Danielle walked along the shore toward his tent. Sayid watched her approach, saw the tattered boots that had been replaced with new, freshly shined leather, the drab pants turned to neatly pressed khakis, the tangled mass of brown hair combed and styled, the piercing blue eyes now peering out from beneath long, massacred lashes. The picture was so incongruous as to be almost painful. It was like a mirage that mocked reality, except it was the reality.
He stood with his lips firmly pressed, his arms crossed and resting just below his bare, sinewy shoulders. When she extended him the paper, he reached for it slowly with one hand, watching her expression guardedly.
"Ben has agreed to the terms," she said, her accent now sounding less harsh, more genteel. "You need only sign it."
"Why should I believe he will honor this treaty?"
"You have my word."
His laugh was short, low, bitter. "What is that worth? You have lied to me about everything. You said your husband was named Robert. You said he was dead. You said—"
"He is named Robert. Ben is a nickname. He was a junior, thus--"
"Enough." Sayid took the paper in both hands now and glanced at, but did not read, the terms. "I of all people should have known you were lying. How easily you caught him in your trap." He gritted his teeth together, biting back the anger that rose against himself. "Yet the way you shot him with that arrow…how could I have known?"
Danielle smiled slightly. For a moment, it almost looked like the old, satirical, battle-weary smile of the pretend Rousseau. For a moment. But then Sayid saw the womanly curve to her lips, the knowing twinkle in her eyes. "Well, Sayid, you ought to know that people are willing to suffer injury in order to make a story believable."
Sayid tugged at the sides of the paper, forcing a crisp sound from the page; he looked at the words fiercely and tried to forget his own failure of perception. "The children will be returned," he said.
"They will hate you, you know, for taking them from what they have come to regard as their home."
"For a time they will."
"Why do you think what you are asking is any better than what we have done? The children do not wish to return to you."
He ignored her question and traced his finger down the page to the next set of terms. "We will return those of your men we have imprisoned in the hatch."
"Yes," she said, looking somewhat disgusted at his refusal to engage her argument.
"The mind games and brainwashing attempts will stop."
"Education, Sayid. Education and not—"
"It will stop."
She nodded.
"You will leave us in peace, provided we do not cross the line again."
"Yes." She fingered a gold chain that dangled about her neck. "Of course, Sayid, you could always join us. We would welcome you into our community. All of you. You could enjoy the comforts of modernity; you could be free of sickness and suffering. You would need only ascribe to the creed, and obey the authority of—"
"I think not. Submitting to your psychotic husband is not my idea of living. We will build our home here. We will endure."
"You do not know Ben like I do. You do not understand how great a man—"
"I understand this, Danielle. I understand the misery he has brought to my people. I will sign the treaty, and if your people should violate it—"
"We do not want war anymore than you do. We only wanted to preserve our community, to protect it from outsiders."
He shook his head. "Surely there were better ways to do that than playing dress up and kidnapping and brainwashing people." He took the pen she had handed him, pressed the paper against his thigh, and bent to sign it. "There is no one to enforce this," he said.
"There never is," she replied. "But a written law has the advantage of being passed down to future generations." Her smile was contemptuous. "You could keep it on display for your children."
Sayid closed his eyes slowly. He did not want to consider the idea of future generations continuing a small, isolated society on these shores. But he knew now rescue was impossible, and already they had begun to repopulate the island—after months of intermittent warfare, Sun had given birth to a daughter, Aaron was nearly a year old, and Kate was pregnant. The kidnapped children would join their ranks soon. Civilization would grind on, even here. He handed her the paper.
"I will bring your copy tomorrow," she said, "along with the children. The adults we took the first night have chosen to stay. So has Jack, as you know. He will marry Juliet."
"You have a strange concept of choice."
She shrugged. "Just because it required education to persuade them of the virtues of our society does not mean they did not choose. After all, Kate and Sawyer chose to return."
"We rescued them before you could—" He swallowed hard. What was the point of conversing with these people? He clicked the ballpoint pin to retract it and turned it in her direction. As she reached for it, her hand brushed against his, and he felt himself shudder. All of the pity he had once felt for her…all of it was false. He felt naked, betrayed, lost, as if a thousands masks had just been violently ripped from a thousand faces. It was a terrible feeling; it left a raw ache in his soul, but at least the shroud of mystery had lifted, at least truth, however strange or ugly, had penetrated the fog of uncertainty that had so thickly coated their lives.
And although the hope of ever leaving this island had dissipated like smoke, now they could finally entrench themselves; they could build for the future and not for the moment; they could begin their lives anew.