Empirical Evidence
Disclaimer: JJ Abrams owns them, not me. I just play with them.
Rating: PG-13 (violence, language)
Word Count: 2210
Summary: In the end, it all makes sense.
I don't want to swim the ocean
I don't want to fight the tide
I don't want to swim forever
When it's cold, I'd like to die
- "When It's Cold, I'd Like To Die" Moby
In his dreams, he is running up the steps of a stadium.
He dreams of racing across the sand, leaving dust in his wake. He dreams of airplanes that stay in the air and women that say 'I love you' and mean it, and he dreams of the taste and burn of alcohol and his father waiting at the top of the stairs. He dreams of what it means to have proof; in his dreams, this all makes sense.
She dreams of highways she will never travel on in cars she has never seen, singing songs of Judy Garland, and the rain has no reason to be feared. She dreams of grocery stores and shopping malls and beauty salons and Christmas lights and she dreams of the men she'll never meet and the children she'll never have. In her dreams she's far from here. In her dreams she was never here.
His hands are shaking.
He holds his head within his hands, and his hands are shaking.
He sighs, which becomes a groan, and the random static emitted from the ancient intercom makes his head buzz.
He doesn't know how to count the days here. All he sees is green and all he smells is the sea. He doesn't know how to count here and his hands tremble against his skull.
His hands are shaking.
He blames the soup he never ate and the hunger and the damp and the cold and the exhaustion, but he's been tired before, too many back-to-back shifts, too many surgeries, too many nights spent in a hospital instead of a home and his hands never, ever shook.
His hands are shaking. He's trying not to think about it, but when you're locked inside with a table and some oddly placed chains and a window without a view you really don't have too many other options.
His hands are shaking. And he wonders if he'll ever hold a scalpel again.
There is a pounding on the door, almost too loud considering her seemingly diminutive strength and he wonders how it came to this.
She brings him soup. He won't eat it.
His hands shake.
She was born behind four walls and surrounded by the sea. She was born and named Juliet because times like those her mother read too much and fell in love with things like iambic pentameter and doomed lovers. Juliet will wonder later why a woman would pick a name like this for her only daughter (her only child, and they'll call her second to last among the rest, because then came Karl and then there were no more) and Juliet has read the Shakespeare, but never among the book club, and she has yet to find the beauty there.
She was born on an island and can't see the sea from her bedroom window. She was born on an island and for the longest time, young and confused and completely unsure, she'll dream of tornadoes and ruby slippers and good witches, not bad, and she'll want to believe there really is no place like home.
(Thirty odd years later and she knows these things like the latitude and longitude and the dimensions of the land and she still has yet to call this place home.)
She reads about things like snow and girls named Anne and Jo and Jane and she reads about countries some call mundane but she refers to as exotic. She never reads about Dharma and she never does learn why she's here.
(She does learn she's supposed to love one of these men and the lack of options is almost heartbreaking but there's Ben who calls himself a hero and she's always wanted to be the heroine, but she can't have children either and he doesn't look at her the same.)
She never learns why she's here. She just knows she'll never leave.
Ben leaves. The TV stays, empty screen, silent static. Ben leaves and the quiet returns.
Jack sighs and stretches. He cracks his neck and arches against the wall and hears his father's voice.
"Some people are meant to suffer. That's why the Sox will never win the Series."
Jack doesn't even like baseball.
Bush is still president, Superman is dead and the Red Sox won the pennant.
He doesn't believe it.
They take him away, later. She takes him away after she shows up, blood-spattered, against the window, and he assumes the worst and finally moves and he's not sure what it means if disaster and death are a motivator for him, but he leaves his corner and he follows her into an operating room.
She dies anyway. She dies and Juliet tells him that the woman's name was Colleen.
He doesn't think he's supposed to care.
(He knows he doesn't care about Colleen, it's Her that gives him pause and he sinks to the chair without question as the cold snap of metal fills the room, the handcuff hanging heavily off his wrist.)
He wonders what she was thinking when she picked up a scalpel. She had never done this before, she had told him as much, and her eyes were wide and finally scared and he didn't like it as much as he thought he would.
He sits there, handcuffed to a gurney, a corpse for company, and it's morbid and it's wrong and he shouldn't feel bad that this woman didn't survive. He shouldn't feel bad that he couldn't save her, he shouldn't care – but he does and it's strange because she's strong and she's smart and she's quiet and she doesn't need him, she doesn't need him, but that doesn't explain what he feels with the daily creaking opening of his cell door.
(He watched her try to save a life and if it's possible he felt something like respect, something like camaraderie, something like desire and the room is silent and sterile as he waits.)
He waits and watches out the door.
His hands are shaking.
She was born on the island and her mother died when she was ten. Her father spent his time Over There, on the second island, in the hatches she wasn't supposed to know about.
They count the years the same as the rest of the world does, and they celebrate New Year's Eve and drink champagne and her birthday comes every November and every year the birthday wish is something the same.
(There's no place like home there's no place like home there's no place like home.)
"You alone will never escape," she states and the phrase is awkward, the tray of food cooling between them.
He laughs at her, throws in an "oh yeah? and how's that?" and her face is still expressionless, save for the muted grin – so condescending and he fucking hates her – and she turns her gaze to the corner behind her (video camera and he gets it, he absolutely gets it that they're being watched) and it strikes him as odd.
She approaches him slowly, purposefully and he's not bound and he hopes she remembers the first time she opened that door because he could have killed her (she could have killed him) and she's right before him, blond hair around them both as she leans in and his breath quickens, pulse spikes, and her mouth by his ear she whispers softly and the words don't make any sense.
"Because I'm going with you."
It's like his dreams, he thinks, as they run down the beach, the sky dark, the stars there, and they run together and his chest aches in a familiar way and the beating of his heart fills his ears.
They run together and he wonders where the doubt is, he wonders why he trusts her and he wonders why he never asked her why she wants to leave.
(He trusts her and as they run he quietly waits for the sky to fall.)
They reach a cliff, they reach a sandy cliff, they slip and slide and out of breath, arm outstretched, she points ahead.
"That's your island," she tells him and he glares at her, sweat dripping down his brow, doubled over, panting.
"That's your island," she repeats, and she remembers mornings when her father went to the docks and took the boat across and then came the day he never returned and they never did tell her why.
"We're not…this isn't…" he stammers and she nods.
You're on the other side of the world, she wants to say. She doesn't and they catch their breath in silence.
"We're going back there?" he asks.
"Yes. We'll go back to your friends, and they have a boat. We'll take it and leave."
They never make it past the cliff's edge.
She was born on the island, and she understands it now. She was born on the island and she'll die on the island, because her mother was right, naming her this, her mother was right and Shakespeare was right and she'd laugh if she could because women really do die for men they love (women really die for them men they love and she'll never leave the island and she'll never leave with him).
She hears the gunshot before she feels it. She hears it and all she feels is strange, detached surprise, because, right now, all she can think of are dinners with Ben, dinners where he told her about the future and things that sound right but maybe don't work that way and she thought what they were building was a utopia, she thought there was a purpose here, but with the springing of a bullet and the blossom of blood across her gut she can't understand how she ever believed him when he said they were the good guys.
(A glooming peace this morning with it brings. The sun for sorrow will not show his head. Go hence and have more talk of these sad things. Some shall be pardoned, and some punished. For never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo.)
She doesn't feel the sand as she falls.
They shoot her from behind and Jack watches – open-mouthed and disbelieving and he always thought he'd be something brave in a situation like this (the lover dies and the hero avenges her wrongful death but they never tell you about the gut-clenching fear that you'll receive the bullet next because even when there's a woman and – maybe – love and definitely despair, you still don't want to die).
"You'll come with us now, Jack," Ben says and there's a woman in the sand with hair fanned out about her and eyes that can't see and she told him to trust her and he did and she died and this – the bullet, the blood, the surf washing up to claim her – might just be his fault.
"You'll come with us," Ben repeats and Jack glares, jaw clenched, because he thought (he fucking believed) that the Red Sox really won and he's such a man to be thinking in sports analogies, but he thought that if they won and the television screen hadn't lied (you can trust me, she said) then maybe hope is real and fate and doom are little more than self-fulfilling prophecies you wish into being and then call unavoidable.
"You'll come," he says and she said "I'll come with you" and the ocean is cold and deep and the sweat stings his skin and he thought that was freedom slicking over his skin.
(The Red Sox didn't really win the pennant – they couldn't have – he wasn't there to see it, but he was there to see his father, dead, and he was there to see Kate and Sawyer disappear and Boone die and Eko wipe the blood off the floor of the hatch. He saw the plane crash and he saw the flames and the gore and the death. He didn't see the Red Sox win the pennant and he didn't see this coming. He saw her die and the proof is there – he saw it – and there's a cold kind of comfort in accepting the fact they're all little more than doomed.)
"Jack," Ben says and there's a boat approaching shore and the rustling of underbrush is enough to tell him they're anything but alone.
"Yeah," Jack replies. "Yeah."
He steps aboard the boat and the guns are unnecessary because there's nowhere for him to run. They're surrounded by the sea, by the island – by fate.
And the Red Sox never won. They never won. And more importantly, he thinks – a gull cries, high tide rushing in, the beach shrinking in the horizon – the Red Sox will never win.
His hands are shaking.
fin.