Now I See You Everywhere (1/?) Desmond/Penny
Title: Now I See You Everywhere (1/?)
Characters: Desmond, Penny, Sayid, Daniel, Sun, Charlie, Widmore, Ben
Rating: PG13
Words: 2100
Disclaimer: Lost is not mine.
Spoilers: S4 Finale.
Summary: Desmond’s idyllic post-island life is shattered when Penny disappears, forcing him to confront everything he left behind. My luau drabble for thespiansparkle The Gift, works as a prelude, but it does not need to be read to understand this story. Won Best Series at the lostficawards in September 2008.
by lj user=janie_tangerine.
After every storm, Desmond’s first task is to survey the property line of Coto Ranch. Last night’s cavalcade of thunder and lighting had seemed more style than substance, but it’s still possible that fallen branches or the wind had damaged the fences holding Fernando Coto’s three hundred Shorthorns. It only takes one loose board or sunken wire for the herd to get loose, but so far the enclosure appears intact and the cattle remain penned, passively munching grass and alfalfa.
Desmond parks his mud splattered truck at the northeast corner of the property and grabs his gloves and tool box. He carefully checks the length of fence dug into a ditch that runs parallel to the river dividing Coto’s ranch from his neighbours. The sun is already high in the sky, but the brightness of the day does not transfer over to heat and he’s thankful Penny pressed his winter jacket into his hands this morning. The dirt and grass are covered with a fine layer of frost. He suspects the next storm will bring snow, not rain.
Despite the cold, Desmond pauses on his way back to the truck to take in the view. The ranch sits at the edge of a valley, one of a dozen cattle farms north of the small city of Río Grande, the last vestiges of civilization between Argentina and the Antarctica. The valley is wrapped around the tail end of the Andes, a sight Desmond can never get enough of. After bouncing for over a year between tropical ports across the Pacific and Atlantic, it was the Andes that convinced him and Penny to exchange their sailboat for a cottage and make Tierra del Fuego their home. The high snow covered peaks make the mountains of Scotland look like swollen ant hills, and here, at the very end of the world, they act like an impassable shield, protecting them from everything that lies beyond.
It is also as different a landscape one can find from the island. Tierra del Fuego is a swirl of rugged greys, browns, and whites, where the lushness of green hovers barely an inch off the ground or is dotted high in a tree. Here, the cool air fills your lungs with a cleanliness he yearned for when he was buried in the staleness of the hatch or the heaviness of the jungle. Each breath helps wipe his senses clean of his detour through hell, just as coming home to Penny means words like certain and hope and always were grounded in something real.
Yet every so often, the newness of his terrain will seem all too familiar. A taste or sound will remind Desmond he did not arrive here straight from London. Today it’s the sight of a floral sofa, suited to the stuffy sitting room of a rectory, casually floating down the river. Most likely this act is some prank by kids or an aborted trip to the dump by a lazy ranch hand, but to him, seeing something so wildly out of place jogs his memory in all the wrong places. It’s all too close to something in the past he would have had to ascribe meaning to, the object that shouldn’t be there but is, the riddle needing to be unravelled, the ordinary act meant to have some extraordinary purpose.
As it passes by, the sofa’s left side catches on a bed of rocks, and flutters, swaying against the current, caught between staying and going. Desmond puts his toolbox down by a fence post and skids down the riverbank. It seems imperative to move it along. Shoving his gloves into his pockets, he reaches into the icy water and grabs a long stick floating by. Balancing on a few slippery boulders, he reaches out with the stick and gives the piece of furniture three sharps pushes. It's enough to dislodge it from the rocks; the sofa twirls, almost in a circle, before catching the current again and disappears.
Once it’s gone, Desmond is filled with unease. Perhaps he should not have interfered. The sofa might get caught again, act as a dam and cause flooding or some children could attempt to play boat with it and fall into the river. A feeling of dread lingers for the rest of the work day. He finishes checking the perimeter, and makes a small repair to a gate. After, he meets up with some of the other men, but finds few words for conversation as they begin construction on the new padlock. At lunch, he can’t eat at all and gives his soup and sandwich away.
Desmond finishes the day with a report to Coto; the Spanish on his tongue feels more cumbersome than normal. In his rush to leave, he’s aware from his employer’s confused face how badly he is mixing up his tenses and stumbling over grammar. When he gets into his truck, he has an urge to run home, and give some physical justification for his heart to pound this way. Only seeing the mountains rooted in their place calms him, so by the time he drives down the laneway leading to their cottage, he knows he will not arrive home in hyper mess.
He parks in front of the shed and takes his time going in, trying to shed the remainder of his anxiety, so he won’t share it with Penny. He spots her bicycle leaning against the side of the house and sees the front tire needs filling. He gets the pump from the shed and takes care of it. On his way around to the front, the appearance of a few snowflakes serves as a reassuring reminder that some things will always take their course. He makes a note to put the winter shutters on this weekend. On the front step, Desmond pauses to scrape the dried mud off his boots before entering the cottage.
Strains of Mozart’s symphony no. 40 greet him when he unlocks the door. He hangs up his coat and follows the music to the cottage’s only lit room, an alcove off the bedroom where Penny works. He’s surprised to find it empty. Her computer is on, open at the file she had been working on the day before, the English translation of software manual for a local company.
“Penny?”
He doesn’t like how his voice echoes through the four room cottage. He retraces his steps, turning on lights as he goes. The bedroom, kitchen, and den are all empty. He knocks on the bathroom door and when there is no response, he opens it, but she’s not in there either.
“Penny?”
He stands in the hall, going over their conversation from the night before, when they had lain in bed listening to the wind shriek and the thunder crash. Because of his early start, they had agreed he would take the truck in morning, rather than have her drop him off like she usually did. She had said, he remembered, as she had tucked her cold feet against his calves, and he had gotten out of bed to get her a pair of socks, that she had no plans to venture into town. If anything, she had mumbled right before sleep, she would bike over to see Hilde, their nearest neighbour, but other than that, she would be busy finishing off her translation.
Even though it’s clear Penny is not there, her name plays on his lips again and repeats silently in his head. The dread that he had carried around all day suddenly rushes through him like a waterfall. He returns to her office and sits in her chair. It reassures him that the symphony is still on the first movement until he realizes her CD player is on repeat. He thinks, trying to consider calmly, that this doesn’t mean anything; that they are just like any other married couple who got their wires crossed. Maybe she’s just gone for a walk. Maybe the software company called her in for a late meeting. Maybe Hilde had picked her up for a shopping trip and Penny would be back any moment with a bag full of ingredients for some recipe she just had to try tonight.
He calls Hilde, reminding himself before she answers, that he is to ask for Stephanie, not Penny, and to call himself Timothy, not Desmond. Hilde answers with a bubbly laugh and an invitation to dinner next week and it takes a minute or so to sort out that she has not seen or heard from Penny in several days. He gets a similar response from the receptionist at the software company.
As he hangs up the phone, Desmond’s foot hits something under the desk. He pushes back the chair and finds the pieces of a shattered teacup. Now that he looks closely, he finds a sticky splotch of spilt tea on her desk and notebook cover. He starts looking for more clues and discovers her purse, containing her wallet, sitting on the night table. Her coats hang in front hall closet and all her shoes are lined up at the door. It’s the last detail that just about breaks his heart, that she is somewhere in this cold without her shoes.
He rechecks their property in and out. All the doors and windows are secure, and there is no response to his calls outside. For the first time, the dusky shadows of the Andes appear to be closing in on him, rather than keeping things unwanted out. His hope leaps when he spies a piece of paper lying on the coffee table, but it’s not a note, only the score sheet from their rummy game from a few nights before.
Desmond returns once more to Penny’s desk and picks up the phone again. He knows the police in Río Grande would not consider her missing for forty-eight hours and would not, could not understand why he thinks, why he knows his wife’s disappearance is something beyond their capabilities.
It’s been years since he called the number he needs and finds that it is gone from his head. Although they have not spoken of it, he imagines Penny keeps it somewhere. He searches through her desk, looking for her worn red phonebook. He finds it in the bottom drawer, under a stack of papers from her old life.
Desmond dials Widmore’s office number first, not even considering the time change takes them far beyond business hours, partly because he’s not thinking straight and partly because it is impossible to imagine the man anywhere else but at work. He also clings to a hope that Penny’s father is expecting this call. If his instincts are right, Widmore has just taken what he thinks belong to him, and Penny is being kept in some posh hotel room in Buenos Aries; the runaway daughter being wooed to return to her real home. That is the only scenario Desmond allows himself to imagine.
His call is finally answered by an automatic voice, inviting him to leave a message for Mr. Widmore. He debates leaving a string of unintelligible curses, but hangs up instead.
Before he tries the Widmore residence, he holds his head, and is only one step away from banging it on the desk when he notices grains of sand stuck in the tea stain. He pushes the notebook aside and finds more underneath; in fact the sand seems coming from the book itself. He flips through the pages, many of which are warped by water, dusting off the sand that falls into his lap.
The writing and diagrams scattered across the pages look delicate enough that if he were brush against them, the ink would fall just like the sand. At once they are entirely incomprehensible and entirely familiar. He doesn’t even need to get to the page with his name scrawled on it to know whose journal he is holding. Suddenly the idea of Penny being taken by her father is replaced by an even more fantastic notion, one that Desmond is even less prepared to interpret.
x x x
Continued in part two.
Characters: Desmond, Penny, Sayid, Daniel, Sun, Charlie, Widmore, Ben
Rating: PG13
Words: 2100
Disclaimer: Lost is not mine.
Spoilers: S4 Finale.
Summary: Desmond’s idyllic post-island life is shattered when Penny disappears, forcing him to confront everything he left behind. My luau drabble for thespiansparkle The Gift, works as a prelude, but it does not need to be read to understand this story. Won Best Series at the lostficawards in September 2008.
by lj user=janie_tangerine.
After every storm, Desmond’s first task is to survey the property line of Coto Ranch. Last night’s cavalcade of thunder and lighting had seemed more style than substance, but it’s still possible that fallen branches or the wind had damaged the fences holding Fernando Coto’s three hundred Shorthorns. It only takes one loose board or sunken wire for the herd to get loose, but so far the enclosure appears intact and the cattle remain penned, passively munching grass and alfalfa.
Desmond parks his mud splattered truck at the northeast corner of the property and grabs his gloves and tool box. He carefully checks the length of fence dug into a ditch that runs parallel to the river dividing Coto’s ranch from his neighbours. The sun is already high in the sky, but the brightness of the day does not transfer over to heat and he’s thankful Penny pressed his winter jacket into his hands this morning. The dirt and grass are covered with a fine layer of frost. He suspects the next storm will bring snow, not rain.
Despite the cold, Desmond pauses on his way back to the truck to take in the view. The ranch sits at the edge of a valley, one of a dozen cattle farms north of the small city of Río Grande, the last vestiges of civilization between Argentina and the Antarctica. The valley is wrapped around the tail end of the Andes, a sight Desmond can never get enough of. After bouncing for over a year between tropical ports across the Pacific and Atlantic, it was the Andes that convinced him and Penny to exchange their sailboat for a cottage and make Tierra del Fuego their home. The high snow covered peaks make the mountains of Scotland look like swollen ant hills, and here, at the very end of the world, they act like an impassable shield, protecting them from everything that lies beyond.
It is also as different a landscape one can find from the island. Tierra del Fuego is a swirl of rugged greys, browns, and whites, where the lushness of green hovers barely an inch off the ground or is dotted high in a tree. Here, the cool air fills your lungs with a cleanliness he yearned for when he was buried in the staleness of the hatch or the heaviness of the jungle. Each breath helps wipe his senses clean of his detour through hell, just as coming home to Penny means words like certain and hope and always were grounded in something real.
Yet every so often, the newness of his terrain will seem all too familiar. A taste or sound will remind Desmond he did not arrive here straight from London. Today it’s the sight of a floral sofa, suited to the stuffy sitting room of a rectory, casually floating down the river. Most likely this act is some prank by kids or an aborted trip to the dump by a lazy ranch hand, but to him, seeing something so wildly out of place jogs his memory in all the wrong places. It’s all too close to something in the past he would have had to ascribe meaning to, the object that shouldn’t be there but is, the riddle needing to be unravelled, the ordinary act meant to have some extraordinary purpose.
As it passes by, the sofa’s left side catches on a bed of rocks, and flutters, swaying against the current, caught between staying and going. Desmond puts his toolbox down by a fence post and skids down the riverbank. It seems imperative to move it along. Shoving his gloves into his pockets, he reaches into the icy water and grabs a long stick floating by. Balancing on a few slippery boulders, he reaches out with the stick and gives the piece of furniture three sharps pushes. It's enough to dislodge it from the rocks; the sofa twirls, almost in a circle, before catching the current again and disappears.
Once it’s gone, Desmond is filled with unease. Perhaps he should not have interfered. The sofa might get caught again, act as a dam and cause flooding or some children could attempt to play boat with it and fall into the river. A feeling of dread lingers for the rest of the work day. He finishes checking the perimeter, and makes a small repair to a gate. After, he meets up with some of the other men, but finds few words for conversation as they begin construction on the new padlock. At lunch, he can’t eat at all and gives his soup and sandwich away.
Desmond finishes the day with a report to Coto; the Spanish on his tongue feels more cumbersome than normal. In his rush to leave, he’s aware from his employer’s confused face how badly he is mixing up his tenses and stumbling over grammar. When he gets into his truck, he has an urge to run home, and give some physical justification for his heart to pound this way. Only seeing the mountains rooted in their place calms him, so by the time he drives down the laneway leading to their cottage, he knows he will not arrive home in hyper mess.
He parks in front of the shed and takes his time going in, trying to shed the remainder of his anxiety, so he won’t share it with Penny. He spots her bicycle leaning against the side of the house and sees the front tire needs filling. He gets the pump from the shed and takes care of it. On his way around to the front, the appearance of a few snowflakes serves as a reassuring reminder that some things will always take their course. He makes a note to put the winter shutters on this weekend. On the front step, Desmond pauses to scrape the dried mud off his boots before entering the cottage.
Strains of Mozart’s symphony no. 40 greet him when he unlocks the door. He hangs up his coat and follows the music to the cottage’s only lit room, an alcove off the bedroom where Penny works. He’s surprised to find it empty. Her computer is on, open at the file she had been working on the day before, the English translation of software manual for a local company.
“Penny?”
He doesn’t like how his voice echoes through the four room cottage. He retraces his steps, turning on lights as he goes. The bedroom, kitchen, and den are all empty. He knocks on the bathroom door and when there is no response, he opens it, but she’s not in there either.
“Penny?”
He stands in the hall, going over their conversation from the night before, when they had lain in bed listening to the wind shriek and the thunder crash. Because of his early start, they had agreed he would take the truck in morning, rather than have her drop him off like she usually did. She had said, he remembered, as she had tucked her cold feet against his calves, and he had gotten out of bed to get her a pair of socks, that she had no plans to venture into town. If anything, she had mumbled right before sleep, she would bike over to see Hilde, their nearest neighbour, but other than that, she would be busy finishing off her translation.
Even though it’s clear Penny is not there, her name plays on his lips again and repeats silently in his head. The dread that he had carried around all day suddenly rushes through him like a waterfall. He returns to her office and sits in her chair. It reassures him that the symphony is still on the first movement until he realizes her CD player is on repeat. He thinks, trying to consider calmly, that this doesn’t mean anything; that they are just like any other married couple who got their wires crossed. Maybe she’s just gone for a walk. Maybe the software company called her in for a late meeting. Maybe Hilde had picked her up for a shopping trip and Penny would be back any moment with a bag full of ingredients for some recipe she just had to try tonight.
He calls Hilde, reminding himself before she answers, that he is to ask for Stephanie, not Penny, and to call himself Timothy, not Desmond. Hilde answers with a bubbly laugh and an invitation to dinner next week and it takes a minute or so to sort out that she has not seen or heard from Penny in several days. He gets a similar response from the receptionist at the software company.
As he hangs up the phone, Desmond’s foot hits something under the desk. He pushes back the chair and finds the pieces of a shattered teacup. Now that he looks closely, he finds a sticky splotch of spilt tea on her desk and notebook cover. He starts looking for more clues and discovers her purse, containing her wallet, sitting on the night table. Her coats hang in front hall closet and all her shoes are lined up at the door. It’s the last detail that just about breaks his heart, that she is somewhere in this cold without her shoes.
He rechecks their property in and out. All the doors and windows are secure, and there is no response to his calls outside. For the first time, the dusky shadows of the Andes appear to be closing in on him, rather than keeping things unwanted out. His hope leaps when he spies a piece of paper lying on the coffee table, but it’s not a note, only the score sheet from their rummy game from a few nights before.
Desmond returns once more to Penny’s desk and picks up the phone again. He knows the police in Río Grande would not consider her missing for forty-eight hours and would not, could not understand why he thinks, why he knows his wife’s disappearance is something beyond their capabilities.
It’s been years since he called the number he needs and finds that it is gone from his head. Although they have not spoken of it, he imagines Penny keeps it somewhere. He searches through her desk, looking for her worn red phonebook. He finds it in the bottom drawer, under a stack of papers from her old life.
Desmond dials Widmore’s office number first, not even considering the time change takes them far beyond business hours, partly because he’s not thinking straight and partly because it is impossible to imagine the man anywhere else but at work. He also clings to a hope that Penny’s father is expecting this call. If his instincts are right, Widmore has just taken what he thinks belong to him, and Penny is being kept in some posh hotel room in Buenos Aries; the runaway daughter being wooed to return to her real home. That is the only scenario Desmond allows himself to imagine.
His call is finally answered by an automatic voice, inviting him to leave a message for Mr. Widmore. He debates leaving a string of unintelligible curses, but hangs up instead.
Before he tries the Widmore residence, he holds his head, and is only one step away from banging it on the desk when he notices grains of sand stuck in the tea stain. He pushes the notebook aside and finds more underneath; in fact the sand seems coming from the book itself. He flips through the pages, many of which are warped by water, dusting off the sand that falls into his lap.
The writing and diagrams scattered across the pages look delicate enough that if he were brush against them, the ink would fall just like the sand. At once they are entirely incomprehensible and entirely familiar. He doesn’t even need to get to the page with his name scrawled on it to know whose journal he is holding. Suddenly the idea of Penny being taken by her father is replaced by an even more fantastic notion, one that Desmond is even less prepared to interpret.
x x x
Continued in part two.