Glass Chapter of Paint, a lost fanfic

Chapter of Paint

And I know the moment's near,
And there's nothing you can do,
Look through a faithless eye:
Are you afraid to die?

It scares the hell out of me,
And the end is all I can see.

- Muse, "Thoughts of a Dying Atheist"

Hurley had never really been much of an artist. Sure, he doodled from time to time, and he liked to do so. But all of his scribblings were imperfect little cartoonish things, childish renderings with no sense of depth or lighting. Nothing that would ever be hung on the walls of any museum, or even purchased from some dinky little sidewalk bazaar. He wasn't talented enough to be something like a classical painter, that was obvious; but beyond that he was also not avant-garde enough to wear a beret and sell questionable modern designs, not consistent enough to market a comic strip, and nowhere near thin enough to be a starving artist.

Even so, he was only mildly surprised by his own actions when he went out and bought that sketchbook. Fifty sheets of acid-free, medium white paper, fourteen by eleven inches. Plus a box of high-quality art pencils, and a sharpener that allowed you to select the desired type of point. None of it ran cheap, but hey, he had to blow through his settlement money somehow, and antiques no longer interested him.

The ones other than the wineglass, that was.

When he returned home, laden with bags full of art supplies, he could smell cooking meat from the kitchen. "Libby?" She wasn't always around—she seemed to come and go with the tide, or the stars, or some other ancient way of measuring time that he had no use for.

"In here," she called back, leaning to peep through the doorway. "I thought I'd make us some dinner: chicken Caesar salad. It's one of my favorites, and I think you'll like it."

He laid the bags down upon the armchair; now that he had company, he always sat on the couch. "Um, I don't think I had all the supplies for that on hand. How'd you get them?"

She turned her attention back to the strips of chicken she was sauteing and smiled.

She was right: it was delicious. He didn't know what she had used to season the chicken, but thought that it might be a new favorite for him. Admittedly, he found it a somewhat less filling than what he usually ate, but she seemed completely satiated, so he didn't say anything.

"That was really good," he said, smiling at her. "I've had Caesar salad at restaurants before...not like fast-food places, but close. And it's never tasted like anything special."

She grinned. "You can't expect to get a decent salad from places like that. They only use them as appetizers before the 'real' food comes. If you want a good meal-quality salad, you need to go to a higher-end restaurant, or make it yourself."

"If I ever start, like, craving it, I'll come to you." He doubted that he'd ever crave rabbit food for a full meal, but it had been good.

She glanced towards the living room. "It sounded like you were carrying something when you came in. What did you get?"

When he smiled at her again, it was a little awkward and more than a little exuberant, like a child trying to impress a loved one. "It's a surprise," he said, his face going all scrunchy the way it did sometimes when he was very excited. "It's not anything real special, but..."

Pushing her chair back, she stood, gathering up their plates and silverware. "I'm sure I'll love it, Hurley." She placed the dishes in the sink, rinsing them with her back to him before loading them into the dishwasher. "It's from you, after all."

"Okay, where do you want me to sit?"

Wordlessly, he indicated the couch. He himself took one of the kitchen chairs and sat across from her. When he withdrew the sketchbook from the bag, she smiled, teeth showing.

"Are you going to draw me?"

He smiled sheepishly, sharpening one of his pencils to a fine point. "Yeah. I'm not very good at it, but...I dunno. It's like, some part of me feels like I should try anyway."

Her smile became closed-mouthed, going from excited to tender. "I'm flattered."

Hurley studied her from over the spiral rings binding the paper, scratching with the pencil in little rough strokes. His tongue protruded from his mouth just slightly, his teeth pressing down on it in concentration. He squinted his eyes and tilted the pad every few minutes, as if to check an angle. And all the while, Libby sat stock-still and studied Hurley in return, hardly blinking, as if she needed to memorize him.

Finally, he looked down from Libby to the pad again, back up to Libby, and back down once more. "Done. I guess." His face was pinkish with hesitation.

She picked her way over to him, grasping the spiral binding of the sketchbook. "Let me see." She turned the pad, and was struck speechless as she looked at it.

It was true that Hurley was never all that great at drawing, and he hadn't gotten any better since be bought the supplies, either. Sketched out, filling up the page, was a picture of Libby. The lines were rough and even shaky at points, the art itself full of the childish feeling of a piece that tries for proper proportion and anatomy but fails. Both the shading and lighting were poor. But all the faults were elaborate, and looking closer, she could even see that the couch he had drawn her seated upon was just a few hastily-drawn lines, while all the detail of the piece was contained in his rendering of her. All of her own flaws—the bags under her eyes, the boniness of her hands, the way her hair always frizzed up just enough to make her look like she had just rolled out of bed—were rendered just as carefully as her qualities, and it was obvious that he treasured, loved, and strove to recreate them just the same.

"Oh, Hurley," she finally breathed, covering her mouth with one hand. "It's beautiful."

"You don't have to lie, if that's what you're doing. I know I'm pretty bad at it."

"No, I mean it," she insisted. "It's not technically good, but it has...it has such a warmth to it. It's more alive than most technically good pieces I've seen. I don't know how else to describe it."

"I'm not exactly some, like...Van Gogh, or anything." He wanted to list more painters, but he honestly couldn't think of another one who had created portraits. Monet was landscapes, right? "This looks like a sixth-grader made it. I don't really see the warmth, or alive...ness, or whatever it is that you're getting."

"It's more alive than I am." Although she said it in a gentle tone, trying to get him to face reality, he still blanched. "I'm sorry Hurley, I'm not trying to make you upset. It just feels like you're letting me live again, through your eyes. Through your drawing."

He remained silent, unsure of what to say. "Uh..."

"I'm trying to tell you that I like it. You need to learn to take a compliment," she teased, releasing her hold on the sketch pad.

"Uh...thank you." His face flushed redder, and he scrunched his mouth, embarrassed.

"Thank you." She reached as if to lay her hand on his shoulder, but pulled back in midair, as if remembering that it was some sort of strange taboo. "I think it's one of the best presents I've ever received." Her hand remained partially raised, at the level of her breasts, but away from Hurley. "I hope you'll decide to make more."

Of course, that's exactly what he did.

Sometimes he even drew without her there to model for him, because he could recall so vividly much of the time they had spent together. He would sit there, pencil in hand, and draw scenes from what little past they shared.

Once, he thought back to one of the times they had done laundry together in the hatch. A few of their items had gotten mixed up, and as he was sorting his clothing, he found himself holding a pair of thong panties, tiny and white and lacy as a snowflake. He was embarrassed to be holding her underwear, and even more embarrassed to know that she wore things like that, the knowledge making him feel ways he shouldn't have felt about a woman like her.

"I think these are yours," he had said awkwardly, dangling the delicate little pair of underwear from the tip of one finger. He was afraid that she would be humiliated too, creeped out by the fat guy manhandling her unmentionables.

Instead, she had snatched them back casually, and without missing a beat, replied: "Are you sure they're not yours?"

It had taken him a second to realize that she was making a joke; whenever anyone had made a joke that referenced his weight, even obliquely, he had always felt some measure of self-loathing somewhere deep inside. But he didn't feel that then. If she was poking fun, it was in a way that suggested she didn't care. That she realized he was fat, really fat, and still didn't see anything worthy of mocking. He had smiled at her, and she had returned the expression.

The day he recalled that was the day that he drew the two of them doing laundry in the Swan. When she returned to him, he watched her look the new drawing over for a minute or so before bringing it up. "You really never cared that I was so fat?"

She continued looking at the drawing, and even now, in death, she refused to miss a beat. "You never cared that I was so much older than you."

"That's, like...different."

"I don't see how." She smiled as she handed the picture back. "This is good too. You really are better than you give yourself credit for."

He opened his mouth to ask her if she was talking about his artistic skill or himself in general, but decided not to spoil what might be a really good thing; and so his question went unasked.

For a long while, everything he drew—whether she was there to model or not—was something that had actually happened. The two of them doing laundry, the two of them jogging, Libby trying and failing to get her shelter set up. Eventually, however, he ran out of situations to recreate. After all, they had only known each other for a matter of days, and he hadn't experienced nearly enough of his life with her to recreate infinite scenarios.

This sent him into a funk, and he didn't draw for days. If she wasn't modeling, he preferred to draw things that he had actually seen himself at one point; he was worried that his art would get even worse if he didn't have a reference to go by. Libby never tried to prod him back into working, seeming to prefer waiting patiently, quietly, for him to get his act together on his own time. She had always been so patient with him: telling him not to worry about how tired he got jogging, because he would get better at it; supporting him even when he revealed his hidden stash of food; talking him back down into reality when he was delusional and ready to kill himself.

And don't tell me you made me up. It's insulting.

He had felt, for so long, that he had known her from somewhere. Once he had thought it was because she was a product of his lonely imagination. Lately, he was coming to think that maybe it was some inner part of him trying to let him know that he'd found the one. Maybe when you'd finally found your soul mate, it seemed like deja vu. He'd liked other women, sure, but he'd never felt that way when he was around Starla.

Maybe he had been meant for Libby, and she for him. If things had turned out differently, they could have had time to love each other. Instead, one act of forgetfulness on his part had placed her in the line of fire. She had kept him from going back for the blankets, telling him to obtain some wine back at their camp. If he hadn't agreed, he would be the one left to bleed out on the floor, and she might have been rescued instead. Would she have placed a flower on his grave, if their positions had been reversed?

No, she might not have shown any signs of disappointment when he ceased his drawings, but she had loved them so much. He would deny her nothing in an attempt to atone for what had happened; he didn't want to let her down this time.

When he went back to the art supply store, he stocked up on different things. The total cost came to a whole lot more than it had the first time, but oil paints don't come cheap, and that wasn't even counting the palettes, canvasses and brushes; the sealants, drop cloths and primer. And most of all, the easel itself, a polished wood structure that actually struck him as being sort of creepy looking without anything on it.

After setting up and priming the canvas, he went right to work with the paints, not bothering to outline a rough sketch first. He wasn't going to paint anything that needed to remain true to an actual event, so what was the point? He couldn't see one. The pigments found their way onto his skin, his clothes, even his curly hair, which he had neglected to tie back. Before long, he looked like an enormous autumn leaf sharing its colors with a stretched canvas. And when Libby arrived, silently and inexplicably as always, that's how she found him: smeared with bold colors, standing before a painting of the sun setting on a beach.

There, seated upon the sand, was a couple with their backs to the observer. The man, who was much bigger, had his arm around the woman, one hand upon her shoulder; the woman was leaned in close to him, her head resting against his chest and her long blonde hair tied back into a messy ponytail.

When the collection of drawings and paintings became too numerous, Libby suggested obtaining frames in order to mount the pencil sketches along with the paintings. It seemed like a good idea at first, but the constant framing was a hassle, and most of the fifty sketches ended up simply being thumbtacked to the walls. Others were stuck to the refrigerator with magnets. The few that ended up framed were placed on tables, cabinets, any available flat surface. Over there, on the end table next to his bed, was the picture he had drawn of their first 'laundry date', and above the rack by the door where he hung his keys was the tacked-up rendering of the time he had assisted her with the tarp, back when she was still a relatively new arrival to the beach camp.

The paintings, however, were what took up most of the available wall space. They varied in size and color scheme, but all consisted of either Libby alone or with himself. The first one, Couple And Sunset, hung above the couch where they often sat together. Café in Paris had its place above the kitchen table. A rather small canvas, titled Libby Asleep, hung above and behind the wineglass itself. The fictional situations abounded: out for a ride along the coast in his yellow Hummer; holding hands in a movie theater; supporting her as she sat atop his shoulders, laughing aloud; picnicking in a forest clearing. He had tried to paint the two of them having a picnic on the beach, the way it should have been, but the sadness and regret was too much for him to bear.

There was even one titled Boarding Flight 815, the only work of non-fiction among his painted renderings: it showed him, covered in sweat, boarding the airplane and unknowingly stepping on her foot. Despite being just as good as the rest of his pieces, this one in particular gave him an uneasy feeling, like he had forgotten to include an important detail; after scrutinizing it up close and finding nothing out of place, he chose to ignore the niggling sensation in the back of his mind and mounted it above the television set.

Libby herself seemed thrilled with every single one of his works; if she found any of his immature renderings of her unflattering, she was damn good at hiding it. She had been around more often and for longer stretches of time than she had been before. Aside from that, there were also some subtle but distinct changes in her appearance. It wasn't like she had ever looked sickly before, but she seemed somehow healthier now; he'd be damned if he could figure out how it was possible for a ghost to do so, but it looked like she had actually put on weight since she first appeared from the glass. Not that he minded in the least, of course—nothing in the world could possibly make her less gorgeous to him—and it actually made her appear less fragile, her hands in particular softening. Her hair seemed more wavy than frizzy. The bags under her eyes smoothed and dissipated slightly, and although she had always glowed from within the moment he first glanced at her on the beach, her radiance seemed even brighter lately.

If she had been alive, he would have merely thought of it as settling into the mundane happiness of a comfortable relationship. Since she wasn't, it made him almost nervous, though he couldn't quite put his finger on why. Of course, he said nothing to her about it–he only wanted to provide her with the life she should have been living, and his affection...if she desired it.

She was there when he set a fresh canvas on his easel, sitting down to think, and he asked her to model for him again. He wanted to create a picture of the two of them celebrating something, and her refreshed beauty was something he wanted to accurately capture. "So, do you, um, celebrate Christmas?" He had almost asked are you a Christian, but thought better of it. If he asked that, and she wasn't one, he didn't want her to think that it mattered to him. She could worship Elvis flying around in an alien spacecraft somewhere, or nothing at all, and it wouldn't make him think of her any differently.

"I did," she said, standing before the easel. When Hurley asked the rare question about her everyday life, he used the present tense, and she always answered in past. "But I kind of have a request, if that's alright with you."

"What?"

"I was wondering if you could paint something based on Halloween." She smiled at him, almost shyly, nibbling her bottom lip.

He smiled back, genuinely amused, and snickered. "Dude, no way, you like that little kid holiday?"

She flashed him a fake-incensed look, narrowing her eyes. "If you're trying to tell me that you don't enjoy a holiday based on dressing up in weird costumes and running around at night for free candy, I'm going to have to call you a liar."

His smile broke all the way through, becoming a grin. "Fair enough." He twisted the brush between his lips and teeth, wondering what color to begin with. "I have no clue what I'd go as. I haven't dressed up for Halloween since I was like, twelve."

"So pick something cool. And I don't mean cool to the adult you, I mean something that you would have loved to wear back when you were a twelve-year old."

He pondered for half a minute before busting out into laughter. "What? What did you come up with?"

"It's kinda stupid," he warned.

"Come on, tell me. I won't laugh."

"A Jedi."

It didn't take long for her to break her promise and laugh anyway, but her merriment was appreciative, not mean. "You would make an excellent Jedi," she giggled. "Hurley Skywalker."

"The one and only," he said, about to dip his brush in the paint. Then he realized something, and paused to look back up at her. "So, uh, what do you want to be?"

She didn't even pause to think, as if this was something she had given a great deal of thought to before even bringing the idea up with him. "A nurse." The curve of her lips no longer suggested amusement, he noticed, but he couldn't quite figure out what kind of smile it was.

The night he hung the Halloween painting above the kitchen stove, Libby was preparing dinner again. This time, it was eggplant Parmesan with garden salad on the side. He wasn't sure, because he hadn't really checked, but it seemed like he had lost a little weight since she began picking the menu and portion sizes; he felt lighter, in any case. She stood at the counter, quickly and efficiently chopping carrots into thin strips as he straightened the canvas and stepped back to make sure it was level.

"There," he said, feeling accomplished. He looked to her for approval just as she looked up to see the painting; he clearly observed her hand slip, almost as if the world was going in slow motion, and then she had brought the knife down upon one of her fingers.

He was rushing to her instantly, reaching out to take her hand in his and check it over, but she gasped and rapidly backed away, knocking the knife to the floor in the process. Her hands were held up and back at the level of her face, and there was fear in her eyes. He knew why she had moved away, of course he did, it had been stupid to try and reach for her in the first place...and still, he felt a crushing rejection settle upon his heart, and it must have showed in his face.

"We can't," she ventured; he could tell that she was trying to convey the reality of the situation without hurting him, but he couldn't help the way it made him feel. His eyes drifted from her face to the hand she had injured, and although he had seen her bring the knife down hard enough to cut herself, there was no blood. Peering closer, he did see the split where blade had met flesh, but it was pale and dry. His heart broke as he fully realized once more what that meant: she was dead, dead and gone, and they would never, ever be together again in the real world.

When he tried to speak, he found that his mouth had suddenly gone dry. "There's got to be a way."

"You're not dying on me, Hurley."

"No. I mean, like a way to get around the rules. A loophole." When a handful of seconds had gone by without an answer or even a change of facial expression from her, he knew that he must have guessed correctly. "What is it?"

Her mouth tightened. "It's not pleasant."

"I can handle it. Whatever it is."

She softened. "I know you could, Hurley. I have faith in you. But it's not a question of whether or not you can handle it. It's a question of whether or not you should have to."

"I want to do it."

"It's going to be painful." When he opened his mouth to reply, she moved her hand forward in a gesture for him to keep silent. "And I don't mean physical pain. It's going to hurt you inside, and it could tear you apart."

He knew what she meant: he could go crazy, lose himself in delusion once more. But who could say that she wasn't a delusion herself, just a product of his guilt and fear? "What do I have to do?"

"We're close now. I wasn't going to tell you, because I didn't want you to get hurt. But what you've done so far has brought us to the final step. All you need to do is paint one more picture." Her words made it sound so simple, but her eyes told him a different story.

"Of what?"

"Of me. I'll model for you, and you will paint me. But you have to paint from reality again, not fantasy. You need to paint me exactly as I am."

"Dude," he breathed. Something about all this was frightening him out of his mind. He thought that maybe some small part of his brain fully grasped what she was asking him to do, but if it did, he was blocking it out and allowing himself just a few minutes more of blissful ignorance. "I can do what I did before, when you modeled the first time. But there's no way I can make it look realistic."

"You don't have to worry about that. I can lend you somebody else's talent this once."

"You can do that? Can all..." He wanted to ask her, but he wasn't going to refer to her as a ghost aloud.

"No." She knew what he had tried to ask and answered anyway. "I guess you'd call it a special case, but it's all because of coincidence. Because of everything that happened, I had a sort of bond with an artist." She bit her lip, and then corrected herself. "A failed artist. You're not the first person I visited." His face fell further, if that was even possible. "It's not like that, Hurley, believe me. I couldn't come to you directly; there needed to be a conduit. But with him...he left a channel open that he couldn't close, and I guess you could say I 'borrowed' his skill from him."

If he had been in a situation where he could give what she had said a bit more thought, he might have made the connections and realized what she was getting at. As it was, he only found himself more confused. "Isn't he gonna realize that his ability or whatever isn't there anymore?"

"No," she said, turning her attention to the food she had been preparing once more. "He'll never have the chance to realize anything."

"Are you ready?"

She stood before him, hands clasped to hold the wine glass in front of her. He had his paints and brushes ready, but hesitated to put them to work. "I'm not sure I get what I'm supposed to do."

"Just paint what you see, right now. When you think you've finished, you'll start up again, and then you'll paint what you need to see."

"Okay, now I really don't get it."

"Just paint me as I am right this minute. The second part will happen on its own." She blinked at him, her face sympathetic. "Just trust me, Hurley."

Because he did trust her—implicitly, in fact—he dipped his brush and set to work. It was obvious almost immediately that he had improved drastically, and while he was still no master of the arts, proportion and scaling came almost effortlessly. There was the pale peachy tone of Libby's skin, the leaf-green of her shirt, the glass-green of her eyes reflecting the light. The shadows and highlights weren't perfect, but they were close enough for government work. Folds added themselves to her shirt and jeans, and stray hairs conjured themselves from the end of his thinnest brush. More shine was added to her seashell-perfect fingernails and her lips, and the swell of her bosom was defined. He found that the less he concentrated on the details, the better they came out, and before long, there was only one thing left to add: the glass that she held. In a few sweeps of color, it was done, and he stepped back to survey the final product.

Just as he was thinking that it hadn't been painful at all, that Libby must have been wrong, he noticed that he had, in fact, gotten the reflection of the light in her eyes all wrong. How could he have missed something so obvious? It was a quick fix, but for some reason, it aggravated him. No, more than that. It set him on edge.

Grabbing a clean brush, he reduced the shine, dimming the tone of the picture and changing the angle and distance of the light source at the same time. But then the gloss coming off her hair, off her lips and nails, was all wrong. It was corresponding to the first version of the light source instead. Just as he had fixed those problems, he decided that he hadn't captured her expression correctly at all.

As his work became more furious, Libby merely continued to study him in silence.

He had finished changing her expression, and although the Libby standing in front of him didn't look at all shocked or agonized like the one in the painting, it felt somehow more right than it had before. In fact, he found that he didn't need to look up at Libby anymore at all; that he could do this without needing to reference her in the slightest. He progressed onward, and as he began working on refining the glass in her hands, he drifted off into the memory of a conversation from what seemed like the distant past.

"What's going on with you and Libby?"

"What do you mean?"

"Look, Tubby, you're holding up the line. We both know you're never gonna get past doin' laundry with her, so how 'bout you back off and let a real man show her what's what."

"Well, it just so happens, Frogurt, that I'm way past laundry. Yeah, that's right—I got a date with Libby right now. We're goin' on a picnic."

"You've got a date."

"Yeah. I'm getting the wine. She's getting the blankets."

It was something that he hadn't allowed himself to think about too deeply since she had died, and that troubled him. Why now? Why, right this very moment, when he had important corrections to make? He pushed it from his mind, and focusing clearly once more, he got to take a good, hard look at his current correction-in-progress: while he had been off inside his own head, he had changed the position of her hands, clenching now so tightly that their painted veins stood out. And the glass was no longer a glass, but a large, soft smudge of light blue. Almost as if he was outside his own body, he watched his own hand add detail to the blue blob, until it became obvious that he was imitating the texture of fabric.

He could have sworn that he felt his blood turn to ice water, and he looked up to check her but Libby herself was still holding the glass. All the while, as he looked her up and down to make sure nothing had changed, his hand was moving across the canvas of its own accord. Her face looked so very sad, and he felt as if he would crack under the weight of her despair.

"Libby..." he called softly, finding his eyes drawn back to the painting despite his concern. There was a new addition since he had last looked: an large and unclear blackish blotch in one lower corner. Squinting his eyes, he decided that it must be something too close to the foreground to be seen clearly, as if it were a snapshot rather than a painting in which all horizon lines could be rendered clear.

It wasn't until he had finished adding the highlights, shining the way only something metallic could, that he realized it was a gun. And by then, it was too late.

"No." Even as he uttered this, a near-whispered refusal to accept what was unfolding before him, he slapped his brush back into the black paint once more. Then, jamming it toward the canvas, he created two jagged-edged spots on the blanket she was carrying, in quick succession: one, two.

Two gunshots rang out in his living room, but he knew that none of his neighbors would call for help: he doubted if anyone else had even heard them.

"LIBBY!" he shouted, panicking, and when he snapped his eyes up to her, she was crying. He wanted to throw his supplies down, to overturn the easel and run to her and just try to hold her until he died too, but something was keeping him there. He couldn't even begin to fight, he was so devastated.

"Oh god, Hurley, I'm so sorry." The glass she held was intact, but there were two ragged holes punched into her stomach, trickling blood.

"Why?!" he sobbed, not even trying to keep his composure. "Libby, why?" If he could just get to her, if he could just place his hands over her wounds to stop the blood, maybe she wouldn't die this time.

"You need to see," she whispered, pain saturating her voice. "So that you can accept that I'm dead. You need to see it as it happened, and I'm not an artist; I couldn't have shown you from my point of view, because I don't have any skill to lend. There was only one other person who saw..."

The gun in the corner, viewed right up close; the person Libby had visited before him, the artist. It all fell into place.

"This is Michael's." Halfway between a statement and a question. "I'm recreating this as Michael."

"I'm sorry," she said, pleading. "It's so damn cruel. But this is what you wanted..."

His tears dripped onto his palette, mixing into the colors. He had covered the entire canvas and the picture it bore in white paint while he was talking to her, and now, he started to paint her anew. This time she was laid out upon the floor, eyes and mouth closed; she looked as if she might have been asleep, she seemed so peaceful. And then came his brush once more, arching her back, opening her eyes, and parting her lips. He stained her teeth and lips a dark red, the pigment dripping down her painted chin, before slopping more paint onto the brush and swinging it before the canvas, splattering the angry color across her neck, her shirt, and the floor beneath her.

The real Libby (was she? really?) gave a wet, hacking cough, and Hurley was able to look up just in time to see her vomit up the blood from her torn insides. It flew out in a gruesomely thick rope, some splashing into the glass she still held, and she gave a series of sobbing moans as she screwed her eyes up in apparent agony. Her knees buckled, but she remained upright even then.

There hadn't been enough blood before to trigger his usual reaction, but there was now. He felt his knees buckle as well, but he actually crashed to the floor, landing woozily. He thought he would pass out—he actually hoped he would pass out—but he couldn't. Whatever was going on, it wouldn't give him a quick way out. Instead, finding it was all he could do, he turned his head to the side and retched, bringing up the food she had cooked especially for them.

He knelt like that, all weepy and crouched beside his puddle of sick, until she called to him. "It's almost over, Hurley. I'm so, so damn sorry. If you can't forgive me—"

"It took this long?" he asked, cutting her off before she could finish. "You were in so much pain, for this long? You weren't, like...you weren't passed out from then until I came?"

"Yes," she said, her voice shaking and thick with her life's blood. "I kept drifting in and out, but I was awake for a lot of it. Jack knew there was nothing he could do for me, but he tried to ease my suffering. He took a syringe." She swallowed painfully. "Injected me with heroin."

He made a small, pathetic sound somewhere in the back of his throat at her final statement, and if there had been anything left in his stomach, he would have thrown up again. Even Jack, their surgeon-leader and hero, had decided that trying to save her wouldn't do a thing: she had been good as dead from the moment those shots were fired. "Did they...did they clean you up before I got there?"

"Yes," she said again, and he still couldn't bring himself to look up at her. "They cleaned the blood off my face, and they stayed with me until you arrived. There was nothing they could do for Ana...she had already died by the time they found us."

"How...how did it..." He kept breaking up his sentences with sobs, and it hurt so very much to ask these questions, but he needed to know, and he'd never get up the courage to ask again. "How did it happen?"

"I walked in as he was looking down on Ana; she was already dead, and he still had the gun pointed in her direction. I didn't know what was going on...Michael had been missing to search for Walt, and then just he was standing there, holding a gun with Ana slumped over on the couch. I was shocked, and I didn't know what to do. So I called his name."

She didn't even know. She was afraid, and she was confused, and she yelled his name. "And he just stayed there? He just let you bleed?"

She nodded. "He didn't know I was still alive. If he had, he probably would have shot me again, or placed something over my face to suffocate me."

Finally, shaking from the force of his sorrow, he looked up into her bloodstained face: she had moved to stand only a few feet before him. "You tried to warn us. The last thing you said was 'Michael'...and we thought you were checking to see if he was okay. And your face, it was so horrified, and you just kept trying to get up enough strength to try again..." He trailed off, face screwed up, as he tried to finish that thought aloud.

"That's how you died." He finally said it, finally admitted in front of her that she was dead. "If we had realized, maybe you could have, like...died at peace. Maybe you would have gotten to say goodbye."

He bent over again, weeping harder, and she bent down to kneel in front of him, placing the glass off to one side. "There's no way you could have known. Michael was your friend—there was no reason for you to think he had done anything." He was finally able to drop his palette and brush, and clapped his paint-stained hands to his face in response. "You need to stop blaming yourself. It is not your fault." She spoke each word of that final sentence clearly and distinctly.

"I-if...if I hadn't fuh-forgotten—"

"Okay, yes, that's true. If you hadn't forgotten the blankets, I wouldn't have been there, and I wouldn't have died. I'll accept that. But if I had turned around and snuck out for help instead of letting Michael know I was there, I also wouldn't have died. And if we had just had the picnic without the blankets, or done something else, I wouldn't have died. And if I hadn't been on that flight, I wouldn't have been on the island, and I'd still be alive. Do you understand what I'm telling you? There is no way you can prevent everything, or even most things. Can you accept that?"

A strangled sound emerged from him. "There's no way you can ever come back."

"You know that, Hurley. You've known that all along. But can you live with it?"

"I don't even know if you're just in my head right now!"

"Can you live with that, too? Can you move on and accept it?"

For a minute or two, the only response from him was more tears. Finally, when it felt as if there was no more water left in him to cry out, he slumped, defeated. More than that: accepting. "Yeah," he said, his voice raspy and hollow. "Yeah, I guess I kinda have to, don't I?"

When he felt her hand slide across his face to cup his cheek, he was shocked into sitting upright. Right there, in front of him, was Libby as she had been before the final painting: radiant, healthy, clean. Tears still trailed down her face, but she was smiling and her eyes were sparkling. The millionaires and billionaires of the world, without her before them, were poor men as far as he was concerned.

"I'm so proud of you!" she exclaimed, and he realized that her tears at that very moment were ones of joy. His eyes widened as he gazed at her, unable to believe that she was touching him, actually touching him there and then. She stroked his cheek with her thumb, tracing circles on his skin, and all at once he found himself seizing her and crushing her to him as if he were afraid that she would disappear the moment they broke contact. Her arms curled around his neck as he buried his face in her hair, breathing in the scent of her, and despite how cried out he had felt before they were soon crying again in each other's arms.

When it came time to clean up the mess he had made, he took the final painting down to the basement and shoved it into the incinerator. He didn't even bother giving it a title.

He didn't need it anymore.