Chapter 4

"Mr. Linus?"

It took a moment for Ben to react; partly because he didn't recognize the voice and partly because he didn't know if anyone in his entire life had ever referred to him that formally.

He turned around to see who was speaking. It took a moment for him to react because for the briefest of moments he thought he was looking at Alex. The illusion quickly passed – this woman was at least six or seven years older than his daughter and while the haircut was similar, it was brown as opposed to Alex's hair.

"I'm sorry," he said slowly. "I don't believe we've met."

"That would have been difficult," the young woman said. "Considering that according to Meredith the one time you visited Seattle Grace I was hiding from the forces of evil."

Ben knew who he was talking to now, considering that of the four doctors at Seattle Grace who Jack and the rest had gotten to go into hiding, there had only been one woman. "So, you're Meredith's sister," he said, offering her his hand.

"You can call me Lexi."

There it was again. Had his subconscious known that he was talking to another Alex? He shook it off. He wasn't on the island anymore. He was going to run into Alexs fairly often in the real world.

"I didn't know you were going to be involved in this," he said, changing the subject.

"My sister's idea," Lexi said with a small shrug. "She said that she couldn't run this project herself that it would make sense if someone she trusted could do it. Besides, it was time for me to start taking on projects like this."

Ben nodded. "Or it could be she doesn't want to be anywhere near this project and doesn't mind if her sister takes the heat."

Lexi smiled at this. "Meredith told me you had a strange sense of humor."

Ben nearly stopped dead in his tracks. "First time I've ever been accused of having one." Suddenly it seemed very important for him to know what Meredith had been telling her family. "What has she told you about me?"

Lexi gave a small smile. "Just that the three of us have more in common than you'd think."

Now Ben was genuinely puzzled. "She…has told you where I've come from?" Lexi nodded. "And what I did when I was there?"

"She may have mentioned something about you being the mendacious acolyte for a psychotic cult." Lexi said nonchalantly. "That's not what we have in common."

Ben did not like feeling out of sorts. "Where are you taking me exactly?"

"The research lab. Meredith reserved it for this afternoon, so she thought it would be a good place for all of us to talk." Lexi said. "Alex and Stevens went to the airport to pick up Drs. Faraday and Lewis. They should be here in less than an hour."

That at least made sense. "And how much have Jack and Juliet told you about me?"

"Does that matter?" Lexi asked casually. "I've heard enough to know that neither of them has an unbiased view of you."

"You're being remarkably generous about who you're talking with," Ben was actually starting to feel a little in awe of this woman's detachment.

"Meredith knows as much about you as I do," Lexi said as they reached the elevator. "And she's willing to work alongside you in a major project. That has to count for something." She paused. "Then again, my sister hasn't always been the best judge of character."

"You talking about her patients or her sex life?" The words were out of Ben's mouth before he could stop them.

Lexi didn't seem remotely shocked. "A little of each actually."

LGLGLG

"I just got off the phone with Stevens," Meredith said ten minutes later. "Our guests are picking up their luggage. They should be here soon."

"So would you mind telling me what we have in common?" Ben asked.

Meredith and Lexi exchanged glances. "I thought you knew everything," Lexi said.

Ben was slightly nonplussed. "It's easier to get information when you're on the island and have a lot of lead time," he said slowly. "When no one's telling you get a list in a few hours, there's slightly less urgency towards it." He hesitated. "But I think I know what Meredith and I have in common. Both of us lost our mothers very prematurely."

Lexi winced.

"Forgive me, I was never a master of subtlety on my best day," Ben said slowly to Lexi. "Let me guess: it happened to you too?"

Lexi was actually grateful that none of her bosses had decided to share this very painful anecdote with Ben Linus. "My mother was hiccupping for two days," she said slowly. "She came into the hospital for tests. Things kept going wrong and less than twenty-four hours later she was dead." She sighed. "My father didn't take it well."

"Neither did mine." A thought occurred to Ben. "That's another thing we have in common. He blamed you for her death."

Meredith did not deny it. "He showed up to the hospital roaring drunk and called me a useless bitch. According to Lexi, he spent the next two years in the bottle. He only managed to get sober within the last six months."

"Not to play queen for a day, but at least you were adults when it happened," Ben said slowly. "My father always got drunk on my birthday. On my eleventh birthday, he told me flat out that I was the reason she died." Now was not the time to tell them about the last birthday they'd ever had.

Meredith and Lexi did not need a map drawn. "Did it happen in a hospital?"

Ben shook his head. "I was two months premature. My parents were…I don't even know what they were doing. All I know is that my father had to flag down a car, and my mother died before she could get there. The rest he was never sober enough to tell me." He paused. "Of course, he was never too drunk to…"

Meredith and Lexi had spent enough time in the ER to know the rest. "You don't have to talk about it," Meredith said gently.

"It has occurred to me, much too after the fact, that part of the reason I was so eager to betray the Dharma Initiative was because I couldn't talk about it," Ben said slowly. "Karev made that painfully clear in one of our first meetings."

"I rarely agree with Karev on anything, but he has a point," Lexi said gently. "I spent my first several months as an intern denying what was happening with my father until he showed up here absolutely hammered. Jack, as you're no doubt aware, had similar issues and he was able to make me see the other side of it."

"It's never easy for anyone whose part of emotionally and," Meredith paused, "physically abusive relationship to come forward with the truth to anyone. I can't imagine it was much clearer to people thirty years ago then it is now. And admitting you need help, that's even harder. Many people consider it a weakness." Meredith hesitated again. "I'm a prime example of it."

"You didn't defect to an enemy organization and help plot what amounted to a coup." Ben had made this point clear numerous on the island. This was the first time he had even hinted he had been in the wrong.

To their credit, neither Meredith nor Lexi blinked. "After I nearly died, Derek was upset not just because it happened, but because he couldn't understand how it happened. I know how to swim, but I just sank," Meredith told him. "I spent two months trying to convince him I was fine, and he didn't buy it. It still took nearly six months after that before I went into therapy and two months of therapy for me to admit the underlying trauma."

Ben had not heard this part of Meredith's story. "Did he actually think you wanted to die?"

"From what I hear from Juliet about your ability to home in on a person's weakness, I might be making a mistake telling you," Meredith said bluntly. "I am choosing to share this secret with you because I don't believe you're that kind of person anymore."

"Are you that kind of person any more?" Lexi asked.

Meredith, to her credit, took her time before answering. "I don't think I am," she said finally. "There were a couple of times that year where it did seem like I didn't value my life and that I was never going to make my mother proud of me. That's another thing we have in common; my mother was a ghost well before she died."

This part of the story Ben was very familiar with. "I'm surprised you never talked much with Jack about this subject," he said. "I'm certain every issue you had with your mother he had with his father."

"He made an effort a couple of times the first few months he was here," Meredith admitted. "I don't think I was prepared to listen. I was only slightly more prepared when he told me about discovering a sister he didn't know he had."

"To be fair, you didn't really make much of an effort to engage with me at all the first year I was here," Lexi pointed out. "Maybe he thought he had to find a more receptive audience. By the way, whatever files you were gathering when you were on the island, they must have gone out of style when the Dharma Initiative did."

Ben was a little surprised at this change of subject. "Excuse me."

"You knew everyone's name, age, blood type, and almost everything about why they were in Sydney to begin with and what they did before," Lexi pointed out. "Yet according to Claire, you somehow managed to miss the fact that two of the survivors had a father in common."

Ben wasn't sure how to handle this. "We found Claire's birth certificate. There was no father listed on it."

Meredith and Lexi each raised an eyebrow in a way that left no doubt about their being related. "Ri-ight," Meredith said. "So, to be clear, you'd spent the last several years trying to deal with issue involving fertility. Miracle of miracles, a very pregnant woman literally falls from the sky. By the way, Juliet made it pretty clear to us that women who became pregnant on the island died before they came to term. How exactly would a woman who was pregnant before she came to the island going to help with your research?"

"What do you expect; their lab equipment hadn't been updated since the end of Reagan's term," Lexi said with a small smile.

"I'm amazed Juliet agreed to work under such primitive conditions; oh wait, she didn't," Meredith was actually smiling now. "Anyway, you make all of this effort to obtain research subjects and you don't bother to get a case history?"

Lexi shook her head. "Yeah, that's just sloppy work. They knew who Jack was married to and had his father's autopsy, but they didn't bother to even check what he'd been doing in Sydney in the first place? That's just slipshod work. Honestly, I'm not sure why you want to partner with this guy."

By now Ben recognized this dance. "Who put you up to this? Jack or Juliet?"

"Karev, actually," Meredith said jovially. "He respects my reputation, and he thinks it's in everybody's interest to know who I'm working with."

"More likely he doesn't want his reputation to be impugned," Lexi countered.

"I thought Karev prided himself on not caring what people thought of him," Ben said archly.

"As a human being. As a doctor he cares very much about that." Meredith said with a smile. "Unfortunately, that happens to be the attitude of far too many of the physicians in this hospital."

"You included?" There was genuine curiosity in that question.

Meredith's smile disappeared. "I'm working on it."

LGLGLG

"I'm trying to figure out right now the level of awkward that we should be feeling," Izzie asked ten minutes later.

"That depends how much your family's told you about me," Ben said to Charlotte and Dan.

"That would be difficult," Charlotte said cautiously, "considering the entire time Desmond was on the island, your paths never crossed."

"And until she found the island, she had no idea who you even were," Dan added. "Needless to say, our father was very good at keeping secrets."

Ben couldn't exactly deny that.

"That doesn't mean my brother-in-law isn't irked at you," Dan went on. "Though it's really more of a general complaint that the whole time your people were running the island you never seemed to give the Swan a moment's thought."

Ben looked a little sheepish at that.

"And he did have some choice words for you when you were doing your little role-playing exercise," Charlotte added. "Considering that you know how important the button was, trying to convince Locke that it was a fake, maybe not your smartest decision."

"John's already chewed me out on that one," Ben admitted. "Honestly, I'm rather surprised he let it go so quickly when he staged his home invasion."

"Electromagnetism under the bridge, I guess," Karev said with a shrug.

"It does kind of put some of the ethical tightropes we've walked the last couple of years to shame," Stevens said thoughtfully.

Ben was used to this kind of back and forth from Stevens. "And Jack and the rest? What have they told you?"

Dan and Charlotte both shrugged. "Whatever they told us, it can hardly come from the position of being neutral observers," Dan said calmly.

Ben couldn't help himself and laughed slightly. "I'm sorry; it's just that I spent thirty years on the island, much of it among the company of scientists, and I don't think anybody ever had an unbiased opinion of me. I'm still somewhat shocked that everyone in this room is willing to give me the benefit of the doubt."

"It helps not to know you," Karev said. "And that's not entirely a joke. Considering that none of us here were ever on the island; that Dan and Charlotte are what could be called island adjacent at best, and that all of us are scientists, if anybody can take a neutral opinion of you it's us."

"Which is the main reason Dan and I wanted to have this meeting," Charlotte pointed out. "We may not have any memories of the island, but it's pretty clear it's in our blood."

"And based on some empirical evidence, there is a good sign that both Charlotte and I were supposed to be on the island at some point," Dan said. "Though neither of us – or indeed anyone connected with it – can come up with an explanation as to how."

"And you were hoping that I could fill in the blanks," Ben shook his head. "You know, not long before John managed to usurp me of my old position, I told him about Jacob. I'll never forget what he said. 'You know what I think? I think there is no Jacob. You are the Man Behind the Curtain. The Wizard of Oz. And you're a liar.' When I tried to turn the question back on him, he pointed out my hand was shaking. And that actually frightened me more than the fact that it was. John had managed to do something no one had done in nearly twenty years. See through the curtain."

Everyone had a vague idea who Jacob was but nobody wanted to press it yet – the idea that God might have existed on a magical island in the Pacific was too much for these scientists to handle yet. So the next question was directed more to the general point. "He thought you were making everything up as you went," Meredith said.

"He wasn't that far off," Ben admitted. "A lot of my leadership was based on improvisation. When Oceanic 815 exploded over the island, I convinced two people to go on spy mission to look for survivors. I wasn't even sure there would be any."

"How long before that did you learn about the tumor on your spine?" Izzie asked.

"Two days."

"You could be forgiven for being a little distracted," Izzie assured him.

"My position on the island didn't allow for being distracted," Ben admitted. "Hell, the three months after the plane crash I was doing such a high wire juggling act. I was trying to convince Juliet of my loyalty; I was trying to get information on the pregnant woman. I was arranging the abduction of several women and children from these surviving camps; I was trying to assess the nature of a psychic child and his subsequent abduction. Then I had to arrange things so that I could get Jack to operate on me and I had to make sure about my daughter's not having sex."

"All your years on the island; you never learned how to delegate?" Lexi said with a smile.

"If Bailey or Weber had been on the plane, either one of them would have had your job in two weeks," Meredith said with a chuckle.

"Need I remind you that Jack nearly fell apart at the job and he had as much training as them?" Ben couldn't help but say.

"Like they said, two weeks at most," Izzie said with a smile.

Ben had met Miranda Bailey. It was hard to argue that they didn't know of what they spoke. "All things considered, she probably would have gotten promoted not long after," he said thoughtfully. "What I guess I'm trying to tell all of you is that much of my time as leader involved improvisation as anything else. I did spend much of my time as the spokesman of the island, but I didn't actually have any of the power that went with it. When I told John that in order to get the secrets of the island, there was a test of loyalty to perform, I specifically chose one that I knew he couldn't do. I humiliated him in public and I left him behind telling him to complete that same task. When he marched into camp having accomplished that task, I was genuinely stunned."

Everyone knew that there was more to this than what Ben was saying, but they figured he'd tell them when he was ready.

"John was a threat to my power. Jacob had made it clear how important he was, so I kept trying to neutralize him and he kept wiggling out of it. I was trying to hold on my power and make sure that no one knew what a humbug I was."

"So what you're saying is that you can't answer our questions." There was a slight sense of disappointment in Dan's voice.

"What I'm saying is, I have my own set of blanks that had never been entirely filled in," Ben confessed. "And in the case of the two of you, there may actually be a very good reason for that. I should tell you up front, if you're not already predisposed to think I'm a liar, what I'm going to tell won't dissuade you of that opinion."

"We've all lied to an extent already," Meredith said dismissively. "Granted some of those lies are worse than others and some of us do it more often, but that's not a cardinal sin."

"I doubt any of the people who knew me would consider it a virtue, either" Ben argued.

"That depends on whether you considering withholding the truth the same as a lie," Izzie said. "Because Jack and the rest have been clear that's pretty much what they did about their past and what happened on the island until they got back. You just got through telling us you did much the same with everybody on the island. That doesn't make you a saint, but it doesn't make you worse."

"The things you did as leader of the Others…" Alex stopped when Izzie elbowed him in the ribs. He didn't need to finish; the implication was clear.

"All right," Ben said doubtfully. "I came to the island when I was eleven years old. I have clear memories of almost everything that happened that first year, from the time he was first were welcomed to Dharma to when I ran past the security fence and first met Richard." Ben looked at Charlotte and Dan. "There's a longer story here, but one impossibility at a time?"

They nodded. "From that point on, there are gaps in my memories. Not small ones, but ones that seem to deal with key elements as part of Dharma."

They all took this in. "That's your big secret?" Alex said doubtfully. "That parts of your childhood were so painful you blocked them out?"

Ben shook his head. "It's the opposite. I remember all the bad things about being Dharma; the loneliness, missing my mother, every tongue lashing and beating my father gave me. But I don't remember any of the good times."

"Slightly weird, but not all of us have a photographic memory," Lexi said casually. "And given what little I know about Jack and the rest's time on the island, they carried a lot of baggage with them."

"I'm not explaining this right. Which is odd, I always have the right words." Ben thought for a moment. "I think the most critical moment in my life as a child was when I formally joined the Others. And while I remember certain details about when it happened, a lot of the period is a complete blank. How many of you have ever forgotten a seminal moment in your life?"

Dan looked like he was about to say something, and then changed his mind. "What do you remember about it?" he asked instead.

Ben thought for a moment. "It was in June of 1977. I remember that Horace's wife, Amy, had just given birth. And the reason I know that is because I would one day convince him to join the Others even if that meant betraying his parents."

They all knew at this point betrayed meant 'purged'. "Who was he?"

"Ethan." Ben said casually. "I remember that on that day, a new group of recruits came in via sub. The group photo was being taken and around that time, one of the vans drove up. Phil and Jerry – they were two of the security guards – came out and rushed everybody into their houses. Later that day, I heard Rosie – she was one of the geologists – whisper to one of her friends that a Hostile had been found in our territory. There was debate on what to do with him, but for now he was being kept prisoner."

"Ever since I had encountered Richard in the woods, I'd been holding fast to the idea that if I was patient, I could join them. For all the very real reasons why this man was here, I only saw the value he might have to me."

Meredith was a little unsure she wanted the next question answered. "What did you do?"

"I made him a sandwich. Then I walked to the holding area, and I told Phil, who was guarding the man, that Horace had asked me to bring him some food. Phil was never the best and the brightest among us; he barely argued before he let a thirteen-year-old talk to the enemy." Ben paused. "This is where the gaps start coming."

"How so?" Dan asked.

"I remember walking into the area. I remember giving him the sandwich, and I remember asking him his name." Ben said. "My next clear memory is walking back to my house. I have no memory of what this man looked like or what we talked about."

Dan looked at Ben. "This may be out of left field, but what the hell. Was there any point in the next few days that you remember being exposed to electromagnetism?"

Ben did not take the question as the non sequitur everyone else did. "Now I do remember that at the time some of the more important stations were being developed. I didn't find out until years after the fact that they had broken ground on the station that would become the Swan just three days later and that they were already hard at work on the Orchid."

Dan reached into his case and removed the journal that some of them had heard about. He flipped pages for a while. "Was this its emblem?"

Ben looked at the journal. "How did you get this?"

"My mother," Dan said. "According to her, this journal is a documented history of something that never happened."

Ben could take this and just move on. "Would you care the share with the rest of the class?" Meredith asked. "What's in that journal?"

"Oh, you know," Karev said casually. "The history of the Dharma Initiative; plans to detonate a hydrogen bomb, where the Others may have been hiding thirty years ago. You know, perfectly normal stuff."

"Please tell me this is his usual snark," Meredith was starting to pale.

"I wish," Stevens said. "We actually got a glimpse of this before the two of you were officially let into the circle, and it's actually more confusing than it sounds."

Lexi decided to circle back. "What does this have to do with Ben not being able to remember his childhood?"

"One of the things everybody in the group seems agreed on is that the Dharma Initiative came to the island because of some kind of energy source," Dan said.

"That's a fairly prosaic way of describing the island," Ben said defensively. "Not inaccurate when it comes to how Dharma viewed the island, though. And the Swan and the Orchid were being designed to tap into that energy in different ways. I did not find out until well after the fact that they were planning to use it to manipulate time and space."

This was a pretty heavy bombshell for the residents. "I'm just an intern, but I'm pretty sure you just said that someone was planning to use the island for time travel," Lexi said.

"That is what the orientation video said," Ben said.

Lexi and Meredith looked baffled. "Ask Jack when he gets back," Izzie told them. "They actually saw some of these films."

Again Lexi tried to bring this to a relevant topic. "And you think exposure to this energy may have led to the gap in Ben's memories."

"It's actually not a bad hypothesis," Ben admitted, "but in this case, I'm not entirely certain how accurate it is. If I may be allowed to continue?"

Dan nodded. "The next morning I went back to the prisoner again. I brought another sandwich and a book for him to read. This time I was bolder. I asked if Richard sent him. He looked at the security camera, and I told them that the monitors had video but not audio. Then I told him that Richard had told him that I could join them if I was patient. And that if he was patient, I thought I could help him."

"And you still have no memory of what he looked like." Meredith said.

Ben shook his head. "It's maddening. I remember it was a blue plate and a chicken salad sandwich. I remember the book was Carlos Castaneda's A Separate Reality which at the time I'd read twice. But I can't remember the man's face or his name."

Charlotte had perked up a little at the book. "You read Castaneda when you were thirteen?"

Ben was a little more nonplussed at this interruption. "You saying I couldn't read at an adult level back then?"

Charlotte shook her head. "Did you consider it fiction or non-fiction?"

Ben gave a small smile. "I forgot I was speaking to an actual anthropologist. No, I didn't learn the truth about the books until well into my adult life, and by then I actually may have been more impressed by his work."

"Would you care to share with those of us who didn't do the reading?" Alex said.

"Castaneda was a fraud," Charlotte said simply. "Around the time that Ben was reading the book, people had begun to question the validity of Castaneda's research. Eventually it was discovered that Castaneda had either fudged most of the information from his research or outright lied about it. But by the time the truth came out, the myth of Castaneda's writings was so prevalent that it didn't matter any more."

"You remember that old movie line? 'When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.'" Ben said.

"You have to admit it's kind of on-brand for you," Charlotte said smiling. "Someone giving advice on mysticism who isn't actually a mystic."

"Stop with the detours," Alex said.

Ben's smile faded. "All right, but this is where it starts getting ugly. A few hours later, I brought him another sandwich. Except when I came to his cell, he wasn't alone. My father was mopping up."

Everyone knew this wouldn't end well. "You don't have to…" Meredith started.

"I think you need to know the truth about who you're dealing with," Ben said. "I tried to pretend I'd brought him a sandwich, but my father saw right through it. And he was furious. He dropped his mop and hauled me out of the security area. We must have passed at least half a dozen people before we reached our house. No one said or did anything." He swallowed. "Then he beat me so hard that he broke my glasses."

For the briefest of moments Karev almost understood why Ben had participated in the Purge. Given what he'd been told scenes like this must have happened constantly and everyone in Dharma had turned a blind eye to it for years. Would he have done what Ben did? No. But he'd thought about it quite a few times well into adulthood.

"If I had any doubts about what I was going to do, that beating erased them. I also knew I didn't have much time – they weren't going to keep him there much longer."

"You decided to set him free and ask him to take you with him," Izzie surmised.

"So what was your exit strategy?"

Ben usually spoke clearly, but he mumbled his response.

"Annunciate, Ben." Alex said.

"I set one of the vans on fire."

It took a moment for everybody in the room to process this. "I'm sorry," Meredith said. "You did what?"

"I set a fire in one of the buses that we used. Then I released the parking brake and drove it into the Barracks."

It still took a while for this to process. "So you set a van on fire and drove it into a densely populated area with no regard for innocent bystanders so you could stage a prison break," Meredith said.

"I spent a lot of my teenage years wanting to run away from home," Alex said. "I may have occasionally fantasized about beating my father to a pulp when I did so. I never considered driving my old man's car into the front yard just so I could escape undetected."

"I have to say this is the first time I've thought that either Jack or Juliet might have known what they were talking about," Meredith said carefully.

"I won't pretend to be proud of my actions," Ben admitted. "I was desperate and I felt trapped. And maybe there is something to the idea of how you are as a child determines who you are as an adult. Even then, I had no concern for the damage I might cause other people in order to achieve my ends. I sure as hell didn't wait around to see if anybody got hurt. All I wanted for Phil to get called away from the monitors. As soon as he was, I ran into the holding area."

He hesitated. "I still can't remember his face, but I do know he was waiting for me. He was standing right by the door with his hands held in front of him. I do remember that he seemed sympathetic when I told him what happened. Something about his father being a hard man too. 'I hate it here', I said. 'If I let me out, will you take me with you?'"

'Of course,' he said. 'It's why I'm here.' And for the first time in I didn't know how long, I actually felt hope.'

"We ran to the outskirts of the perimeter. Another of the guards encountered us, and the prisoner beat him up. I remember him using moves that I'd only seen in Bruce Lee movies. I remember telling him how neat that was. I knew he'd gotten the guard's gun. I assumed it was in case we met anyone else."

The collective doubt about Ben turned to foreboding.

"Then he pointed at me and said something that I never forgot – even though it didn't make any sense, then or now. 'You were right," he said. 'I am a killer.' I was about to ask what he meant. Then he shot me in the chest."

Even those who didn't have a medical degree were thinking the obvious question: how was Ben still alive? Getting shot at close range in the chest almost always led to death now; how could he have survived it thirty years ago on an island with barely any access to proper medicine?

"I have absolutely no clear memories of the next few days," Ben said. "Only flashes that honestly make no sense. I remember the ceiling of a van, my father crying over me – that has to have been a dream; my mother standing over me, looking disappointed; a group of people in ragged clothes arguing and Richard holding me in his arms. My first clear memory after the shooting is waking up on a cot in a tent. There was a bandage on my chest, and it hurt to breathe, but I seemed to be fine otherwise."

"A man who had to be about forty was standing over me. I asked him who he was and he said he was in charge here. He asked me if I wanted to go back home. I said I wanted to stay here. To be one of them. He told me just because I was back at Dharma didn't mean I couldn't be one of them." Ben shifted his glance to Dan. "That was my introduction to Charles Widmore."

Dan took this in. "When did you meet my mother?"

"Not until years after the fact," Ben said. "By the time I was in any position to move around, your mother had gone to the mainland. In retrospect, she must have done so to give birth to you. I don't know why she never returned to the island, especially considering that at the time, she was the leader."

"Well, she sure as hell didn't leave because she'd developed maternal instincts," Dan said bitterly. "And it couldn't have been because she trusted my father's judgment as leader."

"You're definitely right on the latter count," Ben acknowledged.

"Um, you still kind of buried the lead," Karev said. "You were shot in the chest. How the hell did you survive? I know the island has incredible healing potential, but that doesn't seem to pertain to mortal injury."

"I didn't find out until the long after the fact how it happened," Ben paused. "On the island there are many artifacts and monuments that were built well before the oldest inhabitant. Relics that are so old that make you wonder just how long the island was being guarded."

"Are we talking before the time of Christ?" Charlotte asked.

"Well before," Ben said. "Many are no longer intact, but on many of them you see hieroglyphics and references that go all the way back to Ancient Egypt. My education in that area is no doubt inferior to yours, but I'm relatively certain that one of them had a carving of Anubis on it. The one I believe I was taking to is referred to only as the Temple. And that is where I was healed."

"Did you ever learn how?" Izzie asked.

"There's a spring that is always bubbling," Ben said. "I am told that when a subject has suffered an injury that might be fatal, they are placed in the spring and held there. An hourglass is turned over and the body of the individual is placed there until a certain amount of time has passed. If you are deemed worthy, you we will be completely healed. If you are not…" He didn't have to finish the sentence.

"And the island deemed you worthy," Lexi finished.

"I assume as much." Ben hesitated. "The truth of the matter is that Richard never told me one way or the other. And I only learned of the spring until well into my leadership of the island. Between my healing and the time Locke took my position, I never went back to the Temple."

That didn't seem to fit in with either the Machiavellian portrait of Ben Jack and Juliet had told them or the meticulous planner he had described himself to be. "Why the hell not?" Alex asked. "Weren't you the leader?"

"You once referred to me as the head of a cargo cult," Ben said. "That cut me to the quick not because it was false but because there was a certain truth to it. I was the leader of the Others, but I did not know the secrets of the island. I claimed to know them because I spoke for the man who did but in all the years I was on the island, I never even met the man."

The survivors of the flight all either knew or suspected this, but Ben had never confirmed it for them. The people he had just revealed his biggest deception to considered this. "So Locke wasn't talking out of school when he called you on it," Karev said instead.

"All my life on the island, I served Jacob loyally," Ben said slowly. "I never questioned anything. I thought if I did what I was told and listened to Richard, I would finally be rewarded. So I spent more than a decade as a double agent following the orders of Charles Widmore, who everyone on the flight knows could never be trusted and was bloodthirsty from the moment I met him. I agreed to go along with the Purge, but to be fair I had little love for Dharma, and I didn't exactly shed a tear at the idea of my father having to die with them." He looked at Charlotte. "You should count your blessings that you and your family were gone from the island by then. By that point, I was prepared to have them all wiped off the face of the island."

Charlotte was clearly shaken but she kept up a brave face. "I appreciate your honesty. Not much, but I do."

"The only time I ever deviated from anyone's orders was when Widmore told me to kill Rousseau," Ben said. "And if I hadn't seen Alex there, I probably would have done it. Even then, I took an infant from its mother and practically shoved it in Widmore's face, telling him that if Jacob really wanted him dead that he should do it."

Meredith needed to know the answer. "If he had tried to," She couldn't finish it.

"I asked that question countless times as Alex grew up," Ben admitted. "All the time I knew him, Widmore was the kind of man who never soiled his hands but sent others to do his dirty work. I'd like to think I'd called his bluff, but…I'm told that when he was younger, he was more inclined to get his hands dirty without thinking twice. I've often wondered, was there a line he wouldn't cross or was he so shocked his leadership was being challenged that he didn't react? It kept me up nights."

Meredith was smart enough to know Ben had dodged answering the question, but she wasn't going to press him any harder – she knew how raw his feelings for the woman he considered his daughter were.

"When I finally took over for Widmore, I thought now I will finally get the answers I've wanted," Ben continued. "Then I learned that Richard's real position was not merely adviser to the leader but the mouthpiece for Jacob. Richard pulled me aside and told me that Jacob summoned you and if I was patient, I'd get to meet him some day."

"You'd been waiting for more than fifteen years by that point: hadn't you run out of patience?" Karev asked. "You ever consider just telling Locke that you didn't have any answers either and that it might be in his interest to seek them on his own? Maybe Locke wouldn't have spent so much time trying to push you out."

"There's one minor issue with your argument, and Locke himself knew it when he confronted me in the barracks," Ben reminded him. "I was in a wheelchair, and he wasn't. On an island where no one got sick, I had developed a fatal tumor on my spine. The moment Locke awoke from the crash, he was able to walk after being a paraplegic for four years. Locke was the only survivor of the crash to know instantly the powers of the island. You may disagree about his decision not to share these secrets, but as men and women of science you have to admit something like that would radically alter your way of thinking."

None of them could argue with that.

"More to the point, Locke had decided almost from the moment he woke up that his loyalty was to the island more than any person," Ben added. "He'd long since isolated himself from his fellow survivors well before he came to the barracks based on one belief: he was chosen. The fact that he didn't know what he was chosen for or even understand why this was happened made no difference."

"I think I get why so many people stayed away from John on the island," Lexi said slowly. "He became a fanatic."

"He'd have preferred the term disciple, but I can see why you'd choose that word," Ben acknowledged. "The island did make fanatics of its followers." He paused. "And its leaders. I certainly wasn't immune."

Meredith had been quiet for a while. "I suppose your familiar with the nature versus nurture debate," she said softly. "Whether were born a certain way or whether our environment makes us who we are."

"That got talked about a lot on the island," Ben admitted. "Science and faith, destiny and free will."

"I've thought about a lot the last year or so," Meredith said. "Was I always going to be a surgeon, or did I become one because of who my mother was? As a doctor, I know I am genetically disposed to red hair and there is a decent chance I might be so to Alzheimer's." It clearly took a lot for Meredith to say that, even having spent the last three years knowing it was a possibility. "I'm pretty sure because of how I was raised I was disinclined to trust people and reluctant to share my feelings."

"Which is a polite way of asking did the island make me a monster or was I born that way," Ben said.

"For the record, Izzie and I have our own opinion," Karev said. "And it's closer to none of the above. The island didn't make Ben who he was. And I don't believe anybody, whether they're Einstein or Hitler, comes out of the womb that way."

"Your rotation in ob-gyn telling you that?" Lexi said with a small smile.

"I'm inclined to agree with Alex," Izzie said. "Ben made his own decisions. To the degree the island was responsible, it just limited the ones he had."

"You really think that" Ben said.

"There's a good chance you would have had a miserable life given the hand you were dealt had you never gone to the island," Alex told him. "We've all seen way to be scenarios like this end up in the ER as a result of people having no good choices. But that doesn't mean you couldn't have come out of this living a normal life. Iz grew up in a trailer park; my father was an abusive drunk. A couple of bad breaks, both of us would still be there. But we found a way through. The odds were against us – they would have been against you – but that doesn't mean you couldn't have gotten out."

"Alex is right," Dan agreed. "Given everything I know about my parents, there is a very good chance where I was supposed to end up. This journal is a concrete example of the path I was supposed to have taken, one that would have led to the island. Yet I never heard of it until two years ago."

Ben considered this. "How much did Jack and Juliet tell you about Jacob?" he finally asked.

"Very little," Alex admitted. "Locke gave us some details several months ago, but I have to tell of all the shit you guys told us, that's the part all of us are having the hardest part wrapping our minds around."

Charlotte nodded. "I can only speak for myself," she said slowly. "I know that all sorts of cultures have different gods at the center. And this Jacob probably wasn't God in the traditional sense of the term. But still, the idea of a deity existing for who knows how long, manipulating the lives of people all so that he can bring them to this island, I'm not sure I can get my head around it. Honestly, the idea that there was a wormhole from the island to Tunisia was hard enough to accept, and there was proof."

"Even though I never met Jacob, I never questioned his existence. None of my people may have believed in me or even liked me, but they never questioned Jacob," Ben said. "Juliet never truly trusted me or anything about the island, but the moment I mentioned Jacob's name, her doubts were assuaged. Jack may never have believed in me or John, but the fact is, the only reason I went after him and so many of his friends is because their names were on Jacob's lists. Maybe there is truth to what you say about us making our own decisions when we came to the island. It doesn't change the fact that none of us may have had a decision about coming to the island."

"So even now, you're still convinced it was destiny," Alex sounded a little disappointed.

Ben took a pause. "I think I spent far, far too much of my life believing I had been chosen. I think that belief may have forced me to make far too many bad choices as a result. I think I wasted half my life believing in faith."

"So, you're willing to get on board the ship of science?" Meredith said.

"I spent too much of my life luring scientists to an island without actually listening to them," Ben reminded them.

"Better late than never," Stevens said with a smile. "Maybe we can solve your problems."

"Hope springs eternal," Ben actually meant it.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Ben's first meeting with another Alex (Lexi is just another contraction for it). I kind of figured he's having difficulties missing Alex.

I didn't realize until this fiction that both Ben and the Grey sisters had all lost their mothers prematurely to bad medical outcomes. (Meredith lost Ellis twice in a way; first to Alzheimer's, then to a heart attack.) I thought this would be a good way for them to bond (something all of them have trouble doing.) The death of Lexi's mother and how her father reacted is strikingly similar.

Yes the Grey sisters have picked up a hole in Lost. I always found it hard to fathom that Ben seemed to know every survivor's shoe size but never learned the relationship between Jack and Claire. This is me poking Ben, and by extension the series.

Desmond should really be pissed at Ben considering how 'Henry' handled the button. (Though to be fair, the fact that Desmond didn't tell Locke what happened on the day of the crash is another sizable gap in the plot.)

I'm not entirely speaking in jest; giving everything I know about Miranda Bailey on Grey's she might have been able to handle the island's craziness better than most of the survivors and she probably could have ended up doing Ben's job better than he did. She could delegate and her ego could handle bruising.

Ben's just not ready to tell these people what he did to his father and what he forced Locke to do to his. It's a pretty big secret to share.

Like Dan said, 'whatever happened, happened." Darlton did seem pretty clear that there was only one timeline on the island. And I have been leaving bread crumbs that what happened in Season 5 may somehow still have happened anyway. The gaps in Ben's memory may very well have happened when he was healed; Richard did say as much to Sawyer and Kate when they brought Ben to him.

Yes, Ben did hand Sayid Castaneda's A Separate Reality and yes what Charlotte says about it is true. (See Nikki Stafford's Finding Lost: Season Five for the whole backstory. I would have given more about it here, but this chapter was becoming an epic.) I have a feeling even if Ben had known the truth behind the book, he might still have been impressed. It is on brand with who he is.

No surprise that Ben finds it far easier to bare his soul to total strangers than anyone who was on the island. I'm trying to realistically consider some of the conflicts he has to have gone through involving the Purge and killing Rousseau. I should add that I find it very difficult to believe than in as small a community as the Dharma Initiative was, no one picked up on what Roger was doing to his son over more than fifteen years and chose to do anything. When you beat someone hard enough to break their glasses and you don't say anything, there's a certain willful blindness there. I could see that Ben might have some residual hostility towards the Initiative for that reason. It's not an excuse or justification, but it is an explanation and Alex would have picked up on it.

Nature versus nurture is the psychological variation on fate versus free will and the doctors at Seattle Grace might have dealt with it for awhile. Meredith by this point might have though about it once or twice. She is trying to work through Ben's story.

Next chapter we go to LA and see how Addison's doing. Yet another crossover is almost upon us.

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