So this was meant to be the beginning of a longer story, but my brain has made it clear that isn't going to happen any time soon, so I'm posting as-is. Hopefully it's not too bad.
When they landed in LA there was so much to do – too much to do. A pilot lands a plane held together with duct tape and there's going to be questions. When that plane is only carrying six people, including the pilot, there are even more. Add to the mix that only one person besides the pilot was on the original passenger list, three of the other passengers have been thought dead for years and there is no record of the final passenger anywhere – well the result is a mess. They were all taken to a 'secure facility' to be questioned, questioned again, then questioned some more. When they were finally deemed free to go, they were bombarded by the press every time they left the house for weeks. There were funerals for friends to be attended and families to console and weak attempts to forget how devastated those families were. There were tearful meetings between Claire and her mother, and tearful farewells between Kate and Aaron, and a private plane that was chartered to take them back to Australia. Then it was over, and there was nothing, and Sawyer was lost.
One had to appreciate the irony, he thought, that he was more lost off of the island than on it. It couldn't be denied. He was used to life in the pacific in 1978. In LA, 2010, he didn't know which way to look.
"Cheers," he muttered to no one in particular, raising a bottle of beer to his lips.
Honestly, he didn't know what he had expected. He was hardly the sort for sitting around singing kumbaya, but everyone disappeared faster than he had anticipated. Claire and her mother took Aaron and went back to Australia. Kate sobbed alongside Jack's mother at the funeral before heading off to Ohio to visit the grave of someone named 'Tom'. Miles had cashed in big time – apparently he had scooped up Nina and Pablo's stolen diamonds back on the island. He kept in touch, calling every week or so. He was searching for a place with the lowest possible number of dead people. Lapidus was still flying, because apparently the ability to fly a plane held together by duct tape is an attractive quality in a pilot. Richard stuck around long enough to pay his respects before heading off to find himself – a process that was more important when you had a limited time to do it. And Sawyer... well, Sawyer was sitting in a hotel room drinking god awful beer. It was going to be his last night in LA, he was heading to Miami to look for Juliet's sister. The problem was he had no idea what he would say.