Lost and its characters belong to JJ Abrams, Bad Robot and crew. I'm just borrowing to have a little fun. Desmond stresses over whether or not he should press the button. Written for the lostfichallenge #13
Lost – Restart
By Mystic
October 12th 2005
Desmond was awake when it happened. The first beep from the alarm that told him he had four minutes. He was awake and he was sitting at the computer already. His hands were folded in his lap, pressed firmly against his stomach and he listened for a moment. If he lifted his head, he could see Kelvin in the other room. The other man was lying in the bottom bunk, some old book laid open on his stomach. His eyes stared up at the bunk above him.
The keyboard came into focus and Desmond watched it, staring defiantly at the button marked 'Execute'. Every day he sat in the same chair. Every day he entered the numbers. Every day he hit that button. He couldn't remember life differently. He couldn't remember long showers in the morning, evenings spent running under the setting sun, or nights spent curled up with his girlfriend in their bed after making love.
He could only remember to type in the numbers, to make sure they were right. Execute.
"Do you think, Kelvin, that anything would really happen if we didn't send the numbers?" He asked the question every so often. His curiosity never got the better of him though. He passed a glance at the man who continued to stare upwards. Maybe pondering, maybe in defiance himself.
The beeps didn't get any louder the longer they went on. But the ticking of the time clock seemed to. Every second that passed, the metal pages flipped in rhythm. Tick. Tick. Tick. Beep. Tick. Tick. Tick. Beep. Desmond used to hear it in his nightmares, when he'd first arrived. He'd hear it as he dreamed of running through the parks. He'd hear it when he imagined his baby's heartbeat. He'd hear it in dark alleyways. There were no monsters in Desmond's nightmares, only that haunting sound.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Beep.
He tried to drown it out. More then once he and Kelvin had played their music as loud as it could go when they entered the numbers. They watched the counter roll back to the start and they went back to an hour and forty eight minutes or so of loud seventies music blasting through the chambers. Desmond didn't even like the music at first. He made fun of it. Said he knew bands twice as good and half as old, but Kelvin would laugh. He would tell him, "You'll get used to it Desi, I promise you that."
Desmond had gotten used to it. Desmond even had his favorites. He had his song for the morning and his song for the afternoon and his song to go to sleep. He memorized every record cover, every record position. Sometimes he spent hours rearranging them. He arranged them by color, by how much he liked them, by genre and then alphabetically for fun. But the music never drowned out the fact that every one hundred eight minutes, he had to get up, punch in the numbers, execute.
He imagined what would happen if he didn't touch the keyboard, if he stared it down and didn't do it. If he didn't send the numbers. He imagined a bomb. He imagined an electromagnetic pulse. Desmond wasn't a hundred percent sure he even knew what that was. The words were in some book he'd read since they'd been in the hatch. He imagined nothing. Desmond imagined he'd exit the hatch and walk onto the beach and a man would be standing there with a clipboard in one hands and a stopwatch in the other.
He'd tell him he won the race.
Desmond typed the number 4 just as the clock swung down on two minutes. Tick. Tick. Tick. Beep. "Kelvin, you ever consider not sending the numbers?" 8. "You ever think maybe it'd be better if you didn't send 'em at all?" 15. "What would really happen, I mean. They didn't give you any clue?" 16. "What would happen if we just left the hatch? Let the pages flip to a hundred eight again and just leave." 23. "You really think anything'll happen, brother?" 42.
Kelvin didn't answer him. Of course, Desmond knew, Kelvin wasn't breathing either. Kelvin wouldn't answer his questions. Kelvin would never answer his questions. He watched the clock click down and a secondary alarm began to sound, this one frightened him. He didn't even know why. Desmond sat back in the chair, watching seconds tick off the counter. He watched the button. He watched the cursor blinking.
He read the numbers four times consecutively.
He hit Execute.
108.
Finis