La Mer: Parts 3 & 4

[aurilly]

Back to Part 2

iii. “This woman, when she asks you what you did to be with her again… What will you tell her?”

Eames gives himself the once-over in the mirror over the dresser. Thick brown hair, a mouth made more for stoicism than for laughter, eyes serene and honest. He’s rather beautiful, if he says so himself.

“You know, I’m quite beautiful,” he says out loud, mouth chomping in every direction as he poorly stifles a grin of self-satisfaction.

“Shut up and get in bed,” he hears Arthur grunt through his earpiece.

“If I didn’t know better, Arthur, I’d think you were propositioning me.”

There’s no time to continue the pleasantries further, because Jarrah is already fidgeting in his sleep, the drugs of the PASIV machine wearing off now that the IV has been taken out of his arm. Eames slinks (not his personal shuffling gait) towards the bed, starting at the foot and crawling upwards until he---she---is curled up by the pillows like a cat.

It’s because Nadia reminds him of a cat; the movements feel natural for this body. For some reason, other people’s movements come so much more easily than his own. They always have. He long ago figured out that the movements that ‘fit’ usually turn out to be the ones the subject expects, and the secret to this job is doing what the subject wants the ‘projection’ to do, not what Eames thinks a real person would do.

He stretches his newly slender form down the bed, sticking his toes underneath the sheets so that soon he’s snuggled under them with Sayid, spooning him.

This is when the rush kicks in. This is when it always does.

Even more than the delectable naughtiness of the entire endeavor, what makes this his favorite thing is the intimacy. He’s been brother, mother, sister, enemy, anonymous one-night stand, adored film star, character from a novel. He’s been all things to all people in dreamland---some of them things he’s never been in real life.

It’s a higher high than the best drugs---moral ambiguity, sexual ambiguity, every kind of ambiguity. For example, what exactly does this qualify as: Eames rubbing the top of his---Nadia’s---small, acid-scarred foot against Sayid’s leg. It’s what she would have done, he assumes, as his wife; does it matter that it’s something Eames has less than no problem doing himself? He’s a man and a woman, a lover and a plant, a friend and a stranger all at once, embodying the desires and restrictions of both and neither.

Jarrah smells good, feels good, oozes vitality like nothing else---or at least he did back on the island. He isn’t handsome, not like the matinee-idol doctor Ariadne fancies, or the in-your-face sexy redneck they’d chatted with on the beach, or even the tiny but perfect-looking Arthur (not that Eames would ever admit it to Arthur’s face), but there’s a magnetism here that most people are probably too blind, too superficially-oriented, to feel instead of see. However, just as that impossible blonde must have done, Eames feels it.

The thing is, even more than the fact that this is the first role he’s ever felt under-prepared for, he’s wondering if Nadia had ever known the man he and Ariadne have just met, the man Sayid thinks of himself as when all the darkness is stripped away. That Sayid hadn’t shown up in any of the interviews or picture Eames studied for this job. That Sayid could not have been more different from the depressed killer and torturer who will doubtless wake up in a minute.

Eames’s cold-hearted ADHD has lost interest in whatever is left of the original mission. After seeing that island, what does it matter whom this man is killing and why, in life’s humdrum reality? How pedestrian it all is. However, if there’s a possibility that all that was real---so much realer than any place Eames has ever been---that’s all the incentive to keep going he needs.

Sayid’s stirring even more now. It’s almost time.

***

This is why he (almost) never goes into the field.

Yusuf hasn’t stopped running since he left Ariadne and Eames. He has no idea how far he’s run or where he is or if Jarrah is on his tail or not.

It’s always the same; he thought this time, by going with them, he’d avoid finding himself the only one alone battling a horde of projections, but apparently not. And this time he actually finds himself missing the vans of armed killers. They’d be easier to handle than what’s after him.

At this point, he isn’t sure what there is left to discover. Yes, he’s made a promise to Ariadne and Eames to stay and explore, but there isn’t much to do when the subject is onto him and he’s hopelessly lost, miles away from the camp. Trees don’t divulge secrets.

Although, in this place, perhaps they do.

Just as the thought occurs to him, he begins to hear whispers all around him. He stops to look around him, but there’s no one there. It sounds like a multitude, though, whispering with too many H’s and S’s but not enough vowels to make proper words.

That’s all it takes for him to start running again, hoping they don’t follow him.

He’s never thought of himself as particularly fleet-footed, but despite the wild terrain, he’s making excellent progress. Fear is a extraordinary motivator.

As he runs, probabilities and scenarios run through his head. Arthur will have to take Jarrah out sometime soon. He isn’t completely sure what will happen. The projections usually stop, but in this case, that could mean the island will disappear along with the people. Or it could mean…

However, after seeing the way Cobb and Eames died, Yusuf doubts it’s worth making conjectures.

The brush becomes too thick to continue running in the jungle, so he heads for where he knows the beach is. He ducks underneath some branches and sprints back out into the sand. It’s colder now, here, and not just because of the setting sun and the chill breeze coming off the ocean. It’s because of the shadow.

Yusuf’s always had a weakness for antiquity, and just down the beach is an enormous, hopelessly ancient ruin, a vestige of what must have been something along the lines of the Colossus of Rhodes. It is, or was, a statue of some someone---or something---that would have been over a hundred feet tall had it still been whole.

All that’s left is a single, sandaled foot carved out of stone. It only has four toes.

It’s so far beyond, and so different from, all the other strange things they’ve seen here that he stops to gape. There’s almost no time to process it, though, because suddenly everything starts to go white, and there’s a ringing in his ears.

***

Eames places his hand on his husband’s shoulder (the only way this works is to fully inhabit the role) and gently shakes him, providing the comfort he’s going to need not only after what he’s just experienced.

“Sayid,” he says softly, in that strong yet sweet accent he knows Nadia had. “Sayid.”

“Shh…” Sayid mumbles, nuzzling under the caress, and then his eyes snap open, wide and frightened and disoriented. He turns over, making it so that Eames’s hand strokes around his shoulder. His eyes finally focus and squint and he jumps away from her. “Nadia?” he asks, sounding surprised.

First impressions are everything, and if this is to work, if Sayid is to believe that this is real and that everything that’s happened in the past year and a half was a dream, then Eames has to be perfect. And he has to be perfect now.

But he can’t. It’s always been his weakness. No matter what the risks are, even if the job is falling apart and the priority is to salvage, Eames has always wanted to know. To know those deep dark secrets that lurk in the mind, to learn the truths that have been squirreled away, to see past the lies that everyone else believes. And there have never been secrets, truths, or lies like these before. The best thing, the smart thing, to do right now would be to play it safe, ask his questions, do the job. But that isn’t going to happen. Not when this is his only chance to find out what the hell all that insanity on the island was about.

So, instead of saying, ‘Yes, it’s me, darling,’ he replies, “Who else would it be?”

Still sweetly, though. At the end of the day, Eames is a professional.

At any rate, it doesn’t throw Sayid off much more than the safe response would have, for, after blinking a couple more times, he goes with it, just as he went with it when Eames-as-Jack had smoothed over Ariadne’s presence in the camp. “No one else, my love,” he replies, but it’s hesitant. And in a second he’s gripping her tightly, clinging. Clinging in the way of a man who thought his wife was dead would. Clinging in the same way he’d just been gripping Shannon’s corpse.

Eames nuzzles against him even more, drinking in the heat radiating off Sayid’s body. “You were thrashing about in your sleep. Was it a nightmare?”

Sayid slumps and relaxes into the pillow, his mind somewhere distant and his voice even farther away. “It ended as such, yes.”

“The island?” Eames usually eases into things, works up to his interrogations, but he’s too curious about this case, too impatient.

Sayid nods.

“Tell me about it? Talking it through is the best way to---”

“It was nothing.” Sayid abruptly sits up and swings his legs over the side of the bed. He leans forward, not ready to get up, but no longer wanting to lie down. Eames crawls up behind him and cranes his head around to kiss him.

Sayid tastes like ash and smoke; Eames has kissed enough people in dreams to know that the subject dictates his or her own taste, which means that Sayid had an even more tragic case of self-loathing than they had anticipated.

“It was not nothing. You’re upset. You can tell me.”

Sayid stiffens before suddenly standing up, leaving Eames’s arms clasping the air. “It was the same dream I always have. I’ve told you about it before. We were on the island. We were… we were running out of food.”

Through the earpiece he’s wearing, Eames hears Ariadne shouting the question that’s pounding through his own veins but which he can’t ask. “Food? What?!”

“Are you sure that was all?” Eames asks slowly, with as much concern as he can muster and thinking as hard as he can about how he’s to get around such a blatant falsehood.

Sayid is already halfway across the bedroom, but he glances over his shoulder back at Nadia. “Yes, that was all,” he confirms sadly.

For all his talent at extracting the truth from people (Eames notes to himself how useful this man would be on the team; too bad he’s the mark), Sayid Jarrah is a terrible liar.

Perhaps he is simply doing the decorous thing. Eames doubts describing dreams of other women to one’s wife is ever a good idea, even when one is married to a saint like Nadia. Women are still women.

And men are still men.

Stretching out his arms towards Sayid, Eames whispers, “Come back to bed.”

Sayid is either more than a man or less, because he doesn’t go for it. He stops, but not to give in. Eames follows his gaze as it travels from Nadia’s warm, open face down her arms, until it comes to rest on the palms of her hands, which are covered in burn marks and scars, with fingernails that have grown in crooked after having been pulled out one too many times---possibly by Sayid himself so long ago. Like the feet Eames now tries to hide under the covers, they’re the only not beautiful parts of Nadia’s body.

Eames watches Sayid stare at those hands, at the permanent reminder of his crimes, at the guilt that he’s married and goes to bed with every night, inescapable and loving and forgiving and damning all at once.

“We were simply hungry,” Sayid repeats unconvincingly. “It was only a dream, probably because I’m hungry right now. I’ll turn on the coffee machine.” With that, he slumps out of the bedroom. Eames can hear him descending the staircase, the vitality he’d so recently admired completely gone from his step.

“I’ll be down in a minute,” he calls after him.

Eames looks down himself at Nadia’s hands to drink in the sight that has just put her husband off so completely. It’s horrible, what they did to her, truly horrible.

“What are you waiting for?” he hears Arthur admonishing through the earpiece. “Follow him!”

“I know what I’m doing,” he mutters in response, annoyed that anyone---especially Arthur---would have the gall to try to instruct him in his own specialty. Sayid needs some space. This is the best way to play him; Arthur doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

“There’s a gun in the top drawer of the dresser. Mal’s here somewhere. If you see her, you know what to---” Arthur continues, but is interrupted by Cobb.

“I told you, it can’t be her! Did you actually see her face?”

“No, but…”

The only thing Eames needs less than Mal is Cobb being in denial about it being Mal, but he still grins: the worse it gets, the more he enjoys himself.

The little nightie Nadia’s wearing has nowhere to hide anything, so he changes into a loose sundress with deep pockets that’s hanging behind the door.

He’s about to head downstairs when he hears another outburst from the team.

“Oh my god!”

“Who the hell is that?”

“I told you it wasn’t Mal!”

Eames wants to tell them to pull themselves together and explain, but he can’t, not with Sayid so nearby. At any rate, it doesn’t matter, because he figures it out for himself in a few seconds. He moves quietly down the hallway.

Sayid is standing stock-still at the bottom of the stairs, so shocked by whatever he’s looking at that he doesn’t notice Nadia coming behind him.

“Shannon?” He goes---blunders, really---off the staircase and around the corner into the living room, out of sight.

Eames’s thoughts are full of inarticulate question marks and exclamation points, popping up like comic book profanities. Intriguing as this new development is, he’d felt sure the man’s despair on the island had been real; if there was ever a real Shannon, Eames would have sworn she’d died in Sayid’s arms like he’d said. And if that’s true, then she can’t be here.

He creeps to stand on the bottom step and peers around the wall, trying not to be seen.

Despite steeling himself, it’s hard not to chuckle when he catches sight of Shannon lolling on the couch, her legs thrown over one arm and her head resting on the other, as she does a crossword puzzle and sings idly to herself in what sounds like French. She looks for all the world as though she’s supposed to be there… perhaps she is? Delicious thoughts of polyamorous relationships flit through Eames’s head until he comes to his senses. Sayid may be far and away more interesting than he’d originally assumed, but he’ll never be that interesting.

“Shannon? Is it really you?” Sayid whispers and pulls her to her feet and into his arms. Whatever is going on here, he’s as surprised to see her as the team is.

Eames stifles another chuckle when her response to his melodramatically posed question is to roll her eyes and lash out at him with a sarcastic whip. “No, it’s Taller Ghost Claire. Of course it’s me, silly.”

“You can’t be here,” Sayid whispers, but he holds her even tighter.

Shannon pretends to take offense and mock-tries to wriggle out of his embrace. “Well, that’s rude.”

Sayid stretches his arm out to pull her back. “I mean, you’re dead. You died on the island.”

Given that they just watched her die in the dream, either Yusuf’s drugs have unduly addled Sayid’s mind, or Cobb is truly a genius; given his respect for both men’s talents, he’s willing to bet on the latter. Yusuf never makes mistakes.

Regardless, Eames knows this can’t be good; if Shannon is actually dead, Sayid will know this is a dream. He keeps his hand primed on the gun in his pocket; just because she isn’t technically Mal doesn’t mean she isn’t figuratively Mal. Explaining why Nadia shot the ex-girlfriend stalking her husband will be easier to handle than Sayid seeing through the set-up.

However, Shannon promptly establishes herself as the most helpful projection Eames has ever encountered, because she solves the problem by explaining away the impossibility of her own existence.

Shrugging, she says, “So? Hurley sees dead people from the island all the time.”

“Yes, but Hurley is insane,” he tells her, but it sounds more like he’s trying to tell himself.

“No, he isn’t.”

Sayid looks down and nods. “I know.”

It’s an odd conversation they’re having, to say the least.

Eames follows Sayid’s gaze down towards Shannon’s feet, to the gaudy, multi-colored, expensive-looking heels she’s wearing. “You’re wearing them,” he whispers.

“I really did like them, you know. I just never got a chance to wear them before... you know. They look good, don’t they?”

“Beautiful.”

She tosses her hair, in the way of a woman who is accustomed to such compliments, but who is still pleased to hear them, does. “Yeah, well… looking good is one of the perks of being dead. Did Hurley tell you about Charlie?”

“Yes. Seeing Charlie is the reason Hurley had himself committed.”

“Well,” Shannon continues, gesticulating excitedly, “he looks amazing. Like, a million times hotter than he ever looked when he was alive.”

“Are you telling me you’re involved with Charlie now?” Eames can hear Sayid trying to sound playful, but it just comes out baffled and depressed. Not to mention ridiculous.

Shannon raises an eyebrow that all but says, ‘You’ve got to be joking.’

Sayid pulls her in tightly again. “I had to check.”

Still encircled in his arms, Shannon leans to the side and looks Eames right in the face. She waves. “Hey there. Lurking much?”

Through the earpiece, Arthur’s screaming at him to shoot her and explain away why later. He’s been screaming it during this entire exchange, but Eames can’t do it. This is too much fun. There’s got to be another way.

Eames avoids asking ‘who is this woman?’ in case Nadia is supposed to know, so he goes with, “What is she doing here?” straddling the line between ‘what is she doing here?” and ‘what is she doing here?’ so that Sayid can react to whichever one is the correct inflection for the situation.

“You can see her?”

“Of course, I can see her. She’s standing in our living room.”

For a moment, Eames fears he’s made a misstep; perhaps according to the rules laid out by Sayid’s subconscious, ghosts such as the ones Hurley apparently sees aren’t visible to anyone except the intended viewer. But then he remembers that Shannon herself addressed Nadia, which means that Sayid wants---needs---Nadia to see her for some reason.

Eames notes that Sayid doesn’t let go of Shannon’s hand as he makes the introduction. “Shannon, this is Nadia.”

“Oh right. From the picture. What are you guys, like, married now? Oh god, you are, aren’t you?” It would be impossible for anyone to register more scalding levels of scorn. “I thought you were done with that.”

“I…” Sayid is embarrassed and uncertain, two emotions Eames is pretty sure he’s unaccustomed to feeling.

The blatant confusion is more than enough to go on. This is the time to put on the pressure and get answers, even though there’s a sassy ghost in the room doing her unknowing best to make him laugh. Feigning righteous indignation, Eames draws himself up to full height. No one, not even saintly Nadia, would have put up with being called a ‘that’.

“Who is this woman?”

If Shannon’s ghost is a pure projection of Sayid’s own issues about and longing for her, then his reaction to Nadia’s question says volumes more about his issues with his wife. The expression on his face is of guilt beyond anything Eames has ever imagined. It’s even beyond Cobb, whom he’s always thought of as an extremist case.

And that’s when he knows deep down that somehow, impossible as it sounds, it was real. Is.

But the twist (as if they needed another) is that Nadia is not exempt from the lies the Oceanic Six have been telling. She knows just as little as they do. Which means that the original plan will never succeed. There is no way Sayid is going to tell her about the ‘dream’ he had about assassinating people, not when his subconscious is busy with all this.

He finally understands the haunted expression Sayid and his fellow survivors wear. The lie is killing them. He’s desperate to be exposed.

“Wait, so she has no idea who I am?” Shannon disengages her hand and abruptly sits back down on the couch. She pulls her knees into her chest, toes wriggling just off the edge of the cushion. “This is gonna be good.”

Eames is in agreement. Questioning and seductive, he repeats Nadia’s husband’s name, ordering an explanation. “Sayid?”

Gone is the self-assured leader, the some-time assassin. He’s been replaced by a more flustered version of the man they met on the island. “This is Shannon. We… Nadia, I think you ought to sit down.”

***

The ringing gets louder and more painful, like a zillion bees dive-bombing his ears. The light becomes so bright, it’s like looking into the sun, despite the fact that the sun has set. The sky---or what little Yusuf can see of it out of his nearly-blinded eyes---has turned purple and there’s an awful pressure in his head. The pain worsens to the point where he can no longer balance. He falls down and presses his hands against his ears, feeling like he can't handle much more.

He wakes up on his back, on the floor of the tiny room where he started. Arthur’s watching the surveillance cameras. Ariadne and Cobb kneel down to greet him.

“What happened?”

Yusuf wipes his nose and checks his fingers; he feels like his nose is bleeding, but it isn’t, at least not here, or anymore. “I stumbled upon an ancient ruin. Like something out of Ancient Rome. Then there was an awful noise and everything whited out.”

Cobb tries to explain. “Since Jarrah redrew Ariadne’s plans, the dream couldn’t sustain itself without him. It evaporated.”

He shakes his head, both to indicate disagreement and to hopefully rid his ears of the remaining ringing. “No, I’ve been in situations where the dreamscaper has been pulled out. This was something stranger than that. Something more specific.”

“Shocker,” Ariadne says dryly.

Changing the subject, Cobb asks, “Yusuf, is there any way your compounds misfired?”

Yusuf feels just as annoyed at the implication as Ariadne had sounded back when they were on the boat. “In what way?”

“We’ve got a situation here.” Cobb points to the monitors Arthur’s watching. Jarrah is there, along with ‘Nadia’ and…

“What is she doing here?”

“He says she died on the island. He thinks she’s some sort of ghost, and get this: he’s not at all phased by the concept. Is there any way he’s confusing reality with the dream we just had?”

“You mean the opposite of what we planned? No. The compounds don’t work like that. They can’t. The dose we gave him was almost entirely sleep medication. The plan seemed so airtight that anything else seemed unnecessary; these scenarios play out better when they’re driven by the strength of the architecture and performances. If he says she died on the island, then she died on the island. The fact that we recreated the circumstances was mere coincidence.”

“I don’t care where she died. I don’t want her in my dream. Eames, get rid of her,” Arthur barks.

“No! This is our only chance to find out what was going on,” Cobb argues. “She’s our only link to the island.”

“I don’t know what happened to you guys down there, or what you saw, but I’m here to do a job. What I care about is getting it done, and this woman can’t help. She’s a complete anomaly. She doesn’t belong. She’ll screw everything up. She already has.”

“You don’t know that,” Ariadne interjects.

“You’re all too attached. I let it slide the last time, but I am not letting your shit ruin this job, not again,” Arthur snits at Cobb.

“This isn’t Cobb’s baggage, though. This is Jarrah’s. Everyone needs to calm down,” Yusuf tries to order, but his voice trails off. Plus, his heart isn’t in it; his mind is still lingering on the sight of the statue.

***

Arthur and Cobb are screaming contradictory instructions into Eames’s ear. Arthur wants him to kill the blonde and get back to the job and Cobb wants him to sit down and get the story.

He sits.

“What is going on?” he asks. “Where did she come from?”

Finally, Eames knows something in these dreams that other people don’t. He knows the answer to questions Sayid hasn’t even thought to ask yet.

Sayid turns to Shannon, brow furrowed. “Where did you come from?”

“I’m not allowed to tell you that. You’ll find out when it’s your time.”

It’s nice to see that Sayid’s subconscious is humble enough not to try to come up with explanations for the afterlife. What’s heartbreaking is that he looks just about ready to take the necessary step to join her.

Eames brings him back to the land of the living by repeating his name. “Sayid?”

He clears his throat. Simply, he answers, “We lied.”

Eames’s pulse quickens. It’s coming out now. “What do you mean?” Forget the job. Forget the entire assassin brouhaha. This is the only thing that matters.

“The plane didn’t sink into Sunda Trench. It crashed on an island. An impossible island. 48 of us survived, all relatively unharmed. We made shelters on the beach. There was plenty of food and water. Basic survival was easy. The real difficulties came from… less expected sources.”

Shannon snorts and scoots closer to Sayid on the couch. “Understatement of the century.”

Playing in this space requires walking a very fine line. On the one hand, Eames can’t imagine how anyone’s wife would stand for this, but on the other hand, it’s a dream and Sayid thinks Shannon’s a ghost; either his subconscious isn’t tethering the dream too tightly to reality right now, or else his everyday reality isn’t too tightly tethered to anything. Given the theories the team has, it’s probably the latter. At any rate, if Eames makes a scene, he might not get any information, so he pretends not to notice or not to be bothered by the fact that Nadia’s currently playing third wheel in her own home. “And you two?” he asks.

They glance shyly at one another.

“There was a French woman living on the island before we crashed. She’d been stranded there for sixteen years. We met---”

Shannon leans forward to clarify for Nadia. “Just as an fyi, by ‘meet’, he means she caught him in some crazy death trap in the woods and then tortured him.”

There’s an exclamation in the surveillance room, and Eames knows that Ariadne’s finally learned the cause of her hitherto inexplicable demise.

“She can’t be held responsible. Her mind was gone.”

“Oh, please. She was totally going to keep you as her sex slave if you hadn’t run away. Which means she was smart, not nuts.”

Sayid is rendered momentarily speechless by this, and Eames battles back yet another laugh. Shannon takes advantage of the pause to wrap up what promises to be a convoluted story by getting to the point.

“Basically, Sayid stole some maps and papers and stuff from her, but they were all in French, and I was the only one around who spoke any French at all, even though it wasn’t much. So he asked me to help him translate and we started hanging out and… you can guess the rest. Then some bitch shot me.”

“It was an accident,” he seethes through tightly clenched teeth, the calm of that statement obviously coming with so much forced restraint that Eames is glad, for everyone’s sake, that it was an accident, because if it hadn’t been, there would have been hell to pay.

“I see,” Eames replies.

Shannon scoffs, not nastily. “Do you? Because I was there, and I didn’t get it. Hell, I’m dead, and I still don’t. So much for ghostly omniscience, right? Speaking of which… I know what happens when you die.”

“You see the future, too?” Eames asks archly, as though he has not by now learned to roll with whatever punches this case has in store for him. For all he knows, perhaps Shannon was psychic; he’d believe just about anything at this point.

“No.” She points at Sayid. “I know because he knows. Don’t you, Sayid?”

“It was only a dream,” he says softly.

“You also said Walt was only a dream. How’d that pan out for you?”

Eames has no idea who Walt is; all that matters is that the mention of him mollifies Sayid and that there’s now a segue way to talk about the assassinations. This woman is an expository treasure. Just when he’d written it off as a lost cause, the job is back on. “What happens when I die?”

“He loses it,” she says matter-of-factly. “He starts hurting people again. He starts working for Ben Linus. And flat-ironing his hair. It’s completely ridiculous.”

Eames idly wonders which she finds more ridiculous: the murders or the hair.

“I was doing what I thought was necessary to protect---”

“Bullshit.”

In the surveillance room, he can hear the others trying to process this---the first relevant piece of information they have so far ferreted out.

“Ben Linus. Is that someone from the plane?”

”Nope, nobody by that name on Oceanic 815. Eames, ask them, because it’s got to be somebody else.”

“Who is Ben Linus?”

Sayid opens his mouth and makes a face that suggests he would like to explain, but can’t because the story is too elaborate and involved to know where to begin. After everything he’s seen so far, Eames finds himself sympathizing.

“He is liar and a monster.”

“Look who’s talking…” Shannon’s voice is laced with something more cutting than her habitual sarcasm.

Sayid looks as though he’s been slapped in the face. He finally remembers where he is, who is in the room, what has just been revealed. “I’m sorry, Nadia. I’m so sorry.”

“Why did you lie, Sayid?” Eames packs as much hurt and betrayal into Nadia’s voice as he can. Sayid’s face falls even further, if possible.

“I had to. We all had to. Jack said---”

“Fuck Jack,” Shannon spits. “If you’d listened to Hurley and held your ground, you could have talked him out of it. He always listened to you. You’re the only one he ever listened to.”

“I’m so sorry.”

Eames isn’t sure which of the two women the apology is directed towards.

“You promised you’d never leave me. You promised,” Shannon urges, and for the first time, Eames starts to worry that maybe this is a Mal situation, after all. The gun sits heavy in his pocket. However, they’ve already shot this girl once today. He certainly isn’t going to be the one to do it again.

He’s getting just as soft as Ariadne in his old age. He doesn’t even have it in him to interrupt their tête-a-tête.

“I didn’t leave you. You died. You left me.”

“What if it had been different? What if you’d been the one who died, and Boone and I had gotten rescued?”

“I wish it had been different. I would gladly have switched---”

But Shannon smacks his hand away and cuts him off so she can finish. “And what if I’d just gone on and pretended I’d never met you? How would you feel? What if when I got home, I’d started fucking my brother again? Huh? It really seems like I might as well have never stopped. You know what? Maybe I should go fuck Boone again right now.” She spits out the words like venom, biting her lip before the Fs so that each ‘fuck’ stings.

She stands up in a huff, and this time, Eames isn’t acting, isn’t impersonating, when his jaw hangs open. All he can do is follow her with his eyes, follow Sayid’s arm as he tries to hold her back.

“Shannon, please,” he begs.

Eames hasn’t been legitimately shocked in years, but this, this is the most surprising revelation yet, beyond anything that has happened so far. The other things were almost magical, easier to write off than this sordidly realistic bombshell. He’s speechless, his mind too numb to even ask himself whether or not Nadia would be equally shocked. Probably anyone would be, though. The rest of the team in the surveillance room certainly is, for they’ve gone just as silent.

Shannon glances at him and rolls her eyes. “What?” she challenges, leftover vitriol now directed towards Nadia. “Trust me, we weren’t even close to the most fucked-up people on that island.”

She lets herself be pulled back to the couch, though.

“It isn’t… It isn’t what it sounds like,” Sayid tries to explain to Nadia, but the attempt is lame. Eames has a feeling it’s exactly what it sounds like, or at least very nearly.

“Sayid?” They’ve moved away from the mysterious Ben. He makes a last-ditch effort to work on the case and assert Nadia’s presence, but it’s hopeless. The other woman is derailing things just as surely as one of Mal’s trains. If Nadia had been a real projection, Eames thinks she probably would have left by now; they’ve all but forgotten she’s there. Perhaps that in itself means something.

Slowly, things start to click into place.

“Go back,” Shannon begs. “Go back to the island. They need you. Claire, Sawyer, Juliet...”

“I can't go back.”

“You mean you won't.”

“No, I mean I can't. The island disappeared. It’s gone. They’re gone.”

“Nothing's ever gone. Look at me; I'm dead, but I'm still here. Right?”

"Yes, and how could I ever leave you again?" He reaches out to touch her face, but she presses her palms into the leather of the couch and pushes herself backwards, away from him.

“I don't want this Sayid anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

He doesn’t understand; Eames does.

“Don't you remember?” she reminds him. “You. The real you. That guy who spent a whole afternoon making glasses for Sawyer, even though he was an asshole who called you names---called all of us names. The guy who sat around and listened to Hurley talk about cheesy 80s movies and liked it. The guy who helped Desmond call his girlfriend even though it didn't make any sense and was a waste of the batteries. The guy who chopped wood with Jin and built shit with Charlie and fixed the world-ending computer or whatever the fuck it was, just because someone asked you to help... the guy everybody trusted and the mention of whose name made everybody feel safe. The guy who had no idea he was using the cheesiest ever pick-up lines on me. And I mean it: ever, like, to the point where they didn't even make any sense. That was you. This guy? Who lives in this ridiculously ugly house--- seriously, who decorated this place?---and then kills people because he can't move on with his life... that's the guy you were before---the guy who got his best friend killed just to get her”---she points at Nadia---“address. He’s the same as the Shannon who fucked her brother for a plane ticket home. Gross.”

“I do not know if the man you know still exists. I was only that person for a few months. You told me everyone got a new life on that island. You were right. But then we left and it all vanished, literally. We had nothing to go back to but our old lives.”

“You didn't have to. Go back. Find a way to be that guy again. Otherwise? I'm totally going to start going out with Charlie. Either him or that Scott guy… or is it Steve…? I always mixed them up…”

Neither Eames nor Nadia has any place in this scene, so he keeps silent, watching and studying and wishing he could forge a piece of furniture and fade into the woodwork. He watches as Shannon plies the same wiles he’d watched her use back on the beach with Kate and Sawyer, the same irresistible supplications. He watches as Sayid has the same reaction to her all over again.

Eames thought he’d seen all the twists there were to turn. But never did he expect all of this utter insanity to come down to a broken man’s need for a sodding pep talk from his secret dead girlfriend. It’s all so darkly absurd.

Inception wasn’t part of the plan, but that’s what this has turned into---the most elegant and organic one imaginable, because it’s being driven by the subject himself. The team is only facilitating the realization of truths that have long been straddling the line between the conscious and the subconscious.

“Are you sure she’s even real?” Shannon asks, pointing, and for a moment, Eames panics, worries he’s gotten so engrossed over the past few minutes that the disguise has started to slip. But, as before, Shannon dispels the fears she herself incites. “Or is she just a dream… some built-up perfect person for you to beat yourself up about because she'll always remind you of what you did to her? To other people, too? Why don't you just get the fuck over it, already, and stop? Go be the person you want to be. Start over. You did it once. I did it. We did it together. Why can't you do it again?”

And just like that, Shannon---Sayid, himself, technically---puts her finger on the part of this case that’s been poking and prodding and nagging at Eames like a hangnail. Nadia’s got one, as a matter of fact, so he chews on it as he watches this soap opera unfold. For the first time he pities her, the real Nadia, that blameless woman who’d never deserved to be saddled with so much metaphorical weight, or to represent so much irresolvable self-loathing.

Eames stares at Shannon, spoiled, flawed, the kind of woman capable of sleeping with her brother for money.

Ideals are wonderful, but sometimes putting two wrongs together makes them better than they were alone.

And sometimes the understudy steals the show.

He stands up. “Sayid, may I talk to you for a minute? Alone?”

***

“Where is he going? What the hell are you doing, Eames?” Arthur asks.

“He’s helping him let her go,” Yusuf says, mostly to himself. He knows Eames. He knows him better than any of them do. They’ve shared dreams---educational, experimental, recreational. They each know how the other’s mind works.

“Who? Shannon? How’s he going to do that? It’s the same as Mal, except he’s buried her deeper than you ever buried her, Cobb. He’s not even allowed talk about her.”

Yusuf looks at Cobb. If there’s one other person in the room who will get it, it’s got to be him, but he’s staring transfixed at the screen, his mind too far away to be of any help right now.

“This isn’t the same,” he tries to explain, now that it’s all up to him. “It’s the opposite. It’s Nadia he needs to let go of.”

“Shouldn’t it be Shannon? She’s dead,” Ariadne points out.

“They’re both dead,” Yusuf reminds her. “We’re not going to find out who Ben is, not here. But we can get him to stop killing. Am I right, Eames? Cough if you agree.”

A dainty catch of breath echoes through the microphones.

Arthur is visibly frustrated. “That’s not our job.”

Cobb’s finally comes out of his reverie with new determination. “It is now.”

***

Arthur and Cobb are barking contradictory instructions into his hear, and Ariadne’s trying to calm them down, but Yusuf’s the only one who gets it.

Far from proving a boring second act to the island, this level is just as much of a topsy-turvy world, in keeping with the first. And far from being a boring role, this is turning into the best part he’s ever played.

He leads Sayid into the foyer.

“Why did you lie, Sayid? And don’t blame it on Jack. You are too strong-willed to follow another’s lead so blindly.”

“I was trying to protect you. There are people who want the truth kept secret, dangerous people who would kill anyone who threatens to expose it.”

“Who? Why?”

“International financiers and... I don’t know exactly.”

Eames can read the honesty in his face; Sayid genuinely doesn't know much about the work he's been doing. This mysterious Ben Linus has got to be incredible, a true mastermind, to get someone as thorough and inquisitive as Sayid to do anything without proper explanation.

Since that line of inquiry won't lead anywhere, he changes tactic. Drawing on one of the few things that have come up that he does know about, he asks, “Is it true? About your friend? That you allowed him to die to find me?”

He knows the whole ugly story. It was all in Sayid’s CIA file, though who in Saito’s organization had the clearance to get that kind of information is beyond Eames.

“I’d spent eight years looking for you. Most of my entire adult life. The end was finally in sight and I made a choice. I’m not proud of what I did.”

“It would have been better never to find me than to pay that price. I’m glad the plane crashed. I’m glad we didn’t meet under those circumstances. I’m glad news coverage of the rescue allowed me to find you. However, it looks like you found something else in the meanwhile.”

Sayid looks between Nadia in front of him and Shannon, who’s investigating something at the far end of the living room and pretending not to listen.

“I am so sorry. All these years, I've wanted to show you I was a better man than the one you saw the last time we’d met. I wanted to be better, for you.”

“Not for yourself?”

It’s the other half of the pep talk. It feels rushed and nonsensical, but it’s the best Eames is going to be able to do with the limited time and information he has. If the team had planned this going in, they could have done a more thorough job, but as it is, this is going to be a salve, not a cure.

Eames can almost see the lingering threads that won’t end up getting cut right now.

“Goodbye, Sayid.”

“I’m sorry,” he repeats, for the millionth time, and Eames knows Sayid is apologizing not just to Nadia, but to everyone he's ever hurt, the many faces she represents. He knows what the punchline has to be, and it doesn't even require acting, because Eames actually believes it. He was on the island; he's seen for himself what Shannon was describing.

"You are a good man. But you didn't need me in order to know that. You never should have let yourself believe that you did."

Sayid nods and watches sadly as Eames slips on the flip-flops that Nadia keeps by the door.

Eames shuts the door behind him and blinks against the bright sunshine. There’s a BMW in the garage with Nadia’s name on it, and he intends to go for a drive.

After all that, he's earned it.

***

They’ve been listening silently for the past few minutes, but now everyone lets out a collective breath.

“Let’s leave them here for a little while, just to let it sink in. Eames,” Cobb shouts into the microphone, “wait for Arthur. He’s the dreamer, so he has to stick around until the end. Arthur, you should go for a drive around the city until the dream plays out.”

“A drive? Maybe this wasn’t such a waste of time, after all,” Arthur says. “Can you handle the rest?”

“Ariadne, Cobb and I can get out of here and pack up in the hotel room,” Yusuf offers. “By the time we take Eames out, and then you, all we’ll have to do is close the door behind us.”

“Fine. See you back in Sydney.” Arthur sticks a walkie-talkie in the back of his pants and tiptoes out of the surveillance room.

“It’s a shame you all can’t see him right now. He looks like Spiderman in a three-piece suit, shimmying down that gutter pipe.”

Eames's voice is light, but Yusuf knows him too well to think he's feeling as flippant as he sounds.

“Just get as far away from here as you can,” he says into the microphone. “We’ll take care of the rest. Enjoy the ride.”

“Always.”

“So now what? Do we have enough to go to Saito?” Yusuf asks his two remaining teammates. There’s a story here, in bits and bobs that need to be sorted out and dissected before being pieced back together. The parts make so little sense alone they must make sense as a whole; otherwise, this was nothing more than a diverting hallucination. And if that’s all it was, he might as well have stayed in Mombasa.

Cobb shakes his head. “We’ll tell Saito we need more time. We’ll tell him we need to run a control.”

“A control?” Ariadne asks.

Yusuf nods. The scientist in him approves. “An extraction on some other member of the Oceanic Six. We find out from someone else who Ben is. We see if the dreams line up. If they do, then…” The implications on his worldview if they are right are too vast to fully contemplate right now.

“Smoke monsters and polar bears and Roman ruins in the Pacific?” Arthur, who’s still listening through the walkie, scoffs, contemplating it for him. He wasn’t there. He’ll never understand.

“Imagination, darling, imagination. I’m going to put you on a diet, starting tomorrow. Six impossible things before breakfast. What do you say?”

“Move over, Eames. I’m driving.”

The last thing they hear before the signal fades is Eames teasing, “If we run this control, we should do it on Jack Shephard. Ariadne will enjoy that.”

“Eh?” Yusuf asks, not really listening because he’s watching the screen showing the living room, where Sayid’s handing Shannon a gold and bead necklace, which causes her to flail with excitement. It must have been hers, the only token of the island he was able to take with him.

She’s dead and he’s dreaming, and as far as the world knows, they never even met.

Instead of explaining Eames’s comment, Ariadne merely sounds annoyed. “Can we do Kate Austen? This whole thing with the baby is going to bother me…”

iv. “You needed them... To remember, and to let go.”

Sayid awoke the next morning, his arms wrapped tightly around…

…his pillow.

The hair he felt tickling his cheek was his own. The tangled sensation around his legs was the sheets wrapped around him. The soft, smooth texture pressed against his nose was satin and stuffing, not skin. The lingering perfume he swore he could smell must have been imaginary.

Waking to this reality was more devastating than any of the actual nightmares he’d lived through.

Just like every morning for the past three years, he was reminded that she was gone. They were all gone.

The problem he’d been trying to escape returned anew. It had followed him from Moscow to Korea to St. Tropez to Sydney, right back to the start. It had been following him for a decade.

“Go live your life,” Ben had said. What life? He had never had a life, and every attempt to create one had been snatched from him with senseless violence.

And then he remembered, and upon remembering, he clung.

He lay for a minute, savoring the fading phantom physicality of a dreamworld that had somehow been combined with the island---itself as prone to vanishing as a dream.

It was only a dream. But just because it had taken place in his head didn’t mean it wasn’t true. If it wasn’t, then the island was no more than a collective madness existing in the minds of six people. And Sayid knew it was more than that.

“Everyone gets a new life on this island.” He could still hear her voice, calm over the crackling flames. She had been right then; perhaps she could be right again.

Within an hour, he had filled out an online application. Within a day, he was boarding a plane for the Dominican Republic. By the end of the week, he was once again feeling the sun on his face, crunching sand between his toes, listening to the sound of waves, sweating through a black wife-beater, relishing the satisfaction of leading a group of random strangers in building a community. He and his Habitat group built a school, dug a well, planted a garden. Everyone listened to him, not because he was famous or because they feared him, but because he was capable. He’d done all this---chopping, building, organizing, leading---before. He was good at it; it was the only thing he’d ever been better at than interrogating. It’s just that the island had been the only place he’d been allowed to discover that fact.

For the first time since leaving the island, Sayid felt something close to peace. No, this wasn’t the island, and no, the people he was here with didn’t mean anywhere near as much to him as his group of rag-tag survivors had. But like on his island, this was a place where he had no past, just present, and where he was being asked simply to help.

It was enough.

It couldn’t last, though.

It never did. Not in this life.

“Sayid! You have a visitor,” one of his teammates announced one afternoon.

He put his hammer down and looked around, his eyes finally alighting on the very last person he expected to see.

“Hello, Sayid,” Locke said.

~fin~

Et d’une chanson d’amour
La mer
A bercé mon coeur pour la vie