Chapter Four
The time passed the way it had before her reconciliation with Jin made the days fly gloriously by. The hours crept, every day a month, the long week a year. Seven days of solitary mourning. Seven days of pitying glances. Seven days of hushed conversations, words dying the very moment she approached. Sun had tended the garden these past seven days, had tended it from daybreak to sunset, working her hands deep into the earth that recycled death into life.
As she molded a mound around a tender bud, she saw a hand, just a shade lighter than the dirt, rest beside hers. Sayid began to help her sculpt the mound. Kneeling beside her, he said, "Your garden is vibrant. It endures the scorching sun, the heavy rains. It survives."
"Because I entrust it to no one. Because I keep it myself."
"Sun, if there is anything I can do, anything at all--"
"You know as well as I that there is nothing anyone can do."
She was relieved that he did not press her further. He merely rose and left her to her plants. This she could control. This she could protect.
When Sun lifted the flap to Sayid's tent later that night, he jumped instantly to a sitting position. It was a hot night, and he was clad only in boxers, but he grabbed a nearby blanket hurriedly and draped it around his waist, not that she could see him clearly in the dim starlight that filtered its way in random rays through the canopy of the tent. "What are you doing here?" he asked.
"You said if there was anything you could do." Her words fell deliberately; she was never fully comfortable with the English, no matter how often or how well she spoke it. "Anything at all."
"Yes. What is it?"
She crossed her arms, grasped the ends of her shirt, and pulled it swiftly over her head. He stiffened with the instinct of a soldier responding to a threat. "What are you doing?"
She came and kneeled beside him on one side of his legs. "I want to forget," she said. "For just one night, for just one hour, for however long, I want to forget."
His eyes fluttered down reflexively to her naked chest and then quickly returned to her face. "You are crazed with grief," he said. "You are nothing like yourself. Go back to your tent."
Sun wrapped her leg suddenly around him, and he shifted to hide his purely primal response. She refused to consider how strange it was that, in the course of a week, she had gone from slapping him to straddling him. If he could not serve as a receptacle for her rage, perhaps he could release the pain some other way. "Don't you want to forget too, Sayid? Don't you want to lift that weight that bears down every second on your soul? Every second. Don't you want to kill that terrible pain, if even for a single night?"
The moonlight streaming through a vent above made deep pools of his dark eyes, or maybe it was the tears barely contained within them that created the effect. "Yes," he answered. "But not in some way that will bring more pain later. It would feel like adultery in the morning. You know it would."
Sun thought of past temptations, of the vow she had kept during the darkest hours of her marriage, of the promise she could never release, even when loving Jin meant sharing his dungeon. She choked on the idea of what she had almost done to purchase a passing peace.
She swung herself off of Sayid and abruptly pulled on her shirt. As the cotton covered her stomach, she let her hand linger there, where the child grew. She was not yet showing, and in her grief she had almost forgotten that she still kept this last remnant of Jin. She must guard it with her life.
Sitting on the sandy floor of the tent, Sun murmured through her quiet tears, "How can you manage to think ahead to tomorrow?"
"Because I am no longer in the place where you are now."
"Do you regret it, then?" she asked. "The way you beat that man when you were in that place?"
He did not answer.
"How many of them did Jin kill?" Perhaps his response would bring her some relief. The Others hadn't murdered Jin, but it was ultimately because of them her husband was dead.
Sayid swallowed. To her, he seemed worried. "They were insane," he said. "All of them."
"What do you mean?"
"I interrogated several. They claimed to have come here many years ago, in their ship."
"So?" she asked. "Did not Danielle come here on a ship?"
"They said they came 200 years ago. On a space ship. From another world."
Her eyes widened. If she had been looking for a distraction, then this would suffice. The details of the rescue had not interested her before, but this she had not heard.
He glanced away and then looked back at her. "They wanted to study us. They have been studying us. They took Jack, Kate, and Sawyer to study them more closely."
"Why?"
"They said they wanted to save us."
Sun's eyes narrowed in the dim light. "Save us from what?"
"From ourselves, I suppose. They say that they took the children to teach them new powers, that they took Claire to engineer a new species in the womb. They said Walt was already one of them." Walt had disappeared with his father. The survivors did not know whether the pair was alive or dead. "They think they can communicate with their minds, that they can project their own images."
"And the four-toed statue?" Sun asked.
He nodded. "Yes, it belongs to them. It is an image of their…"
"Their god?"
"Not quite," he answered. "Their progenitor."
"Yet they all had five toes?" she asked, a little nervously.
"Yes." He smiled weakly. "They claim to have…evolved. The statue is a memorial to their advancement from primitive roots. They are mad. Cultish. Yet some of the children, who had been with them for years—Alex among them—had come to believe them."
Sun drew in her bottom lip between her teeth. "But you do not believe them."
"Of course not," he insisted. "The blood they bled was human enough."
"Then why do you look so afraid when you speak of them?"
She could not see his features clearly in the darkness, but his teeth seemed firmly clenched. "Have you heard the whispers?" he asked at length. "Have you seen the smoke? Walt?"
"No. I have heard of these things."
He drew his knees up, crossed his arms over them, and leaned forward. "Here is the strangest claim of all," he said. She waited anxiously. He seemed reluctant to continue, but at last he did. "They did not say, precisely, that their ship crashed on this island."
Her lips parted slightly in unspoken question.
"They said their ship is this island: a self-contained ecosystem. They say that is why we can never sail away. They control the current. They control the rain. They control it all. And at this very moment, we are not on earth, but somewhere in space. They have been intermitently gliding just above the earth's oceans, collecting specimens—planes, ships, people." He began to laugh, but it sounded contrived. "Do you ever wonder if we will all go insane?"
She smiled bitterly. "Sometimes I wonder if we already have." She looked at him curiously. "Locke, Sawyer, Jack—they know about what the Others believe?"
"More or less." He rubbed the knuckles of one hand and seemed to study them.
Sun did not wish to ask him any further questions. It was all too strange. Let the madness be buried there, back at the camp of the Others. Let us strive for normalcy here, she thought, on this small patch of shore we call home. Her hand again found its way to her stomach; it wandered absently across the place where she could not yet feel Jin's child move. Let us strengthen what remains.
"Thank you," she said softly, "for…for resisting me."
Sayid nodded without looking at her.
Her hand still rested lightly above the baby. "It would have been an awful thing," she said.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his lips twitch into a partial smile. "How you flatter me."
She felt herself begin to laugh at the unintended insult. She covered the outburst with her delicate hands. It seemed wrong to laugh so soon after Jin's death, but, then, wasn't relief what she had come seeking? She lowered her hands to the ground and pushed herself up. She permitted the smile to remain on her face, yielding to the short glimmer of serenity the moment brought.
Maybe there was hope after all. Whether on a ship or on an island of madmen, she was, at least, not quite alone.
