Part Nineteen
Shannon was not a hero. She allowed the mantra into her head once and could not get it out again, no matter how hard she tried. Over and over, on endless loop, until Shannon thought that it would only be a few more minutes until she screamed. As soon as she began that, she knew, there was a good chance that she wouldn't stop.
'Not very heroic there, girl,' Shannon thought bleakly. Granted, if there was anyone on the island who had an excuse to start screaming right about then, it was she. Her finer had stopped throbbing hours ago and had descended into a slow, sullen ache instead, but it was already turning black and blue with new bruises. The hand itself was swollen and nearly impossible to use, even if she had been able to come up with anything that resembled an escape plan. Shannon's head was still ringing and her thoughts were coming to her sluggishly after someone had put their rifle butt into her temple with a skill and zest suggesting that it was not the first time that they had done something similar. Shannon's lower lip felt fat and swollen, and there was a crust of dried blood on it from the split running straight down the middle. Shannon was pretty sure that she had been punched in the mouth as she was hauled from the water; there were several spots missing from her memory, like turpentine splattered across a painting. She wasn't even sure of where she was right now.
Meanwhile, Sayid had not woken up at all. Shannon guessed that she didn't have to be Jack to know that this was not a good thing. She crouched by Sayid's side, shivering even though the small room that they had been thrown into and summarily ignored was quite warm, and splayed her good hand across his face as if she could wake him up just by touching him and then wishing for it hard enough.
Sayid's breath was warm and steady against Shannon's palm. That was good, right? That was a good sign? Probably not good enough to offset the enormous lump that had arisen on Sayid's own temple or the blood that was thickly caking his cheek and neck and definitely not good enough to make up for their not having a crateful of weapons and companions who knew how to use them, but at this point she would take what she could get.
Shannon shivered again. She didn't know why the Others-she was sure that that was what these people who had only a passing acquaintance with soap were-had left them alive at this point. When she had to stop and ponder something like that, that was when she knew that their situation was, to put it delicately, roughly eight different kinds of fucked up.
"Sayid?" Shannon leaned over Sayid's face and whispered urgently to him, as she had been doing at regular intervals ever since she had woken up herself. In between these moments she would get up, go over to the door, and discover that, yep, it was still made of thick wood and, yep, it was still going to laugh at her every time that she tried to force it open by throwing her shoulder up against it. She had enough bruises as it was, thanks. "Sayid, Sayid, Sayid, please, if you want to hop up and bust out some soldier mojo then I can't think of a better time."
Sayid shifted and muttered something beneath his breath, but his eyes did not open. It was more than Shannon had gotten on any of her previous attempts, but she sank back against the wall all the same, feeling hysteria as it pressed close and threatened to eat her up in one gulp. The temptation to put her good hand over her eyes, lower her head, and just cry was very strong. Had Shannon been the sort to go into hysterics without a huge load of provocation first-even if this counted-then the whole mess probably would have been over right then and there.
Shannon pulled her knees up her chest, rested her head on top of them, and cried quietly for several minutes. She raised her head as soon as she felt calmer, sighing and swiping at the tear tracks with her good hands. Her bad one began throbbing again in spite of her best efforts to keep it still and not even breathe on it unless she had to, as if it was upset by being left out of all the fun. It hurt badly enough that Shannon had to cry all over again. She sniffled to a stop once her finger finally stopped trying to prove a point and had fallen back into a dull ache. It didn't feel quite as good as it had the first time around.
So she wasn't a hero. That wasn't so bad, Shannon reasoned. She was a pretty good bitch, and in a situation like this she figured that it probably came down to one and the same once everything had been said and done. Shannon sent up a brief prayer asking that Sayid didn't have any internal injuries and she wasn't about to, like, send his spleen out through his nose or something before she leaned over and shook him again. "Okay, Sayid? I…like you a whole, whole lot, but you need to wake up and you need to do it right the hell now, all right? 'Cause even if we're both in over our heads, at least you're closer to the surface than I am."
Sayid muttered again, but that was it. Shannon swore violently and would have stomped her foot against the ground if she had not already been sitting. She was still very tempted to do it, anyway, and was only stopped by the fear that moving too quickly would jar her hand again.
She settled instead for throwing a poisonous glare up at the room's single light, one of the long florescent jobs that made supermarkets and public schools such depressing places to spend any amount of time in. It flickered every few seconds, as if it wasn't any happier to be there than Shannon was. Shannon didn't see what it was even drawing power from in the first place, since as far as she could tell the room was really just a glorified alcove carved from the dirt, but that was fine. It wasn't as if she didn't' have any other things to worry about.
Shannon pushed herself back up to her feet and crossed the few yards back over to the door, even though she already knew what she would find from the last twenty or thirty times that she had done so. She couldn't call herself a bitch unless she wanted to be a stubborn bitch, too. It was a heavy wooden door, thick enough that she couldn't force it open and that the Others were apparently confident that Sayid would not be able to force it, either, set on a long wooden pole and hinges made of ancient rawhide. Shannon had thought about seeing if she couldn't cut the hinges and get out that way, but both her pack and Sayid's own had been taken from them at some point while she was unconscious, and any knives that Sayid might have brought with him had gone with them. Shannon had spent close to an hour picking at them with her fingernails all the same before she had given up in disgust. The Others might be creepy, murderous bastards with hygiene that shot straight into territory so nasty that Shannon could not see how they stood to be around each other, but they had the island and its resources bent utterly to their will.
Shannon gave the hinges another experimental tug before she blew a frustrated breath out between her teeth and slammed her fist against the door. Pain echoed all the way up into her shoulder and the skin over her knuckles split; it was still all that she could do not to hit the door again. A good tantrum beat a good cry any day of the week.
"Shannon?"
Shannon's heart leapt into her throat at the sound of her name being called and she spun around, almost thinking that she had gone crazy in the silence and was now only imagining things. When she saw Sayid's warm brown eyes looking back at her, her knees buckled for a second in relief.
"Hey," Shannon said, abandoning the door and crossing back over to kneel by Sayid's side. He pushed himself up onto his elbows first and then used the earthen wall at his back to rise to a full sitting position. From the many grimaces and small sounds of pain that Sayid was making, it was not a fun process. "Um, should you be moving? You could have internal bleeding or something." Shannon made no attempt to hide the naked worry that colored her voice and made it tremble.
Sayid tried to smile for her as he got himself settled back into a more comfortable position. "I have experienced worse," he assured her.
While Shannon had no doubt that Sayid meant it as a comfort, he missed the mark by a wide margin. She went and sat down beside him against the wall, snuggling as close as she was able without hurting either of them. Just their luck, Shannon thought, every time that they tried to go on a date it just all went to hell. She thought that she might laugh and instead wound up pressing the back of her hand quickly to her mouth in order to wrestle back an urge to be sick. Seeing Sayid's look, Shannon quickly shook her head.
Sayid touched at his cheek, made note of the amount of blood there, and asked, "How long was I unconscious?"
"I don't know," Shannon confessed. "I don't know how long I was out myself." She held out her wrists for Sayid to view, both of which were free of any kind of watch. "I think it's been a few hours since I woke up, though. They hit you a lot harder than they did me."
"I tried to protect you," Sayid said slowly. He raised his voice on the final word, as if he was not sure that the memory was real and wanted Shannon to confirm it for him.
Shannon was happy to do so. "When they were trying to get us out of the water. It was sweet." She tried to smile, so happy was she to have another person to talk to and so relieved that Sayid was awake and by all available evidence still in possession of a brain that had not been beaten smooshy.
Sayid's expression changed subtly when Shannon smiled. Embarrassed, she ducked her head and put her hand back over her mouth. "I look like a mess, don't I?"
Sayid pulled her hand down so that he could run his thumb over her lower lip, so lightly that she scarcely felt it at all. "You look wonderful and brave."
Oh, but she had found herself a man who knew how to talk to a lady. Even though he hadn't gone anywhere near directly denying the crapitude of her appearance, Shannon caught herself ducking her head and blushing. "You look like you came out of the wrong side of a bar brawl," she said, letting herself smile fully. "Did I mention that I like men who fight for me?"
Sayid put his arm around her shoulders so that he could stroke her hair through his fingers. They passed several moments in worried silence before he asked, "Has anyone spoken to you since you were brought here?"
"No," Shannon answered. "I woke up in here all by myself, and no one ahs so much as peeked in the door since then." She paused. "Is that a good thing or a bad one?"
Sayid paused long enough to make Shannon's stomach clench itself into an even tighter knot before he answered heavily, "It means that we're either so important that the Others are retreating to think about us and decide how to proceed, or we rank of such little importance that we have already been forgotten. Neither one of those is a good option."
Shannon felt cold all over. She nestled herself even further into Sayid's side and felt his arm tighten about her shoulders in return. "Yay," she said in a small voice. "I'm having more fun by the minute."
The single light flickered once, and then went out with no further warning whatsoever. The room was plunged into a pure and perfect blackness. Shannon let a few shocked seconds go by before she said, "I pissed off fate by doing that, didn't I?" When Sayid did not answer, Shannon went on, "Maybe their light bulb just burned out."
"No." Sayid's voice had gone cold and hard. "Look at the outlines of the door." Shannon tried to focus on the place where she had last seen the door, but all that she could detect was darkness. "There were lights out there a few moments ago. They shined beneath the door."
"Oh," Shannon said in an even smaller voice. She cleared her throat. "So the bad guys are having trouble with their fuse box. Can't say that I'm just eaten up with sympathy."
"Perhaps." Sayid still sounded dubious. Shannon heard as he tried to get to his feet beside her, only to slide back down with a quickly drawn hiss of pain.
"I'll check," Shannon said. She stood.
"Shannon, perhaps you should not-" Sayid began.
"One of us can stand up," Shannon responded tartly. "One of us can't. Don't have to be a crazy math genius to figure that one out." She made her way across the few yards to the door mostly by touch, stopping when her fingers touched the rough wood. She pressed her ear against the door and listened hard, but could hear nothing from the hallway. "Maybe it's just nap time." Shannon started to turn back.
There was a loud 'whump' sound in the air, like a sonic boom in miniature, that made Shannon jump back from the door and issue a brief, startled scream. It wasn't so miniature that it didn't still make the walls of the room tremble and send clods of dirt falling down into Shannon's hair from the ceiling. She yelped again and wasted no time in quickly brushing them out. Would anyone even bother trying to rescue them if the roof fell down and buried them both? If the way that they had been treated so far was any kind of indicator, then Shannon doubted it.
Barely ten seconds went by after the sound before the air…Shannon did not want to say that it moved, because that implied that there was a wind. It pulsed, becoming thick and almost alive for a second before the sensation faded.
Shannon found herself blinking several times in quick succession, as if she had been dazzled by a bright light even though the darkness had remained unbroken throughout. "So maybe not nap time," she said in a shaky voice, drifting close to the door again.
"Shannon, get back!" Sayid commanded suddenly in a ringing voice that Shannon had never heard before. She would have told him without hesitation that being the former soldier boy, all around badass, whatever, did not give him an excuse to start ordering her around now, were it not for that tone.
Shannon took a few steps back from the door and saw what Sayid saw. Curling in through the cracks along the top, bottom, and sides, growing stronger by the second, where there had only been darkness before there was now a sterile, bleached light.
Shannon back up even further, until she stumbled over Sayid's legs and only by the grace of quick reflexes managed to stop herself from a fall. She put her good hand tightly over her mouth as the urge to scream began rising again. They had nowhere to run to.
The door flew open, and Shannon raised her arm automatically to shield her eyes from what she was sure would be a tremendous light. It wasn't.
"Walt?" Shannon asked, lowering her arm and wondering if she wasn't imagining things, if she wasn't really standing in darkness and only thinking that there was a boy in front of her.
Walt fumbled quickly and then turned on a flashlight that he had picked up from God only knew where, replacing whatever it was that Shannon had thought she saw with a light that was far more normal and less likely to make Shannon wonder if she had gone right out of her mind without realizing it. The batteries were on the verge of going out, so that the light bounced across the crags in the walls and drew even more shadows than it would have ordinarily.
"Walt?" Shannon repeated when she got no answer from him, taking a few steps closer. Walt's eyes were wide and wild and he was trembling all over, making the flashlight jiggle. His arms were bleeding from several puncture wounds that looked too large to have come from something as mundane as a hypodermic needle. Shannon winced in automatic sympathy. "Are you all right, sweetie?" The endearment felt strange in her mouth and sounded even stranger on the air. 'Gave me his dog.'
Walt's shaking, if anything, grew even more pronounced. "They're going to be mad when they find out that I left," he said. He sounded as if he was talking to himself as much as he was them. "I'm supposed to be doing a job, but we need to leave now."
Even if Shannon only understood one word out of every three in the first sentence, the last one wasn't going to get any argument from her. "Train that flashlight over her so that I can see," she said, turning without waiting to see if Walt was going to do as she asked. Sayid was struggling to his feet, using the wall at his back as a brace, but he was still listing visibly from side to side. Shannon noticed that he could not take his eyes away from Walt for more than a second at a time. So they were on the same page, then; even in keeping her back turned to him for the moment that it took to walk across the room, Shannon could feel the skin between her shoulder blades begin to tingle and itch.
"He did not turn that flashlight on for nearly a minute after the door opened," Sayid said in a low voice as Shannon knelt to put her shoulder beneath his arm and help him to his feet. She yelped softly as her bad hand was bent at an angle that it did not particularly care for.
Shannon waited for her head to stop swimming before she answered. "You really want to pause and debate that too hard, or you just want to get somewhere where there are more torches and fewer beatings?"
Sayid struggled back to his feet, waving Shannon off when she tried to help him. He remained still for several seconds with his eyes closed until he was sure that he was going to remain upright before he nodded. "Walt, do you know the way out of here?"
Walt nodded slowly. His eyes were grave and distant. "I know everything about this place," he said.
Shannon could catalogue all of the ways that her heart broke to hear Walt saying that sentence in that tone of voice, or she could do her part in getting them out of there. She put her shoulder beneath Sayid's again, ignoring the slight face that he made at her. They could have that conversation at some point when she was not the only thing keeping Sayid on his feet. "We'll need you to lead us out," she said to Walt.
Walt nodded, his gaze still focused on some place far away from them, and turned to go. Shannon did not like that look at all. She reached out before she could stop herself and hugged Walt to her for a moment before she let him go. Walt tolerated the touch for a moment before he walked off, sweeping the flashlight in front on him in wide circles. He seemed to know what he was doing. Shannon was pretty sure that everyone involved, Walt included, would be much happier if he didn't.
They had barely gone one hundred yards in the dark before Shannon began to hear the dim, echoing sound of at least two separate voices. Call her crazy, but she was pretty sure that that was not a good thing to be heading towards, rather than turning and running like hell in the opposite direction. "Walt!" she hissed. He kept walking as if she had said nothing at all. Shannon threw a quick look at Sayid. So they could follow him, or they could go with Plan B, the one that involved running like rabbits that had gotten lost in the warren. Neither of those options was really working for her. "Walt!" Shannon called again, raising her voice a bit louder. The beginnings of an echo started to bounce off the walls, and Shannon winced.
Walt paused long enough to look back at them. "It's fine," he said, a little of the deadness leaving his eyes. Shannon was glad to see it go. She thought that his step even hitched for a moment, as if he was struggling not to break into a run.
Shannon and Sayid exchanged another look. "The dog," Shannon said finally, as if that explained everything. She was trusted with something, for the first time in a very long time. The least that she could do was turn that same courtesy towards its owner. Without waiting to see if Sayid was even going to argue, Shannon followed after Walt as he disappeared around a bend in the corridor. Besides, if the kid had been a little off before, then the few things that Shannon had seen of him since then suggested that he was a lot off now.
Shannon rounded the bend just in time to hear Walt give a yelp of pure joy and rush straight into the arms of his father, who was looking even more haggard and worn out than he had the last time that Shannon had seen him. Michael and Charlie had been supporting an even worse-looking Sawyer between them, but Michael did not even glance in Sawyer's direction before he was rushing forward himself. Sawyer and Charlie both swore and flashed Michael identical looks that would have been funny in any other place and at any other time.
"Dad!" Walt yelped, hurling himself into Michael's arms with a force that nearly bowled them both over. He sounded as if he was on the verge of tears. If Shannon tried to speak then, she was pretty sure that she would have sounded the same.
Michael dropped to one knee so that he could gather Walt to him, running his hands up and down his son's back as if he needed something to convince himself of Walt's very reality. "My boy, my boy, my boy," he whispered over and over again. Okay, so Shannon wasn't going to be in tears only if she tried to speak. A quick glance around confirmed that she was not the only one.
They all appeared moved saved for Sawyer, who looked as if he had just been struck in the back of the head with a board. He stared slowly around the hallway as if he was seeing it for the very first time or worse, that he wasn't. "Guys," he said in a low voice, "think the touching reunion can wait until we've made it back topside, all right?" His eyes were wild, closer to panic than Shannon thought she had ever seen before.
The flashlight that Walt was still holding in his hand began to shake even hard as Walt's trembling increased, as the sounds of approach echoed like distant drums.
End Part Nineteen
