A/N: This is really kind of like part 2 of chapter seven, so it may or may not be short as well. Thanks to Bluenight, Setszuki, bwcheer, Taylor47, Evermore, mfkngst, Oreata, and Rockin' FluteTrumpet. You guys…hmm, I appear to have run out of ways to express your awesomeness. -Puts that on a to-do list-
There was nothing at first. Finally, the smallest of noises broke though the silence, a fuzzy dripping noise like a leak faucet. Little by little, Boone's head began to clear and a tingling sensation began to bring the feeling back to his body, which he quickly regretted. He had a pounding headache and it felt like half his body was damp, which made sense with the heavy mildew smell.
Groaning, he rolled onto his side as his sight slowly shifted back into focus. There was golden light on the wall, casting only meager circles of color against the black, curved cave he seemed to be in. The last thing he ever wanted to do again was sit up and he could just imagine the bruises spreading up his back and arms as he lay there. All he wanted to do was close his eyes again and drift off to sleep. Maybe he would wake up and find out it'd all been one long, horrible dream and he'd be safe back in his bed, or at least at one of the camps.
The room began to blur in his eyes again and had almost turned back to darkness when he heard a noise in the corner of the room. It sounded almost like a groan.
It was then things started coming back to him. The clearing, the bear, Shannon hitting the rock…
Oh God, what had happened to her?
"Shannon, Shannon, is that you?" Boone called towards the noise as loudly as he dared, pushing himself up and trying to sit, but his hands wouldn't move. Pulling hard, he felt something thick and rough scrape against his wrists, some kind of rope.
He froze and listened, but he didn't hear a voice. He had almost stopped breathing now just to catch the smallest sound. Finally, there was another faint noise and he strained his ears to catch as much of it as he could, "Boone? Yes…" The sound trailed off leaving just the dripping noise again.
Sighing, Boone started to breathe again. She was there and alive, at last something was looking up.
"Are you-" He paused, listening for voices and lowered his voice a little more, "Are you alright?"
There was another long pause.
"I'm- I'm not sure."
Boone shifted and tried to use his feet to push him up but found, without surprise, that the rope was around his ankles as well, "What do you mean you're not sure?"
"I just- it's-" She stopped.
"What, Shannon, what?" Boone hissed in frustration as he slowly rolled onto his side, "What's wrong?"
"I'm- it's bad, Boone."
The silence that followed her voice was suffocating.
Swallowing, Boone stopped moving, "What's wrong?" He repeated again, only they sounded like completely different words to his ears, words he could hardly say and knew he didn't want the answer to.
Almost as if she knew his thoughts, there was no answer.
Bending and pushing himself upwards with his elbows, he managed to get to his knees and slowly began to use his feet to slide himself over towards the direction of her voice, whispering the whole way, "Shannon, keep talking. I'll be over in a minute."
There were still no voices and the cave was so dark Boone doubted whether or not he was headed towards her at all anymore, "Come on, say something, anything! It's too dark to find you if you don't talk…" There was a tinge of desperation in his voice as he moved around the floor trying to find her.
Suddenly, there was light. Not enough to brighten the whole room, just barely enough for him to make out a body lying on the floor three feet to his right. Wiggling, stretching, and pushing, he slid across the floor to it as fast as he could.
"Shan? Shannon, are you alright?" He whispered, pushing himself up onto his knees as he knelt over her body. Her eyes were closed and from the limited light he could see her chest slightly rising and falling, but it was shallow and, as he leaned in closer, had a rattling, empty sound.
It was just too much for one day. The shaft, Locke, the bear, whatever the hell had hit him, and now Shannon. Not even the crash had thrown him so much, and now his brain had shut down. Rational thought, plans- hope… it was all dead to him now, just like he and Shannon were going to be, slowly dying in some God forsaken cave.
As everything slowly receded into the corners of his mind, for some reason there was one memory that stuck with him, even as he bent to the ground in despair.
He was eleven and Shannon had been nine and it had been a little over a year since the marriage. The house they lived in then, his mom's had a tree house in the backyard and Boone remembered spending almost every day up there during the summer. Shannon would beg and plead to be allowed up there with Boone and his friends, but being "cool" when you were eleven meant you just didn't let your little sister tag along.
It had been the fifth of July, he'd never forgotten that date, although nothing should have been particularly special about the day itself, and everything started out the same as it always had. Boone and the others had climbed up the slightly decrepit eight or nine foot ladder to the base of the tree house. It hadn't been replaced forever, but he didn't complain, as his mom had taken forever to agree to let him have a tree house in the first place. They had begun the day flipping through comic books or arguing about whatever kind of stupid eleven year old things he'd been into. Shannon had come out, as always, yelling and demanding they put down the ladder and let her up.
The then-Shannon argued differently then the now-Shannon though, almost on the opposite end of the spectrum. Given the chance, she'd physically fight for what she wanted and, more surprisingly, she was good at it. Hence, the ladder was always raised after they got to the top, to hold back the wrath of the tiny, four-foot eleven girl who would, given the chance, kicked them all out.
Eventually she'd gone inside, of course, and Boone had decided to go to the pool to escape the heat with his friends, knowing full well that he was leaving Shannon alone with their old, senile nurse and vaguely remembering, but thinking nothing of, the fact that lately a couple of the upper rope rungs had shredded almost to the point of coming loose. It was obvious how stupid he'd been not to put two and two together afterwards, but then he just hadn't thought of it.
Boone could remember biking down the street by himself heading home and seeing the ambulance and fire truck parked outside his home, even his mom and step dad's cars were there. Voices were coming from the backyard, a bunch of them, and Boone knew as soon as he'd pushed open the gate what had happened, but one of the people standing there explained it to him anyway.
Shannon went outside and tried to get up to that tree house and fell off the ladder, part of it broke off or something. She broke her arm, her wrist in two places, had been out cold for thirty minutes.
As Boone sat with his mom in the emergency room, he'd almost been sick he'd felt so guilty. They hadn't known the full extent of the damage and Boone's step dad had been busy talking with her doctor.
It was then his mom had spoken, almost completely surprising him out of his own shame and fear as he realized she'd been watching him. She said something she'd always quote when Boone would have miserable days.
The darkest hour is just before the dawn.
For some reason, even if he was only eleven, it was like the words had taken on a completely new meaning. And now, now that he'd hit one of the lowest points he could ever remember having, those were the only words that had stayed with his mind.
As if with that memory and the small sense of sane thought it gave back to him, he relaxed and the ropes around his feet seemed to slacken. In fact, it was almost like they'd loosened, but that couldn't have happened.
Throwing a look over his shoulder he saw the severed rope lying by his feet. His eyes shot around the room wildly looking for whatever had cut the ropes.
"He…hello?" He called into the darkness quietly, taking a deep breath, "Who's there?"
There was silence and Boone had begun to back away towards Shannon again when he heard a voice.
"Who're you?" Asked a feminine voice in front of him that sounded familiar, but he just couldn't place it, "Are you…are you one of them?"
"No," Boone replied hastily, "No, I'm…" He paused and bit back his words. What if she was one of them? Did she just expect him to hand over his name like that?
"But if you're not them, than who are you? Are you one of…me?"
Boone raised an eyebrow suspiciously, "What do you mean 'one of you'?"
The voice fell silent again and Boone slowly began to try to work the ropes off his wrists without gaining her attention. He needed a plan, a way to get out of there with Shannon and get back to the others. The longer he could distract whoever, or whatever, she was, the better.
"I freed your legs, I can cut the rope around your wrists too."
Boone froze, blinking, and stiffened, "How do I know I can trust you?"
"We're both in the same cell, aren't we? If I was against you wouldn't I be out there?" She asked with a dry laugh.
The laugh flipped a switch in Boone's brain and he scanned the darkness, looking for the person it came from.
"Claire?"
He heard a sharp gasp and a small squeak from the corner of the room followed by patters and a hissed whisper from behind him, "How do you know my name?"
-
Kate dragged Charlie through the last line of trees into the clearing, both of them gasping for air as they looked around for Jack and Ethan in the moonlight that had suddenly flooded through a break in the clouds.
"What the bloody?" Charlie began, his voice trailing off as he got the full view of the clearing.
There was nothing there.
It looked like just another serene, empty jungle glade, as if it hadn't been touched by anything in the past year, let alone twenty minutes.
"It's alright, we'll find them. All I have to do is track their footprints, which should be somewhere around-" Kate paced and zigzagged back up the trail she'd taken to escape earlier, stopping right behind where she'd seen Jack, "Here."
Charlie followed and stopped next to her, looking down at the space she pointed too and then stooping down to scan it harder, "Kate, there's nothing here."
Kneeling down next to him, Kate searched the dirt, looking for the deep markings Jack had left with his shoe, the faintest sign of a print, anything at all that showed someone had been there. There was nothing.
Leaping up, she made wide circles around the area, mentally recounting every moment of the time she'd spent there as Charlie searched around the area they'd started.
"How could two people disappear into thin air?" Charlie mused as he ran his hand over the dirt where Kate claimed to have been lying earlier, "No blood, no signs of a scuffle, no footprints…There aren't even any boar prints through here."
"That doesn't make any sense!" Kate cried, slamming her toe into the dirt with frustration. They were running out of time again and now Charlie probably thought she was loosing her mind.
"Um, Kate-"
Not to mention that their original mission, to bring back Claire, had left them yet another survivor short, Jack. If Ethan had Jack… she shuddered, she knew what Ethan was capable of.
"Kate-"
It was all her fault anyways; she should never have left them alone. Jack was a doctor, how could she have ever expected him to be able to defend himself?
"KATE!"
"What, Charlie?" Kate snapped, turning to face him.
"Look down."
Kate glanced at the ground, "There's nothing there Charlie, thanks a lot for reminding me."
"Exactly." Charlie agreed, his eyes lighting up, "There's nothing there. You just kicked the ground so, logically, there should be something there. You know, like a mark or something…"
Confused, she looked down again, "What?"
"Watch." Charlie jumped up and walked over to her, scraping one of his toes into the ground as he walked over to her with an odd limp. Kate concentrated on his foot, her eyes widening the closer he got.
It left no trail.
"But…how-what?" Kate marveled as she stooped down to look at the smooth dirt, "That's impossible."
"Isn't everything on this damned island?" Charlie asked, grinning, "Now, if what I'm thinking is right," Charlie began to walk the outskirts of the clearing, watching the jungle floor to his left, "than there should be…ah hah!"
"What?"
"I think I found a trail."