Chapter 11

"I can't really object to the fact that you brought your boyfriend here," Ben said calmly as ever. "I slightly object that he keeps looking at me like I'm a frog he'd like to dissect."

"Choose your words carefully," Izzie said serenely. "We did dissect our share of frogs in our careers."

"I'm sorry Claire," Alex said, turning his attention to here. "I have to say I'm underwhelmed. After everything you and your brother told me about him I guess I was suspecting, you know, Stalin's evil twin, not a short near-sighted guy who on his best day looks like the kind of history teacher whose classes you'd sleep through."

"Looks are deceiving. Remember what they call Bailey?" Izzie seemed absolutely content by this conversation.

""Please. This guy wouldn't last a minute in a war of words with Bailey," Alex said dismissively.

"He did beat up Sawyer a few times and he is a very good liar," Claire didn't seem bothered by this turn of conversation.

"He had to hold him prisoner in a cage meant for polar bears, and as I recall your brother beat him up so bad his knuckles were bloody," Alex still wasn't talking directly to Ben. "Does he have a very good vocabulary?"

"He's a brilliant psychological manipulator," Claire told them.

"Anybody can use psychology to manipulate somebody. That's why it's such a crap science," Izzie pointed out.

"Do I really have to be here for this meeting?"

"Why? You have an appointment to fry ants with an eyeglass or something?" This was the first time Alex had acknowledged Ben's presence, but he still wasn't talking to him.

"I managed to get to where I am because I'm good at what I do," Ben's voice had a trace of his old edge.

"Which from what Claire and Kate tell me has left you as a house husband in Colorado," Alex said casually. "Don't get me wrong. You have to be really secure in your masculinity to let the woman be the breadwinner."

"That's not what I'm talking about," There was more of an edge. On the island people had known better than cross Ben at this point.

Izzie and Alex didn't even seem disturbed. "I think he means when he was the ruler of a cargo cult in a small island in the Pacific," Izzie pointed out.

Ben was starting to look notably unnerved. "You very well that's not what I was."

"No, we know exactly what the island was," Alex demurred. "Iz's description? Pretty accurate. You persuaded a much of easily manipulated people to come to an island in the Pacific to work at a holy place for a great man who none of them seen but one day would make his plan perfectly clear to all of you. The only real difference is you never even met the man who you were supposedly representing. You spoke for him in his name, followed every commandment he brought down and he never as much as gave you the time of day."

"You don't have to remind me of my failings," The hostility had dropped out of Ben's tone. He seemed a bit more supplicant now. "Claire did a fairly good job of them last week."

"That was a personal dressing down. This is more a general one." Alex finally looked at them. "I had a shitty father too. He drank and he beat me and my mother and my family. He didn't have the decent excuse of losing his wife prematurely. He was just a prick. It damaged me."

"And I see you turned things around," Ben admitted.

"No. I'm a selfish asshole. I slept with every woman I could, I was a prick to people who should have been my friends and nearly lost the woman I loved three separate times – once to a man who was dying, once because I wouldn't listen to her when she tried to do the thing, and once when she told me she was dying." Alex shook his head. "You once said Jack had lousy bedside manner. He's goddamn Dr. Oz next to me. I don't even Izzie would say I'm a nice guy."

"You're not Alex," Izzie acknowledged. "You're the love of my life, but you're a prick. The two aren't mutually exclusive."

"So I know what it means to be dealt a lousy hand and have scars. But I'm not Hitler." Alex held up a hand. "Locke told me about the pit. You killed dozens of people because you missed your mom."

Ben actually blanched a little hearing this. "That's not entirely why it happened."

"Then paint a picture that makes you the hero." Izzie had taken up the story. "Let's say your childhood was so horrible and that you hating living on the island so much. There was a submarine. At any point you could have gotten on it, gone back to civilization and tried to have a normal life. You could've found your girlfriend. Maybe by now you'd be married and the biggest worry in your life would be making sure your kids got into an Ivy League school. Did that thought ever cross your mind the fifteen plus years you were a double agent?"

Ben opened his mouth, closed it. For the first time in a long time he was actually at a loss for words. "The island is special. It mattered more than my happiness."

"That sounds an awful lot like something Jacob might've said." Claire said gently. "Did you really just substitute its wellbeing for your own? For a man who never even said you were worthy to see him?"

No one in the room would've recognized the expression on Ben's face. Only Locke had seen a variation on it and that was when everything went to hell near the end. "Alex," he finally said. "She might not have been my actual daughter. But she did matter more to me than the island ever did."

Karev changed his tone. "That's a relief. I was actually starting to think I was in the room with a true medical phenomenon: a man who was capable of living without a heart."

Claire now genuinely sounded sympathetic. "Were you worried that some day she'd want to leave you? Find out what the outside world was like? I have to say she never really seemed to be one of your people."

"There were no other children on the island," Ben said sorrowfully. "I did my best but at some point she had to be upset there was only one other person her own age to even talk to. And I managed to completely ruin that too."

"I heard about that from Kate," Karev sounded a lot more sympathetic now. "The whole trying to brainwash Karl, did you really not like the idea of her dating?"

"I was afraid she might get pregnant," Ben said ruefully. "I overreacted."

"We've seen parents take a much worse approach to the idea," Izzie said a similar tone. "And as bad as you handled it, it's still a better that some of the people who insist on abstinence only."

"I've guessing birth control didn't come in those pallet drops," Alex said.

Ben could see that they everybody was trying to be comforting now, which honestly was more unsettling than the dressing down he'd been getting just a couple of minutes earlier. "Still it doesn't say much for my parenting skills."

"You saw our files. None of us can really claim we had better examples," Claire pointed out.

"The point that we were making – very badly, I'll admit, "Karev finally said "is that you have a terrible track record when it comes to just about everything. You had some pretty good excuses, none of us wants to deny that, but you have to accept that you made some really lousy decisions along the way. None of the survivors wanted to trust you as a source for information, and the idea of keeping you safe, well, right now Juliet In particular is trying to parse the difference between 'safe' and 'unhurt'."

"She has every right to think that way," Ben admitted.

"He's self-aware too," Claire said with mock amazement. "That's a major step forward."

"Puts him ahead of quite a few people at our hospital too," Izzie pointed out.

"This actually gets us to something that none of us really wanted to deal with. When we first met you were willing to give us some information as a sign of good faith. I'll return the favor."

She then went into detail of the trip to the sweat lodge and the vision she'd had, sparing no details. The look on Ben's face was in part rueful and slightly amazed.

"All these years I genuinely thought it was the island that made certain people special. Now its clear there's far more to it than even I thought possible," Ben turned to her. "Christian gave you a list in a vision and it was where he put it in reality."

"Which part is weirder: that it was there or that Izzie somehow knew it would be?" Alex asked.

"A little of each actually," Ben admitted. "I'll admit to some experiences like that when I was growing up but nothing where the spiritual intervened with the real world."

"Well, this is the part where it gets considerably weirder," Izzie had debated whether to bring the actual piece of paper but decided to do so because she thought the vision was more important than the reality. "I know Jacob is gone, but I'm pretty sure whoever took his place has arranged for us to get another list."

She handed the paper over to Ben without hesitation. "The big difference is we actually knew the names going in. All of them work at the hospital."

Ben took the piece of paper from her hand. "I guess it you know all of these people personally."

"All but one of them are close friends," Alex admitted. "The one exception is the bottom one. We know her to call her in on the occasional consult, but none of us would have a drink with her."

Ben looked at the list. "The last time we met, I asked you a question which you only appeared to answer. Since I'm something of an expert at choosing my words carefully I didn't feel justified in pointing it out. Now however, I think I'm entitled to something resembling total honesty."

"O'Malley started his residency the same time as us," Alex said simply. "And he was briefly married to Torres. We finally let him in on some of the details last year."

"I told Lexie Grey what happened to me on the island a few months ago," Claire said simply. "Sloan is her boyfriend, and Derek Shepherd's his best friend. There's no reason she wouldn't have told them both."

Ben took this in. "Is there anyone at your hospital who doesn't know what happened?" he asked simply. "Candy striped on the night shift? One of the janitors?"

"I suppose we deserve that," Alex admitted.

"I may have chosen my words carefully, but that doesn't mean I lied," Izzie pointed out. "The only people who know almost everything about what happened to Oceanic 815 are Callie and the two of us. Several people who work at the hospital do have details, some may have a clearer picture than others, but we're the only ones who have even an inkling of what the island was really about."

"Don't you think there would have been some kind of media firestorm if even some portion of the truth were made public?" Claire pointed out.

"Isabel made it very clear the reasons why you and your friends didn't tell the world when you came back," Ben admitted. "And given what I've seen of your twenty-four channels I'll admit it probably wouldn't make much of a blip on the landscape if it did. So I'll be honest. My people weren't so much worried about the world finding out as certain other people. And even though you have been circumspect it nevertheless seems that they have found out anyway."

"Which brings us back to the question we've been dealing with since this began," Claire said simply. "Who are these people?"

Ben gave a genuine sigh. "John once referred to me as the man behind the curtain, the Wizard of Oz. And that I was a liar. I was actually telling the truth about Jacob, but he was on point about the rest of it. And that was just when it came to things on the island. As you have been told, there were people on the island who had more knowledge of it than I ever did."

"Richard Alpert," Claire said simply. "I'm guessing he never really told you how he got his job."

"You're the one who had to tell me remember," Ben pointed out. "I figured there was a reason people who'd been on the island longer than me deferred to him. I just never thought his story was sadder than mine. If anyone knew about the world outside it, it was him."

"But you clearly knew more than you were telling," Izzie said bluntly.

"What do you want to know?"

Anyone else who'd spent more than five minutes with Ben Linus on the island would have been struck dumb by this apparent honesty. Claire didn't seem that distrustful. Alex and Izzie decided to do something none of them would have dared to – take him at his word.

"Did your people have a reason to see Henry Gale as a threat?"

The question was so specific and assumed so much Ben was clearly a little unnerved by its directness. "Aside from the fact we didn't exactly see new arrivals as good people?" he asked.

"We've already had that conservation," Claire reminded him. "When Sayid, Ana Lucia and Claire followed your map to 'your' balloon, they did a thorough examination. It wasn't until we started doing research on Radzinsky's son that Sayid remembered something that he'd thought irrelevant."

"And what would that be?"

"There was a sponsorship sticker on the balloon from Nozz-A-La Cola," Alex said. "Under the name of Scott Jackson, Sam Radzinsky was working for that company when he got on the plane."

The look of bafflement on Ben's face would have been unrecognizable to any of the survivors. "I'd never even heard of Nozz-A-La Cola before I saw that balloon," he told them. "Hard as this may be to believe I hadn't had so much as a Coke for thirty years. Unless it had a Dharma label, I wouldn't have known what soda was."

"So you had no idea there might be a connection to between Henry Gale and Dharma?' Alex said doubtfully.

"None."

"I believe what Alex meant to ask was: 'Did you see an outside threat posed by Henry Gale?'" Claire repeated.

"Sorry, Old habits die hard," Ben admitted. "There was actually an icon on the balloon itself that literally spelled out the threat. I don't blame Sayid for not remembering; he was no doubt focused on how many pieces he was going to cut off me for lying to him."

"Which was?"

"The balloon and the basket had been manufactured by Widmore Industries." Ben said simply, looking at Claire. "And given everything that he put you and your friends through later on, I think you can understand why I was not inclined to just see that as a coincidence."

None of them could exactly disagree with that statement. "Was he connected to Widmore or the outside threat?" Claire asked.

"We never got a clear answer," Ben reluctantly answered. "In retrospect, sending Danny and Pryce to try and get information out of him was a bad idea. Both were loyal soldiers, but neither of them was ever very good at knowing how brutal to be when it came to questioning a prisoner. He was dead within half an hour and he didn't tell them a thing."

"I guess good help is hard to find when you don't exactly have an unlimited recruiting resources," Alex said, only half in jest.

"When did the real Henry Gale show up?" Claire asked.

"About two months before the plane crash. That part I didn't make up," Ben told them. "Mikhail picked up the balloon on the satellite. When I saw what was on it, I sent my men out there and told them to tell no one else. When I realized they went too far, I just told them to bury the body and not touch anything else. And no, Jacob didn't send any instructions on that one. I wish I could say I had some kind of Machiavellian strategy to use it at some point but the truth is…I was distracted."

"Leadership issues?" Alex asked.

For the first time since Claire had seen him – hell, since anybody on the island had ever dealt with him – Ben was having trouble looking people in the eye. "Personal ones. It was becoming clear that Alex – my Alex – was become far too friendly with Karl and if she didn't have any other children talk too, there wasn't exactly a PTA to go to on the island. Not that long after, I learned that Juliet was having an affair with Goodwin."

"Juliet was too nice to say this, so I will," Alex said. "I wasn't wild when Iz started spending too much time with Denny and I wasn't exactly rooting for their relationship. That said I didn't want the guy to die. I'm a lousy human being, but I'm not a monster."

"I didn't kill Goodwin," Ben said.

"You sent him into a dangerous situation where you knew he might get killed," Izzie was now just as harsh. "You kept him in after your other spy had gotten killed. Then you showed Juliet his corpse and watched as she broke down in tears. You berated her for loving him in the first place. And unless I missed part of the story, you didn't even bring his body back for his wife to mourn. Please explain how that's better than just putting a bullet in his brain."

"Was there not an HR station in Dharma?" Alex was only half joking. "I realize that you can make up certain rules when you're in charge but I think given the way you 'hired' Juliet, then forced her to sign 'extensions' to her contract… I realized it's the least of our worries right now, but I think it's safe to say she's got a real cause for creating the ultimate hostile work environment."

"Not to mention the whole sexual harassment thing," Iz was only half kidding. "I get why you didn't want her to leave. There probably weren't any lawyers on the island."

"You don't have to remind me I handled things with Juliet badly," Ben said in a classic understatement.

"Actually we did," Claire piped up. "Our being this polite about your misconduct is the only thing that kept her from coming with us on a visit and, how did she put it, performing exploratory brain surgery on you. Starting at your feet."

"And as you know from past experience, she's a lousy anesthesiologist," Alex reminded him.

Ben took this in. "She's never going to forgive me, is she?"

"She's a kind soul. Her husband, not so much," Claire pointed out.

Ben walked over to the window in his hotel room. "Be honest with me. If I were to leave this hotel, find Annie and let the two of us take our chances, would we be safer than under you and your friends' protection?"

Izzie changed her tone. "I got the message that we had to protect you. Considering that Annie was, like you, a child of the Dharma Initiative, I can only assume that she might be in danger too. We're not going to let anything happen to either of you." Then because she couldn't help herself: "This may come as hard to believe, but in our world, a person's word means something."

Ben paused. "She's an innocent person in all this. If I'd had any good sense I wouldn't have gone anywhere near here. I may not be on the island any more, but I still have a target on my mind."

"My friends' opinion to the contrary, you're a human being," Claire said gently. "And human beings are allowed to fall in love."

"You'll keep her safe. I'll tell you whatever you need to know, but she needs to stay safe."

"It's not conditional, Ben," Alex told him. "We're not savages."

"Jack and his friends would probably never forgive you for making that last distinction," Ben turned from the window. "There are people in civilization who are allied with the island. On occasion I've made contact with them over the years."

"Your people?" Izzie asked.

"They deal with me in conjunction with the island. I don't think they'd consider themselves 'my people'," Ben admitted. "I had contact with a few of them when I was first sent into exile. I'll reach out."

"Would they be behind this new attempt?" Claire asked.

Ben shook his head. "Just the opposite. They'd be doing everything in their power to make sure those efforts were thwarted. However, there are still people out there who might have different allegiances. That Abaddon fellow is one of them."

"Would he still be working in connection with Charles Widmore?' Claire asked.

"To use an expression your intelligence agencies have, not since he's been burned," Ben pointed out. "How good a job has Penelope done in rooting out his alliances?"

Izzie and Alex looked at Claire. "She's done the best she could over the past two years, but as you're no doubt aware her father had decades to build up these kinds of connections and the infrastructure to keep them hidden," Claire asked.

"It would probably gall her even more than your friends to have to ask me for assistance in this way," Ben said with a sigh.

"Considering that she hadn't spoken to her father for years before she knew about his connection to the island, she might be more sympathetic to you than you'd think," Alex told him. "Based on what we've heard, he was a worse father than you ever were."

"Cold comfort, but I'll take it," Ben acknowledged. "I'll start making a list of contacts I'm familiar with. Widmore may be gone, but that doesn't mean they're still not interesting in the island." He paused. "And since we're on the subject of lists…"

"What do we do with the one we have?" Izzie said wearily. "I'm a little surprised you don't have an answer for that in your back pocket."

"I only got them on the island, and even then I never understood why," Ben said with perhaps some justified bitterness. "And those seemed to come from a human being, not a vision."

"Isn't the message the same?" Alex asked.

"If your source is to be believed, this list is to stop them from following a certain path," Ben said slowly, as if he were puzzling it out for himself. "From what little I know about Jacob, they came to the island for the opposite reason."

"Weren't your people supposed to protect them?" Alex asked.

"If that was what it was, they had a very strange definition of it." Now Claire spoke with some equally understandable bitterness.

"It's a moot point now, and in this case irrelevant," Ben said calmly. "Somehow your friends are tied into this. I can't imagine how, but I couldn't see how most of the people on the lists I got were at the time. They need some form of protection, which from what I understand is what you and the rest of the survivors are offering to do."

"You clearly haven't met these people," Karev said with genuine humor. "They won't accept assistance during simple surgical procedures; I'm not sure how to convince them they're somehow involved in a struggle for control of a mystical island."

"This may be something that I'll have to leave in your hands," Ben said. "Somehow I can't see myself as the best salesman when it comes to convincing people to get involved with the island, even under duress."

Izzie looked at Alex. "We have some ideas as to talk them about this," she told Ben. "Alex's is right about it being a hard sell, so we're going to have to try and figure out the right way to talk them."

"I'll take your word for it, but I don't envy you your task," Ben said honestly. "How exactly do you plan to do it?"

Alex sighed. "It's not so much how we do it, as to whom."

SEATTLE GRACE CAFETERIA

It had been two minutes since Alex and Izzie had told George their story and he still hadn't responded one way or the other."

"I didn't think it was possible, but I'm starting to think we broke O'Malley," Alex was only half joking.

That finally spurred a reaction from George. "You're telling me Jack's dead father told me I was in danger." Izzie nodded. "In the middle of a hallucination."

"It wasn't a hallucination, it was a vision," Izzie said slowly.

"Of course because if you'd hallucinated it this whole thing would be ludicrous," George looked at his friend. "Iz, how long has it been since your last CAT SCAN?"

"The cancer's not back, George. Believe me, if it was…"

"There's no way you can finish that sentence that would make me feel better for having asked the question," George admitted. "I mean I know the stories that you guys and Callie have told me the last year. They were weird and I wasn't sure how much to believe, but Jack and Juliet are honest and even if I didn't trust them, you guys wouldn't go to all this trouble just to mess with me. But there's hearing this stories and then finding out that you have to participate."

"Believe me O'Malley, if there was a way not to involve you, we wouldn't be here," Alex admitted. "I'm not wild about Iz being involved in this, but it's starting to look that what we want doesn't really matter."

"I'd be concerned myself, you know, if I knew what 'this' was," George pointed out. "And unless I'm hearing wrong, you guys don't really know that either."

"We've told you the same stories we heard," Izzie reminded him. "It has something to do with this fight for the island and powerful people who are perfectly willing to use people like us as chess pieces in order to get what they want."

George looked at them. "I liked RPG's when I was a kid, but I grew out of them when I went into college. The idea of being part of a real life one isn't exactly high on my to-do list."

"I almost wish it were like that," Alex said sincerely. "At least in those games you had a clear mission to complete and an evil boss to fight. We don't have either of those." Then he raised an eyebrow. "And honestly, some sexy cosplay wouldn't hurt either."

"And there's the love of my life," Izzie said, rolling her eyes. "But as always, beneath the sarcasm is the truth. We're not sure what we're up against. We've talked in detail with our friends. They're not sure what we're up against."

"But I'm involved somehow," George said. "This isn't just some elaborate excuse to stop me from me getting chief resident."

"I think we all know that the only one capable of coming up with that kind of strategy is Yang," Alex reminded them.

"Kind of self-defeating, since she's pretty much got it in her back pocket anyway," George thought for a second. "You know when they called that staff meeting two weeks ago, Shephard and Carlson were pretty clear that they weren't going to get us involved no matter how much we begged to help them."

Alex and Izzie exchanged a glance. "They weren't exactly wild about the two of us getting involved," Izzie allowed. "But I kind of pushed them into it. I suppose you could blame this part of it on me."

"You're already seeing dead people. I think you've got enough on your plate." George said gently. "Do you even have any idea of what you'd need me to do?"

"All we know is that you and the other people on that list need protection. From what we don't know, but its irrelevant," Izzie pointed out. "You're our friends. We help our friends when they're in trouble."

George considered this. "What the hell. It can't be any more dangerous than helping Bailey give birth."

"So you'll let us help," Izzie said.

"Protect me from something unknown for reasons you don't understand. It can't be any more frustrating than failing the boards by one point," George said.

"I have a feeling that it might be slightly worse than having to repeat your first year again," Alex told him. "Physically that is. Mentally, nothing was worse than that."

LGLGLG

Meredith Grey looked at Jack again. "You know, just when I start to think that maybe my life isn't as bad as I think it is I get hit with the worse possible diagnosis."

Sloane looked at his best friend. "Is that what I sound like when I'm talking to people?"

"Honestly, I don't think you mean it most of the time," Derek told him,

"I'm trying to be as understanding as I can here," Meredith said in a slightly calmer tone, looking at Jack. "It's just… you tell me, that my husband, my half-sister and one of our closest friends is in some kind of mysterious, perhaps mortal danger that I really can't do anything to help with or protect them from. Considering everything else I've gone through in the last few years it's very difficult not to consider this as some kind of cosmic joke."

"Maybe we should've brought Hugo with us," Claire said to Jack. "He definitely would've been able to relate to your issues."

"Yeah, what is Reyes' story? I mean, I knew about the time in Santa Rosa and I gather the time on the island wasn't a picnic, but he seems to have it altogether," Sloan asked.

"The operative word was 'seemed'," Jack looked at Claire. "Hurley was at a party. He stepped on an overcrowded deck, it collapsed and two people died. He goes into a fugue state, stops sleeping, stops speaking, he doesn't stop eating. He's in Santa Rosa for about eight months, he makes a recovery and he thinks things are fine."

"And then he wins the lottery," Lexie said.

"You ever wonder how he got the numbers that he won the jackpot with?" Claire asked. "There was a patient who the only thing he said the entire time he was there was '4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42.' Not even Hugo could've known the kind of role they would end up playing in all of our lives." She looked at her brother.

Jack shuddered internally. "Hurley very quickly began to think he was cursed. But not the kind of curse where bad things happened to him. It was the kind of curse where the world would crumble around him and he'd turn out fine. During the interviews, his uncle died of a heart attack. His best friend ran off with a girl he asked out. His brother's wife ran off with another woman. The day after he bought the Mr. Cluck he owned a reporter does an interview, walks in and an asteroid hits the place. And all of that was before he flew to Sydney and the plane crash. I can't tell you how many times he blamed himself for that and everything else that went wrong on the island, and as you know a lot went wrong."

"All right," Meredith admitted. "By comparison, the last few years have been relatively easy for me. Still, you have to admit this is a lot to drop on all of us."

At least she's saying us now Jack thought to himself. "I know. And in a weird way I'm the worst possible to reassure you about this," he told them. "The whole time we were on the island where every five seconds something weird was happening, everyone was always looking to me to be the rational one."

"And you did it very well," Claire assured her brother. "It just happened that nothing on that island was rational."

"I like to think I've made some progress," Jack told them. "I'm telling people I've worked at the hospital with for the last two years that one of their colleagues – who had brain surgery fairly recently – had a vision in a Native American sweat lodge in which she received a message from my dead father that their lives were in danger."

"Is that why you asked to meet with us outside the hospital?" Derek asked dryly. "To make sure we could immediately call for men in white coats to inject you with Thorazine?"

"That only would make sense if I was an immediate danger," Jack went along with it. "Though I wouldn't have blamed you for calling a psych consult. I held proof in my hands, and I'm still not sure I can believe it."

"Izzie really saw all that," Meredith was trying to focus on the part she could wrap her head around. "Your dead friends, your dead father and us in the waiting room."

Claire had found something else to focus on. "You were clinically dead last year."

Everybody winced at that, even Jack. "I'm not sure what that has to do with anything," Meredith began, slightly angry.

"You saw Denny too."

The anger disappeared from Meredith's voice. Genuine shock appeared on the rest of theirs. Claire seized on it. "Just when you decided to live, your mother passed you. That's when you knew she was dead."

Claire knew that she had probably caused a fair amount of pain when she said these things, but she had a feeling that this might be the only way to convince Meredith – and probably the rest of them – that this wasn't an elaborate hoax.

"There are stories," Meredith said slowly. "When people suffer near-death experiences their brain triggers memories of their dead relatives. It's a perfectly logical scientific reaction."

Jack could tell from Meredith's voice that she was trying to convince herself as much as anybody else. It took a person who lived in denial to another. He didn't say that, though. "Did you tell anybody else that?" he asked instead. "Did you tell Derek or Lexie?"

"That's not the point," Meredith said in a very ragged tone. "Izzie clearly had a similar experience when she ingested that hallucination…"

"My father told her what you saw," Claire said gently. "He even told her where you saw her. How would she know that detail?"

That was as much as Meredith could handle. For the first time since Jack had met her – and the first time for almost everybody else – she began to cry. Derek embraced her. "It's all right."

"It isn't fair!" she said through a very un-Meredith like burst of sobs. "You and I have been through so much crap the last three years. I finally got better – we finally got better! – and now after everything that's happened, my husband – my family! – is in danger and there's nothing I can do about it!"

"Whoa, whoa," Jack didn't reach out for her – Meredith wasn't his wife – "I did it again, didn't I? The last few years I thought I'd improved my bedside manner, but clearly I have a lot more to work on."

"You'd better explain before I decide to punch you," Derek said without looking up.

"And trust me, he has a mean right hook," Mark added.

"Yes your friends and your family are in danger, I'm not going to lie about that," Jack said, "and I do realize it sucks that it's them and not you who are in peril. But we didn't invite you to hear all this to tell you that there was nothing you could do about it."

Meredith sniffled a little. "What do you mean?"

"You don't know how many times I went through some dangerous trek in the jungle, told Kate not to follow me and she would end up doing it anyway," Jack smiled a little at this. "I kept telling myself that I was doing this to protect her, but if I'd just let her come with me, I probably would've gotten in a lot less danger. God knows she would've. It was a lesson that I think all of us on the island needed to learn over and over; you need to let the people you love help you when they need it."

"And trust me when I tell you this, it took a lot of bad decisions for my brother to finally get the message," Claire said with a small smile.

"But I did learn from my mistakes. And the most important lesson is when people offer to help you, you let them," Jack said gently. "Almost everybody on this list is someone important to you. Throw in the fact that Alex and Izzie are already involved in this and it would be an act of monumental stupidity to try and keep you from helping.

Meredith sniffed a few more times. "You're still not sure how or what I'd be helping with," she said in a calmer tone.

"Juliet and I made the mistake of trying to keep all of you out of this when this started," Jack reminded her. "In our defense we really did think this was just our problem and that getting the rest of you involved would just get you needlessly hurt. Now it looks like to a degree your friends are somehow involved in this. To try and keep you out would be just as dangerous."

"This won't be fun," Claire told her. "But considering some of the situations you and your colleagues have been in the last couple of years, you're definitely more prepared than most of us were when we got on the plane."

"Are we going to get on a plane?" Sloane piped up. "Cause there's a limit to how grand an adventure I want to get involved in."

"We're going to do everything in our power to make sure that doesn't happen," Jack paused. "But if its certainty you want, that's the one thing we can't give you."

Mark took this in. "Guess I can accept that if the rest of you can," he said looking at Lexi.

"You know how I said I have a photographic memory," Lexi told them. "I have a feeling this is the first time I may think it's a curse."

Derek looked Jack in the eye. "If the choice is between this and leaving Meredith, I think you know which side I'll come down on."

"Love helped get us off the island," Jack told them. "I'm not going to let it bring people to it."

Meredith looked at Jack. "What is the next step?"

"We wait for Juliet to come back with the last person on the list," Claire said.

"About that," Mark asked. "You never told Dr. Robbins anything about what happened on the island, did you?"

Jack shook his head. "I barely know Dr. Robbins well enough to say hello to her in the locker room."

"So why would she be involved with us?" Mark asked. "Why not Bailey or Weber or Torres? Everyone else on this 'list' learned about the island. Why a complete stranger?"

"We've been trying to figure that out for the last day, and we don't have a good answer," Claire paused. "That's being kind. We're clueless."

"That's never a good sign," Derek said.

Jack gave a humorless laugh. "Comes with the territory."

LGLGLGLG

"Excuse me," Juliet said to one of the nurses. "Have you seen Dr. Robbins?"

"She's not in her office?" After Juliet shook her head, the nurse shrugged. "I guess that interview she said she was on must have gone really well."

"What interview?"

"Dr. Robbins has been thinking about going into private practice the last few months," the nurse said. "I can't say I blame her. Being a pediatric surgeon in a trauma center can't be a lot of fun, and that's kind of critical to who she is."

Juliet couldn't exactly disagree with that part of the statement.

"Anyway, she said this afternoon she had a lunch appointment with this camp that treated children in recovery from cardiac surgery. Sounded like her thing, though why anyone would want to go all the way for Portland for that is beyond me."

An alarm that been vibrating the minute Juliet had heard the word 'interview' became a siren when she heard 'Portland'. "Do you remember the name of this camp?" she said in as unconcerned a tone as she could manage.

"Some unpronounceable name. I think it started with an M."

"Was it Mittelos by any chance?"

The nurse looked surprised. "Are you familiar with them?"

It took all the restraint Juliet had learned being an Other not to start rushing down the hall. "If you hear anything from Dr. Robbins, page me immediately," she said as she walked away.

Not that she expected that to happen. She didn't know how they'd found out or even if they knew about the list to begin with. All Juliet knew for certain was that the island had managed to grab Arizona Robbins.

NOTES

Flash sideways humor from Alex. I couldn't resist.

Alex's backstory is pretty much what it was on Grey's Anatomy – as well as his self-awareness. He'd have sympathy for Ben, but that would only go so far.

Ben confesses in this story what he couldn't say about his daughter until after she was dead. I'm giving him a little more credit here on that.

Both of the elements I mentioned were present on the real Henry Gale's balloon. I made up the former connection, but I can see why Ben might have seen the latter one as a genuine threat, even if he knew nothing about how Desmond came to the island.

One of my biggest disappointments with the back half of the series was that there was never any closure between Juliet's betrayal of Ben and his general creepy behavior towards her. (I have to say, if I'd been in Juliet's shoes in Season 5 and Young Ben was bleeding to death in my care, I'd have let the bastard die, sweet kid or not.) Izzie and Alex are me giving a voice to one of my biggest beefs.

As to the people on the list:

I have a feeling George wouldn't take that much convincing. He was a good person and he was always willing to do whatever it took to help his friends. (Still not over Shonda killing him after twelve years.)

I never liked how stoic Meredith could be. The fact that she only seemed willing to say how much she missed her sister during a near death experience was just another reason I've never liked her character. Part of the reason I gave up watching the show was I never thought she showed enough emotion. So yes, this is a kind of wish-fulfillment. Also the fact that she spent a lot of time with the dead herself might come into play later.

Yes, the island is reaching out to Robbins. Familiar faces will show up there too.

This story is getting a lot longer than I thought. I may end up divided into two parts. How very Lost of me.

Read and review!