"These days are smoking days
Though he won't see,
(deceived me) You deceive me
(with you) Erase it I will not
(to stay) Touching a helix (didn't she know Alex?)
(I will plead) Blotting an excuse you
(Alice, Alice, Alice, Alice, Alice)
would share,
(Alice, Alice, Alice, Alice, Alice)
who shall
(Alice, Alice, Alice, Alice, Alice)
replace
(Alice, Alice, Alice, Alice, Alice)
you?"

- Cocteau Twins, "Alice"

April 23, 1941

I know you must think the very worst of me, love.

But to-day I sit here on the flagstones, turning my face toward the weak London light not at all like that strange light on the island, remembering. Charles has gone off somewhere again with his friends, not like on the days I could steal away and go hunting frogs with him in the streams and all sorts of other nasty things little-boy hobbies with him.

They grow so quickly, don't they? And after all, some days I still with the knowledge that I spent more time caring for your little boy than my own. I never even told you about my boy. Did you know? You flinched as I told you my married name, just for an instant before the mask stole over your face again. No, I never told you about him. How could I have?

So what kind of a mother does that make me, love? Less of a mother than you? No. We'll both send our own boys off into war when their time comes. I know it and you know it.

Maybe you'll think differently once you have Widmore blood in your line, too, although somehow I doubt that.

Really, the problems began after you returned from the other camps, wearing those dreadful dungarees you never took off. You acted as though fighting was beneath you, but the more I asked of you, the less you asked of me.

I do miss those days, really. I could still pretend that things were honest between us. I know you didn't really trust me anymore after you returned, but my God, how you wanted to. I could feel it, I could.

"If I ever see you again, I'll kill you," you once told me. You already proved yourself wrong once.

And so I'm off to-morrow to see you, you know. No, of course you don't know, how could you? Me off to 2030, to seek yet again the treatments of the future. For all the good it'll do. And to see you in Victoria Station, if I can find you. You and I suppose that husband of yours, that American bloke. Jonah's father. I never could see that. But the pain keeps getting worse. Worse and worse and worse, coughing up blood in the mornings like some tuberculositic nightmare and hiding it from Robert, from Charles. You have no idea what that's like, do you? You don't care about the island's abilities anymore. Not once it got you what you wanted, your sister cured, you and your son out of the rabbit hole. Selfish, selfish, selfish.

What am I supposed to do now, my boots hidden in the closet, the worn leather shriveled up? All the mud is dried out and crumbling and still I've never cleaned them. Nearly fired Agatha for even trying. Rattling around in this big house, getting my affairs in order, filling up that locked filing cabinet for when Charles comes of age. He is going to find you, of that I am certain. In 1954, you and that fellow of yours.

And here I sit, wearing a key around my neck once again, feeling the drag of metal against my breastbone. What colors go best with a key, love?

The sense of humor is supposed to be the last thing to go. Somehow I'm not quite sure that's the case.

Everything is set, has been set for so long, will always have been. Do you know how brutally unfair that is? Do you know what it's like to be on the losing side of history, on the losing side of my own life? You told me you'd already seen my grave. And yet if you'd spit on it, I wouldn't blame you. And yet I was supposed to destroy you. Oh, the ways the island manages to twist everything into something beyond comprehension. You and I, of course, tried to laugh about it when we could; you trying to explain e-mail and me with our flapper haircuts: the simplest ways we could find.

I admit there were some days it felt good - having that kind of power over another human being, especially in that place. The day we cut our hair together, the day we began to match, I thought I had already won. I thought that, too, the day we found you, the day He pulled you back into your body and the three of us stood over you: He, Ben and I before we went our separate ways, me to wait for you back at the camp. But of course, I wasn't expecting to care about you. Spend years getting under someone's skin, inside someone's mind, you would be shocked to know the kinds of things that can happen. How much I hated you. How much I loved you. Who brainwashed whom?

And yet, still I hope. I hope and I hope and I hope.

You really have no idea, love.