Chapter Two
Jin had gone with Sayid, Locke, and a half dozen others to rescue the captured trio. The mission had been no ocean cruise; neither Sayid nor Jin would hear of Sun accompanying them for the dangerous search and rescue attempt, not with a child in her womb. Her own insistence that she join the journey had been only half-hearted anyway. She had been stronger in her plea for Jin to remain behind, but she had relented just as she saw her husband prepare to yield. She had seen the softness in his eyes, the fear of angering her, the wounded resignation. Yet she had seen deeper than those eyes: she had known he believed he would betray his friends by staying; she had perceived his unspoken feeling of emasculation, and in the end she had not wanted a man who would choose subjugation over honor. So she had let her last protest die on her lips, and she had let him go. But now, she thought, even the shell of the man would be preferable to this yawning isolation.
They hadn't wrapped the body this time. Tarps were growing scarce, and Sawyer and Sayid had covered the corpse swiftly with nothing but earth. The funeral seemed perfunctory. The wind blew the dark strands of Sun's hair across eyes that were too dry and lips that were too numb. She sensed rather than saw the survivors file out past her.
The hands that rested briefly on her shoulder irritated her flesh. Their conciliatory touches felt as if each passing person had simply shrugged. What was one more death now? The funeral goers had done their duty. They had stood at the covered grave. They had waited awkwardly for someone to speak, and they had nodded mechanically as Jack filled the silence with mundane recitation of the ways Jin had served them all. The doctor's short speech, as far as she heard it, had boiled down to something like, "He was a swell guy. He fished for us."
A fisherman. Was that how he would be remembered? Was that all? He had been a prop to her when the fear crept in at night; an anchor when chaos closed around the camp; a conduit for the secrets she had too long kept. He was a shoulder to lean on, a hand to hold, a lover, a husband, and a friend.
Sayid was the last to walk by. He did not attempt to touch her. Perhaps he remembered too keenly how sensitive the skin became once the heart was laid in the grave, how irksome the strained affection of a crowd that would push past mourning. There was no time here on this island. No covered dishes in the kitchen, no voices conversing in the living room late into the night, no voices dying into soft whispers in the nearby hall, no neighbors dropping by for days after, no ritual, no relief. There was only life moving mercilessly forward, survival eked out day after day on the shores and in the jungle.
Sun remained alone beside the grave.
