"My heart fell because I hadn't planned anything for my future beyond this meeting."

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"


They're halfway through their flight when James sees that Juliet's eyes have drifted over from Neverwhere to focus on him. OK, so he hasn't quite been paying attention to the Miami Herald crossword puzzle in front of him. "Stuck?"

He leans back in his seat. "Hell no. Way too smart to be stuck."

"Of course you are." Juliet slides her bag out from the seat in front of her. "If you're bored, you can finish this." She pulls out her library copy of A Brief History of Time, smirking at him as he crinkles his forehead.

"I already read the damn thing twice."

"Yeah, but in this decade? Come on, I did all that studying just to be able to understand five percent of what'll come out of his mouth."

"Lemme-think-about-it-no."

"Real mature, James." She smacks him on the arm with the book. Stupid fucking Stephen Hawking. "So, still hate flying?" she asks conversationally.

"Huh, how'd you guess?" He shifts slightly, glances around the plane. "OK, I dunno if this is all that likely to come up at Faraday's tomorrow, but, uh..."

"What?"

"Well, y'know how we all tried to piece together what we could? Faraday was pretty much unreachable for awhile, and there was no way in hell I was talkin' about any of this to the Doc, but I spent some time with Locke, and he told me, uh... Listen, you remember those guys who almost cut off your hand?"

"Funny how you just never forget a minor detail like that."

He gives her a look that translates roughly into, Hey now, I'm supposed to be the sarcastic one here. She raises an eyebrow in response, somewhere along the lines of, Keep dreaming that you're the only sarcastic one. "All right, all right, wiseass. What I'm tryin' to say is that it was 1954, right? One of those guys was Charles Widmore."

She makes a strange face he can't quite identify. Doesn't say anything.

"You may not have ever known this, but believe it or not, Others can play tricks."

"Weird," she finally says.

"An' turns out, Widmore just happens to be the mad scientist's daddy."

That obviously surprises her. "Now you're just making things up to see if I'm paying attention."

"Yeah, well, it ain't like Chuckie's gonna win father of the year. They don't really speak, far as I can tell."

She shrugs. "That's probably a good thing."

"Yeah, well, just wanted you to know, case Mr. Wizard lets it slip or somethin'."

"OK, if we're planning to have confession time -- I should probably tell you that I saw Daniel on the island in 1925."

"You what?"

"Here's the weirdest part -- he was old when I saw him."

Jesus, the things that come outta her mouth. "What?"

"He was in his mid-sixties," she says matter-of-factly.

James shakes his head slowly. What the hell is she even talking about? Maybe he should pick up that damn Hawking book after all.

"Remember how I told you they were bringing them in from all over? Well, the Daniel I saw back there was coming from 2042. And I have this crazy idea that he's about to spend most of the next 29 years working on the stuff I tell him this weekend."

"So he can eventually go back there."

"At least if 'whatever happened, happened' can hold."

"Let's hope, I guess."

"You know there's going to be some things tomorrow you haven't heard before, right?" she asks gently.

He nods.

"I might ask you to leave. If I do -- please don't get angry."

He doesn't try to hold in his frustrated sigh.


Juliet can tell by Daniel Faraday's tight-lipped smile that he's not really happy to see them, and they skip all but the slightest pleasantries. She feels bad for him, really, that's he's being forced to mentally revisit his years of grief over Charlotte -- the same woman he'd left at home this morning, alive and whole. His wife.

She and James settle on an ancient brown leather couch in his office and Daniel perches obediently on the edge of a faded green armchair. A thin layer of dust coats the bowed metal desk to her right, and she realizes Miles was right when he'd claimed Dan hadn't been working. The plants on the windowsill are shriveled, seventy-five percent dead.

"You didn't believe me on the phone about Jacob and his brother," she begins, delicately. "Um..." She cringes inwardly. "Did you talk to your mother?"

"Uh... yeah," he mumbles, tearing a page from a blank pad of paper, crumpling it in his fist. "She, uh, she pretty much said what you said."

"I know it's hard, hearing about them when you're coming from a scientific background." I know it's hard, talking to the mother who killed you in another lifetime. Juliet always feels like she's speaking with a child when she talks to him. Sure, a child with an IQ of about 200, but Daniel's gentleness always slays her to the core. "Believe me, it look me years to believe any of it myself, but I'm going to need you to give me the benefit of the doubt for this, all right?"

He nods. "Yeah. I can do that. You said on the phone... well, why don't you give me the two-minute version first, and we can just go from there?"

There is no two-minute version of ANYthing to do with the island, she thinks. Daniel of all people should know that.

James reaches down, pulls Juliet's green notebook from her bag. "Here," he says gruffly, shoving the notebook at Dan. "She, uh, she took a bunch of notes for ya."

"You can look at that after we go," Juliet tells Daniel. "I just tried to sum everything up for you in there so you'd have it."

She sees, in her mind's eye, the faded green notebook that Daniel had carried everywhere in the jungle in 1925. And then, two months ago, she'd gone to find a notebook to keep for him -- and she stopped dead in her tracks in the office supplies aisle at Target. There it was -- shiny, new, unwrinkled, but undeniably the same green notebook he'd carried with him back there. And she'd felt an inexplicable, unexpected surge of joy at these pieces clicking together. Like maybe this could ever be solved.

"Thanks," Daniel says politely to James as he leans over to hand him the notebook. James nods once, deeply, slowly, trying to be polite toward the twitchy little guy on the couch -- but the tilt and jerk of his head conveys maybe something a little sarcastic -- and she flashes him a muted warning look. Daniel just always drove James crazy, one of those inherent personality clashes that will never quite resolve itself, no matter what decade they happen to be in.

"So, uh..." Daniel lines up the corner of the notebook with the corner of the coffee table. He's jiggling his leg against the edge of his chair, absent-mindedly shredding the edges of the paper ball he holds in his hands. Juliet hopes she won't treat the green notebook that way, but then she remembers. He won't.

"OK. I have to warn you at this point that I'm not even sure what's fact, what's theory and what I just sort of supernaturally know. Also, the people from the future were giving me information, but when I think about it, maybe they got that information because I'm telling you now." Shit. She's trying to NOT let Daniel know that she's seen him in the island in the future.

Maybe that goes right over Daniel's head, or not, but his brown eyes slide out of focus for a moment and then lock onto her face again. "Go ahead, and we'll sort it out later."

"So, obviously the bomb caused a reset of sorts. Except that I didn't get a reset, and Ben didn't -- or chose not to."

"What about you?" Daniel nods at James, who shrugs.

"In a way, James did remember subconsciously, because he..." Because he what? Stopped being a tremendous asshole during his second time in 2004? "Because he did things differently, and some of it was reminiscent of our time in the '70s -- he had a security job for awhile."

"Sucked compared to Dharmaville," James offers.

"Right," Daniel says impatiently. "But we didn't think anyone would remember, after."

James throws an arm over the back of the couch. "August 16, 2007, for you too, champ?"

Daniel nodded. "Naomi had come in 2004 again to recruit me for the freighter, but I... just had a bad feeling."

"So 'whatever happened, happened' isn't working the same way," Juliet says. "And sometimes it seems to, but sometimes it doesn't. I saw myself once, in 1923. Another one of me, I mean, coming from the future. And then two years later, when I was on the opposite side of that conversation, it played out exactly as it had before. Even though I wanted to try to change something, just to see if I could... I didn't."

James is staring at her with open-mouthed surprise. "You talked... to yourself?"

"Mm hm."

"An' what was that like, Gemini?"

She realizes he's a little bit fascinated, and she'll seriously kick his ass all the way back to 1925 if he makes a threesome joke in front of Daniel. "Weird. Very, very weird. Both times."

"So uh..." Daniel twists in his chair. "Is it that you didn't change anything when you saw yourself again, or that you couldn't?"

"I don't know. It was just... That's what it was, you know? That's what happened."

He's nodding to himself, mumbling, so she decides to just press on.

"But then sometimes there's the opposite effect. Ben killed Jacob in 2007, but after that, Jacob was just dead across all times. It wasn't like he was still alive before 2007 -- he was just always dead."

"'Cept he ain't," James points out.

"Well, right. Jacob's body is dead, but he's still conscious. This is going to sound really strange, but... he's water."

"What do you mean, he's water?"

"He's just -- his consciousness resides in water. I can talk to him. In the ocean. He is the ocean. All I have to do is open my eyes, and I don't need to breathe as long as I'm down there. There's a series of short time flashes so I keep skipping over the same moment, and I don't have to go up for air."

"And you can... talk to him? In your head?" Daniel's eyebrows knit together in confusion and she knows she has to steer this conversation back to the things that Daniel actually has a chance in hell of helping her with.

"I don't know. A side effect of the bomb, maybe. Could the bomb even do that? Or the electromagnetism? Something strange happened to Desmond, too, after the Swan imploded in 2004. But how could Jacob just be alive in all times, but then I set off the bomb, and now it's all different?"

Daniel leans back, steeples his fingers. This is obviously an easy one for him. "If it's midnight in England and 4 p.m. in Oregon, what time did I call you?"

"You mean it happens at the same time... Just not the time on a clock."

"Exactly."

"I have a theory on why I didn't get a reset, but... what do you think?"

"You're the one who... who actually detonated the bomb, right? Manually?"

She nods, trying to keep her expression neutral.

"Well, if you'd had a reset, then you never would have set off the bomb."

"That's what I was thinking, too." But she can't quite prevent the bitter expression that distorts her face. After a second, though, she forces it away, because she knows if it weren't for that bomb, Daniel and Charlotte wouldn't even be alive. "Right. OK. That makes sense. But what about Ben?"

"You said Ben killed this... this Jacob, right? And that it seemed like as a result of the bomb, his... his consciousness remained?"

"Yeah."

"Well, if Ben had gotten a reset, that would... have undone his actions, as well. Maybe you were meant to detonate the bomb, and... and Ben was meant to kill Jacob. You'd said those actions sort of went together, right? Two sides of the same coin."

She wills herself to not throw up on the coffee table, hearing herself be paired up with Ben like that. "At any rate, Jacob and his brother are at war. And his brother still has a body, so who knows? Jacob's side -- they were bringing in people from all times. The 1950s, the 1980s. The 2040s. The 22nd century." She tries her best to fill him on on the underground station, the counterpart to the Orchid. That's a huge gaping hole in her knowledge and she kicks herself now for not getting someone to tell her about it, teach her how to use it. So much for staying uninvolved.

Dan takes notes rapidly as she speaks, her eyes on a curling photograph of Charlotte propped up on a bookshelf. In the picture, Charlotte's wearing a wide-brimmed khaki hat, looking just off to the side, laughing, somewhere in a desert. Thank you, reset, Juliet thinks, the thought springing to her mind uninvited.

She realizes she's trailed off, focuses on Daniel again. "And they were fighting across all times. I fought in a battle at the Black Rock shortly after it landed." James is silent and still beside her; she's already explained this to him as best she could, but she sneaks a peek at him and he squeezes her hand.

Juliet tries to explain about the redone battles, the ambushes. "But those things didn't always happen -- Jacob told me that himself. And I don't think I was always there -- not like we were always in the '70s in Dharma."

"Why don't you think you were always there?"

"I don't know. Jacob told me I was never supposed to be there. I think his plans before the bomb had to change, after the bomb. But Richard sent me forward in time, back to that flaming arrow night. Before I went, he told me I'd always been there. But when I was back there again? I just watched the entire thing and didn't do anything. When I returned, he said he'd just wanted to see what I thought about causality."

"And did... did you believe him?"

"Now that I think about it, no. I think he wanted to see what he thought about causality. To see if I could do something that hadn't been done before."

"Did you?"

"Well. No."

"And you think it was because you weren't always there. Not -- that you were always there, and... just never did anything?" Daniel sounds skeptical, but opens the green notebook to a blank page and scribbles something in pencil.

She shrugs. "I don't know. Cause and effect just seemed dead there sometimes. You know what you told us, a long time ago -- or I guess technically it never even happened for you and James, did it? But you told us how time travel is like a street. And you can go back and forth on the street but you can't build a new street." God, that first day, the first day they'd ever time-traveled. She doesn't even remember anymore what that first flash felt like, deadened on Dharma rum. Focus, Juliet, focus.

"Well, that's what I thought at the time." He starts mumbling about people being variables and then about diffeomorphism invariant quantities. Focus, Daniel, focus.

"The people from the future -- the people who traveled back after the bomb -- had a new theory. After the bomb, time on the island changed. Time's as if you're drawing a line. But something came along and knocked into the pencil, and --

"And that line turned into a scribble." Daniel's forehead creases. "And the longer you scribble, the tighter the knots get, right?"

Did he just invent his own theory after hearing one line of it? "And if you keep scribbling, eventually you can't tell the beginning or the end anymore."

He's nodding rapidly, his hair brushing along his forehead in time with the bobs of his head. "So time on the island is converging."

"Every now and then, I got sucked into different times without trying to. Not a white flash. More like a wormhole. Not at first, but then it started happening more often. But Daniel, if that goes on for too long..."

"Time would collapse." Daniel rocks on the edge of his chair. He starts muttering, "inside... inside, the fabric of the universe collapses into a point of infinite curvature."

Sure, that makes perfect sense. Absolutely. What are they doing here, again? "A singularity, right?" Juliet prompts. "The island could become a singularity, maybe?" Ugh, that awful stack of library books... All that loop quantum gravity crap.

"And inside a singularity the laws of physics no longer apply."

"Anyone wanna translate?" James grumbles.

Juliet doesn't quite understand all this herself -- after all, that's why they're here in the first place, right? But she can't help egging him on a little. "You know, James, if you'd bothered to do the assigned reading..."

He gives her a dirty look. "All right, Science Club, I get it, I guess. So the bomb worked in its own way for us. It prevented 815 from crashin', saved Dan and Red, kept Jacob from disappearin' altogether. But it didn't just reset things, it went too far. And you're sayin' -- at least, I think you're sayin' -- we need to bookend it. Cause some other event to occur, create some sort of end point." He's gripping the arms of his chair and she realizes he's thinking about another bomb, but she doesn't think a bomb is what this is about at all.

Juliet nods, turning to Daniel. "That's right, isn't it? Otherwise, time is going to keep changing. My memories change sometimes, Dan. People were able to move through time fairly easily before I'd left the island. And it kept getting easier. And really, if things can change, then anything can still happen."

"Jonah's scar," James mutters.

Juliet nods, and Daniel looks at them questioningly.

"Jonah's our son. The one I told you about, the one I had on the island? Last week James was giving him a bath, and he saw something on the side of his arm -- a burn mark. Pretty small, but he'd never seen it before, and it was fully healed. Jonah and I couldn't remember where he'd gotten it at first -- and then we did. When he was three years old, he was reaching out for something, and burned his arm on the side of a hot kettle."

"But he didn't always," Dan croaks, his eyes lighting up.

"Exactly. We also remember when he didn't have it -- I remember pushing his arm out of the way in time, and he didn't get burned. So something tiny must have changed that day, and I was looking the wrong way for just a second, but something did change."

Daniel scribbles in the green notebook for a minute or two, looking enthralled at this new development, like this is all a science experiment. Like it's none of their lives. But it is. It could be. And after a moment he raises his head. "So anyone who's been on that island after the bomb could still end up getting hurt. Or worse."

All of a sudden she feels incredibly tired. "Yeah. And I need you to figure out how to prevent that from happening."

"Juliet, this sort of thing -- it's too big. It could take years," Daniel hedges. "Decades."

You're absolutely right. "I know," she says gently. "But there's one other problem."

"What's that?"

"Jacob wants to drown the island. And we need to figure out if we want him to."