...now it is found.
Coming in just under the wire before this week's episode of Lost (on the West Coast, anyway), here's Part 2:
Title: Loa'a
Author: Viola
Rating: PG13-ish
Characters: Ensemble, but mostly Ethan, Kate, Boone, Shannon, Locke and Claire
Disclaimer: Not mine. None of it.
Summary: The thunder echoes to the women in the rising flames. (Part 2 of 2; Part 1 is here; Spoilers through ‘All the Best Cowboys...’)
1. Hekili (Ethan)
'Ele mimo ka lani
There are black pearls under the water off the hula'ana where the black rock sits. Ethan isn’t sure how he knows that or where he learned the proper word for the tall sea cliffs that brace their side of the island. He does remember, although it seems like a long time ago, that once someone showed him the pearl beds. Someone showed him how to dive, which knife to use and the right way to pry the shells apart. The pearls are useless, but they’re beautiful and that alone makes them worth the risk.
Claire is beautiful, too, and he risked a lot to get her.
Claire is white and pink, glowing and unmarked, like the giant pearls he remembers seeing a long time ago behind glass walls in a large city filled with light and automobile traffic. His memory is fragmented like that. Tiny details are sharp and keen and real as life, but the big things -- his parents, his birthday, his Christian name -- those things escape him now.
He doesn’t remember when he chose the name Ethan for himself, but it fits somehow. Claire, he realizes then, is going to need a new name, too.
He chooses one for her while he watches her sleep. It’s the second day, maybe the third, and she still cries and fights and he has to bind her wrists together even though it hurts him to hurt her. He chooses a name for her, one that comes to him in hushed murmurs and speaks of spring and birth and pink blossoms that he remembers from a long time ago.
He lays his hand on her forehead as he says it out loud.
The others approve and they decide that he should be the one to take care of her until the baby comes. They’re unsure of her; they don’t want her to know too much. Anything could happen. Ethan doesn’t mind tending to Claire, even though, at first, she cries and curses him and pulls away when he tries to help her.
“You bastard,” she sobs on the fourth day. “You killed Charlie.” She throws her head back and starts to scream. She’s screaming words at first, but soon she tires out and the screams subside into tears and hiccups.
Ethan had to kill Charlie and he’s not sorry, but he realizes that it’s far too soon to make her understand this. She will understand in time, though. He doesn’t have any doubt about that. Instead, he brings her a bowl of hot water, steeped with ginger petals, and a soft, thick cloth.
“You shouldn’t scream like that,” he says, softly, reasonably, calling her by her new name. “It isn’t good for you.” He moves her bound hands out of the way and helps her to sit up. He tests the water’s temperature carefully before dipping the cloth in and rubbing it against her flushed and puffy face.
“Please,” she says, looking at him with wide, fearful eyes. “Please let me go.”
He just shakes his head, handing her a cup of strong tea. “You’re safer here, you’ll understand that soon.”
They go on that way for almost a fortnight. The baby is late and it worries him, but Claire doesn’t scream or cry so much anymore and he thinks that’s progress, at least. The others, though, are more worried about the child than Claire and they’re afraid that things may not work out after all. Ethan argues with them long into the night and finally they’re brought around to his way of thinking.
He prepares for every eventuality, though.
Two days past the time when Claire ought to have had the child, Ethan sits by the fire with the others. He’s holding the edge of his diver’s knife over the flames. If the baby doesn’t turn in time, he may need it. But he really hopes it doesn’t come to that.
That night, like so many nights since Claire came to him, he hears the hunters in the trees beyond the black rock. They never venture any further than that, they never come too close, and after a few nights of these encounters, Ethan realizes that they aren’t hunting Claire any longer. Locke is leading them and Ethan has long suspected that Locke understands the island better than any of the other newcomers. He’s teaching the others to understand it, too. There are at least two other hunters with him. Their voices are young and Ethan, for the first time, has hope that maybe they won’t have to fight the newcomers, after all.
On their way back out of the jungle, the hunters are close enough that Ethan can hear them as they struggle home with their day’s kill. That night, he guesses, they must have a celebration because there’s music and laughing on the air. Claire hears it before he does, though.
“I hear singing,” Claire says, her eyes sleepy and her breathing labored. “Can you hear it?”
He doesn’t at first, but when he stops, going completely silent, he can hear an echo of it on the wind. He can smell the faint scent of woodsmoke and hear the sound of laughter. He doesn’t recognize the song, though.
Claire does. She sings him a line or two and reaches for his hand, and when she falls asleep that night her breathing is easy and the lines around her mouth ease.
2. Ula (Kate)
'O na wahine i ka puoko o ke ahi
After she tracks Charlie through the jungle, Kate starts hunting with Locke.
So does Boone. They walk up from the beach together and Locke meets them at exactly half the distance of the narrow path, knives in hand and a lesson on his lips. They’re both quick studies, and Locke seems pleased.
She isn’t sure why she does it, at first. She goes looking for them one day, at least a week after Claire is taken, in the late morning when they’ve been out in the jungle for hours already and the sun is slanting sideways and golden through the trees above her. She thinks, at first, that it’s just concern. Or maybe that it’s just a feeling of uselessness, of restlessness.
She’s wrong, and it doesn’t take her very long to figure that out.
They’re hunting, on an afternoon five days after she goes out to meet them the first time. She has begun to count the days, the sunrises, the sunsets and the rains. Boone is better at it, keeping track, being mindful of the passage of time, but she’s learning. They’re hunting, walking single-file over slick red clay, when she realizes what she’s doing, why she’s really there.
She’s walking behind Locke, right behind him, when she realizes that she’s marking his steps, mimicking his gait. She’s following after him, placing her feet in the prints he leaves in the mud. She remembers another day like this, when her feet were much smaller than they are now, and she did the same thing: following after her father, through mossy trails and giant ferns, and carefully stepping only where he stepped.
And here she’d thought Jack was the one with daddy issues.
It bothers her less than she would have imagined, once she realizes, maybe less than it ought to. A connection to her father is a connection to the past and if there’s anything that Kate fears on this island, it’s forgetting. She’s afraid, afraid she’ll forget who she is, what she’s done, where she comes from.
Most of all, more than anything, she’s afraid that she wants to forget.
The temptation to do just that, to just start over, is almost too much to bear. It’s why she chooses to stay on the beach. Her resolve isn’t going to hold forever, though, especially not where Jack is concerned. It’s why she won’t give up on a rescue, however remote the chance. It’s why she’s here, now, following Locke through the mud and mist and learning the right way to hold a knife.
That night they bring a piglet back and roast it over a fire. Boone has a black eye and Kate has dark blood spilled down the front of her t-shirt, but Locke puts a hand atop each of their heads in turn and tells them they’ve done well.
Rose is sitting on the far side of the fire, trimming Shannon’s hair with a pair of nail scissors. She clucks her tongue in disapproval.
“You’re turning those young people wild, John,” she says without looking up. “There’s no call for that.”
“We’ve got to eat,” he replies.
“That’s not what I mean and you know it.” But she lets the matter drop, for the moment.
Locke, though, goes to sit beside her. He smiles down at Shannon, who frowns at him and then over at Boone.
“It’s important, Rose. You know that,” he says.
“Mm-hmm,” and a sidelong glance is all he gets in return.
“But you’ll eat.” He grins at her, and she can’t help but smile back.
“Oh, I’ll eat.” She sighs a little, brushing stray hairs off Shannon’s bare shoulders. “And tomorrow, if you find me some salt, I’ll fry us up some bacon for breakfast.”
“Now, that sounds just about right.”
Shannon makes a frustrated noise and stands up abruptly. “I’m going back down to the beach.”
“Aren’t you going to eat?” Boone asks, looking caught somewhere between surprise and anger.
“Jenny and Cari caught fish today. I’ll eat that.”
Boone looks to Locke in appeal, but all he says is, “Suit yourself, Shannon.”
“Whatever.” She stomps off, without even a word to Rose, and for some reason Kate follows.
“Shannon,” Kate says, jogging to catch up with her. “Hey, Shannon. Wait.”
“What?” The word comes out sharp, sulky, and Kate can definitely see that Shannon is used to being the little sister.
“Come on back. Boone is getting really good at hunting. I think it would mean a lot if you stayed to eat what he caught.”
“Killed, you mean?” Shannon shakes her head, looking truly upset. “Do you have any idea how weird that is? Boone? Killing things? He hates guns, he hates violence. He’s a member of Amnesty International, for fuck’s sake.”
“People have to make ad-“
“And you… aren’t you a vegetarian? Or weren’t you, you know, before?”
“I was,” Kate says, feeling the skin inexplicably prickling along the back of her neck. “But I don’t see what that has to do with any-“
“You’re both turning creepy! That’s what it has to do with. You’re like, like…” she pauses, arms outstretched, like she’s casting around for something exactly creepy enough. “You’re like zombies. Or cult members. You’re… Scientologists!”
“Come on,” Kate says. “You’re overreacting. We’ve all got to work together, Shannon. We’ve got to help each other if we’re going to stay alive here.”
“Please. You should hear yourself. You even sound like Locke now.”
Kate finds that she doesn’t have anything to say to that, and after a long moment, Shannon sighs.
“Whatever. I’m going down to the beach to eat fish with the normal people. Okay?”
“Shannon…” Kate reaches out a hand to her, but Shannon steps away, standing just out of reach.
“You have blood on your shirt. It’s gross,” she says, and walks away.
3. Kupina'i (Locke)
Ke 'iloli nei ka lani
They go out looking for Claire again on the third day after she disappears. They go out on the fourth, and the fifth, and the sixth, long after hope should be abandoned. They don’t find Claire, but they find other things of perhaps equal importance. Locke realizes, on the seventh day, that they aren’t going to find her, not unless Ethan and the Others want them to.
That doesn’t mean, though, that he stops hunting.
Boone stays with him, even though neither of them speaks out loud about what they’ve discovered. When Kate comes to find them, on what is the tenth day by Boone’s count, she asks why they’re still out there and what they hope to find.
They’re hunting, Locke tells her. He’s teaching Boone to hunt.
Kate, it turns out, wants to learn, too. She’s an apt pupil, something that surprises him at first. On reflection, though, he thinks maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised at all. They’re very different things, tracking and hunting, finding versus killing. He’d known she could do the first, but hadn’t realized she had the spirit for the second.
She does. Kate is a hunter at heart, though maybe she didn’t always know it.
They’re all finding these things out about themselves. Things they need, things they want, things they didn’t know they knew. He’s grateful, even though sometimes he feels a little guilty for it. Kate, at least, is measurably better off here on the island. Locke knows that without even asking her. He thinks that, perhaps, Boone is as well -- although learning to know that will probably be a longer process for him.
Locke, of course, is better off here, and in more ways than he thought possible. There’s nothing for him back home. He says it to himself at least once a day.
He never had the chance, back there, for wife, children, family. The island has given him that, too. He thinks of Walt and Charlie (his problem child), and now Kate and Boone. They’re more like each other than Boone is to Shannon, both dark-haired, fair and delicate. He likes to imagine that his own blood children might have looked like that: tall, raw-boned and strong. Sure-footed, intelligent, loyal.
He teaches them everything he can. He doesn’t rush, though. They have plenty of time.
Boone and Kate are on their way to becoming skilled hunters under his instruction. It’s been nearly two weeks since Claire vanished, since he and Boone made their discovery, and nearly five days since Kate joined them. This day is an especially good day. They’ve been lucky, but, also, their skills are improving. They’re coming home with their arms full and the promise of full bellies.
The sun is setting behind the trees to the west as they head back. He can hear the murmur of voices as they pass black rock and so, he knows, can Boone. Kate doesn’t seem to notice them yet, but it’s only going to be a matter of time. He hasn’t quite decided what to tell her when she asks. He’s afraid she’ll go to Jack once she knows; her connection to him is still there, strong as it ever was. Jack is a good man, Locke trusts him, but he also knows that of everyone Jack is perhaps the least ready to know what Locke knows, what Boone knows, what Kate is beginning to find out.
In time, though, they’ll all understand. It won’t be easy. There may be tears, there may be blood, there may be sacrifice -- there may already have been. But in the end, Locke believes, it will all be worth it. It will lead them all to something more.
4. Makuahine (Claire)
O 'imi'imi, 'o nalowale a loa'a, Lo'a ho'i ka hoa e
They whisper to her, the others at the black rock, but Ethan’s is the only face they let her see. They tell her that what’s coming is going to be soon and that she shouldn’t be afraid. They’re wrong about that. Claire ought to be terrified and she knows it, but somehow she isn’t. She begins to suspect after a little while, that there’s something in the bitter tea that Ethan brings her everyday, something to keep her docile and controlled. She can’t help thinking about Jack and his sleeping pills whenever she swallows it.
She drinks the tea anyway, even after she knows she shouldn’t. She’s so heavy and swollen and hot; her throat is dry and papery and, besides, it’s not as though she believes she could escape.
Ethan brings her tea and soup and mashed roots in little clay pots. He arranges them carefully, kneeling in front of her like she once saw a Japanese geisha do on the Travel Channel.
“Maia, Maia,” he calls her, but she won’t answer to that.
He makes sure that she eats and washes, and that she’s never too hot or too cold. One morning he brings her an empty glass jar, because he saw Charlie do the same thing once and it made her smile. Even the drugged tea can’t keep her calm after that, and she cries and screams and carries on so much that they have to tie her down until sunset. That night, Ethan comes to her with coconut pounded into sticky paste and a shell comb. He brushes her hair while she eats and speaks into her ear, telling her his secrets about the island.
Ethan tells her that the dead beneath the seawater have precious stones where their eyes should be. When she falls asleep afterward, Claire dreams about Charlie, with a black ribbon around his neck and white pearls in his eyes.
The next morning, she’s afraid to tell Ethan what she saw in her dream, but somehow he seems to know anyway.
“Don’t fight it, Claire,” he says, and it’s the last time he will ever use her real name. “Just let it tell you what you need to know.”
“What? What is it?”
“You’ll know when you’re ready,” is the only answer he has for her, his eyes burning with some kind of passionate devotion. Whether it’s for her, or the island, or whatever it is that’s there in her dreams, Claire isn’t sure.
But Ethan is kind to her, kind enough that she almost begins to forget the rough feeling of his hands around her wrists, her mouth, her throat. She almost forgets the sharp, shocked intake of Charlie’s breath and the creak of rope. She almost forgets, she begins to forget, because it’s easy to here, in this place where time moves slow and quietly, and the edges of the world are blurred. Now, Ethan’s hands are gentle, his fingers lying softly across the curve of her stomach. There’s relief in his voice when he tells her that the baby has turned and that it won’t be long now. He tells her that her son needs her, and she knows that someone else told her that once but it’s harder now to remember what came before. Ethan shows her how to read what’s coming, with stones and pearls, black and white, future and past. That feels familiar, too. Her hands know what to do, and her eyes know how to read the signs for what they mean.
On another night, after the baby has dropped so low that she can’t sit or stand anymore, she falls into a restless half-sleep and dreams about pearls again. Ethan is lying on the shore, with the tide low and the beach littered with smooth, pale wood like bones and sharp glass like diamonds. He’s draped in seaweed holding a black pearl in his left hand and a pink pearl in his right. Charlie is there, standing over him, hands clenched and breathing hard, with ruby-red tears leaking from the corners of his eyes.
Claire wakes with a start, finding it hard to catch her breath. She has the sense that there’s something she’s forgotten and she tries to remember, but then there’s a flutter in her heart, a twinge in her belly and she forgets everything but the moment in front of her.
“She can see,” Claire hears Ethan say to the whispers beyond the sheltered bamboo glade where she’s lying, pillowed on something soft and woven that Ethan placed beneath her back and legs. “She’s gifted. She can help us if we continue to teach her how.”
Claire doesn’t hear any answer beyond the sound of the night wind through the banyan leaves, but when Ethan comes back he’s smiling.
“It’s time,” he says, kneeling down behind her, letting her rest her back against his solid chest. “Can’t you feel it?”
She can. The others, the island, the sound of the waves, the round white stones that lay gleaming at her feet in the moonlight all tell her so.
“You aren’t afraid anymore? Are you, my Maia?” he asks, and she’s not.
There isn’t any pain, not yet, but she’s hot, she’s sweating. She’s on fire. Her face is flushed and burning. She feels like she might burst, like she might break apart and shatter onto the hard ground. She reaches back for his hand and squeezes it tight. He leans in, holding her hand, holding her still. He won’t let her break open, so long as he doesn’t let go. His head is bent, his mouth against her ear. He tells her softly that it won’t be long, that this will be easy. They’ve made sure of it. He tells her that she’s brave, that she’s special, that he understands.
Ethan tells her again that she’s the world’s mother, and this time she believes him.
*
Story Notes:
Loa'a means "to find, obtain, discover, acquire, have, take, reach, receive, catch, win, succeed; to have or beget a child; to be born." Maia is a name associated with motherhood and with the goddess of spring from Greek/Roman myth. The English translated lyrics for Pule Ho'āo are here.
Cross-posted to charlie_claire, ficinabottle, lost_fanfic.
Title: Loa'a
Author: Viola
Rating: PG13-ish
Characters: Ensemble, but mostly Ethan, Kate, Boone, Shannon, Locke and Claire
Disclaimer: Not mine. None of it.
Summary: The thunder echoes to the women in the rising flames. (Part 2 of 2; Part 1 is here; Spoilers through ‘All the Best Cowboys...’)
1. Hekili (Ethan)
'Ele mimo ka lani
There are black pearls under the water off the hula'ana where the black rock sits. Ethan isn’t sure how he knows that or where he learned the proper word for the tall sea cliffs that brace their side of the island. He does remember, although it seems like a long time ago, that once someone showed him the pearl beds. Someone showed him how to dive, which knife to use and the right way to pry the shells apart. The pearls are useless, but they’re beautiful and that alone makes them worth the risk.
Claire is beautiful, too, and he risked a lot to get her.
Claire is white and pink, glowing and unmarked, like the giant pearls he remembers seeing a long time ago behind glass walls in a large city filled with light and automobile traffic. His memory is fragmented like that. Tiny details are sharp and keen and real as life, but the big things -- his parents, his birthday, his Christian name -- those things escape him now.
He doesn’t remember when he chose the name Ethan for himself, but it fits somehow. Claire, he realizes then, is going to need a new name, too.
He chooses one for her while he watches her sleep. It’s the second day, maybe the third, and she still cries and fights and he has to bind her wrists together even though it hurts him to hurt her. He chooses a name for her, one that comes to him in hushed murmurs and speaks of spring and birth and pink blossoms that he remembers from a long time ago.
He lays his hand on her forehead as he says it out loud.
The others approve and they decide that he should be the one to take care of her until the baby comes. They’re unsure of her; they don’t want her to know too much. Anything could happen. Ethan doesn’t mind tending to Claire, even though, at first, she cries and curses him and pulls away when he tries to help her.
“You bastard,” she sobs on the fourth day. “You killed Charlie.” She throws her head back and starts to scream. She’s screaming words at first, but soon she tires out and the screams subside into tears and hiccups.
Ethan had to kill Charlie and he’s not sorry, but he realizes that it’s far too soon to make her understand this. She will understand in time, though. He doesn’t have any doubt about that. Instead, he brings her a bowl of hot water, steeped with ginger petals, and a soft, thick cloth.
“You shouldn’t scream like that,” he says, softly, reasonably, calling her by her new name. “It isn’t good for you.” He moves her bound hands out of the way and helps her to sit up. He tests the water’s temperature carefully before dipping the cloth in and rubbing it against her flushed and puffy face.
“Please,” she says, looking at him with wide, fearful eyes. “Please let me go.”
He just shakes his head, handing her a cup of strong tea. “You’re safer here, you’ll understand that soon.”
They go on that way for almost a fortnight. The baby is late and it worries him, but Claire doesn’t scream or cry so much anymore and he thinks that’s progress, at least. The others, though, are more worried about the child than Claire and they’re afraid that things may not work out after all. Ethan argues with them long into the night and finally they’re brought around to his way of thinking.
He prepares for every eventuality, though.
Two days past the time when Claire ought to have had the child, Ethan sits by the fire with the others. He’s holding the edge of his diver’s knife over the flames. If the baby doesn’t turn in time, he may need it. But he really hopes it doesn’t come to that.
That night, like so many nights since Claire came to him, he hears the hunters in the trees beyond the black rock. They never venture any further than that, they never come too close, and after a few nights of these encounters, Ethan realizes that they aren’t hunting Claire any longer. Locke is leading them and Ethan has long suspected that Locke understands the island better than any of the other newcomers. He’s teaching the others to understand it, too. There are at least two other hunters with him. Their voices are young and Ethan, for the first time, has hope that maybe they won’t have to fight the newcomers, after all.
On their way back out of the jungle, the hunters are close enough that Ethan can hear them as they struggle home with their day’s kill. That night, he guesses, they must have a celebration because there’s music and laughing on the air. Claire hears it before he does, though.
“I hear singing,” Claire says, her eyes sleepy and her breathing labored. “Can you hear it?”
He doesn’t at first, but when he stops, going completely silent, he can hear an echo of it on the wind. He can smell the faint scent of woodsmoke and hear the sound of laughter. He doesn’t recognize the song, though.
Claire does. She sings him a line or two and reaches for his hand, and when she falls asleep that night her breathing is easy and the lines around her mouth ease.
2. Ula (Kate)
'O na wahine i ka puoko o ke ahi
After she tracks Charlie through the jungle, Kate starts hunting with Locke.
So does Boone. They walk up from the beach together and Locke meets them at exactly half the distance of the narrow path, knives in hand and a lesson on his lips. They’re both quick studies, and Locke seems pleased.
She isn’t sure why she does it, at first. She goes looking for them one day, at least a week after Claire is taken, in the late morning when they’ve been out in the jungle for hours already and the sun is slanting sideways and golden through the trees above her. She thinks, at first, that it’s just concern. Or maybe that it’s just a feeling of uselessness, of restlessness.
She’s wrong, and it doesn’t take her very long to figure that out.
They’re hunting, on an afternoon five days after she goes out to meet them the first time. She has begun to count the days, the sunrises, the sunsets and the rains. Boone is better at it, keeping track, being mindful of the passage of time, but she’s learning. They’re hunting, walking single-file over slick red clay, when she realizes what she’s doing, why she’s really there.
She’s walking behind Locke, right behind him, when she realizes that she’s marking his steps, mimicking his gait. She’s following after him, placing her feet in the prints he leaves in the mud. She remembers another day like this, when her feet were much smaller than they are now, and she did the same thing: following after her father, through mossy trails and giant ferns, and carefully stepping only where he stepped.
And here she’d thought Jack was the one with daddy issues.
It bothers her less than she would have imagined, once she realizes, maybe less than it ought to. A connection to her father is a connection to the past and if there’s anything that Kate fears on this island, it’s forgetting. She’s afraid, afraid she’ll forget who she is, what she’s done, where she comes from.
Most of all, more than anything, she’s afraid that she wants to forget.
The temptation to do just that, to just start over, is almost too much to bear. It’s why she chooses to stay on the beach. Her resolve isn’t going to hold forever, though, especially not where Jack is concerned. It’s why she won’t give up on a rescue, however remote the chance. It’s why she’s here, now, following Locke through the mud and mist and learning the right way to hold a knife.
That night they bring a piglet back and roast it over a fire. Boone has a black eye and Kate has dark blood spilled down the front of her t-shirt, but Locke puts a hand atop each of their heads in turn and tells them they’ve done well.
Rose is sitting on the far side of the fire, trimming Shannon’s hair with a pair of nail scissors. She clucks her tongue in disapproval.
“You’re turning those young people wild, John,” she says without looking up. “There’s no call for that.”
“We’ve got to eat,” he replies.
“That’s not what I mean and you know it.” But she lets the matter drop, for the moment.
Locke, though, goes to sit beside her. He smiles down at Shannon, who frowns at him and then over at Boone.
“It’s important, Rose. You know that,” he says.
“Mm-hmm,” and a sidelong glance is all he gets in return.
“But you’ll eat.” He grins at her, and she can’t help but smile back.
“Oh, I’ll eat.” She sighs a little, brushing stray hairs off Shannon’s bare shoulders. “And tomorrow, if you find me some salt, I’ll fry us up some bacon for breakfast.”
“Now, that sounds just about right.”
Shannon makes a frustrated noise and stands up abruptly. “I’m going back down to the beach.”
“Aren’t you going to eat?” Boone asks, looking caught somewhere between surprise and anger.
“Jenny and Cari caught fish today. I’ll eat that.”
Boone looks to Locke in appeal, but all he says is, “Suit yourself, Shannon.”
“Whatever.” She stomps off, without even a word to Rose, and for some reason Kate follows.
“Shannon,” Kate says, jogging to catch up with her. “Hey, Shannon. Wait.”
“What?” The word comes out sharp, sulky, and Kate can definitely see that Shannon is used to being the little sister.
“Come on back. Boone is getting really good at hunting. I think it would mean a lot if you stayed to eat what he caught.”
“Killed, you mean?” Shannon shakes her head, looking truly upset. “Do you have any idea how weird that is? Boone? Killing things? He hates guns, he hates violence. He’s a member of Amnesty International, for fuck’s sake.”
“People have to make ad-“
“And you… aren’t you a vegetarian? Or weren’t you, you know, before?”
“I was,” Kate says, feeling the skin inexplicably prickling along the back of her neck. “But I don’t see what that has to do with any-“
“You’re both turning creepy! That’s what it has to do with. You’re like, like…” she pauses, arms outstretched, like she’s casting around for something exactly creepy enough. “You’re like zombies. Or cult members. You’re… Scientologists!”
“Come on,” Kate says. “You’re overreacting. We’ve all got to work together, Shannon. We’ve got to help each other if we’re going to stay alive here.”
“Please. You should hear yourself. You even sound like Locke now.”
Kate finds that she doesn’t have anything to say to that, and after a long moment, Shannon sighs.
“Whatever. I’m going down to the beach to eat fish with the normal people. Okay?”
“Shannon…” Kate reaches out a hand to her, but Shannon steps away, standing just out of reach.
“You have blood on your shirt. It’s gross,” she says, and walks away.
3. Kupina'i (Locke)
Ke 'iloli nei ka lani
They go out looking for Claire again on the third day after she disappears. They go out on the fourth, and the fifth, and the sixth, long after hope should be abandoned. They don’t find Claire, but they find other things of perhaps equal importance. Locke realizes, on the seventh day, that they aren’t going to find her, not unless Ethan and the Others want them to.
That doesn’t mean, though, that he stops hunting.
Boone stays with him, even though neither of them speaks out loud about what they’ve discovered. When Kate comes to find them, on what is the tenth day by Boone’s count, she asks why they’re still out there and what they hope to find.
They’re hunting, Locke tells her. He’s teaching Boone to hunt.
Kate, it turns out, wants to learn, too. She’s an apt pupil, something that surprises him at first. On reflection, though, he thinks maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised at all. They’re very different things, tracking and hunting, finding versus killing. He’d known she could do the first, but hadn’t realized she had the spirit for the second.
She does. Kate is a hunter at heart, though maybe she didn’t always know it.
They’re all finding these things out about themselves. Things they need, things they want, things they didn’t know they knew. He’s grateful, even though sometimes he feels a little guilty for it. Kate, at least, is measurably better off here on the island. Locke knows that without even asking her. He thinks that, perhaps, Boone is as well -- although learning to know that will probably be a longer process for him.
Locke, of course, is better off here, and in more ways than he thought possible. There’s nothing for him back home. He says it to himself at least once a day.
He never had the chance, back there, for wife, children, family. The island has given him that, too. He thinks of Walt and Charlie (his problem child), and now Kate and Boone. They’re more like each other than Boone is to Shannon, both dark-haired, fair and delicate. He likes to imagine that his own blood children might have looked like that: tall, raw-boned and strong. Sure-footed, intelligent, loyal.
He teaches them everything he can. He doesn’t rush, though. They have plenty of time.
Boone and Kate are on their way to becoming skilled hunters under his instruction. It’s been nearly two weeks since Claire vanished, since he and Boone made their discovery, and nearly five days since Kate joined them. This day is an especially good day. They’ve been lucky, but, also, their skills are improving. They’re coming home with their arms full and the promise of full bellies.
The sun is setting behind the trees to the west as they head back. He can hear the murmur of voices as they pass black rock and so, he knows, can Boone. Kate doesn’t seem to notice them yet, but it’s only going to be a matter of time. He hasn’t quite decided what to tell her when she asks. He’s afraid she’ll go to Jack once she knows; her connection to him is still there, strong as it ever was. Jack is a good man, Locke trusts him, but he also knows that of everyone Jack is perhaps the least ready to know what Locke knows, what Boone knows, what Kate is beginning to find out.
In time, though, they’ll all understand. It won’t be easy. There may be tears, there may be blood, there may be sacrifice -- there may already have been. But in the end, Locke believes, it will all be worth it. It will lead them all to something more.
4. Makuahine (Claire)
O 'imi'imi, 'o nalowale a loa'a, Lo'a ho'i ka hoa e
They whisper to her, the others at the black rock, but Ethan’s is the only face they let her see. They tell her that what’s coming is going to be soon and that she shouldn’t be afraid. They’re wrong about that. Claire ought to be terrified and she knows it, but somehow she isn’t. She begins to suspect after a little while, that there’s something in the bitter tea that Ethan brings her everyday, something to keep her docile and controlled. She can’t help thinking about Jack and his sleeping pills whenever she swallows it.
She drinks the tea anyway, even after she knows she shouldn’t. She’s so heavy and swollen and hot; her throat is dry and papery and, besides, it’s not as though she believes she could escape.
Ethan brings her tea and soup and mashed roots in little clay pots. He arranges them carefully, kneeling in front of her like she once saw a Japanese geisha do on the Travel Channel.
“Maia, Maia,” he calls her, but she won’t answer to that.
He makes sure that she eats and washes, and that she’s never too hot or too cold. One morning he brings her an empty glass jar, because he saw Charlie do the same thing once and it made her smile. Even the drugged tea can’t keep her calm after that, and she cries and screams and carries on so much that they have to tie her down until sunset. That night, Ethan comes to her with coconut pounded into sticky paste and a shell comb. He brushes her hair while she eats and speaks into her ear, telling her his secrets about the island.
Ethan tells her that the dead beneath the seawater have precious stones where their eyes should be. When she falls asleep afterward, Claire dreams about Charlie, with a black ribbon around his neck and white pearls in his eyes.
The next morning, she’s afraid to tell Ethan what she saw in her dream, but somehow he seems to know anyway.
“Don’t fight it, Claire,” he says, and it’s the last time he will ever use her real name. “Just let it tell you what you need to know.”
“What? What is it?”
“You’ll know when you’re ready,” is the only answer he has for her, his eyes burning with some kind of passionate devotion. Whether it’s for her, or the island, or whatever it is that’s there in her dreams, Claire isn’t sure.
But Ethan is kind to her, kind enough that she almost begins to forget the rough feeling of his hands around her wrists, her mouth, her throat. She almost forgets the sharp, shocked intake of Charlie’s breath and the creak of rope. She almost forgets, she begins to forget, because it’s easy to here, in this place where time moves slow and quietly, and the edges of the world are blurred. Now, Ethan’s hands are gentle, his fingers lying softly across the curve of her stomach. There’s relief in his voice when he tells her that the baby has turned and that it won’t be long now. He tells her that her son needs her, and she knows that someone else told her that once but it’s harder now to remember what came before. Ethan shows her how to read what’s coming, with stones and pearls, black and white, future and past. That feels familiar, too. Her hands know what to do, and her eyes know how to read the signs for what they mean.
On another night, after the baby has dropped so low that she can’t sit or stand anymore, she falls into a restless half-sleep and dreams about pearls again. Ethan is lying on the shore, with the tide low and the beach littered with smooth, pale wood like bones and sharp glass like diamonds. He’s draped in seaweed holding a black pearl in his left hand and a pink pearl in his right. Charlie is there, standing over him, hands clenched and breathing hard, with ruby-red tears leaking from the corners of his eyes.
Claire wakes with a start, finding it hard to catch her breath. She has the sense that there’s something she’s forgotten and she tries to remember, but then there’s a flutter in her heart, a twinge in her belly and she forgets everything but the moment in front of her.
“She can see,” Claire hears Ethan say to the whispers beyond the sheltered bamboo glade where she’s lying, pillowed on something soft and woven that Ethan placed beneath her back and legs. “She’s gifted. She can help us if we continue to teach her how.”
Claire doesn’t hear any answer beyond the sound of the night wind through the banyan leaves, but when Ethan comes back he’s smiling.
“It’s time,” he says, kneeling down behind her, letting her rest her back against his solid chest. “Can’t you feel it?”
She can. The others, the island, the sound of the waves, the round white stones that lay gleaming at her feet in the moonlight all tell her so.
“You aren’t afraid anymore? Are you, my Maia?” he asks, and she’s not.
There isn’t any pain, not yet, but she’s hot, she’s sweating. She’s on fire. Her face is flushed and burning. She feels like she might burst, like she might break apart and shatter onto the hard ground. She reaches back for his hand and squeezes it tight. He leans in, holding her hand, holding her still. He won’t let her break open, so long as he doesn’t let go. His head is bent, his mouth against her ear. He tells her softly that it won’t be long, that this will be easy. They’ve made sure of it. He tells her that she’s brave, that she’s special, that he understands.
Ethan tells her again that she’s the world’s mother, and this time she believes him.
*
Story Notes:
Loa'a means "to find, obtain, discover, acquire, have, take, reach, receive, catch, win, succeed; to have or beget a child; to be born." Maia is a name associated with motherhood and with the goddess of spring from Greek/Roman myth. The English translated lyrics for Pule Ho'āo are here.
Cross-posted to charlie_claire, ficinabottle, lost_fanfic.