A Different Way to Be (Chatper 10) Part 2
Title: A Different Way to Be
Author: Zippy88
Fandom: Lost
Pairing: Kate/Juliet
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Don't own anything
Spoilers: A little from season 3
Chapter 10: Forever's Not So Long
Part 2.
Sighing under your breath, you’re quickly reminded of the guilt you felt the last time you tried to judge the character of the brunette sitting across from you. You shouldn’t do it, yet it’s the first thing you draw upon when something doesn’t go the way you want it to. Is that just nature, or is it how Ben has made you think these days? She’s laughing at you. Her delicately pointed corners of her mouth are turned upwards to their highest point and you find yourself loosing all the sourness you’ve just aimed at her a moment ago. Nothing that looks that innocent could ever be deserving of such rancid acrimony.
“Sure you do,” she repeats you, still laughing slightly, “and I’m sure Ben does too.” How quickly your places have turned and how strange it feels to be pushed into the tight corner you’ve learnt to stay out of all these years. Your brow sharpens more and has an anxious dip in the middle. “What do you mean?” you find yourself asking before you’ve properly thought of the right words. She’s grinning madly now obviously overly pleased that she’s managed to catch you at your own game. “I’ve seen the way he talks to you,” her utterance seems to dull her grin into a faint smirk. It’s no longer funny to her to see the wretched agony of being under someone’s tyrannical control. She has a reflectance like look stamped harshly into her eyes. She’s remembering something, and you assume from the sudden quietness that she upholds that it isn’t anything good.
For the single moment when her mind is clearly occupied with a string of memories, you get to see the delicate innocence that seeps forward and glistens naively on the surface of her skin. You’re astonished at how easy it comes flooding into the open for her. No matter what terrible things she might have done or experienced in her past, there’s always a glow of guiltlessness about her that you can only dream of having yourself.
“It can’t be easy living under someone else’s shadow,” she continues when she finally falls from her entranced state. You want to hide from her again. You want to lie to her and prove to her that you’re not still the foolish woman you once were when you walked a lonely existence underneath your ex-husband’s name. But there’s nowhere left to hide. You’ve simply exhausted all the protective places you once used to know by heart. There’s something telling you that she knows all of your hiding places too, because she’s been to them too, in her own mind. She’d find you before you even got there. No, you have to be brave enough to carry out what you’ve planned to do. You can’t waste this. It’s your only chance, you feel.
“I’ve been on this island for three years, two months, and twenty eight days,” you finally sigh with a huge amount of relief having been able to say that number out loud to someone who would understand. You’re more conscious of how long you’ve been here ever since the number hit six months. You were supposed to leave after six months. You close your eyes briefly as you remember the infamous six months. It still hurts, more than ever now, whenever you think of that shattered promise they made to you.
She’s staring at you with a quiet fascination. You’re convinced that she’s already made up her mind that you’re lying to her again. You wouldn’t blame her of course because it’s all you’ve ever done to her since the day you met her. Her metal fork is left forgotten on the side of her plate while the last portion of food is gathered in a neat pile in the middle. “You don’t want to be here?” she asks, but somehow you know it isn’t a question. She recognises finally that your place here on the island isn’t where you want to be. You can still feel the blazing heat that radiates from her eyes, burning your face. You don’t feel that the words of your answer need to be said.
“Then why don’t you leave?” The intricate simplicity of her new question has somehow laced itself with her young naivety, making it sound much easier that it is. For a moment you wish you shared her lessened knowledge about the island and about Ben’s unkind influence. It would at least make it gentler to stomach that way. You look away from her searching gaze, afraid that she might see the longing sadness that has gripped you so tightly inside and it’s far too ugly to allow her to see that.
“You people can leave anytime you want,” she’s screwed her face up in mild disgust, as she informs you of what she knows, “so why don’t you just leave?” You have no idea how she’s come to learn about the submarine that provides Ben with the only access to the outside world, but there’s a hollow pity that jumps to your surface for her. She’ll fall straight into the same cruel trap that you walked into with your eyes wide open. She’ll have the treasured carrot dangled in front of her face, hypnotising her into believing that it’s hers and only hers, but she’ll never get close enough to touch it, to smell it, to taste it.
Shaking your head slightly to rid yourself of any floating thoughts that will surely make you crumble in front of her, you share her glance and steady yourself before telling her with a heavy heart, “I can’t.” The frosted frown that traces her dark brow tells you that she doesn’t believe you, but you wait for her to jump back at you and accuse you of lying again. “I know you have a submarine,” she tells you as though this information is supposed to shock you, “Tom told me.” You’re not in the least bit surprised that she knows about the submarine though, yet you are a little startled to hear that Tom of all people is the person that let slip such valuable details. Of course, it doesn’t matter to you that she knows, it only matters to Ben. You smile a little, wondering if he reprimanded Tom for his lack of attention.
“Yes there’s a submarine,” you admit to her, and you can see the tiny smirk that starts to form on her face, clearly pleased that she’s in the right, “but I can’t use it.” You watch silently as the smugness fades into faint confusion. “I’m not allowed to leave,” you clarify for her, as you reach for your wine glass. Somehow the fruity sweetness that touches your tongue numbs the rough sullenness that those words have left there. “Says who?” she demands to know. You blink your eyes away from hers in embarrassment that is hidden from view by the hostile frustration that comes with speaking his name, “Ben.”
There’s a thickening fog of unwelcomed silence that comes to hang over the both of you. Its perishing presence is chilling you to your inner core. You’re deeply unsettled by the nervousness that she instils in you from a simple look. You’re left feeling brokenly empty. You replied on her endless quizzing to fill that vast space in which time has only covered with sliver spiders’ webs. “Don’t you want to know why?” you find yourself asking before you’ve realised.
She’s no longer studying you intently now; instead she’s reaching for the half empty wine bottle. Its darkened glass shines in the glow of the overhead lights while her glass quickly refills for the third time. She pushes out her bottom lip with an indifferent look etched upon her face. “Not really,” she mumbles distantly. You’re astonished at how insulted you feel from her lack of interest. You hastily swallow your wounded pride and maintain your frosted glare to the perfection you’re accustomed to.
“What?” she shakes her head slightly, as she sees you still looking intensely at her, “you want me to feel sorry for you, is that it?” There’s a sense of mocking amazement in her raised tone of voice, which doesn’t sit well with you. It suddenly feels like an offensive attack on you and you’ve lost the means to protect yourself from the brutality of her cheek. She’s laughing again to make matters even more unbearable for you. “You’re seriously mistaken if you think I care about you or your people,” she adds with a naked cruelness fired on with a furious forcefulness.
There’s a salty sting that slices around the frail edges of your eyes and it threatens to betray everything you’ve worked so hard to hide all these years. It’s almost as strikingly painful as the twinge that is pulsating through your nose from where she hit you forcefully with her angered fist. You were a fool if you ever thought differently from what she’s told you. She has no reason to care about you. Why did you bother to get your hopes up to think that she would?
“You should care,” you warn her with a dangerous fire burning through your words, “what do you think Ben’s going to do with you and your friends when you’re no longer useful to him?” You’re desperate now. You’re so desperate that you are once again bringing in the mention of her friends to try to persuade her to see things from your downtrodden view. She scoffs at you loudly, looking away with an irritated roll of her eyes, “Ben doesn’t scare me.”
The deeply fermented blue hues darken in your eyes while you focus all your attention on the young brunette, attempting frantically to call her bluff. She hasn’t got one though. You can see in her brazenly calm attitude that she is telling the unexpected truth. She isn’t in the least bit frightened of Ben. The weight of the shock drags you down and you feel heavy yourself for witnessing such bravado, but as the ardent jealous kick starts its rusting motor again, you feel yourself wanting to scream out at her. Of course she hasn’t seen the harshest side of Ben, not properly, not like you have.
You puff out lightly an exhausted breath of air, not fully understanding where this childish obsession to compare yourself with Kate has developed from. You don’t like it. You never have when you’ve ended up pitying yourself. It makes you shudder inwardly when you remember the time you had gazed upon the new casual woman who had taken your place beside your former husband. You remember studying her carefully from your hiding place behind the desk, and the frenzy of hurt that flooded your every pore when you saw how beautiful she was. It was in that moment that you came to realise that she was standing on your precious collection of hearts, the very ones that you had saved up so attentively from the rest of the playing cards that your mother insisted you never dealt out to anyone. But still you handed them out to the man you thought you loved, only to be scattered around the feet of his new, temporary lover. No, you conclude, making a comparison only means you loose more of your own identity, and let’s face it, you haven’t got that many playing cards left to loose.
“But I take it you are.” You’re ripped violently from your decaying trail of thoughts, and for a moment you’re lost at the meaning of her assumption. She must see your avid bewilderment because she’s quick to clarify what she means, “you’re scared of Ben.” When you hear it said so plainly, you want to laugh at the ridiculous notion it harbours, how can you, a grown woman be scared of a man who only has his cautious tongue as a weapon? But no matter how insulting the phrase is to your delicate ears, you can’t deny the ounce of truth that tips the weighing scales. “Yes, I am,” you announce quietly, your voice sounding hoarser through a whisper, “and so should you.” In a way you’re right, she should be at least a little apprehensive of him. His word is always the final word. If he wanted it so he could kill Kate in an instant, you know there’s far too many willing people on his side to answer his tyrannical orders. She should fear him, she should fear him like you do.
“Oh please,” she feigns her disbelief rather well you think, “Ben’s nothing.” As much as you want to agree with her statement, you know otherwise, you know Ben is everything to this island, he’s the one who dictates what happens and when it happens. “I thought you were all meant to be tough on this side of the island,” she laughs sardonically, before taking another large gulp from her wine glass. You swallow hard on your embarrassment when you think she’s not looking. How quickly she’s sussed you out, it’s shameful. You’re made of harder stuff than this. “Well maybe I’m tired of playing the tough guy,” you snap suddenly, unable to control the acid on your tongue.
She turns her head rapidly at your unexpected outburst with her glass hovering just above the table in her hand. She regains herself, narrowing her eyes at you and shaking her head before placing the glass back into its neat position next to her plate. “I seriously doubt you can play anything else,” she smirks sarcastically, almost as if she hadn’t planned on speaking out loud. It’s difficult to swallow her rude judgment and when you finally manage to it lodges itself inside your throat, tearing at the skin with its painful insult. You look away from her, disgusted at her for judging you so cruelly, but somehow there’s a tiny fragment of shame that hangs onto what she’s said, because you know somewhere deep inside that it’s true. You don’t know how to be anything else.
She snorts back her laugh as you reach for your own glass and throw back the contents in one go. You’ve never really been a drinker. You never let yourself fall onto the wild side of the road before you got to the island. The most you would settle for is maybe a glass of wine for a celebration, but you most certainly never had anymore because you know you can’t handle its extremely versatile side effects that throw all kindly regarded proportions of your emotions to the wind. You remember that Edmund liked to drink. Your ex-husband could surely drink enough for the both of you. It makes you shudder even now to see his drunken chaos waltz through the front door of the home you shared for a brief time, his tongue sometimes covered with vile insults while other times it would be hanging out with a greedy hunger, demanding only one thing from you. It’s probably one of the few saving graces that the island has to offer you. You don’t have to be around it at all. By all means there’s an endless list of luxuries that you can order and Ben would naturally take care of it and within a few days you’d have whatever you asked for. But you don’t have to play carer to any drunken fools that litter your path.
So as you empty the bottle’s last few drops into the glass you’ve just refilled, you find yourself oddly ignorant to all of your concrete principles. The pleasant sweetness that captures your taste buds and the strong desire to forget a few niggling things that have burrowed into your head, has deepened your curiosity for the red liquid. You notice that it’s hardly had an effect on Kate at all. She’s sat back in her chair now; her left arm hanging casually over the back rest of the chair next to her while her right arm lays flat along the table, her hand twirling the circular bottom of her glass.
You don’t understand why she isn’t feeling a little giddy, why she isn’t as light headed as you seem to appear. You try to shake off the feeling, but the wine is so refreshingly good that you don’t want to stop drinking it. She’s looking at you carefully and you even see her eyes narrow a little more, almost hiding the inner colours of her small irises. “You don’t know what it’s like,” you let slip finally, as the plaguing thoughts you’ve tried to keep at bay seem to float further to the surface. You blame the wine. You thought it would do the opposite, instead it’s allowing you to spill everything you’re feeling, everything you want to say out into the open, whether you want to or not.
“Oh I’m sorry,” she’s rubbish at faking her regret, “it must be really hard being an Other.” She snorts back her sarcastic laughter again. It’s such an unhealthy sound that you frown at her, deeply offended that she isn’t taking you as seriously as you want her to. “And it must be really hard being a killer,” you mutter suddenly before you have time to properly think and stop yourself from saying the words out loud. You grimace at yourself for saying it so bluntly, and once again your blame falls against the wine glass that you’re holding clumsily in your hand.
You don’t need to look at her face, you can sense by the sharp intake of breath that you’ve broken her shielded core. The grave intensity of the silence that beckons you to sit in amidst its cold circle is enough to tell you that you’ve took a step too far. You can’t even begin to imagine the raw stench of hurt that is probably ripping through her and rotting away the only self pride that she has left. You hadn’t meant to say it, but even as you turn to stare at her finally, you can’t find the ability to let the muted apology show through your hardened mask.
“Then I guess we’re both really bad people then,” she spits with acidic venom. She’s shifted now, sitting back in her chair with her arms folded defensively. There’s a vivid urgency that crawls across your skin, frantically biting at you to take back your evil words. How dare you even mention it? It is one thing to think silently to yourself about the things in her file, but it’s certainly another to throw them at her in a fit of rage because you’re loosing face before her.
You notice now that the flickers of assertive cockiness you’ve seen swarm her eyes many times before, have now died bitterly in the boggy swamps of your vileness. There’s a reserved resentment boiling slowly underneath her broken surface though and you’re cautious not to poke her threatening volcanic eruption of emotions too much. She downs the last of her wine, grimacing at the harsh taste it leaves after gulping more than a sip.
“What do you want from me?” she gasps out finally, rubbing her forehead with her left hand. You’re surprised at how empty she looks now. It’s almost as if you’ve somehow sucked all the fiery life out of her with one simple but brutal sentence. This is your chance to come clean with her. You doubt though that she’ll even listen to you know that you’ve let slip that you know more about her than she thinks. “I want your help,” you confess plainly. Just as you expect her dark eyes are on you, studying you deeply trying to gauge whether you’re telling the truth or not. You let her look, you allow her to make the quiet judgement, you owe her this much.
“Help with what?” comes her reply sternly and you want to sigh with relief that she’s decided to trust you enough to hear what you’ve got to say. There’s a faint redness that appears on your cheeks, you can feel its growing warmth radiate from your skin. You’re embarrassed that you’ve got to ask her for this. “I want your help in killing Ben.” It feels foreign to say those words, almost like you’re speaking another language that you don’t fully understand, it’s not something you’ve ever had to learn to say before. But she understands, she speaks this language, and for as much as you hate to admit that you’re using her because of the one fact that you’ve read in her file, you know she’s the right person to ask.
You see the calm look of realisation fall across her face with a blanketed shadow. All the tiny pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that you’ve placed at her feet for all this time have finally revealed their bigger, darker picture to her. She understands now why she’s here, especially now you’ve announced that you know about her bleak past. “Why?” she clicks her tongue across her mouth hastily, looking more dishevelled by the minute, “why kill Ben?” You don’t stop the laugh that bubbles out from the tight niches of your throat, “why wouldn’t I want to kill Ben?” you turn her question around, and you’re surprised to see her tilt her head in a thoughtful satisfaction.
“You’ve got all the guns,” she smartly points out, her eyes dropping down to where you’re still fashioning the pistol inside the waist band. You draw in a deep breath, you’ve already thought about this long and hard for far too long. “We can’t kill him with a gun,” you inform her clinically, “it has to look like an accident.” She’s watching you with a thoroughly shocked expression wiping her face clean of any anger she might have felt beforehand. “You’ve already planned this, haven’t you?” she acknowledges, and you curtly nod back at her, a truthful determination glistening inside your cold eyes. “For how long?” she demands, pushing her arms back into their neatly folded position. You keep your eyes steadily staring into hers, you keep your voice low and calm, “since forever.” Her eyes widen in a mild surprise while she purses her lips together thoughtfully, a small scoff escaping them after a while. “Forever’s not so long,” she mutters flatly, but you can hear the subtle bitterness when she adds, “when it’s only been three years.”
A sharp, narrow frown slips down onto your darkened brow, and you’re quickly reminded of the rest of her heavy file that is still sitting somewhere in your house. You pull at the drastic comparison that fills your mind to her eventful life that is so colourised in the wad of paper behind the red folder. You suppose she’s right, for her it had been so much longer. You can only guess at the number of years that Kate mulled over her options to rid her life of Wayne, and the final moment when her mind decided that forever would come to an end that day.
Author: Zippy88
Fandom: Lost
Pairing: Kate/Juliet
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Don't own anything
Spoilers: A little from season 3
Chapter 10: Forever's Not So Long
Part 2.
Sighing under your breath, you’re quickly reminded of the guilt you felt the last time you tried to judge the character of the brunette sitting across from you. You shouldn’t do it, yet it’s the first thing you draw upon when something doesn’t go the way you want it to. Is that just nature, or is it how Ben has made you think these days? She’s laughing at you. Her delicately pointed corners of her mouth are turned upwards to their highest point and you find yourself loosing all the sourness you’ve just aimed at her a moment ago. Nothing that looks that innocent could ever be deserving of such rancid acrimony.
“Sure you do,” she repeats you, still laughing slightly, “and I’m sure Ben does too.” How quickly your places have turned and how strange it feels to be pushed into the tight corner you’ve learnt to stay out of all these years. Your brow sharpens more and has an anxious dip in the middle. “What do you mean?” you find yourself asking before you’ve properly thought of the right words. She’s grinning madly now obviously overly pleased that she’s managed to catch you at your own game. “I’ve seen the way he talks to you,” her utterance seems to dull her grin into a faint smirk. It’s no longer funny to her to see the wretched agony of being under someone’s tyrannical control. She has a reflectance like look stamped harshly into her eyes. She’s remembering something, and you assume from the sudden quietness that she upholds that it isn’t anything good.
For the single moment when her mind is clearly occupied with a string of memories, you get to see the delicate innocence that seeps forward and glistens naively on the surface of her skin. You’re astonished at how easy it comes flooding into the open for her. No matter what terrible things she might have done or experienced in her past, there’s always a glow of guiltlessness about her that you can only dream of having yourself.
“It can’t be easy living under someone else’s shadow,” she continues when she finally falls from her entranced state. You want to hide from her again. You want to lie to her and prove to her that you’re not still the foolish woman you once were when you walked a lonely existence underneath your ex-husband’s name. But there’s nowhere left to hide. You’ve simply exhausted all the protective places you once used to know by heart. There’s something telling you that she knows all of your hiding places too, because she’s been to them too, in her own mind. She’d find you before you even got there. No, you have to be brave enough to carry out what you’ve planned to do. You can’t waste this. It’s your only chance, you feel.
“I’ve been on this island for three years, two months, and twenty eight days,” you finally sigh with a huge amount of relief having been able to say that number out loud to someone who would understand. You’re more conscious of how long you’ve been here ever since the number hit six months. You were supposed to leave after six months. You close your eyes briefly as you remember the infamous six months. It still hurts, more than ever now, whenever you think of that shattered promise they made to you.
She’s staring at you with a quiet fascination. You’re convinced that she’s already made up her mind that you’re lying to her again. You wouldn’t blame her of course because it’s all you’ve ever done to her since the day you met her. Her metal fork is left forgotten on the side of her plate while the last portion of food is gathered in a neat pile in the middle. “You don’t want to be here?” she asks, but somehow you know it isn’t a question. She recognises finally that your place here on the island isn’t where you want to be. You can still feel the blazing heat that radiates from her eyes, burning your face. You don’t feel that the words of your answer need to be said.
“Then why don’t you leave?” The intricate simplicity of her new question has somehow laced itself with her young naivety, making it sound much easier that it is. For a moment you wish you shared her lessened knowledge about the island and about Ben’s unkind influence. It would at least make it gentler to stomach that way. You look away from her searching gaze, afraid that she might see the longing sadness that has gripped you so tightly inside and it’s far too ugly to allow her to see that.
“You people can leave anytime you want,” she’s screwed her face up in mild disgust, as she informs you of what she knows, “so why don’t you just leave?” You have no idea how she’s come to learn about the submarine that provides Ben with the only access to the outside world, but there’s a hollow pity that jumps to your surface for her. She’ll fall straight into the same cruel trap that you walked into with your eyes wide open. She’ll have the treasured carrot dangled in front of her face, hypnotising her into believing that it’s hers and only hers, but she’ll never get close enough to touch it, to smell it, to taste it.
Shaking your head slightly to rid yourself of any floating thoughts that will surely make you crumble in front of her, you share her glance and steady yourself before telling her with a heavy heart, “I can’t.” The frosted frown that traces her dark brow tells you that she doesn’t believe you, but you wait for her to jump back at you and accuse you of lying again. “I know you have a submarine,” she tells you as though this information is supposed to shock you, “Tom told me.” You’re not in the least bit surprised that she knows about the submarine though, yet you are a little startled to hear that Tom of all people is the person that let slip such valuable details. Of course, it doesn’t matter to you that she knows, it only matters to Ben. You smile a little, wondering if he reprimanded Tom for his lack of attention.
“Yes there’s a submarine,” you admit to her, and you can see the tiny smirk that starts to form on her face, clearly pleased that she’s in the right, “but I can’t use it.” You watch silently as the smugness fades into faint confusion. “I’m not allowed to leave,” you clarify for her, as you reach for your wine glass. Somehow the fruity sweetness that touches your tongue numbs the rough sullenness that those words have left there. “Says who?” she demands to know. You blink your eyes away from hers in embarrassment that is hidden from view by the hostile frustration that comes with speaking his name, “Ben.”
There’s a thickening fog of unwelcomed silence that comes to hang over the both of you. Its perishing presence is chilling you to your inner core. You’re deeply unsettled by the nervousness that she instils in you from a simple look. You’re left feeling brokenly empty. You replied on her endless quizzing to fill that vast space in which time has only covered with sliver spiders’ webs. “Don’t you want to know why?” you find yourself asking before you’ve realised.
She’s no longer studying you intently now; instead she’s reaching for the half empty wine bottle. Its darkened glass shines in the glow of the overhead lights while her glass quickly refills for the third time. She pushes out her bottom lip with an indifferent look etched upon her face. “Not really,” she mumbles distantly. You’re astonished at how insulted you feel from her lack of interest. You hastily swallow your wounded pride and maintain your frosted glare to the perfection you’re accustomed to.
“What?” she shakes her head slightly, as she sees you still looking intensely at her, “you want me to feel sorry for you, is that it?” There’s a sense of mocking amazement in her raised tone of voice, which doesn’t sit well with you. It suddenly feels like an offensive attack on you and you’ve lost the means to protect yourself from the brutality of her cheek. She’s laughing again to make matters even more unbearable for you. “You’re seriously mistaken if you think I care about you or your people,” she adds with a naked cruelness fired on with a furious forcefulness.
There’s a salty sting that slices around the frail edges of your eyes and it threatens to betray everything you’ve worked so hard to hide all these years. It’s almost as strikingly painful as the twinge that is pulsating through your nose from where she hit you forcefully with her angered fist. You were a fool if you ever thought differently from what she’s told you. She has no reason to care about you. Why did you bother to get your hopes up to think that she would?
“You should care,” you warn her with a dangerous fire burning through your words, “what do you think Ben’s going to do with you and your friends when you’re no longer useful to him?” You’re desperate now. You’re so desperate that you are once again bringing in the mention of her friends to try to persuade her to see things from your downtrodden view. She scoffs at you loudly, looking away with an irritated roll of her eyes, “Ben doesn’t scare me.”
The deeply fermented blue hues darken in your eyes while you focus all your attention on the young brunette, attempting frantically to call her bluff. She hasn’t got one though. You can see in her brazenly calm attitude that she is telling the unexpected truth. She isn’t in the least bit frightened of Ben. The weight of the shock drags you down and you feel heavy yourself for witnessing such bravado, but as the ardent jealous kick starts its rusting motor again, you feel yourself wanting to scream out at her. Of course she hasn’t seen the harshest side of Ben, not properly, not like you have.
You puff out lightly an exhausted breath of air, not fully understanding where this childish obsession to compare yourself with Kate has developed from. You don’t like it. You never have when you’ve ended up pitying yourself. It makes you shudder inwardly when you remember the time you had gazed upon the new casual woman who had taken your place beside your former husband. You remember studying her carefully from your hiding place behind the desk, and the frenzy of hurt that flooded your every pore when you saw how beautiful she was. It was in that moment that you came to realise that she was standing on your precious collection of hearts, the very ones that you had saved up so attentively from the rest of the playing cards that your mother insisted you never dealt out to anyone. But still you handed them out to the man you thought you loved, only to be scattered around the feet of his new, temporary lover. No, you conclude, making a comparison only means you loose more of your own identity, and let’s face it, you haven’t got that many playing cards left to loose.
“But I take it you are.” You’re ripped violently from your decaying trail of thoughts, and for a moment you’re lost at the meaning of her assumption. She must see your avid bewilderment because she’s quick to clarify what she means, “you’re scared of Ben.” When you hear it said so plainly, you want to laugh at the ridiculous notion it harbours, how can you, a grown woman be scared of a man who only has his cautious tongue as a weapon? But no matter how insulting the phrase is to your delicate ears, you can’t deny the ounce of truth that tips the weighing scales. “Yes, I am,” you announce quietly, your voice sounding hoarser through a whisper, “and so should you.” In a way you’re right, she should be at least a little apprehensive of him. His word is always the final word. If he wanted it so he could kill Kate in an instant, you know there’s far too many willing people on his side to answer his tyrannical orders. She should fear him, she should fear him like you do.
“Oh please,” she feigns her disbelief rather well you think, “Ben’s nothing.” As much as you want to agree with her statement, you know otherwise, you know Ben is everything to this island, he’s the one who dictates what happens and when it happens. “I thought you were all meant to be tough on this side of the island,” she laughs sardonically, before taking another large gulp from her wine glass. You swallow hard on your embarrassment when you think she’s not looking. How quickly she’s sussed you out, it’s shameful. You’re made of harder stuff than this. “Well maybe I’m tired of playing the tough guy,” you snap suddenly, unable to control the acid on your tongue.
She turns her head rapidly at your unexpected outburst with her glass hovering just above the table in her hand. She regains herself, narrowing her eyes at you and shaking her head before placing the glass back into its neat position next to her plate. “I seriously doubt you can play anything else,” she smirks sarcastically, almost as if she hadn’t planned on speaking out loud. It’s difficult to swallow her rude judgment and when you finally manage to it lodges itself inside your throat, tearing at the skin with its painful insult. You look away from her, disgusted at her for judging you so cruelly, but somehow there’s a tiny fragment of shame that hangs onto what she’s said, because you know somewhere deep inside that it’s true. You don’t know how to be anything else.
She snorts back her laugh as you reach for your own glass and throw back the contents in one go. You’ve never really been a drinker. You never let yourself fall onto the wild side of the road before you got to the island. The most you would settle for is maybe a glass of wine for a celebration, but you most certainly never had anymore because you know you can’t handle its extremely versatile side effects that throw all kindly regarded proportions of your emotions to the wind. You remember that Edmund liked to drink. Your ex-husband could surely drink enough for the both of you. It makes you shudder even now to see his drunken chaos waltz through the front door of the home you shared for a brief time, his tongue sometimes covered with vile insults while other times it would be hanging out with a greedy hunger, demanding only one thing from you. It’s probably one of the few saving graces that the island has to offer you. You don’t have to be around it at all. By all means there’s an endless list of luxuries that you can order and Ben would naturally take care of it and within a few days you’d have whatever you asked for. But you don’t have to play carer to any drunken fools that litter your path.
So as you empty the bottle’s last few drops into the glass you’ve just refilled, you find yourself oddly ignorant to all of your concrete principles. The pleasant sweetness that captures your taste buds and the strong desire to forget a few niggling things that have burrowed into your head, has deepened your curiosity for the red liquid. You notice that it’s hardly had an effect on Kate at all. She’s sat back in her chair now; her left arm hanging casually over the back rest of the chair next to her while her right arm lays flat along the table, her hand twirling the circular bottom of her glass.
You don’t understand why she isn’t feeling a little giddy, why she isn’t as light headed as you seem to appear. You try to shake off the feeling, but the wine is so refreshingly good that you don’t want to stop drinking it. She’s looking at you carefully and you even see her eyes narrow a little more, almost hiding the inner colours of her small irises. “You don’t know what it’s like,” you let slip finally, as the plaguing thoughts you’ve tried to keep at bay seem to float further to the surface. You blame the wine. You thought it would do the opposite, instead it’s allowing you to spill everything you’re feeling, everything you want to say out into the open, whether you want to or not.
“Oh I’m sorry,” she’s rubbish at faking her regret, “it must be really hard being an Other.” She snorts back her sarcastic laughter again. It’s such an unhealthy sound that you frown at her, deeply offended that she isn’t taking you as seriously as you want her to. “And it must be really hard being a killer,” you mutter suddenly before you have time to properly think and stop yourself from saying the words out loud. You grimace at yourself for saying it so bluntly, and once again your blame falls against the wine glass that you’re holding clumsily in your hand.
You don’t need to look at her face, you can sense by the sharp intake of breath that you’ve broken her shielded core. The grave intensity of the silence that beckons you to sit in amidst its cold circle is enough to tell you that you’ve took a step too far. You can’t even begin to imagine the raw stench of hurt that is probably ripping through her and rotting away the only self pride that she has left. You hadn’t meant to say it, but even as you turn to stare at her finally, you can’t find the ability to let the muted apology show through your hardened mask.
“Then I guess we’re both really bad people then,” she spits with acidic venom. She’s shifted now, sitting back in her chair with her arms folded defensively. There’s a vivid urgency that crawls across your skin, frantically biting at you to take back your evil words. How dare you even mention it? It is one thing to think silently to yourself about the things in her file, but it’s certainly another to throw them at her in a fit of rage because you’re loosing face before her.
You notice now that the flickers of assertive cockiness you’ve seen swarm her eyes many times before, have now died bitterly in the boggy swamps of your vileness. There’s a reserved resentment boiling slowly underneath her broken surface though and you’re cautious not to poke her threatening volcanic eruption of emotions too much. She downs the last of her wine, grimacing at the harsh taste it leaves after gulping more than a sip.
“What do you want from me?” she gasps out finally, rubbing her forehead with her left hand. You’re surprised at how empty she looks now. It’s almost as if you’ve somehow sucked all the fiery life out of her with one simple but brutal sentence. This is your chance to come clean with her. You doubt though that she’ll even listen to you know that you’ve let slip that you know more about her than she thinks. “I want your help,” you confess plainly. Just as you expect her dark eyes are on you, studying you deeply trying to gauge whether you’re telling the truth or not. You let her look, you allow her to make the quiet judgement, you owe her this much.
“Help with what?” comes her reply sternly and you want to sigh with relief that she’s decided to trust you enough to hear what you’ve got to say. There’s a faint redness that appears on your cheeks, you can feel its growing warmth radiate from your skin. You’re embarrassed that you’ve got to ask her for this. “I want your help in killing Ben.” It feels foreign to say those words, almost like you’re speaking another language that you don’t fully understand, it’s not something you’ve ever had to learn to say before. But she understands, she speaks this language, and for as much as you hate to admit that you’re using her because of the one fact that you’ve read in her file, you know she’s the right person to ask.
You see the calm look of realisation fall across her face with a blanketed shadow. All the tiny pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that you’ve placed at her feet for all this time have finally revealed their bigger, darker picture to her. She understands now why she’s here, especially now you’ve announced that you know about her bleak past. “Why?” she clicks her tongue across her mouth hastily, looking more dishevelled by the minute, “why kill Ben?” You don’t stop the laugh that bubbles out from the tight niches of your throat, “why wouldn’t I want to kill Ben?” you turn her question around, and you’re surprised to see her tilt her head in a thoughtful satisfaction.
“You’ve got all the guns,” she smartly points out, her eyes dropping down to where you’re still fashioning the pistol inside the waist band. You draw in a deep breath, you’ve already thought about this long and hard for far too long. “We can’t kill him with a gun,” you inform her clinically, “it has to look like an accident.” She’s watching you with a thoroughly shocked expression wiping her face clean of any anger she might have felt beforehand. “You’ve already planned this, haven’t you?” she acknowledges, and you curtly nod back at her, a truthful determination glistening inside your cold eyes. “For how long?” she demands, pushing her arms back into their neatly folded position. You keep your eyes steadily staring into hers, you keep your voice low and calm, “since forever.” Her eyes widen in a mild surprise while she purses her lips together thoughtfully, a small scoff escaping them after a while. “Forever’s not so long,” she mutters flatly, but you can hear the subtle bitterness when she adds, “when it’s only been three years.”
A sharp, narrow frown slips down onto your darkened brow, and you’re quickly reminded of the rest of her heavy file that is still sitting somewhere in your house. You pull at the drastic comparison that fills your mind to her eventful life that is so colourised in the wad of paper behind the red folder. You suppose she’s right, for her it had been so much longer. You can only guess at the number of years that Kate mulled over her options to rid her life of Wayne, and the final moment when her mind decided that forever would come to an end that day.