Disclaimer: do not own Lost.
[1]
She comes-to in a tree with two dead people belted into a seat and dangling too precariously to live for long. She shifts trying to get free and falls instead.
She likes to think it was decapitation, this first death: dramatic, fast, and absolute.
[2]
She appears in the ocean next, spitting and sputtering salt water with people screaming and a plane sinking. She can't tell up from down and almost drowns, then she's dragged to shore by someone and left alone.
So she sits there, watching, and breathing. (Mostly breathing.) She stays like that until a blonde wonders her way. When asked if she's alright, she laughs and laughs and laughs and says: "I might just be crazy, you know."
"Oh. Well," and the blonde is giving her a small smile that could mean anything. "I don't know. This whole thing is pretty crazy."
"You don't understand. This isn't real. It can't be. I've never even been on a plane!"
The girl moves quickly and punches her arm. "Feel that?"
"Yes I felt that!" She's gripping her arm as if it hurts, but is more startled than anything. "What's wrong with you?"
"Pretty real then?"
"It just doesn't make sense. None of this does. Maybe it's a fever dream- a coma?" Hannah looks at her companion and asks: "Am I dead?"
"Well, I could hit you again, if you'd like. See if that answers your question."
It's a sharp breath she takes, says: "It wouldn't." She feels more than pain, after all. Warm sun and sand and breeze; she smells- well, needless to say her senses were processing this place like any other.
"Then I wouldn't worry about it. You feel pain well enough. Best to think it's real and you're alive."
"Right."
"Of course I am. Now that the existential crisis is over, how do you feel?"
"Don't know. Feel odd. Bit sore." She sighs. "I'm fine though."
"Name's Libby."
"Hannah. Nice to meet you."
Libby leaves, but later they've gathered around a large bond fire made from drift wood. It's too hot, really, igniting the air so it's uncomfortable. She shifts, slowly, carefully, and focuses on the conversation.
It's introductions, mostly, a who's-who and what-do-you-make-of-this thing.
It isn't hard to pick out familiar names. There's Ana-Lucia and Mr. Eko and Libby Smith and Bernard. There's a flight stewardess and nouns like Australia and Oceanic and numbers she doesn't want to think about.
She doesn't know the others because they wouldn't live long and their stories were over before they had begun. And it is a story, their lives, as imagined as this island. An eight-hundred page anthology she read once upon a class in pre-grad, it had been long and confusing and post-modern in execution.
It's insane. It's absolutely insane. She doesn't say much of anything after that, just lies down on cooling sand and watches as the sky turns dark and the Milky Way shines.
She falls asleep with a stitch in her side and a rattle in her chest. When she wakes it's because she can't breathe.
There's pain in this death, it feels like she's swallowed freeze-dry ice and there's a panic to drowning on dryland that lasts for far too long.
[3]
She's on a beach that's more shore-line with an engine spinning somewhere to the left. She's there for less than a minute, hunched over and taking in precious air with an ease she's so very grateful for. Only she's standing very much in the wrong place at the wrong time and there's a loud noise and fire and impact.
[4]
She'd not said anything to anyone the next go around, just sat on the beach as people made their way to relative safety. Same group of people, (Libby, Ana-Luica, Mr. Eko, and Bernard,) same motions as before, but when she sleeps it's without pain and she wakes to shouting and taken survivors and dead shoe-less men. In the morning she goes into the jungle, doesn't make it past a seat she's died in before she's stopped by Ana-Lucia. Hannah points up to the trees and mimics eating an apple, she gets her point across. She's given a 'good idea,' but nods in acceptance when the ex-cop says its best to stay together, even when foraging.
She contributes, going with this group or that group, and in the light of a burning signal-fire she listlessly weaves fern leaves together. It starts as a daisy chain and grows, sloppily, into the ugliest hat ever seen. It amuses the kids, for some reason, and Hannah has an odd few nights of trial and error with fictionalized children playing copy-cat.
They make enough ugly hats for almost everyone.
Then the children are taken and Ana-Lucia pushes them all into a mid-jungle trek and when Nathan is tossed into the pit unconscious, so is she.
[5]
She's been flung onto a hard sharp surface and salt water has drowned her leg. She says nothing, not to the nameless few and not to Libby (or Eko or Bernard and absolutely not to Ana-Lucea and the man who killed her last). She laughs, or maybe cries, but it is silent all the same and nothing more than air pushing from lungs because she's lost the ability to make sound somewhere between last death and this life.
She walks slowly, carefully, with a branch to help her along. She weaves hats for the children and tries twisting long hanging vines into wobbily sacs to carry fruit. Nathan goes into the pit; she does not.
"Here," says Bernard, who has taken to caring for her like a wounded thing, and helps her stand. Brake's over, Ana-Lucea had told them; they are almost at another beach with three strangers who have given hope.
What she remembers of the two groups meeting doesn't take place; nobody is shot, nobody dies. Their journey had been too fast or too slow to catch two lovers at picnic. They are welcomed, like family seen only at reunion, and settle in for the night of fire-side story telling.
Still, she should have remembered the manifest and survivor's paranoia. They put her in a small room for questioning. Only she doesn't know, doesn't know, doesn't know and couldn't say even if she did. She is in solitary, but treated moderately well. They feed her at regular intervals and she has a bed to sleep on while she waits. She is given a bucket. She is not touched.
Sayid comes in, from time to time, and watches her when he asks about the Others. Where are they? What do they want? She remembers only the end, with two brothers fighting and Hurley proven the heroic main character, remembers a jumbled time line and character arc that is an exploration in human nature.
What he gets from her, she doesn't know, but he says he believes her. She watches him like a weary thing that says she does not believe him.
Sawyer wakes up, Kate takes an interest, and someone somewhere finds her passport. She is lead to the beach and settles in. Life goes on.
Benjamin Linus stumbles into a hunting party and is dragged into a small room with a bed she had slept on. Michael reappears. Life goes on.
She's in the hatch with Rose and a pile of laundry needing more than industrial soap when Michael comes in. He says he's sorry.
[+1]
Hannah is walking in a crowd feet carrying her forward without thought, the echo of a gunshot death chilling her. She is holding an uncapped bottle, new and clear and processed filtered water, and looking at the proof of civilization. She's in a food court, large and filled with high ceilings. She feels dizzy, and relieved, because she's not on the island, not on a beach, and maybe she can just go home.
Then someone steps on her left heal –"watch where you're going" she is told- and stumbles into a shoulder. She looks up and knows she won't be going home.
Boone does not stay to help them, even as he takes the blame for Shannon. (He will not think of this of the beach; Shannon never cared.)
Sayid knows her as a kind pedestrian, who apologies with wide eyes and a helping hand of napkins pulled from messenger bag. "No harm done," he assures her, patting his arm dry. (He will repay this kindness on the beach, they are not quite strangers anymore.)
Kate notices her while boarding, as she's being pushed about the Marshal's hand almost bruising her arm, but only in the way of someone idly planning to use her as a distraction. They are similar enough it might work, if only for a few seconds. (She will not admit this to anyone.)
Jack meets her on the plane sometime after take-off, the result of awkward legs and a small aisle. He helps her stand, but hands her over to the stewardess. (He will ask about her knee, because she went down hard; will tilt her face back and check her for injury and think he misremembered the cut on chin from her fall.)
When the plane crashes, she survives. She goes with it. She helps wounded and builds shelter and gathers fruit and makes friends.
She wonders about the looping, and dying, and if she can make it to the end if it'll all stop or only start again.
Things change, but her memory is vague in exactness to a story that was never her favorite, and so she adapts. She's crazy, but she makes it work for her.
[x] End. Between you and me? I imagine that the +1 sticks.