Chapter of Dreams

This is the last night you'll spend alone,
Look me in the eyes so I know you know
I'm everywhere you want me to be.
The last night you'll spend alone,
I'll wrap you in my arms and I won't let go,
I'm everything you need me to be.

- Skillet, "The Last Night"

--

"So, um...do you like cats, or dogs?"

The two of them were seated together, Hurley resting one hand on the arm of the couch. His other hand was interlaced with Libby's; she was sort of half-sitting, half-sprawled, leaning herself against his side. Playing on the television was one of those classic lowbrow comedies that everyone and their brother has seen half a thousand times: Caddyshack, or The Jerk, or maybe Groundhog Day. Whatever it was, it was a guy movie, and he doubted she was actually paying attention, which was alright with him, because he wasn't, either. He was too focused on the feel of her hand in his, the way she seemed to try and sink into him when they watched films together, and all the questions he was still trying to work up the guts to ask her.

She took a moment to think it over. "Both," she finally answered, "but I think I like dogs better."

"Me too," he agreed, and she looked up and over at him to find that he was smiling. She smiled back before snuggling her head against him once more. "I like the little dogs, chihuahuas and other ones like that. I'm not picky about breeds. But I like the small ones you can, like, pick up and hold in your lap. They're really cute." He wasn't concerned about how that might reflect upon his masculinity: Libby was a shrink, and she would know better than to pay attention to that stereotype.

"They are cute, but I tend to prefer the big, friendly dogs—labs or retrievers, mostly. They'll be everyone's best friend, but if their owner is in danger, they'll protect them with their life. And they're so much fun to play around with. I think they're just as adorable in their own way, and they're so eager to just be around you."

"Oh," he said, and they were silent again for a half a minute or so before Libby laughed aloud. "What?"

"I was just thinking," she said, squeezing his hand, "about what kind of dogs we like."

"Yeah?"

"It just hit me that maybe our preferences say a lot about us."

He glanced down to find a mischievous grin on her face. "How?"

She slapped at his arm playfully with her free hand, as if to scold him for not getting the joke. "About us as a couple."

When she put it like that, it only took him a second or two to realize what she was implying. "Dude!" he laughed, mock-indignant, and pretended to push her off him. She only laughed harder and tried to push him back. "Not gonna work," he teased, nabbing her and holding her still against him with one arm. "A big dog and a little dog get into a shoving match, the big dog's gonna win every time."

"Who says?" She grabbed his arm and attempted to lift it away, but he merely employed his other arm to help keep her down.

"The big dog."

She kicked and squirmed around for a while before huffing and resigning herself to her fate. "Fine, you win. This time."

"Told ya." He placed a kiss on the top of her head. "Have you been paying attention to the movie?"

"No," she confessed, settling her back more comfortably against his chest. "And I don't think you have, either. So next time, I get to pick."

"Crap. I should have at least pretended like I was." He injected false despair into his voice, to make it seem as if he dreaded her taste in films.

"And that is how the little dog wins," she declared triumphantly.

--

"There is no way you've never heard of this movie."

"You can keep not believing me, but I have absolutely no idea what it's even about." She had somehow obtained a DVD from Blockbuster. He assumed that she got it the same way she bought some of their groceries, but he didn't ask how. It was one of those things he instinctively knew she wouldn't be able to answer, and bringing it up would just lead to another argument. "Are Harold and Maude supposed to be like Bonnie and Clyde, or Thelma and Louise?"

Having just placed the disk in the DVD player, she grabbed the remote and plonked herself down on the couch next to him. She seized the case he held, and whacked him gently with it. "Neither. And I'm not going to tell you about who they are like, or it'll spoil the whole movie." She grinned at him, winking. "I forgot that this came out before your time."

"You couldn't have been old enough to watch this then. Whatever it is, I know you didn't pick out some Disney cartoon."

"At least I was born before it was made," she shot back, selecting 'play movie' from the on-screen menu. "And it's not a kid's movie. It's a love story."

"Are you subjecting me to a romantic comedy?"

"Do you have any faith in my cinematic taste? No, of course not, although it would be the perfect payback for that buddy comedy we had to sit through. This is simply a love story, and I think you'll be able to appreciate it."

The titles started up. "Do you want me to make us some popcorn or something before it gets going?"

"We're going to be laughing and crying too hard to eat anything. Trust me."

He had severe doubts about the ability of some old movie about two people in love to make him laugh or cry, but he shrugged and settled back to watch it sans popcorn anyway.

--

By the end of the film, he had to wipe the tears from his face.

"Did you like it?" she inquired gently, wiping her own eyes. "No matter how many times I see it, it still gets to me."

"Yeah." His voice was gruff, and he cleared his throat to banish the tears from his voice. "It was awesome." The depressed and troubled kid finding his true love in an joyfully enigmatic older woman who was running out of time...Libby was so tender sometimes that he could hardly stand it. The ending, although beautiful, wasn't something he wanted to dwell on. Maybe not all the Harolds in the world wanted to let go and live life without their Maudes. Maybe if that Harold had been crazy enough to see people that weren't there, he could've brought his Maude back, too.

"Yeah," she agreed, repositioning herself to face him and tucking her legs up underneath her rear. "Yeah, it really was." Both of her hands found a perch along his forearm, and her lips found safe harbor against his.

--

It had been a few days since they had watched Harold and Maude, and Hurley had taken the time to think it over. How long had Maude and Harold known each other in the movie, anyway? Hadn't it only been a week? Yeah, that sounded right: they had met and fallen in love in only seven days, and then Maude had died. Harold was young and immature, but he had known it for what it was, and was ready to propose to her that very day. He told her how he felt before she died. They had even made love, soaking in the afterglow and blowing soap bubbles.

Harold might have barely been a man, but Hurley thought the kid had gotten a lot more of it right than he himself had.

That's when he decided that his current inertia just wasn't going to cut it anymore. He had wasted his first chance, and he would never be able to make up for it no matter what he did...but maybe, just maybe, he could show her what he would have done, if he had only known. He only wished that he wasn't scared to death of trying.

So one day, as Libby sat at the kitchen table reading a book, he came up behind her and bent to wrap his arms around her shoulders.

"Hurley," she laughed playfully, laying one of her fingers inside the pages to keep her place. "What is it?" When he responded by placing a kiss just above her collarbone, she started, her jolt sending the paperback out of her hands and skittering a short distance across the linoleum floor.

"We can't." She pulled forward, pushing herself against the table, and he released her, startled by her reaction. "We can't do this."

He looked at her, arched over the table with the errant hairs that had escaped her ponytail hanging in her face, and shook his head. "This isn't one of those rules you talked about, is it." He stated this more than he asked it, knowing already that he was right.

"No." Her voice was low and hollow.

He chuckled half-heartedly, backing away from her. "I guess I should've known." A hand reached up, entangling itself in his kinky locks as he held the side of his head. "I mean, a girl like you, and a guy like me..." He didn't want to believe that she had lied to him that day on the cliff's edge. She had stepped right up to stand there by him, even though he was acting crazy and willing to pitch himself over the side, even though he could have easily taken her down with him. Maybe she really had taken a liking to him, enough to initiate a kiss and hug him and hold his hand, but it wasn't the same when the lights went down and the clothes came off, was it? When it meant that the two of them would be pressed together, naked as they were born with nothing in between them, the whole game plan changed. He felt gutted, of course, but he shouldn't have honestly held out the hope of it happening.

"It's not like that. It's not that I don't want to, you have to believe me."

"Oh yeah? Then why don't you tell me what it is like, Libby?" Against his better instinct, he found himself getting angry. He knew that she had come back from the dead to spend time with him, and to watch old movies, and cook for them, and sit with him; and he should have been grateful, but at that moment he wasn't. Instead he felt jerked around yet again, this time by the one person whom he had come to trust wouldn't put him through that.

"Can't we just stay like this?" she whispered, still hunched over the table. "Like we are right now?"

"We're not like anything," he protested. "We're not going anywhere."

"I know you think you want this, Hurley. But you don't. It might spoil everything, and I want the time we have together to be happy."

The way she said that, as if their days together were numbered, chilled him. "It wouldn't spoil anything." He moved forward again to lay a hand on her shoulder. "I...I like you a lot, Libby."

"You like what you know of me," she said, and she began to shiver. "If we do this now, you'll hate me even more when it comes time for me to go."

"Hey," he said softly; she seemed so frightened, and her attempt at an explanation worried him. When he drew her close and enfolded her in his arms, she didn't object. For the first time in his life, he was glad for all his bulk as he tried to make her feel warm and safe and protected. "You're not going anywhere, so you don't have to worry about that. And I swear, no matter what it is you're trying to get at, that I could never hate you."

"You need a real relationship, with a real live person. You can't expect me to stay here with you for the rest of your life. It isn't healthy. This is a stage you're going through, like the stage before your last painting. The time will come when you don't need me to be here anymore."

"I'll always need you. I don't want you to leave me, ever again."

"You're not always going to feel that way. And that's okay! Grieving is a process, and little by little, you'll be able to let me go. There's nothing wrong with that. It doesn't change the way you felt about me."

"The way I feel," he insisted, stressing the present tense.

"Doing what you're asking of me, right now, it would only make it harder for you to move on. And regardless of whether you want to move on or not, you need to. And you will. When that time comes, I don't want you to think of me and feel pain over who I was."

"Back on the island, when I was gonna jump off that cliff, I said that you didn't know me, and you said that you were starting to." A hitching breath came from her throat, and he turned her around, pulling her upright to look at him. "And when I told you about those two people that died, and about Dave, you didn't run away. Well, now I want to start getting to know you. And I promise," he said, cupping her face this time, "I'm not gonna hate you. I'll always—"

She laughed tearfully, interrupting him and tilting her head. "You're such a good person. You don't deserve...you never deserved any of this."

"Neither do you. You didn't deserve to die. And if you want to wait, we'll wait. I'm not trying to, like...force you into anything. I just need to be near you. That's enough for me."

She squinched her eyes and mouth shut, lips trembling, and a few small tears dripped from her lashes. When she finally looked back into his eyes, she only spoke one word. It was only two syllables long, and he had heard it constantly throughout his life from an infinite number of people, but the feeling and power contained in it when spoken by her at that moment moved him. Maybe, he considered, it was the other two-syllable word that she didn't use which was most significant.

"Hugo."

This time, he leaned in to comfort and assure her with a kiss. When her lips parted, he was no longer frightened of how she might react, or if she would leave at some point down the road. The hand that wasn't on her cheek pressed against the small of her back, and she rolled onto the balls of her feet to gain some extra height when she wove her arms about his neck.

--

She had let him pick her up and carry her into the bedroom with her legs wrapped around him, interrupting their kissing only to breathe, and set her down on the edge of the bed. The button and zipper of her jeans were hastily undone, and the pair was off in a flash. She took off her own top, and assisted him when he fumbled with the hooks keeping her bra cinched, but when he tried to slip off her panties, she moved his hands away. He had less than a second to worry about that before she was kneeling on the end of the bed, her hands tangled in his shirt, trying to yank it up over his head. Upon raising his arms she pulled it off easily, throwing it into a corner, but he took a step or two back in order to be able to remove his pants by himself.

Mainly, it was so that he'd have a few seconds just to look at her there, naked, on the end of his bed. She was perfect: he was entranced by the way the soft filtered light from the window played across her pale, slightly freckled skin, the softness promised by her breasts, the curving angles created by her lean form as she shifted position. Now he had the image of a body to pair with that of her kind and gorgeous face, and didn't have to wonder anymore. For a moment, he could almost imagine that they had both been rescued together; that they'd bought this place together and been a couple since their first kiss, with no cruel death to tear them apart. That's how vibrant and wholly alive she looked.

Even in loose boxers, his stiffening was apparent, and he couldn't help it: he smiled awkwardly and blushed, and she laughed at him, though not unkindly. "C'mon, take 'em off." He gripped the waistband and stepped out of them, leaving them discarded on the floor. She didn't react badly to seeing him undressed—quite the opposite, in fact. When he tried to peel her panties away a second time, she raised her legs to make it easier for him.

Impulsively, he leaned in to place a kiss in the blonde thatch of her pubic hair. She took his hand and tugged him closer, but when it became clear that she was trying to pull him onto her, he hesitated.

"It's not like I haven't done this before," she breathed, her voice husky. "You're not going to hurt me. And even if I hadn't, nothing can hurt me anymore."

It wasn't like he hadn't done it before either, but this was different. She was different, and he wouldn't take the chance. Ignoring her assurances, he laid himself down on the bed beside her and gently grasped her hips, maneuvering her until she was atop him and straddling his body as best she could. She laid both her hands on his chest, running them upwards until she gripped his shoulders. Her touch was hungry and frantic but not robbed of its inherent power to soothe.

"You're not forcing me into anything. I want you to know that right now." Pressing against him with her hands, she lifted her lower body off of him and settled him inside of her with a pleasurable, hissing intake of breath. All of his fears and insecurities melted away in the face of what was happening, and the last part of him that had still been afraid of getting hurt was able to accept her feelings. There would be no foreplay this evening: they were greedy for it to happen there and then. They grasped each others' hands, clutching intensely, and she began to rock herself forward and back.

It was the sweetest thing he had ever experienced, despite the fact that he was no stranger to the act itself. He felt powerless in the wake of her sensuality for the first few moments, just lying there, but soon joined her in the rhythm by rocking his pelvis in time to her thrusts. For a moment, he was almost afraid that this wasn't Libby at all: it must be Diana, wild goddess of the moon and the hunt, come down to Earth to break her vow of chastity at last. Then he was certain it was her, that this hungry and sexual being was his Libby after all, and his adoration for her grew boundlessly. What they had missed out on, back when she still drew breath!

Down there, before arousal, he was just about on the slightly bigger side of average. Now, rock-hard, he nearly filled her. Then he arched his lower body, shifting some of his belly out of the way, and slipped further inside her. She moaned throatily as he began to stroke her g-spot, and her fingernails dug into the back of his hands. They began to rock more furiously, increasing the speed of their thrusting. Hurley could hold back his moans and little snatching gasps no longer. He had to struggle to keep himself from coming right then, so satisfied by her was he. But he held out, determined not to finish until she had come as well.

Libby untangled one of her hands from his gripping fingers and slipped it down between her legs, a scant distance above the place where their flesh met like lock and key. She worked her fingers, teasing and rubbing at the tiny bud of pleasure there, and moaned again, biting her bottom lip. Had she bitten just a little harder, she might have actually drawn blood (if she had been able to draw blood, that was). She managed to hold out and prolong the conclusion for an admirable amount of time, but finally her hips bucked furiously against him and she was coming, crying out. The combination of these final thrusts and the sight of her experiencing la petite mort sent him over the edge, and he released himself in her, crying out as well. Even after his orgasm had ceased, he could still feel her contracting around him.

She laid herself against his chest, too exhausted to bother with removing herself from him just yet. They were both panting and utterly soaked in sweat—Hurley tended to sweat a lot anyway, but for someone so slight she had done a pretty good job of it herself. He ran the fingers of one hand through her damp hair and she sighed contentedly.

He still held her hand in his, and he squeezed it gently, bringing it up to his lips and kissing her knuckles. And finally, he was certain: he could say it without doubt, without reservations, without fear. The time for caution had long since passed. Murmuring it past her fingers:

"Love you."

--

For the first time since she had appeared in the glass, she fell asleep. In the past, if she had stayed into the late hours, she sat up until he fell asleep and was gone by the time he woke up. Now, he held her in his arms as they spooned, and when her breathing evened out, he kept repeating it in his head:

"Love you."

She nuzzled her face against him, her lips tickling his chest. "Love you too."

Maybe the Harolds and Maudes of the world never got happy endings. This Harold, he was satisfied with the happy-enough ending. The agony of losing her couldn't make him regret having known her...she had taught him so much in their handful of days. It still wasn't fair; it would never be fair. It would never be right or okay. But he had known her. And if the seemingly endless mourning was the price of that, he'd pay it a thousand times over.

Unafraid that she might disappear, he finally fell asleep, still holding her against him.

When he awoke early in the morning, she was still there, snoring lightly. He didn't move until she stirred, turning to face him and smiling groggily.

"Hey there."

"Hey."

--

By the time she had stepped out of the shower and changed into one of his clean shirts, he had breakfast on the table: bacon, eggs and toast. She cheerily accepted a plate, and he chuckled as he looked her over.

"You look like you're swimming in that." He set his plate on the table, and seated himself across from her.

The collar of the shirt kept surreptitiously attempting to creep down one shoulder, and she yanked it back up. "It's not really a good look, is it?" She plopped one of the sunny-side up eggs onto her slice of toast and took a large bite.

"Nah, you'd look good in anything." He smiled as he crunched into the bacon. "Or nothing."

"Don't talk with your mouth full," she chided him, still chewing her own mouthful of food and trying to smirk. Eyes wandering, she noticed the thick black rectangle on the far end of the table. "Hey, my book."

"Yeah, I picked it up when I started making breakfast. Didn't check it out though." Hurley grabbed it and looked it over. "House of Leaves...never heard of it." Flipping through it, he expressed a puzzled look. "How exactly do you read this thing?" On many pages the text was tilted diagonally, oddly spaced, structured into shapes, or hardly there at all. Different words popped up in different colors, entire pages were nearly filled with X's or other repeating letters, and in one section, there were multiple boxes of text on each page serving as miniature pages-in-a-page themselves.

"It's a little challenging to get into."

"Shit, man," he exclaimed, flipping the book this way and that. "Are these little blocks of text here supposed to be read in a mirror?" He thumped the book to the table, shaking his head. "Dude, I don't even know what it's supposed to be about, and it's giving me the creeps." Trying not to dwell on it, he took a long sip of his orange juice.

Libby retrieved the book and riffled through the pages. "Damn." She pushed it aside, and stabbed at a piece of bacon with her fork. "Lost my page."

--

The question came to him one day, out of the blue. Once it did, he was amazed that it hadn't occurred to him earlier; it was such an obvious thing to ask. So he just blurted it out:

"Have you, uh...seen Charlie?"

She kept her back to him, arranging some fresh flowers in a vase upon the kitchen table. They, at least, had a mundane origin: he remembered what she said about liking the flower he had laid upon her grave, and came home with a bunch of fresh ones from the local florist. None of them were red this time, however: it just would have been too sad. "Why would I have?" Her tone was conversational, but maybe a touch too calm.

"Because, you're both, like...dead." He had told Libby about what had happened to Charlie on their first night together again.

"He's been visiting you, then?" Tilting her head to inspect the arrangement from a different angle, she raised the scissors and carefully snipped off a rogue sprig of baby's breath.

"Yeah. Unless I'm, you know, imagining all of it." The fact that she hadn't yet tried to dissuade him from thinking this about herself was troubling to him. In life, she had gone to great lengths in order to prove to him that everything happening around him was real. Maybe it was another one of those rules she had mentioned—perhaps he had to take it on faith, or it would be meaningless.

"Not all dead people congregate in the same channels, Hurley. Not even if they knew each other in life. Charlie was your visitor; I was Michael's. That's why I couldn't just come to you of my own free will."

He didn't know exactly what she meant by 'congregate in the same channels', or by assigned visitors, but he thought he understood the gist of it. "Oh." Why Michael? Why not me?

"I haven't seen Ana since it happened, and we died in the same room. She wasn't even that far ahead of me." She stood back to admire her flower craft. "I have talked with the young blonde girl from your camp, even though I never saw her alive. So it's not entirely random, but it's not perfectly organized, either."

He didn't even realize that his mouth had fallen agape. "Shannon? You've seen Shannon?"

"Yes. She hasn't managed to contact her person yet, though. She has a message she needs to pass on to him."

Automatically, he guessed that Shannon's person was Sayid. He turned out to be correct. "What's the message? Am I allowed to know?"

She stayed in silent thought for a beat or two. "Yeah, I think you would be. If she can't contact Sayid, I think she'd rather somebody hear it than leave it unsaid." The scissors were back in her hand again as she moved in to trim several wayward leaves. "The message is 'Please don't forget me. Bring me home'."

A little piece of Hurley's heart broke. He had dwelled almost constantly on the living people he had left behind, but now he considered the bodies of the dead, buried in a ground both foreign and unnatural. Boone, Shannon, Mr. Eko and Ana-Lucia. Charlie, his friend, whose body must be still decomposing somewhere in the cold and dark of the ocean. Even Libby, she who stood here before him now, was really still back there. Without even the simplest of caskets, the weight of all the sand pressing in against her body, wrapping around her face and suffocating

"Have you seen anyone else?" she inquired, snapping him out of his guilty and morbid reverie. Snip, and a wilting little bud fell to the table. "Dave, I mean."

His answer came fast, snapping at the heels of her question. "No." Insistent. "Not since you saved me. Never again."

She placed the scissors on the table before she turned towards where he sat, slouched in one of the kitchen chairs. "Hey, hon, I was just asking. I didn't think you actually would have. I have faith in you." Fluidly, she sat herself in Hurley's lap, one arm around his shoulder and the other hand placed against the softness of his chest. "I told you that I believed you could change. I was telling the truth."

Her lips met his in a tender kiss, and his hands went up to cup her back. When they pulled away for air, she was smiling. Tucking an escaped lock of hair behind his ear, she began to recite a short poem.

"If you steal her once,
steal her twice,
or free us with a glance—
for an only child is the only chance
to end this wicked curse—
the only way, we say
you rid a sea with dance
and banish love to verse."

"Whoa." He was impressed by not only the sound and flow of the poem, but by the fact that she had remembered it so clearly from whenever and wherever she had learned it. "Where did that come from?"

"That book. The one you said was giving you the creeps."

"Wow. Maybe I was wrong about it, because that was really nice."

"It is," she agreed, and before she moved in for another kiss, she had one more thing to say: "But you weren't wrong."

--

He had been having weird dreams about Libby ever since she'd returned, some good and some bad. That night's, however, was surreal and frightening enough to stand out above all the others.

He was racing up an enormous, sprawling staircase—each step had to be at least twenty feet wide, and it ascended so far into the sky that it was impossible to see where it ultimately lead; when he looked behind himself, he couldn't see where he had come from. The staircase was open, exposed to the world without even a railing, but he wasn't afraid. The individual stairs were solid enough, but appeared to be made of water that was somehow thicker than it should be, which in turn looked like it held galaxy upon galaxy of nebulae and stars. With every step, ripples spread somewhere below the flat, glassy surface of the stair, as if he had dropped a stone into a pond. And although he couldn't see his destination, he knew what it was: he was going to the underworld—which in this case he supposed would be called the overworld due to his upward climb. He possessed no instrument, neither harp nor lyre, but he was Orpheus

(or free us)

all the same, and he was going to bring her back. Granted, he had no idea how this would be accomplished.

But screw it. He'd figure it out once he got there.

In this dream he looked the same, but he was much more agile and athletic. He was running without feeling out of breath, and he wasn't sweating. In fact, he felt like he could go on forever, and managed to keep up his steady clip until he came upon the first bodies.

There were two of them, so old that they were little more than yellowed bones and scraps of rotted cloth, with their brittle hands clenching small pebbles. Somehow he knew that he had no business with them, or they with he, and he moved nimbly to the side without so much as a nervous shiver. There were more ahead, and as he ran further and further ahead, he noticed that they seemed to be slightly more recent deaths. Among them were large groups, and these were the ones he took the most notice of: here was a group of what he assumed had been men, because the clothes they wore resembled those of old-time sailors; there was a massive pile of bodies tumbled down many a stair, both male and female this time, wearing decrepit khaki jumpsuits with their skin shrunk tight across their grinning skulls and a little of their hair still clinging to their scalps, dry and fragile and straw-like. Then more individual bodies appeared, and a small group of corpses dressed like priests. When he reached the group beyond them, he finally began to twitch in building fear.

They weren't newly dead by any means, but they still seemed somehow fresher than the ones before, the remains of shriveled eyes still crumbly in their sockets. They were dressed in colorful clothes, modern clothes, and just a foot or so away was another group dressed in the same. One male body still displayed the colors of the angry infection that had conquered one of his legs, and in that loose and somehow both sensical and nonsensical way that exists in dreams, he thought: His name is Donald, and she buried him.

He shivered, gritting his teeth and jogging right on past.

She buried a lot of people.

There was a man with his head cocked at an unnatural angle, a few people with their skulls bashed in, one man with a crude wooden spear jutting from his chest, and more he didn't recognize. Then Ethan Rom, that strangler of friends and kidnapper of pregnant women. There were one or two, perhaps even three more bodies with names he would have recognized but not necessarily counted as friends before he reached the gruesome little conga-line. He thought, distantly, that it should have chilled him, but instead it made him overheated, as if he were running in a sauna. They were spaced unevenly, but the distances between them were not large: a young male with a crushed leg, a heap of dried and desiccated flesh rendered unrecognizable, a female with smartly-cut blonde hair and a bullet hole marring her fashionable shirt. With the exception of Arzt, these bodies looked more human than skeleton. There was something still wet about them, although no fetid liquid decomposition seemed present. And although he knew them, he had no desire to slow down and spend any time in their grim company. He had a Eurydice

(you rid a sea)

to save, and so he left Boone and Shannon behind him and continued upwards.

He had a short stretch in which he encountered nobody he could recognize, and it soothed his nerves. When he saw the two bodies up ahead, still too far away to make out their details, he realized that he should have known. There was no way he could not have known, not with the way this staircase had worked so far, but this was a dream, and nothing functioned the way it should—not even his thought process.

They were almost close enough to reach their dead hands out and touch one another, just three or four steps apart. The first one, dark haired, with a single bullet wound; her body better kept by the sand it had been buried in than wet soil would have been able to afford. The second, blonde, dull fingernails looking like scratched plastic. Her face had been smoothed before burial, but you would never know with the way her skin had withered and dried, drawing her jaw down in a horrible rictus. There were the twin holes in her green shirt, the spots of curdled and flaking blood that she had choked up on her collar. Her body was drawn back by her shriveled muscles: she looked as though she had died trying to bend herself in half backwards, arms cramped and hands like talons.

Eurydice was here, and the story had lied. There was no lord of the dead to plead a case to, no trial in which he was forced to not look back. This was the truth of death: it was final no matter what, even if old tales promised an exception for the heroic or talented or magical. There was no magic verse to sing and play. Just stiffening and rot and eventually being forgotten. His own body heat became so intense that he felt as though he might throw up.

He went to his knees and cradled her, her milky sunken eyes staring blindly through him. She was so light in his arms, so fragile, and she smelled of dry corruption and stale places. Strands of her hair fell out as he cupped the back of her head. She was dead, and whatever had made her Libby had gone and left a shell of bones and dried meat, but he wouldn't leave her alone. If that was all that was left of her, fine. He'd take her back with him and bury her properly, secrecy be damned. She deserved that much.

Rising with the bundle that had been Libby in his arms, face determined, he turned around. And as dreams often do, this one changed locations. He was atop some gargantuan structure, cold wind howling in his face, and as he turned, he had taken a step over its edge.

His arms pinwheeled, struggling for balance (he no longer held anything, much less a corpse), and although he screamed to himself not to look over the edge, he did so anyway. Like the stairs, what he stood upon was so tall that the bottom couldn't even be hinted at, instead melding into an inky black as it descended eternally. Jagged, razor-edged cliffs rose around it, and he had no doubt that the ground was just as capable of tearing him to shreds.

Finally, he obtained enough purchase to jerk himself backward, falling on his ass with the very tips of his feet sticking out beyond the edge. He scrambled backwards like a crab with his heart pounding at a sprint, trying to calm himself and catch his breath. He was seated upon black stone, and as he glanced around, he noticed that all he could see of it was seamless, seemingly carved out of a single, impossibly titanic piece of rock. Then he saw the rooms, the extensions and impossible branching corridors that extended from the surfaces around him kept above, below and around, and he realized that he was on the outcropping of some maddeningly intense skyscraper. No, this wasn't modern enough for that name. It was some kind of tower.

"You don't want to be here."

It was her voice, and he scrambled to his feet, turning around. She was dressed in flowing white, like the proverbial elf-queen from so many fairy stories, but aside from that she looked the same.

"What is this?"

"It depends," she said, walking past him to stand at the edge of the outcropping and stare into the horizon. "It's been described in a lot of different ways, and it doesn't really have a form unless someone is experiencing it. Not a form we can grasp, at least. There are two descriptions I enjoy, by two different writers, and each of them leaves room for interpretation. The tower was the least frightening of the two."

"Least frightening?" he said, and he found that he had to yell it - at some point a distant but horrendous cacophony had started up, sounding like the shriek of metal on metal. "What was the other one?"

"A house." She turned back, and noticed the skeptical look on his face. "Honestly, that one is far, far worse...although some of its influence seemed to creep in here, in an inside-out fashion." She indicated the structurally impossible twists of outcroppings and enclosed corridors. "This is still mostly the tower, although I visualized it as tall enough to prevent a view of the bottom. I didn't think you'd want to see that. All those roses, when you're far enough away for them to look like one featureless mass...it looks like the earth is bleeding to death."

Hurley had absolutely no idea what she was on about, but it seemed too organized and specific for him to have created it on his own. Furthermore, something about the answer had made him realize that none of this was real. "So you're really in my dream right now? I'm not just imagining you're here?"

"The part of you that dreams is here," she said, and he noticed that he could hear her quiet voice just fine above the din. "Likewise, the part of me that dreamed is here."

"That doesn't make any sense."

"Did you expect it to?" she asked, smiling. "It's a dream, after all."

"But dreams usually make sense, like...when they're happening."

She shrugged. "You seemed to think it was making sense when you were running up all those stairs and there were bodies everywhere. You weren't even really surprised to find me among them." His face paled, and his mouth worked to say something. "Don't feel bad, and don't apologize. You can't help what you dream about, and besides, that's pretty much what I look like by now."

It hurt too much to follow that avenue of thought. "You told me why this place looks like it does. I still don't know what it is."

She nibbled her lower lip. "It's really, really hard to say. I don't think there's actually a set definition for it."

He was tired of bullshit excuses, half-answers that just confused him more. But instead of asking about this place again—knowing that he would cease to be here upon waking—he chose to ask something that he had subconsciously avoided before.

"What's your last name?"

Instantaneously, the screech emanating from the sky grew more frenzied, harsher. "You don't want to do that, Hurley," she said, looking all around with wide eyes.

"What's the worst that could happen?" He yelled, getting angrier. "I'll just wake up!"

"You said that before, and it almost got you killed before I talked you out of it." She took another step towards him. "So let me talk you out of it again: don't ask questions like that."

"Questions like what? Like anything that would let me know who you are?"

"The answers would break the spell." Her countenance grew mournful, and his anger abated just slightly.

"If you told me anything, you'd have to leave?"

"If I told you everything, yes. If I only told you some things, no. But you'd want me to anyway."

"I already told you that'd never happen."

"You only feel that way because you can't even begin to imagine how deep this goes."

"I trust you, Libby. So trust me."

She gazed at him with sad eyes. "I do trust you." They were silent for some time, their eyes locked, and in the end Libby looked away first. "You might not remember any of this when you wake up. If you eventually do, you might not remember it right away. I might not even remember it. But when you do recall this dream, and you're ready for the first part of it...ask me about the boat."

A niggling feeling was rattling around somewhere in Hurley's mind, a connection there in two pieces that had not yet been assembled. Some part of him knew what she was talking about; now if only the rest of him did. "What boat?"

She merely stared at him, an unreadable expression on her face.

"Libby, what boat?"

Slowly, she raised one finger to her lips in a shushing gesture. She shook her head.

And that's when the wall behind her exploded.

It wasn't as if a bomb had been set off, no: it was as if the stone itself was water breaking from a dam. Seemingly liquid rock rushed towards them, pouring out from the impossibly angled dead-end corridors, but before it could reach Hurley, it snaked into lightning-fast tendrils that wrapped themselves around Libby. She was lifted into the air as they began retracting into the wall, fast as a tape measure when the button is released. It might have been his imagination going out of control, but he thought he heard bones snap as her arms were crushed to her body.

"LIBBY!" he screamed, already chasing after her, but it was no use. She was sucked into the structure, leaving no trace behind, and the wall remained solid for him no matter how hard he pounded on it. He beat his hands bloody as he screamed for her, skin peeling and hanging, but he could not get to where she was. He would always be too late to save her.

"Libby," he whispered to himself as he fell to his knees, his dragging hands leaving patchy streaks of blood that shone against the black rock. He fell silent, and that's when it registered: the cacophony of shearing metal had ceased entirely. Had, in fact, done so as soon as she placed her finger to her lips and warned him to be quiet. Suddenly, he was positive that someone or something lurked behind him, and turned one hundred and eighty degrees, flinging his back to the wall.

A mere split-second before he would have caught whatever it was in his sight, the tower gave a mighty lurch and the floor cracked beneath him. Whatever might have been there—if anything at all—had disappeared, using the shift as its chance to take flight. He tried to lunge forward, but the crack spread, and then suddenly the entire tower crumbled beneath him. He had one exhilarating moment of hanging in space before he began hurtling downwards.

The breath was snatched from his throat and he bit his lip hard enough to draw blood, but he found himself unable to close his eyes. He revolved in the air, falling an impossible distance; and looking down, he spotted her.

She was twenty or so feet below him, her body stretched out and her arms reaching up towards him. There was one nail in each of her eyes, stuck right through the pupils, each formerly green and perfect iris red with busted veins. The resulting blood was spattered across her gown, and her mouth was frozen in an expression of surprise that was halfway between a gasp and a grimace.

Two nails, he thought distantly. Just two pieces of metal, and that's all it took. Before he could even begin to reach out to her, he began to gray out. No! If I wake up now, I won't remember.

Crazily, his muddled mind began to argue with itself. If you keep dreaming, you'll hit the ground. Don't you die in real life when you die in your dreams?

I don't care, the first part of him countered. Then, he could have sworn a voice that was not a part of him answered...and it sure wasn't any part of Libby, either.

IT'S NOT UP TO YOU

As if thrown back into wakefulness by some unseen hand, breath half-caught in his throat, Hurley jerked out of sleep. He rocketed into a sitting position, cold sweat soaked through his shirt, his underwear, his pillow, even the sheets below and atop him. He shakily placed a hand over his face as the pale and shallow light of a very early morning washed over him. The dream was rapidly melting out from between the fingers of his consciousness, and he tried desperately to keep his hold on what was left. He wasn't quite sure why, but he knew it was important he remember this.

"Hurley?" Libby mumbled from beside him, her speech muffled by the cotton of sleep. "Whas' wrong?" She sat herself up beside him slowly, tiredly, and gently drew his hand away from his face. When he still refused to speak, she cupped his face and turned it to look at her. "Wha'is it?"

Looking into her face, he received a shock just substantial enough to make him forget everything he had dreamt. She had been crying in her sleep, salty tracks still wet on her cheeks, and it must have been hard enough to burst two or three blood vessels, because her eyes were badly bloodshot.

There's something I'm supposed to remember. This shouldn't have made me lose track of it. It should have reminded me. He groped invisibly, trying to catch the fugitive recollection before it got away.

"Hurley?"

It was no use. "I don't remember," he said hollowly. "I don't remember."