(A/N: Set mostly during "One of Them," 2x14. The Dendrobates auratus tree frog shown in the episode has skin secretions which can cause hallucinations.)
Chapter 1: My Friend Dave
It was Rose's idea to throw a big party and give away all the food in the Swan Hatch pantry, but she didn't mind one bit if Hugo took the credit. After all the jars, boxes, and cans had been distributed (or so everybody thought), after the beach camp castaways had bedded down by their fires, Hugo lifted a hammer and saw from a Hatch storeroom. He crept past an oblivious John Locke, too distracted by his own preoccupations with the station's whirring computers to notice Hugo sneaking out of the Hatch.
You sure don't need wood around here, Hugo thought as he sawed away. Bamboo grew everywhere, and it did just fine. He cut down one long straight pole after another, unable to slow down his racing thoughts.
Kate and Jack had disappeared right after the party. Maybe they'd stolen away to one of the rooms in the labyrinth-like Hatch, or maybe they were making love in the jungle. Not that Hugo blamed Jack. Kate was hot, even if Hugo didn't go for the Natural Born Killers type himself.
Sayid was probably getting some loving tonight, too, but who knows. On her best days, Shannon acted like a beautiful grenade ready to go off in your face. Now nobody could keep track of her moods, not even Sayid. One moment they'd be all over each other, spurring people to grumble that they should get a room. The next moment Shannon would fight Sayid like a wild cat, then switch back to tender again.
Now Shannon was saying strange things, and seeing them as well.
Maybe he should tell Shannon that he'd seen a few things in his time too, but Hugo set that thought aside right away. Sure, he'd told Jack he'd been a psych patient, but doctors were supposed to keep that stuff secret, right? Shannon would tell the whole beach, though, and if that story got around, nobody would trust him with anything again. Anyway, Shannon thought he was a slob, that was obvious.
Not that she was wrong.
Hugo sighed as he carried his bamboo poles to a woodsy copse near the Swan Station's back door. The path was hard going, and Hugo stumbled more than once over fallen logs and loose rocks which shifted underfoot. A grinning crescent moon hung high in the sky as Hugo cobbled together some crude shelves. Tears came to his eyes, and not just from the occasional smack of a hammer.
The makeshift bamboo shelves were done. Now it was time to stock them.
Even his hammered fingers couldn't divert Hugo from the force which pushed him onward, leaving him almost powerless. The higher the crooked moon rose, the faster Hugo moved at his task, almost tripping as he toted cans and jars from the Swan pantry, weighed down by his backpack and his own compulsions.
A moment of clarity struck him. This really sucks. Why the hell am I doing it?
In the days following the plane crash, Hugo had been so ravenous that his teeth ached. He would have stuffed anything in his mouth: sedge grass, tree bark, unripe fruit. Even so, in the throes of near starvation, something had changed inside of him. Something was missing. At first he chalked it up to being genuinely hungry for the first time in his life.
But after his body had gotten used to the fish, the unusual tropical fruits, the eggs, the coconuts, his gnawing hunger had died down to mild nagging emptiness. A single dried octopus was delicious now. Enough was enough. The urge to mechanically eat until near-unconsciousness had disappeared.
Hugo wasn't a reflective man and didn't often put his thoughts into words. All he knew was that a low constant ache had vanished, one which you didn't know you had until it was gone.
After Locke blew open the Hatch with dynamite, the urge was back, if not quite in the same way. Before, Hugo had eaten openly, even when his mother yelled when whole boxes of cookies disappeared, or when he packed away a twenty-piece bucket of hot wings.
He placed jars and cans carefully on the bamboo shelves, arranging them just right. Other than finishing off a few Apollo bars, he hadn't even opened the ranch dressing or peanut butter. Simply knowing that the jars and cans rested in their jungle hiding place gave him a nauseating sense of excitement. The hiding brought more pleasure than the eating itself.
Hugo slid a few treats into his backpack, then slipped back into the Swan Station through the rear door. Now it was his turn to sit in front of the Hatch terminal and wait until the counter reached 108 minutes. Time to "play the numbers," as he put it to himself.
When the buzzer sounded, Hugo typed in the fatal sequence, fighting off the sick feeling of wrongness. Locke's glance might have traveled from Hugo to his backpack and back again, but Locke said nothing. So Hugo eventually drifted off to sleep in front of the computer terminal, exhausted from having traded the weight of his first burden for one heavier and even more strange.
Two weeks later the beach camp was in turmoil. Never a dull moment on Craphole Island, as poor Shannon would have put it. Only now she was dead. Then last night, Sawyer had managed to steal every weapon from the Hatch's entire armory, and no one could puzzle out how he'd pulled it off.
In the morning light, the beach camp huddled hushed and quiet. People whispered in small groups, darting glances over at Sawyer, dropping their eyes if he looked in their direction.
Hugo was sick with fear that Sawyer might lose his temper and shoot someone, the way Ana Lucia had shot Shannon. So he skirted well around Sawyer's shelter and headed for that part of the jungle where no one was supposed to go.
No one would follow him, because they were all afraid of the French chick.
Hugo wasn't. For one thing, Rousseau liked him. Not only had she given him a battery when he'd asked her for one, but also a long hug topped off with an awesome kiss. Sure, he'd tried to catch her eye a few times after that, and sure, she ignored him. That was the story of his life, wasn't it? Girls might make out with him behind closed doors, but stepping out with him to the Troubadour for a concert, that was another story.
Rousseau was hot, though. Too bad she was 31 flavors of crazy and a baby-napper besides.
In any case, it was easier to muse about Rousseau than listen to the inner fragment of sanity which insisted that something was wrong. Hugo pressed all his will down on that small spark of reason, trying to shut it up. Just like he'd done for the past two weeks.
From high in the canopy a couple of loud bird calls rang out. He'd first heard a bird like that on a trek to the Black Rock, before the smoke monster showed up and all hell broke loose.
Today it sounded like a whole flock of them. Up in the canopy they called out to one other in those long syllables which sounded just like his name.
As Hugo moved deeper into the jungle, the weird bird cries vanished into silence. In a shaded clearing Hugo plopped onto carpet-soft moss and unpacked his backpack. He stared at the cans and jars spread out all in a row, then compulsively opened and closed every tin, arranged the Apollo bars and chocolate cookies in a line, touched each pickle and olive jar. In pride of place he set a half-gallon tub of Dharma Ranch Dressing.
Overhead, tree limbs hung heavy with fruit, unpicked because not even Kate would stray this far from the beach. Maybe mango would slide down well with some of that ranch. He plunged one slice after another into the white, sticky mess, but mango made a poor substitute for chips, and the combo tasted pretty disgusting. He kept on eating anyway, relishing being alone, hating it at the same time.
In the forest, crouched over the foul-smelling jar of salad dressing, seized with weird compulsion and pleasure, something inside Hugo reassured him that he needed this. He was owed it. Hadn't he done so much for everyone over the past two months already? Think of it as payment. He was due.
He began to muse. In his mind's eye Claire sat next to him as she wrote in her blue leather-bound book, while Hugo soothed baby Aaron to the tune of the crashing sea. The silence between Claire and him wasn't one of those strained ones where no one knows what to say, but the peaceful kind where everything is in its proper place, and all the pieces fit.
Well, if Claire saw him at this moment, he could kiss that idea goodbye, because she wouldn't come within ten feet him, for sure. Look at what had happened when Charlie's heroin-tooting habit got displayed all over the beach. Now Claire wasn't even speaking to him.
"Liars," was what she'd shouted to Charlie. "I won't have any liars around my baby." Well, Hugo had to be the biggest, fattest liar of them all, didn't he?
Just as bad, Sun had almost caught Hugo resupplying his backpack from the secret shelves in the copse. Then again, what was she doing all alone in the woods herself, far from the beach? He'd offered her a candy bar, but she glared as if he'd handed her a rotten fish.
Hugo was glad Jin was back safe and sound, even if Hugo's nights weren't quiet anymore. Sun and Jin's tent sat right next to his own, and now it was full of small midnight cries and soft noises. Sun would gasp, then let out a drawn-out sigh, followed by Jin's louder, deeper conclusion. Each morning Sun would emerge from her tent and walk to the sea with long, liquid movements, her face glowing with love.
It was pure torment.
As if things couldn't get any more bizarre, a couple days ago he'd been doing laundry in the Hatch when that tall, lean Tailie named Libby had put on a purple sequined shirt right in front of him, and hadn't taken it off since. He tried to keep it light, but whatever he said to her always seemed to come out wrong or not good enough. Also, this weird familiarity surrounded her, like a lyric resting on the tip of your tongue, but you just couldn't place the song.
He was still puzzling it out when a familiar voice sneered directly into his left ear. "Women. Mooning over 'em's just a waste of time."
Hugo gave a little start. He had to be making it up, wasn't he?
Dave. From the mental hospital. Who Hugo had thought he had banished. But maybe not.
The voice went on, and now Hugo couldn't deny that it was Dave speaking clear as a bell, as if he sat close beside Hugo as they used to in the hospital.
"Take your buddy Sayid there," the voice went on. "What's love done for him? Dude almost went postal on you when you gave him Bernard's radio. The fights, the tears, the drama... Man, believe me, they're not worth it. Hump 'em and dump 'em, that's what I say."
Nobody was hiding nearby in the vacant jungle. Of course not. Hugo knew the drill, how it started. First you hear voices. Then you start talking back to them. And if you're really unlucky, the voices grow faces, bodies. Before you know it, you're stuck in your own private Idaho having energetic conversations with the walls.
He ate another mango slice and decided OK, he'd play along. What the hell. "So, Dave, what happened to you getting out of Santa Rosa and banging hot chicks? Change your mind?"
"That's right, bro, hot chicks, not like the skanks around here—"
"Shut up," Hugo said, and amazingly, Dave did.
All at once, a tiny peeping sound piped up right in front of Hugo. He squinted into the dappled forest shadows as a small creature leaped across his field of view and landed on the log directly at his feet. The tiny frog chirruped again and fixed Hugo with an eye black as a jet bead.
Without thinking, Hugo reached out his laden hand towards the creature. "Hey, little buddy." White gluey sauce dripped from the mango chunk onto the log. The frog just chirped, ignoring the offering. "I guess you want flies or something. Sorry, little dude. You're gonna have to catch your own."
It was a pretty thing, green as an emerald with deep violet-black patterns across its head and back. Hugo's nightmare of compulsion slid away from the chirping piebald jewel as if repulsed by it. He saw himself in a cold, merciless light, hiding and ashamed, hand sticky with white residue.
What in the hell was wrong with him?
The frog chirped more frantically this time, then leaped onto an overhanging low branch. Another chirp or two, and he could almost swear the little thing wanted him to follow it.
Once more the frog cried out, shrill and insistent, and Hugo thought about clambering to his feet, but hesitated. If he went after it, he'd have to leave the food. There would be no time to gather it up and stuff it back into his pack. "Damn," said Hugo, stricken and unable to act. The frog darted away into the trees, peeping loudly as it dove deeper into that neck of the woods where none of them were supposed to go.
Might as well dip another piece of mango into Dharma ranch dressing, whose label read, "Fully hydrogenated. Shelf-life seven years without refrigeration." Hugo was so busy pondering what the hell was in it which made it keep that long, that he didn't even hear someone pushing through the bushes.
Things went from bad to worse. Over him loomed Sawyer, red-eyed and furious.
(continued)