Here is the next part. I really enjoyed writing this chapter so I hope you like it to. Back to an all Ana-Lucia chapter I'm afraind, but we'll find out what happens to the rest of the group in the next one. Promise.
Hopefully, if there aren't too many customers in work this evening (I'm stuck working the bloody night shift again ) I'll have the next chapter written and possibly typed up for sometime Wednesday night. Woohoo. What will no more Lost for us poor Brits to watch anymore...well, not until the spring anyway.
Anywho, I'll let you get reading.
Chapter 9.
Thunder cracked above. An ear-splitting noise that made Ana-Lucia cover her ears with her hands instinctively. Reflexively.
It was above them now. Circling and even though she was too distracted at that moment to continue counting out the seconds and discern how far away the storm actually was, her efforts wouldn't have been needed as the lightening tore open the sky with scorching, neon radiance even before the thunder had finished roiling through the heavens like a deafening beat on a drum.
She recoiled from the person posing as Sawyer as fast as she could, hands still clasped over her ears, stepping backwards carefully and yet deliberately instead of turning tail and running for fear of turning her back upon whoever, or whatever, it was. For fear of what he would do if she didn't have her eyes on him the entire time. She dared not even blink.
Her heart pounded in her chest like a hammer striking against an anvil making it thrum deep inside her. Making her entire body ring with the force with which it beat. As if it was trying to break free of her ribcage and bolt away from the danger like she herself wanted to do. But the fear, the sheer weight of the anxiety settling across her like a second skin, the pressure paralysed her in the shadows of the thunderous night and the stare of the counterfeit Sawyer considering her.
The unease in her stomach multiplied tenfold as his form, so familiar and yet so not him, stood before her, face no longer smiling. Hand no longer stretched forth to offer her the compass. All she could do was stand. Counter his stare, disturbingly blue.
He simply stood, the thing that had stolen Sawyer's likeness to get close to her, to lull her into a false sense of security. But why? That was the question. What exactly had he just told her?
"You-" Ana started to speak and then paused, her throat closing over slightly, feeling still slightly unnerved that she was speaking to something so like him. "What-?"
He shook his head causing her to fall silent once more, snapping her mouth shut and clenching her teeth against her tongue to keep the dread from bubbling up her throat from her lips.
She was trained. She had to remain calm.
A deep breath. Then another. And two more. A deep breath.
Time had come to a standstill, swirling between them in it's imaginary patterns, disturbed only by the very first large, stinging drops of rain from the clouds still glowering wrathfully on high. She felt them splatter down, heard them pattering on the soft earthen ground and clacking against the leaves overhead like someone cracking a whip over and over again. Sporadically at first they fell, hitting her burning shoulders, hunched, ready to swing her fists up and defend herself if the need arose. Then they came copiously. Lavished down as if the sky had thousands, millions of the giant silver globes to spare.
The shock of the wetness and the bitterness drew a gasp from her lips and she took her chance then to step further away from him until her back thudded against the comforting hardness of a tree trunk, rough and splintery though it was. Her hands slapped down, palms seeking out the coarse bark as if trying to anchor herself to it. Something real to hold onto when the very epitome of the unexplained was standing before her, trying to tell her something. To warn her, perhaps.
"You said watch out for them," she managed to call back across the halted time and distance between them, continuing faster, so that he had no time to cut off her speech again. "Do you mean…the Others? Are they coming here?"
He neither acknowledged her question nor her presence any longer. A curl simply drew his lips up into the infamous Southern smirk that she knew so well and his eyes, glazed eerily all of a sudden, focused no longer upon her but past her. Seeing through her, as if she were no longer there…or he wasn't.
"Answer me!" she demanded, her courage suddenly returning as this new, motionless and sightless, imitation Sawyer studiously ignored her and her confusion soared.
And as if in reply to her plea, she heard a voice, familiar again, though she was wary now of it's authenticity. A voice calling, shouting out a name desperately. She had the distinct feeling that she had lived through those moments before as she snapped her head in the voice's direction, unaware that she was following the stare of the man before her.
"Walt!"
The voice was female. Familiar. She knew the tone of fear running deep through it's timbre, cracking when it reached the height of the woman's yell.
"Walt!"
She'd heard it's fevered and panicked pitch before, not so long ago. Deep in another jungle, or another part of it. In another time, or what seemed was only yesterday. In another life. She knew it. And yet she didn't. Something about it was new. Something was changed. It was more certain about what, or who exactly, it was searching for. The owner of the voice believed now. The last time Ana had heard the cry go up-was it a month gone?-she had heard the uncertainty in the call. The unspoken concern that perhaps the voice's owner thought she was chasing a ghost.
Then it hit her.
"Shannon!" she yelled out, her own voice's desperation surprising her. "Shannon, stay where you are! I'm coming to get you!" and she whirled as she spoke, looking back towards the false Sawyer only to find him gone. Not a sign that he had been there at all. Not a sound to announce his departure, only the empty ground, the vacated space where he had stood, had held her attention and fear for long moments. Had he really been there at all? Was her sanity leaving her right when she had the greatest need for it to remain where it was?
Time had righted itself it seemed and flowed freely about her now in the lashing rain and she turned and spun trying to find the figure that she had been speaking with mere moments, seconds previously.
He had to have been there. He had to have left something, some thing, in his wake. He had been so real. She had held his wrist. She had touched him.
"Who's out there!" Shannon's voice came back through the undergrowth, closer now, a fearful note suddenly making it higher and more full of breath. As if she gasped. As if she wheezed, finding it hard to fill her lungs. Made it waver slightly as if she hadn't thought that she would actually find anyone on her excursion into the jungle depths. And suddenly she crashed through the brush, stumbling like she had the first time that they had come face to face, though not falling to the ground and lying deathly still like she had before. "Ana!" the relief in her voice was amazing. Overwhelming as she lurched forwards, golden brown eyes wide as the terror partially left them at seeing Ana's familiar form.
Stiff, cold arms wound around her neck in a fleeting embrace of relief before she pulled away again and instead icy hands gripped at Ana's forearms, wrapping around them tightly, knuckles brilliant white in their desperation. Her breathing was laboured.
"Shannon, calm down." Ana tried to sooth, despite the larger part of her that wanted to join the blonde's panic and run with her back to the caves. But Shannon would pass out long before then, perhaps even die, she thought, remembering overhearing that the younger woman suffered with asthma. "Deep breaths. In through the nose." she curled her own hands about Shannon's forearms in a mirror-gesture, giving her the comfort that she apparently craved, clamoured for. The reassurance that Ana, standing before her, was real, as Ana had sought by pressing her back up to the tree. "What is it?"
"Did you see him!" Shannon demanded between frantic gasps. "Did you see him come through here!"
For a long, bewildered moment, Ana thought that she was speaking about Sawyer, or the image of him that she thought she had seen. How could she know? Had she seen him too? And she barely managed to restrain herself from demanding as such and shaking the trembling girl in her anxiousness for the truth. For the confirmation that she was not going mad, or that if she was, at least someone else was there going insane with her.
"I thought he was gone," she continued suddenly, startling Ana out of her thoughts. Her voice was low and deep and her eyes flitted about them where they stood beneath the wide tree, arms linked together. "But he keeps coming back and I don't understand what he's trying to tell me." tears now glossed her amber eyes, welling up and streaming down her face to mingle with the pouring rain that soaked the pair of them to the bone. "I don't know what he wants from me…" she was distraught, the fear making her asthma flare up worse and in turn her emotions spiral out of control. "I know that he's out there. I know it. I need to find him. He keeps coming to me. I keep seeing him, when no one else can."
Then she realised. Shannon wasn't talking about Sawyer. She hadn't come out searching the darkness and night for the Southerner's form. She had been calling for the boy. Walt.
"Don't worry. They're all out there looking for him." Ana tried once more to comfort her, to take her mind away from their current situation. "Locke and Eko and your man, Sayid. Sawyer and Michael. Even Kate. I know they'll find him."
But blonde locks whipped out amid the rain, sending water lashing out every which way. Denying Ana's words of assurance.
"No. He's telling me something. He speaks to me but I don't understand it. He's trying to warn me."
Alarms bells went off in the back of Ana's mind, making the place where her spine became her neck tingle.
Warning. A warning. The Others. They were coming.
"You shouldn't be out here alone, Shannon." she murmured, turning away from her abruptly with the pretence of scanning for the way back to the caves while, in fact, she searched again for any evidence of the entity that she had been conversing with prior to Shannon's arrival.
"I'm not alone." Shannon stated evenly and Ana could hear the curiousness, the wariness in her tone. "You're here."
Silence, save for the ever falling, relentless downpour, wove out between them as she felt Shannon's eyes burning a hole in her shoulders and she paused in scrutiny the area, debating whether or not to speak the words and tell her, let another person know what she had just been through.
"You know something!" Shannon demanded fiercely, taking a stride in her direction. "You saw something too, didn't you? Was it Walt?"
Ana shook her head and as she did Shannon spoke again, refusing to believe that Ana hadn't witnessed anything, telling her that she knew she was lying. Calling her bluff.
"Sawyer." she stated bluntly.
"What?"
She turned slowly to fix the taller woman with a resigned glance.
"Sawyer. I saw him. Not Walt."
"But Sawyer's out there with the-" Shannon began in confusion, waving her hand in the direction of the deeper jungle and the mountains that the search party had headed for.
"I know…"
-oOo-