Part 2
"Psst, Annie!"
Annie looked up from her homework and over at the window. It was open, but she couldn't see anything. She got up and walked over to it.
"Sasha?" she whispered, recognizing the voice with the slight Russian accent straight away. "Sasha where are you?"
She heard a tapping noise and looked down. There in the bush below the window crouched a dark haired boy with a pair of lopsided red lips grinning up at her.
The day Benjamin Linus arrived Sasha stole Annie away from her homework at the risk of getting her into trouble to go and stare at the new arrivals. Sasha was banned from talking to them, on account of his incessant questions – why are you here? What do you know about what you're going to do? – the usually shy boy driven by his curiosity to approach strangers and make them nervous when they realised how little they actually knew about the Dharma Initiative.
They'd sat watching with a pair of binoculars from the shore, hidden in a tree with their legs dangling down into the air. They passed the binoculars back and forth commenting on the emerging people and guessing at them. It was Annie who saw the boy their age. She got excited and thrust the binoculars into Sasha's hand, saying how nervous he looked and how they should go and welcome him.
"I can't, remember," Sasha said, and then he looked at Ben and saw that he did indeed look nervous, and even a little sad, but he couldn't help but not like it when Annie said that maybe she should go alone.
His mouth wasn't lopsided when he felt he should do something too and gave Annie the Apollo bar, the bar that he had meant for the two of them to share, to give to Ben, because it was only lopsided when he smiled. To be more precise it sat symmetrically and solemnly in the middle of his rather serious face, a red bar on a white canvas framed in neatly cut black. Neither was it wasn't lopsided when he forced a smile at Annie as he said to say hello from him, but Annie didn't notice like she usually would (and she was one of the few who knew the difference between a real smile and a fake smile from Sasha), because she was thinking about the lonely looking boy on the jetty.
He chose to stay in the tree and watched as Annie slipped down to the ground and skipped off towards the hall where they newcomers were always registered. Annie, warmhearted, curious girl, forgot about Sasha and felt immediate warmth towards this timid boy. His shyness was different from Sasha's, who wasn't shy at all with Annie, and many of those he knew on the island. The small island community suited him and in it he could be confident, though he still wasn't particularly sociable in large groups.
When Sasha jumped down from the tree and wandered back towards the village he saw Annie coming out of a building with Ben, though he didn't know this was the boy's name yet. Sasha felt resentment well up inside of him; Annie was his friend! He was an only child and used to getting every drop of his father's love to himself, and he liked something similar with his friends. He changed his trajectory and made his way to the Chang's house; to a scene that he knew would warm his heart.
Since arriving on the island Sasha had been welcomed wholeheartedly into the home of the Changs. Lara pampered him and listened to his stories, and let him lie on the couch with his feet on the cushions and his head on her lap, which was always covered in a pretty dress of the kind he thought mothers should always wear, and put his pictures up on the fridge with magnets, while Pierre would call him to his office which seemed such a serious and important place – full of knowledge and work – to talk to him like he really appreciated it, and let him tag along on his heels on his pre dinner walks.
They both insisted on him calling them "Lara" and "Pierre", like he was a real grownup, instead of insisting on "Mr" or "Aunty" and all those kinds of names – why should he have to call a person he wasn't related to in the slightest "Uncle"? And why should she be "Mrs" and he be plain old "Sasha", or even "Son", when he certainly wasn't anyone's son but his father's. But, anyway.
Now there was a new arrival in the house, one that might have made him feel pushed out of the house after having such attention lavished on him, but Sasha felt a kinship with little Miles, who'd be four days old that day. He felt responsible, like an elder brother might, and yesterday Lara had let him hold him, gently lowering Miles onto his lap as he held his arms ready to cradle him. He sat there in silence some fifteen minutes – a miracle for a ten year old – and his smile was so lopsided you'd think it was a Picasso if you saw it.