Title: Blueprints.
Rating: PG
Ship: None, really. Hints of S/S.
Summary: She's stored that part of her life away, rolled it in a tube beneath an old coat and two boxes of out-of-season shoes. Post-series, Shannon POV.
She remembers in flashes, disjointed bits of life that never add up to anything whole.
She was sitting on the beach and the sand was cold, too cold for this place, she wore two shirts and an airline blanket and still it wasn't quite enough.
She was digging in the earth and it was hot, too hot, air so thick she could barely feel the sweat on her skin, rivulets running down in the dirt on her legs. She was digging, digging because it was all she could do, digging like the only thing that mattered, but for what? She can't remember.
She hates dirt beneath her fingernails. She hates dirt anywhere, and this is what bothers her most. It must have important; it must have mattered somehow.
But she only remembers the digging.
She was standing in the rain and the tarp wasn't doing much, it just channeled the water into thick streams that fell into the cave and ran across the ground, soaking the food. She was holding all her clothes in her arms, holding them off the ground.
She was sitting beside a man with warm skin, her arm was bare and so was his, and who was he? She remembers only the skin; if she touched her arm, she thinks it would be warm still.
They told her it was natural, told her it made sense. A fever, they said. Drugs, they said. Ever taken hallucinogens? She snorted. You think I'm going to answer that?
And so she sees in flashes.
She has a tube in her apartment, and no one knows it's there. She has a piece of paper rolled up inside, thin tracing paper like blueprints; she writes on it in pencil. She pieces it together alone, late at night, when she can't sleep. The timeline is not right, and it never has been, but she tries to place the flashes.
Some of it she remembers well. She hasn't been on a plane again. There was a helicopter from the rescue boat to the hospital, she was told, but she wasn't conscious for that. She remembers chaos and screaming and turbulence and blackness – blackness and warm sand beneath her cheek.
She remembers the first days, gathering food and finding clothes and hoarding the only decent hairbrush. She remembers French translations and asthma and the smell of eucalyptus in the air.
She remembers fear. She remembers being truly afraid, for the first time, how it caught her off guard and felt nothing like she had imagined it would. It was not panic, pressure crushing her chest and blocking the air, it was much worse than that. It felt like vertigo, like the world had slanted and everything was somehow wrong.
It felt like falling.
She doesn't remember much after that – only the flashes. Bright and dark, the scent of thick mud, the feel of cold water from the stream. Fruit with the skin still on, meat too fatty and hot off the spit. Her stomach rumbled; she threw it up.
He told her to eat again.
She got a phone call once, late at night. The connection was bad and it crackled and scratched like she thought it only did in old tv shows. She only said hello once; maybe she heard voices on the other end, maybe it was only background noise.
She knows who it was, or at least thinks she knows, and that's certainty enough. It's better he didn't speak, better the line went dead. He's nothing more than part of a dream; the kind of thing that could never happen in reality.
(Which, perhaps, is why it happened, in that unreal place.)
They buried her brother in a quiet spot near the beach, on private property where they could keep the paparazzi away. They were everywhere, then, reporters and photographers and agents wanting interviews. She still gets the calls, occasionally, someone dogged enough to find the unlisted number and the new city. The story is too old for reporters, anymore, mostly writers looking to do a book or a treatment and scholars looking to do a PhD. She blows them all off, sometimes after leading them on, tells them no with words she knows they won't print in the paper.
They buried him and her mother wept and her father cried and she was silent. She was done with him, through, and she lied even about what little she could remember. Better they didn't know, better they dreamed. Better he remained who he had been, not what he became.
She got a subpoena once, just before the trial. She threw it in the trash with a credit card application and a department store ad. There's probably a warrant out over that, somewhere, but so what? Just one more state to fly over.
She hears about the others occasionally, bits and snatches she mostly tries to avoid. She knows enough to be sure none of them live here; this city is safe, cool with glass and steel and anonymity.
She doesn't want the accident, doesn't want the chance. Doesn't want to run into one of them at the department store or the end of the bar or somewhere crossing the street. She gets phone calls occasionally – answering machine messages about birth and death and people feeling guilty enough to dial. She doesn't answer the messages, and after a while they taper off.
They haven't gone away completely; she's afraid they never will.
She's stored that part of her life away, rolled it in a tube beneath an old coat and two boxes of out-of-season shoes. She only takes it out late at night, only when she can't sleep, unrolling it across the table and plotting the flashes across it like scattered stars.
The rest of the time she's normal; the rest of the time she is her. Her father said she should have changed, her mother said she should have grown. (Her brother said nothing; he never will, and she cried for that, twice, when she was alone.)
Normal is safe, flimsy and needless, with nothing to plan beyond the immediate day. The only change is the money, more regular now, and the men, more rare. The cash is nice, guilt money and blood money pushed into her hands. The men are less so, but she never keeps them long enough to notice. They're a lacquer, a façade – something to seal the surface and coat the corners. It's all she needs, really, a polish and shine. She stays away from the family, doesn't come home too often or stay too long. Doesn't let them watch her spend and watch her squander and watch it all drift away.
She's always looked better from a distance, she knows: bright and vibrant and unlined.
She saw a man on a street once, here where that accident is never supposed to happen. It was his posture, perhaps, or his gait, something enough to catch her attention, less than a memory, more than a flash. He was standing outside her building, standing with hair that shielded his face, then he was turning and walking away. Then he was a part of the crowd, swirling and pulsing and moving at its own pace. She wonders whether it was real, wonders whether it's her eyes or her mind, wonders what she swallowed last night.
She feels her still-warm arm, and wonders if it is the press of his skin she remembers there.
She unrolls the paper that night, flat across the table with four mismatched glasses to hold it down. She empties a mechanical pencil and switches to bright blue pens. She makes the notes neat and small, next to each dot, each flash. She crosses them out and begins over again.
When the sun hits the first glass, she knocks it off the table with the back of her hand. It shatters, no problem, one more task for the maid. The paper rolls in; one corner, and then the other, and she's stuffing the whole thing back into a tube again. She's cold, too cold for this place, even with two shirts and a blanket around her shoulders.
This is what she fears: that the dark spots have a reason for being dark, that it's more than bad jungle weeds hiding beyond the edges of her dreams. But she knows the numbers already: deaths, injuries, accidents, breakdowns. (Hers included.) Someone filled those spots in, a thousand someones, in every news headline for all the world to see. She knows the worst, then, doesn't she? That people are craven, and broken, and dark. She learned that long ago. So what more is there? What more is there for her to see? The flashes are frustrating; the flashes are infuriating.
The flashes are safe.
She puts the tube away, packs it deeper this time: behind a box of paperwork from the accountant and a bag of bad Christmas gifts she forgot to return. She throws away the stub pencil and two blue pens. She scrubs the ink off her fingers and fixes her nails, puts on new clothes and pulls back her hair.
This is life, her life, the way she keeps it. Everything at a distance, everything at arms' length: bright and vibrant and unlined.