(no subject)
Title: I'm Warning You We're Growing Up
Fandom: Lost
Characters/Pairings: Shannon, Boone
Word Count: 564
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: kayim wanted Shannon/Boone friendship type fic.
Summary: Boone watches her run further and further away from him through glossy photographs.
Boone watches her run further and further away from him through glossy photographs.
Postcards, pictures of places he’s only seen in books or on business trips with his mother. This one is the Eiffel Tower at night. He traces his fingers over the outline, before flipping it over, finding her familiar scrawl across the back, dark green ink, tales of how beautiful the city is, about the people she’s working for, as an au pair.
This is early; she’s only been gone for a few months.
Nora looks at him like he’s the saddest thing on this planet, and also like she might be willing to do something about that. That’s the only reason she allows him to keep in contact with her, to use her for information. She was one of Shannon’s last friends here, the only one she still sends postcards, and therefore his last connection.
She sends him nothing.
“She seems happy.” Nora tells him, with a shrug, hands him coffee, too hot to drink, and she’s half out of her clothes from class. A ballet instructor, like Shannon was. But she isn’t as pretty, nor as smart. She has no ability to see through people, past the superficial.
He sets the postcard down on the coffee table in front of him, resigned sigh, and he hates that he still cares when he replies, “She isn’t.”
---
The first time she calls him, he learns she has no concept of time zones.
“It’s four a.m., Shannon, what is it?” The irritation in his voice disguises just how happy he is to actually hear from her.
“I need help.”
So he gets on a plane and tries not to be short with the flight attendant or yell at the guy driving in the cab to go faster because all he can think about is getting to her and how he might be running out of time.
---
“Come home.” It’s a demand, or it tries to be, but he withers under her eyes and the force behind his words dies.
“For what?”
Me, he wants to say, I miss you, but at some point that stopped being enough for her so he just tells her, “We’re grownups now, Shannon, stop acting like a kid.”
The door shuts in his face. It becomes painfully clear right then and there that this isn’t the same girl he used to know.
---
The second time, it’s a different tactic.
“This is becoming a pattern.” His checkbook is twenty-five thousand dollars lighter and his head hurts right along with his heart.
“You think I want this?” She fingers a dark purple bruise on her wrist; he wonders if she knows she’s doing it.
“I don’t know.” He can’t look at her. “You don’t talk to me anymore. You used to talk to me.”
Her voice is watery as she says, “I used to do a lot of things.”
---
Afterwards, a full year afterwards, it happens like a series of unfortunate events.
He finds out she’s conning him.
They sleep together.
Their plane falls from the sky.
This used to be so much easier.
Boone hands her sunglasses, their third day there, and wishes for the simplicity of their youth, to be ten again and dancing with her at their parents wedding. Before all of this.
He never stops hoping they’ll get back there again.
Someday.