(no subject)
[ dialogue featured in this comes from the Lostpedia transcript of 3x07, "Not in Portland" ]
Amazing, how Juliet returns home in one piece. She spends the entire ride home bawling: bawling about this morning's conversation with Edward, bawling about this afternoon's botched interview, bawling over her lot in life, over her professional imprisonment, her professional stagnation, her professional failures, her personal failures. She had married under the assumption that such a thing as forever existed, that she had achieved a harmonic utopia of the personal and professional, found a soul mate who recognized and cherished her talent, her intelligence, her beauty - sentimental nonsense, since forever could be terminated by lawyers, judges and several pieces of paper, since the personal had no place in the professional except to be used for blackmail, since she hadn't found an appreciative soul mate but a selfish, ambitious businessman who wasn't so much interested in medicine than he was in his own glory and wasn't so much interested in Juliet's “beauty” than he was in any beautiful woman who passed his way.
Juliet has nowhere else to go. Nobody in the professional world cares about her, or knows about her; Edmumd is just waiting to take credit for her accomplishments, or waiting to throw her to the dogs if she fails; and considering that she uses her sister, Rachel, like a guinea pig and injects false hope into her body in the form of chemicals Juliet says will cure her sister's ravaged womb, considering all that, she can't blame people for being disinterested in her and can't blame Edmund for wanting to steal the spotlight from such a mess of a human being.
Still, as she walks up the stairs to her apartment, she musters whatever false pleasantness she can find within her to show to Rachel, who is waiting for her there, waiting to hear good news. Juliet sees her sitting on the back of the couch as she enters, dressed in a long sleeve green shirt and green pajama bottoms, a scarf wrapped around her head. “Hey. How was the interview?” she asks.
Juliet enters the living room, her ams folded across her chest. She's wearing her best fake smile. “It's not for me.”
“What?”
“It's fine. We're too far away, anyway. It's Portland.”
“Jule, you didn't say no because of me.”
“Well, why would I want to go all the way to Portland for research that doesn't even work?”
Rachel pauses, a hopeful expression overcoming her face. “Because it does work.”
Juliet blinks, her brow furrowing slightly. Rachel's saying that as a pep talk. She has to be.
Rachel continues: “I'm pregnant.”
“What?”
She can't believe it. She walks over to Rachel, who has climbed of the couch, and is grabbing something on the table beside it. It's a pregnancy test and a paper showing results from a blood test. Rachel hands them all to Juliet. “I didn't want to tell you until I was sure.”
The the tests were conclusive: two sure-fire, no-mistake tests staring her in the face telling her she was wrong, that she wasn't injecting false hope, that she wasn't a failure, that -- “It worked.”