A/N: a mini juliet character study, set during jack's time in otherville. please review :)
Juliet Burke was never comfortable.
Even as a young girl she never felt quite at ease, able to be herself. There was some level of expectation, some pretense that made her watch what she said and did at every turn. Her father's expectations that she could never quite live up to, the pretense that her family was a normal and happy one – everyone expected her to be a certain way. Except for Rachel.
With Edmund there was always the expectation that she would do what he said, follow his lead, be who he wanted. Until, of course, one day she wasn't.
She searched for comfort in all her relationships, for something that meant it was okay to just be. She kept searching, though in a man she never seemed to find it.
Juliet always kept a secret.
Mittelos Bioscience appeared to open a door to self expression and the freedom she'd been waiting for, but once she arrived on the island she only found the opposite to be true. Another awkward silence, another mask to wear.
She'd left home for freedom, she'd left Edmund for freedom, she'd left Miami for freedom – the irony was that with every bid for emancipation she had instead found herself even more trapped than before.
Juliet longed for effortlessness.
Ben had cornered her into a blackmailed agreement, a prison where the bars weren't metal but sea, and the guards not armed with guns but disease. A disease that would not be cured. Each failure broke her down further and further until she thought she had forgotten how to succeed. She used to be so good at winning.
Every step and every word was carefully measured and thought out. Without Rachel by her side she had lost any comfort she'd ever had, and the constant game of pretense had left her even more guarded and angry than before.
Juliet was always angry.
Mostly her anger was directed at herself, for not being brave, for just following orders, for finding another dead end. But she hated Edmund and she hated Ben and she hated and hated until hope was empty and she fell into the numbing routine of just doing what she was told and hiding and hiding and hiding away and away and it never never ended like a run-on sentence that didn't stop to pause and take a breath and never never loosened its suffocating grip and never and never…
Until Jack.
Everything stopped. The cogs slowed. The rope gave. Something changed.
"Hey, Juliet," he leaned against her doorframe.
"Hey."
"You busy?"
"No, come in," she stepped back to let him in.
"The house they gave me… there's really nothing to do." He sat.
"Well, it's your lucky day. I was just about to watch a movie."
"A movie? You have a TV?"
"Not one Ben knows about," she smiled, wheeling an old TV set out of a closed cupboard.
Jack looked amazed.
"I had an admirer with a knack for acquiring hard to find items."
"You femme fatale."
She laughed.
"Unfortunately DHARMA didn't have the best movie selection. Star Wars or Casablanca?"
"Star Wars," he nodded, ankle on knee.
"How did I know you would say that…"
She put in the tape and sat beside him. They didn't need to say anything. She felt the heat from his body and realised something.
Juliet Burke was comfortable.