Happy 8/15 Day!
This is the start of another convoluted LOST tale from my mind, full of what we love about the show and its central characters, the survivors of Oceanic 815. This particular tale is based, on a foundational level, in Season Two, with heavy canon elements from Seasons Three, Four and Five folding in as we move further along.
AU/Canon is where I enjoy writing for LOST. There were so many canon plots that could be pieced together in different ways with different consequences, that hopefully lead to satisfying, fulfilling endgames. This is only one of many that has captured me, inspiring me to return to writing longer stories.
Jack and Kate are, and will always be, the heart and soul of my stories, and that is no different for this one. I weave them along an arduous journey together, and often times apart, that finds them in the most perilous situations, but leading with intense love, unbridled passion and the shared desire to protect one another at all costs, even if that cost is their own lives.
But before we get to our lovebirds, a little villainous backstory exposition to start us off. Enjoy!
July 1977
The gallops of the sprinting stallion ripped through the gentle bustling of the camp like a bullet. Richard stood in waiting, cleaning his hands of blood and other bodily fluids with a towel outside of the medical tent. His frustration was ticking about what was coming, and he wouldn't hold back this time. The man he was waiting for finally came into view, riding atop the steed through the leaves, coming to a dauntless stop at the tree-line, short of the village as he pulled back on the patent leather reins.
He dismounted with ease and stomped through the camp with unperturbed aggression until he came face to face with the one man he needed to yell at. Throttle even.
"What have you done, Richard?" He asked with clear exasperation.
"Calm down." Richard eased as he approached him midway on his path, not wanting their disagreement about this to catch the ears of the others, but it was likely much too late for that.
"So it's true? You actually brought one of them to our Temples?" He bit back, quieter this time, but only for so long. He rounded Richard, but only got so far before he heard it.
"He's just a boy, and he was dying." Richard defended himself.
He stopped short and turned to shoot him a questioning glance, his British accent harsh and unyielding. "Then you should've let him die."
He moved toward the tent again, where the child was resting. Richard wasn't sure if he was heading in there to finish the boy off, his temperament insufferable ever since she left.
Richard moved after him, his voice purposefully loud enough for everyone to hear, "Jacob wanted it done. The Island chooses who the Island chooses. You know that."
Sensing the challenge in his tone and volume, he pounced. "Or maybe this was you and Eloise's doing. Save the boy and continue on with your farcical ceasefire with those invaders."
"Eloise is gone, and again, Jacob wanted him alive." Richard repeated himself, his temper flaring, "and yes, it serves the Truce, because if any of them were found injured in our territory, we agreed to help as much as we can and vice versa. Remember?"
Richard wasn't sure how many more times he could remind him of this very salient fact. He walked off to leave him to consider the stakes and what it meant if he planned to openly defy Jacob and the Island's will. The next move he made would not only define the next phase of their survival, but would send a powerful message, for better or worse.
These were turbulent times, he reminded himself. His people, The Others, needed someone to look after their best interests. While he saw the DHARMA Initiative as a treacherous group of vultures ready to pick the Island clean of all of its resources, to invade and cavitate its wonder, he knew that Richard and Eloise felt differently, and they had convinced everyone else to their way of thinking, slowly and surely, leaving him with very little support to openly antagonize their neighbors.
He had to appear to be at least agreeable to the Truce. Eloise was gone, but she still arrested the loyalty and heart of the majority of their people. The Truce made them feel safe. It was his job as their leader to make them feel safe. He was failing. He could feel their eyes on him, all the time, probing, expecting.
He relented, speaking out to Richard, his tone less menacing, concealing his anger. "Yes. Yes, of course. What's his name?"
Moments later, he walked through the flaps at the opening of the tent, taking in the boy lying in the cot in front of him. He was pretending to be asleep as his eyes opened and wandered over to where he was standing. He was on guard, and smaller than he imagined for a boy his age. His hair was a dark brown, long and sweeping over his forehead, dotted with sweat from the heat and a possible fever. His glasses were taped together at the hinges, and a large bandage was taped in a similar pattern along his small and frail torso. The child looked like a ghost, meager and broken, but he could still see a fire in his eyes. A purpose. A will to live, at all costs.
When the news reached him about a young child bleeding from a near-fatal gunshot wound, who had meandered over the perimeter of the Line, it hadn't caused much of a reaction in him. The message that Richard was told to take him to the Temples had. He wanted to have the child killed, as a lesson to the people he wanted to drive out for good, but he came to the crushing conclusion that what he wanted didn't matter.
He shook his head at the scene of the feeble boy in the small cot, healing from the Island's swift intervention. He still didn't care for children, even though one day soon he was to be a father. An absent father. A footnote. The choice had been taken from him about his own child, or had he never wanted the child in the first place? He was still trying to decide.
He cast the thought away as he approached, sitting down next to the frightened, reclined child. "Hello Benjamin."
Ben noticed that he was attempting to make himself appear non-threatening, slumping his shoulders and pressing his hands together between his knees, but his tone had an edge he didn't believe he could trust. The temperature dropped a few degrees as soon as he stepped inside the tent. That lack of trust and ice-cold aura didn't stop him from wanting answers.
Ben spoke up. "What happened?"
"You were injured." He began to explain.
"How?" Ben pressed.
"You don't remember?" He asked the boy. The question was rhetorical for him, a play to not reveal too much at this boy's insistence and exacting precision with his question. The side effects of being brought back to life in the manner he had something he couldn't even begin to explain, no matter who was doing the asking. The Island kept the memories, but left the pain from them behind, embedded under the skin like a million razor sharp edges, pressing deeper with each attempt to remember. It was all he knew from his years of watching its healing powers in action. He almost felt bad for the child, but not bad enough to truly care what happened to him or if he ever recovered them.
Ben kept his eyes squarely on this man who unnerved him, but thrilled him at the same time. "Where am I?"
He moved to tuck the blanket that shifted closer and tighter along his body. "You're among friends. We're going to take care of you."
Ben noticed that this man never gave him any real answers to his questions, often answering a question with another question or a vague platitude. He was starting to get frustrated, but changed course.
Ben pressed him again, his voice ticking, shaking. "My dad. Is he here?"
"You'll be back to him soon enough." Another evading platitude, Ben thought.
Suddenly frightened, turning a graver shade of pale, his eyes opened wide, pleading, his voice in a full quake. "No. No, I don't want to go back."
Ben tried to sit up, but the pain snuck up on him and robbed his breath. He weakly folded back down onto the bed, hopeless and restless, his breathing labored. If running away was all for nothing, if he was forced to go back and live in that horrific nightmare, he wouldn't survive it. The stench of alcohol on his breath at all hours, cigarette smoke choking him, the random beatings when he was happy, sad, frustrated, any emotion, any trigger setting him loose. The punishment he suffered because he was there and she wasn't plagued him. If he was forced to go back there, he would be desperate enough to take a shotgun out of the crawlspace his father didn't think he knew about and end it all. At least the pain, and any future threat of it, would be gone, even if he had to die to make it happen.
"Okay, easy." He reached for the child, helping him to lie back down. Unfamiliar sympathy swelled in his chest. "Easy."
"Oh…" Ben groaned, his voice strained and defeated. He needed this man to hear him loud and clear. "I don't want to go back. I wanna stay. I wanna be one of you."
He started to realize. This child wasn't looking to go back home, he was in desperate need of a new one. He let the mystery sweep him in, if only for a moment. "What did he do to you? Your father?"
Ben continued to breathe heavily, lying his head back down and avoiding eye contact for the first time since he walked into the tent. His guard was down, off, deactivated by that question. Once again so small and fragile. His eyes travelled down to the child's forearm, the appearance of an etching bruise in the form of a large palm was highlighted by the peeking light at the one of the seams of the tent.
He began to understand. His father had beaten him black and blue, repeatedly, the fear in the child's eyes reflecting years of hurt and anguish at the hands of the person that was responsible for making him feel loved and protected. His father was the one who shot him in the back as he was running away of his home, in desperate search of another. There was nothing in the child's pack but a few canteens of water, a sleeve of crackers, a journal and a few comic books he figured he would need in the jungle, without a television or radio to keep him entertained. He didn't have enough food and water to last two days. He had a better chance of dying from hunger or the elements or becoming prey than an adequate predator. He literally left everything behind and chanced death at a better life. He must have been so scared when his father caught up with him.
He was much too young to have to know and understand that level of desperation, he thought sadly.
"What about your mother?" He asked, genuinely interested in the answer.
"She died," Ben sighed, his tiny chest beginning to heave, "giving birth to me."
He didn't like it, but he knew he couldn't let him go back there. The fact that Jacob wanted to save this child's life baffled him, but he would figure out just what Jacob had planned. That was more than enough to keep this child around. For however long it took.
"You should be dead, Benjamin. But this Island," he told him by way of a small comfort, pausing for effect, "it saved your life. It chose you."
That unfamiliar swell of sympathy spread like a flame through dry brush despite his attempts to snuff it out. "You're safe with us. You can stay here."
"Who are you?" This child was full of questions, he thought. This would be the last one he would answer for today.
He spoke with the same darkness peeking through his tone, his accent thicker and his face brightened by a wicked grin. His eyes twinkled with deception, which reeled Ben in even more.
"I'm Charles. Charles Widmore."
April 1996
The sky expanded over their heads on the perfect day. Their camp was quiet, contented residents walked along the paved sidewalks, while others watered their lawns and sat on their porches, allowing the breeze to cool them down from the heat wave. Peace and serenity buzzed along like a honey bee. It had been years since their neighborhood, their barracks, felt this comforting.
Ben looked down at the head of the heart in his chest as she squealed in delight at the breeze in her hair and the dangling at her feet as he pushed her gently on the swing.
"Again, Daddy! Again!" Alex giggled, delirious with glee.
He smiled, careful not to push too hard, but hard enough to send her flying a bit higher. "Okay. Okay."
Richard stood off to the side, watching the scene play out. He remembered a much earlier time on the Island, this same man, then just a boy, now a father, the same age as the child who loved him beyond anything, was at the brink of death. He also remembered Charles at that time, a man who didn't want the picket fence, the swing or even the child sitting in it, no matter how much he struggled with realizing it over the last twenty years. He was still that man, only the more gluttonous, vindictive, but aged and voted out by his people.
Richard hated to interrupt the family moment, but as the new leader of the Others, Ben had immediate business to tend to, business that couldn't wait.
He walked over, feigning high spirits for the child in attendance as he approached them. "Wow, Alex! Any higher, and you're gonna fly right off the Island!"
Ben stood firmer at the sound of his false tone, his entire body tensing. His lips pursed tightly, his smile at his daughter's laughter evaporated into the waffling heat. Richard wouldn't be here if it wasn't time, if the submarine wasn't about to launch and take Charles with it. Forever. If he were asked, as that young orphan who had become a son to him, if Charles would ever neglect the Island as much as he had for as long as he had, he would've laughed the absurdity of the idea out of existence.
But he grew up, learned more, discovered crosses into diabolical, megalomaniacal behavior purely for his own gain, his only purpose to maintain his own power and influence, and to watch it slip undetected into an unnatural dictatorship. Without the checks and balances that protected them all, death and extinction was the only recourse. He didn't care how many bodies there were in his wake, he would persist without realizing the peril he brought to the Island all his own. He had to be stopped. Alex's laughter brought him back to the moment.
"The sub's about to leave." Richard informed him, his tone back to normal, diplomatic yet suggestive. Richard would always have a suggestion. They were to be hurled his way now as their new leader. He appreciated the guidance, but silently reviled the timing.
Before Ben could respond, Alex's thirst to be seated among the clouds grew thirstier. "Higher, Daddy! Higher!"
"All right." Ben surrendered. It was a response for both the man pushing beside him and the child squealing ahead of him.
Richard sensed his trepidation, his unease with being there for what had to be a devastating moment for the man he once thought of as a giant. "You don't have to see him off, Ben."
Ben couldn't take the out. He needed this to be over and he needed to confront the man he betrayed head on. It was the best way to move forward. He looked over at him for the first time since he made his presence known. "Yes, Richard, I do."
The dock was quiet except for hard soles of combat boots along the creaking, aging wood planks of the platform that paved the runway towards the submarine. Seagulls gawked along the mountains in the distance, the sound mingling with the waves of the ocean water. The sky was framed with calamitous overcast here, a stark contrast to stretches of calm, blue skies with brushes of white clouds seated over the barracks. No matter where Charles went, doom and gloom fast approached behind him. In the sky and on the ground.
The submarine was ready to set sail, crew members making their final checks both in and outside. Charles, handcuffed and flanked by two guards, was escorted toward it without ceremony or well-wishers, a lonely departure for a lonely man.
Charles stopped at the sound of Ben calling out. "Charles!"
The guards released their hold on him as he turned to face the biggest mistake he ever made.
"I came to say goodbye." Ben offered, his efforts at a mature, amicable farewell genuine.
Charles knew exactly what this was and wouldn't give the slimy mouse the satisfaction. The eroded chuckle that pushed from his chest was bitter, acidic. "No, you didn't. You came to gloat."
"No, don't act as if I wanted this," Ben shot back with slick derision, "you brought this on yourself."
"Are you quite certain you want to do this, Benjamin?" Charles threatened, one last ditch effort to scare the boy he knew still lived good and well inside of the man he never expected to overthrow him.
Ben knew better than to let Charles talk him into feeling guilty about the position he had been put in and the decisions he had to make for himself, his people and the Island. Charles was selfish, but he wasn't stupid. His voice rose despite his best efforts to contain himself.
"You left the Island regularly. You had a daughter with an outsider. I wonder how that went over with Eloise."
Ben could see Charles shrink a touch at the sound of her name. Eloise was still his weakness. It was no wonder why his tyrannical reign started and ran a year short of two decades after she left him.
"You broke the rules, Charles."
"We broke the rules together, Benjamin, or did you forget what you've done? The lies you've told? The part you played? I wonder how long it'll take them to find out about what we did." Charles continued to threaten him.
Ben met his threat with the simple truth. "What you did and what I found out about."
"You kept your mouth shut for seven years, and we're going on eight if memory serves. How is Alex?" Her name dropping out of his mouth was like a deafening alarm to his ears, but he would never let him know it.
"She's fine thanks. How is Eloise and the son you abandoned? What was his name again? He has to be about what? Nineteen? In his last year of college, I presume?" Ben shot back.
Charles never spoke much about the family he had back on the mainland, the family he easily ignored for his self-serving dalliances all over the world, only to come back to the Island, spent, full from his incalculable riches and reluctance to properly lead them.
"He finished college at the age of twelve. He's onto his third doctorate." Charles replied with a smug grin.
Ben bit back a grin of his own, disgusted. The absent father was keeping up with his son, but he wasn't raising him or providing any real support to him. Charles still measured others by what they could offer him, what they could give of themselves for his benefit. He asked him to give his soul and, in parts, over long years and even longer battles, he had. He wondered what he would one day take from the child he measured in degrees and success from the longest distance.
"Answer me this, Benjamin. What makes you think you deserve to take what's mine?"
"Because I won't be selfish. Because I'll sacrifice anything to protect this Island." Ben stated with upmost confidence.
"Sacrifice?" Charles knew the meaning of that word all too well, and he was certain Ben hadn't even scratched the surface. "You wouldn't sacrifice that baby."
"You're the one who wanted her dead, Charles, not the Island." Ben shook his head at him.
"Tell that to her mother." Charles sniped.
Ben was the one to shrink this time. Alex wasn't of age yet to start asking questions about her, but one day she would be. He rehearsed the lie in his head a thousand times, preparing for the day she outwardly wondered about how she came to be and why the other half of her parentage was missing. Anything but the truth.
"I take it it's gonna be hard for you. Idle hands and all. Spending all those years pretending you were so much better than the rest of us. Now, you get to go collect a pension like the old, tired, forgettable man you are. The Island doesn't want or need you anymore, Charles."
Charles smirked, assured that the battle had only begun.
"I hope you're right, Benjamin, because if you aren't, and it is the Island that wants me here and wants her dead, I'll be here and she will be dead. And one day, you'll be standing where I'm standing now. You'll be the one being banished, and then you'll finally realize that you cannot fight the inevitable."
Charles took a measured step forward, the guards allowing it out of respect to him, but ready to pounce and drag if they needed to. He spoke to that scared boy who would always owe him, who had been near death and without a home. He gave him a home and he invited himself to all of it slowly but surely. He didn't even have the decency to wipe the blood and dirt from his boots before entering.
Charles had it planned, and when the time came, he would strike, and Ben wouldn't see it coming.
"I'll be seeing you, boy." The words carried with the breeze to his ears, sharp and chilling.
With his shoulders bold, his back straight and his head held to the wind, Charles turned off with all the satisfaction of those last words. Words he hoped haunted Benjamin's every waking moment until the declaration came to life.
When it did, there would be nowhere for him to hide.
Ben and Widmore were always a duo I wanted to write more of. Pure evil awaits.
No worries though, I know where your heart and interests lie. Our beloved Oceanic survivors, notably Jack and Kate, are next up. :P
