La Mer - Part 2

[aurilly]

ii. “Guys... where are we?”

On screens in a tiny room that Ariadne has carved out of an impossible corner of the house, Arthur and the team watch as Jarrah stirs in his bed. The blinds are drawn and the negligible amount of light that seeps through the edges isn’t enough to make anyone want to get up. After looking around him in slight confusion, he gives into the comfort, drinks the water on the nightstand, and gets back under the covers.

As soon as Jarrah’s asleep, the team quietly moves to the bedroom. Arthur stands with his hands in his pockets as the others sit on the floor beside the bed and get the PASIV ready. Again.

It’s all going according to plan, just the way Arthur likes it. Maybe this job is what he needs to get his groove back. The others may have gotten a thrill out of the Fischer job, but Arthur’s happiest when everything works like clockwork. This time, he’s researched every possible facet of the case; there won’t be any surprises. He’s even triple-checked that Jarrah has never had dream security training. In fact, it’s pretty clear that he’s never even heard of the concept of shared dreaming. Between that and Cobb’s assurances that Mal has been dealt with (more reassuring was Ariadne’s confirmation of this fact), he’s feeling confident about this one.

“See you later,” he says smugly as he watches unconsciousness overtake them.

***

Ariadne’s on her back in the middle of a bamboo grove, the sky impossibly blue overhead. Branches from taller trees sway above her, dancing to a rhythm she can’t follow. She loves this feeling---knowing she’s in a dream, but still reveling in that sense of delight at how her own imagination can surprise her.

And that’s when she realizes something’s wrong: she isn’t supposed to be surprised. Not in a place she’s not only created, but also been to.

There’s no bamboo on Membata.

She sits up, and that’s when she sees the next sign that something is amiss. A white canvas sneaker hangs off a branch a few feet away from her. But even stranger is the way it doesn’t simply hang; it shimmers into existence, as does the branch. It starts out as a transparent, watery outline, but quickly solidifies, taking on color and tangibility faster than Ariadne can process what’s happening. If she didn’t put bamboo in the dream, she definitely didn’t put random Keds. That’s a level of detail and creative license that she hasn’t yet achieved, and, despite her confusion, she makes a mental note to start working towards that.

The shimmering is happening all around her: trees appear out of nowhere to fill in the jungle landscape; rolling hills come into view. The transformation completes itself in seconds, so quickly and seamlessly that if she hadn’t known it should look otherwise, she wouldn’t even have noticed.

She picks herself up and brushes the soil off the back of her pants. She doesn’t know how this happened; her first thought is that the drafts somehow got mixed up with some other ones, but unless Cobb has been sketching on the side, she doesn’t know of any other island dreamscapes the team could have created.

This is a place she’s never seen, never imagined, and definitely never built. But whatever it is, it’s beautiful---too beautiful to resent for not being hers. Still, Ariadne’s fingers itch to drag the scenery back to the way it should be---the way she planned it---but her better judgment stops her. She remembers what happened the last time she went crazy with revisions while in someone else’s dream.

In the meanwhile, she decides she might as well try to stick to the plan, as much as is still possible, until she can figure out what’s going on. She tries to call Cobb, Yusuf and Eames, who should be on a boat about half a mile offshore, but no one picks up. She assumes it’s because they aren’t yet in range, though why a dream walkie-talkie should be subject to those kinds of laws, she doesn’t know. In the meanwhile, she makes her way through the utterly unfamiliar flora, trying to get to the beach she can hear but not yet see. Even though something strange has happened to the island, she figures Jarrah and his six or so friends should be around, somewhere.

Within a few minutes, she’s reached where the jungle meets the coast. The trees grow shorter and sparser and the soil gives way to sand in the kind of arbitrary but perfect line that only nature can create… yet another reminder of the differences between her island and this one, the difference between unpredictable imagination and hyper-controlled design.

Okay, maybe she does resent it, just a little.

The walkie talkie finally vibrates against her thigh. Ariadne’s about to barrage Cobb with questions, but before she can, Eames pipes up with a remark so unexpected that she all but loses her train of thought.

“Ariadne, is there a boozy Scotsman haunting your past you’ve neglected to tell us about?”

“What?”

Cobb, reassuringly calm, explains, “We just had an altercation with a guy on a sailboat. Bearded. Drunk. No pants. Thick accent.”

“Scots. Utterly incomprehensible,” she hears Eames muttering in the background.

Carefully, Ariadne asks, “What kind of altercation?”

“The kind where he pulled out a rifle and started yelling at us. Something about being ‘hostile’ and ‘trapped in a snowglobe’. He called us his 'brothers', shot at us, and then tripped over his feet and fell back into the hold. None of us recognized him, so we wondered if maybe he’s someone you brought here.”

“No, I don’t know any Scottish people, and all the guys I know keep their pants on.”

“You poor girl,” Eames sympathizes, and Ariadne purses her lips in annoyance. He doesn’t realize it (or at least she wants to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he doesn’t realize it), but Eames sometimes cuts too close to the quick.

“I only built the ocean out a couple of miles. Maybe he ran into the edge, and that’s what he meant about being trapped in a snowglobe?”

She can all but hear Cobb nodding to himself, mentally running down the list of theoretical possibilities and agreeing with her. “Makes sense. But the main question is, who is he? If he isn’t one of ours, he must be someone Jarrah knows. He was too specific, too well-drawn, to just be a nameless filler projection.”

“But the Oceanic Six were rescued by a raft that happened to float towards the island. Not by a Scotsman in a fancy sailboat,” Yusuf counters.

Ariadne figures this is as good a segue way as any. “Speaking of things that shouldn’t be here…”

“Yeah, we were going to ask about that. We thought Membata was a tiny, flat strip of beach. This looks more like… Hawaii.”

“It started out right, but then…” She doesn’t know how to describe the shimmering.

“We saw.”

“How does that even happen?” she asks, still trudging through jungle and brush, following the tree line in search of the beach where she’ll find Jarrah and his friends.

Ariadne can hear waves both near her and through the walkie as water splashes against the side of the boys’ boat. The noise makes it difficult to hear Cobb’s attempt at an explanation. “I’ve read theories about this, but I’ve never seen it pan out before now. Basically, the idea is that the mind doesn’t have to limit its projections to people. It can create places, too, or in our case, it can correct places. So as soon as we got here, Jarrah’s subconscious filled in what you built to turn it into what he remembers.”

The perfectionist in Ariadne bristles at the word choice. “But I built the island he remembers. Every rock. Every tree. There’s nothing to correct.”

“I know. But for some reason, Jarrah’s subconscious wants the island to look like this. Where are you?”

“Close to the shore. I’m looking for the camp.” Ariadne’s still hidden by the trees and bushes, but the landscape opens up into the most gorgeous beach she’s ever seen. What she sees makes just as little sense as the rest of the island.

Spread out along the beach are at least thirty makeshift shelters, all fashioned out of bits of tarpaulin (where’d they get that from?) and airplane parts. But even more shocking is the throng of people milling around; they’re sitting, swimming, washing clothes, playing cards, roasting pigs over a campfire…

Ariadne has read over and over again about how only eight passengers escaped the plane before it sank to the bottom of the ocean and how they’d floated to this shore; the airplane parts that these shelters are built out of can’t exist. She’s watched interviews in which they described in great detail how they’d subsisted on nothing but coconuts and fish---no pigs, no industrial-sized cans of food that Ariadne can see lined up on a hand-made shelving structure. During her visit to the island the survivors had sworn they’d spent their time stranded on, she’d seen for herself how there were no building materials, no bamboo or cutting tools; there’s no way these people could have created any of this.

“This is all wrong,” she says, more to herself than to the team.

“What do you mean?” is Cobb’s worried reply. In the background, she can hear Yusuf and Eames bickering about how to sail the boat, probably unaware of the complete dissolution of the plan she now knows won’t work at all.

“The camp I’m looking at is… huge.”

“How huge?”

Ariadne scans the group she’s looking at, adding up the clusters of people surrounding the various stations. “Forty people huge.”

“That’s impossible,” Cobb yells into the walkie.

“Tell that to all these people. Tell that to your drunk Scotsman. Tell that to the island.” She picks up the binoculars that hang around her neck and peers through them for a better look at the action. “The ambush isn’t going to work. There are too many of them. And… Where’d they get the guns from?”

“Guns?” Cobb asks sharply. After the Fischer case, the impossibility of the projections being armed was the one element of this job to which the whole team had been looking forward. Now that expectation, too, has proven false.

“There’s a blond guy with a shotgun. And a bald guy organizing a case full of knives.” Finally, Ariadne’s eyes fall on people she recognizes---people who actually belong in the dream. “I see Kate Austen and Jack Shephard. She has a pistol in her back pocket. And she’s not pregnant.”

“Maybe she’s already had the baby,” Cobb reasons, now unable to mask the worry in his voice. He’s an architect as well: a control freak like her, like all of them (except maybe Eames). “Any sign of Jarrah?”

Ariadne looks more closely, and finally spots their subject chopping wood with a short guy she recognizes from the photographs as Charlie Pace, one of the three crash survivors who didn’t survive the island. Sayid and Charlie appear to be building some sort of communal dining area for the camp. Keeping the builders company are Sun Kwon and a couple of unfamiliar blonde girls of about Ariadne’s age, one of whom is holding a baby.

“Yeah, you’re right. Kate’s already had it. Sayid’s with Sun and Charlie and the baby. He looks… relaxed.” Ariadne remembers Eames remarking how Sayid never once smiled in any of the interviews or photographs he looked at in his research. The sight of him grinning as he chops and chats is almost as shocking as the giant island and the inexplicable crowd on the beach.

“Well, let’s keep him that way, at least for now,” Cobb reminded her. “We don’t want him siccing all these people on us when we aren’t ready for it. And no matter what you do, don’t try to force the dream back into the structure you built. We don’t have manpower or firepower to deal with fifty angry projections.”

A nasty thought occurs to Ariadne. “If the landscape is also part of his subconscious, does that mean the island could attack us?”

“I guess, technically, but it’s too unlikely to be worth worrying about. We’ll moor the boat and come find you.”

“Okay. I’ll check in with you in a little while.” She takes a deep breath as she turns off the walkie and puts it in her pocket. This is the first time she’s ever been on her own in one of these dreams, and while she’s high on the responsibility she’s been given, she wishes things were going more according to plan.

Just as she’s about to walk into the camp, she feels a hand on her shoulder. She spins around to see a large man with a friendly face smiling down at her. She recognizes him as Hurley Reyes, one of Jarrah’s fellow survivors.

“Hey, can you help me with something?” he asks, looking sheepish.

This is the moment. Either he’ll accept her as part of the dream or he’ll alert the rest of the projections to her intrusive presence.

Slowly, she replies, “Sure. What with?”

“Jack asked me to bring some supplies down from the hatch, but it’s too much for one person, and I don’t have time to make multiple trips. I’m on button duty in an hour.”

The hatch? Button duty? Ariadne thinks to herself. She has no idea what he’s talking about, but it’s clear she needs to go with the flow. Aloud, she replies, “Sure!”

“You’re the best, dude.”

Although Hurley checked himself into a mental institution only months after returning from the island, Jarrah’s subconscious doesn’t appear to think of him as crazy. Chatting beside her as he leads her back into the jungle, this projection of Hurley couldn’t be happier or saner. She wonders where the disconnect lies.

***

Arthur checks the monitor one last time. The drugs are working and Jarrah’s out cold; he won’t be waking up anytime soon. Other than the soft snoring that comes through the speakers in his observation room, the house is blissfully silent. The city is blissfully silent.

Arthur has the whole world to himself.

This is his favorite part. It’s the reason why he always volunteers for this role. There’s a quiet and a calm at this point of a job that never occurs in reality, or even in any other kind of dream. The subject’s asleep, and the rest of the team is in another level.

Where Eames finds himself in other people, Arthur finds himself in solitude.

He tiptoes downstairs in his socks, minding the creaky floorboard he knows from having memorized the plans. His goal is the study in which he knows he’ll find a bottle of MacCutcheon scotch. The best stuff on earth. It’s in a locked desk drawer, separate from the rest of the bottles in the liquor cabinet in the next room. Arthur knows the key is under the rug; he can’t imagine why anyone would hide good stuff like MacCutcheon until he’s pouring himself a glass and notices a little card tied around the neck of the bottle. Inside is written Congratulations, Sayid! in neat, feminine handwriting, with a happy face beside the words. Directly underneath, in a bigger but equally precise man’s handwriting: May you find happiness, brother. One day, when all this is over, I hope we can meet again. The card is unsigned, but the picture of a bride and groom on the front clearly labels it as a wedding present, dating it to less than a year old in this dream’s timescale.

Except that Sayid Jarrah’s brother died during the first Gulf War, 12 years ago.

After turning the card over and over in his fingers and his mind, Arthur still doesn’t know what to make of it. He puts the bottle back in the drawer and takes his glass into the living room. The couch is stiff under his hamstrings as he sits down; the leather is too new to have much give, just as it should be if Jarrah’s only had it for a few months. From his seat, he surveys the room, feeling appreciative of every aspect of his surroundings.

Ariadne’s got a gift, that’s for sure. Arthur always enjoys her creations; they’re organized, detailed, and warm, but without being sentimental or nostalgic. They’re perfect recreations of the assigned place, but somehow they still feel like her.

He itches to go for a drive; she’s built the entirety of LA, just in case, and she’s put in all sorts of secret short-cuts to beat traffic. Arthur’s sure the beach level is just as well-crafted and he hopes the others are enjoying the South Pacific sunshine (Yusuf had joked about bringing his favorite swim trunks), but he’s always preferred something more structured. Something more like this.

It isn’t even close to being the biggest house in the neighborhood---Jarrah could have afforded a mansion with the millions in sympathy money the airline gave them all---and it’s very blandly decorated. Arthur’s been in Best Westerns with more personality. There’s nothing that signals ‘tortured Iraqis’ or ‘miraculous survivor’ or ‘newlyweds’ or really anything at all. It’s a minor observation, but it’s been nagging him; Ariadne’s a genius at understanding locations, and Eames is brilliant at reading people (not that Arthur would ever pay him that compliment to his face), but Arthur’s specialty has always been reconciling the space between. Spaces like here, where people have left their marks but aren’t around to distract. Only here, where everything’s quiet and distractions are stripped away does it become obvious what fits and what doesn’t. There have been a couple of jobs where he and Cobb failed to extract the necessary information from the subject’s mind, but Arthur’s ability to sleuth in the projected space had still rendered the missions successes.

Arthur knows better than anyone that projections exist in real life, too---obscuring, tricking, complicating.

He wanders around the house, investigating the details he didn’t have time to ponder during research. There are no photos here, no mementos. It’s as though Sayid and Nadia wanted to pretend they had no past, either together or apart. Given the pasts they did have, Arthur isn’t surprised.

Something tells him to head back to the study. That drawer’s the only locked place in the whole house; the only person Jarrah could have been hiding anything from is Nadia, and Eames had mentioned that she never touched alcohol.

Sayid Jarrah’s Bluebeard drawer turns out to be mostly empty, and what little is in there is fucking random. Other than the scotch, there’s nothing but a folded black tank top, crusty and stinky with dried sweat and seawater. It’s tied neatly with a necklace made out of gold and beads.

There’s only one thing the shirt can be: the one he was wearing on the island. However, except as a form of self-torture, Arthur isn’t sure why anyone would want to keep something so viscerally reminiscent him of the worst three months of his life. The necklace makes even less sense. He knows Nadia never wore jewelry, so it can’t be hers. And even if Jarrah was somehow, unlikely as it is, secretly carrying a torch for Kate Austen or Sun Kwon, this girly-girl accessory doesn’t look at all their style. And none of this explains the hidden bottle of $25,000 scotch.

And then a sound breaks Arthur’s perfect, ethereal silence.

”La mer, qu’on voit danser…”

It’s a woman’s voice, singing. Arthur recognizes the tune as that Bobby Darin song, but the words are incomprehensible. French.

”Le long des golfes clairs…”

He cranes his neck to look outside a nearby window and just barely glimpses a long pair of women’s legs as they disappear around a corner in the backyard. The woman is out of sight, but the song she sings still wafts towards him.

“…à des reflets d’argent, la mer, des reflets changeants sous la pluie…”

Arthur grits his teeth and hesitates where he stands, unsure if he should head back to the surveillance room to find this person or to the bedroom to make sure nothing happens to Jarrah.

One thing’s for sure: he’s going to kill Cobb, if not in reality, then at least in this dream.

***

By the time Ariadne and her new best friend Hurley are approaching the camp again, her previous level of confusion can’t possibly compare to what she’s feeling now. Her arms are full of gear, her back is weighed down by a pack full of food, and her head is spinning.

“Can you give these diapers to Claire and the batteries to Sayid?” Hurley shoves the wares into her arms. “If I don’t get back to the hatch on time, Locke’s gonna kill me. Or the world’s gonna end. Or something.”

Ariadne’s learned by now what he means by ‘the hatch’ and ‘button duty’, but knowing doesn’t always mean understanding, especially not in this place. Especially when not even Hurley understands.

“Sure,” she says. Nice as he is, she’s desperate to be rid of him so she can find the team and fill them in.

“Thanks a million, dude,” he says, dumping his pile of supplies beside what is presumably his tent, and then taking off faster than Ariadne would have thought possible for a man of his size.

She looks at the diapers and then down the beach, trying to guess who Claire might be. The same blond girl from earlier is still hanging out with the baby, so Ariadne figures she’s as good a guess as any. She trudges down to where the girl sits, rocking the baby in a cradle expertly fashioned out of branches and twigs. Ariadne tries to act normally, hoping no one will notice that she doesn’t belong.

When she reaches the makeshift shelter, she drops the diapers on top of two stacked suitcases. “Hurley said to give these to you,” she whispers, ready to take off before the girl can see her face.

Looking up, she sweetly responds in an Australian accent, “Hey, thanks!” Ariadne turns to walk away, but hears her continue talking to the baby. “Mummy’s got some clean diapers for you, Aaron!”

Ariadne stops, and frowns. ‘Mummy?’ She glances to where Kate Austen is sitting, cutting the hair of that good-looking guy who’d been holding a gun before, and not exuding the slightest bit of maternal aura. She glances back at Claire and the baby, who, now that she’s looking closely, are spitting images of one another…

However, soapy baby drama isn’t what she’s here for, and at this point, the list of things that don’t add up is entirely too long for Ariadne to get bogged down on something so irrelevant, so she gets back on task. She spots Sayid way down the beach, past all the tents and people, curled up on a blanket with the other blond girl who’d been hanging around him and Charlie earlier. They’re sitting in front of a tent, one that looks newer and less haphazardly built than the rest. An interesting structure that someone put a lot of thought and care into; it’s a home, not a survival necessity. A yellow Labrador lies curled up at their feet, the finishing touch on this unlikely picture of domesticity.

This is the first time Ariadne’s gotten close to him. Seeing him asleep in his hotel room for a minute, or asleep in the last dream level didn’t count. This is him, moving, interacting, being a real person instead of just a collection of words and pictures in documents that Arthur gives her to read. In fact, besides her teammates, he’s the only real thing in this whole dream.

Sayid’s too wrapped up with Leggy Blonde to notice Ariadne’s arrival. Typical, she thinks, just before clearing her throat. Even after years of living in Paris, where making out in the street is de rigeur, PDA of this sort still makes her slightly uncomfortable. Finally, they look up. Sayid regards Ariadne with a leftover glow while Leggy Blonde holds her hand over her forehead and squints.

“What’s with the scarf? It’s ninety degrees here.”

Ariadne’s fingers fly to her neck-kerchief. “I… I…” She decides to leave the comment dangling. “Hurley told me to give you these,” she says, trying to quell the awkwardness, and hands Sayid the case of batteries.

“What are you making now?” the girl asks playfully. “More sonar made out of twigs?”

He smiles mischievously, and again, Ariadne marvels at how different he looks here---happy---a far cry from the sourpuss in the photographs. “No, some of this is to fix the walkie talkies from the hatch. The rest is for a surprise.”

The girl smiles up at Ariadne. Proudly she tells her, “He thinks of the best surprises.”

Then Sayid looks at her, too, and she can feel him really seeing her for the first time. His forehead wrinkles and his eyes narrow. Ariadne’s palms start to sweat, because here it is, here is where he’s noticing that she doesn’t belong, that not only is she not one of the eight official crash survivors, she isn’t even part of the inexplicable throng in this dream. And, just to remind her that Leggy Blonde and everyone else here are nothing more than extensions of Sayid himself, the girl’s smile of pleasure transforms into a smirk of suspicion that matches her boyfriend’s.

The dog barks.

When, almost immediately, a strong hand comes from behind to grab her shoulder, she thinks, Crap.

“I see Ariadne here got your batteries for you,” a man’s voice says from behind her. It’s Jack Shephard, clenching her shoulder and speaking to Sayid. Ariadne gapes, wondering how he knows her name…

“Ariadne?” Sayid’s looking between her and Jack, questioning and just as confused as Ariadne herself. But finally, with the lack of any other explanation, he (and in tandem, the blond girl) relaxes and resigns himself to her inclusion. She can easily imagine his thoughts: If Jack knows her, then she must be… I must have had too much sun today…

“Yes…” Sayid says slowly, finally breaking his focus on Ariadne to get back into the moment. “I should have the walkies fixed by tomorrow morning.”

“Not tomorrow,” his girlfriend reminds him. “We have a date tonight, remember? Down the beach, by the cliffs?”

“Shannon,” Sayid begins, trying to cajole her. The name rings a bell. Ariadne can’t remember why exactly, though.

“You promised.”

This almost does it for Sayid. Ariadne can see the weight the word holds for him. But just to seal the deal, Shannon leans into his ear and sing-songs, “Come on. Relax. Live a little. Everyone’ll get by for a night without you. Won’t they, Jack?”

She’s like a siren, except that, knowing what Ariadne does about Sayid, it’s less temptation and more good advice. She wonders where this Shannon person is back in reality, or if she’s just a made-up dreamgirl; either way, it sounds like he could use a little more temptation of this sort.

“It’s fine,” Jack says. “You two go have fun. I’ll hold down the fort until the morning.”

Kate Austen and the guy she was hanging around before stroll over. They look like… Ariadne can’t tell. She knows that in real life, Kate Austen and Jack Shephard fell for each other on the island and are still serious---living together---but it’s obvious that in the context of this dream, she and this man have a thing.

Watching them approach (well, Kate approaches; the guy swaggers), and glancing behind them to where Charlie Pace is playing songs on his guitar for Claire, Ariadne notes to herself that Sayid’s subconscious has, bizarrely, paired not only himself but also all of his friends off with unreasonably attractive fictional blond people.

She doesn’t know what that says about him. But then again, she doesn’t know what any of this says about him.

The new man is carrying a roll of paper under his arm, and, when he reaches where they’re all sitting, he drops it into Sayid’s lap.

“What is this?”

“French chick said to pass this along to you,” the man drawls in a Southern accent; somehow the perfectly harmless words come out like an insult.

Sayid blinks up at him. “Rousseau was here? Why didn’t she come speak to me in person?”

The man flops down to sit beside them. “Beats me. But it ain’t like I was gonna invite her in for tea, if you know what I mean.”

“My guess?” Kate offers, her arms crossed and her mouth serious as she sits down beside her (boy?)friend. “This is her idea of a peace offering to the camp. But I saw her. She’s still nervous around us. She took one look at Claire and ran off.”

“She better be embarrassed, after the stunt she pulled,” the Southern guy adds.

Sayid’s barely listening. He’s studying the papers. “You can’t blame her for what she did. She lost a child. She’s lived alone for 16 years. Her mind…” He trails off, engrossed.

Shannon leans over to look with him. “Looks like another project, huh?”

He smiles up at her. “Yes, it does.”

“What is it?” Jack asks.

“It’s a map of another Dharma station,” Kate explains.

“Did she say anything when she left this?” Sayid asks Kate.

“She said she found it in the jungle. But she has no idea where the station itself is.”

“Whatever it is, it looks extensive. It also is where the power source for the hatch is located. Look here,” Sayid says, pointing at one of the quadrants. “And here. This is the customary blueprint of a generator. If we can find this place…”

“Then what, Mohammed?” Sawyer says, and Ariadne is shocked at how offensive this guy is. She’s even more shocked at how no one seems to even blink; it’s as if he’s desensitized them all.

“I’m sure we could find some use for it. We could amplify our distress signal, rig a powerful light that might attract the attention of passing planes. Who knows?”

“If you want to go look for it, just let me know,” Kate says.

“How come I’m never invited on these hikes?” Shannon pipes up.

Sayid looks at her as though he’s never realized that she feels excluded from whatever it is they’re talking about. “You came the first time and proved invaluable. You’re always welcome.”

She looks at the ground, too flustered by the compliment---because it’s about something real, not about being pretty, Ariadne can tell---to make eye contact. She digs her index finger into the sand. “I don’t know about invaluable… Me and my shitty French.”

“It isn’t… shitty.” He says it like a man who isn’t at all used to swearing in English, which is understandable, given it’s his second language; the words don’t fly off his tongue with the same relish.

“Woah, woah woah,” Sawyer interrupts. “Hold on a minute there, Pippi Longstocking, Malibu Barbie. Who’s goin’ anywhere? Especially on wild goose chases psycho Frogs are putting us up to.”

“Sayid’s right. If there’s a power source on the island, we have to try to find it. It might be our ticket to getting rescued,” Jack argues.

Suddenly remembering something from her engineering classes, Ariadne feels bold, wants to play her part and contribute. “It might not be that hard. If this place is generating enough energy to power the entire island, it’s got to be emitting an electromagnetic current. Can’t we somehow harness the electromagnetism in the hatch to hone in on a direction? We could fan out around the island and use the walkie talkies to triangulate the signal.”

The speech takes all the air out of her; she inhales a much-needed deep breath and hopes that wasn’t completely off.

It goes over well; Eames would be proud of her. Jack compliments her on the idea; inside, she feels something warm and proud coiling.

Sayid nods, though he still remains vaguely confused by her presence. “It’s an excellent idea, Ariadne. However…”

“Let me guess,” Shannon says, and then adjusts her inflection to fake a deep-throated, not-quite British accent that Ariadne thinks is supposed to be Sayid’s, even though it’s a terrible imitation. “You don’t know how long the batteries will last.”

Kate and Sawyer snicker. Jack starts to laugh, too. Ariadne doesn’t get it. Sayid does though, because his eyebrows draw closer to one another and his nose flares, like someone who is only now, at 30-odd years old, finding out what it’s like to be teased.

“It’s a legitimate concern,” he replies, amused, not angry.

Shannon grins through her laughter; it’s shy and unpracticed, like she’s re-learning how to form the expression again. She’s beautiful, her tan more perfect than the others, who just look brown. Shannon reminds Ariadne of the girls she used to watch from afar in high school. The effortlessly pretty rich girls who did ballet and had no idea how many problems it was possible to have. Or at least Ariadne thought, until she heard them puking in the upstairs bathrooms that hardly anyone ever used. She doesn’t keep in touch with anyone from high school beyond two equally nerdy classmates, one of whom is in med school now, and another guy who’s teaching English in Mongolia. But she wants to call her friends, let them know she’s found even more proof that high school doesn’t mean anything. Because who’d have thought that quiet, goody-two-shoes Ariadne would end up on her second heist as part of a team of international mind criminals, or that one of the pretty girls from school would end up stranded on an island and dating an Iraqi torturer-turned-assassin.

She knows there’s more to it than pithy, phrase-long descriptions. There’s more to what Ariadne is doing than petty crime, just as she has a feeling there’s more here than a grown-up Valley Girl and the alpha male with the dark past and future who’s presently doting on her.

But then she remembers that Shannon’s fictional. All of this is fictional.

And that’s when Ariadne realizes she doesn’t want it to be. She wants this to be true even though there’s no way it can be. All of it: the bamboo grove; the hatch; happy, healthy Hurley; the twinkle in Sayid’s eyes; the way Dr. Jack Shephard (on whom she’s had an uncharacteristically silly celebrity crush ever since the story of the Oceanic Six broke almost three years ago---she’ll die before she lets any of the guys find out, though) is sitting only a foot away and nodding at her with approval.

“Hey,” Shannon says, poking at Sawyer with a sneaker-clad foot. “Can you watch Vincent for us tonight?”

At the sound of his name, the dog sits up and goes to Sayid for some petting; his tongue wags. Ariadne pities the poor thing; the island is swelteringly hot---miserable conditions for such an adorable furball.

She pulls on her scarf, undoing it a bit.

Sawyer shakes his head. “Me and animals don’t have the best track record on this island.”

“I don’t think Vincent has it out for you,” Kate says.

“What does he need watching for anyhow?” Sawyer grumbles. “Far as I can tell, he can look after himself better than any of us can.”

“You’re a good watchdog, aren’t you, Vincent?” Shannon asks the dog playfully while rubbing him about the face. “You’ll protect the camp from the rumble in the jungle tonight, won’t you?”

“I’ll watch him,” Kate offers, while Ariadne asks herself what the hell that was supposed to mean.

“Thanks.”

“I’d better get going. Have fun tonight.” Jack gets up and tugs on Ariadne’s arm. She lets him pull her to her feet, leans into him for a sexy second as she sways into a balanced stance. It leaves her slightly off-kilter. “Can you help me with something down at the hatch?”

She gulps. “Okay.”

The panic returns, just as strong as the last time someone here asked her to accompany him to the hatch. Maybe this is all a ruse, a long con. Sayid’s a wily guy, Ariadne knows that much. Maybe that whole scene was just a way for him to put her off her guard, make her think everything is okay, but really, Jack’s just been pretending to know her, and is about to put a hit on her. He’s her femme fatale… except a guy.

God, she’s been watching too many film noirs lately.

But still.

As Jack leads Ariadne away, Shannon and Sayid go back to canoodling, as if on a double date with Sawyer and Kate. The dog stretches and yawns.

“It’s a good thing I arrived when I did.” Jack’s voice crackles and statics like a radio dial turning between stations. Soon, the even tones of the doctor are morphing into a familiar British drawl. “You looked like you were in need of some assistance.”

She peers at him. “Eames?”

Jack’s face remains, but shimmers like the sneaker in the jungle, as if by letting the voice go, Eames has broken the perfect wall of his disguise, and his real, incorrigible self now fights to reveal itself.

“In the flesh. Or, at least, someone else’s flesh. Very handsome, though the cut-off sleeves and rough stubble are doing him no favors. However, I think I’ve discovered how you like your valiant heroes, Ariadne. You prefer rugged to besuited. Interesting.” The wink he gives her is beyond smug. He knows. She’s mortified. Not to mention irrationally bummed.

None of it, the shared laughs, the familiarity, was real.

Like she always does with emotions she doesn’t know how to handle, she channels her disappointment into inquiry. “But how? You didn’t even practice how to be him!”

Eames shrugs. “All I needed was in his bio: a spiral surgeon with a god complex and some daddy issues. He’s a type. I winged it. Rather well, I might add.”

Ariadne darts her eyes around, scanning the camp for doppelgangers. “Where’s the other Jack? If Sayid sees two of you here…”

“Don’t worry. He went to fetch water with Sun Kwon’s husband at some caves. He won’t be back for awhile.”

“How? Sun Kwon’s husband died in the crash. Sayid wouldn’t know him.”

“There are a lot of people Sayid shouldn’t know. And yet, here they are, in all of their rag-tag glory.” He purses his lips in a way that, even if she didn’t already know it was really Eames, Ariadne might have started to suspect.

“Where are the others?”

“Just past the tree line and down the beach. We’ll reach them in a minute.”

“How come you were in the camp? Has the plan changed?”

“I came to look for you,” Jack---Eames---says, just as she spots the others hiding in some bushes. “We were getting worried.”

“Where have you been?” Yusuf asks as soon as they’re out of sight of the camp. “You never checked in like you said you would.”

Ariadne tells them of the hatch, and her heart leaps as she thinks of it again. She’d loved it. Beautiful, with soaring ceilings and majestic domes. A recreation of daylight so perfect you might forget you were in a bunker. Rooms interconnected yet separate. 70s hippie-dom harmoniously married to 80s modernism. Ariadne has always had a weak spot for the academic lines of those time periods. The hatch, as Hurley had called it, was amazing, more paradoxical than any of her her professors’ best creations: an incongruous metal world buried inside an island, built for a simple yet enormous purpose. She wishes she could have met the architect. She’d asked, but Hurley didn’t seem to know anything about it.

“It was built by that research company Saito was interested in,” she finishes. “The Dharma Initiative. Their logo is all over the place, on all the food, on all the equipment. And there’s a computer in there, with a timer. They have to enter a code into a mainframe computer and push a button every 108 minutes, or else this guy named John Locke---”

“The philosopher?” Yusuf asks incredulously, but Ariadne simply shrugs and keeps going; she might as well get the full insanity out before they start laughing.

“---says the world will end. Or something.” Hurley’s words seem like the only proper ones to describe it. “None of them are very clear on that part.”

“Jarrah didn’t strike me as such a Freudian head case, but this is staggering,” Yusuf comments. “The idea of the world ending because someone fails to enter a code into a computer… 17th-century philosophers… It sounds like a dystopian novel waiting to be written.”

“It isn’t Freudian if he doesn’t care.” The knowledge she’s picked up from chatty Hurley tumbles out of her mouth before she’s even decided for herself if the details of this dream are worth taking seriously. But these are the rules of the world they’re in right now. “Aside from how the supplies can improve life here at camp, he’s not really interested in the hatch or the button or the arguments Jack and Locke have been having about whether or not to keep pushing it. Apparently he spends most of his time building things to make everyone more comfortable, thinking of ways to communicate with the outside world, and hanging out with his girlfriend.”

“You’re well caught up on the local island gossip,” Eames teases.

“Hurley can’t keep his mouth shut. He’s really sweet, though. Or at least, Sayid thinks he is.” She keeps having to remind herself that everything here has been colored by his perception. Changing tack, she asks her burning question. “So, who’s the girl? She wasn’t in the research brief.”

“That sort never are, darling,” Eames informs her.

“She is in the research,” Cobb states. “I recognize her face from a news clipping Arthur had. She’s Boone Carlyle’s sister, Shannon.”

And that’s why the name sounded familiar. Ariadne has seen it in connection to this case, but not at all in connection to Sayid himself. “But she never made it off the plane. Only Boone did. And he died before they were rescued.”

“So, either Jarrah met Shannon in Australia and has included her here…” Yusuf offers.

“Or he’s harboring some sort of repressed desire for Boone that is manifesting itself in a projection of his sister…” Eames counters.

“Or they’re lying,” Cobb says with finality.

“I liked my idea better,” Eames mutters.

“Lying about what?” Ariadne asks.

“About everything---about the crash, abut where they were, about who survived. When you’ve done as many jobs as I have, you learn how to tell the difference between someone whose subconscious is making things up on the fly and someone who’s recreating the past. These are definitely memories.”

“That’s impossible, though…” Ariadne and Yusuf say simultaneously. The reasons why it’s impossible are so many that they pause before trying to enumerate them. Cobb takes advantage of the break to cut in.

“Put aside logic and just look around you for a minute. Look at them.” He points through the trees at all the people milling around the camp.

“What about John Locke? You’re trying to tell me he’s back from the dead?” Yusuf, still stuck on this, scoffs.

“For what it’s worth, this Locke wasn’t British,” Eames pipes up, serious when required. “This was someone else entirely---a crazy old coot with a million knives. And like our hirsute Scot, I could tell he was someone Jarrah knows, not a random creation. Everyone I spoke with was.”

Putting the debate to rest, Cobb adds, “I didn’t memorize the passenger list, but if there was someone on the plane named John Locke, Arthur will know.”

“So what do we do?” Ariadne asks.

Cobb peers through the trees and at the beach camp. Turning back to face them, he says, “We stick to the plan. We give him a nightmare.”

“There isn’t much nightmarish about being surrounded by friends on Fantasy Island. According to Ariadne, they even have all the amenities in that hatch of theirs,” Yusuf notes.

Cobb shakes his head. “We kill the girl and take our chances fighting the projections. And then we get the hell out of here.”

“What? Why?” Ariadne still has trouble remembering that they aren’t actually killing anyone. But even so… it seems a shame to turn what is such a beautiful (if insane) world into a tragedy, regardless of whether or not that was the original plan, regardless of the mission. “There’s got to be another way.”

“It’s the easiest way to go ahead with the plan, even with all this. He’ll wake up in his house, beside his wife, after a nightmare.”

“They’ll be heading down the beach by themselves soon,” Eames suggests. “They’re going on some sort of overnight date. I imagine privacy is hard to come by here.”

Yusuf peers through the brush. “I think they’re getting ready to leave.”

“Let’s go,” Cobb says.

Ariadne’s heart sinks as they make their way through the woods. They’re hidden by trees as they walk parallel to Sayid and Shannon, who carry packs with blankets and supplies down the beach, hand in hand as the sun begins its afternoon descent. She knows this was the plan, and she’d been on board with it, but now…

Cobb must sense her consternation, because he comes to walk beside her. “It’s okay, you know. This isn’t real.”

“I thought you just said it was,” she snaps as she shoves branches out of her way with unnecessary force.

After that, they walk in silence, except for Yusuf huffing, “Funny how these people think it’s romantic to go camping when they’re already camping.”

After a few hours of walking, the terrain changes; sand gives way to rocks. It’ll be sunset soon enough. Ariadne only realizes they’ve been walking uphill for the past hour when she finds herself near the top of a cliff and completely winded. The trees here are thinner and don’t provide as much cover, so keeping the couple in sight while staying out of sight now requires binoculars.

There’s an overhang where a sheet of rock juts out to create a more open version of a cave. Shannon and Sayid head right for it. They’ve obviously been here before. The team watches as they lay out their blankets and water and other supplies. Sayid sets up a tiki torch even though it isn’t dark enough yet to need it.

It isn’t long before Shannon gets up. Sayid tries to pull her back, but she makes a coy motion with her head and wriggles out of his grasp. The words, ‘I’ll be back in a minute’ float over to where Ariadne and the boys are hiding.

“What in the world is she doing?” Yusuf asks as Shannon skips off into the woods by herself.

Ariadne’s the only one who gets it; she’s the only one who’s a girl. “She has to pee,” she says glumly, knowing what’s coming.

Cobb pulls out his gun.

The guys charge ahead. Ariadne hangs back. It doesn’t matter if it’s only a dream. This pre-meditated murder still feels ugly, tainting the beautiful island that she feels possessive towards, even if it isn’t hers.

She crouches underneath a bush and looks away as Cobb, Yusuf and Eames surround Shannon. She refuses to listen as Shannon screams; she squeezes her eyes shut as two shots go off, hopes she never has to find out which one of them fired.

She wants to throw up when, in the distance, she hears Sayid screaming Shannon’s name. There’s rustling in the trees and she knows he’s coming to investigate.

When she finally dares to look up, Shannon’s still flopping and staggering about in the center of the circle formed by Cobb, Eames, and Yusuf, the bullet hole in her gut is beginning to bleed. Sayid arrives quickly, and shoves them out of the way to catch her just before she falls. Shannon doesn’t even get to speak before she’s gone.

Sayid hugs her close and his face goes slack. Ariadne thinks she’s never seen pain like this before. It’s anguish of the mind, just as painful and real as anything that happens up above.

He doesn’t need to say anything for her to know they’re screwed.

***

From the surveillance room, Arthur watches as Jarrah starts to twitch in his sleep. Whatever they’re all doing in there, the plan seems to be working. However, they’d better finish up quickly, or he’ll have to start pulling them out.

With Mal around somewhere, he’s got to be extra careful.

He takes his gun, activates the silencer, and locks the door behind him so she can’t get in while he’s out.

When he gets to the bedroom, Jarrah isn’t the only one shaking and kicking. Now Ariadne’s making little whimpering noises. If one of them doesn’t wake up soon, he’s going to start pulling them out. Arthur begins dragging everyone into chairs or placing them on the edge of the bed to facilitate the kicks.

Eames is a lot heavier than he looks, the bastard.

***

Ariadne emerges from her cover, and the boys brace themselves and point their guns, ready for all fifty projections to start rushing at them; that’s what always happens.

The thing is, that isn’t what happens. Not here. Instead, she hears an eerie noise, like a taxi cab receipt printer that’s been possessed by a demon. It’s barely audible above the other sounds of the jungle, over Sayid’s silent despair (so much louder than sobbing could ever be), but it fills her with fear. The others seem to hear it, too, because she catches Yusuf looking around for the source, too. It’s his dream; he needs to take more care than the rest of them to make sure he survives whatever’s coming so this place doesn’t collapse.

Meanwhile, there’s a wild galumphing noise---different from the terrifying ch-ch-ch-ch that she can’t make sense of. A white blur is heading towards them at a hideous pace. This is something more tangible, animal. Cobb takes aim and shoots, twice, but the bullets barely slow whatever it is down. As it approaches, the shape sharpens into something more familiar. It’s a bear, white in a way that Ariadne knows she should recognize, but can’t place, can’t reconcile, here in the jungle. Cobb’s throat is already being slashed by the weakened creature’s giant claws by the time she realizes what it is: a polar bear.

A polar bear on a tropical island.

“Well, that’s novel,” Yusuf remarks beside her. He and Eames shoot a few more rounds into it and the beast collapses, but it’s too late for Cobb. She looks away from the sight of her friend, mutilated and bleeding on the ferns---green and red colliding like some kind of psychotic holiday scene---but the alternative view isn’t any better; Sayid’s rocking back and forth on his knees, still clutching Shannon’s limp corpse to his chest.

“Who are you?” he screams at them, the words laced with more danger than Ariadne’s ever faced. For the first time, she gets it, sees how the sad-faced man from the pictures, and the tentatively relaxed guy back on the beach could have become the cold-blooded killer Saito had hired them to investigate. That Sayid Jarrah had never felt real to her before, but now that she’s seeing him, she’s terrified.

“You’re them, aren’t you? The Others? You’ve already killed her. Wasn’t once enough?”

Ariadne isn’t sure who they would be except for ‘others’, but she’s quickly learning that words have different definitions here. She looks at Eames for support; he always knows what to say.

“What is he talking about? How could someone have already killed her?” she whispers.

Eames is steely-eyed as he cocks his gun. “He’s waking up,” he mutters back. “His conscious memory is seeping in. We’re almost at the end.”

But Sayid doesn’t get a chance to attack them, because just then, a nearby tree is uprooted, by nothing that Ariadne can see. She, Eames, and Yusuf huddle closer to one another as a loud mechanical grating fills the air. There’s a noise like an elephant roaring, but she still can’t see what’s doing this, which is odd, since it’s got to be something not only enormous, but also just a few yards away.

“What is that?” Yusuf yells.

Sayid simply laughs, low and dangerous and vengeful.

“It’s a security system for the island,” he growls.

Ariadne doesn’t know what’s going on, but she has a feeling that they’ve just summoned the darkest part of him, the darkest part of anything she’s ever encountered. They had wanted to give him a nightmare; they hadn’t expected to have it turned around on themselves.

It’s time to run.

“No matter what happens,” Eames shouts at Yusuf, “you have to hold on. Hold on for as long as you can. I need to know what happens! Promise me!” There’s desperation in his eyes and Yusuf nods slowly before sprinting away.

Ariadne and Eames look at one another. Whatever is in the jungle is going to be after them next. They’re so busy trying to get a glimpse of the monster that they stop registering Sayid, who’s now leaping at them.

Ariadne goes down, crushed underneath his weight. She loses sight of Eames as she and Sayid roll through the jungle. Her nose ends up smushed into the soil, and she feels something dark and malevolent whoosh over her head.

The roaring noise starts up again, and she hears a high-pitched squeal that would be funny in any other circumstance. It’s Eames. Fighting Sayid so she can pick up her head to see, she goggles as a column of black smoke inexplicably wraps itself around Eames’s waist, lifts him high into the air, and begins flinging him like a wet rag doll against high branches. There are sickening cracks as bones and branches break against one another.

***

After watching everyone muttering and thrashing for the past minute, Arthur’s about to give Ariadne a kick, but he’s distracted by Cobb jolting awake. It’s a good thing Arthur’s fleet-footed, because his hand over Cobb’s mouth is the only thing stopping him from screaming.

“I’ve got you,” he whispers, pulling the IV out of Cobb’s wrist and helping him to his feet. “What’s happening back there?”

“Po… polar bear,” Cobb rasps, his voice dry as he picks himself up off the floor.

Arthur had been about to give Cobb a piece of his mind, but… “What?”

“I was killed by a polar bear. Things aren’t going the way we planned.”

Arthur frowns. His beautiful job is falling apart. “You don’t need to tell me that. Mal’s here.”

He can tell that the problems on the island aren’t attributable to Mal, because Cobb’s confused by this news. “No, she can’t be. I told you. It’s sorted.”

“Not well enough. She’s here. Singing old French songs just like she always did when she was working in the garden, remember?”

Cobb nods, but before he can answer, Eames jolts up. “Well, that was unexpected.”

“What happened to you? Did you see what was making that noise?” Cobb whispers, and Arthur can tell that whatever’s going on is out of his depth. But he did the research and it was perfect. Everyone was prepared. He doesn’t understand what can have gone wrong.

Eames has never been one to mind the decibel of his voice, so he doesn’t whisper back when he replies, “The origin of the noise is what did me in. Sentient black smoke. I mean, honestly.”

“It wasn’t a dinosaur?” Cobb asks, baffled.

Arthur pauses. “What?! What are you talking about?”

Sitting on the floor, Eames shakes his head and leans back against the side of the bed. He tries to hide his leg behind a chair, but not before Arthur’s noticed how badly it’s shaking, how badly all of him is shaking. However, his voice is deceptively calm as he ignores Arthur and clarifies for Cobb, “No. It was smoke. It picked me up and knocked my head against trees until I died. Most painful.”

Arthur moves to wake Ariadne, but Eames’s hand on his elbow stops him.

“Not yet. Please.” Eames so rarely says ‘please’ that, despite his better judgment, Arthur draws back.

“Someone needs to explain what’s going on right now.”

Just to infuriate him, Eames doesn’t explain. Instead, he lazily asks, “By the by, Yusuf and I have something of a wager going on… do you remember if there was a passenger on Oceanic 815 by the name of John Locke?”

Arthur’s photographic memory immediately recalls the list of names and headshots that were listed in Time magazine’s memorial issue about the crash. “Yeah. Middle-aged bald guy.” He watches as Eames and Cobb nod slowly at one another.

With his usual brevity, Cobb finally satiates Arthur’s curiosity, rattling off, “Jarrah and his friends are lying. Their plane crashed on some crazy island, not in the ocean. A whole lot more of them survived than came back or were reported.”

Arthur nods as he takes it all in. The tank top and the necklace and the scotch make a lot more sense now. “Let me guess… he got together with someone from the flight?”

Hopefully, Eames adds, “Perhaps I can impersonate the new girl instead? At this point, I know her better than I know Nadia.”

Cobb shakes his head no. “No, we stick to the plan. You’d better start prepping.”

Ariadne sits up with a gasp, clutching her neck so hard she’s practically strangling herself.

“Was it the sentient smoke or the polar bear?” Arthur asks lightly, trying to keep up.

She’s still feeling her neck as she shakes her head no. “Neither. I was running and then I stepped on something… something metal. There was a click and then some ropes moved in the bushes… And then my ankle was caught in the trap and there was an arrow headed right for my neck and…” She’s still panting and terrified. They all are.

“We’d better get Yusuf out,” Arthur says. He can’t have the entire team this much of a mess, no matter how interesting Yusuf’s manner of death is sure to be if he stays.

“No!” Eames and Ariadne both almost shout, which doesn’t make sense given what they’ve just been through.

“He said he’d stay. Finish it out to the end.”

This is getting ridiculous, and it’s Arthur’s responsibility to put his foot down. “We have a job to do. We get Yusuf out, we unplug Jarrah, and we get the hell out of this bedroom.”

“What if we carry Yusuf and the PASIV into the surveillance room?” Ariadne suggests. “Even after we take Sayid out, the dream would still be there for Yusuf, right?”

“I guess so.” Arthur isn’t usually one to feel left out, and he really had wanted to stay here, but they’re all so breathless and excited that part of him wishes he’d shared whatever experience has affected them like this.

Or maybe he doesn’t.

“If Yusuf said he’d stay, let’s do that,” Cobb agrees.

Arthur shrugs and moves to change the time on the clock to nine in the morning. “Fine. It’ll take all of us to move him, though. We’ve got five minutes between when we unplug Jarrah and when he wakes up. Eames, get ready. It’s show time.”

Back to Part 1 --- On to Parts 3 & 4