Fic: We All Fall Down (Richard, Sawyer, Ben) Gen
Title: We All Fall Down
Characters: Richard, Sawyer, Ben
Disclaimer: Lost is not mine. Seriously? Seriously.
Rating: PG13
Words: 8850
Spoilers: All of S5, just to be safe.
Author’s Note: This fic continues the same back story for Richard I began with A Midnight Stroll Down Cul-de-Sac Lane but takes place earlier in his history and can be read independently. This fic goes AU after 316. For lostpicksix “Pillow Talk”. Many thanks to janie_tangerine for the beta. Nominated for best gen fic at lost_fic_awards in February 2009>.
Summary: Set in the early 1980s, Richard is a prisoner of the Dharma Initiative and is joined in his imprisonment by a popping out of time Sawyer.
x x x
Ring around the rosy
A pocketful of posies
Ashes, Ashes
We all fall down!
-17th century nursery rhyme that some claim refers to plague ridden London, England
x x x
He hears them coming. It’s quite the performance: boots pound the buffed linoleum, muffled voices exchange heated words that suggest a rally of orders and insults, and then there’s a scuffle of sorts. A body is slammed against the wall. Over the top of his glasses, Richard eyes the tiny red light that is a constant reminder of the camera positioned where the wall meets the ceiling. He almost expects it to blink in response to his pointed gaze.
They are rarely careless. They want him to hear this. They are watching his reaction.
He refuses to display any curiosity. So he returns to his book and forces himself to read each word even if his mind is indeed wandering. Ad habitum vero huius pauci perveniunt, quia non nisi per spatium temporis-have they caught one of his people? Et studii assiduitatem regulamur et doctrinamur in illa-or are they treating one of their own like this?
Shadows appear across the small square window on his door. There’s a clattering of keys and it opens. Richard rests the book against his chest as a man with bound wrists is unceremoniously flung into the room. His bare feet skid across the tile and only come to stop when the door slams closed. Multiple locks are turned, leaving the stranger alone with Richard.
The man barely takes in his surroundings before he flings himself up against the door, all the while letting out a stream of curses directed, Richard supposes, at his retreating escorts.
He ends his diatribe with the words, “Fuckin’ hippie psychos,” then catches sight of Richard sitting up in bed and barks, “Who the hell are you?”
Rather than reply, Richard studies the man, the only one without a beige jumpsuit or white coat that he’s seen in months. He’s wearing faded dungarees and a worn flannel work shirt. His stringy hair hangs in his unshaven face almost masking his scowl. When he catches Richard’s scrutiny, he shakes his hair out of the way with a self conscious nod of the head and straightens up, bringing himself up to his full height.
“What’re you looking at?”
“Nothing,” Richard admits with his own shake of the head. The man is here for a purpose, however the details are unimportant. It’s merely another test.
“Swell.” The man returns his attention to the door and peers out the window. Their view is limited to the white wall opposite their room, much like the four white walls that surround them now. Richard knows if you stare at them long enough your pupils will dilate to almost nothing and you’ll think your eyes are actually closed.
The man gives up craning his neck and turns his attention to what he can see. He takes in his new surroundings: the second hospital bed, the wooden chair by the door where Richard’s change of clothes lies folded, the tray with his barely uneaten dinner resting at the foot of his bed, the sink and toilet behind the screen, the pile of books on the table between the beds, and the lamp which only gives off a dim glow, yet is a welcome break from the ceiling’s fluorescents that shine for twelve hours each day, simulating daylight underground. The man doesn’t miss the camera and pauses to give it a furious glare. As he completes his 360 degree survey, he can’t help look slightly flummoxed when he catches sight of the IV pole and traces with his eyes the bag of fluid and the trail of tubing that connects to Richard’s arm.
“Are you dangerous?” Richard removes his glasses and places them and his book on the nightstand.
“What?”
“I mean, if I were to untie your hands, would you be friendly?” he clarifies, purposely eying the camera this time. The least he could do was move this charade along.
The man grunts, “Depends.”
“Fair enough.”
Richard swings his legs over the side of the bed and stands. He’s still dizzy and needs to grab hold of the IV pole to find his equilibrium before he can walk. As he comes forward, the man raises his wrists and balls his fists like a boxer waiting for the bell to ring. It’s not until Richard holds up his own empty palms that the man lowers his and they meet in the centre of the room.
He starts to work on the knot, and the man asks, “Is this supposed to be a hospital or a prison?”
“Depends. Are you sick or in trouble?”
“Do I look like I volunteered to be here, Curious George?”
The knots are tight and his hands have not gained back their full strength. Richard reaches back for the plastic fork from his tray, and wedges the handle under the cord. The leverage he uses causes it to snap in half, though not before it loosens the coils. “What did you do?” he asks.
The man exhales a huff that suggests his list of transgressions is endless. “At least there’s a proper bed this time.”
Richard raises one eyebrow. “This is not the first time you’ve been…detained?”
The man flashes him something caught between a grin and a grimace. “Been there, done that, ate the fish biscuit.”
Richard shakes his head at this odd remark. The man’s suspicion and bafflement seem genuine, as does his bravado. Either he’s an innocent lured into this ruse dreamed up by The Staff’s medical team or he’s a brilliant actor. Richard finally manages to undo the last knot, and begins unwinding the rope. “There.”
The man rubs his wrists and gives a small nod of thanks. Then he stares passed Richard to the dinner tray, his hooded eyes already consuming the food.
“Go ahead. I’m not hungry,” Richard lies. The man seems to have swallowed half the macaroni and cheese before the words are out of his mouth.
After a few mouthfuls, he carries the tray to the other bed and makes himself comfortable. He leans back against the headboard, props the tray on his lap and tackles the red square of Jello next. As he watches the man eat, Richard’s stomach growls in response, however he’s not hungry for a processed meal that tastes just like the boxes and cans it came out of. He knows not far from this very location is a tree that grows the sweetest papayas and just the thought of food fresh from the ground or ocean causes his mouth to salivate. The dizziness returns and Richard settles back on his bed. He takes a sip from the plastic cup on the night table. Even the water tastes wrong here; it flows from a nearby creek, only to have its coolness and flavour tainted by pipes and fluorides.
While the man eats, Richard picks up his book again. His mind is still too busy figuring out the purpose of getting a roommate to follow the words on the page. So he holds the book like it’s a prop for a one act play to which only one of them has a script and begins to properly consider the possibilities.
In the two hundred days he’s been held in The Staff, Richard’s seen plenty of empty rooms like this one on his way back and forth from his testing. Giving him a roommate is not due to lack of space. Clearly they are trying to construct this man as a prisoner too. Do they expect Richard to bond with him just because he appears to be on the outs with Namaste crowd? Are they expecting him to share island secrets with a stranger? But it’s not as if Charles didn’t tell the De Groots and Candle everything anyway; they’re not after Richard for a confession of any kind. So is throwing the man into a room that is frequently in and out of quarantine a special punishment for misbehaving? He doesn’t rule out any of these options, yet none of them feel particularly right.
Meanwhile the man punctuates the end of his meal with a belch and tosses the tray on the floor. He proceeds to punch his pillow until its shape is to his liking and then flips over on his side, facing away from Richard. Whatever the point of this is, the man is not losing any sleep over the turn of events.
When Richard is sure the even breathing and relaxed frame means his new companion is actually asleep, he gets up from his bed, quietly pulls his IV pole across the floor and picks up the tray. He tries to make it look like he’s searching for something left to eat. He turns the dirty paper plate upside down and rearranges the remaining plastic cutlery so they are pointing south. Then he folds the paper napkin into a neat square. If Annie is the nurse on duty in the morning, she’ll get this message to Ben and hopefully return with an answer. With that done, Richard feels a bit better about the situation, so he returns to his book and this time can actually read the words on the page.
x x x
Hours pass in quiet meditation. Richard finishes Boccaccio’s De Casibus Virorum Illustribus and moves on to The Decameron, an all too fitting tale given his circumstances. He thinks he remembers a man, perhaps his father or maybe his tutor, the faces and voices have long disintegrated in his mind, reading this story aloud in front of a fire while a brown dog’s tail thumps on the hearth. Lost in his own thoughts, Richard almost forgets he’s not alone until the stranger comes awake with a startling coughing fit.
“Son of a bitch,” the man moans once the rattling in his chest passes enough for him to speak. He leans forward and pounds his chest a few times, releasing another round of hacking. When that fades, he sits stunned and hunched, blinking, and wipes the gathered sweat off his brow. He pushes off the thin covers and gets up on shaky feet, making his way behind the screen, where he leans down to drink from the tap.
Richard watches this performance from the other side of the room, a wild idea dawning on him. From behind the screen, the man’s stooped shadow wheezes a few more times. Then he comes out looking like he didn’t have enough hands to clutch where it hurt, and settles for his head. “What the hell did you people do to me?”
Richard lays the book on his chest and thinks for a moment the best way to approach this. He finally decides to start with the obvious. “Before they left you here, did they examine you?”
The man gingerly sits down on the edge of his bed and rubs his temples. “Yeah.”
“And they injected you with something?” he prompts.
The man nods and then seems to regret moving his head. He pushes up his sleeve and peels off a band-aid just below his bicep. He peers and pokes the swollen lesion underneath. “What the fuck did-?” he begins before he is overcome with another coughing fit.
Richard refills his cup of water from the plastic jug and stands. His dizziness from earlier is gone, which means he’s recovered just in time to witness this man’s illness begin. Pushing his IV pole with one hand, and carrying the cup with the other, he walks over with the water. The man looks at it suspiciously, but chooses to take a small sip anyway.
“They’re testing your immune system,” Richard explains.
“What?” he asks, though the question could have easily been "How?" or "Why?" or any number of the expletives he’s apparently so fond of.
There’s enough give on Richard’s IV tubing to crouch down in front of the man, with his back to the camera. He doesn’t think the room is wired for sound too, but he whispers anyway. “You’re not from around here, are you?”
The man cocks his head, and his sarcasm pours out in the form of a crooked smile and a quip. “What? You can’t see me singing Kumbaya with the other freaks?”
“They wouldn’t test one of their own and you’re not one of my people. So I have to ask, are you supposed to be here?”
The question catches the man off guard. He looks passed Richard and blinks a few times. Then with a resigned shrug, he says, “No matter. I’m here now.”
“True enough.” Richard wants to ask if this man comes and goes with a flash of light, and if he knows someone named John Locke or a twitchy fellow who knows about bombs, but he would not risk saying any of those names aloud in this room and having them be written down in the Dharma records. So instead he says, “Lie down. I’m going to examine you.”
“Like hell you are.”
“I’m a doctor.”
“No thanks.”
Richard rises and gives his own aloof shrug. “I just thought you’d want to know if you had Smallpox, Yellow Fever, or Typhus.”
The man glares at him and even though he’s sitting, his body takes on the same defensive stance he had when he first arrived.
It didn’t matter; Richard could guess what was wrong. When he was first trained in medicine, doctors rarely had the privilege of touching their patients, who were almost always of noble stature and even diseased were considered purer than their lowly healers. So he was taught to use his powers of observation for diagnosis and would search for imbalances in the body’s temperaments that were plain to the eyes: redness showed that the blood was too hot and needed to be thinned though bleeding; swelling was a sign that black bile was present and a mustard seed poultice would help; sallow skin suggested difficult digestion that could be cured with a special tea.
Of course, he’s known for ages how misguided these early theories and treatments were, and has since studied modern medicine of all forms. Back home in the caverns his bookcases are filled with medical texts and almost every time he’s left the island, he’s attended seminars at Oxford, Harvard, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine and Pharmacology, John Hopkins, and the University of Wittenberg. He’s also had audiences with homeopaths, herbologists, masters of Reiki and Ayurveda medicine and even yoga gurus. Understanding how the body works has become an obsession of his, one that is constantly challenged by the peculiarities of the island. Still, there is merit in the simplest imaginings of health and sickness. It is easy to tell where this man hurts. The cough in itself sounded like the prelude to something spectacularly deadly.
“You have had a headache, right?” He asks and the man nods. “What about a fever?
The man feels his own forehead with the back and then the front of his hand. “Maybe.”
“Any abdominal pain?”
“No.”
Richard nods. “It’s probably influenza.”
“The flu?”
“That’s what they like to start with.”
“Fabulous,” the man says and stretches out on his bed again, with his hand over his eyes.
x x x
It wasn’t the flu. Influenza would have been bad enough. Any strain could turn deadly, even amongst the young and healthy. It is estimated that in 1918 the Spanish flu killed forty million people internationally.
The first sign that this was more than influenza was that breakfast arrived via an orderly, the one whose faced reminded Richard of a boar, and who was dressed in a containment suit. Meals were normally served by Annie or one of the other nurses in training who usually came twice a day, and were only ever been protected with a cloth mask and gloves. The orderly had rolled in a cart with two bowls of oatmeal on it and a fresh jug of water, which he spilled as soon as the room was filled with the stranger’s coughs. The orderly then tripped over his own feet in a desperate attempt to depart as quickly as possible. In his haste to leave, he forgot to take away last night’s dinner tray which means the message to Ben remained undelivered.
When he was gone, Richard caught a smirk on the stranger’s face directed at the camera which suggested his coughs had been perfectly timed to produce chaos. Still the effort had taken its toll, and the man barely had the strength to sit up and stir his oatmeal before lying back down again, leaving his breakfast uneaten.
Richard notes all this silently. Over the course of the night, while the man had tossed and turned, coughed and groaned, he had to remind himself of the vow he made on the first day of his own imprisonment: all survival took was patience. He had that without even trying. So he hadn’t resisted their barbarism or tried to escape. On the eventuality of his capture in their renewed hostilities against Dharma, he had warned Tom and the rest not to risk themselves with an ill planned rescue. And he had passed the same message onto young Ben. Whether it took eight months or eight years, in theory, all he had to do was outlast them.
For over six months Richard had won that game by putting up with everything-the needles, the biopsies, the exploratory surgery, the regular dosing with germs, and all the pain that came with it. He was pretty sure it would get worse before it got better. Soon they would check to see if he needed a limb or his heart, just like they had his upper right molar. That hadn’t grown back and while he was aware all his wounds repaired themselves after injury, even he was curious to see if he would survive after a vital organ was removed completely.
He wasn’t afraid of death; he would almost welcome it if the Dharma freaks, as his roommate so jovially referred to them, discovered a permanent cure to his resurrecting health. And maybe that’s why he was being overly patient with them. He wanted to know if it was possible to give him a one way ticket off this plane of being. What he was not prepared for was letting them decide the when and the where. Nor was he willing to give these trespassers a victory. In time, their morbid curiosity would be punished, if not by him personally, then by Jacob. He had to admit he spent a good part of each day imagining how that will come to be.
Richard forces himself to eat his breakfast. He notes the addition of honey to the bland mixture, and wonders if that kind gesture meant Annie prepared his meal, even if she wasn’t allowed to serve it. When he finishes, he goes behind the screen to wash up and change his clothes. He also takes the opportunity to remove his IV. Since all the attention was on the new arrival, Richard didn’t imagine security would rush in to stop him from ending that failed experiment. Ever since he had recovered from Cholera, they had taken a break from their death watch and instead been pumping him full of sedatives to see if they could get him to sleep. Beyond producing a mild dizziness, dry mouth, and a slowed heart rate, the pills and fluids they had pumped into his system had done nothing. He almost expected Candle himself to show up next with a flock of sheep for him to count.
“That mumbo jumbo you’ve been sticking your head in is Latin, isn’t?” The man asks out of the blue.
“It is,” Richard confirms with some surprise as he dries his face, feeling the stubble on his cheeks. He suspects that with this heightened quarantine no one would be willing to supervise his weekly turn with a razor. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason. Just like to know who I’m bunking with.”
He states this with a certain authority that causes Richard’s curiosity to stir over the man’s origins again. It’s not a conversation they should have while being filmed, so all he says is, “I’m Richard.” His response provokes a snort from the other side of the screen, so he has to ask, “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. I just know someone who’d kill to get all this face time with you.” Richard comes out from behind the screen, still buttoning his shirt, and shooting a glare that he hopes censors their talk. The man seems to interpret him correctly and he doesn’t mention any names or shared timelines. He does add his own introduction, “I’m Sawyer.”
Sawyer. The name rolls around in his mouth. It is an oddly fitting title for a man who would look comfortable lounging in a haystack with a piece of straw in his mouth or strolling down a busy city street like he owned the world. Richard imagines the tale of how he came to be here, on this island, would be an interesting one best suited to a long night around a campfire with a bottle of something strong passed between them. It’s unlikely that will ever happen, not with the death sentences they like to hand out here, and this man’s unlikely resistance. Still he asks, “How are you feeling?”
“Peachy,” Sawyer says, managing to sound relatively healthy, though his grey pallor and sunken eyes suggest otherwise. He picks up his bowl of cold oatmeal again and just stares at it.
Richard stands by the door and looks out its tiny window, just so he doesn’t have to look at Sawyer. Even if he wanted to, there’s nothing he can do for him. “You should eat. Keep up your strength.”
“Yeah,” he mutters. By the time Richard turns around, Sawyer’s gone back to sleep.
Even though Sawyer remains asleep for the most of the day, immobile on his bed, his very presence makes the room feel smaller. Richard’s whole routine is thrown off. He forgoes his calisthenics and can’t concentrate on reading. At first he busies himself by straightening his pile of books from the Dharma library. When he’s done, he flips through a book of crosswords that he had long finished and methodically begins to fill in each square with his pencil, shading over the letters he had printed weeks ago. He feels like he’s covering up a secret code, across - bluebird, down - urn, across - noodle, down - wit and so on. He presses down so hard that the tip of his pencil snaps and he throws it across the room. Only fifteen minutes had passed, but it felt like days. He spends the rest of the morning and afternoon pacing and thinking and eventually just standing and staring at the wall, much like one would do if there were a window with a remarkable view or a particularly fine piece of art present.
“You have X-Ray vision or something?”
“Hmmm?” Richard turns around to see Sawyer sitting up, perhaps looking a little perkier than he did before, though it could just be because the colour has returned to his face. He shuffles to the toilet and Richard moves to the furthest corner of the room to give him some privacy. Behind the screen, another coughing fits takes hold of Sawyer, followed by him spitting into the basin. That little trip seems to have taken all of his energy and he collapses back on the bed with a groan.
“Would it kill them to give me some aspirin or at least turn off the damn lights?”
Richards eyes the fluorescents he had gotten so used to being on half the day. “Probably.”
Sawyer quiets and Richard thinks he’s dropped off to sleep again. Then he asks, “Be straight with me. Are you real a MD?”
“Yes.” Richard comes a little closer to Sawyer’s bed.
“I’ve had the flu before,” Sawyer says, then hesitates, scratching his throat. “There was never this swelling before.”
“Where?”
Sawyer thinks for a moment. “Under my arms.”
“Both of them?” Sawyer nods. “Are they soft or hard?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t go poking around.”
“Are they hot?”
“I feel hot all over, and don’t take that as some sorta come on.”
“May I?” Richard approaches Sawyer and he just shrugs. The man’s forehead is warm and clammy against his own cool hand. There’s definitely a fever, though it’s not overly high yet. “Do you still have a headache?”
“Where doesn’t it ache would be the better question.”
“Can you unbutton your shirt? I want to check the swelling.”
Sawyer looks like he wants to protest or crack a joke, but he must fear that something more serious than the flu is wrong with him so he acquiesces. He unbuttons his shirt, a task he takes slowly, though Richard saves him his dignity by not taking over. When he’s done, Richard slides the shirt off his right shoulder. He doesn’t comment on the fairly fresh looking bullet wound just under his clavicle or the row of tidy suture scars above his heart. Instead he presses three fingers along the man’s side, and runs them passed the ribs and upwards. The swelling sits like a bubble in his armpit, around the size of a child’s fist. He pulls the shirt back over the exposed shoulder and checks the other side. There’s another lump there, though not as large as the one on the right side.
He’d like to check Sawyer’s lower body for swelling too, the legs and groin area, but he suspects that would be testing the man’s trust and patience. Besides he’s pretty sure what this is without doing a complete physical. Instead he moves his hands to Sawyer’s throat and touches the visibly swollen glands. As he does, he asks, “Are you bringing up blood when you cough?”
“Just now.”
“Are you experiencing any nausea?”
“Off and on.”
Richard then holds Sawyer’s wrist feeling his pulse. It’s fluctuates between slow and weak and rapid and strong. When he lets go, Sawyer asks, “What the diagnosis, Do-?” He appears to stop short of calling Richard doc or doctor.
“It’s just the flu.” Richard removes his hands, and pulls Sawyer’s shirt closed. He shrugs, and returns to his own bed. “Sometimes the lymph nodes swell,” he adds causally.
He can feel Sawyer’s doubtful eyes on him as he smoothes his blanket and tucks an exposed piece of sheet under the mattress. He takes a moment to gather his thoughts, then forces himself to turn around and look Sawyer in the eye. He tries to smile. As he does, he thinks the following.
Yersinia pestis. The Great Pestilence. Peste Negra. The Black Death. The Plague.
Richard can’t recall all that much about his childhood. His memory has not kept up with his body. He does remember once when white crosses were painted on the doors of the stricken houses and the overwhelming smell of smoke had hung in the air as people tried to burn out the rot. As his family fled to the home of a distant relative, he had seen the cemetery piled high with bodies no one had the strength to bury. He thinks his family had remained untouched; he had been lucky even then. Then later, as a man at sea, he brings to mind the vigilance the captain gave toward killing rats. Cats were considered precious cargo, a preventative against the diseased critters. If it had been the cats who mutinied, the captain would have spared their lives and plied them with saucers of cream to win back their affection.
Maybe he doesn’t really remember this. Maybe these are only images generated by his reading of medical texts, history books, and his recent companion, Boccaccio. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change his diagnosis. Dharma had given this man Sawyer a needle full of Black Death.
x x x
“It’s just the flu.”
Why did he lie? He’s not sure. It could just be a reflex; he’s not used to being honest with strangers. Perhaps he didn’t want to deal with the man’s potential panic. Whatever the case, he can tell Sawyer remains sceptical, and if to stubbornly prove Richard wrong, he only gets worse. His groans grow louder, his cough threatens to stop his breathing, and his fever rises. At one point, he empties the contents of his stomach onto the floor. All Richard can do is clean it up and then continue his pacing, his part of the unfolding macabre dance.
He’s not worried about exposure. Sawyer’s germs won’t do anything to him. It’s a different story when the bacteria is forcibly injected, then they have a fighting chance to take hold, but so far his body has managed to fight off whatever Dharma’s thrown at him, and even if he did succumb, it wouldn’t stay that way for long.
Richard can’t believe only a day has passed since Sawyer arrived when an orderly enters that evening, a different one this time, who is as efficient as the one this morning was clumsy. Richard notes that two armed guards, also wearing containment suits, hover outside the door while the orderly cleans the room of any dishes and lays out two bowls of soup, ham sandwiches, and a fresh jug of water. He also leaves a box of crackers, some granola bars, half dozen apples, and a bag of nuts, as if to indicate he’s laying in supplies because the staff visits won’t be so frequent, perhaps not until Sawyer decides whether to live or die.
“I want to speak to Candle,” Richard says as the orderly pushes his cart out. It’s not clear if the man heard him in his sealed containment suit. He almost lets it go because he’s not sure what he would to say to Dharma’s head man. Unleash his pent up rage? Ask for a private room? Plead for this stranger’s life? Yet even without knowing what he wants, once the orderly is gone, Richard speaks again, this time directly to the camera, enunciating each word carefully. “I want to speak to Candle.”
Unsurprisingly, his request is ignored. Richard would like to think that this is because there was a breach in procedures and Candle himself has been infected with the plague too, along with his army of pseudo scientists and security teammates. He plays around with the image of swollen bodies encased in beige jumpsuits and white jackets littering the hallways of The Staff.
For now, any vengeance is far in the future. He will continue to bid his time and wait for the proper moment. In the meantime, there is one weapon he can employ. It had not occurred to him before, but perhaps he can steal a minor victory away from Dharma without really even trying. He looks to Sawyer’s huddled shape on the bed.
The plague works notoriously fast. You can wake up feeling fine and be dead by nightfall, yet if you can get through the first three days, you were more likely to survive. These days, treatment with sulphonamide drugs would most likely guarantee a cure, though it’s unlikely Dharma plans on treating Sawyer. They are playing a waiting game, one where they don’t expect any interference from Richard. There would be certain satisfaction in thwarting Dharma by keeping Sawyer alive. Plus it would be something to do and for so long he’s done absolutely nothing.
As if hearing a promise of sorts being made, Sawyer stirs. His leg twitches as if he’s running in his dream and one arms flails about. Suddenly his eyes pop open. Seeing he’s awake, Richard lifts a bowl of soup from the tray and carries it over to the bed. “Here, you should take some. You need to keep hydrated.” He holds up the spoon, and contemplates volunteering to feed the man if necessary.
Apparently Sawyer has other things on his mind. Unexpectedly and with more strength than Richard suspected was left in his body, he grabs Richard’s wrist and yanks him closer. He can feel the heat radiating off him. Most of the soup spills on the bedcovers but Sawyer doesn’t notice. His glassy eyes find their focus, then flare with intensity. “What’re you doing here? You shouldn’t have come back,” he growls.
“I’ve always been here,” Richard responds. Sawyer’s eyelids flutter in confusion. With his free hand, Richard unpeels his wrist from Sawyer’s grip and pushes him down back onto his pillow. He sets the bowl and spoon on the floor, then strips off the wet blanket and top sheet. Rather than swap over his own dry bedding, he decides to leave Sawyer uncovered for now. It will help cool him and pretty much the only thing Richard’s equipped to do in these circumstances is bring the fever down.
He goes behind the screen and runs the water in the sink until it’s as cold as it will get. He soaks their only washcloth in the water, then rings in out, and returns to place it on Sawyer’s forehead.
At the touch of the damp cloth, Sawyer sighs and opens his eyes again. “Live together, die alone, huh Doc?”
Richard ignores his ramblings and pulls Sawyer’s arms free of his unbuttoned shirt. He leaves his jeans on for now. Then he strips the pillow case from his bed and heads back behind the screen to dampen it too. When he returns, he uses it to wipe down Sawyer’s arms and his torso. Sawyer seems oblivious to his ministrations and chatters on almost insistently.
“Did Freckles come back with you?”
“She’s around,” Richard replies automatically, guessing at the sex, and presuming the name belongs to a long lost cat. He notices the size of the swelling under each arm has increased and hardened. Sawyer winces when Richard prods them gently.
“Don’t bother with that, Doc,” he hisses between clenched teeth. “Go check on Red. She’s bleeding the worst.”
Too focused on the buboes, Richard makes no response. He was trained to lance them. It was thought to release the imbalance in the body; at best it would only relieve some of the pain. He thinks about the needle from his old IV and if he could disinfect it and possibly use it to open and drain the pus. Discomfort is not Sawyer’s biggest problem here, so he decides it’s best to leave it for now, rather than risk a secondary infection from lack of proper sterilization. He rinses and rings out his pillowcase one more time, then lays it against Sawyer’s chest. The skin seems no cooler, but perhaps it offers some comfort because his new patient closes his eyes and stops his rambling.
Sawyer spends the night drifting in and out of sleep. The coughing wakes him often, as does his delirium. At one point he sits straight up, startling Richard with an announcement.
“They got Michael’s boy!” He strains upward and tries to get out of the bed. Richard grasps his shoulders and tries to keep him still. “That big fella took him off the raft.” The effort only makes him cough more and he surrenders. Richards pushes him down gently. “I couldn’t stop ‘em.”
“Don’t worry about that.”
Once Sawyer is resettled on the bed, and the washcloth re-dampened and placed on his forehead, he says to Richard with some pride, “You should have seen me, Doc. I took out the bullet myself.”
Richard stares at the puckered wound on the man’s exposed chest. It looks messy enough to have been taken out that way, so he doesn’t dismiss Sawyer’s ramblings as purely the fever. “Did you now.”
As usual, the fluorescents turn on at seven o’clock sharp. No one follows with the regular routine of breakfast, confirming Richard’s suspicions that they are being left alone for fear of exposure. He pictures a pair of men ogling a television monitor down the hall, noting every cough and groan in their notebooks. This thought provokes an action he should have taken long ago. He pushes the chair over to the corner and climbs atop. He yanks the cord from the hole in the wall, disconnecting the camera’s power source. For good measure, he smashes the equipment with the chair leg; pieces of glass and black plastic scatter across the tile floor.
If they want their free show, they are going to have to come in to get it back. What will win out, he wonders, their voyeurism or their cowardliness?
Without their eyes on him, Richard feels practically free. He didn’t realize the burden it was until the surveillance is stopped. It’s comparable to letting out a long held in breath. He pulls the chair over to Sawyer’s bed, and resumes his vigil, wiping Sawyer down, holding him up so he can cough up the phlegm, and he even gets him to take a few tablespoons of the cold soup. That tiny bit of nourishment gives Sawyer a burst of energy and he asks again about Freckles and if anyone found Claire. Richard wants to take advantage of the privacy to ask him about John Locke’s whereabouts, and where and when exactly did he and his comrades come from, but Sawyer continues to be elsewhere.
“Did you know Jin’s alive, Doc?” Sawyer’s head rolls back and forth on his pillow in disbelief. “Blew himself right back to the beach.” His voice drops, and he attempts a confession level whisper that comes out fairly hoarse and he coughs and coughs until his voice clears. “Can never tell him about what happened in the garden with Sun. It wasn’t about the guns, you know.”
“I know,” Richard says wearily, taking his pulse. It was the same, fluctuating like crazy. “It never is.”
The rest of the day and night continue in much the same manner. No one comes into the room to check on them, though the traffic outside their door increases. It looks like they are on manual surveillance now. Richard even spots Candle taking a peek through the window. Now it’s his turn to be ignored and Richard doesn’t even acknowledge a note that is held up to the window. To pass the time, he puts on his glasses and reads out loud to Sawyer, choosing the only English book in the room, The Pit and the Pendulum by Poe. It may just be an illusion, however Sawyer seems to sleep more soundly when Richard’s reading aloud.
He estimates it’s about 4:00 p.m. on the afternoon of Sawyer’s third day when he hears a key turn in the lock. He had finished Poe and moved on to Ovid’s Metamorphoses which was in Latin so he had to stop every few minutes to explain the story to Sawyer, which was a bit unnecessary since he was unconscious. At the sound of the door opening, Richard places his glasses in his shirt pocket and stands, instinctively blocking Sawyer as best he can from whatever is coming. He can’t make out who the solitary visitor is hovering in the doorway, except to note that he or she is wearing a containment suit, but they are not bearing food or come accompanied by guards.
A muffled voice on the verge of panic seeps through the containment hood. “Richard?”
Richard squints to make out the young man’s owlish face. “Ben?”
There’s a noise in the hallway and Ben jumps about three feet. He darts back out of the room and frantically looks around. “We don’t have much time.”
Richard walks passed Ben into the deserted hallway. It smells overwhelmingly of disinfectant, but behind that is a whiff of fresh air, the smell of freedom. In less than a minute he could be back outside, on his own turf. Still, he’s cautious of a trick and pulls Ben back into the room and closes the door. “Where are Candle and the rest?”
“Annie put Librium in their dinners. She drugged hers too. All the cameras are off. I took care of everything,” Ben announces proudly. He’s been breathing hard and the plastic window of his hood’s fogged up, as are his spectacles. “You can go now.”
“Ben, we talked about this. You can’t interfere. This is not your war.”
“With all the heightened security, Annie thought you were really, truly dying.”
Ben’s face is so earnest, Richard almost doesn’t have the heart to scold him. “It’s very brave of both of you, but if they found out about you and I, all our plans for the future would be…”
“I did this to save you! I’m ready to-” Indignity clings to Ben’s voice, then the tone shifts to caution. “Who’s that?”
In the excitement, Richard had forgotten about Sawyer. He casts a glance to the bed where the man lies unconscious and oblivious to the possibility of escape. He could go and leave Sawyer here to die or he could take him along and risk making him sicker by moving him. Even worse, dragging a sick man through the jungle would slow the trek back to his territory, wherever those lines may lie these days, and get them both recaptured.
As Richard pauses to consider how much this man’s present and future is his responsibility, Ben wanders over to get a closer look. “What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s sick, Ben. Don’t touch him.”
Richard steps in front of Ben to feel Sawyer’s forehead. It’s still burning. All his efforts to lower the fever have failed and even without touching them, Richard can tell the glands on his throat have swelled more, and probably under the arms too. There’s no evidence that the infection is residing. It may be too late for antibiotics or whatever healing the island chooses to offer once they are aboveground.
“Who is he?” There’s a note of jealousy to Ben’s voice that Richard find disconcerting. Before Richard can conjure an explanation, Sawyer takes the opportunity to wake and performs his own study of his visitor.
Upon spotting Ben, Sawyer’s eyes go wide. If Richard’s not mistaken, there’s recognition in his gaze. Rather than confusing Ben for someone else, like he had clearly done with Richard over the last few days, there’s a clear identification, as if he’s picked the right suspect in a line-up. The certainty doesn’t last, and the fever takes over his gaze again, but not before he mutters, “Oh good, the gang’s all here. Who invited Captain Bunny Killer?”
The possibility that Sawyer actually recognizes Ben settles Richard’s question. If Sawyer knows Ben from another time, it’s possible that he's a critical player within the island’s history. For Richard, that alone is more important than teaching Dharma a lesson or simply finishing what he’s begun.
“Ben, I need you to break into the pharmacy. Take any bottles marked Hydrochlorothiazide and Acetazolamide.” He scribbles the names across the inside cover of The Pit and Pendulum. “I also need aspirin and cough syrup. I’ll meet you at the entrance.”
“There’s no time! They could wake up any-”
“Just go!”
Ben looks like he wants to argue, but thinks twice about it. He dashes out of the room. Richard follows him out, but heads in the other direction, looking for a gurney. He finds one in an examination room. On his way back, he also locates an unconscious security guard, and takes his rifle for good measure. Once back in his room, he lowers the gurney to bed level and slides Sawyer onto it. He pushes the gurney out into the hallway, then darts back into the room to retrieve the washcloth. Before he departs, he takes a final look at his room. It seems just like yesterday he had been brought in. Time flies, he thinks.
The Staff corridors sloop upwards as he heads to the surface. Sawyer mumbles something unintelligible as Richard pushes the gurney. Along the way, Richard pokes his head into the rooms and offices. He comes across a nurse and a couple of orderlies with their heads down on a table, and a technician slumped on the floor. He ignores them and moves on. He finally finds who he’s looking for. Candle sits behind his desk on a swivel chair, head back, with his mouth open in a snore. Richard comes closer and gently tucks Sawyer’s germ ridden washcloth in the pocket of Candle’s white jacket. Then he grabs a black marker from the desk and scrawls on the outside of Candle’s office door, QUARANTINE.
Ben’s already waiting for them at the entrance with a satchel slung across his chest. Richard hopes it’s full of the meds he asked for.
The young man peeks cautiously outside the hatch entrance, and says, “All clear.” Ben holds the door open for Richard to push Sawyer out.
It’s an overcast day with angry black clouds rolling in from the west. An unseasonably cool breeze brings with it the smell of the ocean. Richard can almost taste it. It all feels so clean and fresh and ripe.
It’s a perfect welcome.
Two Dharma vans are parked beside The Staff’s entrance. Ben holds up the keys to one of them and together they carry Sawyer off the gurney and load him into the back. Ben gets into the front seat and reverses off the path and drives into the jungle. Richard crouches in the back, one hand pressed against Sawyer’s chest to stabilize him over the rough terrain, the other clutching the rifle as he scans for any signs of Dharma through the van’s rear window.
“Where are we going?” Ben calls from the front, his voice still muffled from his containment suit.
“Just keep going east.”
Once they had put enough distance between The Staff and themselves, Richard lays down the rifle and searches through Ben’s bag. He tears through what seems to be several boxes of gauze and a thermometer.
“Where are the drugs I asked for?”
“I got the aspirin.”
“Aspirin’s not going to do much.”
Again an unsettling aura of possession creeps into Ben’s voice again. “He’s not one of ours.”
“You have no idea who he is.”
Richard swats Sawyer’s face until he wakes. “Swallow,” he insists, forcing two aspirin down his throat. He expects a fight, however in his groggy state Sawyer complies and returns to sleep. Richard then leaves him wrapped in a blanket in the back and crawls over to the front bench.
“Stop the van.”
Ben obeys. He parks in a grove of palm trees whose fronds twist together into a canopy, blocking out much of the sky. Behind them the tall grass is flattened by their muddy tracks. As Richard orientates himself, rain begins to pelt the roof and windshield lightly.
Richard places his hand on the wheel. “I’ll take it from here.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ben, you have to get out now. Go back. Tell them I stole your van.”
“I want to come with you.”
“It’s not the right time,” he insists firmly. “We need you on the inside.”
“But Jacob said-“
Richard cuts him off. “He said you must be patient.”
“I’ve been patient,” he says with loads of exasperation.
Any other time, Richard would gladly lecture him on what waiting truly means. “Don’t you want to check on Annie? Isn’t that why you left all the medication behind?” He tilts his head back to where Sawyer lies. “In case she caught what he has?”
Ben’s response is to hold his gaze for at least a minute. Then, without saying a thing, he opens the door and jumps out. Richard closes the door behind him and rolls down the window. The fresh air feels like a second layer of skin. “You did good Ben,” he says, starting the van’s ignition, then pulls away. In the rear view mirror he can see Ben’s slight figure, wrapped in the containment suit, fade into the landscape.
x x x
“I was sick, sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me. The sentence, the dread sentence of death, was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. After that, the sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy indeterminate hum. It conveyed to my soul the idea of revolution, perhaps from its association in fancy with-”
“Is this déjà vu or did you already read that?” Sawyer’s voice is hoarse, yet brimming over with attitude.
Richard lays the collection of Poe’s short stories on his knee, and chuckles. “I didn’t think you’d mind. You weren’t exactly taking notes the first time through.” He rises from the folding chair and checks Sawyer’s forehead. It’s warm to the touch, but no longer feels like he’s pressing down on burning coals. “How are you feeling?”
“That sounds like déjà vu too.”
Richard plucks the thermometer out of the glass by the bedside and shakes it. “You don’t present much opportunity for scintillating conversation.” Then he shoves the thermometer under Sawyer’s tongue.
As he waits for his temperature to be taken, Sawyer examines their surroundings. One hand paws the canvass wall on the tent by his side and his ear cocks to the sound of people chatting nearby. Richard removes the thermometer and lifts open a tent flap, sending a beam of sunlight across Sawyer’s cot.
Sawyer squints and remarks, “I see we’re outta the ground.”
“For almost a week. It’s nice of you to notice.”
“I take it the sign of no Rent-a-Cops standing guard means we’re with your Latin-lovin’ horde?”
Richard nods. “A few of you friends are here too.”
Sawyer leans up on his elbows. “God dammit! Who?”
“They said they were separated from you during the last flash, before you got captured I presume. Daniel, Miles, Jin and Juliet...Hey! Wait!” Richard grabs hold of Sawyer’s shoulders and keeps him from getting off the cot. “You might still be contagious. You’re not seeing anyone yet.”
Sawyer huffs and swears, then collapses back on the cot. He accepts the two pills Richard gives him. With a mouthful of water, he asks, “What about Benjamin-Fucking-Linus?”
So he had recognized Ben, Richard muses. “What about him?”
“Is he here too?”
“No.”
Sawyer allows Richard to pull up the t-shirt he’s wearing. He winces when the cold stethoscope is placed on his chest. “I could have sworn I saw a junior version on that bug eyed creep floating around here.”
“Shhh...” Richard says, trying to listen. He moves the stethoscope across Sawyer’s chest listening in several places before pulling the shirt back down. “You saw and said a lot of things. It was the fever.”
“But you know who he is?”
“He’s just one of the Dharma kids, graduated from high school last year, I think.”
“Riiight...Bet he was Valedictorian!”
Richard doesn’t press the issue. He really didn’t want Sawyer to paint a picture of what was to come. If he was stuck here to witness it all, at least it should be a surprise. Whatever the case, he didn’t need a man from the future to tell him that Ben was going to be a handful. That had been plain to see since he was a boy. Still he had to trust that Jacob could see more than he did in the young man. In the meanwhile there was John Locke to watch over, and whenever their latest battle with Dharma ended, he would check in with him again.
Richard puts his stethoscope back in his bag. “So it looks like you’ll live.”
“That was one helluva bug.”
Richard pours fresh water into a basin and washes his hands. “If you think you can manage something solid, I’ll get you some breakfast.”
Sawyer clears his throat. “I could eat a horse.”
“We’ll start with something a little smaller.” He pauses in the tent’s entranceway. “Any message you want me to pass on the others?”
“The Others?”
“Your friends.”
Sawyer leans back on his pillow and closes his eyes. “Just tell them I hope they got their flu shot.”
“Will do.”
Richard steps out into the sunshine he won’t ever take for granted again. Behind him Sawyer calls out to him.
“Hey, Tricky Dick. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
x x x
Characters: Richard, Sawyer, Ben
Disclaimer: Lost is not mine. Seriously? Seriously.
Rating: PG13
Words: 8850
Spoilers: All of S5, just to be safe.
Author’s Note: This fic continues the same back story for Richard I began with A Midnight Stroll Down Cul-de-Sac Lane but takes place earlier in his history and can be read independently. This fic goes AU after 316. For lostpicksix “Pillow Talk”. Many thanks to janie_tangerine for the beta. Nominated for best gen fic at lost_fic_awards in February 2009>.
Summary: Set in the early 1980s, Richard is a prisoner of the Dharma Initiative and is joined in his imprisonment by a popping out of time Sawyer.
x x x
Ring around the rosy
A pocketful of posies
Ashes, Ashes
We all fall down!
-17th century nursery rhyme that some claim refers to plague ridden London, England
x x x
He hears them coming. It’s quite the performance: boots pound the buffed linoleum, muffled voices exchange heated words that suggest a rally of orders and insults, and then there’s a scuffle of sorts. A body is slammed against the wall. Over the top of his glasses, Richard eyes the tiny red light that is a constant reminder of the camera positioned where the wall meets the ceiling. He almost expects it to blink in response to his pointed gaze.
They are rarely careless. They want him to hear this. They are watching his reaction.
He refuses to display any curiosity. So he returns to his book and forces himself to read each word even if his mind is indeed wandering. Ad habitum vero huius pauci perveniunt, quia non nisi per spatium temporis-have they caught one of his people? Et studii assiduitatem regulamur et doctrinamur in illa-or are they treating one of their own like this?
Shadows appear across the small square window on his door. There’s a clattering of keys and it opens. Richard rests the book against his chest as a man with bound wrists is unceremoniously flung into the room. His bare feet skid across the tile and only come to stop when the door slams closed. Multiple locks are turned, leaving the stranger alone with Richard.
The man barely takes in his surroundings before he flings himself up against the door, all the while letting out a stream of curses directed, Richard supposes, at his retreating escorts.
He ends his diatribe with the words, “Fuckin’ hippie psychos,” then catches sight of Richard sitting up in bed and barks, “Who the hell are you?”
Rather than reply, Richard studies the man, the only one without a beige jumpsuit or white coat that he’s seen in months. He’s wearing faded dungarees and a worn flannel work shirt. His stringy hair hangs in his unshaven face almost masking his scowl. When he catches Richard’s scrutiny, he shakes his hair out of the way with a self conscious nod of the head and straightens up, bringing himself up to his full height.
“What’re you looking at?”
“Nothing,” Richard admits with his own shake of the head. The man is here for a purpose, however the details are unimportant. It’s merely another test.
“Swell.” The man returns his attention to the door and peers out the window. Their view is limited to the white wall opposite their room, much like the four white walls that surround them now. Richard knows if you stare at them long enough your pupils will dilate to almost nothing and you’ll think your eyes are actually closed.
The man gives up craning his neck and turns his attention to what he can see. He takes in his new surroundings: the second hospital bed, the wooden chair by the door where Richard’s change of clothes lies folded, the tray with his barely uneaten dinner resting at the foot of his bed, the sink and toilet behind the screen, the pile of books on the table between the beds, and the lamp which only gives off a dim glow, yet is a welcome break from the ceiling’s fluorescents that shine for twelve hours each day, simulating daylight underground. The man doesn’t miss the camera and pauses to give it a furious glare. As he completes his 360 degree survey, he can’t help look slightly flummoxed when he catches sight of the IV pole and traces with his eyes the bag of fluid and the trail of tubing that connects to Richard’s arm.
“Are you dangerous?” Richard removes his glasses and places them and his book on the nightstand.
“What?”
“I mean, if I were to untie your hands, would you be friendly?” he clarifies, purposely eying the camera this time. The least he could do was move this charade along.
The man grunts, “Depends.”
“Fair enough.”
Richard swings his legs over the side of the bed and stands. He’s still dizzy and needs to grab hold of the IV pole to find his equilibrium before he can walk. As he comes forward, the man raises his wrists and balls his fists like a boxer waiting for the bell to ring. It’s not until Richard holds up his own empty palms that the man lowers his and they meet in the centre of the room.
He starts to work on the knot, and the man asks, “Is this supposed to be a hospital or a prison?”
“Depends. Are you sick or in trouble?”
“Do I look like I volunteered to be here, Curious George?”
The knots are tight and his hands have not gained back their full strength. Richard reaches back for the plastic fork from his tray, and wedges the handle under the cord. The leverage he uses causes it to snap in half, though not before it loosens the coils. “What did you do?” he asks.
The man exhales a huff that suggests his list of transgressions is endless. “At least there’s a proper bed this time.”
Richard raises one eyebrow. “This is not the first time you’ve been…detained?”
The man flashes him something caught between a grin and a grimace. “Been there, done that, ate the fish biscuit.”
Richard shakes his head at this odd remark. The man’s suspicion and bafflement seem genuine, as does his bravado. Either he’s an innocent lured into this ruse dreamed up by The Staff’s medical team or he’s a brilliant actor. Richard finally manages to undo the last knot, and begins unwinding the rope. “There.”
The man rubs his wrists and gives a small nod of thanks. Then he stares passed Richard to the dinner tray, his hooded eyes already consuming the food.
“Go ahead. I’m not hungry,” Richard lies. The man seems to have swallowed half the macaroni and cheese before the words are out of his mouth.
After a few mouthfuls, he carries the tray to the other bed and makes himself comfortable. He leans back against the headboard, props the tray on his lap and tackles the red square of Jello next. As he watches the man eat, Richard’s stomach growls in response, however he’s not hungry for a processed meal that tastes just like the boxes and cans it came out of. He knows not far from this very location is a tree that grows the sweetest papayas and just the thought of food fresh from the ground or ocean causes his mouth to salivate. The dizziness returns and Richard settles back on his bed. He takes a sip from the plastic cup on the night table. Even the water tastes wrong here; it flows from a nearby creek, only to have its coolness and flavour tainted by pipes and fluorides.
While the man eats, Richard picks up his book again. His mind is still too busy figuring out the purpose of getting a roommate to follow the words on the page. So he holds the book like it’s a prop for a one act play to which only one of them has a script and begins to properly consider the possibilities.
In the two hundred days he’s been held in The Staff, Richard’s seen plenty of empty rooms like this one on his way back and forth from his testing. Giving him a roommate is not due to lack of space. Clearly they are trying to construct this man as a prisoner too. Do they expect Richard to bond with him just because he appears to be on the outs with Namaste crowd? Are they expecting him to share island secrets with a stranger? But it’s not as if Charles didn’t tell the De Groots and Candle everything anyway; they’re not after Richard for a confession of any kind. So is throwing the man into a room that is frequently in and out of quarantine a special punishment for misbehaving? He doesn’t rule out any of these options, yet none of them feel particularly right.
Meanwhile the man punctuates the end of his meal with a belch and tosses the tray on the floor. He proceeds to punch his pillow until its shape is to his liking and then flips over on his side, facing away from Richard. Whatever the point of this is, the man is not losing any sleep over the turn of events.
When Richard is sure the even breathing and relaxed frame means his new companion is actually asleep, he gets up from his bed, quietly pulls his IV pole across the floor and picks up the tray. He tries to make it look like he’s searching for something left to eat. He turns the dirty paper plate upside down and rearranges the remaining plastic cutlery so they are pointing south. Then he folds the paper napkin into a neat square. If Annie is the nurse on duty in the morning, she’ll get this message to Ben and hopefully return with an answer. With that done, Richard feels a bit better about the situation, so he returns to his book and this time can actually read the words on the page.
x x x
Hours pass in quiet meditation. Richard finishes Boccaccio’s De Casibus Virorum Illustribus and moves on to The Decameron, an all too fitting tale given his circumstances. He thinks he remembers a man, perhaps his father or maybe his tutor, the faces and voices have long disintegrated in his mind, reading this story aloud in front of a fire while a brown dog’s tail thumps on the hearth. Lost in his own thoughts, Richard almost forgets he’s not alone until the stranger comes awake with a startling coughing fit.
“Son of a bitch,” the man moans once the rattling in his chest passes enough for him to speak. He leans forward and pounds his chest a few times, releasing another round of hacking. When that fades, he sits stunned and hunched, blinking, and wipes the gathered sweat off his brow. He pushes off the thin covers and gets up on shaky feet, making his way behind the screen, where he leans down to drink from the tap.
Richard watches this performance from the other side of the room, a wild idea dawning on him. From behind the screen, the man’s stooped shadow wheezes a few more times. Then he comes out looking like he didn’t have enough hands to clutch where it hurt, and settles for his head. “What the hell did you people do to me?”
Richard lays the book on his chest and thinks for a moment the best way to approach this. He finally decides to start with the obvious. “Before they left you here, did they examine you?”
The man gingerly sits down on the edge of his bed and rubs his temples. “Yeah.”
“And they injected you with something?” he prompts.
The man nods and then seems to regret moving his head. He pushes up his sleeve and peels off a band-aid just below his bicep. He peers and pokes the swollen lesion underneath. “What the fuck did-?” he begins before he is overcome with another coughing fit.
Richard refills his cup of water from the plastic jug and stands. His dizziness from earlier is gone, which means he’s recovered just in time to witness this man’s illness begin. Pushing his IV pole with one hand, and carrying the cup with the other, he walks over with the water. The man looks at it suspiciously, but chooses to take a small sip anyway.
“They’re testing your immune system,” Richard explains.
“What?” he asks, though the question could have easily been "How?" or "Why?" or any number of the expletives he’s apparently so fond of.
There’s enough give on Richard’s IV tubing to crouch down in front of the man, with his back to the camera. He doesn’t think the room is wired for sound too, but he whispers anyway. “You’re not from around here, are you?”
The man cocks his head, and his sarcasm pours out in the form of a crooked smile and a quip. “What? You can’t see me singing Kumbaya with the other freaks?”
“They wouldn’t test one of their own and you’re not one of my people. So I have to ask, are you supposed to be here?”
The question catches the man off guard. He looks passed Richard and blinks a few times. Then with a resigned shrug, he says, “No matter. I’m here now.”
“True enough.” Richard wants to ask if this man comes and goes with a flash of light, and if he knows someone named John Locke or a twitchy fellow who knows about bombs, but he would not risk saying any of those names aloud in this room and having them be written down in the Dharma records. So instead he says, “Lie down. I’m going to examine you.”
“Like hell you are.”
“I’m a doctor.”
“No thanks.”
Richard rises and gives his own aloof shrug. “I just thought you’d want to know if you had Smallpox, Yellow Fever, or Typhus.”
The man glares at him and even though he’s sitting, his body takes on the same defensive stance he had when he first arrived.
It didn’t matter; Richard could guess what was wrong. When he was first trained in medicine, doctors rarely had the privilege of touching their patients, who were almost always of noble stature and even diseased were considered purer than their lowly healers. So he was taught to use his powers of observation for diagnosis and would search for imbalances in the body’s temperaments that were plain to the eyes: redness showed that the blood was too hot and needed to be thinned though bleeding; swelling was a sign that black bile was present and a mustard seed poultice would help; sallow skin suggested difficult digestion that could be cured with a special tea.
Of course, he’s known for ages how misguided these early theories and treatments were, and has since studied modern medicine of all forms. Back home in the caverns his bookcases are filled with medical texts and almost every time he’s left the island, he’s attended seminars at Oxford, Harvard, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine and Pharmacology, John Hopkins, and the University of Wittenberg. He’s also had audiences with homeopaths, herbologists, masters of Reiki and Ayurveda medicine and even yoga gurus. Understanding how the body works has become an obsession of his, one that is constantly challenged by the peculiarities of the island. Still, there is merit in the simplest imaginings of health and sickness. It is easy to tell where this man hurts. The cough in itself sounded like the prelude to something spectacularly deadly.
“You have had a headache, right?” He asks and the man nods. “What about a fever?
The man feels his own forehead with the back and then the front of his hand. “Maybe.”
“Any abdominal pain?”
“No.”
Richard nods. “It’s probably influenza.”
“The flu?”
“That’s what they like to start with.”
“Fabulous,” the man says and stretches out on his bed again, with his hand over his eyes.
x x x
It wasn’t the flu. Influenza would have been bad enough. Any strain could turn deadly, even amongst the young and healthy. It is estimated that in 1918 the Spanish flu killed forty million people internationally.
The first sign that this was more than influenza was that breakfast arrived via an orderly, the one whose faced reminded Richard of a boar, and who was dressed in a containment suit. Meals were normally served by Annie or one of the other nurses in training who usually came twice a day, and were only ever been protected with a cloth mask and gloves. The orderly had rolled in a cart with two bowls of oatmeal on it and a fresh jug of water, which he spilled as soon as the room was filled with the stranger’s coughs. The orderly then tripped over his own feet in a desperate attempt to depart as quickly as possible. In his haste to leave, he forgot to take away last night’s dinner tray which means the message to Ben remained undelivered.
When he was gone, Richard caught a smirk on the stranger’s face directed at the camera which suggested his coughs had been perfectly timed to produce chaos. Still the effort had taken its toll, and the man barely had the strength to sit up and stir his oatmeal before lying back down again, leaving his breakfast uneaten.
Richard notes all this silently. Over the course of the night, while the man had tossed and turned, coughed and groaned, he had to remind himself of the vow he made on the first day of his own imprisonment: all survival took was patience. He had that without even trying. So he hadn’t resisted their barbarism or tried to escape. On the eventuality of his capture in their renewed hostilities against Dharma, he had warned Tom and the rest not to risk themselves with an ill planned rescue. And he had passed the same message onto young Ben. Whether it took eight months or eight years, in theory, all he had to do was outlast them.
For over six months Richard had won that game by putting up with everything-the needles, the biopsies, the exploratory surgery, the regular dosing with germs, and all the pain that came with it. He was pretty sure it would get worse before it got better. Soon they would check to see if he needed a limb or his heart, just like they had his upper right molar. That hadn’t grown back and while he was aware all his wounds repaired themselves after injury, even he was curious to see if he would survive after a vital organ was removed completely.
He wasn’t afraid of death; he would almost welcome it if the Dharma freaks, as his roommate so jovially referred to them, discovered a permanent cure to his resurrecting health. And maybe that’s why he was being overly patient with them. He wanted to know if it was possible to give him a one way ticket off this plane of being. What he was not prepared for was letting them decide the when and the where. Nor was he willing to give these trespassers a victory. In time, their morbid curiosity would be punished, if not by him personally, then by Jacob. He had to admit he spent a good part of each day imagining how that will come to be.
Richard forces himself to eat his breakfast. He notes the addition of honey to the bland mixture, and wonders if that kind gesture meant Annie prepared his meal, even if she wasn’t allowed to serve it. When he finishes, he goes behind the screen to wash up and change his clothes. He also takes the opportunity to remove his IV. Since all the attention was on the new arrival, Richard didn’t imagine security would rush in to stop him from ending that failed experiment. Ever since he had recovered from Cholera, they had taken a break from their death watch and instead been pumping him full of sedatives to see if they could get him to sleep. Beyond producing a mild dizziness, dry mouth, and a slowed heart rate, the pills and fluids they had pumped into his system had done nothing. He almost expected Candle himself to show up next with a flock of sheep for him to count.
“That mumbo jumbo you’ve been sticking your head in is Latin, isn’t?” The man asks out of the blue.
“It is,” Richard confirms with some surprise as he dries his face, feeling the stubble on his cheeks. He suspects that with this heightened quarantine no one would be willing to supervise his weekly turn with a razor. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason. Just like to know who I’m bunking with.”
He states this with a certain authority that causes Richard’s curiosity to stir over the man’s origins again. It’s not a conversation they should have while being filmed, so all he says is, “I’m Richard.” His response provokes a snort from the other side of the screen, so he has to ask, “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. I just know someone who’d kill to get all this face time with you.” Richard comes out from behind the screen, still buttoning his shirt, and shooting a glare that he hopes censors their talk. The man seems to interpret him correctly and he doesn’t mention any names or shared timelines. He does add his own introduction, “I’m Sawyer.”
Sawyer. The name rolls around in his mouth. It is an oddly fitting title for a man who would look comfortable lounging in a haystack with a piece of straw in his mouth or strolling down a busy city street like he owned the world. Richard imagines the tale of how he came to be here, on this island, would be an interesting one best suited to a long night around a campfire with a bottle of something strong passed between them. It’s unlikely that will ever happen, not with the death sentences they like to hand out here, and this man’s unlikely resistance. Still he asks, “How are you feeling?”
“Peachy,” Sawyer says, managing to sound relatively healthy, though his grey pallor and sunken eyes suggest otherwise. He picks up his bowl of cold oatmeal again and just stares at it.
Richard stands by the door and looks out its tiny window, just so he doesn’t have to look at Sawyer. Even if he wanted to, there’s nothing he can do for him. “You should eat. Keep up your strength.”
“Yeah,” he mutters. By the time Richard turns around, Sawyer’s gone back to sleep.
Even though Sawyer remains asleep for the most of the day, immobile on his bed, his very presence makes the room feel smaller. Richard’s whole routine is thrown off. He forgoes his calisthenics and can’t concentrate on reading. At first he busies himself by straightening his pile of books from the Dharma library. When he’s done, he flips through a book of crosswords that he had long finished and methodically begins to fill in each square with his pencil, shading over the letters he had printed weeks ago. He feels like he’s covering up a secret code, across - bluebird, down - urn, across - noodle, down - wit and so on. He presses down so hard that the tip of his pencil snaps and he throws it across the room. Only fifteen minutes had passed, but it felt like days. He spends the rest of the morning and afternoon pacing and thinking and eventually just standing and staring at the wall, much like one would do if there were a window with a remarkable view or a particularly fine piece of art present.
“You have X-Ray vision or something?”
“Hmmm?” Richard turns around to see Sawyer sitting up, perhaps looking a little perkier than he did before, though it could just be because the colour has returned to his face. He shuffles to the toilet and Richard moves to the furthest corner of the room to give him some privacy. Behind the screen, another coughing fits takes hold of Sawyer, followed by him spitting into the basin. That little trip seems to have taken all of his energy and he collapses back on the bed with a groan.
“Would it kill them to give me some aspirin or at least turn off the damn lights?”
Richards eyes the fluorescents he had gotten so used to being on half the day. “Probably.”
Sawyer quiets and Richard thinks he’s dropped off to sleep again. Then he asks, “Be straight with me. Are you real a MD?”
“Yes.” Richard comes a little closer to Sawyer’s bed.
“I’ve had the flu before,” Sawyer says, then hesitates, scratching his throat. “There was never this swelling before.”
“Where?”
Sawyer thinks for a moment. “Under my arms.”
“Both of them?” Sawyer nods. “Are they soft or hard?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t go poking around.”
“Are they hot?”
“I feel hot all over, and don’t take that as some sorta come on.”
“May I?” Richard approaches Sawyer and he just shrugs. The man’s forehead is warm and clammy against his own cool hand. There’s definitely a fever, though it’s not overly high yet. “Do you still have a headache?”
“Where doesn’t it ache would be the better question.”
“Can you unbutton your shirt? I want to check the swelling.”
Sawyer looks like he wants to protest or crack a joke, but he must fear that something more serious than the flu is wrong with him so he acquiesces. He unbuttons his shirt, a task he takes slowly, though Richard saves him his dignity by not taking over. When he’s done, Richard slides the shirt off his right shoulder. He doesn’t comment on the fairly fresh looking bullet wound just under his clavicle or the row of tidy suture scars above his heart. Instead he presses three fingers along the man’s side, and runs them passed the ribs and upwards. The swelling sits like a bubble in his armpit, around the size of a child’s fist. He pulls the shirt back over the exposed shoulder and checks the other side. There’s another lump there, though not as large as the one on the right side.
He’d like to check Sawyer’s lower body for swelling too, the legs and groin area, but he suspects that would be testing the man’s trust and patience. Besides he’s pretty sure what this is without doing a complete physical. Instead he moves his hands to Sawyer’s throat and touches the visibly swollen glands. As he does, he asks, “Are you bringing up blood when you cough?”
“Just now.”
“Are you experiencing any nausea?”
“Off and on.”
Richard then holds Sawyer’s wrist feeling his pulse. It’s fluctuates between slow and weak and rapid and strong. When he lets go, Sawyer asks, “What the diagnosis, Do-?” He appears to stop short of calling Richard doc or doctor.
“It’s just the flu.” Richard removes his hands, and pulls Sawyer’s shirt closed. He shrugs, and returns to his own bed. “Sometimes the lymph nodes swell,” he adds causally.
He can feel Sawyer’s doubtful eyes on him as he smoothes his blanket and tucks an exposed piece of sheet under the mattress. He takes a moment to gather his thoughts, then forces himself to turn around and look Sawyer in the eye. He tries to smile. As he does, he thinks the following.
Yersinia pestis. The Great Pestilence. Peste Negra. The Black Death. The Plague.
Richard can’t recall all that much about his childhood. His memory has not kept up with his body. He does remember once when white crosses were painted on the doors of the stricken houses and the overwhelming smell of smoke had hung in the air as people tried to burn out the rot. As his family fled to the home of a distant relative, he had seen the cemetery piled high with bodies no one had the strength to bury. He thinks his family had remained untouched; he had been lucky even then. Then later, as a man at sea, he brings to mind the vigilance the captain gave toward killing rats. Cats were considered precious cargo, a preventative against the diseased critters. If it had been the cats who mutinied, the captain would have spared their lives and plied them with saucers of cream to win back their affection.
Maybe he doesn’t really remember this. Maybe these are only images generated by his reading of medical texts, history books, and his recent companion, Boccaccio. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change his diagnosis. Dharma had given this man Sawyer a needle full of Black Death.
x x x
“It’s just the flu.”
Why did he lie? He’s not sure. It could just be a reflex; he’s not used to being honest with strangers. Perhaps he didn’t want to deal with the man’s potential panic. Whatever the case, he can tell Sawyer remains sceptical, and if to stubbornly prove Richard wrong, he only gets worse. His groans grow louder, his cough threatens to stop his breathing, and his fever rises. At one point, he empties the contents of his stomach onto the floor. All Richard can do is clean it up and then continue his pacing, his part of the unfolding macabre dance.
He’s not worried about exposure. Sawyer’s germs won’t do anything to him. It’s a different story when the bacteria is forcibly injected, then they have a fighting chance to take hold, but so far his body has managed to fight off whatever Dharma’s thrown at him, and even if he did succumb, it wouldn’t stay that way for long.
Richard can’t believe only a day has passed since Sawyer arrived when an orderly enters that evening, a different one this time, who is as efficient as the one this morning was clumsy. Richard notes that two armed guards, also wearing containment suits, hover outside the door while the orderly cleans the room of any dishes and lays out two bowls of soup, ham sandwiches, and a fresh jug of water. He also leaves a box of crackers, some granola bars, half dozen apples, and a bag of nuts, as if to indicate he’s laying in supplies because the staff visits won’t be so frequent, perhaps not until Sawyer decides whether to live or die.
“I want to speak to Candle,” Richard says as the orderly pushes his cart out. It’s not clear if the man heard him in his sealed containment suit. He almost lets it go because he’s not sure what he would to say to Dharma’s head man. Unleash his pent up rage? Ask for a private room? Plead for this stranger’s life? Yet even without knowing what he wants, once the orderly is gone, Richard speaks again, this time directly to the camera, enunciating each word carefully. “I want to speak to Candle.”
Unsurprisingly, his request is ignored. Richard would like to think that this is because there was a breach in procedures and Candle himself has been infected with the plague too, along with his army of pseudo scientists and security teammates. He plays around with the image of swollen bodies encased in beige jumpsuits and white jackets littering the hallways of The Staff.
For now, any vengeance is far in the future. He will continue to bid his time and wait for the proper moment. In the meantime, there is one weapon he can employ. It had not occurred to him before, but perhaps he can steal a minor victory away from Dharma without really even trying. He looks to Sawyer’s huddled shape on the bed.
The plague works notoriously fast. You can wake up feeling fine and be dead by nightfall, yet if you can get through the first three days, you were more likely to survive. These days, treatment with sulphonamide drugs would most likely guarantee a cure, though it’s unlikely Dharma plans on treating Sawyer. They are playing a waiting game, one where they don’t expect any interference from Richard. There would be certain satisfaction in thwarting Dharma by keeping Sawyer alive. Plus it would be something to do and for so long he’s done absolutely nothing.
As if hearing a promise of sorts being made, Sawyer stirs. His leg twitches as if he’s running in his dream and one arms flails about. Suddenly his eyes pop open. Seeing he’s awake, Richard lifts a bowl of soup from the tray and carries it over to the bed. “Here, you should take some. You need to keep hydrated.” He holds up the spoon, and contemplates volunteering to feed the man if necessary.
Apparently Sawyer has other things on his mind. Unexpectedly and with more strength than Richard suspected was left in his body, he grabs Richard’s wrist and yanks him closer. He can feel the heat radiating off him. Most of the soup spills on the bedcovers but Sawyer doesn’t notice. His glassy eyes find their focus, then flare with intensity. “What’re you doing here? You shouldn’t have come back,” he growls.
“I’ve always been here,” Richard responds. Sawyer’s eyelids flutter in confusion. With his free hand, Richard unpeels his wrist from Sawyer’s grip and pushes him down back onto his pillow. He sets the bowl and spoon on the floor, then strips off the wet blanket and top sheet. Rather than swap over his own dry bedding, he decides to leave Sawyer uncovered for now. It will help cool him and pretty much the only thing Richard’s equipped to do in these circumstances is bring the fever down.
He goes behind the screen and runs the water in the sink until it’s as cold as it will get. He soaks their only washcloth in the water, then rings in out, and returns to place it on Sawyer’s forehead.
At the touch of the damp cloth, Sawyer sighs and opens his eyes again. “Live together, die alone, huh Doc?”
Richard ignores his ramblings and pulls Sawyer’s arms free of his unbuttoned shirt. He leaves his jeans on for now. Then he strips the pillow case from his bed and heads back behind the screen to dampen it too. When he returns, he uses it to wipe down Sawyer’s arms and his torso. Sawyer seems oblivious to his ministrations and chatters on almost insistently.
“Did Freckles come back with you?”
“She’s around,” Richard replies automatically, guessing at the sex, and presuming the name belongs to a long lost cat. He notices the size of the swelling under each arm has increased and hardened. Sawyer winces when Richard prods them gently.
“Don’t bother with that, Doc,” he hisses between clenched teeth. “Go check on Red. She’s bleeding the worst.”
Too focused on the buboes, Richard makes no response. He was trained to lance them. It was thought to release the imbalance in the body; at best it would only relieve some of the pain. He thinks about the needle from his old IV and if he could disinfect it and possibly use it to open and drain the pus. Discomfort is not Sawyer’s biggest problem here, so he decides it’s best to leave it for now, rather than risk a secondary infection from lack of proper sterilization. He rinses and rings out his pillowcase one more time, then lays it against Sawyer’s chest. The skin seems no cooler, but perhaps it offers some comfort because his new patient closes his eyes and stops his rambling.
Sawyer spends the night drifting in and out of sleep. The coughing wakes him often, as does his delirium. At one point he sits straight up, startling Richard with an announcement.
“They got Michael’s boy!” He strains upward and tries to get out of the bed. Richard grasps his shoulders and tries to keep him still. “That big fella took him off the raft.” The effort only makes him cough more and he surrenders. Richards pushes him down gently. “I couldn’t stop ‘em.”
“Don’t worry about that.”
Once Sawyer is resettled on the bed, and the washcloth re-dampened and placed on his forehead, he says to Richard with some pride, “You should have seen me, Doc. I took out the bullet myself.”
Richard stares at the puckered wound on the man’s exposed chest. It looks messy enough to have been taken out that way, so he doesn’t dismiss Sawyer’s ramblings as purely the fever. “Did you now.”
As usual, the fluorescents turn on at seven o’clock sharp. No one follows with the regular routine of breakfast, confirming Richard’s suspicions that they are being left alone for fear of exposure. He pictures a pair of men ogling a television monitor down the hall, noting every cough and groan in their notebooks. This thought provokes an action he should have taken long ago. He pushes the chair over to the corner and climbs atop. He yanks the cord from the hole in the wall, disconnecting the camera’s power source. For good measure, he smashes the equipment with the chair leg; pieces of glass and black plastic scatter across the tile floor.
If they want their free show, they are going to have to come in to get it back. What will win out, he wonders, their voyeurism or their cowardliness?
Without their eyes on him, Richard feels practically free. He didn’t realize the burden it was until the surveillance is stopped. It’s comparable to letting out a long held in breath. He pulls the chair over to Sawyer’s bed, and resumes his vigil, wiping Sawyer down, holding him up so he can cough up the phlegm, and he even gets him to take a few tablespoons of the cold soup. That tiny bit of nourishment gives Sawyer a burst of energy and he asks again about Freckles and if anyone found Claire. Richard wants to take advantage of the privacy to ask him about John Locke’s whereabouts, and where and when exactly did he and his comrades come from, but Sawyer continues to be elsewhere.
“Did you know Jin’s alive, Doc?” Sawyer’s head rolls back and forth on his pillow in disbelief. “Blew himself right back to the beach.” His voice drops, and he attempts a confession level whisper that comes out fairly hoarse and he coughs and coughs until his voice clears. “Can never tell him about what happened in the garden with Sun. It wasn’t about the guns, you know.”
“I know,” Richard says wearily, taking his pulse. It was the same, fluctuating like crazy. “It never is.”
The rest of the day and night continue in much the same manner. No one comes into the room to check on them, though the traffic outside their door increases. It looks like they are on manual surveillance now. Richard even spots Candle taking a peek through the window. Now it’s his turn to be ignored and Richard doesn’t even acknowledge a note that is held up to the window. To pass the time, he puts on his glasses and reads out loud to Sawyer, choosing the only English book in the room, The Pit and the Pendulum by Poe. It may just be an illusion, however Sawyer seems to sleep more soundly when Richard’s reading aloud.
He estimates it’s about 4:00 p.m. on the afternoon of Sawyer’s third day when he hears a key turn in the lock. He had finished Poe and moved on to Ovid’s Metamorphoses which was in Latin so he had to stop every few minutes to explain the story to Sawyer, which was a bit unnecessary since he was unconscious. At the sound of the door opening, Richard places his glasses in his shirt pocket and stands, instinctively blocking Sawyer as best he can from whatever is coming. He can’t make out who the solitary visitor is hovering in the doorway, except to note that he or she is wearing a containment suit, but they are not bearing food or come accompanied by guards.
A muffled voice on the verge of panic seeps through the containment hood. “Richard?”
Richard squints to make out the young man’s owlish face. “Ben?”
There’s a noise in the hallway and Ben jumps about three feet. He darts back out of the room and frantically looks around. “We don’t have much time.”
Richard walks passed Ben into the deserted hallway. It smells overwhelmingly of disinfectant, but behind that is a whiff of fresh air, the smell of freedom. In less than a minute he could be back outside, on his own turf. Still, he’s cautious of a trick and pulls Ben back into the room and closes the door. “Where are Candle and the rest?”
“Annie put Librium in their dinners. She drugged hers too. All the cameras are off. I took care of everything,” Ben announces proudly. He’s been breathing hard and the plastic window of his hood’s fogged up, as are his spectacles. “You can go now.”
“Ben, we talked about this. You can’t interfere. This is not your war.”
“With all the heightened security, Annie thought you were really, truly dying.”
Ben’s face is so earnest, Richard almost doesn’t have the heart to scold him. “It’s very brave of both of you, but if they found out about you and I, all our plans for the future would be…”
“I did this to save you! I’m ready to-” Indignity clings to Ben’s voice, then the tone shifts to caution. “Who’s that?”
In the excitement, Richard had forgotten about Sawyer. He casts a glance to the bed where the man lies unconscious and oblivious to the possibility of escape. He could go and leave Sawyer here to die or he could take him along and risk making him sicker by moving him. Even worse, dragging a sick man through the jungle would slow the trek back to his territory, wherever those lines may lie these days, and get them both recaptured.
As Richard pauses to consider how much this man’s present and future is his responsibility, Ben wanders over to get a closer look. “What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s sick, Ben. Don’t touch him.”
Richard steps in front of Ben to feel Sawyer’s forehead. It’s still burning. All his efforts to lower the fever have failed and even without touching them, Richard can tell the glands on his throat have swelled more, and probably under the arms too. There’s no evidence that the infection is residing. It may be too late for antibiotics or whatever healing the island chooses to offer once they are aboveground.
“Who is he?” There’s a note of jealousy to Ben’s voice that Richard find disconcerting. Before Richard can conjure an explanation, Sawyer takes the opportunity to wake and performs his own study of his visitor.
Upon spotting Ben, Sawyer’s eyes go wide. If Richard’s not mistaken, there’s recognition in his gaze. Rather than confusing Ben for someone else, like he had clearly done with Richard over the last few days, there’s a clear identification, as if he’s picked the right suspect in a line-up. The certainty doesn’t last, and the fever takes over his gaze again, but not before he mutters, “Oh good, the gang’s all here. Who invited Captain Bunny Killer?”
The possibility that Sawyer actually recognizes Ben settles Richard’s question. If Sawyer knows Ben from another time, it’s possible that he's a critical player within the island’s history. For Richard, that alone is more important than teaching Dharma a lesson or simply finishing what he’s begun.
“Ben, I need you to break into the pharmacy. Take any bottles marked Hydrochlorothiazide and Acetazolamide.” He scribbles the names across the inside cover of The Pit and Pendulum. “I also need aspirin and cough syrup. I’ll meet you at the entrance.”
“There’s no time! They could wake up any-”
“Just go!”
Ben looks like he wants to argue, but thinks twice about it. He dashes out of the room. Richard follows him out, but heads in the other direction, looking for a gurney. He finds one in an examination room. On his way back, he also locates an unconscious security guard, and takes his rifle for good measure. Once back in his room, he lowers the gurney to bed level and slides Sawyer onto it. He pushes the gurney out into the hallway, then darts back into the room to retrieve the washcloth. Before he departs, he takes a final look at his room. It seems just like yesterday he had been brought in. Time flies, he thinks.
The Staff corridors sloop upwards as he heads to the surface. Sawyer mumbles something unintelligible as Richard pushes the gurney. Along the way, Richard pokes his head into the rooms and offices. He comes across a nurse and a couple of orderlies with their heads down on a table, and a technician slumped on the floor. He ignores them and moves on. He finally finds who he’s looking for. Candle sits behind his desk on a swivel chair, head back, with his mouth open in a snore. Richard comes closer and gently tucks Sawyer’s germ ridden washcloth in the pocket of Candle’s white jacket. Then he grabs a black marker from the desk and scrawls on the outside of Candle’s office door, QUARANTINE.
Ben’s already waiting for them at the entrance with a satchel slung across his chest. Richard hopes it’s full of the meds he asked for.
The young man peeks cautiously outside the hatch entrance, and says, “All clear.” Ben holds the door open for Richard to push Sawyer out.
It’s an overcast day with angry black clouds rolling in from the west. An unseasonably cool breeze brings with it the smell of the ocean. Richard can almost taste it. It all feels so clean and fresh and ripe.
It’s a perfect welcome.
Two Dharma vans are parked beside The Staff’s entrance. Ben holds up the keys to one of them and together they carry Sawyer off the gurney and load him into the back. Ben gets into the front seat and reverses off the path and drives into the jungle. Richard crouches in the back, one hand pressed against Sawyer’s chest to stabilize him over the rough terrain, the other clutching the rifle as he scans for any signs of Dharma through the van’s rear window.
“Where are we going?” Ben calls from the front, his voice still muffled from his containment suit.
“Just keep going east.”
Once they had put enough distance between The Staff and themselves, Richard lays down the rifle and searches through Ben’s bag. He tears through what seems to be several boxes of gauze and a thermometer.
“Where are the drugs I asked for?”
“I got the aspirin.”
“Aspirin’s not going to do much.”
Again an unsettling aura of possession creeps into Ben’s voice again. “He’s not one of ours.”
“You have no idea who he is.”
Richard swats Sawyer’s face until he wakes. “Swallow,” he insists, forcing two aspirin down his throat. He expects a fight, however in his groggy state Sawyer complies and returns to sleep. Richard then leaves him wrapped in a blanket in the back and crawls over to the front bench.
“Stop the van.”
Ben obeys. He parks in a grove of palm trees whose fronds twist together into a canopy, blocking out much of the sky. Behind them the tall grass is flattened by their muddy tracks. As Richard orientates himself, rain begins to pelt the roof and windshield lightly.
Richard places his hand on the wheel. “I’ll take it from here.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ben, you have to get out now. Go back. Tell them I stole your van.”
“I want to come with you.”
“It’s not the right time,” he insists firmly. “We need you on the inside.”
“But Jacob said-“
Richard cuts him off. “He said you must be patient.”
“I’ve been patient,” he says with loads of exasperation.
Any other time, Richard would gladly lecture him on what waiting truly means. “Don’t you want to check on Annie? Isn’t that why you left all the medication behind?” He tilts his head back to where Sawyer lies. “In case she caught what he has?”
Ben’s response is to hold his gaze for at least a minute. Then, without saying a thing, he opens the door and jumps out. Richard closes the door behind him and rolls down the window. The fresh air feels like a second layer of skin. “You did good Ben,” he says, starting the van’s ignition, then pulls away. In the rear view mirror he can see Ben’s slight figure, wrapped in the containment suit, fade into the landscape.
x x x
“I was sick, sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me. The sentence, the dread sentence of death, was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. After that, the sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy indeterminate hum. It conveyed to my soul the idea of revolution, perhaps from its association in fancy with-”
“Is this déjà vu or did you already read that?” Sawyer’s voice is hoarse, yet brimming over with attitude.
Richard lays the collection of Poe’s short stories on his knee, and chuckles. “I didn’t think you’d mind. You weren’t exactly taking notes the first time through.” He rises from the folding chair and checks Sawyer’s forehead. It’s warm to the touch, but no longer feels like he’s pressing down on burning coals. “How are you feeling?”
“That sounds like déjà vu too.”
Richard plucks the thermometer out of the glass by the bedside and shakes it. “You don’t present much opportunity for scintillating conversation.” Then he shoves the thermometer under Sawyer’s tongue.
As he waits for his temperature to be taken, Sawyer examines their surroundings. One hand paws the canvass wall on the tent by his side and his ear cocks to the sound of people chatting nearby. Richard removes the thermometer and lifts open a tent flap, sending a beam of sunlight across Sawyer’s cot.
Sawyer squints and remarks, “I see we’re outta the ground.”
“For almost a week. It’s nice of you to notice.”
“I take it the sign of no Rent-a-Cops standing guard means we’re with your Latin-lovin’ horde?”
Richard nods. “A few of you friends are here too.”
Sawyer leans up on his elbows. “God dammit! Who?”
“They said they were separated from you during the last flash, before you got captured I presume. Daniel, Miles, Jin and Juliet...Hey! Wait!” Richard grabs hold of Sawyer’s shoulders and keeps him from getting off the cot. “You might still be contagious. You’re not seeing anyone yet.”
Sawyer huffs and swears, then collapses back on the cot. He accepts the two pills Richard gives him. With a mouthful of water, he asks, “What about Benjamin-Fucking-Linus?”
So he had recognized Ben, Richard muses. “What about him?”
“Is he here too?”
“No.”
Sawyer allows Richard to pull up the t-shirt he’s wearing. He winces when the cold stethoscope is placed on his chest. “I could have sworn I saw a junior version on that bug eyed creep floating around here.”
“Shhh...” Richard says, trying to listen. He moves the stethoscope across Sawyer’s chest listening in several places before pulling the shirt back down. “You saw and said a lot of things. It was the fever.”
“But you know who he is?”
“He’s just one of the Dharma kids, graduated from high school last year, I think.”
“Riiight...Bet he was Valedictorian!”
Richard doesn’t press the issue. He really didn’t want Sawyer to paint a picture of what was to come. If he was stuck here to witness it all, at least it should be a surprise. Whatever the case, he didn’t need a man from the future to tell him that Ben was going to be a handful. That had been plain to see since he was a boy. Still he had to trust that Jacob could see more than he did in the young man. In the meanwhile there was John Locke to watch over, and whenever their latest battle with Dharma ended, he would check in with him again.
Richard puts his stethoscope back in his bag. “So it looks like you’ll live.”
“That was one helluva bug.”
Richard pours fresh water into a basin and washes his hands. “If you think you can manage something solid, I’ll get you some breakfast.”
Sawyer clears his throat. “I could eat a horse.”
“We’ll start with something a little smaller.” He pauses in the tent’s entranceway. “Any message you want me to pass on the others?”
“The Others?”
“Your friends.”
Sawyer leans back on his pillow and closes his eyes. “Just tell them I hope they got their flu shot.”
“Will do.”
Richard steps out into the sunshine he won’t ever take for granted again. Behind him Sawyer calls out to him.
“Hey, Tricky Dick. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
x x x