Unconsciousness must have passed straight into sleep for me, because I didn't awaken again until the morning sun was peering weakly over the horizon. I was momentarily terrified at the thought that this stranger had left me for dead in the middle of the wild jungle, but as I sat up, I realized that I was not in the thicket of trees that the dark of night had led me to believe I was, but rather, I found myself barely a stone's throw from Sun's garden. He had led me back to camp.
He had led me back to a camp he had never been to via a path I had never seen before. Who were these people? My own insatiable curiosity urged me to search for the path he had abandoned me by, but the truth was, I couldn't have tracked a rhinoceros out of a paper bag, so I soon gave up and crept quietly back to my own shelter.
I foolishly somehow expected to arrive to a peacefully sleeping camp, but what I arrived to instead was madness. I seemed to come crashing out of the brush at roughly the same moment Kate, Sawyer, and Hurley were heading in. I lunged into the shadow of a tree stump, silently watching them pass, expressions a twisted collection of grief and confusion. I remembered what Henry Gale had said to me the night before, eyes flashing in the firelight. What had Michael done?
Fortunately for me, the restless milling of the other survivors on the beach allowed me to slip unnoticed back to my own shelter, and it wasn't long before I was emerging yet again, sidling over to Charlie's camp.
"Charlie?" I asked, attempting a pathetic pastiche of half-asleep grog. "What happened?"
"Tristan." He replied curtly.
"Where is everybody going?"
"Didn't you hear?"
"About Michael?" I asked.
"Michael? About Ana Lucia. And Libby. What that monster did to them."
"Monster? Michael?"
"Henry, Tris. He killed them, and he's gone. Escaped."
I felt the blood draining from my face. It couldn't possibly be. Though it was, admittedly, the far more plausible version of the truth, I couldn't wrap my brain around it. I had just seen him. If he had killed them all, what would have stopped him from shooting me in the jungle and leaving it at that?
"Well, then, what happened with Michael?"
"What is it with you and Michael? He's going to be fine." Charlie rose, agitated. "Listen, it's great that you've decided to join the human race for a change, but today really isn't the day."
I was left with my head spinning, and a vicious desire to head off again into the jungle to search for Henry. What was it that he had said? Patience.
Patience wasn't one of my strongest characteristics, if we were being honest. It took a considerable amount of mental gymnastics for me to remind myself that, as Henry truly was an Other, he was not only long gone, but he would have left no trace by which even Locke might have tracked him, let alone me. Begrudgingly, I elected to spend the balance of the morning allowing the waves to wash over my feet instead.
That day seemed like the longest day we had spent on the Island. I waited in tense silence for anyone to return with news. I was equally afraid that evidence of my foolish stumbling would be found in the underbrush, and betray our erstwhile houseguest. Why was I still so willing to believe him? The truth seemed clear to everyone but me. I just couldn't get it out of my head. We had stood, feet from each other, he was armed, he was in control of my life for our entire encounter, and all he had done was take me on a midnight dime tour of the jungle and absolve me of scrutiny, had I been discovered to have been walking with him.
At last, I became aware of the somber procession winding across the beach, and I rose, reluctantly, to join the throng. It was, perhaps, the first time I would experience what I came to know as survivor's guilt, though my heart was still unable to let go of my own private version of the truth. I drifted, as I usually did, around the margins of the group. I didn't belong in the stoic nucleus of Dr. Jack and the cool kids, but I was still largely socially invisible enough to find my way within earshot of them.
I couldn't explain it, but Hurley's acquiescence to Michael at the funeral galvanized something inside my mind. I was livid at the thought that Hurley, sweet, trusting Hurley could be so taken with Dr. Jack and his confidence that he wouldn't even give Michael's proposition a second thought. That Jin and Sun would welcome him back with open arms. The curiosity that had led me to seek out Henry in the first place, to learn his name, to lay eyes on him in the shadows of the armory had turned to a fierce sort of determination. If there had been any doubt in my mind that he had told me the truth about Michael, I could have justified staying put, waiting for Dr. Jack to return with Walt, being proven wrong. I could have justified all those things, had Henry lied to me. But he hadn't lied, and I was the only one who could ever know that. I was the only member of our camp to know what Michael had done, and it infuriated me that Jack and the other survivors would take his word as truth simply because he was one of us, and not one of Them. Whatever it had been that urged me to beg Henry to take me into the jungle with him came roaring to the surface of my consciousness along with a strange kind of revulsion. I had to get off the beach. I had to get away from the dozens of people content to believe an idealist version of the truth.
A/N: This one's a shorty, but I had to cut it off somewhere.