(lost) Solitaire Way
Title: Solitaire Way
Fandom: Lost
Characters: Sawyer, Juliet
Spoilers: Through Season 4 Finale
Prompt: un_love_you - "I'm awake and you're breathing."
Summary: The world was all before them, in the form of a small, abandoned island. A paradise lost. And they themselves lost in the middle.
The World was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence Their guide:
They hand in hand with wadding steps and slow,
Through Eden took Their solitaire way.
John Milton, Paradise Lost
-
He always awoke before she did, troubled into consciousness by dreams he could never remember. His eyes would open and he would suddenly be aware of the weight of a body laying across his arm or the feel of hair tickling against the bare skin on his neck.
He would look down at her for a moment, her face peaceful in sleep, her lips upturned into the faintest of smiles. He could close his eyes again after seeing her there, and it comforted him to know that she too felt safe beside him. He would drift off to sleep for a moment, and when he awoke, she was always gone.
Most mornings she would be sitting on the remains of a fallen tree, her eyes cast out into the jungle beyond, seeing but not seeing. But sometimes she would vanish, disappearing for the entire day. He never asked her where she went.
He had followed her once, in the early days following the purge. He stood unnoticed in the tree line as she sat before a small mound of earth on a windy hilltop, and felt a pang in his chest. He longed for a grave to kneel beside, a place to grieve over all that had been lost. It was not until later that he realized the entire island was a tomb. Every inch of ground was a grim reminder of what had been. Every tree a headstone for those who had perished. Every shadow the memory of the ones who had vanished.
He never felt the need to track her again.
He would spend his days slinking past the dilapidated ruins of the barracks, ignoring the ghosts and whispers that still lingered. Some days he would spend in the remnants of the camp, leaning against a familiar tree and staring out at the new horizon that all too soon had became as familiar as the old one.
As soon as dusk approached, bringing with it a shadowy darkness ideal for hiding fake emotions, they would find one another, brought together like the opposite ends of a magnet. She would smile at him, and he would produce a box of chocolate cream cookies or a bottle of liquor from the stash of items he had salvaged in the aftermath, and the two would toast to their misery. To their dead friends. To being alive.
Then he would take her face in his hands and brush the tears from her eyes with this thumbs, and their bodies would fall into one another. And it felt safe. And they could hide. And they could forget.
They were like Adam and Eve, two lost souls in the prison of paradise. For he knew what lay beyond the great mountains, the lush jungles, and wide ocean. And he had tasted freedom. He could still feel the wind against his face. Feel his stomach rise in his throat as the helicopter rose into the air. Feel his heart swell when he knew what he had to do. It had surprised him to learn that he had one, a heart. It had been beating in his chest all along, waiting to be put to use, to be ignored no longer.
His heart. It was long gone now. Dead and buried in the smoldering wreckage of their last hope.
And so they did the only thing they knew how to do: they survived. And they clung to one another and cursed their final act of selflessness. And they waited. Waited for the missing to return. Waited to be found. Waited for death.