.
You sleep and wish on a shooting star that you’d never been brought back at all.
This is.
You exist in a space without time, where reality puckers and contracts and it takes you a millennium to take a sip of water but only a millisecond to grow old.
The world is beautiful here, and you chuckle with your old sense of irony that people only really experience perfection until their heart stops beating. Every person you see, you see their soul, all their flaws and virtues, and you know them like you know yourself. Your existence is acceptance and love and when you lace your fingers with hers it’s like there’s no space between you at all.
The grass is a bright green below you both, though if you wished for sand or stone you could have it. She breathes with the sway of the trees and you smile peacefully.
Ana laughs as two birds fight over a piece of red string. You kiss her temple, wishing you’d found her when you both were still alive, before she’d destroyed herself from the inside out. Not that it matters now.
She chases your lips on the retreat with her own, and for a moment you’re just touching, mouth to mouth and soul to soul. But you feel a tug on your sundress, and you break to search it out.
It’s one of those damn birds, a sparrow if you’re not mistaken. It’s plucking at the soft, orange material with its little beak and you laugh as you shoo him away.
Suddenly you feel a sharp pain in your stomach, and the world narrows to your abdomen and the grains of agony you can feel loosing into your veins.
“What’s wrong Shannon?” Ana questions worriedly, and you can feel her panic.
There isn’t pain here. They’re supposed to be through with all that. But you pant as another spasm rocks you, and you clutch at your dress. You barely notice that the world is losing its saturation, its brightness. You tilt your hand away and there’s blood. Blood staining your hands and red dampening your citrus sundress, like a lick of fire.
You can feel Ana’s hands hovering over your shoulders and the sparrow is still tugging at your hair and you gasp: “I think I’m-“
Notes: So I got this idea after not!Locke promised Sayid to bring someone he'd lost back to life if exchange for his help. And I thought, huh. Well there's a loophole. Hence, fic.