jumping off the deep end here
And now, for a fic that can be described with four words. Every person on my flist will likely be annoyed by at least two of these words, maybe all four. Yes, I have gone off the deep end. No, it’s not a permanent sort of illness. It’s like a 24-hour fanfic flu. No apologies, because nobody’s forcing you to read. Curiosity's the only thing that can do that.
Title: Falling
Characters: Kate, Ana Lucia
Rating: PG-13 for a teensy bit of bad language
Summary: Inside Ana’s head. Apparently, I do have empathy for her when I’m not watching her on the screen. No real spoilers other than the very general season two kind. Hastily done, not that it matters, because I might be this piece of writing’s sole audience. And that will have to be fine with me.
Falling
There was normally something about the rain that Ana found soothing. Back in the real world, she could sit on her front porch, under the protection of a roof, and watch the water come down, the wind blowing it closer and closer until it left a soft mist on her arms and bare feet. But when the water encroached too far and too much, she had to make a choice: get wet or retreat into the comfort and safety of the house. Really, it depended on her mood. Sometimes, the spray of water excited something in her, and at rare times, she might even walk out into the rain, feeling it sting her face and soak into her clothing and drip down through her hair to her scalp. But sometimes, that feeling was one of vulnerability. It had been a very long time since she was okay with feeling vulnerable; it had been a very long time since she had to stay out in the rain. There were so many things the island did to her, things it created in her mind and her actions that she had fought hard never to deal with again. The rain that had come and gone for the last few days was just a reminder.
*****
Ana didn’t have any accurate word to describe it for the longest time, this feeling she had when she was around Kate, and that was bothersome. Typically, when a person made her angry or jealous or annoyed or feel any sort of recoil from them, she knew exactly why. But the problem with Kate was that Ana was certain she hated her, but she felt no recoil. In fact, she needed to be near Kate, and as much as possible. And she had no earthly idea why, except that it must have to do with vulnerability, with plane crashes and Jack Shepherd.
She was actually waiting for him when the latest storm came up. She had been indulging his talk of an army, because he needed it and because she agreed with his ideas in principle. They needed to think about protecting these people somehow, even if an earnest doctor with eyes more large and serious and brown than any human being’s had a right to be was not the person to do that. It would take her a long time to make him understand that he was a defensive person, able to shut things out; he didn’t have the heart to attack; in some ways, he didn’t even understand the need.
Ana had been walking the beach, but when she saw the clouds come up black and heavy, she retreated to her shelter, hoping more than trusting in its ability to keep her relatively dry if not safe. Her new home was always just one gust of wind away from blowing apart and flying down the beach, and then, where would she be? But she had fought back from worse on this island, things that Jack really didn’t understand. The tailies, they moved--constantly. They didn’t nest. They ate what they ran across and hoped they could run across more soon. They had people taken away from them without a warning or a reason. It left a person always suspicious, always watching. This is exactly how she knew who Kate was. Ana watched her, and in that watching she saw a woman who peered back at her with a stare that made her nervous because it looked only for something to fear. Kate had been running a lot longer than she had.
*****
Ana at first thought her feelings were jealousy. Who was this woman who could make Jack forget he was tied up inside himself? Why in the world did her five foot nothing and brown hair and eyes have such an effect on the man? She was a criminal, even. She laughed too much, scowled too much, walked like she owned the world, hunched inside herself like nobody was trustworthy, went without a bra sometimes so that every man on the island was staring at her small, round breasts. Her hips didn’t move too much when she walked, but just enough. And when she was alone--scouring the jungle, the beach, the caves for something, anything, her own sanity--when she was not posturing to make the hick hard or Jack defenseless, she was such a quiet, self-assured creature that it made Ana curious. She would stay behind a tree or a rock or someone’s shelter, out of sight, and curse herself for staring. She knew why Jack and the hick were always watching her. Kate was fascinating. Kate was fascinating, and Ana hated her for it. Neither of those things she could deny, even if she still didn’t have a label for what the meant.
When the rain began to dapple the sand, it always surprised her--the sound of it, how it could look so random, disorganized, but all add up to a single irresistible force. She always expected that the rain would soak into the dry sand and turn it hard and flat like it looked at the shore, but it didn’t. The sand simply kept soaking it in, kept accepting more and more rain, while the surface churned up and looked attacked, scarred. Ana sat under her tarp, listening to the sound of the rain slapping it, gusting into it, and she watched the sand absorb the hits. Then she watched a solitary figure stalking down the beach, walking slowly, arms crossed but otherwise ignoring the fact that the sky had opened up a flood on her head. Kate’s dark blue tank top and blue jeans were soaked through. Her hair was pulled back into a loose knot, and while the rain had flattened the hair at the top of her head and taken all the life out of it, it hung in the back heavier but still lovely, resting on her neck.
Kate didn’t look at her, only walking past her shelter in that way that seemed calm but only to a person who had never known that purposeful determination to not think or feel, even if that banishing of emotion was the biggest lie in the world. Because Ana did think, she did feel, she did want Kate to get out of the fucking rain and stop pretending it wasn’t somehow getting inside her, making her helpless. If Ana knew anything about Kate, it was that she didn’t like to be helpless. The only person that could make her that way was Jack, and the woman kept running to him. It was ridiculous, and it made her halfway sick.
Ana chuckled to relieve her tension, then she found herself suddenly standing and ducking her head out into the rain. It was cooling but harsh.
She called out, “Come get out of the rain.”
Kate’s gaze immediately snapped toward her shelter. She just shook her head and continued walking.
“You’re being stupid,” Ana called again, impatient now that she could feel the rain stinging her head and coursing up her arms. “Why are you so fucking stubborn?” she shouted into the whorl of wind.
Kate stopped and immediately began walking toward her, trying so very desperately to keep the indignation from showing in a twist of the hips or a stomp that her eyes shot daggers. But they were beautiful daggers because, at least, they were aimed at her.
*****
The first time they’d run into each other away from the other survivors, Ana was on the beach, so far from camp that she couldn’t see the smoke anymore. This was in the first few days after the groups had reunited only to leave her feeling like all the things she’d done to save them had been represented by that one thing she did only out of protection. She knew she had to let them be angry, so she ran away. Then, that afternoon, Kate had suddenly popped around the closest bend in the shoreline, almost running, a scared, confused look on her face. This was before Ana knew that this wild-eyed fear and uncertainty was not the norm for Kate. When Kate’s eyes finally met hers, widening then narrowing, it seemed to dawn on her that she wasn’t alone anymore, and she turned and fled, going back the way she’d come. She was coming from Jack’s lips and going back to Sawyer’s arms, but Ana didn’t know that. She only knew the woman was running from her, like all the rest.
Now the woman was moving toward her, not exactly running, but finally moving into her life with a purpose. Kate had avoided her or talked at her, but never to her or with her. Now, she approached her shelter and scowled, but she didn’t come in.
“What’s your problem?” Kate finally said.
“Oh, you know, probably the same one that made me go shoot that girl. What is it? I’m fucking crazy, right?” She realized that she should have had a plan, because that was not at all the right thing to say, even if it was the sort of thing people expected from her. She had said it evenly, but with her customary bitterness and sarcasm creeping into her voice. She added, exasperated with herself and with Kate, “Are you coming in?”
“How is it you can call me stubborn when you’re ten times worse?”
“I am, but you don’t know that. You don’t know me at all. Don’t pretend you do.”
At those words, Kate’s eyes narrowed. “Jack does.”
“No he doesn’t. He just has that annoying ability to make a person feel like he’s always known them.”
The rain still fell, and now it was accompanied by low thunder and distant lightning. In one direction, she could look through the cracks in her shelter and see that the sun was trying to fight its way into this particular storm front, but in the other direction was more and more blackness. And Kate was standing there, arms still crossed, water now coursing down her face, and she was regarding Ana with a carefully veiled terror, as if her mention of Jack’s name had brought something horrible to the surface.
“At least Jack wants to know me,” Kate said. “And not because he feels sorry for me.”
“Jack feels sorry for everybody. And he only thinks he wants to know you. But he doesn’t understand complications like we do. He’s not capable.” When that was met with a quizzical face and more scowling, she added, “Don’t worry, Kate. I don’t want to take him away from you.”
“Who says-“
“Shut up and listen to me. He’s god’s gift, right?” she said flippantly, even if they both knew she was serious. “I can’t deal with that every day. It’s tiring. Let him fix you. I don’t think I need fixing.”
“Neither do I,” she said, and she turned and began to stalk off.
Ana didn’t say she agreed with her, that she’d meant it for both of them, that Jack couldn’t fix them nor should he. It was only when she got up and went a few paces into the rain to grab Kate’s arm that she even knew what she’d been thinking. Her hand slid over Kate’s bicep. “Come in here. Jesus.”
For no discernible reason, Kate allowed Ana to pull her toward the shelter, but she kept that same look of suspicion and anger for a long time. The anger would pass once she realized what Ana was just now learning for herself--Ana didn’t want Jack, not that way. It would take a longer time to get rid of her suspicions, but that was something Ana understood. She didn’t trust Kate, and she didn’t particularly like her either. But Kate sat down beside her, staring out over the water, saying nothing except, “I was already wet.”
“I know.”
Neither one of them moved a muscle, only listened to the distant lightning and the rattle of the tarp against the tree.
*****
The second time Ana had run across Kate, it had been in the jungle, and it was one of those miserably hot days that made Ana sure she’d move somewhere cold and snowy if she got back to civilization. Her clothes stuck to her in a way that felt like suffocation, like the intrusive, prohibitive stickiness of the island would never let go of her. She was actually hunting food, as she was unwilling to ask anyone for anything. Later that day, the Koreans would bring her a fish, and it was a gesture that made her even more sure that, though she couldn’t understand the man, she had been right in judging him to be strong and good, if not slightly unyielding--and even that was something she respected. But now, she was hungry, and she had climbed into a tree that she recognized held fruit.
A few minutes later, Kate came down the same path she had, brushing the same branches out of her face, and Ana had to make a split-second decision: make her presence known and face the woman’s wrath and scorn, or stay in the tree to watch her and be annoyed with herself for watching. As she thought about it, Kate stopped and took a drink from her water bottle, her head tilting back and a look of pure contentment passing over her face for a moment. Ana stayed there, not even moving enough to rustle a leaf. Kate put the water bottle back in her pack and continued down the trail a few steps before she tripped over a root and fell face first onto the ground.
She cursed, crouched there on the jungle floor, and Ana was ready to drop down out of the tree to help her up. But as Ana tucked her pack into a safe position so she could swing herself down, she heard the sound of laughter. Peeking through large, green leaves, Ana watched Kate’s back and shoulders heave and shake with giggles, and the soft, warm sound of her laughter filled up the close, hot jungle space. Slowly, wiping tears from her eyes, she stood up and pulled the water bottle out of her pack to take another drink. Fits of giggles still shook her, and she smiled so wide it was contagious, making Ana grin in return. Ana knew this was intrusive, but she kept watching, because to stop, to come down out of the tree, would be the end of it. Kate took the time to re-adjust the knot in her hair, then she glared over at the trunks of the trees nearest her, saying in mock severity, “No more tripping me, guys,” then she was brushing herself off, winding into the jungle and out of sight, occasional sounds of amusement dying away as the sound of her crunching footsteps diminished into the landscape.
Ana had stayed there in the tree for only a few minutes more. Once she’d added some fruit to her pack, she dropped down onto the jungle floor, and she found that she was still imagining Kate’s grin and the heave of her shoulders, her easiness with the nature that conspired every day to make their lives difficult in a place where nature could be used by others to destroy them. Kate was foolish to let her guard down, but she was happy. As much as her happiness had made Ana smile--somehow, momentarily--it also made her nervous, and for reasons she didn’t understand. She couldn’t even begin to catalogue them, because she was convinced that there were too many.
Now Kate sat beside her, and she was not happy nor warm nor dry. There was, however, some sort of energy raging between them, perhaps good, perhaps bad, but there nonetheless. It was physical, and it pulled Ana toward her. She wondered if Kate was consciously pulling and if she was pulling back. Kate didn’t look at her except out of the corner of her eyes, and only then to regard her as an alien being that either knew too much about her or knew nothing at all. That was fitting--it was the same look that Jack gave both of them. But it wasn’t the look that she gave Kate now. She did know her. Seeing her when she was alone, or believed herself to be, had made Ana all too aware of what kind of person she was, or at least could be.
The problem must have been in Kate’s eyes. She could read them, at least well enough to say things that pushed buttons. But she couldn’t see a bit of how she was reflected in them. She had a suspicion that she wasn’t even in there; she still wasn’t quite a person yet to these people. Sitting there beside Kate, she suddenly found the label for her problem: she wanted something terrible: she wanted Kate to see her. Jack already did, even if he misconstrued what he saw. But Ana would not allow Kate to misconstrue her anymore, even if that meant...
She shook her head against it. She would not move her hand. She would not use the spare shirt beside her to wipe the water from Kate’s face. She would not turn the woman’s face and kiss the rain from her lips, as if lips like hers needed anything else to make them sweeter or more inviting. So Ana sat inside the shelter and willed herself not to move, but as she did, she reeled with the realization of what it really was, that thing that made her nervous and made her want to know that Kate felt her sitting there, felt that pull, even if it was the pull of hatred, as long as she would know Ana was an actual person who could feel and could offer shelter and could break under being ignored for very much longer. These were things Ana did not like to dwell on, and they all gathered under one word that she now felt keenly like the most ironic knife stuck into her flesh: lust.
The sun was coming, bringing with it cloying humidity the likes of which she had forgotten after this week of wind and clouds and sporadic rain. In fact, she hadn’t felt it since she retreated from her tree in the jungle, feeling a warmth spread over her whole body that only made her too impossibly hot to think or even breathe. She could feel that coming on her now, almost against her will. It was wonderful and terrifying.
The tarp on her shelter snapped fiercely in the wind, and it was one too many times for Ana’s sanity. She didn’t wait for the shelter to fall apart or the sky to clear. She simply got up without a word and walked out over the dimpled sand toward the sunny part of the beach, hoping the rain wouldn’t put dents in her skin or any other part of her, hoping like hell that Kate didn’t say anything to her or follow. She really didn’t know what she was likely to do at the sound of the other woman’s voice besides rage or fall. She was tired of being angry, and she knew all too well the bad things that happened when she let herself fall.
-end-
Note: I gave up on the idea of an Ana filter. The three comments I got were very meh on the subject. I think we’re all adults. If you don’t like “the bitch” (or the idea of mildly f/f stories), ignore this like you do anything else you don’t love to read.
Don’t shoot me for this. I’ll go back to Sub!Jack and Dom!Sawyer soon. (After Sawyer/Sun...so many irons in the fire.) I will likely never return to this sort of insanity.
Title: Falling
Characters: Kate, Ana Lucia
Rating: PG-13 for a teensy bit of bad language
Summary: Inside Ana’s head. Apparently, I do have empathy for her when I’m not watching her on the screen. No real spoilers other than the very general season two kind. Hastily done, not that it matters, because I might be this piece of writing’s sole audience. And that will have to be fine with me.
Falling
There was normally something about the rain that Ana found soothing. Back in the real world, she could sit on her front porch, under the protection of a roof, and watch the water come down, the wind blowing it closer and closer until it left a soft mist on her arms and bare feet. But when the water encroached too far and too much, she had to make a choice: get wet or retreat into the comfort and safety of the house. Really, it depended on her mood. Sometimes, the spray of water excited something in her, and at rare times, she might even walk out into the rain, feeling it sting her face and soak into her clothing and drip down through her hair to her scalp. But sometimes, that feeling was one of vulnerability. It had been a very long time since she was okay with feeling vulnerable; it had been a very long time since she had to stay out in the rain. There were so many things the island did to her, things it created in her mind and her actions that she had fought hard never to deal with again. The rain that had come and gone for the last few days was just a reminder.
*****
Ana didn’t have any accurate word to describe it for the longest time, this feeling she had when she was around Kate, and that was bothersome. Typically, when a person made her angry or jealous or annoyed or feel any sort of recoil from them, she knew exactly why. But the problem with Kate was that Ana was certain she hated her, but she felt no recoil. In fact, she needed to be near Kate, and as much as possible. And she had no earthly idea why, except that it must have to do with vulnerability, with plane crashes and Jack Shepherd.
She was actually waiting for him when the latest storm came up. She had been indulging his talk of an army, because he needed it and because she agreed with his ideas in principle. They needed to think about protecting these people somehow, even if an earnest doctor with eyes more large and serious and brown than any human being’s had a right to be was not the person to do that. It would take her a long time to make him understand that he was a defensive person, able to shut things out; he didn’t have the heart to attack; in some ways, he didn’t even understand the need.
Ana had been walking the beach, but when she saw the clouds come up black and heavy, she retreated to her shelter, hoping more than trusting in its ability to keep her relatively dry if not safe. Her new home was always just one gust of wind away from blowing apart and flying down the beach, and then, where would she be? But she had fought back from worse on this island, things that Jack really didn’t understand. The tailies, they moved--constantly. They didn’t nest. They ate what they ran across and hoped they could run across more soon. They had people taken away from them without a warning or a reason. It left a person always suspicious, always watching. This is exactly how she knew who Kate was. Ana watched her, and in that watching she saw a woman who peered back at her with a stare that made her nervous because it looked only for something to fear. Kate had been running a lot longer than she had.
*****
Ana at first thought her feelings were jealousy. Who was this woman who could make Jack forget he was tied up inside himself? Why in the world did her five foot nothing and brown hair and eyes have such an effect on the man? She was a criminal, even. She laughed too much, scowled too much, walked like she owned the world, hunched inside herself like nobody was trustworthy, went without a bra sometimes so that every man on the island was staring at her small, round breasts. Her hips didn’t move too much when she walked, but just enough. And when she was alone--scouring the jungle, the beach, the caves for something, anything, her own sanity--when she was not posturing to make the hick hard or Jack defenseless, she was such a quiet, self-assured creature that it made Ana curious. She would stay behind a tree or a rock or someone’s shelter, out of sight, and curse herself for staring. She knew why Jack and the hick were always watching her. Kate was fascinating. Kate was fascinating, and Ana hated her for it. Neither of those things she could deny, even if she still didn’t have a label for what the meant.
When the rain began to dapple the sand, it always surprised her--the sound of it, how it could look so random, disorganized, but all add up to a single irresistible force. She always expected that the rain would soak into the dry sand and turn it hard and flat like it looked at the shore, but it didn’t. The sand simply kept soaking it in, kept accepting more and more rain, while the surface churned up and looked attacked, scarred. Ana sat under her tarp, listening to the sound of the rain slapping it, gusting into it, and she watched the sand absorb the hits. Then she watched a solitary figure stalking down the beach, walking slowly, arms crossed but otherwise ignoring the fact that the sky had opened up a flood on her head. Kate’s dark blue tank top and blue jeans were soaked through. Her hair was pulled back into a loose knot, and while the rain had flattened the hair at the top of her head and taken all the life out of it, it hung in the back heavier but still lovely, resting on her neck.
Kate didn’t look at her, only walking past her shelter in that way that seemed calm but only to a person who had never known that purposeful determination to not think or feel, even if that banishing of emotion was the biggest lie in the world. Because Ana did think, she did feel, she did want Kate to get out of the fucking rain and stop pretending it wasn’t somehow getting inside her, making her helpless. If Ana knew anything about Kate, it was that she didn’t like to be helpless. The only person that could make her that way was Jack, and the woman kept running to him. It was ridiculous, and it made her halfway sick.
Ana chuckled to relieve her tension, then she found herself suddenly standing and ducking her head out into the rain. It was cooling but harsh.
She called out, “Come get out of the rain.”
Kate’s gaze immediately snapped toward her shelter. She just shook her head and continued walking.
“You’re being stupid,” Ana called again, impatient now that she could feel the rain stinging her head and coursing up her arms. “Why are you so fucking stubborn?” she shouted into the whorl of wind.
Kate stopped and immediately began walking toward her, trying so very desperately to keep the indignation from showing in a twist of the hips or a stomp that her eyes shot daggers. But they were beautiful daggers because, at least, they were aimed at her.
*****
The first time they’d run into each other away from the other survivors, Ana was on the beach, so far from camp that she couldn’t see the smoke anymore. This was in the first few days after the groups had reunited only to leave her feeling like all the things she’d done to save them had been represented by that one thing she did only out of protection. She knew she had to let them be angry, so she ran away. Then, that afternoon, Kate had suddenly popped around the closest bend in the shoreline, almost running, a scared, confused look on her face. This was before Ana knew that this wild-eyed fear and uncertainty was not the norm for Kate. When Kate’s eyes finally met hers, widening then narrowing, it seemed to dawn on her that she wasn’t alone anymore, and she turned and fled, going back the way she’d come. She was coming from Jack’s lips and going back to Sawyer’s arms, but Ana didn’t know that. She only knew the woman was running from her, like all the rest.
Now the woman was moving toward her, not exactly running, but finally moving into her life with a purpose. Kate had avoided her or talked at her, but never to her or with her. Now, she approached her shelter and scowled, but she didn’t come in.
“What’s your problem?” Kate finally said.
“Oh, you know, probably the same one that made me go shoot that girl. What is it? I’m fucking crazy, right?” She realized that she should have had a plan, because that was not at all the right thing to say, even if it was the sort of thing people expected from her. She had said it evenly, but with her customary bitterness and sarcasm creeping into her voice. She added, exasperated with herself and with Kate, “Are you coming in?”
“How is it you can call me stubborn when you’re ten times worse?”
“I am, but you don’t know that. You don’t know me at all. Don’t pretend you do.”
At those words, Kate’s eyes narrowed. “Jack does.”
“No he doesn’t. He just has that annoying ability to make a person feel like he’s always known them.”
The rain still fell, and now it was accompanied by low thunder and distant lightning. In one direction, she could look through the cracks in her shelter and see that the sun was trying to fight its way into this particular storm front, but in the other direction was more and more blackness. And Kate was standing there, arms still crossed, water now coursing down her face, and she was regarding Ana with a carefully veiled terror, as if her mention of Jack’s name had brought something horrible to the surface.
“At least Jack wants to know me,” Kate said. “And not because he feels sorry for me.”
“Jack feels sorry for everybody. And he only thinks he wants to know you. But he doesn’t understand complications like we do. He’s not capable.” When that was met with a quizzical face and more scowling, she added, “Don’t worry, Kate. I don’t want to take him away from you.”
“Who says-“
“Shut up and listen to me. He’s god’s gift, right?” she said flippantly, even if they both knew she was serious. “I can’t deal with that every day. It’s tiring. Let him fix you. I don’t think I need fixing.”
“Neither do I,” she said, and she turned and began to stalk off.
Ana didn’t say she agreed with her, that she’d meant it for both of them, that Jack couldn’t fix them nor should he. It was only when she got up and went a few paces into the rain to grab Kate’s arm that she even knew what she’d been thinking. Her hand slid over Kate’s bicep. “Come in here. Jesus.”
For no discernible reason, Kate allowed Ana to pull her toward the shelter, but she kept that same look of suspicion and anger for a long time. The anger would pass once she realized what Ana was just now learning for herself--Ana didn’t want Jack, not that way. It would take a longer time to get rid of her suspicions, but that was something Ana understood. She didn’t trust Kate, and she didn’t particularly like her either. But Kate sat down beside her, staring out over the water, saying nothing except, “I was already wet.”
“I know.”
Neither one of them moved a muscle, only listened to the distant lightning and the rattle of the tarp against the tree.
*****
The second time Ana had run across Kate, it had been in the jungle, and it was one of those miserably hot days that made Ana sure she’d move somewhere cold and snowy if she got back to civilization. Her clothes stuck to her in a way that felt like suffocation, like the intrusive, prohibitive stickiness of the island would never let go of her. She was actually hunting food, as she was unwilling to ask anyone for anything. Later that day, the Koreans would bring her a fish, and it was a gesture that made her even more sure that, though she couldn’t understand the man, she had been right in judging him to be strong and good, if not slightly unyielding--and even that was something she respected. But now, she was hungry, and she had climbed into a tree that she recognized held fruit.
A few minutes later, Kate came down the same path she had, brushing the same branches out of her face, and Ana had to make a split-second decision: make her presence known and face the woman’s wrath and scorn, or stay in the tree to watch her and be annoyed with herself for watching. As she thought about it, Kate stopped and took a drink from her water bottle, her head tilting back and a look of pure contentment passing over her face for a moment. Ana stayed there, not even moving enough to rustle a leaf. Kate put the water bottle back in her pack and continued down the trail a few steps before she tripped over a root and fell face first onto the ground.
She cursed, crouched there on the jungle floor, and Ana was ready to drop down out of the tree to help her up. But as Ana tucked her pack into a safe position so she could swing herself down, she heard the sound of laughter. Peeking through large, green leaves, Ana watched Kate’s back and shoulders heave and shake with giggles, and the soft, warm sound of her laughter filled up the close, hot jungle space. Slowly, wiping tears from her eyes, she stood up and pulled the water bottle out of her pack to take another drink. Fits of giggles still shook her, and she smiled so wide it was contagious, making Ana grin in return. Ana knew this was intrusive, but she kept watching, because to stop, to come down out of the tree, would be the end of it. Kate took the time to re-adjust the knot in her hair, then she glared over at the trunks of the trees nearest her, saying in mock severity, “No more tripping me, guys,” then she was brushing herself off, winding into the jungle and out of sight, occasional sounds of amusement dying away as the sound of her crunching footsteps diminished into the landscape.
Ana had stayed there in the tree for only a few minutes more. Once she’d added some fruit to her pack, she dropped down onto the jungle floor, and she found that she was still imagining Kate’s grin and the heave of her shoulders, her easiness with the nature that conspired every day to make their lives difficult in a place where nature could be used by others to destroy them. Kate was foolish to let her guard down, but she was happy. As much as her happiness had made Ana smile--somehow, momentarily--it also made her nervous, and for reasons she didn’t understand. She couldn’t even begin to catalogue them, because she was convinced that there were too many.
Now Kate sat beside her, and she was not happy nor warm nor dry. There was, however, some sort of energy raging between them, perhaps good, perhaps bad, but there nonetheless. It was physical, and it pulled Ana toward her. She wondered if Kate was consciously pulling and if she was pulling back. Kate didn’t look at her except out of the corner of her eyes, and only then to regard her as an alien being that either knew too much about her or knew nothing at all. That was fitting--it was the same look that Jack gave both of them. But it wasn’t the look that she gave Kate now. She did know her. Seeing her when she was alone, or believed herself to be, had made Ana all too aware of what kind of person she was, or at least could be.
The problem must have been in Kate’s eyes. She could read them, at least well enough to say things that pushed buttons. But she couldn’t see a bit of how she was reflected in them. She had a suspicion that she wasn’t even in there; she still wasn’t quite a person yet to these people. Sitting there beside Kate, she suddenly found the label for her problem: she wanted something terrible: she wanted Kate to see her. Jack already did, even if he misconstrued what he saw. But Ana would not allow Kate to misconstrue her anymore, even if that meant...
She shook her head against it. She would not move her hand. She would not use the spare shirt beside her to wipe the water from Kate’s face. She would not turn the woman’s face and kiss the rain from her lips, as if lips like hers needed anything else to make them sweeter or more inviting. So Ana sat inside the shelter and willed herself not to move, but as she did, she reeled with the realization of what it really was, that thing that made her nervous and made her want to know that Kate felt her sitting there, felt that pull, even if it was the pull of hatred, as long as she would know Ana was an actual person who could feel and could offer shelter and could break under being ignored for very much longer. These were things Ana did not like to dwell on, and they all gathered under one word that she now felt keenly like the most ironic knife stuck into her flesh: lust.
The sun was coming, bringing with it cloying humidity the likes of which she had forgotten after this week of wind and clouds and sporadic rain. In fact, she hadn’t felt it since she retreated from her tree in the jungle, feeling a warmth spread over her whole body that only made her too impossibly hot to think or even breathe. She could feel that coming on her now, almost against her will. It was wonderful and terrifying.
The tarp on her shelter snapped fiercely in the wind, and it was one too many times for Ana’s sanity. She didn’t wait for the shelter to fall apart or the sky to clear. She simply got up without a word and walked out over the dimpled sand toward the sunny part of the beach, hoping the rain wouldn’t put dents in her skin or any other part of her, hoping like hell that Kate didn’t say anything to her or follow. She really didn’t know what she was likely to do at the sound of the other woman’s voice besides rage or fall. She was tired of being angry, and she knew all too well the bad things that happened when she let herself fall.
-end-
Note: I gave up on the idea of an Ana filter. The three comments I got were very meh on the subject. I think we’re all adults. If you don’t like “the bitch” (or the idea of mildly f/f stories), ignore this like you do anything else you don’t love to read.
Don’t shoot me for this. I’ll go back to Sub!Jack and Dom!Sawyer soon. (After Sawyer/Sun...so many irons in the fire.) I will likely never return to this sort of insanity.