Title: Lasting Imprints
Summary: For the Choices Challenge at the Lost challenges LJ community. Sort of a missing scene that takes place right before Shannon knocks on Boone's door in Hearts and Minds
Rating: PG/PG-13
Ship: Shoone, kind of
Lasting Imprints
Shannon stood outside of the door, the thickly painted white entrance mocking her with its matronly nobility. The aged gold plaque on the door that read, "1215" glittered in the subdued lighting of the hall – nobody bothered to turn up the lights this late at night. The lush, soft carpet causing her to teeter unevenly as the sharp heels of her Miu Miu pumps dug into the floor. When she moved her foot, she noticed that the solid sole of her shoe had left a significant indent in the carpet. Within seconds it would fill again, and the carpet would go on as if a shoe had never once pierced its surface. But there were longer lasting indents, those of the legs on desks that had been tunneling grooves into the floor since they had been placed there, like bloody incisions left after a child digs into a mosquito bite, those of the raw soreness of a newly broken heart or a thumbprint on a piece of paper.
His room was at the end of the hall, on the left, and her buzzing mind had proved difficult to find it. When she stepped out of the elevator, and its quiet beep had rang out loudly, like her cries would later, she had stood at the fork in the hall, blindly unaware of the polite plaques gracing the walls claiming that rooms 1201 through 1220 were located to the left. She had weaved desperately to the right, the winding tan and burgundy carpet throwing her drunken mind into a deep state of confusion. Each door said a number – the wrong number, of course, and inside of each door was another person, another story, another wavering song of anguish. She had fallen headfirst into the wall at the end of the hall, and the restrained dim lights had shone across the taupe crowning of the wall, placing the spotlight on Shannon and her idiocy.
Breaking into an irregular run, she wiped sweat from her brow, letting her heels fall into the carpet, threatening her balance with each step she took. When she bought these shoes, at Bloomingdale's in LA two years ago, she had found the ribbon-like mauve straps to be flirty and fun, and the three inch spike heels daring and sexy. Now, these shoes were just as impractical and pointless as Sabrina had scoffed to her that they were when she had caught glimpse of them as Shannon had arrived home and opened the reflective silver box, unwrapping pieces of wrinkled tissue paper. As the room numbers raced by her, her head spun, dizzy from one too many shots of vodka that she had drank – no, absorbed, downstairs in the hotel lobby, despite the twinkly music and conservatively dressed bartender.
Then she had slowed to a stop, shrinking like Alice had shrunk when she ate the tea bread in Alice in Wonderland, in the presence of the door that seemed to be judging her. The peephole was like an open mouth, gaping at her and teasing her as she had been teased when she was a gawky, stringy child before she had acquired a figure. But there was no point just standing here, she thought. Shannon rounded her hand, closing it into a tight fist and let her knuckles touch the door, right above the handle. The sound made a slight tapping noise, so she knocked again, harder, until her knuckles were raw and the pattern of the wood had made an imprint on them. But the indent, compared to the one she would leave on him, would fade unfairly quickly.