Triumph and Disaster
Summary: Desmond was a prisoner to the promise of doom and the dream of freedom contained in six innocuous numbers.
Well, reviews still haven't started rolling in, but I'm a persistent one, aren't I? Besides, I'm getting enough hits, so I know at least a few people are reading and that's comforting (but, I admit, a poor substitute for feedback) enough.
Rating: K+… to be safe, because it might be a little dark at points. A very little.
Desmond isn't the most popular character, but I'm fond and he's interesting and as a result he deserves a chance to star in one of my drabbles. This has to be one of the longest one-shots I've written to date (excluding Common Enemies), so give the man a round of applause.
Officially Disclaimed (this really goes without saying). Oh yeah, and title taken from Rudyard Kipling, who gets all due credit.
Look at me, I'm being prolific!
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If he didn't press the button, the world would have exploded. There would have been a second of silence, time enough for his wildly pounding heart to fill the briefest of moments, and then a rumbling would have sounded, a deep roar from within the earth itself. He would have known just then how much he screwed everything up, his mouth dry and his expression mute horror.
Then the fire would have come: hot, rushing, hungry. It would have scoured the world of anything alive, burned across land, water, and air faster than time could measure. It would have reached the planes in the sky and would have dove right down into the hatch that kept Desmond relatively safe. The flames would have burned through flesh and muscle and veins and would have reduced even bones to charred ash, buildings and forests leveled down to the same base substance. Smoldering embers and nothing else would have been in the place of the world which had one teemed with life. At least it would have been quick, and, apart from the brief moment of agony when the white-hot flames first exploded into existence, it would have been painless.
But to keep the fires at bay, he typed in that six-number code and pressed the button every single time it was required of him. The world outside didn't know, but life went on because of him. Sometimes he hated his hesitation, every time that he paused to consider if he could escape his duty. He had to keep pressing the button or the world would explode, and it would be entirely his fault. It was some sort of time bomb on the island, and the only way to reset it for another one hundred and eight windows was to deliver the code in a timely fashion.
There were plenty of times where he had wanted to give up. The computer beeped so regularly that he didn't have time for anything without being interrupted. One day, he had gotten sick, and even feverish he had been forced to drag himself over and type in the code. He had been so terrified of sleeping through the warning that he stayed seated with his head bowed next to the speakers on the computer as he drifted between dreams and some distorted reality.
He didn't need to have bothered. He could have typed those numbers in his sleep and in any state. He was as machinated as the computer after only a short while.
If he didn't press the button, he would have woken up. It would have felt strange, the awareness of two realities, a tingling sensation squirming in his stomach and writhing in his chest. He had taken a psychology course back in college and this was like that. He was comatose, insane. If he didn't press the button, he would have lost the tie that kept him locked inside of his mind. He would have come back to reality, the reality where he hadn't landed on this bizarre island and had instead been found, shaking and sick from hypothermia resulting from spending a soaked day or more in his little boat on a race around the world. Lucidity would have returned and illness would have receded if he only neglected the code. He could have gone back to the woman in the picture whose name he can't really remember after three years like this. He felt awful for not knowing her name, but when he sometimes forgot his own he couldn't blame himself much. If he had woken up and gone back to her, he would have remembered. It would have been the first thing he said. She would have laughed with hysterical relief and embraced him, and he would have laughed, too, just because she was so happy. He could still imagine her laugh well. After three years he remembered just the exact sound of it, even though her name was forgotten in the recesses of his mind.
Sometimes he promised himself that he would only go through with this one more time, and then he would stop absolutely. He vowed to wake up and go back to her- next time. There was always a next time, and procrastinating out of fear was a cycle as continuous as the computer itself. Because as nice as that option was, he either had the choice to hope he could go back or to risk having the fires come. Both options were solid to him, but more often than not waking up seemed like a hopeless fantasy and the fire seemed so real he could practically smell the acrid odor.
It definitely wasn't a job for one man. He had suffered through moments where he couldn't bring himself to continue the loop any more. Kelvin had always come forward in time and done it for him. Then there had been times when it had been his turn to hesitate and Desmond's turn to step in. Once Kelvin died, Desmond was alone and he had been forced to step in for his own hesitation. It just wasn't a job for one man, but he did it. He always thought that someone would come eventually and he would be able to leave, finally leave, and go around the world and back home, completing a race that suffered from a three-year delay. He lived in a state of permanent denial.
He talked to himself. With no one else there, he had to do something, but eventually he ran out of things to say. He played music for the sake of a voice but could never bring himself to sing along. His situation didn't exactly call for belting out lyrics at the top of his lungs while 'saving the world.'
If he didn't press the button, the disease would have spread to the rest of the world. He couldn't be sure what contained it to the island, but that invisible barrier would be ruined if he slipped even once. He almost preferred the fire. Disease would be slow, an inching epidemic that would have taken a long time to become rampant. People would have been able to see it coming, and Desmond would have to watch without being able to help anyone. One by one and not instantaneous, it would have been worse than the explosion and he would have had time to feel the dreadful chill of guilt. His lapse in judgment would have ruined the world and whatever time he would have been granted before disease crept through his veins would have been tormented by his conscience.
He would have been able to shut the hatch door and ignore those getting ill outside, but it wouldn't have taken long before he would have died himself. The end result would be the same as fire, but the disease was such a slow, excruciating poison.
If he didn't press the button, poverty would have stopped. Starvation would have been practically unheard of and war would have become a thing of the past. Corruption and greed would have slowly worn themselves out and people would have been happy for the first time. Paradise would have become a truth instead of a dream. There would have been peace of the soul and of the world, the unattainable kind that many people strove for and never quite acquired. He was unwittingly imprisoning everyone for fear of destroying them. His priorities were mixed; his intentions were good but his actions undid that.
If he didn't press the button, nothing would have happened. He would have sat there, frozen in trepidation, numbers already plugged in and finger wavering just a slight space over the button that he was supposed to attend to. His eyes would have been fixated on the counter as the last second passed. Then his tight throat would have relaxed and stale breath would finally be exhaled from his lungs. The world would have still been there, solid and real and not in shambles. He would have known instinctively that the disease was contained, that there would be no explosion and no other form of disaster. No flash flood or volcanic eruption or fatal earthquake or sudden cessation of the world's spinning. He would have had the illogical knowledge that he could finally go up through the hatch door and into the real sunlight. The air would have been sweet and even if it had been raining, pouring in fat, frigid droplets, he would have known that just being free of the hatch was perfection. He would have laughed or screamed into the sky in defiance or in absolute elation.
If he didn't press the button, he would have been free. He would have been free of it, as would any replacements that would come. If he didn't press the button, he would have died, as would any and all people in the world. It was an absolute either way. He would have shed the Dharma suit forever or he would have died in it.
It was the uncertainty that caused him to continue the routine. He could have been saving the world or he could have been destroying it for three years. It might have been some elaborate, cruel hoax or the imaginings of a confused mind.
So when the girl shot the computer, he was at first gripped with despair. That was it; the world was doomed. So he ran- he panicked and he ran away from it once he discovered that he couldn't fix it. He wanted to be as far away as possible from the site when the world began to crumble.
"Desmond, you're an idiot," he whispered to himself when only the trees and the thousands of watchers whom he couldn't see surrounded him. It was about time someone said it. He was mentally counting down with the timer above the computer, calculating how much time he had before something momentous occurred. He had told the doctor what to do in a desperate tone, just in case they managed to fix it.
At least he got away. He didn't care whether the world ended or not. If they repaired the machine and kept to the procedure, it was no longer his problem and they would have to put up with it. He could slip away into the jungle and forget the numbers. If they couldn't fix it, then he had tried and failed and that was the end of it, the same for if they fixed it and didn't put in the numbers or if they didn't even make the attempt. He got to flee into the jungle and leave the responsibility on their shoulders. He would have felt bad for it if he weren't so grateful to make his own escape.
He could hear them whispering from time to time. They were haunting and ever-present but he wasn't as afraid of them as maybe he should have been. He kept a wary, almost paranoid watch for them, but he never considered that they might be the death of him. Not yet.
Out there, in the jungle, he still couldn't sleep a full two hours. His body was so used to rising hardly after his eyes closed that he couldn't force himself to stop after so long. He was programmed like that, programmed to Dharma's regulation, fine-tuned and perfected. He used to sleep nine hours every night, especially when he was training. He knew he needed sleep to operate like a human and not like a zombie, but saving the world regularly had robbed him of that luxury.
It sounded like such a romantic concept, saving the world. It sounded like an epic about heroes and villains, when it only ever was a confused man wondering whether or not he should even try.
The fact was that the world continued spinning because he wasn't sure, because he didn't know whether he would be faced with destruction or something better than what he had begun to expect since he had unexpectedly ended up on the island.
It's the uncertainty that made him push the button for so long. He couldn't be certain, out in the jungle, if they had followed his example or not. The world hadn't ended, hadn't even changed in his perception. So maybe Dharma is a hoax. But more likely than not, they pushed the button, because they couldn't be sure either- and that's what kept everything static.