Chapter 8

"This may not be the most appropriate question, but I am curious," Izzie said.

"Your friends usually shouted accusations at me, and I tended to lie when I was answering them," Ben said almost casually. "Shocking me is going to be hard."

"All right. The island had this miraculous ability to heal injuries – John being the most obvious example," Izzie paused. "So why do you need glasses to read?"

Ben paused and actually seemed to consider the question. "You know I honestly don't think I ever thought about it," he said slowly. "If the island worked the same for everybody, I should have had perfect vision the moment I got off the submarine the first time."

"Maybe there's something about the eyes the island just can't deal with," Charlotte said slowly. "James told us he developed far-sightedness nearly a month after the crash. I realize it's nowhere as extreme as what happened to you…"

"But it does suggest that the island's powers were more arbitrary than I might have thought all this time," Ben looked at Charlotte. "Given what I've been looking at, there were definitely standards as to who saw what on the island."

Meredith had made it very clear for this experiment work they fundamentally needed a baseline to explain what they had seen. To that end, she and Lexi had gone to Jack and the rest of them and gently asked if they would mind giving them any experiences on the island that they had dismissed as hallucinations but might have had more to it than that.

Surprisingly, Jack had been more than willing to go along with it as had everybody connected with the plane crash. The only condition they had all asked for wasn't really a condition at all: that if this ended up in any publication, no names would be used. Since all scientific studies kept case histories anonymous by design, nobody had a problem with it.

Meredith hadn't mentioned directly the next obvious point – that Ben Linus would, as part of this study, have full access to another group of secrets. It was clearly implied, but no one – not even Stevens or Karev - felt any need to rub this particular part of their research in their faces. Meredith, however, had gently reminded Ben that she was a neurosurgeon, and should she choose, do very bad things to his brain.

"Some might say that anything removed from their could only improve my personality," Ben had said with a small smile. "However, as a sign of good faith, at our next meeting I will bring a couple of secrets of my own."

Now as he finished going through the papers that Meredith and Lexi had compiled, he looked up. "How much of this did John know about at the time?" he asked.

"Almost nothing," Izzie answered. "He was aware that Jack was seeing something that wasn't there, but he never asked what. And he knew well before you did just how special Walt was. "

"How exactly did he pick up on it?" Dan asked.

"According to him, he figured it out when they were playing backgammon," Lexi said. "When he was teaching him how to play, he would tell Walt the numbers he would need to win. Almost from the start, the dice always seemed to go his way. Locke may not have been a mathematician, but he'd played so many board games that he knew the probabilities that come with dice rolls. Walt was just too lucky for it to be pure coincidence."

"And we all know John never believed in coincidence," Karev said. "Still, you got to admire him, all that he needed to figure out that Walt had certain capabilities was basic math. Kind of makes whatever you and your people doing look a lot closer to German scientists."

"I would make my apologies to Walt in person, but for understandable reasons, his father doesn't want me to be in the same room with him," Ben admitted. "Plus unless I'm mistaken there isn't a flower arrangement to apologize for a kidnapping."

"You should tell Hallmark about it, cause clearly there was a market for it among your people," Alex pointed out.

"Alex, we've been through this," Izzie chastised her boyfriend.

"It's not exactly an insult if it's a fair comment," Ben pointed out. "Besides, as I said at the start this whole study is part of my atonement."

"Cliff notes for those of us who weren't on the island," Charlotte asked Meredith. "How many of the survivors had an experience like this?"

"Sun and Jin never saw anything that qualifies as part of this," Lexi stated. "Aside from anything that might have to do with Walt, Michael didn't either, but he's willing to admit he wasn't exactly the most balanced person at the time. We have no clear picture of those who came back from the tail section but based on what Locke told us, Eko had a communion with the island similar to him. So there's a decent chance all of the survivors and quite a few of the dead, may have seen things that would fit them into the category of this experiment."

"Even Sayid?" Ben seemed a little surprised at this.

"He's relatively sure he heard the whispers in the jungle," Izzie told him. "And right before Shannon…died, she and him saw an image of Walt trying to speak to them."

"Trying?" Dan asked.

"He couldn't understand a word, and honestly given what happened a couple of minutes later, you can't exactly blame him for being distracted," Alex said sadly. "Honestly, I'm amazed he remembered that much."

"There's actually a sub-category I'm not sure how to proceed with. Maybe you can offer some clarity," Meredith told Ben. "I kept a separate record of this, but no less than four of the survivors…and two of the dead had very vivid dreams while they were on the island."

"That wasn't entirely uncommon," Ben acknowledged. "I had my share of dreams when I was on the island. And I don't think it should come as a complete surprise. If the island was able to communicate with us when we were awake, why shouldn't it have been able to do the same with the subconscious?"

"I can't speak to that part of it. What I'm not sure of is how much of it is applicable to this particular study." Meredith said.

"Why?" Dan asked. "It involves a lot of the same parts of the brain you'll be focusing on."

"We're already on fringe-level science right now," Lexi pointed out. "I'm not sure how much we want to dabble into the deeper parts of the subconscious."

"I agree," Ben said. "Maybe if this study gets any traction we can consider for a future date. There's enough to deal with as it is."

Charlotte nodded. "I assume you've made copies for Dan and myself."

"You know we have to put you through the same requisite NDA bullshit," Karev pointed out. "Swore to a blood oath, cross your heart, etc."

"We're scientists. We know the drill," Dan said. "And we're well aware of the irony associated with this particular NDA on multiple levels."

"Has your brother-in-law been willing to go into any more detail about what happened to him?" Meredith asked.

"His exact words are, 'as soon as he figures it out himself, he'll let us know," Dan pointed out. "I can't exactly say I blame him as I'm still not sure how to quantify scientifically even in regard to the things we know about the island."

"The term you used was that his 'consciousness traveled back in time, but his body remained on the island," Ben had heard about this part and was still looking for an explanation that fit within the terms of the island.

"He thought that his life flashed before his eyes but in such a way that he was aware of the past," Dan told Ben. "The other alternative he has is that somehow the electromagnetism transported him off the island both in space and time, but he had memories of everything that happened. My explanation is the closest that anybody's come up with to an answer." Dan paused. "Of course, just because it's an explanation doesn't necessarily mean it's a clarification."

"I agree with you on that much," Ben admitted. "But considering that blast should have by all right, erased him from existence, we should be grateful he has one."

"According to John, he and Eko were only a few feet away," Lexi reminded him. "How do you explain their surviving?"

"I have an explanation. It doesn't clarify anything," Ben told them. "When I was recovering from my injury, Richard told me that one of the reasons that I had survived had less to do with the healing process of the island. In fact, it went so much further that I'm not entirely certain even I truly accepted it."

"Here we go again," Alex muttered. "As always I'm afraid to know but not to ask: what was the story?"

"If the island had a plan for you, it would not let you die," Ben said. "Even by the standards of which I lived my entire life, I find that somewhat ridiculous."

For Ben Linus to admit something was 'ridiculous' was the equivalent of Einstein saying that relativity was just something he came up while doodling on the john. It sounded just as absurd to everyone else, of course, but they were more surprised that Ben was so dismissive of the idea.

"Seventy-one people survived a plane falling from the sky," Izzie reminded them. "Many of them with little more than minor injuries. None of us are inclined to believe in fate or destiny the same way people like you would, but as people of science, the odds of that many people basically walking away from that is so infinitesimal as to be statistically insignificant."

"I sent men out there based on that surmise," Ben reminded them. "But my exact words to Ethan were: 'There may actually be survivors.' I thought there might be five or six on either side of it. Not nearly as many as there were."

"I knew that the island and by extension Jacob had a way of bringing people here," Ben continued. "Those people still died. The French team that Danielle was a part of, if the island had brought them there, you would think that it would have protected them from harm, whether from the island or other people."

"I talked to quite a few of the people who had interactions with Rousseau," Izzie reminded them. "Admitting that its secondhand information from an at-best unreliable narrator, the words that keep coming up were 'infected' and 'sickness'. Everyone else acknowledges that no one got sick on the island. What do you think that means?"

"The only answer I have is what you called the monster," Ben said. "But I have to tell you that I don't fully understand how that could make sense."

"I think in this case, you have to," Meredith said. "If for no other reason than it to an extent pertains to what we're dealing with."

"This smoke monster you keep talking about," Charlotte was having a hard time wrapping her head around this part of it. "The one that quite a few of your survivors had the ability to shapeshift into those who had recently died."

"And other forms, but let's stick with that for now," Meredith didn't particularly want to linger on this either, but she knew the foundation of this study came down to whether seeing the dead was limited to the island. "You clearly knew more about it then you were telling. Part of it was because you were part of Dharma and Dharma had clearly figured out a way to counteract it. But there's more to it than that."

"I thought this was coming," Ben admitted. "That's part of the reason I wanted to make sure I had an offer of good faith."

He reached into the satchel he had brought with him and pulled out a notebook. In size, it resembled the one that Daniel had found a while ago, but it was clearly older and more used.

"I'm guessing you remember writing in this one," he said slowly.

"Not long after I took over leadership of the Others in 1991, I began keeping a diary of my time on the island." Ben sighed. "Don't ask me why. I never cared much for the past growing up and I certainly had no intention of keeping it for future generations. Honestly, I think I was keeping them to say in private what I could never say to anyone else. "

"The things you couldn't admit even to yourself?" Lexi asked.

"I think that's as close to it as I can come," Ben said. "No one knew I kept them. Not Richard, not even Alex."

"Either you really had very little to say in thirteen years or this isn't the only volume," Karev said looking at it.

Ben nodded. "There were ten notebooks like this once. I wasn't allowed to take much with me when I left the island, but no one seemed to object that I took my journals with me. It's not that there was much else that I could take with me that would fit."

"How much of this was not wanting your replacement and your lackeys to know all the secrets you kept?" Karev asked bluntly.

"It's a little frightening how easily you can read me at times, Karev," Ben said calmly. "I'd been thrown out of the only home I'd known for thirty years. I think I was entitled to some petty behavior. " he said before Alex could hold up a hand.

"All I was going to say was, giving what happened, you'd be entitle to be a little petty," Alex said. Before Ben could say anything resembling thanks he added: "I realize that's a human emotion and you would be a foreign concept to you, but still."

Lexi shook her head. "I really don't understand how you're so fine just being blatant called inhuman. Alex has been beaten up for saying far less offensive things to other people."

"Maybe it's the respect of brutal honesty coming from the point of view of a pathological liar," Ben said simply. "Or maybe it's because he just uses his venom without any meaning for psychological damage."

"Could be simpler," Karev said. "Game recognizing game."

"I'll grant that's likely too," Ben said with a small smile. "In any case, there is a fair amount of information in these journals that could give some potential answers to the question we want. I don't pretend they have all the answers because I never had them."

"If nothing else, they'll give us a place to start," Dan admitted.

Charlotte had been quiet for a bit. She'd been watching Meredith ever since Ben had taken out his diary. There was a strange expression on her face, one that, not knowing her well enough, she couldn't quite read.

Stevens and Karev followed Charlotte's gaze, and because they could, they did understand the expression. "Mer, I say this with all the respect in the world," Izzie began. "You've seriously got to stop letting your mother run how you approach everything."

"Iz is right," Karev said. "I hate to tell you this but the way she keeps reaching for you from beyond the grave is starting to seem like the plot to a really bad horror movie sequel."

"Which is all of them," Iz pointed out.

"I know what it means to have your mother have a hold on you long after she's gone," Ben said compassionately. "Did she keep journals too?"

Meredith nodded. "I didn't find them until two years ago," she acknowledged. "There weren't personal expressions of love, inner thoughts. Mainly it detailed almost all of surgical procedures over her life." She paused. "Of course, considering who she was, that was what mattered most. I spent the better part of four months dealing with them before I realized they were just too much baggage. The Chief has them now."

"You might not want to look at these too closely then," Ben said. "There's no reason that Karev or your sister couldn't go over them and summarize what they think is meaningful."

"She was my mother," Meredith said with a little more force. "I barely know you."

"Which is why seem to be getting along," Ben said. "Knowing the inner processes of someone who even his closest colleagues would consider a borderline sociopath, it's not going to make for pleasant reading."

Even Karev seemed a little surprised by this self-description. "Don't tell me you're finally taking what everybody else told you seriously," he said only half in jest.

"It hasn't been easy to keep lying to myself now that I'm off the island," Ben admitted. "Looking at these journals does more to remind me of my often magical, if not self-delusional thinking."

Meredith came to a decision. "Give Lexi the earliest volumes, I'll take the most recent ones," she told him.

Ben looked a little surprised at this. "Even I didn't intend for you to read all of it," he said. "There are actually only four volumes that pertain the most closely to the parameters of this study. If you wish, you can go through the rest but the reason I think they're critical to the study is because there are the most incidents that have to do with what might be critical to what we're going through."

"I think you better be clearer than that," Dan said. "What years are you covering?"

"The first four volumes basically cover my first three years when I was assuming leadership of the island," Ben told them. "This is where I began to learn what I did about the Dharma Initiative and the secrets that the higher-ups were keeping from everyone else, including me."

Meredith had not wanted to ask this question. "Did your people really kill all of them?"

Ben wasn't going to pull punches now. "One of my last jobs as an infiltrator was to see which members could be considered possible defectors. In the end, twenty-one of the members decided to join us. They helped organize things when the Purge took place."

"Including your father," Lexi said slowly.

"If everything he's told us about Roger Linus is true – and I have absolutely no reason to doubt that part of his story – then I'm frankly amazed you waited that long," Alex said brutally. "Granted, killing everyone else he worked with does still strike me as the literal definition of overkill."

"I wasn't thrilled with their decision," Ben said sadly. "I argued for several of the ones who wouldn't defect. I even spoke out for Horace, saying he could be an asset and it didn't make sense for anyone else to lose a father." Ben looked at them. "I was more shocked than anyone that Ethan argued against it."

"How old was he at the time?" Charlotte asked.

"He wasn't even fifteen," Ben said. "I don't pretend to be a saint, but there was something very wrong with him. I actually refer to it a couple of times in my journal. I sent him off the island to get an education and become a doctor. Part of me really hoped that when I did so, he'd decide to try and move on. But he ended up coming back."

"Why?"

Ben didn't answer. "I have a few entries on that too, but not in any of the volumes I brought. When you tell Jack and the rest about my journal, tell them if they really want I'll give them the entries related to Ethan."

That it was accepted that Ben was willing to share his story was a given but they were still a little surprised to hear it. Charlotte, the other child of Dharma in the group, asked the obvious question. "Was he really that bad?"

"I was angry when he defied my orders and abducted Claire," Ben said. "I was just as angry when she escaped. I had absolutely no confidence in his ability to clean up his mess. I was going to send a team to take her in the night. Ethan defied my orders. The moment he did, he was a dead man walking."

"You'd gotten away with it once," Karev pointed out.

"I'd spared two lives, not nearly killed two people," Ben reminded them. "And considering that Ethan was one of the only doctors we had on the island, we needed him back with us more than in the field. I still don't know why he violated protocol. There was just something…missing from him that the island couldn't fix."

Again considering the source, this was saying quite a lot. "Considering who we're talking to, you'd better explain why you think that." Meredith told him.

Ben had a troubled look on his face that would have been utterly foreign to anybody from the island, even Juliet. "When Dharma was still on the island, I frequently had to engage in late-night meetings to pass on information. The first several years I would take every precaution for what I was doing. As more time passed, I became lax. One night coming back from a meeting, I was passing over the fence when I saw Ethan. Before I could even proffer an explanation, he told me he knew what I'd been doing."

"Given how young you joined, I'm kind of stunned you didn't give him props for effort," Izzie said slowly.

"I was going to run," Ben said. "I knew that Widmore would certainly have me killed if he learned of this sloppiness, but I thought that Richard might intercede. Before I could react, Ethan said he wouldn't tell if he could join." Ben was pensive. "Even if he'd been older, he was one of the least likely recruits. His parents might be high in the Dharma leadership, but they were loving and compassionate people. Ethan had no reason to want to abandon them. I was sure I was being played. But when I tried to fob him off, he told me point blank: 'If you don't take me next time, I'm going to tell my parents about you.'"

"I guess this is where you got your first real lesson in the power of blackmail," Karev said, clearly trying to cover his shock. "Seriously, did you think they'd believe what, a ten year old over a grown-up?"

"By now I had a pretty good understanding of the leadership of the Initiative. I wasn't going to take the chance." Ben said. "Not that I didn't tell him as brutally as possible that the Initiative would kill him first, then me the moment we showed up together. I thought that might scare some sense to him."

"It would in any other child," Lexi said.

"I'll never forget his response. 'Well, if I tell my people, they'll just kill you. You'd better hope they understand.' He knew the box he had me in."

"Maybe he just wanted you dead," Dan said.

"Maybe he wanted to take your place," Karev countered.

"The former was infinitely more likely to happen than the former, and he had to have expected that," Ben reminded them. "It was the first time I just couldn't comprehend his reasoning. It wasn't the last. I left a message for Richard telling him I had a potential recruit. He told me for the two of us to come the next night at three AM."

"That quickly. No objections." Izzie said.

"I didn't even earn a dressing down when I showed up. Widmore glared daggers at me but Richard looked at me like I was the golden child. It wasn't until a couple of years later that Richard told me that without him having to tell me, I'd found a name on one of Jacob's lists."

"Had he told you who Jacob was by then?" Meredith asked.

"I'd known who he was ever since I'd switched allegiances. But for the briefest of moments, I seriously considered whether Jacob was everything I'd been told. Why was someone like Ethan on his list? That feeling only intensified when Widmore sent me after Rousseau."

"Wait a minute," Charlotte said slowly. "You're not telling me that Charles Widmore sent an eleven-year old boy to see you kill a person?"

"I'm afraid it's worse than that," Ben said. "When I was outside her tent, I hesitated. Then Ethan spoke up. 'Do you want me to do it?' I saw and heard some terrible things on the island, but few things put as big a chill through my soul as an eleven year old boy discussing killing a woman – one who wasn't that much older than him – as if he were asking for breakfast. I got out of there to do my job as much to get some distance from him. And when I came back a few minutes later with a baby in my arms, he honestly wanted to know what it was like to do it. He seemed genuinely disappointed, not only when I told Charles that I didn't kill the mother, but that no one killed the daughter."

This understandably put chills down everybody's spine. "Did he strangle animals when everybody was asleep?" Lexi finally asked.

"Forget a serial killer. That's a future Central American dictator right there," Charlotte shuddered. "And his parents were my neighbors when I was a child. I don't know which I find more unnerving."

"How about the part where you're talking to one of his babysitters?" Alex asked bluntly. "We passed strange in this particular scenario a few miles back."

"Did Juliet know all this about him when she worked with him?" Izzie asked.

"He went with Richard to recruit her," Ben told them. "He was supposed to be there if she had any medical questions to ask him, but I don't think those ever came up. The two of them worked pretty much hand in glove the three years she was on the island, but the two of them didn't socialize much outside of work. He was a reminder to her of just how poorly things were going. She was more alarmed then upset when she learned he was dead. I think it's pretty clear as to why."

"With good reason as it turned out," Karev reminded him. "Honestly, who wanted him dead more, you or his wife?"

Juliet had told them what Ben had revealed about the Stanhope marriage. The jury was still out whether Alex or Izzie fully bought into it. "I won't pretend it was entirely a show I put on when I showed Juliet his body," he admitted. "Still, he deserved a proper funeral. Extramarital antics aside, he was basically a good man."

That was high praise from Ben. Meredith decided to return to the source of this discussion. "These journals give an explanation to some of the things you learned about the island," she asked Ben.

"Most of it had to with what Dharma was actually up to," Ben was more than willing to change the subject. "There were things I had to deal with, the pallet drop, making sure the satellite connections on the islands at the Flame and the Looking Glass were working."

"What about the Swan? Don't tell me you didn't know anything about it?" Dan pointed out.

"That was one of the stations we couldn't do anything about. Radzinsky had been exiled to the Swan after the Incident ended up taking place," Ben began. "Apparently, not long after I woke up in the Others tents, it had happened."

"What exactly was the Incident?" Lexi asked.

"The Initiative was drilling in Hostile Territory. This was already a violation of the Truce that Horace himself had signed three years earlier. The fact that they were doing the same level of drilling at the site that would become the Orchid made it very clear that they had no intention of keeping any part of it. In the case of the Swan, they clearly should have listened."

"What happened?" Charlotte pressed.

Ben looked at Alex and Izzie. "John told you what happened when he smashed the computer at the Swan?"

"After you convinced him that nothing would happen when the button wasn't pressed?" Karev reminded him. "Yeah, that part did come up."

Ben nodded. "I'm told it was a much larger scale of the same thing. Everything that was metal got sucked into the pocket, chains, piping, cars. At least a dozen men died at the site that day but none of them were important. Dr. Chang suffered an injury that would cost him his right hand and somehow Radzinsky got away unscathed. No one would ever talk about how they managed to stop it exactly, and the only thing ever told me about what happened was that he saw the sky turn purple."

Dan thought of the book from an alternate universe. What could Dharma have done?

"No one in Dharma ever talked about the Swan again. It wasn't hard to avoid the subject: very few people knew about it and most of them were dead. Horace and Pierre never talked about the rest of the time they were there." Ben said. "I didn't find out about the details until well into my stint as leader. And there's a good reason for that. All of the other Dharma stations had some kind of construction that could be covered up in the jungle with most of it being underground or in the case of the Looking Glass underwater. After they finished building –by which I learned later meant pouring over, the Swan – they didn't build an entrance until the man who would inhabit it was put in there."

"And that man was Radzinsky," Dan reasoned. "That station was essentially his sentence for his crime."

Ben nodded. "Like so many of the orientation films about the stations, it was based on a fundamental lie. Everyone was told they were going to be on shift for 540 days. Radzinsky's shift was never going to end. I don't know the details, but he kept going through partners the rest of the time the Initiative was active."

"According to Desmond, he found a way to fill his time," Dan said. "And apparently, he didn't take his punishment any more seriously than his crime."

"You mind sharing with those who still don't know the full story?" Lexi asked.

"I don't know the full story either," Dan said, "but according to Desmond, Radzinsky spent as much time as possible not only exploring the island but drawing a map on the blast door where he could plot revenge against his enemies."

Ben nodded. "John told me he got the briefest of glimpses of it. Believe me if that was my fault it was purely unintentional."

Karev looked at him. "You really didn't know about the blast door being triggered?"

"I was lying through my teeth when I was being held prisoner," Ben told them. "That doesn't mean I wasn't as shocked as John was went the lights went out and the doors started closing. I might have known the Swan existed, that didn't mean I knew anything close to all its secrets. And certainly I had no idea what Radzinsky and the others were doing."

"Even though there was a station whose only job was to watch it?" Alex was still doubtful.

"I think if you want to explain yourself better, you need to tell us what you know about the Pearl," Dan countered.

Ben didn't hesitate. "The Pearl was actually designed to do exactly what it was meant to. Monitor the other stations. But because no one could know the purpose of the Swan, the people at Dharma made up a cover story. That the people there were watching a psychological experiment. They didn't know the purpose of the station was to make sure that the Swan was always operating."

Izzie thought for a moment. "That field of nothing but tubes of notebooks that Jack and his team found when they were on their mission to rescue Walt," she pointed out.

Ben nodded. "The system was real. It just went nowhere. At the end of a three week shift – and apparently these were taken seriously – Dharma would send someone to check the printer to make sure the button was still being pushed."

"And no one knew what the experiment was or why it was so important," Charlotte said. "Very Orwellian."

"But even though the Pearl was in effect while you were in charge, you're telling us that you had no idea what the purpose of the Swan was," Dan said doubtfully.

"I left to that to the work of Mikhail," Ben told them. "The Flame had the capability to monitor other stations. He kept me appraised to what was going on with everywhere else." He hesitated. "Though honestly, Richard did most of the work there. We never got along particularly well."

"How exactly was that different from say, all the rest of your people?" Karev asked. "From what Juliet told us, you weren't exactly Mr. Popular among them even after Widmore was exiled."

"It may have something to do with how he was recruited," Ben acknowledged. "It was apparently one of the older messages that Dharma sent out well after the Purge."

"'Would you like to save the world?'" Izzie quoted. "Kate told me she didn't know whether that was another lie."

"No, it was one of their methods for years. I shut it down after Mikhail answered the ad. But by the time I had, Mikhail was already on the island. He always thought he'd been brought their under false pretenses, which to be fair he had been." Ben acknowledged. "He was always loyal to the island, but make no mistake it was the island, Jacob and I was always a distant third."

"Well, he was willing to sacrifice himself on your orders," Dan said slightly coldly.

"He didn't do it for me," Ben said simply. "The only reason people did anything for me was because they thought I was the voice of Jacob."

"How exactly did that come about anyway?" Izzie asked. "Not even John's clear on that one."

Ben didn't answer directly. Instead, he went through his case and removed one of the notebooks. "This was about six months after the Purge," he said slowly. "We'd finally finished defeating the remnants of Dharma, which left Charles and myself time to start chewing on each other. To be clear at this point, I was pretty sure I was going to be the loser in this fight."

He opened the book to a section he'd marked. "April 19th. For the third straight night, the same dream. Horace is in a clearing in the woods, chopping down the same tree over and over. He finally looks at me and he says: 'You know where to find him.' I see his nose bleeding and then I wake up."

"I've dreamt about Horace before, but this is different. It's always about him in the Barracks. And why he is chopping down trees? All the years I knew him, he never once did anything resembling manual labor. The island is trying to tell me something again, but I am unclear as to its message. Still…him. Could Jacob finally be trying to talk to me?"

"April 21st: The dream went further this night then before. He was still laying out ground for a structure, but this time I picked up another detail. A few feet away from it was a line of ash. I think that I might actually recognize the area of land, but I've never seen any place with ash before. I'm clearly being sent a message. Tomorrow morning I intend to take a hike to that area. Perhaps the answers I have looked for all this time might be there."

Ben hesitated. "I've never told this part of it to anybody," he said slowly. "This will no doubt confirm much of what John believed as well as the rest and I don't expect it will necessarily improve your opinion of me. Nevertheless, I do think it has something to do with what we're about to study."

"Then by all means feel free to keep it to yourself," Alex said. "Because as we've been telling everybody who came back, keeping secrets about the island was always in everybody's best interest."

"They're not on the island anymore," Meredith reminded them.

"What's your point?" Charlotte asked.

Ben took the hint. "Early morning April 23rd: 'Is this the truth I've been seeking all this time? Or is just more bitter medicine? Either way, it may very well be that I have gotten what I truly deserve."

"At the crack of dawn this morning, I left my house before anyone was awake to notice and told no one, not even Richard, where I was going. I knew my position is tentative, and that I might lose face for disappearing but I could not risk it."

"I packed a day's worth of food and water and walked slowly through the jungle. I knew that if the monster came to find me I would have little chance of protection, but right now that was the least of my concerns. The island had protected me so far and now it was clearly leading me. I had to assume that I was on the right path. That is after all, what faith is. Belief with no evidence."

"I walked for hours, sometimes certain of my path, otherwise positive I was lost. I knew what I was looking for but seemed unsure where to find it. I knew I could turn back at any time, and no one would know why I had been gone. I also knew that it would be a defeat. The island was sending me on this path. I had to follow it."

"Finally, at nightfall I found it. A line of ash. For the first time I wondered why it was here and what it was for: to keep people out or to keep something else in. I could have walked through it, but I chose to step over it."

"As I did, I thought I heard a scream. I didn't recognize the voice or know where it was coming from. I also knew I couldn't stop to follow it."

"I walked for several minutes, and then I found the cabin. I'm relatively certain that by this point I have explored every inch of the island, and I'm certain I've never seen this cabin before. And it's not because it's been built recently: judging by the looks of it, this cabin has been here for a very long time. The wood was weathered by nature, there were gaps in the walls. There were two windows that I could see, and no light in either, but I knew it was inhabited."

Izzie and Alex were the only ones who knew this had been the cabin where Ben had claimed Jacob had lived. They also knew very well that Jacob had never lived there. So the question was: who had?

"There was a lantern on the porch, the kind that you light with a match. Keeping matches around this kind of wood would be the definition of a fire trap, not just for this cabin but perhaps the entire jungle. Yet it didn't surprise me that there was a book of matches right beside the lantern. I was expected, after all."

"Still, for the briefest of moments, I considered walking away as fast as I could. I could feel a presence within it, but it didn't seem friendly or welcoming. But that would have an admission of defeat as well. So I lit the lantern and stepped inside the cabin."

"Even now, I'm not sure what I was expecting but it initially seemed underwhelming. There were jars with a strange liquid in them on the window ledge. Next to it was a portrait of a dog. And in the corner was an old decrepit rocking chair that looked even older than the cabin."

"It was empty. More to the point, it didn't look like anyone had lived there for a very long time. I held the lantern to the chair, like a foolish child. No one was there."

"I didn't know what I had hoped to find here. But whatever the island had wanted to show me, I clearly couldn't see it. I turned away, thinking of an explanation as to why I'd been gone. And that's when it happened."

'Hello there'.

"I froze. I knew the cabin was empty. I also knew that if I turned around, someone was going to be sitting in the chair. And not someone I ever wanted to see again."

"'You came a long way. Don't you want to know why?'

"For the first time I considered the possibility that the island had summoned me here not to reward me for my service but to punish me. Perhaps I had spent the last fifteen years on the wrong side. I'd made similar mistakes in judgment before, after all. Still, there was no point in trying to run now."

"I turned around. 'Hello, Horace.' I'm amazed my voice didn't shake."

"'He looked exactly how I'd last seen him, hair slightly graying, glasses still on and with a fond look in his eyes. He'd always liked me and had tried to look out for me over the years. Perhaps he hadn't done the best he could against him, but without him I'd never have come to the island."

'I see you've moved up in the world.' It was a cruel thing to say but there was no judgment in it. 'I'm glad you got my message.'

"I found my voice." 'You're dead.'

"Again he didn't blink. 'I think you know here dead is kind of relative.'"

"'What is this place?'" I finally asked."

"'Mine. Yours. His. No one's.'

"Years of service to Richard and Widmore had gotten me used to being talked to in riddles. I can't say it wasn't any less frustrating hearing it from the dead. 'Why did you bring me here?' I asked."

"'Because right now, you need it more than I do.'"

"I considered where I was. 'Does he use this place?' I asked.

'He did once. He will again.'

"For the first time I considered the possibility that I was still asleep, that all of this was just another dream. It certainly had this quality."

'Ask the question you really want to ask,' Horace said gently."

"Did Jacob send you?"

"Horace blinked. 'He knows you're special. He knows you're loyal to the island. He knows that you will always act in your best interest – even when it's painful. You're the right man for the job. You just have to convince them of it."

"I had so many questions to ask, and I should have asked them. But all that I heard was that I was the right man for the job. As far as I was concerned, I'd finally been chosen."

"I don't think I blinked, but when I looked at the chair, Horace was gone. It doesn't matter anymore. It was a sign, the closest I've gotten to one in nearly twenty years. I know what I have to do now. The way before me has been made clear."

Ben closed his journal. "The next morning, I went to Richard and told him that I'd had a meeting with Jacob. I told him Jacob had come to me and that I was to serve as his mouthpiece to our people."

"And he didn't immediately call you on it?" Izzie had heard Locke's version of events.

"Just the opposite. He said he had no problem with it going forward and asked me to tell everybody what had happened. That was the beginning of the end of Widmore's role as leader."

"And Richard was fine with you keeping up the deception even after – Widmore was gone?" Dan asked. "Especially given that he knew you were lying."

"I don't pretend that I ever fully understood Richard's motivations," Ben admitted. "I assume he must have told Jacob about it at some point, and that the deception was something both of them were fine with. Maybe they thought this was a test of my worthiness. It's just as likely both of them were fine with me as a figurehead because it meant no one was taking actual power away from either of them."

"And the rest of your people? They accepted it?" Meredith asked.

"It meant they tolerated me. Most of them still didn't like me. So every few weeks, I went out and said I was going to talk to Jacob. Sometimes I found the cabin. Sometimes I didn't. But even when I found the cabin, it was always empty. I never saw or heard anything in it for the next decade." He hesitated. "Then John demanded to see Jacob, and I knew very well my bluff was going to be called. "

"He was never coming back from that trip," Alex pointed out.

Ben nodded. "I put on my little show. When everything just started moving and exploding around me, I put on my best act but I was stunned as John was. He was so terrified himself that he didn't pick up on it. And when he told me that he heard Jacob speak, I was stunned. John had a way of doing that."

"I expect you finally learned that lesson when he turned up at the radio tower," Izzie said.

"I'd spent the last three months in denial. I stuck to that course even when John showed up. That was the final blow." Ben admitted. "I might have been the head of a cargo cult. John was Moses."

"Kind of amazes me that after all that he gave it up," Alex admitted.

"I don't know how well any of you know the Old Testament," Ben said. "After leading his people forty years through the desert, Moses was told by God that while his people could enter the Promised Land, he was going to have to die outside of it. Because he spent his life serving God, Moses accepted this as punishment. But not all of us are built that way. John may have been considered the island the Promised Land, but there's a difference between that and Paradise."

"How much theology did they teach in Dharma?" Charlotte asked.

"Not much," Ben said. "But you didn't spend your life on the island and not spend some time considering every aspect of God that was possible."

"So which was it?" Alex asked. "Heaven or Hell?"

Ben searched Karev's tone for the usual snideness. There only seemed to be curiosity. "Like so much else, it was clearly within the eye of the beholder," he said. "Most of the survivors thought one thing; my people thought the opposite. I think for me the closest equivalent might be purgatory. I thought that if I followed the rules and did what I was told, I might someday be allowed the secrets to the universe. I have only recently concluded that at some point, the cost was just too great."

"Which brings us back to the part of atonement," Dan said.

"And here is the second part of my offer of faith," Ben reached into his case again. "Strictly speaking, this gift isn't for you and your friends as much as it for Jack and his. Feel free to watch it, but I guarantee they will appreciate it infinitely more."

It took a moment for everybody to realize what they were seeing. They all had heard the stories and they knew that Ben had access to these things, but it was still hard to rationalize it when you saw what you were seeing.

"I assume there's a DVD player around here?" Ben asked.

AUTHOR'S NOTES

This was a long chapter and I had more ideas, but I decided to cut it off before it became another novel. For the record:

I like Karev giving Ben the business. He rarely got a chance to unleash his venom on a target who truly deserved it, and even Ben knows as much which is why he doesn't mind it.

Why couldn't the island clear Ben's near-sightedness? He wore glasses as a child and he still needed them as an adult? This is a note found in Finding Lost, so kudos to the legendary Nikki Stafford for picking out something that the show never answered.

As we all know a lot of people on the island had prophetic dreams as well as strange vision. I actually wanted Meredith to quantify this before she began the work on the study itself.

I never quite bought the whole 'the island won't let you die'. A lot of the people who were chosen by the island and Jacob did die, and if Jacob would allow candidates to get killed, well, a lot of them still did. Is it based on the idea that if they kill each other, it doesn't count? It's a tricky subject, and I'm having Ben express because I want the question out there. If anyone wants to hazard a guess in the comments, they're more than welcome too.

No I'm not violating canon. Ben did keep a journal and was in fact writing in it in 'Through the Looking Glass' (thank you again Nikki for freeze-framing it) Am I violating things by saying that Ben would have kept one for over a decade? I don't think for a second it was a recent thing: a journal is where you keep your most secret thoughts and we all know how many of those Ben had.

Let's face it. There was something very wrong with Ethan. That flashback in 'Dead is Dead' confirmed it. He survived the Purge, which means at a very young age he had to have signed off on his parents dying and didn't seem to have a problem with it. He was always creepy. I needed to make that crystal clear and Ben would have the clearest view on it.

I might be hedging my bets about Ben knowing the truth about the Swan, but there's an argument that he didn't until he took over, if even later. He was in the Others camp when the Incident happened, Radzinsky was in years after the fact and even if they knew where the front door was, there's no sign any of the Others ever went in. They did know about it, to be sure, but how much any of this filtered down is a debatable question. As for the bit on the Pearl, that's pretty much canon by now.

How did Ben find the cabin originally and why did he know it belonged to Jacob? Why did Richard never call him on it, especially when Locke went with him there in 'The Man Behind the Curtain' or immediately afterwards? I tried to explain some of this, but I'm not sure how much Ben ever knew. Ben himself admitted his reaction was genuine in 'The Incident', but I did take some liberties.

Those of you who saw the extras in the Season 6 DVD already know what Ben has. The rest of you will find out, but you'll have to wait a bit. In the next chapter I go back to LA to deal with Addison, the LA contingent of the Losties and at least one other doctor at Oceanside Wellness.

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