After a lot of goading from my lovely friends at Livejournal (yes, I'm giving you all Juliet's deadly side-eye right now), I bring you the first of "No One Beings Here More Than You: Missing Pieces."

They won't go on forever, but I do have a list of things that never quite made it into the original story. (And makealist, I do have your Dharma-era request on that list.)

NOTE: If you haven't read the original, I suggest you click on my username and find that story, because it's likely that some of these mini-stories won't make complete sense otherwise.

Oh, and since I've already used a whole lotta Miranda July quotes for the original, here I'm using lines from songs I listed to (obsessively) while writing the original story.

Enjoy!

"It's nothing but time and a face that you lose.
I chose to feel it and you couldn't choose."

- Stars, "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead"

Feb. 4, 2008

All day long, he feels like he's forgetting something.

James wakes up from a dream he's just missed remembering, except he could swear in his head that Juliet's crying out for him, over and over. Except she's gone. Dead (no) or missing, still on the island, or who even fucking knows what, and the last six months (ever since he remembered) have been... well... It's just, he doesn't need to get into this shit all over again. His stomach's already cramped up with grief, and he runs a hand through his hair.

Shit.

So he spends the day trying to remember. His research paper's not due until a week from Tuesday, so it's not that, and he doesn't have Clementine at all this week (he double-checked his calendar), and she doesn't have sports in the winter, and the parent-teacher conference was last week.

Miles is coming to visit next week. He needs to send Sun and Jin a baby gift. Maybe it's that? They're scheduled to finalize their daughter's adoption next month, and what with international mail the way it is, he needs to get on that. But two weeks' lead time is more than enough, and anyway he has no idea in hell what to send them for a baby.

Babies. There's another thing he doesn't want to be thinking about. And he definitely doesn't want to be thinking about how he and Juliet had just started trying before Jackass and Company had to come back and wreck all their lives. And now Kate's in the clink and Jackass ain't no better than he was when he'd started off and Juliet's just... just fucking gone.

Some fucking reset.

Now James sits in his lecture zoning out and wishing at least he had his daughter this week. She's the only goddamn good thing in his life, and he's so grateful for it that sometimes it makes his teeth hurt. And, yeah, it's not that he'd truly expected everything to be all perfect forever, back there in the good ol' glory days of Dharmaville, but really... Yes. Yes, who's he even kidding, yes, he truly had. That's what makes it so bad. The thought that maybe he and Jules could have had their own little seventies family, their kid growing up with the same pop-culture points of reference as the two of them had... yeah, it would've been secretly surreal, and he wouldn't have his daughter now, but... goddamn.

Screw this. He's not paying attention anyway. He shoves his books into his messenger bag, pushes his chair out so abruptly that even the professor looks up, but then he's just throwing open the door of the classroom and then he's alone out in the hall and breathing too heavy.

Why had be woken up with Juliet's panicked crying in his head? It was like she was practically screaming out for him, and even as he remembers it now, every hair on the back of his neck stands up.

Where IS she?

For some reason James thinks, then, of reading Slaughter-House Five over and over again in their little yellow house, and Juliet teasing him about it, a time traveler reading a book about a time traveler. But now he wishes he could live in the world of that book, slide back and forth through the good and the bad in life, endure a little, treasure a little, measure out the pain and the joy. Instead of nothing but bad, then three years of goddamn wonderful, and then nothing but this, this, here, now, for the rest of his life.

He doesn't know why he'd thought he could have all that good. He'd done nothing to deserve it. That cozy little yellow house, a home. A gorgeous, intelligent, snarky-as-fuck woman who somehow thought that he was somehow worth her time, someone to be loved, even. And an imaginary, wished-for, never-to-be baby.

Who's he kidding? He's not forgetting a damn thing.

It didn't happen. And it's not gonna.