Lost Fic: Toward the End of Time, Alex/Karl
On the eve of the finale, why not some Alex fic?
Title: Toward the End of Time
Author: hollycomb
Rating: R
Pairing: Alex/Karl
Summary: "Their memories of everything that occurred took place with the other’s face as a backdrop, and sometimes the air was grainy like a movie about evening, and sometimes there was an ending in the air that looked like a scene from a different beginning." --Arda Collins
Notes: Pre-finale, spoilers for the rest.
~
"And how are things between you and your father?"
Alex takes a break from staring at the floor to give Harper a disbelieving look.
"Did he tell you to ask me that?"
"Of course not. You know I don't discuss our sessions with him."
Alex doesn't know that, and in fact she's pretty sure that Harper does report back to Ben after these forced therapy afternoons. She leans back on the sofa, lets out her breath.
"Everything's fine."
"He did mention to me, just in conversation, that you've seemed lethargic lately."
"Yeah, well."
"Is there any particular reason? Have you started your period yet?"
Alex sits up, glowers at her.
"No." She did, actually, two weeks ago, just three days before her fourteenth birthday. She hasn't told anyone but Sabine, who gave her supplies that she's kept hidden in her room. It's nobody's business, certainly not her father's. What would he know about it?
"It can be a complicated time in a young woman's life," Harper says, as if she knows she's lying. Alex sometimes wonders if she can read minds. Her father would send her to a mind reader rather than a real therapist. She doubts all the time that Harper is qualified for this job.
"Complicated? Are you kidding? I wish my life was complicated." Wearing tampons for a week every month is hardly the kind of excitement that 'becoming a woman' once seemed to promise.
"And why is that?" Harper asks, smiling slightly, as she always does when Alex offers any information semi-willingly.
"Because I'm bored," Alex says. "All the time."
"And what exactly do you think would make your life more exciting?"
Alex leans back again, stares at the ceiling. She can hear the little brass clock on Harper's bookshelf ticking, her weekly hour of torture almost up.
"How about living in a real city, where everyone in town hasn't known me since I was a baby?"
Harper's smile is so condescending, Alex wants to get up and walk out.
"Believe me," Harper says. "You would be more miserable there than you are here."
"I doubt it."
"Well," Harper says. "You're young."
The clock chimes, and Alex jumps off the sofa. It's noon, and she's free to go. There is nothing she's particularly looking forward to today, except no longer being in this room, answering these questions. She goes for the door without offering Harper any sort of goodbye, but when she turns the knob, it's locked. A vague sense of panic shoots through her.
"Oh, sorry," Harper says. "I've gotten used to locking it behind me."
Alex unlocks the door, then the dead bolt. She frowns at Harper.
"Why?"
Harper smiles, just insincerely this time. She has about twenty different ways of smiling, and Alex loathes them all equally.
"No reason," she says. "Have a great day, Alex."
~
Her father makes pork for dinner, with a fancy fig sauce and green beans on the side, salad with avocado. There is fresh baked bread, fresh squeezed juice. Alex hates the production that he makes of every dinner, candles and music and cloth napkins. She feels like she's on a date that someone else didn't show up for.
"And how was your day?" he asks. Same question every night. He even holds his fork the same way every time he asks it, horizontal over his plate.
"Fine."
"The usual answer," he says, stabbing at his green beans.
"To the usual question."
"Touché."
"Do I have to keep seeing Harper?" Alex asks.
"I don't see why it's such an inconvenience," Ben says. "I would have appreciated having someone professional to talk to when I was your age."
Alex snorts into her plate, avoids the obvious joke. "Someone professional? I'd rather have a friend."
"You have friends."
"Yeah, and they're all twenty years older than me."
"That's such a bad thing?"
Alex clamps her mouth shut, stares at a spot on the wall to the left of her father's head. He doesn't understand. When he was young, there were other kids his age on the Island. The closest she's got to a contemporary is Karl, the errand boy at the medical center. He's sixteen, and extremely boring, just like everything else here.
"Anyway, I hate her," she says.
"You hate everyone these days."
"That's not true." It is, actually, or close to true. The only company she can stand is that of Sabine, her neighbor, and occasionally Tom, who has been teaching her how to fire a gun.
"Harper's been locking her door," she tells her father, who doesn't look up from his plate.
"She's allowed to do that if she feels she needs to."
"But why does she feel she needs to?"
"You'd have to ask her."
"I'm finished," Alex says, pushing her plate away. Lately nothing annoys her more than these conversations with her father. She thought that as she got older he would be more willing to actually answer her questions, but that was a fool's hope. "Can I be excused?"
"Of course." Ben pats his mouth with his napkin. "Can I get a thank you for cooking this meal for you?" he asks as she stands.
"Thanks," she mutters. "I'll do the dishes later."
"Where are you going?"
"Just for a walk!" she says, her hand on the doorknob. "Is that okay?"
"Stay in the --"
"I know, Dad! I know."
As if she could get out of the compound if she wanted to.
~
Outside, the last of the sunset is still lingering in the sky, orange so dark it's almost blue. Alex walks through the residential area, smelling someone's barbecue, hearing voices through windows, people laughing, records playing. She walks all the way to the small beach near the lake, which her father doesn't like her to do, especially not at night. Glad to find it empty, she sits down in the sand.
Sabine tells her she has a charmed life. She tells her about what it was like back in the real world, how awful it was, the ignorance and pointlessness of people who aren't working together toward a common goal, just grabbing whatever they can for themselves. Alex loves Sabine, but she can't believe her thirty-seven year old friend is naive enough not to see that that's exactly what's going on here, most of the time.
"Hey."
Alex turns, though she doesn't want to, recognizing the voice. It's Karl, standing maybe twenty feet behind her, holding his hands behind his back.
"Hi, Karl," she says, turning back toward the lake, hoping he'll get the hint. He doesn't, and comes to sit beside her.
Karl grew up on the Island like Alex did, came here when he was three years old but doesn't remember anything about his life before. His mother is a lab technician at the medical center, and she's training him to follow in her footsteps. His father didn't join them, stayed in America, in Evansville, Indiana, where Karl was born. It's the most interesting tidbit Alex has ever been able to get out of him about life off of the Island: the name of that town, that state.
"I got you -- well, I made you something," Karl says, still hiding his hands behind his back. Alex gives him a pitying look. He's been trying to camouflage his pimples with sunburn, and his face is red as usual.
"Why?" she asks. "I mean, thanks, but--"
"Your birthday." He grins. "Remember?"
She rolls her eyes. "Yeah, I remember. It was two weeks ago."
"Right, but it took me longer than I expected to finish this. Here."
He hands her a lumpy bag made out of palm fronds that have been woven together. It's been patched with glue in places where the fronds dried out and broke.
"Thanks," she says, actually kind of touched, though what she'll do with this thing she has no idea. "It's neat."
"I know it looks like shit." He jumps at the sound of the curse, and Alex grins. All of the adults go out of their way not to curse around her, though of course her father never needs to, has probably never uttered a bad word in all of his dull, rational life.
"It doesn't look like shit," she says. "It looks great. I could never do this, I'm too clumsy to even sew. Sabine was trying to teach me, but--"
Karl interrupts her by leaning forward to kiss her on the mouth. She's too shocked to react for a moment, but pushes him away when she feels his tongue against her lips. She boggles at him. He's redder than usual.
"Karl!"
"Sorry!" He gets up, scrambling for traction in the sand. "I didn't mean to, I don't know, I didn't mean to!" He's already walking away, hands in his hair like he wants to tear chunks of it out.
Alex puts the bag against her face, and holds in her laughter until he's gone. She's known about Karl liking her for some time, has caught him staring at her during community dinners, but she's not particularly flattered. Who else is he going to admire, one of the women his mother's age, the married ones who changed his diapers when he first arrived here? It's stupid, the way the adults look at she and Karl like they're preordained to fall in love, chuckling about it with jealous nostalgia.
Karl might be stuck falling in love with her, but Alex is already spoken for, though the object of her affection doesn't know it yet. At the moment, he's married to her therapist.
Back the house, she goes to bed without washing the dishes and lies on top of her blankets, still dressed. She shuts her eyes and imagines Goodwin finding her on the beach, kissing her like that in the middle of a sentence. She knows she's too young for him, but someday, maybe. He certainly deserves better than Harper.
She realizes she's got Karl's bag still hugged to her chest, and holds it up to the moonlight from the window. Karl will find somebody else. Maybe she can ask her father to recruit someone new for him, a beautiful girl who wants to leave the world behind. The thought of it bothers her, but she knows that's not fair. Secretly, she does enjoy Karl's attentions a little bit. She just doesn't want Goodwin to get the wrong idea about them.
The bag Karl made fits neatly between the bed and the wall, pressed flat. She'd love to carry it around as a signal to Karl that she's not mad about the kiss, but her father, if he sees it, will definitely get the wrong idea.
~
Two days later, the community has its monthly picnic in the square, and Alex's father forces her to attend. Annoyed, she hopes at least that Goodwin will be there. Last month, Tom set up an archery game, and Goodwin helped Alex with her aim. It was the thrill of her year -- no, her life -- being so close to him while he still smelled like charcoal and fire from manning the grill.
"Did you bring the bow and arrow and all that?" Alex asks Tom when they run into him on the way to the party, Alex holding a bowl of salad, her father a case of wine.
"Alex," he scolds before Tom can respond. "Don't say 'and all that.'"
Alex ignores him, and keeps her eyes on Tom, who winks at her.
"It's touch football this month, kiddo," he says, nodding to the ball tucked under his arm.
Alex wilts for a moment, then considers the 'touch' aspect of the game. She imagines being tackled, picked up over Goodwin's shoulder as a kind of joke, both of them laughing, and she nearly drops the salad.
"What are you smiling about?" her father asks.
"Nothing."
"Well." He sighs. "It's nice to see."
Alex sets the salad down on the buffet table and smiles vaguely at greetings from the women who are unwrapping casserole dishes and distributing spoons. She walks around looking for Goodwin and doesn't see him, but that doesn't mean he won't come. Maybe he's just got some work to finish up first.
She spots Karl sitting at a table with his mother, drinking from a plastic cup and scanning the crowd. She waves at him and he pretends not to notice. Alex hasn't seen him since he tried to kiss her by the lake, imagines he's been hiding. Feeling guilty, and also a little sadistic, she heads over to talk to him.
"Hi, Betsy," she says to Karl's mother. "Karl," she adds, smiling. He lifts his hand in a kind of wave, keeps his eyes on his cup.
"Alex, how are you?" Betsy asks, motioning for her to sit down. She does, beside Karl, who still won't look at her. "Is your father here?"
"Yeah, he's around somewhere. How are things at the medical station?"
"Oh, you know. Just keeping a close eye on Samantha."
Alex nods somberly. Samantha is the latest woman to get pregnant on the Island. She's five months along now, approaching the time when all the others died.
"How is she?"
"She's fine," Betsy says, not really paying attention. She's watching something, and Alex turns to see Ethan coming toward the table, his usual weird attempt at smile stretched across his face. Karl squeezes his cup, and the plastic pops.
"Hello," Ethan says when he arrives. "Beautiful day, isn't it?"
"It really is," Betsy says, beaming at him. Alex glances at Karl. His jaw has gone tight.
"I'm gonna go, uh . . .," Karl trails off, and gets up. Alex follows him across the square, where the few musicians in the community are setting up, getting ready to play. Karl walks toward the gazebo, and then into it, leans on its railing.
"Hey," Alex says, stepping in behind him. "What's wrong?"
"Why are you following me?" Karl asks. He seems surprised at his own tone, lets his face go soft again.
"Nothing -- I'm not --"
"I just hate that guy," he says, flicking his chin back toward the party.
"Ethan?"
"Yeah, Ethan. He's trying to, I don't know. Date my mom."
Alex laughs, and regrets it when Karl glowers at her. He starts to rush out of the gazebo, but she catches his hand. The gesture punches through her, the heat of his palm taking her out of the moment, and she lets go. She's too tuned in to this stuff lately, thinking all the time about Goodwin, how much she wants to do things with him that are still mostly formless in her imagination. She feels possessed, and especially since Karl kissed her.
"He's not so bad," she says, though she's not sure this is true. She doesn't like Ethan, and doesn't blame Karl for not wanting him around his mother. She's always been glad, secretly, that her father hasn't tried to date anyone since her mother died giving birth to her. Not that she feels any particular loyalty to the mother she never knew and whose pictures her father can't even stand to display. It would still be hard.
Karl makes a face. "He's weird."
"Well, yeah. Who here isn't?"
Karl grins, and Alex does, too, looks away. When she glances back at the square, she sees Goodwin arriving, catching the football Tom brought and laughing. Harper is nowhere to be found.
"Goodwin came," she says, smiling wider.
"So?"
"So, he's nice." Alex raises her shoulders, caught. "Are you going to play football?" she asks, changing the subject.
"No." Karl shuts one eye, makes a face like he's bracing himself for an inoculation. "Aren't you mad at me?" he asks.
"What for?"
"Um, for. Whatever."
She knows what he means. He's brave to even mention it.
"Karl, I'm not mad. It's -- fine."
He walks out of the gazebo, and this time she lets him go. She looks back toward Goodwin, who is shaking hands with her father. If only he knew.
She and Goodwin get picked for opposite touch football teams, but there is no tackling. No one even reaches for her hip to tag her, and it makes her hate this community all the more, makes her want to give up. She's Ben's daughter, and they all treat her like glass. Karl doesn't play, sits on the sidelines and sneaks wine from his plastic cup. The best Alex gets is slapping Goodwin's hand after the game, congratulating his team for winning. She's out of breath, and so is he, and it's almost enough to get her knees weak.
"Are you going to dance?" she hears herself say. The band is starting up again, the game finished, and the music they're playing makes her feel reckless, weightless, stupid. Goodwin breaks into his perfect grin. She knows he thinks of himself as one of her benevolent guardians, like everyone else here.
"Are you?" he asks.
"I dunno."
"C'mon," he says, pulling her to the brick patio in front of the band. Alex laughs and pretends to be reluctant, drags her feet. It is embarrassing, really. No one else is dancing. Goodwin spins her, and she watches the twinkling lights someone has strung up on the trees spin around her, gets pulled back in. She's glad Harper isn't here, because she can feel it on her face, how obvious it is that she loves him, that she could do this forever.
Other people come forward to dance, including Ethan and Betsy. Alex looks back toward Karl, but his chair is empty. She gets passed between several partners, grabbing hands with Greta, Bonnie, and Matthew, who just last year she was foolishly in love with. Well, she thought she was in love. She didn't know, then, what it was really like. She comes back to Goodwin, reaching through a crush of laughing, drunk adults to find his hand again.
"Without you here, no one would bother to dance," Goodwin says.
Without you, I wouldn't have bothered, either, she thinks.
"You keep us all young," her father chimes in, suddenly at her shoulder. He takes her arm and leads her from the patio. She looks back toward Goodwin, who is already distracted by Bonnie, picking her up and spinning her around, both of them laughing. Alex's dizziness turns to nausea, and she wants to hit her father, hard. She yanks her arm out of his hand.
"What are you doing?" she asks.
"Nothing. We're going home. It's late, and all of these people have had too much to drink. You don't need to linger in this environment, trust me."
"Trust you?" She glares at him. "Why should I? You're always lying to me."
"Alex--"
"Like now. You're just mad that I'm having fun and you're not."
"Please don't be so immature."
She recognizes a particular tone in his voice, one that tells her she won't win this. She walks home ahead of him, her arms crossed over her chest. When she gets inside and slams into her room, she hopes he won't follow her and try one of his "rational dissections" of their argument, but he seems to know, too, that any further communication is useless. She hears his bedroom door close.
Lying on her side in bed, she lets her eyes get wet, knowing she's being dramatic, but she's less upset about being dragged away from Goodwin than about not having anyone to talk to now, to gush with about the way his hands were warm, but not sweaty like Matthew's, to help her criticize Bonnie and to share her exasperation over her father and his treatment of her.
She wipes her eyes, knowing that even if her mother was alive, she wouldn't be able to talk with her about any of this. Her mother would probably be on her father's side, though really Alex doesn't know. She doesn't know anything about her.
~
Five weeks later, everyone gathers again in the courtyard, this time for Samantha's memorial service. Her body is elsewhere, will be studied by the doctors on the Island and then buried in the little graveyard on the far eastern end of the compound. Samantha's husband, Rick, is not in attendance; there are rumors that he was so distraught he had to be sedated. Tom is with him. Alex thinks they should have waited to do the memorial service until Rick was ready to join them. She watches her father step forward to say a few words.
"We have all made sacrifices," he says. Alex hears someone choke out a sob, and looks across the courtyard to see Ethan folding Betsy into his arms. She was at Samantha's bedside when she died. Alex looks around for Karl, knowing this gesture will upset him, and finally sees him near the back of the crowd, looking at the ground with his mouth hanging open, like he's getting ready to ask for an explanation. Alex's eyes well up as Betsy struggles to keep her crying contained.
This is no way to live.
She leaves the memorial service early, skipping the refreshments. Her father is too overwhelmed with grieving community members to notice. She walks down to the lake, takes her shoes off and sits on the short dock with her legs hanging in the water. Chewing on her lip, she tries to stop herself from losing her composure, though no one is around. The usual survivor's guilt pushes at her like hands against her back, and she thinks about dropping forward into the dark water. Whenever there is a memorial service for a pregnant woman, she imagines that everyone in attendance is staring at her, wondering why she got to survive when all of the other babies died, taking their mothers with them.
She's wiping her cheeks dry when she hears footsteps on the dock behind her. She looks up hoping to find her father, but, as usual, he's too busy speaking with his followers to comfort his daughter. Karl is standing at the edge of the deck, his thumbs hooked in his pockets.
"Um," he says.
Alex gets up, her legs soaked and dripping, and goes to him without pausing to consider it, leans up on tiptoes to put her arms around his shoulders. He seems stunned for a moment, but recovers and hugs her waist, puts his cheek against her forehead. Alex doesn't know what to say, how to tell him how grateful she is right now for his familiar smell, which reminds her of Betsy's house, and the field behind it where she and Karl used to play together when they were very young. He squeezes her tighter, and she pushes her wet face against his neck.
"I hate it here," she says, her voice a pathetic choke. "We should leave."
"Me and you?"
"All of us. Everyone. What's the point?"
Karl shakes his head. "I don't know. My mother says we're lucky to be here."
"Has anyone ever told you why?"
"Not really."
Alex takes a deep breath and turns back to the lake. She realizes with a kind of curious flick that she wants Karl to try and kiss her again. It actually wasn't that bad. She's actually been thinking about it a lot. There's no way she'll be talked into falling for Karl -- it's too predictable, too boring -- but maybe they could kiss again. For practice.
"Do you have the access code for the security gate?" she asks him.
"Your father would kill me," he says.
"Please, Karl, I just want to go to the beach. I need to see the ocean, something that's not just connected to this place."
"Alex, he'll kill me."
"He won't even notice! He's overseeing the memorial, calming people down. We'll only be gone for an hour."
Karl sighs and looks up at the sky in defeat, like she's got a gun to his head.
"He's probably got some tracking device implanted in you," he says. "So that all the alarms on the compound go off when you leave the gates."
"That's crazy! I've left the compound before."
"Not with me."
They look at each other for a moment, and Alex grins when his cheeks go red. She shrugs.
"So I'll get the access code from Tom and go by myself."
"You will not. He wouldn't give it to you."
"Well, somebody should! I'm fourteen. I'm old enough to have the code."
Karl rolls his eyes. "C'mon," he says. "I'll take you. Just remember when your dad kills me, it's your fault."
They walk around the lake and out to the edge of the valley, Karl leading and Alex following. It's about three o'clock in the afternoon, and it will take them an hour or so to walk to the beach. She wishes now that she had eaten at the memorial service, but even the emptiness of her stomach seems to fit the sense of freedom and adventure she's enjoying as they trudge through the jungle.
"I should have brought a weapon or something," Karl says when they stop to drink from a creek. Alex laughs and sits down, out of breath.
"A weapon?"
"Yeah, you know. There are animals out here."
She shrugs and lies back to watch the sun flicker through the swaying canopy above her. All her life, her father has talked about the dangers of this island and the need for their security measures. She's never seen any evidence to back up his threats. Pregnancy seems to be the only danger here.
"Have you heard the legend about the cabin?" she asks. Karl makes a face at her.
"You're crazy if you think that's true," he says.
"What? It is true! It's romantic, that somebody wanted to build a house out here that the people in the compound wouldn't know about. He built it for his girlfriend. Or his wife, something."
"Oh," Karl says. "That legend. Um, well, what? You want me to build a cabin for you?"
"I'm not your girlfriend!" She tries to make her laugh friendly, not derisive. He seems to get offended anyway, looks at her like she's crazy.
"I know that," he says. "It was a joke."
"Oh. I mean, I know. I --"
"Let's just get moving," he says, already walking away. "This was a stupid idea. I'm going to get in so much trouble."
They walk the rest of the way in silence, Alex staring ahead at the tense set of Karl's shoulders. She feels bad for him, then just annoyed with him, and has the strange desire to jump on his back and let him carry her to the beach, but that's probably just because she's tired. Still, she likes the sweat stain on the back of his shirt, and why should she like something so gross?
When they finally arrive at the beach, she runs forward like an idiot, laughing and relieved. She kicks off her shoes and walks in the waves, waits for Karl to join her. When he doesn't, she steps out of the ocean and sits in the sand, stretches her legs out so that the waves just barely reach her toes. Karl sighs and stands beside her, his hands on his hips.
"There's your ocean," he says, and she laughs until she's fallen onto her back. When she looks up at him, her hand over her eyes to shield them from the sun, he smiles down at her, and she's glad he's not still angry about the girlfriend comment.
"Karl, someone died," she says, wanting to return to earth, feeling a little nervous suddenly, too free from her usual anchors.
"I know," he says. "It happens everywhere. All over the world."
"How do we know?"
He rolls his eyes and sits down beside her. She leans up with a groan, and hunches her back to match his posture.
"What if a ship came now and offered to take us to America, where you were born?" she asks. "What would you do?"
"I don't know. What would you do?"
"I'd leave!"
"What about your father?"
"Maybe I'd leave a letter for him. Hmm, what would it say? Thanks for the memories, enjoy your precious Island, see you in hell."
"You're so stupid," Karl says, laughing. She smiles and falls against his side, likes the humid warmth of him so much that she leaves her head on his shoulder.
"Am I like my father?" she asks, guilty for how good this feels. Karl was right, her father will want to kill him if he finds out he's taken her out of the compound without a proper adult escort.
"No," Karl says. "I don't think so."
"How are we different?" Alex asks, looking up at him.
"You just are."
"Yeah, but how?"
"I don't know!" He frowns out at the horizon. "God!"
"Don't be mad," she says, pulling on his arm. He won't look at her. "Karl, hey." She tugs his elbow until he finally turns, sneaks his eyes up to hers. "You can kiss me if you want."
"What?" He seems infuriated by this, and she can't imagine why.
"I said you can--"
"I heard what you said. You know what? You are like him. You're manipulative and weird and I don't know -- I don't know."
He gets up and leaves her sitting, stunned, in the sand. Her eyes fill before she even has time to think about what just happened, automatic, like she's shut her finger in a cabinet door. Karl paces behind her, cursing, and seems to realize that he can't just storm away and leave her here as he was perhaps planning on doing.
"Don't sit there and act like I'm the mean one!" he says. "You're the one who -- and you know I -- and --"
"I want to go home!" she shouts, standing up. Behind her, the sound of the ocean rises like a taunt. Karl looks frightened for a moment, and she thinks of the way the community members shrink when her father loses his temper, which is rare but terrifying indeed. Karl is right, she is like him. She's selfish and unexplainable, the spoiled baby who survived, so determined to have her way that she fought off death.
"Alex --"
"I mean it! Right now!"
"You can't get mad at me!" he shouts.
"Yes, I can!"
"No! You don't really want me to kiss you."
"Yes, I do!" She realizes as she says so that it's true, then wishes she hadn't told him.
"Okay, then!" He scoffs, holds his hands out in exasperation. "Come and do it."
"You do it!"
"This is dumb." He shakes his head. "You know what? Forget it."
"Karl!"
"What?"
"I don't know! You're a jerk!"
He walks to her the way she came to him on the dock, as if what will happen when he gets there is already fated and he only needs to align himself. She grabs him too enthusiastically, and they both go tumbling down to the sand when their lips meet. Alex is afraid for a moment that she'll chip a tooth against his, but then she's only laughing, they both are, and when she licks his bottom lip he curses, then apologizes.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck," she whispers back into his mouth. "Say it all you want, I don't care."
"Don't," he says, grabbing her hips.
"Don't what?"
"Just quit squirming, you'll--" He inches out from under her, leaving her on her elbows in the sand. She watches him from behind the veil of her messy hair, sighs.
"This is not how I imagined it," she says, rolling onto her back.
"Sorry," he says bitterly. He's adjusting his pants like he's got sand fleas all of a sudden.
"Hey." She reaches for his hand. "C'mere."
He blinks at her, then leans in slow, pauses to meet her eyes before he shuts his and kisses her on the mouth, just a little peck. She arches up to him and tries again to slip her tongue through his lips, which still feels ridiculous but also good, particularly when he does the same to her.
"I've got to take a break," he says, and he lies back in the sand, sucks in a deep breath.
"A break?" She stares at him, and he rolls away from her. "You're so weird." He doesn't respond, only curls up like he's got a stomachache. She reaches over to touch the smooth skin on the back of his neck, dark from the sun and covered in tiny blond hairs.
"You're not helping," he says weakly.
"Not helping what?"
"Do you seriously not know?"
"Uh, no."
Karl groans. "Ask Sabine about it sometime."
"Ask her about what? Karl!" She grabs his shoulder and rolls him over. He winces, and she looks down to see him holding his hands over his lap.
"Don't make fun of me," he says. He looks close to tears. Alex just wants to kiss him again, is completely lost.
"Karl," she says, softly now. She leans down to lick the corner of his mouth. He makes a sound somewhere between a whimper and a swallow. "It's okay," she says, confused. His eyes flutter shut when she strokes his cheek.
"Why do you like me all of a sudden?" he asks.
"I don't know. It's not a big deal. Can't we just kiss and not tell anyone?"
He lets out his breath. "Okay. But you need an anatomy lesson. Because. It's gonna -- affect me." He still won't take his hands off of his lap. Alex frowns, considers what she does know about anatomy, which is not a lot. She's had a few lessons with Colleen, one of the nurses at the medical center. Her father likes everyone to participate in her education.
"Oh!" she says when it dawns on her like the answer for a test. "You mean, like, you have an -- oh." She grins, and he brings one hand up to cover his face.
"I told you, don't make fun of me."
"I'm not!" She kisses his cheek. "It's kind of awesome, actually."
"Yeah, my amazing talent."
"Mine, more like," she says, and he snorts a laugh. She grins and puts her head against his shoulder, thinks about her brief lessons in human reproduction. She would have preferred a teacher like Sabine, who would giggle over the details with her. Colleen simply told her which parts fit together with a perfectly straight face, as if she were describing how to bake a cake. Alex began to wonder if giving a sex ed class was some sort of punishment Colleen had earned, or if her father simply thought she would be the one to make sex sound the least interesting.
Anyway, it doesn't matter. She's not going to have sex with Karl, for crying out loud. She laughs at the idea, until he's laughing, too, asking her what's so funny.
"Are you better?" she asks, sitting up. The sun has started to sink. Karl takes his hands away from his lap.
"Yeah. We should get back."
"Right, right." She sighs. "Karl."
"What?"
"I don't know." She grins and kisses him again, risking another anatomical phenomenon.
*
It's dark by the time she gets home, and her heartbeat is pulsing loudly between her ears. She half expects to find her father arranging a search party, complete with torches and automatic weapons, but when she opens the front door he's sitting calmly on the living room sofa, reading.
He's got his glasses on, which is never a good sign.
They stare at each other for a moment, both waiting for the other to crack. Alex realizes that she really is a bit like him, but how she was supposed to avoid that, she doesn't know. He raised her, after all.
"I hope you enjoyed that little excursion, because it was the last one you'll have for quite a long time," Ben finally says.
"Why?" Alex asks. "What's the big deal if I don't spend the whole day clinging to your arm?"
"That's hardly what I expect of you. I cannot, however, allow you to leave this compound without informing me and without having someone along who can take care of you if anything should happen."
"I did have someone," she says, and then she bites her lip. She shouldn't have admitted that much.
"Yes, I saw the exit code on the gate," Ben says, his jaw shifting in the subtle way that tells her she's screwed. "Betsy's son. Karl. I might have known."
"We just went to the beach!"
"What you did doesn't interest me." Ben holds up a hand and shuts his eyes, which is more than she usually gets out of him when he's furiously angry. "What I'm telling you now is that it won't happen again."
"Fine, what do I care?" Alex says. "It's just Karl."
Ben watches her walk toward her room, following her with his eyes but keeping his head still, as if one wrong move will trip some alarm.
"Indeed," she hears him mutter before she slams her bedroom door.
Inside, Alex lets out her breath and falls onto her bed. She's terrified for Karl. What if her father tries to send he and Betsy away? She wouldn't put it past him. People have disappeared before.
She rolls onto her side and considers what happened on the beach, pictures Karl lying beside her like he did in the sand, physically -- agitated? engaged? -- by her kisses. When she tries to imagine Goodwin in his place, it's all wrong. But she's not in love with Karl. That's important to remember, even as she slides the palm frond bag from between her mattress and the wall, and strokes it like she stroked his cheek. He's just someone to kiss. He's got a good mouth. And his eyes aren't bad either.
She slides the bag back into its hiding place and turns to stare at the ceiling, unable to keep a maniac grin off her face, despite the almost audible presence of her father plotting her punishment out in the living room. It was worth it, the best day of her life so far. Better than archery lessons from Goodwin. This was completely different, too real and so strange, a kind of pleasant disaster that she can fully take credit for. She's shaking all over, and she wants someone to put a hand against her chest, to hold her still. She wants it to be Karl.
*
//
A/N: This is the first in a chronological series of Alex fics I have planned. The original plan was for a four-parter: in the next fic she'll be fifteen, she'll be sixteen in the third, and a ghost in the fourth. But I'm thinking the sixteen year old action that takes place during the show might be crazy long, or at least longer than one installment. So we'll see. Thanks for reading!
Title: Toward the End of Time
Author: hollycomb
Rating: R
Pairing: Alex/Karl
Summary: "Their memories of everything that occurred took place with the other’s face as a backdrop, and sometimes the air was grainy like a movie about evening, and sometimes there was an ending in the air that looked like a scene from a different beginning." --Arda Collins
Notes: Pre-finale, spoilers for the rest.
~
"And how are things between you and your father?"
Alex takes a break from staring at the floor to give Harper a disbelieving look.
"Did he tell you to ask me that?"
"Of course not. You know I don't discuss our sessions with him."
Alex doesn't know that, and in fact she's pretty sure that Harper does report back to Ben after these forced therapy afternoons. She leans back on the sofa, lets out her breath.
"Everything's fine."
"He did mention to me, just in conversation, that you've seemed lethargic lately."
"Yeah, well."
"Is there any particular reason? Have you started your period yet?"
Alex sits up, glowers at her.
"No." She did, actually, two weeks ago, just three days before her fourteenth birthday. She hasn't told anyone but Sabine, who gave her supplies that she's kept hidden in her room. It's nobody's business, certainly not her father's. What would he know about it?
"It can be a complicated time in a young woman's life," Harper says, as if she knows she's lying. Alex sometimes wonders if she can read minds. Her father would send her to a mind reader rather than a real therapist. She doubts all the time that Harper is qualified for this job.
"Complicated? Are you kidding? I wish my life was complicated." Wearing tampons for a week every month is hardly the kind of excitement that 'becoming a woman' once seemed to promise.
"And why is that?" Harper asks, smiling slightly, as she always does when Alex offers any information semi-willingly.
"Because I'm bored," Alex says. "All the time."
"And what exactly do you think would make your life more exciting?"
Alex leans back again, stares at the ceiling. She can hear the little brass clock on Harper's bookshelf ticking, her weekly hour of torture almost up.
"How about living in a real city, where everyone in town hasn't known me since I was a baby?"
Harper's smile is so condescending, Alex wants to get up and walk out.
"Believe me," Harper says. "You would be more miserable there than you are here."
"I doubt it."
"Well," Harper says. "You're young."
The clock chimes, and Alex jumps off the sofa. It's noon, and she's free to go. There is nothing she's particularly looking forward to today, except no longer being in this room, answering these questions. She goes for the door without offering Harper any sort of goodbye, but when she turns the knob, it's locked. A vague sense of panic shoots through her.
"Oh, sorry," Harper says. "I've gotten used to locking it behind me."
Alex unlocks the door, then the dead bolt. She frowns at Harper.
"Why?"
Harper smiles, just insincerely this time. She has about twenty different ways of smiling, and Alex loathes them all equally.
"No reason," she says. "Have a great day, Alex."
~
Her father makes pork for dinner, with a fancy fig sauce and green beans on the side, salad with avocado. There is fresh baked bread, fresh squeezed juice. Alex hates the production that he makes of every dinner, candles and music and cloth napkins. She feels like she's on a date that someone else didn't show up for.
"And how was your day?" he asks. Same question every night. He even holds his fork the same way every time he asks it, horizontal over his plate.
"Fine."
"The usual answer," he says, stabbing at his green beans.
"To the usual question."
"Touché."
"Do I have to keep seeing Harper?" Alex asks.
"I don't see why it's such an inconvenience," Ben says. "I would have appreciated having someone professional to talk to when I was your age."
Alex snorts into her plate, avoids the obvious joke. "Someone professional? I'd rather have a friend."
"You have friends."
"Yeah, and they're all twenty years older than me."
"That's such a bad thing?"
Alex clamps her mouth shut, stares at a spot on the wall to the left of her father's head. He doesn't understand. When he was young, there were other kids his age on the Island. The closest she's got to a contemporary is Karl, the errand boy at the medical center. He's sixteen, and extremely boring, just like everything else here.
"Anyway, I hate her," she says.
"You hate everyone these days."
"That's not true." It is, actually, or close to true. The only company she can stand is that of Sabine, her neighbor, and occasionally Tom, who has been teaching her how to fire a gun.
"Harper's been locking her door," she tells her father, who doesn't look up from his plate.
"She's allowed to do that if she feels she needs to."
"But why does she feel she needs to?"
"You'd have to ask her."
"I'm finished," Alex says, pushing her plate away. Lately nothing annoys her more than these conversations with her father. She thought that as she got older he would be more willing to actually answer her questions, but that was a fool's hope. "Can I be excused?"
"Of course." Ben pats his mouth with his napkin. "Can I get a thank you for cooking this meal for you?" he asks as she stands.
"Thanks," she mutters. "I'll do the dishes later."
"Where are you going?"
"Just for a walk!" she says, her hand on the doorknob. "Is that okay?"
"Stay in the --"
"I know, Dad! I know."
As if she could get out of the compound if she wanted to.
~
Outside, the last of the sunset is still lingering in the sky, orange so dark it's almost blue. Alex walks through the residential area, smelling someone's barbecue, hearing voices through windows, people laughing, records playing. She walks all the way to the small beach near the lake, which her father doesn't like her to do, especially not at night. Glad to find it empty, she sits down in the sand.
Sabine tells her she has a charmed life. She tells her about what it was like back in the real world, how awful it was, the ignorance and pointlessness of people who aren't working together toward a common goal, just grabbing whatever they can for themselves. Alex loves Sabine, but she can't believe her thirty-seven year old friend is naive enough not to see that that's exactly what's going on here, most of the time.
"Hey."
Alex turns, though she doesn't want to, recognizing the voice. It's Karl, standing maybe twenty feet behind her, holding his hands behind his back.
"Hi, Karl," she says, turning back toward the lake, hoping he'll get the hint. He doesn't, and comes to sit beside her.
Karl grew up on the Island like Alex did, came here when he was three years old but doesn't remember anything about his life before. His mother is a lab technician at the medical center, and she's training him to follow in her footsteps. His father didn't join them, stayed in America, in Evansville, Indiana, where Karl was born. It's the most interesting tidbit Alex has ever been able to get out of him about life off of the Island: the name of that town, that state.
"I got you -- well, I made you something," Karl says, still hiding his hands behind his back. Alex gives him a pitying look. He's been trying to camouflage his pimples with sunburn, and his face is red as usual.
"Why?" she asks. "I mean, thanks, but--"
"Your birthday." He grins. "Remember?"
She rolls her eyes. "Yeah, I remember. It was two weeks ago."
"Right, but it took me longer than I expected to finish this. Here."
He hands her a lumpy bag made out of palm fronds that have been woven together. It's been patched with glue in places where the fronds dried out and broke.
"Thanks," she says, actually kind of touched, though what she'll do with this thing she has no idea. "It's neat."
"I know it looks like shit." He jumps at the sound of the curse, and Alex grins. All of the adults go out of their way not to curse around her, though of course her father never needs to, has probably never uttered a bad word in all of his dull, rational life.
"It doesn't look like shit," she says. "It looks great. I could never do this, I'm too clumsy to even sew. Sabine was trying to teach me, but--"
Karl interrupts her by leaning forward to kiss her on the mouth. She's too shocked to react for a moment, but pushes him away when she feels his tongue against her lips. She boggles at him. He's redder than usual.
"Karl!"
"Sorry!" He gets up, scrambling for traction in the sand. "I didn't mean to, I don't know, I didn't mean to!" He's already walking away, hands in his hair like he wants to tear chunks of it out.
Alex puts the bag against her face, and holds in her laughter until he's gone. She's known about Karl liking her for some time, has caught him staring at her during community dinners, but she's not particularly flattered. Who else is he going to admire, one of the women his mother's age, the married ones who changed his diapers when he first arrived here? It's stupid, the way the adults look at she and Karl like they're preordained to fall in love, chuckling about it with jealous nostalgia.
Karl might be stuck falling in love with her, but Alex is already spoken for, though the object of her affection doesn't know it yet. At the moment, he's married to her therapist.
Back the house, she goes to bed without washing the dishes and lies on top of her blankets, still dressed. She shuts her eyes and imagines Goodwin finding her on the beach, kissing her like that in the middle of a sentence. She knows she's too young for him, but someday, maybe. He certainly deserves better than Harper.
She realizes she's got Karl's bag still hugged to her chest, and holds it up to the moonlight from the window. Karl will find somebody else. Maybe she can ask her father to recruit someone new for him, a beautiful girl who wants to leave the world behind. The thought of it bothers her, but she knows that's not fair. Secretly, she does enjoy Karl's attentions a little bit. She just doesn't want Goodwin to get the wrong idea about them.
The bag Karl made fits neatly between the bed and the wall, pressed flat. She'd love to carry it around as a signal to Karl that she's not mad about the kiss, but her father, if he sees it, will definitely get the wrong idea.
~
Two days later, the community has its monthly picnic in the square, and Alex's father forces her to attend. Annoyed, she hopes at least that Goodwin will be there. Last month, Tom set up an archery game, and Goodwin helped Alex with her aim. It was the thrill of her year -- no, her life -- being so close to him while he still smelled like charcoal and fire from manning the grill.
"Did you bring the bow and arrow and all that?" Alex asks Tom when they run into him on the way to the party, Alex holding a bowl of salad, her father a case of wine.
"Alex," he scolds before Tom can respond. "Don't say 'and all that.'"
Alex ignores him, and keeps her eyes on Tom, who winks at her.
"It's touch football this month, kiddo," he says, nodding to the ball tucked under his arm.
Alex wilts for a moment, then considers the 'touch' aspect of the game. She imagines being tackled, picked up over Goodwin's shoulder as a kind of joke, both of them laughing, and she nearly drops the salad.
"What are you smiling about?" her father asks.
"Nothing."
"Well." He sighs. "It's nice to see."
Alex sets the salad down on the buffet table and smiles vaguely at greetings from the women who are unwrapping casserole dishes and distributing spoons. She walks around looking for Goodwin and doesn't see him, but that doesn't mean he won't come. Maybe he's just got some work to finish up first.
She spots Karl sitting at a table with his mother, drinking from a plastic cup and scanning the crowd. She waves at him and he pretends not to notice. Alex hasn't seen him since he tried to kiss her by the lake, imagines he's been hiding. Feeling guilty, and also a little sadistic, she heads over to talk to him.
"Hi, Betsy," she says to Karl's mother. "Karl," she adds, smiling. He lifts his hand in a kind of wave, keeps his eyes on his cup.
"Alex, how are you?" Betsy asks, motioning for her to sit down. She does, beside Karl, who still won't look at her. "Is your father here?"
"Yeah, he's around somewhere. How are things at the medical station?"
"Oh, you know. Just keeping a close eye on Samantha."
Alex nods somberly. Samantha is the latest woman to get pregnant on the Island. She's five months along now, approaching the time when all the others died.
"How is she?"
"She's fine," Betsy says, not really paying attention. She's watching something, and Alex turns to see Ethan coming toward the table, his usual weird attempt at smile stretched across his face. Karl squeezes his cup, and the plastic pops.
"Hello," Ethan says when he arrives. "Beautiful day, isn't it?"
"It really is," Betsy says, beaming at him. Alex glances at Karl. His jaw has gone tight.
"I'm gonna go, uh . . .," Karl trails off, and gets up. Alex follows him across the square, where the few musicians in the community are setting up, getting ready to play. Karl walks toward the gazebo, and then into it, leans on its railing.
"Hey," Alex says, stepping in behind him. "What's wrong?"
"Why are you following me?" Karl asks. He seems surprised at his own tone, lets his face go soft again.
"Nothing -- I'm not --"
"I just hate that guy," he says, flicking his chin back toward the party.
"Ethan?"
"Yeah, Ethan. He's trying to, I don't know. Date my mom."
Alex laughs, and regrets it when Karl glowers at her. He starts to rush out of the gazebo, but she catches his hand. The gesture punches through her, the heat of his palm taking her out of the moment, and she lets go. She's too tuned in to this stuff lately, thinking all the time about Goodwin, how much she wants to do things with him that are still mostly formless in her imagination. She feels possessed, and especially since Karl kissed her.
"He's not so bad," she says, though she's not sure this is true. She doesn't like Ethan, and doesn't blame Karl for not wanting him around his mother. She's always been glad, secretly, that her father hasn't tried to date anyone since her mother died giving birth to her. Not that she feels any particular loyalty to the mother she never knew and whose pictures her father can't even stand to display. It would still be hard.
Karl makes a face. "He's weird."
"Well, yeah. Who here isn't?"
Karl grins, and Alex does, too, looks away. When she glances back at the square, she sees Goodwin arriving, catching the football Tom brought and laughing. Harper is nowhere to be found.
"Goodwin came," she says, smiling wider.
"So?"
"So, he's nice." Alex raises her shoulders, caught. "Are you going to play football?" she asks, changing the subject.
"No." Karl shuts one eye, makes a face like he's bracing himself for an inoculation. "Aren't you mad at me?" he asks.
"What for?"
"Um, for. Whatever."
She knows what he means. He's brave to even mention it.
"Karl, I'm not mad. It's -- fine."
He walks out of the gazebo, and this time she lets him go. She looks back toward Goodwin, who is shaking hands with her father. If only he knew.
She and Goodwin get picked for opposite touch football teams, but there is no tackling. No one even reaches for her hip to tag her, and it makes her hate this community all the more, makes her want to give up. She's Ben's daughter, and they all treat her like glass. Karl doesn't play, sits on the sidelines and sneaks wine from his plastic cup. The best Alex gets is slapping Goodwin's hand after the game, congratulating his team for winning. She's out of breath, and so is he, and it's almost enough to get her knees weak.
"Are you going to dance?" she hears herself say. The band is starting up again, the game finished, and the music they're playing makes her feel reckless, weightless, stupid. Goodwin breaks into his perfect grin. She knows he thinks of himself as one of her benevolent guardians, like everyone else here.
"Are you?" he asks.
"I dunno."
"C'mon," he says, pulling her to the brick patio in front of the band. Alex laughs and pretends to be reluctant, drags her feet. It is embarrassing, really. No one else is dancing. Goodwin spins her, and she watches the twinkling lights someone has strung up on the trees spin around her, gets pulled back in. She's glad Harper isn't here, because she can feel it on her face, how obvious it is that she loves him, that she could do this forever.
Other people come forward to dance, including Ethan and Betsy. Alex looks back toward Karl, but his chair is empty. She gets passed between several partners, grabbing hands with Greta, Bonnie, and Matthew, who just last year she was foolishly in love with. Well, she thought she was in love. She didn't know, then, what it was really like. She comes back to Goodwin, reaching through a crush of laughing, drunk adults to find his hand again.
"Without you here, no one would bother to dance," Goodwin says.
Without you, I wouldn't have bothered, either, she thinks.
"You keep us all young," her father chimes in, suddenly at her shoulder. He takes her arm and leads her from the patio. She looks back toward Goodwin, who is already distracted by Bonnie, picking her up and spinning her around, both of them laughing. Alex's dizziness turns to nausea, and she wants to hit her father, hard. She yanks her arm out of his hand.
"What are you doing?" she asks.
"Nothing. We're going home. It's late, and all of these people have had too much to drink. You don't need to linger in this environment, trust me."
"Trust you?" She glares at him. "Why should I? You're always lying to me."
"Alex--"
"Like now. You're just mad that I'm having fun and you're not."
"Please don't be so immature."
She recognizes a particular tone in his voice, one that tells her she won't win this. She walks home ahead of him, her arms crossed over her chest. When she gets inside and slams into her room, she hopes he won't follow her and try one of his "rational dissections" of their argument, but he seems to know, too, that any further communication is useless. She hears his bedroom door close.
Lying on her side in bed, she lets her eyes get wet, knowing she's being dramatic, but she's less upset about being dragged away from Goodwin than about not having anyone to talk to now, to gush with about the way his hands were warm, but not sweaty like Matthew's, to help her criticize Bonnie and to share her exasperation over her father and his treatment of her.
She wipes her eyes, knowing that even if her mother was alive, she wouldn't be able to talk with her about any of this. Her mother would probably be on her father's side, though really Alex doesn't know. She doesn't know anything about her.
~
Five weeks later, everyone gathers again in the courtyard, this time for Samantha's memorial service. Her body is elsewhere, will be studied by the doctors on the Island and then buried in the little graveyard on the far eastern end of the compound. Samantha's husband, Rick, is not in attendance; there are rumors that he was so distraught he had to be sedated. Tom is with him. Alex thinks they should have waited to do the memorial service until Rick was ready to join them. She watches her father step forward to say a few words.
"We have all made sacrifices," he says. Alex hears someone choke out a sob, and looks across the courtyard to see Ethan folding Betsy into his arms. She was at Samantha's bedside when she died. Alex looks around for Karl, knowing this gesture will upset him, and finally sees him near the back of the crowd, looking at the ground with his mouth hanging open, like he's getting ready to ask for an explanation. Alex's eyes well up as Betsy struggles to keep her crying contained.
This is no way to live.
She leaves the memorial service early, skipping the refreshments. Her father is too overwhelmed with grieving community members to notice. She walks down to the lake, takes her shoes off and sits on the short dock with her legs hanging in the water. Chewing on her lip, she tries to stop herself from losing her composure, though no one is around. The usual survivor's guilt pushes at her like hands against her back, and she thinks about dropping forward into the dark water. Whenever there is a memorial service for a pregnant woman, she imagines that everyone in attendance is staring at her, wondering why she got to survive when all of the other babies died, taking their mothers with them.
She's wiping her cheeks dry when she hears footsteps on the dock behind her. She looks up hoping to find her father, but, as usual, he's too busy speaking with his followers to comfort his daughter. Karl is standing at the edge of the deck, his thumbs hooked in his pockets.
"Um," he says.
Alex gets up, her legs soaked and dripping, and goes to him without pausing to consider it, leans up on tiptoes to put her arms around his shoulders. He seems stunned for a moment, but recovers and hugs her waist, puts his cheek against her forehead. Alex doesn't know what to say, how to tell him how grateful she is right now for his familiar smell, which reminds her of Betsy's house, and the field behind it where she and Karl used to play together when they were very young. He squeezes her tighter, and she pushes her wet face against his neck.
"I hate it here," she says, her voice a pathetic choke. "We should leave."
"Me and you?"
"All of us. Everyone. What's the point?"
Karl shakes his head. "I don't know. My mother says we're lucky to be here."
"Has anyone ever told you why?"
"Not really."
Alex takes a deep breath and turns back to the lake. She realizes with a kind of curious flick that she wants Karl to try and kiss her again. It actually wasn't that bad. She's actually been thinking about it a lot. There's no way she'll be talked into falling for Karl -- it's too predictable, too boring -- but maybe they could kiss again. For practice.
"Do you have the access code for the security gate?" she asks him.
"Your father would kill me," he says.
"Please, Karl, I just want to go to the beach. I need to see the ocean, something that's not just connected to this place."
"Alex, he'll kill me."
"He won't even notice! He's overseeing the memorial, calming people down. We'll only be gone for an hour."
Karl sighs and looks up at the sky in defeat, like she's got a gun to his head.
"He's probably got some tracking device implanted in you," he says. "So that all the alarms on the compound go off when you leave the gates."
"That's crazy! I've left the compound before."
"Not with me."
They look at each other for a moment, and Alex grins when his cheeks go red. She shrugs.
"So I'll get the access code from Tom and go by myself."
"You will not. He wouldn't give it to you."
"Well, somebody should! I'm fourteen. I'm old enough to have the code."
Karl rolls his eyes. "C'mon," he says. "I'll take you. Just remember when your dad kills me, it's your fault."
They walk around the lake and out to the edge of the valley, Karl leading and Alex following. It's about three o'clock in the afternoon, and it will take them an hour or so to walk to the beach. She wishes now that she had eaten at the memorial service, but even the emptiness of her stomach seems to fit the sense of freedom and adventure she's enjoying as they trudge through the jungle.
"I should have brought a weapon or something," Karl says when they stop to drink from a creek. Alex laughs and sits down, out of breath.
"A weapon?"
"Yeah, you know. There are animals out here."
She shrugs and lies back to watch the sun flicker through the swaying canopy above her. All her life, her father has talked about the dangers of this island and the need for their security measures. She's never seen any evidence to back up his threats. Pregnancy seems to be the only danger here.
"Have you heard the legend about the cabin?" she asks. Karl makes a face at her.
"You're crazy if you think that's true," he says.
"What? It is true! It's romantic, that somebody wanted to build a house out here that the people in the compound wouldn't know about. He built it for his girlfriend. Or his wife, something."
"Oh," Karl says. "That legend. Um, well, what? You want me to build a cabin for you?"
"I'm not your girlfriend!" She tries to make her laugh friendly, not derisive. He seems to get offended anyway, looks at her like she's crazy.
"I know that," he says. "It was a joke."
"Oh. I mean, I know. I --"
"Let's just get moving," he says, already walking away. "This was a stupid idea. I'm going to get in so much trouble."
They walk the rest of the way in silence, Alex staring ahead at the tense set of Karl's shoulders. She feels bad for him, then just annoyed with him, and has the strange desire to jump on his back and let him carry her to the beach, but that's probably just because she's tired. Still, she likes the sweat stain on the back of his shirt, and why should she like something so gross?
When they finally arrive at the beach, she runs forward like an idiot, laughing and relieved. She kicks off her shoes and walks in the waves, waits for Karl to join her. When he doesn't, she steps out of the ocean and sits in the sand, stretches her legs out so that the waves just barely reach her toes. Karl sighs and stands beside her, his hands on his hips.
"There's your ocean," he says, and she laughs until she's fallen onto her back. When she looks up at him, her hand over her eyes to shield them from the sun, he smiles down at her, and she's glad he's not still angry about the girlfriend comment.
"Karl, someone died," she says, wanting to return to earth, feeling a little nervous suddenly, too free from her usual anchors.
"I know," he says. "It happens everywhere. All over the world."
"How do we know?"
He rolls his eyes and sits down beside her. She leans up with a groan, and hunches her back to match his posture.
"What if a ship came now and offered to take us to America, where you were born?" she asks. "What would you do?"
"I don't know. What would you do?"
"I'd leave!"
"What about your father?"
"Maybe I'd leave a letter for him. Hmm, what would it say? Thanks for the memories, enjoy your precious Island, see you in hell."
"You're so stupid," Karl says, laughing. She smiles and falls against his side, likes the humid warmth of him so much that she leaves her head on his shoulder.
"Am I like my father?" she asks, guilty for how good this feels. Karl was right, her father will want to kill him if he finds out he's taken her out of the compound without a proper adult escort.
"No," Karl says. "I don't think so."
"How are we different?" Alex asks, looking up at him.
"You just are."
"Yeah, but how?"
"I don't know!" He frowns out at the horizon. "God!"
"Don't be mad," she says, pulling on his arm. He won't look at her. "Karl, hey." She tugs his elbow until he finally turns, sneaks his eyes up to hers. "You can kiss me if you want."
"What?" He seems infuriated by this, and she can't imagine why.
"I said you can--"
"I heard what you said. You know what? You are like him. You're manipulative and weird and I don't know -- I don't know."
He gets up and leaves her sitting, stunned, in the sand. Her eyes fill before she even has time to think about what just happened, automatic, like she's shut her finger in a cabinet door. Karl paces behind her, cursing, and seems to realize that he can't just storm away and leave her here as he was perhaps planning on doing.
"Don't sit there and act like I'm the mean one!" he says. "You're the one who -- and you know I -- and --"
"I want to go home!" she shouts, standing up. Behind her, the sound of the ocean rises like a taunt. Karl looks frightened for a moment, and she thinks of the way the community members shrink when her father loses his temper, which is rare but terrifying indeed. Karl is right, she is like him. She's selfish and unexplainable, the spoiled baby who survived, so determined to have her way that she fought off death.
"Alex --"
"I mean it! Right now!"
"You can't get mad at me!" he shouts.
"Yes, I can!"
"No! You don't really want me to kiss you."
"Yes, I do!" She realizes as she says so that it's true, then wishes she hadn't told him.
"Okay, then!" He scoffs, holds his hands out in exasperation. "Come and do it."
"You do it!"
"This is dumb." He shakes his head. "You know what? Forget it."
"Karl!"
"What?"
"I don't know! You're a jerk!"
He walks to her the way she came to him on the dock, as if what will happen when he gets there is already fated and he only needs to align himself. She grabs him too enthusiastically, and they both go tumbling down to the sand when their lips meet. Alex is afraid for a moment that she'll chip a tooth against his, but then she's only laughing, they both are, and when she licks his bottom lip he curses, then apologizes.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck," she whispers back into his mouth. "Say it all you want, I don't care."
"Don't," he says, grabbing her hips.
"Don't what?"
"Just quit squirming, you'll--" He inches out from under her, leaving her on her elbows in the sand. She watches him from behind the veil of her messy hair, sighs.
"This is not how I imagined it," she says, rolling onto her back.
"Sorry," he says bitterly. He's adjusting his pants like he's got sand fleas all of a sudden.
"Hey." She reaches for his hand. "C'mere."
He blinks at her, then leans in slow, pauses to meet her eyes before he shuts his and kisses her on the mouth, just a little peck. She arches up to him and tries again to slip her tongue through his lips, which still feels ridiculous but also good, particularly when he does the same to her.
"I've got to take a break," he says, and he lies back in the sand, sucks in a deep breath.
"A break?" She stares at him, and he rolls away from her. "You're so weird." He doesn't respond, only curls up like he's got a stomachache. She reaches over to touch the smooth skin on the back of his neck, dark from the sun and covered in tiny blond hairs.
"You're not helping," he says weakly.
"Not helping what?"
"Do you seriously not know?"
"Uh, no."
Karl groans. "Ask Sabine about it sometime."
"Ask her about what? Karl!" She grabs his shoulder and rolls him over. He winces, and she looks down to see him holding his hands over his lap.
"Don't make fun of me," he says. He looks close to tears. Alex just wants to kiss him again, is completely lost.
"Karl," she says, softly now. She leans down to lick the corner of his mouth. He makes a sound somewhere between a whimper and a swallow. "It's okay," she says, confused. His eyes flutter shut when she strokes his cheek.
"Why do you like me all of a sudden?" he asks.
"I don't know. It's not a big deal. Can't we just kiss and not tell anyone?"
He lets out his breath. "Okay. But you need an anatomy lesson. Because. It's gonna -- affect me." He still won't take his hands off of his lap. Alex frowns, considers what she does know about anatomy, which is not a lot. She's had a few lessons with Colleen, one of the nurses at the medical center. Her father likes everyone to participate in her education.
"Oh!" she says when it dawns on her like the answer for a test. "You mean, like, you have an -- oh." She grins, and he brings one hand up to cover his face.
"I told you, don't make fun of me."
"I'm not!" She kisses his cheek. "It's kind of awesome, actually."
"Yeah, my amazing talent."
"Mine, more like," she says, and he snorts a laugh. She grins and puts her head against his shoulder, thinks about her brief lessons in human reproduction. She would have preferred a teacher like Sabine, who would giggle over the details with her. Colleen simply told her which parts fit together with a perfectly straight face, as if she were describing how to bake a cake. Alex began to wonder if giving a sex ed class was some sort of punishment Colleen had earned, or if her father simply thought she would be the one to make sex sound the least interesting.
Anyway, it doesn't matter. She's not going to have sex with Karl, for crying out loud. She laughs at the idea, until he's laughing, too, asking her what's so funny.
"Are you better?" she asks, sitting up. The sun has started to sink. Karl takes his hands away from his lap.
"Yeah. We should get back."
"Right, right." She sighs. "Karl."
"What?"
"I don't know." She grins and kisses him again, risking another anatomical phenomenon.
*
It's dark by the time she gets home, and her heartbeat is pulsing loudly between her ears. She half expects to find her father arranging a search party, complete with torches and automatic weapons, but when she opens the front door he's sitting calmly on the living room sofa, reading.
He's got his glasses on, which is never a good sign.
They stare at each other for a moment, both waiting for the other to crack. Alex realizes that she really is a bit like him, but how she was supposed to avoid that, she doesn't know. He raised her, after all.
"I hope you enjoyed that little excursion, because it was the last one you'll have for quite a long time," Ben finally says.
"Why?" Alex asks. "What's the big deal if I don't spend the whole day clinging to your arm?"
"That's hardly what I expect of you. I cannot, however, allow you to leave this compound without informing me and without having someone along who can take care of you if anything should happen."
"I did have someone," she says, and then she bites her lip. She shouldn't have admitted that much.
"Yes, I saw the exit code on the gate," Ben says, his jaw shifting in the subtle way that tells her she's screwed. "Betsy's son. Karl. I might have known."
"We just went to the beach!"
"What you did doesn't interest me." Ben holds up a hand and shuts his eyes, which is more than she usually gets out of him when he's furiously angry. "What I'm telling you now is that it won't happen again."
"Fine, what do I care?" Alex says. "It's just Karl."
Ben watches her walk toward her room, following her with his eyes but keeping his head still, as if one wrong move will trip some alarm.
"Indeed," she hears him mutter before she slams her bedroom door.
Inside, Alex lets out her breath and falls onto her bed. She's terrified for Karl. What if her father tries to send he and Betsy away? She wouldn't put it past him. People have disappeared before.
She rolls onto her side and considers what happened on the beach, pictures Karl lying beside her like he did in the sand, physically -- agitated? engaged? -- by her kisses. When she tries to imagine Goodwin in his place, it's all wrong. But she's not in love with Karl. That's important to remember, even as she slides the palm frond bag from between her mattress and the wall, and strokes it like she stroked his cheek. He's just someone to kiss. He's got a good mouth. And his eyes aren't bad either.
She slides the bag back into its hiding place and turns to stare at the ceiling, unable to keep a maniac grin off her face, despite the almost audible presence of her father plotting her punishment out in the living room. It was worth it, the best day of her life so far. Better than archery lessons from Goodwin. This was completely different, too real and so strange, a kind of pleasant disaster that she can fully take credit for. She's shaking all over, and she wants someone to put a hand against her chest, to hold her still. She wants it to be Karl.
*
//
A/N: This is the first in a chronological series of Alex fics I have planned. The original plan was for a four-parter: in the next fic she'll be fifteen, she'll be sixteen in the third, and a ghost in the fourth. But I'm thinking the sixteen year old action that takes place during the show might be crazy long, or at least longer than one installment. So we'll see. Thanks for reading!