fic: the approriate travel arrangements have been made (lost)
the appropriate travel arrangements have been made
lost. the problem is that this isn't limited to just dreams anymore - the island followed them home. 5005 words. rated r. post-season four finale. various; including kate/jack, kate/sayid, kate/sawyer, sawyer/juliet, jack/juliet, sun/jin, sun/sayid, sun/michael, desmond/penny, desmond/claire, dan/charlotte.
notes: this is long. that said, i have no idea where half of these pairings came from. but let the record state, i am totally enamored with the very idea of sun/sayid. and, uh, spoilers galore for the season four finale. this is primarily a reaction to that. and par usual, completely non-linear in its structure.
that corpse you planted last year in your garden,
has it begun to sprout? will it bloom this year?
(t.s. eliot)
1.
“You were supposed to come with us,” Locke said.
And then he died.
2.
This is after:
Hurley swaps the hospital’s chess set for a broken game of Mouse Trap on a stormy afternoon. No one notices but the bleakness of his room.
Sayid runs errands.
Kate runs errands, her to-do-list crumpled at the bottom of her purse.
Sun excels as an executive and at executions.
Jack cries foul.
Aaron is just a kid.
His sins are pardoned.
3.
The first sign was a crashed plane in the jungle that wasn’t really there.
Locke’s breath had caught in his chest at the sight of it, the telltale shine of old yellow paint on metal, the way the wings had once expanded but now lay broken and cracked open. There were propellers and his left knee gave out as he attempted to advance, his knife at the ready.
The closer he caught, his left leg dragging, the more pungent the air became. There was the stink of wasted oil and gasoline, of burning and dead fires, of decay, wan and used flesh.
Boone looked up at him and his eyes were empty, made of glass. The trees reflected back to him in duplicate across their surface.
“This isn’t your chapter to be written,” he gasped and John Locke’s right leg crumpled beneath him.
4.
His mother clucks her tongue.
“If you don’t watch it, son, you’re going to have nothing but ghosts hanging about your head.”
Jack raises a hand to his eyes and his mother pours another cup of coffee. He will drink it, two sugars, no milk and she will tell him he’s too skinny. She won’t offer to make breakfast and Jack’s thumb will slip along the corner of the newspaper.
He will not tell his mother about the empty coffin.
His father is a subject of which they will never speak.
Her fingers wrap loose around his wrist and for a brief moment, they squeeze.
“You need to eat more,” she says, and she clucks her tongue again. “Look at you - like a scarecrow.”
5.
When Jack doesn’t sleep, he questions.
His bare legs tangle in the sheets and Kate will curl in on herself next to him. He’ll try to trace her spine sometimes, the light muted against drawn curtains, a faint glow of a lamp still lit in the hall traveling through the cracked door. His eyes will travel from the top of her neck down along until the base, and a mass of messy curls will hide her face. Doubt and insecurity will rear their twin heads and in the morning, over toast and coffee and a half-empty box of Froot Loops, a juicebox, Aaron, they will both pretend these conversations do not exist.
There is a night, before his father, before Hurley, before a ring and her fourth finger where Jack tosses and turns. Kate watches the clock, that mutant glow of green and yellow.
“You would have jumped. If I had jumped, you would have jumped. Wouldn’t you have?”
Kate shifts beside him and the springs of the bedspring whine in answer. Her fingers might tremble. This, he cannot see.
She closes her eyes.
“What?” she breathes.
“If I had jumped. You would have followed me.” There is no longer that curious gasp of a question at the end of the sentence. He states it like he knows, that if he had decided to leap from the helicopter into the sea and let the rest of them ride off and away towards certain things like danger and fear and maybe dry land, she would have let herself fall from above to join him.
She rolls farther away from him and the tight knot of a sob catches in the back of her throat.
“No,” she whispers into her pillow and the clock next to her glows 1:53.
Jack doesn’t ask any more questions.
Kate sleeps with her car keys on the nightstand next to her. She dreams to the snore of Patsy Cline.
Jack reaches for sunken metal.
6.
The phone rings.
The clock reads 2:13.
“Sawyer?” she murmurs against a tight inhale.
There is a garble of sound, there is static, and she is left alone.
Kate can’t breathe.
Her son sleeps.
7.
Sun has a child now and it sleeps through the night; the same cannot be said for her.
She is teaching herself things now, late in the night. She reads books about business and books about power. She collects information about things like continental drift and oceanography, C4 and its detonation, stories of miracles and treatment of burn victims. Sun stores the knowledge carefully, a curious hopeful timeline attached to it.
Michael visits sometimes; he always wears flannel and smells like muffled smoke.
8.
The first time Sun found Michael he was in her bedroom. She had fallen asleep, a book still wide open on her lap and a half-filled legal pad next to it. The pen was still in her hand. The light had flickered, once, and she had awakened.
He stood by the mirror, arms bared and hands behind his back.
“Did I wake you?” he asked and she had wanted to cry. Ghosts aren’t supposed to have manners, she had thought and her fingers had twisted around the pen. He wasn’t supposed to have manners. He should be with his son or the bottom of the ocean - never here.
He let his fingers skim the edge of her dresser and she watched his reflection instead of him. She watched the clean line of his shoulder and the way the muscles of his arm would flex in time to the movement of his fingers across the wood. She remembered this. She remembered him. More than that, watching him like this, a sort of voyeur in her own home, she could recall things like possibility, the way it had curled on her tongue once long ago in a jungle of sweat and she stood bare before him. She swallowed hard. Looking at him like that struck her as blasphemous, now. Her husband was dead and there was a ghost in her bedroom and his fingers were dark against the light grain and her legs had shifted unbidden beneath the sheets and she might have wanted him a little, dead or alive.
“Are you here to apologize?” she finally asked.
He had stilled before the mirror and his eyes had been bright.
“Why would I do that?” He sounded amused then and Sun looked away. It was still him, she thought. There was still that consistent one note of incredulity running through his words, like always. It didn’t comfort. Rather, it reminded.
“You betrayed us,” she said then; the headboard had felt cool against the nape of her neck and she shuddered. He watched. He cocked his head a little to the left, listening though she did not speak, and he had raised his chin as his eyes slanted down to closed. “You betrayed all of us.”
“You would’ve done the same.”
She swallowed and bit her lip and Sun could not remember how to sound the words - English, Korean, it didn’t matter. She could hear them in her head, so loud, so indignant - no, I wouldn’t have; no, I couldn’t have; no, I’m better than that.
She clutched the white comforter in fists, fingers curled tight, white knuckles against white fabric, and then she was searching, scrambling. It was a bed of shifting sand and her fingers ran through it, fast; Michael had watched in silence.
She had misplaced her wedding ring.
When she opened her eyes there was the morning and there were birds and warm, watery light scratching against her open window. There was a book spread across her lap and a half-filled legal pad, a pen still clutched between her fingers.
The garden still grows, the words read in strictly lined characters, her own handwriting.
Each night she closes her window with a click of the latch.
Every morning she awakens to open.
9.
A man crosses the street at a slant. His feet stray from the faded white borders of the crosswalk, and the man walks, his head cast down.
When a lone car’s brakes squeal, when the light has already been cast to red but the car travels on, the man bounces off the windshield and lands in a motionless pile of limbs and old jeans, blue windbreaker and blood.
When the red car hits him, Kate forgets to scream.
10.
The second sign was his father.
There were still bruises and reddened, angry welts hung around his neck, a macabre, invisible noose that sticks.
“You left the door open, John,” he had said. “You left the goddamned door open.”
Locke had stood there and stared.
His father had laughed.
“It’s too late now, son. You’ve let the armies escape.”
11.
Penny dies.
Her body is found right where she left it: the hallway behind her locked front door.
There will be a single gunshot wound against her temple and her blood will dry, a large splatter, against a yellow wall.
The forensics team will find no leads and Desmond will wander in Charles Widmore footsteps, unsure if he is the man to blame.
His reflection, it mocks.
(He lingers in half-priced bookstores and flea markets, sidewalk sales and the like. He builds a singular book collection, first a shelf and then an entire bookcase, all of the same title.
He cannot bring himself past the first page, and the liquor - it stings).
12.
Claire opens the door and Desmond watches as she tries to step lightly. The floorboards moan all the same and she smiles, brief.
“Are you…real?” It’s a stupid question, and when he makes a move to rise from the bed she stops him with a raised hand and a shake of her head.
“It’s alright.” She remains across the room and he eyes the empty bottle next to the lamp. “I wanted to see you.”
“What for?” His mouth is too dry to swallow and Claire looks suddenly so small and so shy.
“I just. I wanted you to know. I,” she laughs, “well, I wanted you.” She advances three steps and one of his hands reaches for the edge of the beside table. “I could love you,” she offers. “All the time, if you wanted.”
He finds it horrifying. He thinks he finds her horrifying but he isn’t sure; the word strikes him as too large for her.
There is something childish still lingering there: the bright blonde hair and little striped t-shirt too loose on her frame. Errant strands of hair catch across her forehead and there is a small pout to her pink lips.
“Why would I want that?” he chokes out and she frowns.
She shrugs and her frown deepens. The curtains flutter in an echo behind her head as she exhales. Sweat cools on Desmond’s bare shoulders and he shivers; he thinks this is why he shivers.
Claire still stands there, arms akimbo, and when she smiles he looks to the empty space in the bed beside him. His nose is bleeding.
“Why would I want that?” he repeats and he doesn’t try to fight the desperation cresting there. He doesn’t see a point to it. He thinks she might be dead and he right along with her. He wonders where Charlie is in all of this, if maybe because he died at sea he must remain at sea, tethered down to a reef and forever he’ll just float, float, float up like a balloon never breaching the surface.
She shrugs again and steps forward.
“I don’t know. I just thought it probably gets a little lonely here.”
He presses his bare feet to the wood floor.
“What the bloody hell ‘s that supposed to mean, eh?”
Claire presses her mouth in a firm line.
“I get lonely…” she says and a cold breeze fills the room. “I get lonely all the time,” and Desmond thinks he might vomit. Save for the feminine lilt of her accent her words are devoid of any emotion, any at all and it makes him feel sick. She states it all like cold fact, indisputable in its truth, and he doesn’t understand, he doesn’t want to understand. If she is dead, why is she here? Why is she alone? This isn’t her, this isn’t the Claire he remembers, barefoot and with the baby and smiling up at Charlie, occasionally at him. And it scares him to think, more than scares him, bloody well terrifies him, to think that after death the banal features of fear and loneliness and desire still ripple along, guiding action and thought and everything the afterlife was supposed to be blissfully void of and removed.
He remains still at the edge of the bed and she advances closer to stand between his legs. She looks down at him and her fingers toy first at the frayed hem of her t-shirt and then slide back into the thickness of his hair to cup the base of his skull. He lets her. He lets her though he doubts - with every fucking fiber of his being - that he has any say in this.
“I am tired of looking at wooden walls,” she whispers and it is a plea, her voice plaintive and Desmond likes that better. Her fingers press down along the back of his neck, and he lets her.
He opens his mouth beneath her own and her fingers press deep into the muscles of his thighs. He can taste the humidity on her tongue and his hand curls to cradle the small of her back.
“That’s better,” she giggles.
He obliges.
13.
Claire perches on the side of the tub, one of his t-shirts gaping open in the front, hanging off her shoulder. He can see the bones try beneath her skin, skin he knows is warm to the touch, soft under his lips, that she’s both pliant and demanding.
She spreads her legs open and he doesn’t look away.
“Best make this quick,” she rasps. “They’ll be looking for you soon.”
14.
After, Sayid chooses to find her first.
He enters through the revolving doors of the building and rides the elevator in silence to the top floor. He tells her secretary that, no, he does not have an appointment and that, no, for him an appointment would hardly be necessary.
“I have a favor to ask of you, Sun,” he says.
“Sit,” she bites back. “Please.”
And he does.
She will deliver.
This was long before. Three years spills fast and the six will unravel, disparate, dangerous.
Ben had expected this.
There is always a plan. Always.
15.
I was thinking in circles could come as an almost credible excuse if uttered but Sayid never lets the words come to light.
There is a start and a finish to all of this. The world has always only operated on a schedule of births and funerals, arrivals and departures. One has already come to pass.
It is a matter of deliverance, and he has never been very good at those.
He calls Ben boss with a tangible amount of disdain. Ben calls him collateral with an earnest salesman’s smile and Sayid does not allow himself to wonder what this might mean. Language and its messy interpretation: relativity at its finest and its worst.
Instead he sees Nadia, he sees shallow graves and dull stone walls bleached by sun and sand and scrubbed out blood.
It’s an ugly picture, but it’s his.
16.
The rum slides and disappears fast.
Sawyer wants a fucking cigarette.
Here, he’s got the blonde and he’s got the red and he let the brunette run away.
“You should have expected that from the start,” Juliet tells him with an arched brow. Somehow, drunk and sandy and mixed up somewhere in the realm of disappointment and abject bitterness, she still manages to come across as smug, as all-knowing. He thinks he hates her. He knows that at one point he did, back in the days of cages and guns and beatings without introduction. There were rabbits and strawberries. There was her. He was stupid.
“Could say the same for you, Blondie,” and it is his turn to preen, his turn to act the wizened one. “Romeo didn’t even grant you a good-bye, now did he?”
She stretches her legs in front of her and doesn’t say a word. Her sleeves are rolled up into the crook of her elbow and grains of sand stick along the expanse of his bare back as he leans. She doesn’t look at him; she watches the sea.
Sawyer remembers places, down in the South, not of his childhood, but of other years. Those old buildings the ivy would wrap around like a second skin, hiding the ancient brick and stone and locked wooden doors. He can remember how they would butt up onto the sea, how the smell of salt and the dampness would chip away at those houses, add layers of age and thick stories to be told into the walls. Most of those houses had the stretch of a widow’s walk, a gangplank all its own to wander onto, to wait.
Juliet toys with an empty bottle of rum and Sawyer leans back on his elbows. White foam laps at the sand as the waves arrive. He thinks this might be their future - a grim biding of time as they wait for a return that will never come to pass.
“That’s enough of that, James,” she says on a sigh. “That’s enough.”
17.
“Do you regret it?” Juliet asks at night.
Sawyer feigns innocence; it looks wrong on him. Indignation suits him better, and his face creases with it.
“Regret what?”
She cocks her head towards the sky and then back again towards the sand, her eyes casting out towards the dark ocean. Her smile sweeps in a downward motion and her teeth are never bared.
“This.”
He exhales low. The impact of the surface of the water had been sharp against him and he had gasped, salt and sea filling his mouth as he tried to breathe. The current had caught.
“Shit, woman.” He sighs again and when he cants his head back like that the tips of his hair brush his sloped shoulders. She notices these things. She catalogs these things - safekeeping, she would explain if asked. “Only every blessed moment on this goddamned rock.”
It makes sense to kiss him then.
So she does.
18.
She keeps flowers at her husband’s grave.
It’s something.
Jin always used to buy her flowers.
19.
“Funny,” she says as he enters the room, unannounced but not forgotten. “I had started to believe people like us did not exist anymore.”
Sayid smiles. What she means is him, her, the other three and the baby. Ben. The island and those still clinging to it. Charles Widmore. Her dead husband. People who know secrets the rest of the world could never come to grasp as truth.
His smile widens as she crosses her arms in front of her chest.
“I am afraid that would be little more than wishful thinking, Sun.”
She glares.
“I know why you’re here,” she enunciates carefully.
“Then I won’t bore you with reiteration of what you already know.”
“I won’t go.”
His lips quirk upwards. “I thought as much.”
“It would be a disservice to his memory. Among other, less desirable things.” The words carry a careful, crafted, thought-out edge to them, an edge he does not like, and she knows it. She can see it in the way his arms go from crossed against his chest to poised outward, hands on hips.
“Is this about Jack? Forgiveness?” There is a less than gentle mockery to him now, in her office. She sneers.
“It’s about avenging the dead.”
He springs. Her shoulder blades meet the wall before the back of her head does, a hand pressed against her neck propelling her back.
“Do not make the mistake of assuming you are the only one who has lost someone in all of this,” and it’s something. She has enough semblance of mind to recognize this as a crack, as something for her to build from. His breath is hot against her face and the words travel on the low end of a growl and Sun does her best not to frown.
There is something honest like, “I never thought I was,” held behind her teeth and it remains there. She bites down on it, her mouth dry and when she licks her bottom lip he watches the quick swipe of her tongue.
He breathes heavily; so does she. At this close range she can see the heavy circles under his eyes, the lines that have collected along his mouth, his forehead. He looks older. Three years - she imagines so does she. Her pulse leaps beneath his palm and his breath catches. He inches closer and her fingers curl against the front of his shirt.
“Sayid…” she tries, more a plea than a warning, and he takes it.
His lips find hers and her eyes flutter, mouth opens wide.
(She can feel the blunt edge of his fingernails as they scrape across her hip, over and down along her upper thigh as he pulls her panties off; they slip and catch along her right ankle. Her skull meets the wall with a crack that translates between the two of them and he moves his fingers, sharp, between her legs.
Infidelity against the dead, yes, she thinks it, but her leg hooks around his back all the same and there is a rhythm there to be built. She slept with a man who wasn’t her husband when her husband was alive and the guilt was there, the guilt persisted as she learned more than one way to acknowledge words like betrayal, as this man drew the sounds and the syllables out of her, coaxed away an accent and then let gravity take its toll to an early grave.
This is different.
Sayid’s hair is soft beneath her fingers, long, and she pulls when he thrusts too rough against her. He only moves his hips that much harder, and she tries to move back but she can’t, she can’t, she’s pinned to the wall.
She’s pinned to him, and when he spills into her, when she comes against him - she forgets to sob).
20.
The third sign was a rocking chair, empty as it moved.
“Jacob?” Locke had called, and in the darkness the rhythmic creak of the chair was his only answer.
When he returned to camp he expected to find blood.
He did.
21.
The Donner Party disappeared in Sierra Nevada in the winter of 1846, the dawn of 1847.
Dan was never great at history - he had always preferred the intractable things science had to offer, numbers and equations and more often than not a singular, inflexible outcome. History led to questions, events to interpretation and speculation. His head does not have the room or time for that. There are too many words, not enough symbols.
But the boat floats. Gentle waves lap and the sea glitters darkly. He thinks about fish and cannibals and the Donner Pass. The green behind them is gone and the sky lights in blues and grays, not the strange purple that cast across the sky, before.
He isn’t thinking of these colors.
He’s thinking in red -
red sky at night, sailor’s delight, or something, something his mother had said, or something Frank had said, he can’t recall, it’s too difficult to recall, but there’s red and there was red, red sky, red blood, red hair, yes, red hair and it had felt thick, damp with sweat under his fingers as she said good-bye, as she said no, she would not leave and she hadn’t, she had stayed, she had stayed but the island, it would leave, it would leave and it did -
“What now?” one of them keeps whimpering. It is a woman and Dan has never known her name. She clutches to the side of the boat and the quiet without the motor running is disorienting. There are just the waves, the wind; Dan hasn’t heard the cry of a bird since the engine finally quit. There is just ocean and blue, all that water, not a drop to drink and he thinks his face might be visibly falling as the woman repeats, “What now?” like maybe now, finally, someone will have an answer.
“We eat each other,” he doesn’t answer. And once back then the Donner Party had the cold and the snow and the crack of frozen limbs.
They have the sun, the salt and their skin burns raw.
22.
“What the hell are you looking for?” Miles ask. He pulls his hood over his head against the night, the stars.
Charlotte doesn’t answer.
A fire crackles somewhere down the beach.
“C’mon, Pippi,” the tall man (shirtless, she notes) calls. “It’s quittin’ time.”
She sighs and the ocean rests empty. Miles shuffles towards the fire, the shirtless man, Juliet, the others. She closes her eyes for a moment.
This cannot be home.
23.
Jimmy Buffet is still on the stereo, an endless loop of margaritas and islands and broken flip-flops. After the barbeque, Jack turns the music off with a relieved sigh.
It is the final time the six of them will be together, until the end. Until Jeremy Bentham and Benjamin Linus and Charles Widmore reappear, a troika of coincidence or fate. Sayid will bury the dead and remember long-dormant skills. Sun will break through the glass ceiling, come to resemble her father in more ways than one. Hurley will crash cars; he will cry for the safety of locked doors and padded cells. Kate will take Aaron. Jack will take pills.
But this is later.
Jack collects empty bottles and dirty paper plates in a trash bag and Kate carries Aaron upstairs. There are pages of destroyed coloring books decorating their fridge, the plural possessive and grammatical structures pleasing him more than it should. Their house, their family, their friends. Their future.
He cracks his neck, once.
“Looking for me?” Claire asks against the sliding door. Her smile is crooked. “I am, after all, the mother of your child.”
Jack drops the empty beer bottle.
When he looks up, she’s disappeared.
24.
Sayid finds Kate at a coffee shop in Los Angeles.
She wears sunglasses now, large, and they hide the better portion of her face. When he finds her, she hides behind a page of obituaries and an empty cup.
“Kate,” and she sighs.
He sits across from her and leans on his elbows; Kate folds the paper in half and then into fourths.
“Sayid,” and she sounds sad. He had not expected that. He hadn’t been sure what to expect of her. There had been moments, of course, little odd moments interspersed between her time running from Jack to Sawyer and then back again, times where the two of them had achieved a quiet, unrecognized camaraderie. And it had been nice, to have someone there who knew how to hold a gun, who understood the simplicity of point and shoot while at the same time wholly and fully aware of the entire course moral ambiguity can run in a man. It was the unsaid that made her company more than just tolerable.
“What are you…” Kate clears her throat and her skin is paler here, fluorescent lighting and away from the sun. “How are you?”
Small talk rests between them, unfamiliar and unwanted.
“Nadia is dead,” he replies and his entire frame remains rigid in the little wooden chair of the coffee shop. Kate looks down, to her left, her right, and then back towards him.
“I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry, Sayid.” Her fingers brush his own, then pull away. And that is that.
They sit in silence. He watches the wall behind her, his back to the large glass window and the street stretching outside. A car horn calls from somewhere and another, closer, answers. At the table next to them a woman keeps repeating, “The nerve, the absolute nerve, the nerve,” and the man behind the counter announces the arrival of a latte, soy. Kate folds her fingers together, and the woman, the stranger, changes her tune: “Now, that’s fate if I ever heard it. That’s fate, I swear. Fate.”
Sayid’s collar feels damp, his suit, limp.
“It was good to see you, Kate,” he says at last, and she nods, relieved. She grabs her purse from the floor and rises, fast.
“Yes, you too. You too. And I’m sorry, really, I would love to stay, but I have to pick my son up - ”
She falters.
“Your son?”
She freezes.
“Yes,” she whispers. She leans forward. He stays seated. “My son.”
The denial sings; he watches her go.
“Well, I never,” the woman marvels. “The nerve. I swear. That’s fate.”
Kate left the obituaries behind.
25.
“There is a Jeremy Bentham here to see you, sir.”
Jack lets him come on in.
He forgets: there was a cabin in the woods.
(They’re all dead, the trees lean in secret, whispers).
26.
“I moved the island,” Locke says and his eyes shine bright, proud. They dim when he smiles, teeth white and sharp. There were once sharks in the ocean there and they would circle as they swam.
Jack backs away towards closed doorways and tall potted plants.
“You were supposed to come,” Locke says.
And then he dies.
fin.