Daniel isn't sure what he was expecting, but this isn't it.
He can count on one hand the number of times he's set foot inside a church. The most recent must've been nearly a decade ago, a service on Christmas day that he attended with Theresa and her family. He hardly remembers it, now, but that might not be a symptom of his faulty memory; he didn't exactly get much out of the experience, aside from successfully passing himself off as a respectable boyfriend that her father might approve of.
He didn't mention it to his mother the next time they spoke. He'd always tried to keep Theresa out of their conversations, as much as he possibly could, but more than anything it just wasn't relevant. His mother has never exactly been religious, so neither has he. That's why it doesn't make any sense for her address to lead to a church, of all places.
And yet, here he is. The numbers engraved on the stone sign beside the driveway correspond to the address written on his death certificate, but he'd still asked the cab driver, no less than three times before letting him drive away, if he was sure this was the right place. After all, Dan doesn't exactly know his way around Los Angeles; maybe there's another street with the same name in a different part of town.
He's stalling. With a sigh, he folds up the certificate to stuff it back into his pocket and makes his way up the small staircase leading to the front door.
It's unlocked, but the pews all sit unoccupied; unsurprising, given the empty parking lot and the fact that it's nearly 11pm on a Tuesday. He steps lightly anyway, hesitant to disturb the peace of such a perfectly silent place.
A few candles flicker near the altar; there must be someone here, then, if he can find them. He tries a door to his right and finds it locked, but the door on the left isn't.
"Hello?" Daniel's voice comes out too softly as he nudges the door open. "Anyone here?" he tries again, a bit louder, taking a tentative step forward for a better look.
It's an office of some sort, smaller than he might have expected in such an otherwise grand building; a wooden desk stands proudly in its center, buried beneath a pile of haphazardly stacked papers and framed by a pair of matching bookshelves against either wall. The faint glow of a streetlamp peeking through the lone window silhouettes the virgin Mary statue on the other side of the desk.
Dan lets out a soft laugh. What is he doing here?
He turns to leave – to go back to the motel, to catch up on some much-needed sleep after the two-day train ride, to reevaluate and rethink and try again to make sense of it all in the morning – and then he stops. An envelope sits precariously on one corner of the desk, blank and unassuming aside from the small symbol printed near the top.
A symbol that he knows. A shape that he's seen a thousand times before, that he's sketched in his journal time and time again, that he's sure he would recognize anywhere, memory or no memory.
The logo of the DHARMA Initiative.
Daniel slips inside, leaving the door slightly ajar behind him to illuminate the dark room with a single sliver of light. He picks the envelope from the pile, carefully to avoid an avalanche, and turns it over in his hands. There's nothing inside. There's no sign that it's ever been sealed; no postmark, no stamp, no return address, nothing but that damn logo.
The same damn logo that's plastered all over half the materials on the desk, now that he's looking for it. He shuffles through maintenance information and attendance demographics and landscaping orders for the church to find a wealth of data buried beneath – measurements of electromagnetic anomalies occurring over the past thirty years, pages printed edge to edge with seemingly random sets of coordinates, along with detailed reports of air pressure, ocean currents, tide fluctuations, earthquakes, solar flares, everything and more than he could ever have hoped to find among the DHARMA Initiative records that are now nothing but ash in the basement of a university library in Ann Arbor.
But…why is any of it here?
He surveys the room again. An alcove off to the side of the room's only door leads into an even smaller storage area, lined with more shelves packed full of more books. He moves closer to squint at the tiny letters on the spines, unreadable in the dim light. A sharp edge juts out between two of them, a small stack of photographs printed on thick cardstock that's smooth against his fingers as he thumbs through them. They look like poorly taken survey pictures, most of them grainy or out of focus. There's no context attached until he reaches the second to last one, a photo of a lush green valley between two rocky crags with an ocean surface in the foreground, obscured by a caption printed in bold type:
9/23/54 – U.S. ARMY – OP 264 – TOP SECRET – EYES ONLY
What kind of church is this?
As he parts the books with one hand to slide the photos back into their place, another one tumbles from the shelf and lands facedown on the floor. The handwritten caption on the back – DHARMA Recruits, 1977 – is explanatory enough that his cursory glance at the picture itself is almost an afterthought, almost too brief for him to recognize three of the jumpsuit-clad people smiling back from the center of the group photo.
He turns it over and reads the caption again. Turns it over and stares. "What…?"
A creak nearby can only be the door opening, and he freezes.
Staccato footsteps fill the small space, and a light clicks on from the direction of the desk. Daniel stays where he is, still crouched behind one of the shelves, around a corner and out of sight.
There's a long, tense silence, broken only by the sound of his own heart racing in his ears.
"Hello?" A woman's voice, sharp enough to make him flinch. A wooden drawer scrapes open somewhere nearby, and the clacking footsteps start up again, slower this time, moving closer to his hiding spot. A figure stops just short of the alcove to cast a shadow on its well-worn carpet, its garish green color straight out of the seventies now faded and packed down with a thick layer of dust. One more step, and he'll be spotted.
Maybe he should just step out now. There's no real reason for him to hide – well, aside from the fact that he's probably trespassing. Still, what's the worst that could happen if he's caught?
"I know you're there." A gun cocks noisily in the small space. "You have until the count of three to come out."
Shit. He tries to visualize the distance between the alcove and the door – can he make a run for it without getting himself killed?
"One."
Not likely. He swallows hard. "Okay," he says as evenly as he can, slipping the photographs into his back pocket, "Don't shoot."
"Two."
He raises his empty hands in surrender and holds them up so they're the first thing visible over the shelf, then he cautiously stands up. The rifle staring him down looks vaguely old-fashioned, but that doesn't make it any less menacing. He tears his eyes away to focus on the face behind the gun and does a perfect double-take. "Mother?"
She takes a small step back. "Daniel." She seems genuinely surprised, an emotion she wears so rarely that it's almost disturbing. "You shouldn't be here."
"Uh…" He shrugs a bit. "Sorry? Is… Is that why you're still pointing a gun at me, or…?"
She quickly lowers it, but the troubled expression on her face remains. "You're not supposed to be here."
"Why, because I'm dead?" He tries to say it like a joke, but the look in his mother's eyes is anything but funny. He fishes the death certificate out of his pocket. "I…was hoping you could explain this?"
She frowns at it. "Where did you find this?"
"Does it matter?" he counters. "Why did you have me declared dead?"
She takes a deep breath before meeting his eyes; when she does, the shock and awe is all gone, replaced by a cool air of disdain that he knows far too well. "You never came back, Daniel," she says with a small shrug, as if she's talking about the weather. She circles around the desk to put the gun away. "After three years, one has to face the facts."
"You signed this in 2005. Barely a year after I left." It's harder than it should be to keep his voice steady. He's not sure what he was expecting; it would be unlike his mother to throw her arms around him and weep for joy, of course, but he assumed she would at least be glad to see him again.
"Why have you come here?"
He makes a sound like a laugh. "You don't wanna know where I've been all this time? Or how I made it off the island?"
"Well, it's obviously irrelevant, now that you're clearly trying to find your way back."
Daniel frowns. "How would you know that?"
"Am I wrong?" she says. "There's no other reason for you to be here. The only thing I don't understand is what you're hoping to find." She watches him expectantly.
He stares down at his feet, like he's been caught doing something he shouldn't be. "I, um. My– I found a message in my journal that I didn't put there." On the edge of his vision, Eloise's posture shifts. "A message that was written by somebody else, after I left the island. See, it– I left it behind, accidentally, and… One of the other–"
"Who gave it to you?" His mother's voice is sharper than before, angrier. "How did you get it back?"
"One of the other people from the freighter," he presses on, not ready to answer that yet. "Charlotte. She wrote to me, and– The only explanation, the only way any of it can make sense, is if she leaves the island too, if I go back and find her." He looks up, finally, to see that Eloise's face has hardened.
"I'm sorry to tell you this, Daniel," she begins, and she doesn't sound sorry at all, "But that won't be possible."
He resists the urge to roll his eyes. "Listen, I understand that it's a time-honored hobby of yours to disapprove of my love life, but this doesn't have anything to do with that." She glares at him, but he continues anyway, "She's not the only one that was left behind, but I know that I'm supposed to save her. I'm supposed to save all of them, and she's the key to it, so I only need to–"
"She's dead."
The air leaves Daniel's lungs like he's been punched. "What?"
Eloise makes a small hmph and walks to a bookshelf, her shoes clacking on the hard floor. She searches for a moment before pulling one dust-covered tome from between the rest, its cover embossed with a faint DHARMA logo, and she flips through it to a specific page. "16th of February, 1972," she reads aloud, one finger trailing over the handwritten words. "Analysis has been completed of the human remains previously found in grid 57E. Based on the state of decomposition, subject has been dead for at least a decade, likely longer. Subject is female, early thirties, of Caucasian descent. Hair color appears to be red, though little is left intact to determine–"
"Stop." Dan covers his mouth with one hand and swallows against the bile crawling up his throat. It doesn't make any sense.
"Of course it does, Daniel," Eloise says with a scoff; he didn't realize he was speaking aloud. "You should know already that the island moves through space and time."
"No, I– I know that, but…" She can't be dead, because that would mean he'll never see her again. That for now really did become forever, but no, that doesn't make sense, because nothing's forever. "No, she can't be… This has to be a mistake."
His mother rolls her eyes. "Really, Daniel, the only mistake I can see here is your lack of foresight," she says, tucking the book back into place on the shelf. "Simply finding it isn't enough. You should know as well as I do by now that navigating to the island is far more complicated than that."
Daniel barely hears her. "She's really…" His mouth doesn't want to form the words. "She's really gone?"
"Who gave your journal back to you?"
He stares numbly at the floor. "Charles Widmore."
Eloise goes still, and then she dismisses him with a wave of her hand. "Go out into the hall and wait. There's something I need to look into."
And he does, steps back into the auditorium and tries not to flinch when the door shuts behind him. He stands and waits, watches the shadows cast by the flickering candlelight at the far end of the long aisle, because he doesn't know what else to do.
Because there's nothing on the island worth going back for.
He counts to two hundred before leaving the church without another word to his mother. He's still counting as he crosses the parking lot, for something to focus on, something to think too hard about so he doesn't have to think about anything else.
Six, seven, eight, nine, forty. He'll go back to the motel. He'll call Desmond.
One, two, blue eyes, three, red hair, four, a voice like music that he'll never hear again, five–
"'Scuse me!"
Daniel looks up with a start at the man standing in his path.
"Sorry," the man says with a laugh. "Didn't mean to scare you. I was wondering if you could help me, I'm trying to find my buddy's apartment, but I'm, I'm all turned around."
Dan blinks. "Uh. I'm…sorry, I'm not from here," he stammers out, with a forced laugh of his own. "There's, um– I think, I saw, a payphone, over…" He looks around helplessly, struggling to remember which direction the cab brought him from earlier. "That way, maybe?"
The stranger steps closer to peer in the direction he's pointing. "Mind showing me?"
"Sorry," Daniel repeats, shaking his head. "I'm, um. In a hurry, so–" He moves to shuffle past.
A hand grabs his arm to stop him, and Dan doesn't put together what's happening until something cold and hard digs into his ribcage. "So am I, actually," the man says in a low voice, all pretense of friendliness gone.
"Oh." Daniel hazards a glance down at the concealed weapon now pressed to his side.
"This way."
He's dragged away from the sidewalk, across a street and toward a run-down strip mall, its paint peeling and storefronts all dark. "I– I don't have a lot of cash on me, but, it's yours, if you're–"
"I don't want your money."
Dan was afraid of that. He casts a quick look over his shoulder toward the church. Is this why his mother told him to wait inside for her? Because it isn't safe here? Why else would she keep a gun in her office?
But how would she know that? How could she possibly have any reason to suspect that there might be people after him, waiting in the shadows to kill him or to steal him away to God knows where?
The man pulls him around the back of the building and out of sight, to a lone parked car, and he opens the trunk. "Get in."
Daniel doesn't move. "Can we, uh. Can we talk about this?" he hears himself say.
The pressure of the gun disappears, only to dig into the back of his neck instead. "Now."
He breathes shakily, in and out.
Then a sound like a shovel striking concrete splits the air in the same instant that a fine mist hits the side of his face, and he has a single second to realize that he hasn't been shot before he's shoved forward by the full weight of another body collapsing against his. He catches himself on the car and staggers out of the way to let his would-be kidnapper crumple lifelessly to the pavement, a dark pool of blood slowly expanding around his head.
A figure shifts in the darkness, stoops down to pick up the empty bullet casing, and Daniel stares, frozen, at the gun in their hand. He should run. He should already be running, making a break for the church, but his legs won't move. He can only watch in stunned silence as the figure walks toward him, and his fear gradually morphs into recognition, and confusion.
"Sayid?"