"Here, you need a gun too," says Sawyer, tossing Daniel a semi-automatic.
He catches in his left hand. What is he supposed to do with this? Sawyer sees his doubtful look.
"What? Don't you know how to fire one?"
"Ummm, no, not really."
"You mean to tell me that they never taught ya'll on the freighter?!"
"I'm sorry. You got anything in beginner?"
Sawyer rolls his eyes and passes a pistol over to him. Now he knows how his Grandpa felt when he was clerk-turned-soldier in World War II. He actually remembers him telling him about a mission to save a soldier named James Francis Ryan. Grandpa didn't know how to fire a gun either, something he always regretted, he said.
"Let's get in the car. We need to go now," urges Sawyer and he's shaken out of his memory.
The gun feels weird in his hand. This hand was meant for pencil and pen and paper, not weaponry. Dan starts to believe in history repeating itself, in more ways than one. He starts to recall more to the story. His Grandpa, Corporal Timothy P. Upham, was chosen by Captain Miller to look for the soldier who had lost his family. It was a day, he vowed, that he would never forget.
Just as he's about to hop in, they're spotted. Horace and someone else Dan doesn't know wants to know why they're up so early and what's behind their backs? He stays frozen, tries to step forward to explain what they're up to in a half cooked plan. He doesn't remember to hide his gun. When shots are fired, everyone is scrambling to get into the Dharma version of a Jeep. He feels a bullet graze his neck. It burns.
Sawyer drives as fast as lightning until they reach the forest. Jack goes into doctor mode and examines his flesh wound. It's nothing, he assures, putting a band-aid over it, You'll be fine.
He launches into an explanation about being variables in the master plan and that everything is chance and what happened might not have actually happened and that everyone can still die. He tells Jack and Kate that he needs Jughead and he's going after his Mother. He tells them, once again, that she's the only one that can save them. He steps out of the shrubbery, telling Jack and Kate to stay down. Dan tells them that he sees Richard. Maybe he'll know where Eloise is.
As he carefully walks out into the open, gun up, he thinks again about his Grandfather's story. He had told Dan that he had only ever killed one man, that nameless, feckless German. The one who savagely, brutally, and fatally stabbed Private Stanley Mellish. Dan hoped that it wouldn't come to killing, but if he had to, he would shoot Richard.
"Richard, where is Eloise Hawking?" he demands.
"Have we...have we met before?" Richard asks.
"Sort of...But that's not the point. I need to speak to Eloise!"
"She's not here, so just put your gun down and we can talk."
"No! I need to see her now! I'll shoot!" He doesn't know how to use it all that well though
Daniel is beyond listening to reason. He is so focused on the task at hand that he doesn't even hear the blonde come up behind him. Her own gun raised. And then...POW! A shot is fired and he drops to the forest floor.
"I-It was you? Y-you knew, an-and you s-sent m-me back any--way? W-hy?" he chokes out, realizing that the blonde is his Mother.
She doesn't respond, just stares down at him questioningly. She doesn't realize that she has made a terrible mistake yet.
As he lays there, gasping and shuddering in pain, he thinks one last time about his Grandpa's story. He, Daniel Faraday, was going to die in battle. The battle of good and evil, Dharma and Hostile, Ben and Widmore, on and on and on it goes. He hopes his Grandfather will think that he died honorably.
