----Just a little fun with my two favourite girls because i'm procrastinating finishing my other fics.
----Set in Season 3. Though I've decided to make Juliet somewhat of an outcast after she comes to live with the other plane crash survivors at the beach.
Sounds of Silence
1.
The discussion takes place, as always, surrounding her and not including her. No one asks for her opinion, no one addresses her personally. It was something she had become used to since relocating to the beach. No one liked her, no one trusted her, no one wanted her around. And it suited her just fine that they ignored her, treated her as if she didn't exist. It was so much easier to convince herself that she didn't. That this was all a dream, and nothing mattered anymore. And so she sat silently, but not quite untouched by the panic building around her.
"Has anyone seen Kate?" Someone asked to no one in particular.
"Not since yesterday." Someone else answered.
"You think something happened to her?"
"Maybe she just took off some place?"
"Why would she do that?"
"Why does Kate do anything?"
The swirl of voices is silenced for a moment, as no one has an answer.
"Should we go look for her?" Someone finally suggests.
"She'll come back when she wants to." Someone else answers.
"She wouldn't take off, not now, when we've finally got that transmitter working. Any minute now someone will pick up our signal. We're finally going home."
"You're kidding yourself if you think that the thing is working."
"You'll be eating your words when someone picks up our signal and comes to rescue us."
"No one is coming to rescue us."
"We're not going home."
"Do you have to disagree with EVERYTHING I say?"
"Maybe THEY took her." Someone suggests, bring the conversation back to Kate.
"They?"
"The others."
Juliet cringes at the term. All too aware of her own otherness. All too aware of the part she had played.
"Why would they do that?"
"Why not?"
"The others are gone, anyway."
"Not quite gone."
Although no one mentions her by name, they all turn to look at her in that moment. Juliet refuses to look up at them, but she can feel the eyes boring into her. She feels the need to say something after being included in the conversation. And so, without glancing up in their direction, she utters softly, tauntingly "Maybe Kate doesn't want to go home."
They all stare at her, as if she has two heads. Not want to go home? How could anyone not want to go home?
"That's just a crazy thing to say." Sawyer spits at her.
"There isn't a whole lot waiting for her." Jack finally concedes.
"What would you know?" Sawyer demands.
"More than you do." Jack answers.
"Even Jail has gotta be better than dying on this god forsaken place." Sayid interjects.
"That's beside the point, Kate won't end up in jail, She's too smart to let them beat her." Charlie pipes in.
Juliet turns away from their pointless droning on and on. It mattered very little to her one way or the other. She was so sick of Kate. What was so damn great about Kate that had everyone falling over themselves just because she'd been missing a few hours. What was so damn great that Jack and Sawyer were falling over themselves to claim her. Had they forgotten the way she had betrayed them both? Had they forgotten the things she was capable of? Forgotten that she was a cold blooded killer? Forgotten that she evaded capture for god knows how many years? Kate didn't need that bunch of idiots charging off to rescue her.
"What's it to you anyway, blondie?" Sawyer eyes Juliet suspiciously, turning his attention from the bickering crowd.
"Nothing at all." She tells him, and she means it. It doesn't matter one bit to her if she lives here, if she dies here, let alone if Kate lives or dies or whatever the hell they think has happened to her.
"Weren't you the last one to talk to Kate anyway?" Sayid asks her.
"I saw you talking to her yesterday." Hurley agrees.
"At the campfire." Charlie adds.
"That's just ridiculous. Kate and I don't speak." Juliet answers in her own defence. Talking to Kate? That was just insane.
"Oh, so you sayin you got something against Kate?" Sawyer asks
"No more than she has something against me." But even as she utters the words, Juliet can see that they just don't care about the way Kate has treated her. She is an 'other', she has no rights. She is sub human as far as the rest of them are concerned.
"Have you done something to Kate, Juliet?" Jack asks.
Juliet laughs then. "Have I done something to her?" Juliet scoffs at the idea. "Tell me, Jack, what is it you think I could do to her? She is stronger than me, crazier than me, She'd eat me alive."
Instead of looking past her, looking right through her, as if she were nothing, the men are all eyeing her suspiciously now. Even Jack. This, Juliet thinks to herself, is not so great.
"You find this amusing?" Sayid wants to know.
"Not in the slightest, I find it rather dull. If you'll excuse me." Juliet gets up from her place in the sand, her place that only moment ago had been peaceful and secluded. Before those voices had interrupted her tranquillity. Before those men started looking at her as if she were a criminal. She preferred it when she had been invisible to them.
"Where are you going?" Sayid asks Juliet.
"Got some place to be?" Sawyer asks Juliet.
"What have you done with Kate?" Jack asks Juliet again.
Juliet shakes her head, wearily. There was positively nothing she could say to make it any better.
Like it or not, she had to live with these people. They were all stranded here for God knows how long, maybe forever. And if they think she has done something to their precious Kate, then heaven help her. Like it or not, Juliet finds herself as a one woman search party taking off into the wilderness looking for Kate Austen.
Fantastic.