Hi reader! It's been a very long time since I've written for LOST, and I've literally been coming back to this story off and on for almost three years now. But I think I finally have enough of it written to post in chapters and share with you, so please enjoy.
When I started reading and writing LOST a few years back, there didn't seem to be any full-fledged, multi-chap stories that dealt with what happened to Sawyer, Juliet, Miles, and Jin during their three years with the Dharma Initiative. There were one-shots and snippets of course, some of which I wrote myself, but I needed something more concrete, and thus, this story was born.
It's going to be mostly Suliet, with mentions and implications of other canon pairings. And the first few chapters are going to be expository and pretty slow going, so I hope you'll stick with me, at least for a little while.
So, without further ado, please read and review!
PS- If you're currently reading my work in other fandoms, don't worry, I haven't abandoned you! This was sitting around on my computer and I was just itching to share it with you.
They slept in the rec room that first night, all five of them. James, Juliet, Miles, Jin, and Dan. They rotated from the couch in two-hour shifts so no one ever got a completely awful night's sleep, although Juliet had a theory that the concrete floor and the lumpy sofa had nothing to do with her insomnia. She lay awake at night staring at the ceiling wondering if she'd made the right choice. She knew she'd only agreed to stay for two weeks, but for some reason it felt like the biggest decision she'd ever made in her life. In a way, it was. She'd been trying to get off this island for three years and then suddenly she was offered a way off and decided to stay. Who was she? What had changed?
She sat up from the floor and looked at James sprawled out across the couch. She'd given up the coveted seat an hour ago, as per the agreement, and now just watched him sleep. Three months ago if someone had told her that she would befriend the victims of that plane crash and then choose to stay on the island to help them, she would have laughed in their face. The chain of events was just so comical.
Juliet laughed quietly, but loud enough to make James move on the couch. "Say something?" he grumbled, jerking awake.
"Sorry," she whispered. "Nothing. Go back to sleep."
"Easier said than done," he said, and then turned over and was breathing heavily in ten seconds.
Juliet had never been a heavy sleeper. When she was little and shared a room with Rachel, the lights would go out and she would hear her sister snoring within minutes. But Juliet took a bit of settling to finally fall asleep, and then once she did, the slightest noise, the tiniest rustle made her alert. And that was when she was safe in her own bed. Here, with nothing but a thin Dharma blanket between her and the cool concrete of the rec room floor, sleep was impossible.
She laughed again, she couldn't help it. "I'm sorry," she giggled behind her hand when James turned around, annoyed.
"Care to tell me what the hell is so damn funny, Blondie?"
"Nothing," she said, wiping her eyes.
She heard him rustle around, and she thought he'd fallen back asleep, but a few minutes later she heard his voice come out of the darkness. "Thanks for staying," he said quietly.
She was surprised, but answered back, "No problem."
"Why'd you do it?"
Juliet shrugged. "I don't know."
They fell into a comfortable silence and after a while, James sighed and lay back down again, settling into the couch. Juliet did the same, rolled over, and pretended to fall asleep just as she heard him say, "You don't sleep a wink at night, do you?"
She'd been caught. Smiling sheepishly, she turned to face him. "No, not really."
"Take the couch," James offered, standing.
"No, James, come on. We share the couch. We rotate, all of us. It's not fair if I get it twice."
"Think of it as a gentleman doing a lady a favor."
She studied him, half shrouded in darkness, half illuminated by the moonlight that shone through the caged windows to the rec room. There was darkness in his face, that lean shadowy look that made him so mysterious. But there was light, too. He was honest, she believed that. For some reason, she trusted him. There was something about the hungry look in his eyes that said he deserved at least two weeks' company on this island. Maybe that was why she'd agreed to stay. To make sure she hadn't been wrong about him. To have a victory again.
"Keep the couch, James. See you in the morning."
Juliet rolled over, facing away from him, and shut her eyes, hoping that somehow, she would fall into a gently rocking slumber before sunrise. She didn't, and thought instead about empty docks and questions without answers.
X
Horace came in before it was light. There was the unforgiving sound of metal against metal as he unlocked the door and scraped it open, and then the shuffling of his work boots over the concrete floor.
"Rise and shine, ship wreckers," he called, and Juliet pretended to be waking from some deep sleep. Around her, the guys were rising stiffly from their sleeping places like bodies from graves.
"Good morning. As I understand it, your friend Dan here is getting on the sub and the rest of you are staying behind to look for the rest of your crew."
"Yeah, we'll look all right," James grunted, wincing as he pulled on his shirt. "Don't mean we're gonna find anything." Juliet shot him a look.
Horace didn't seem to notice. "I'll take you to the dock so you can see Dan off, and then we'll see what we can do about getting you some equipment."
They followed Horace through the barracks as the sky glowed with a pink sunrise ahead of them. Juliet looked around, surprised to see that people were actually up and working at this ungodly hour. Men and women dressed in those tacky Dharma jumpsuits walked back and forth between the yellow houses on roads that she would come to know very well in thirty years. Being a stranger in a place she knew so well was disconcerting.
The submarine loomed before them at the end of the dock like some post-apocalyptic leviathan. She was here. She could get on that sub and go home now to… to what? To a world she'd seen through the eyes of a five year old, a place without any of the conveniences of modern society that she was used to? She fit in more here on this rock than she did in the place she'd grown up calling "home."
Juliet glanced up and down the length of the sub, its sleek sides covered with a thin sheen of water. This was some ridiculous trick, some cruel plan the island had for her. She hadn't been able to leave the island when she actually had something to go back to, and now that she'd been transported back in time thirty years, here was the opportunity right in front of her.
"Juliet. Are you okay?" Dan asked.
"What? Oh." She pulled herself from her thoughts. "Have a safe trip Dan." She hugged him goodbye. "Go invent the internet or something," she laughed.
"Take care, man," Miles said again.
They watched him climb aboard, eventually losing sight of him amongst the other workers climbing on. And before they really had time to process Dan's departure, Horace said, "Well gang, welcome to Dharmaville."
