That's Why My Hand Was Shaking by Teenage Anomaly
Something always brings me back to you.
It never takes too long.
No matter what I say or do I'll still feel you here 'til the moment I'm gone.
You hold me without touch.
You keep me without chains.
Set me free, leave me be. I don't want to fall another moment into your gravity.
You loved me 'cause I'm fragile.
When I thought that I was strong.
But you touch me for a little while and all my fragile strength is gone.
You're neither friend nor foe though I can't seem to let you go.
The one thing that I still know is that you're keeping me down
Chapter Two: Special.
I awoke with a start, my eyes snapping open. I wondered, for a moment, were the hell I was. My back didn't hurt like it normally did after sleeping in the sand. My head was supported by something soft and cool and soft sheets slid over my feet.
I blinked up at the bottom of the bunk above me, memories returning.
Sawyer.
Trek.
Black Rock.
Explosion.
Monster.
Elliot.
Desmond.
Hatch.
Bed.
Ben.
Jacob.
Holy freaking crap, Jacob.
You can't die, you can't die, you can't die, you can't die-
The words echoed through-out my brain like a mantra.
"It was a dream," I muttered to myself. "It wasn't real."
I saw Jacob's face in my head, that wide, knowing smile.
I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed, shaking my head. It felt like there was a small, fuzzy animal in my mouth and I could taste my bad breath. My skin felt greasy and oily and gross.
I rose unsteadily to my feet and made my way past Locke, who was sleeping on the couch, into the storage room. I grabbed a bottle of shampoo and conditioner, a razor, a bar of soap, and body wash, and made my way to the bathroom.
For the first time in over a month, I was going to take an actual shower. That just made me so happy.
I walked into the old bathroom and shut the door behind me before turning to see on of the most frightening things I'd seen on this island.
My reflection.
I mean, I had a small plane of glass in my tent that could inform me if I'd broken out or if my hair was absolutely horrific, but this thing was full length and in harsh lighting.
Part of me thought I looked super hot. Sure, I was short, but I was curvy and had a pretty nice body, at the risk of sounding conceited. My breasts were larger than average and my hips were wide, but my waist and legs were thin and muscular, making me look stream-lined. I had a fairly pretty face; I didn't consider myself to be stunning or beautiful, but there was something about my face that made people look again. Probably my eyes or my lips, or maybe the combination of features that looked so wrong separately, but just worked, together, somehow.
On the other hand, I looked completely different than I had before the island. It wasn't something physical so much as the look behind my body- whereas previously I'd carried myself as an average teenager would, casually and a little slouched, I now stood straight and at attention, as though my body was a tightly coiled spring. I was alert, all the time, even during sleep, and that really took it out of a person. My eyes were skittish and somehow harder than I remembered, and even my mouth (the lips that had always reminded me of Elvis Presley) was set in a firmer, straight line.
I'd lost weight, too. Not significant, but I was lean and hard, my body slinky and coiled and ready to attack at any given time. My hair was long and shaggy and layered, falling in thick, almost golden waves around my face and down to the middle of my shoulder blades, past my collarbones.
I grasped the bottom hem of my shirt and lifted it over my head, my torso stretching, revealing my significantly paler, muscled stomach and nude-colored bra. My stomach was covered in a myriad of thin, red scratches, and my guess as to where they'd come from was as good as anyone's. Since coming to the island, I was used to being in an almost constant state of discomfort, and the scratches had barely bothered me.
I reached up behind my back to unclasp my bra and it fell to the floor of the hatch and I stared at myself in the mirror, shirtless and wearing only jeans, my messy, flyaway hair not even beginning to cover my breasts. I stared at the foreign and yet, so familiar girl in the mirror and she stared back at me, her blue eyes thoughtful and judging and unblinking.
"We've been through hell together," I told her, before twisting around to examine my scarred back.
It wasn't a pretty sight. After the explosion in Venice almost two months ago, my back had healed very quickly, but not cleanly. Simply put, my upper back looked like a mass of scar tissue.
There were long slashes two of my fingers wide and shorter scratches that were pencil thin, all looping over each other. Burn marks mixed with oddly shaped lacerations gave my back a rough, textured look. Some of the scars were raised significantly, but most of them, people only noticed when they hugged me or saw me shirtless.
The scars weren't just on my back, though that was where they were the worst. The backs of my biceps had their share of scrapes, though those were mostly thin and hard to see.
I unbuttoned my tight jeans and slipped them and my underwear off in a jerky move.
The thin slashes continued down my backside on onto the tops of my thighs though they, like the marks on my arms, were much harder to see than those on my back.
I sighed, my body twisted, as I regarded my scarred body. I hadn't tried to fool myself into thinking the scars were attractive in anyway at all. They were ugly and embarrassing and I hated them.
But there was something striking, something that they gave me that hadn't been there before. Carrying those scars around- well, it felt like I was carrying the world on my back. They made me someone different. Someone who could be hard and cold and dangerous and even deadly.
Someone who should have been dead.
-Flashback-
She stumbled out the back entrance of the hotel in Venice amidst the confusion, only beginning to feel the pain in her back. Her mind, logical and icy even when in a crisis, informed her that she wouldn't be able to explain why she'd gone up to her hotel room after being harmed in the explosion, and there was no way she could explain about Elliot or what she'd done.
So her newly-found survival instincts kicked into gear and led her out of the hotel.
The city, understandably, was in chaos. Smoke rose over the buildings in the distance, and Katty's heart hardened as she thought of the four bodies lying in the center of the blast. People stood in the streets, staring, shouting in languages she didn't understand, people screamed, pushing past her, ambulances wailed and deep voices sounded through mega-phones. The entire city was a blur of color and noise that she fought to understand.
She approached a man in a Venetian police uniform, tapping his shoulder lightly with a shaking hand. Shock and adrenaline were wearing off, and the pain in her back was increasing. People were beginning to stare at her, at the pretty Westerner with the gashed shirt and bloody back.
The man turned to her, revealing a kind, middle-aged face with a beard and dark eyes under bushy eyebrows.
"Please," she said, her voice quiet and weakening as she lost blood, her hands shaking, "please help me."
"I'm a little busy at the moment," he said, compassion in his eyes and in his thickly accented voice, but she shook her head, the movement making her dizzy. It had been almost fifteen minutes since the explosion, and she'd been loosing blood steadily since then.
"No," she said, her voice even weaker. "My back. I was in the explosion."
His kind eyes widened in alarm and he grasped her shoulders, turning her around. She heard him swear in angry Italian as her back came into view. People were beginning to crowd now, cameras clicked. She stared at them, hard, looked into the flashes, knowing soon, her face would be plastered all over the world as a survivor- possibly the first from this explosion- of a terrorist attack.
But really, she was a survivor of something much worse.
The policeman was shouting something in Italian now and the sound of an ambulance was coming closer and Katty saw, with a faint tinge of surprise, that it was a boat. The cop, afraid to touch her back, took her hand and led her through the crowds. She kept her head up and met people's eyes and didn't cry. It was important that everyone saw her strong, because she felt stronger than she ever had in her life.
She was a murderer.
She could survive whatever life threw at her, now.
She stepped into the ambulance and the Venetian equivalent of EMTs surrounded her, asked her questions in broken English, asking the cop questions in perfect, rapid Italian.
"Who should we contact?" the cop asked her as she was settled on her stomach in an odd cot that had a hole for her face, as a gas mask was strapped over her nose and mouth and an IV was hooked into her arm, one giving her oxygen and the other, morphine. The girl's lids flickered, the bright blue eyes behind them dimming as thins began blurring and the drug took effect. The dark eyes of the cop became the light eyes of Elliot as she drifted off somewhere where things were safe.
"Elliot," she mumbled. "Elliot."
-
"John, do you know what time it is?" I asked, walking out of the hallway that lead to the hatch bathroom to see Locke going through books in the shelves and putting back the ones that Des had pitched to the floor.
He reached into one of his many pockets and pulled out a watch.
"Almost five. You slept for about twelve hours," he said, smiling that calm, reassuring smile, I crossed my arms across my chest and grinned back at him, leaning against that concrete wall of the hatch.
" 'S the longest I've slept consecutively since we got here."
He glanced at me and laughed, shaking his head, putting a few more books on the shelves.
"What?" I asked, nonplussed.
"Not every day you hear a teenager usin' a word like "consecutively" in everyday conversation," he said, his grin widening.
"I'm not an ordinary teenager, Locke."
"No," he said, still grinning, turning back to his books. "No, you're not."
I pulled my shoes back on, said good bye to Locke and, after wrestling with the wheel on the door, I was happily tromping my way through the jungle and back to the beach, my gun stuck down the front of my jeans, my clean and wet hair pulled back into a french braid, my sore muscles stretching in a way that was both painful and nice.
I shoved my hands down the pockets of my jeans as leaves crunched under my shoes, humming happily under my breath as I made my way through the beautiful green jungle.
Somewhere on the other side of the island, Sawyer and Jin and Michael would be making their way back across the Island with what remained of the Taillies, and tomorrow, I'd have to do my damndest to save Shannon from death and my best friend from the same heart-break I'd suffered. Sayid wouldn't recover from Shannon's death for a long time, and though I didn't really like the blonde girl, I didn't want her to die.
I'd loved her brother, after all.
But now, as the afternoon light filtered down through the thick foliage of the jungle, as I inhaled the scent of nature, birds singing and insect chirping around me, everything was good.
And then a blonde man with green eyes stepped out of the jungle into my path and I stopped, glaring at him. He raised his hands, placating.
"I just want to talk," he said, eyebrows raised.
"Yeah?" I snapped. "I don't really feel like talking."
I brushed roughly past him, not meeting his eyes, but he grasped my bicep and I stopped, anger thudding in my stomach, my jaw clenched.
"Will you listen, then?"
I turned back to him, wrenching out of his grasp, and put my hands on my hips, regarding him with a raised eyebrow. He stared down at me and sighed.
"You aren't gonna make this easy, are you?"
My eyes widened in anger and I gritted my jaw tighter to stop myself from screaming at him.
"Look, what happened in Venice was an accident, I never intended for them to get as close to us as they did," he said, trying in vain to explain his actions, while I just looked stonily at him. Venice wasn't what I was pissed about.
He looked at me. "I'm sorry."
That did it.
"Sorry?" I said, my voice quiet with disbelief. "You died, Elliot! You were bleeding all over me and you couldn't even tell me-"
"I didn't die," he said hastily, flooring me. I blinked once. Twice. The birds were still singing, but the cheerful song contrasted with the anger flowing through me.
"What?"
"I thought I did, but I didn't." He exhaled, running a big hand through his blonde hair. "It's very difficult to kill people like Richard and I."
"What?"
"I never died, Katty."
"… how?"
"We heal quickly," he said, and my heart thudded in my stomach.
" 'We' "? I repeated, my voice stunned. He looked at me quizzically.
"Richard and I."
"Okay," I said, finding my voice. "Okay. But even if the bullets didn't kill you, the explosion-"
"I healed," he stressed.
"Then why aren't you burned?" I hissed, thinking of my own scars. He looked down at me, pity in his eyes.
"Because I healed, Katty. It takes a good deal to scar people like me. A lot more than some fire, at any rate-"
"How old are you?" I said, my voice almost a whisper. He just looked at me.
"Old."
"Give me some friggin' answers!" I hissed, pointing a quivering finger at him. He, like his brother, didn't blink. "How old are you? What the hell did you mean when you said I was special? What," I growled, stepping closer to him, "the fuck in going on here?"
He said nothing.
"WHAT DID YOU MEAN WHEN YOU SAID I WAS SPECIAL?" I bellowed, and birds took off from the trees with indignant screeches.
"I can't tell you that yet."
"Why the hell not?"
He just looked down at me, some ancient mystery written in his eyes, a mystery that somehow involved me.
"Because of what you would do."
I glared up at him, trying to cover my shocked silence.
"How old are you?" I growled, and he sighed.
"I don't know, exactly."
"Guess."
"I was born in what you would now call Norway," he said matter-of-factly, his eyes glowing. "My parents were Vikings, descendants from Romans who'd occupied Britain several centuries earlier."
His eyes bored down into me. "That was before the birth of Jesus Christ."
My heart thudded as I realized that before me was an unknown wonder of the ancient world. He was thousands of years old. I suddenly felt very, very young. To this man, I wasn't even a flicker in existence.
"Richard?" I asked, my voice quiet.
"Richard is Egyptian."
"How are you two-"
"We aren't really brothers," said Elliot. "I guess a more correct way of saying it is that I'm his nephew."
My mind was whirring.
"How-"
"I was descended from his brother, one of the soldiers who went to Britain. Richard is a century or two older than me."
Old. So very, very old. Ancient, really. I looked away from those piercing green eyes, turning my back on him and shaking my head.
The problem wasn't that I couldn't grasp how old they were. The problem was that I could grasp it.
"Why?" I said finally, turning back to him. "Why you two?"
"Jacob chose us."
"Why?"
For the first time, a smile crossed his face. "You'll have to ask Jacob."
"How am I special?" I asked again, and the smile melted right off his face.
"Katty, please-"
"No, no, no. For the past month, I've tried to keep my head down, I've let things play out how they're supposed to, watched someone else die, just so things would stay the same. I haven't asked questions. I've been a good little girl and kept all this secret. But now, now, I want some friggin' answers!"
I'd seen Elliot a lot of ways. I've seen him icy, I've seen him warm and welcoming, I've seen him with desire and intoxication laced in his growl of a voice, and I've seen him splattered with blood and bullet ridden.
But this was the first time I'd seen him angry.
"You think you have it hard?" he asked, his voice a growl as his eyes flashed at me. "Wanna trade jobs? Cause next to mine, yours is a piece of cake. If you weren't so damn selfish, maybe you could see that-"
My jaw dropped and every wall containing my anger and frustration dropped. For the first time since arriving on the island, I cracked.
I'd been pissed before, annoyed, irritated to the point of murder, but now, for the first time since the man in front of me had died, I was truly angry.
"Okay, I'm a selfish little bitch. I'm sorry I don't have the perspective of a thousand years on my side, but you know what I do have, Elliot freaking Alpert?"
I gestured in the direction of the beach. "All those lives. In my hands. I DIDN'T ASK FOR THIS!
"You met me in Venice," I growled, my voice dangerously low. "You told me that I was special, which is so much BS, because I'd never done anything interesting or dangerous or special in my goddamn life before meeting you! I was ordinary! Average! Nothing special about me, nothing at all! And then there you were, like freaking Hagrid, telling me these things. Then you died, and I was left with a smoking gun and scars on my back.
"I get on a plane, and suddenly, everything changes again. Suddenly, I'm inside a fucking TV show! I survive the crash, and I keep my head down, don't tell people what I know. I make some friends. I fall in love with a man I know is gonna die! Then, joy of joys, I meet your brother. Your uncle. Does he tell me you're still alive? Give me anything to cling to? No, the hell he does! He takes your son, the only person I could love without fear because I didn't know what was going to happen to him, away from me.
"Boone died. Another man I cared about, died, in my arms. But still, I keep my head down, I don't ask questions. And you, you were alive the WHOLE FUCKING TIME!"
I took a deep breath. There was some shock in those endless eyes and my throat hurt from screaming at him.
"I'm not some ancient immortal, Alpert! I'm a freakin' teenager! I'm tired of not knowing things. I'm tired of knowing things!"
He grasped my chin, gently, forcing me to look up into those eyes, so much like Richard's, but a bright, piercing green.
"You will know," he said quietly, his eyes searching mine. "But not yet."
He looked at me hesitantly, considering something, before crushing me to his chest in a tight hug.
"I couldn't tell you," he murmured. "It would have broken you. You weren't strong enough to deal with it, not yet."
I blinked back tears, clinging to his collared shirt.
"I didn't want this for you, Katty. Not at all. And I'm so, so sorry."
He pulled away, looking down into my eyes again.
"I care about you immensely, Katty. Be safe."
And just like that, he was gone, leaving me, standing in the darkening jungle, my heart pounding and my throat hurting.
I turned and began trudging my way back to the beach, my hands shoved in my pockets, no longer humming, no longer happy, but at least I had some kind of closure now.
I sighed, regarding the jungle in front of me. The back was maybe ten minutes away.
"Damn immortals."
LOST
"Gravity" by Sara Barellies. Katty's feelings towards Elliot and, to a lesser extend, 's a very fitting song for the three of them.
A/N: Alrighty, chapter two. Next chapter.... the action picks up. Like, FAST. It's gonna be big. You're gonna love it :). So, yeah... I normally try very hard to stick strictly to canon, but I took some liberties in this chapter with Richard's background. Some people think he came over on the Black Rock, but I still think he's an Egyptian. And It's going to be a plot device. Not too major, just in case I'm wrong, but if it turns out he DID come over on the black rock, I'm just gonna.... ignore that. :). Also, I had a lot of fun with the Katty/Elliot scene in this. Before anyone starts wondering, no, they're not going to get together. Katty would never be able to trust him enough after Venice, but, as you can see, there's still lots of tension and angst, wich is gonna be SUPER FUN to work with. Hope you enjoyed, as always, PLEASE REVIEW!
Sarah.