Time-line: Set after 'The Greater Good.'
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters. I am not affiliated in any way, shape or form with anyone who does.
Another person has just rested their hand upon her shoulder – a middle-aged woman named Marjorie. She has never said a word to Shannon, barely ever glanced at Boone, but still she gives her condolences.
I suppose that it was bound to have an effect like this. In such a small community everyone feels connected to all their peers.
Well… almost everyone. Nobody has talked to me since I reappeared. Nobody has questioned why I disappeared in the first place. I'd fool myself into thinking that they had considered it but that would be a worthless pursuit of my time.
They don't see me as a person – only as a function. I was a kidney for my father, a verbal punching bag for Randy, a customer for Helen. Then I became nothing but a hunter, a tracker, and a murderer.
Sayid questioned me earlier, but nobody believed him when he declared my innocence. If they had believed in me, then Jack wouldn't have left me lying in the mud, struck by a bullet.
Marjorie has left now and Shannon pulls out Boone's wallet, staring gloomily at the picture inside. I wish that I'd never given it back to her, it was the humane thing to do but now I don't have a shred of proof of Boone's existence, a shred of proof that I a had managed to keep a friend.
To begin with I wasn't important to him; I was the hunter, just like everybody else thought I was. Then Claire was stolen and we found the hatch, the beautiful destructive hatch that can give a man his purpose yet take away his life. Boone trusted me, he opened up to me about Teresa and I told him about my miracle, and he believed me.
I was never going to tell any of them, never going to open up. After what happened with Helen it was too hard, too much of a struggle to become anything more than a stereotype.
But it still hurts when they don't ask me how I'm feeling. It hurts as another islander goes to comfort Shannon when she doesn't even know their name, when she was probably laughing about their fashion sense or their hair or some superficial nonsense just the day before. It hurts when they glance at me out of the corners of their eyes, as if they believe that if they make eye contact they may just drop dead where they stand.
Boone loved Shannon, but he didn't like her. At times he hated her, she caused him so much pain and she never cared about how her exploits affected him. Boone was useful to her, and that was when her affection for him ended. He was a way to get money, to get material objects, and to get power over other people, to become better than him, to control him, to own him.
Boone liked me, I'm certain that he did, and I liked him back. But if we were friends and they weren't, I just don't see why nobody has asked me how I'm feeling. They all knew that he was my friend that he was developing beyond his original position as my student. But nobody has spoken a word to me since I came back.
I thought that everything was changing when I found Boone, but it's about time that I accepted my fate. I am Jonathon Locke, kidney, hunter and murderer. And that is all I will ever be.
