Lost Fic: See the World -- Epilogue
Title: See the World (Epilogue)
Author: hollycomb
Pairing: Martin Keamy/Captain Gault
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers: All available spoilers
Summary: The post-finale epilogue; earlier installments can be found here.
Not needing to sleep anymore is the hardest adaptation. Gault has considered trying it, but is afraid that if he shuts himself down for too long he won't return to even this paltry form. Though his new non-life is mostly a nightmare, he's not ready to stop existing entirely. He's afraid, too, that he might find out he can't erase what's left of himself no matter how long he shuts his eyes, and he doesn't want to know yet that he's going to be here forever.
Haunting the living is mandatory. There is nothing else to do. Keamy was of course Gault's first choice, but he's dead now as well and less interesting for it. Gault did get to see Keamy's final moments play out, and enjoyed how sloppy and oddly talkative he became after encountering Gault in the jungle near the Orchid. He credited himself entirely for Keamy's mad attempt to become a proper villain, explaining his plans and spouting bad poetry about the way Linus' daughter died, which ended up getting him killed despite his truly poetic insurance policy, the heart rate monitor, the thing Gault died asking about, which perhaps explains a lot and brings this whole catastrophe to a neat end. Or maybe it was Keamy being stabbed in the neck that did that.
Gault spent time with Keamy while he recovered from being shot, the breath knocked out of him. He sat beside him and watched him take huge gulps of air, staring at the sky and trying to regain his bearings. Gault couldn't be sure at that point if Keamy saw him or not. If he did, he made no indication, simply stumbled up and headed after Linus, followed him into a chamber deeper than hell to meet his death.
Keamy's last heartbeats pumped the blood right out of his neck, and Gault hung back in the corner, wanting to intervene partly because he didn't want to share all of eternity with Keamy, but mostly because it didn't seem like a real ending, just an offshoot of some more important story.
He knew from the beginning that Keamy wouldn't last long here. There is a savageness to this place that is much more complex than Keamy's own. Gault watched John Locke try to save him, frantic and shouting at Linus. There was a tenderness in it that had nothing to do with Keamy, but Gault still appreciated that someone was desperate to feel the last weak beats of his heart. Keamy coughed out another threat as he died, saying Widmore would someday find Ben, as if he would do so to avenge his low-level thug's death.
Keamy's ghost took one look at Gault and disappeared. He's seen him twice since, moping near the coastline like he's waiting to get picked up and taken away from here.
The Island is densely populated with ghosts, something Gault found rather hilarious at first, but now just annoying. He avoids most of them, but doesn't mind the company of Claire, who is from Sydney. Keamy killed her, too. He and Claire share an interest in Charlotte and Miles, who spend most of their time arguing and failing to successfully track the group led by Richard.
"Do you think they'll fall in love?" Claire asks Gault one day, when they've followed Charlotte and Miles to a rocky beach where they've stopped to eat and rest.
"I doubt it," Gault says. He reclines on a rock, wishing he could feel the sun on his face. He even misses pain, would do anything for a burn across the bridge of his nose.
"Why not?" Claire asks. She's always wanting something to happen, has already grown bored with the slow progress of human drama.
"He's a prick."
"Well, she's not so great, she complains all the time."
"If he's a prick and she's a nag, why would you want to see them fall in love, anyway?"
"It's not that I want it," Claire says. "I just thought, maybe."
When Sawyer and Juliet begin having an affair, Claire starts following them around the Island instead. Gault is not interested in watching other people have sex with bodiless nostalgia, and he continues wandering alongside Miles and Charlotte, until Miles finally turns on him and glares.
"What the hell do you want?" he shouts.
"Who are you talking to?" Charlotte asks, and Gault smiles.
"Going to let her think you're crazy?" he asks.
"I don't care what she thinks."
"What who thinks?" Charlotte asks. "Are you -- what are you doing?"
"It's the captain of that freighter," Miles says. "He's been following us."
"The -- what?" Charlotte laughs in confusion. "Have you gone mad?"
"Just leave us alone!" Miles shouts at Gault. He grabs Charlotte's wrist and pulls her away. Gault considers walking after them -- what could they do to stop him? -- but turns around instead. He wonders whatever became of Faraday. The freighter exploded, but he might have gotten to the helicopter. Gault is fairly sure he would know if Faraday had died. He would have shown up by now.
He finds Claire sitting alone by the lake inside the now deserted compound where she died. She's at the end of the dock, her feet in the water, and he can tell by the expression on her face how disappointing it still is to not be able to feel it, cool on her skin. He sits beside her and looks for their reflections in the water, knowing he won't see them.
"So, Miles can see us but Charlotte can't," he tells her. She shrugs.
"What's wrong?" he asks. He pats her back, can't really feel her like he would if they were alive, there's no breath and no warmth and nothing really solid about either of them, but she's more concrete and immediate to him than the wind or the sun or the water.
"I just don't understand," she says. "Why are some of the people who died here, and some aren't?"
"Search me. I don't think you'll get very far trying to put a logic to it."
"It's just that I knew someone," she says, quiet and staring at the motionless surface of the lake. "Who died here."
"What, and he hasn't shown up?"
"I loved him, was what I mean to say." She looks at Gault, heartbreakingly pretty, preserved forever with perfect skin that isn't skin, watery eyes that were actually burned away by an explosion. She's shown him her body, lying blackened in the compound behind them. They've yet to find his.
"I loved him," she says again. "And he's not here."
"But he died on the Island?"
"In the ocean. Like you."
Gault makes a motion like a sigh. It feels different without real breath to expel.
"I've got the bloke I was fucking wandering around here somewhere," he says, trying to lighten the mood.
"You what?" She laughs, and he's glad he's humiliated himself, both because it's good to see her laugh, and good to know that his soul, or whatever's left of him here, can still experience embarrassment.
"He's the fella who killed us, actually."
She laughs harder, throws up her hands. He can't help but join in, glad that he's not the only one who has posthumously found humor in this.
"No accounting for taste, eh?" he says.
"I think I knew all of this," she says, wiping at her eyes as if there were tears of laughter there. "I think I already knew. It's funny how that works."
"It is," he agrees. Knowledge clouds his consciousness like balloons floating along a ceiling. When something he already knows is actually articulated, it's as if one of the balloons pops, and the details spill out like air, inconsequential but clear.
"You should go and see him," Claire says. She kicks her feet through the water, and the surface of the lake stays perfectly still.
"What for, a chat? Should I go and gloat that he's been murdered now, too?" He's considered it.
"Just go see him." She looks at him, and Gault understands. One of her balloons has popped.
"Should I give him hell for killing you?" Gault asks, standing.
"If you want," Claire says. "It'd be a waste of time, though."
"Time, well." Gault turns to leave. "We've got plenty of that."
*
Keamy is much more locatable than he was when he was alive. Gault finds him on the beach, standing and staring out at the ocean with an expression of accusation. He seems reluctant to stray very far from the water, and also determined not to turn back to look at the Island, as if it will have him for good when he does.
"Keamy!" Gault calls, afraid that if he surprises him he'll flick away instantly. Keamy peeks back over his shoulder, turns around again.
"Get lost," he says.
"Make me."
Keamy offers no response, only folds his arms over his chest and stands up straighter. Gault thinks he looks shorter now that he's dead. Maybe he's slouching.
"Linus got away," Keamy says after a long time has passed, Gault refusing to leave or be the first to make a concession.
"Yeah, I noticed. He also killed you."
Keamy glowers at the water, his eyes almost shut against the sun. Gault wishes it would rain, can't believe it hasn't yet.
"Sorry, is that still a touchy subject?" Gault asks. More than rain, he wants to rile Keamy. This won't be any good if he can't shake him up the way he did before he died, again turn him into an ineffectual issuer of elaborate threats.
"Just go away," Keamy says. Gault does, not understanding what Claire thought either of them would get out of this. He turns back when he gets to the tree line and sees Keamy still standing there, his shoulders raised up. He's not slouching, he's wincing, or bracing himself, or just frozen into an uncomfortable posture like a startled bird, hoping he won't be seen.
"No one's coming back for you," Gault shouts. He hates Keamy for killing him when he would have died anyway, hours later. What difference did it really make? He couldn't have stopped Keamy. He wouldn't have fired.
"How was I supposed to know that?" Keamy shouts, and Gault feels as if he's been caught with his pants down.
"Let's agree not to read each other's minds," he calls back, mostly because he's disappointed that he can't read Keamy's, though he hasn't really tried yet, probably doesn't want to know.
"Fine," Keamy says. "You're the one who -- why don't you go bother those fucking scientists?"
"They told me to get lost, too."
Gault sees the corner of Keamy's grin, and he doesn't understand why this should make him feel better. He walks away, dizzy with disorientation like that he experienced after first arriving here, and he takes hold of a tree to steady himself. He doesn't know why he's still afraid to break apart. There's nothing here worth saving. He shuts his eyes and tries to find Faraday, but he's long gone.
"Have you been to see Jacob yet?" someone asks, and Gault shoots up, scrambling against the tree trunk and expecting its bark to scrape him through his shirt. He keeps waiting to get hurt again, to be relieved that he still can be. Probably everyone here is waiting to be told that there's been a mistake, that they're still alive.
Alex is the one who is asking him about Jacob. She's alone, which is unusual, and the way she is looking at Gault makes him uneasy, as if she's the only one here who might still be able to hurt him.
"Who?" he asks. "What?"
"Jacob," she says, like he should know the name, and maybe he does. He shies away from the knowledge, leaves it alone. He doesn't like not earning these things, not needing to wonder.
"No," Gault says. "I haven't seen him."
"Well, you ought to." Alex is staring at Keamy. Gault wonders if he can feel it on the back of his neck, like hairs rising. What sort of revenge can ghosts take on each other? There's got to be a reason they're all still around, and Gault is afraid -- or certain -- that it's something dark. He's more troubled by the fact that he doesn't want any sort of revenge than he is by this premonition.
"He'll answer a question for you," Alex says. "One question, anything you want to know. Even if it's about the future. Or what would have been the future."
"Is that what you asked about?" Gault knows it's a nervy question, but it's more polite than peeling back his hesitation and letting himself know anyway.
"I haven't asked anything yet," Alex says. "I'm still thinking. You only get one question." She's looking at Gault like she knows he's already made up his mind. He leaves her with Keamy, not headed in any particular direction. He might know what his question will be, but that doesn't mean he's ready to ask it.
*
Like Claire, he keeps waiting for certain dead people to show up, though his people didn't die here, not even in the ocean. More than anyone, he wants to see his younger sister. He had two sisters, an older one who hated him at first sight, and his younger sister, Carla, who was big-eyed and a little slow, always on his side. She died at seventeen, in her drunk boyfriend's car. He wouldn't mind seeing his Mum, either, only a few years dead from some mysterious heart condition that she hid from the family all her life. He prays his father won't ever stumble out of the jungle. He would just call Gault a fag and ask him what the hell he expected to come from all of that.
Nobody shows, just Claire, and sometimes Alex, her mother and boyfriend trailing her as if she's got a body left to guard. There are a few others; nobody remarkable. Gault tries to be glad that Faraday got away, that he's not here to stutter and need reassurance. He misses giving him things: the gun, the raft. He misses taking things from Keamy, too. The gun, the raft. Bracing himself against the mattress in the stateroom and just taking all he could.
Sometimes he feels stir crazy, trapped in his non-body, unable to take comfort in any of the things he used to subject himself to. There are also times when he's just charmed by the fact that he never has to worry about taking a piss again, suffering a hangover, getting shot in the chest. The sand doesn't stick to his skin the way he always hated when he was alive. But the sun doesn't touch him, either, and that's the one thing he can't get past.
He imagines that all of this must be doubly hard for Keamy, who never had much of an inner life, as far as Gault could tell. He watches him like he watches the living, from afar. Keamy keeps his eyes on the horizon, and Gault wants to ask him what the hell he's looking for out there, remembers him watching the ocean from the windows of the steering room on the night of the bad storm.
Finally, he just goes to the cabin.
Claire is hanging around in the clearing outside, leaning against a tree with her arms folded and looking like she's been scolded, sent to her room. Gault stands beside her and stares at the cabin. The stream of constant whispering that sits in the back of his mind like a different kind of hangover altogether quiets when he sets his eyes on it.
"Have you gone in there yet?" he asks Claire.
"Yeah." She pushes away from the tree, narrows her eyes. "I think he might be a liar."
Gault knows she only wants to believe this, that she didn't get the answer she wanted. He wishes he felt a manic urge to protect her like he did with Faraday. It was as addictive as anything, having a sense of purpose. But Claire is already dead, and if she's here to be saved in some other way, Gault is pretty sure that's somebody else's job.
Claire leaves him alone with the cabin, and Gault watches her go. She's careful with her steps through the jungle, the way she learned to walk when she was pregnant. If someone she loved died here, why would this place keep him from her? Gault moves toward the cabin with a kind of righteous fury, though that is not the question he is going to ask.
He hesitates when he reaches for the doorknob. More virtuous questions prickle through him. What will become of his son? His wife, will she remarry? He's afraid he knows the answers. Vera will find someone and Sammy will hate him at first, but by high school graduation he'll be calling him Dad. God knows what he'll think about the man he used to call that. If Jacob knows as well, Gault doesn't want to hear it.
He could ask questions about this place, about the fate of the world, about why he's here. He could ask Jacob who the hell he thinks he is. But he knows enough about this goddamn place already, doesn't care much about the rest of the world, and as for why he's here, he suspects it has nothing to do with him in particular. He's like a bug that's been sucked into a vacuum, crawling around in the dark and the dust, trying to figure out what he did to deserve this when he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Jacob's cabin is both dark and dusty, and it looks like it belongs to some other place, like it's got too long a history to have originated here. There is a man sitting in a chair. Gault can't see his face. It occurs to him that the man might not have one. He shuts the door behind him and feels as if he's been taken hostage.
"Well?" Jacob says, when they've both been silent for a long time. The questions Gault should ask bubble under his lip, and he holds them back, terrified that he'll slip up and do the right thing, ask about something that matters.
"Tell me everything about Martin Keamy," he says before he can.
Jacob shifts in his chair, and for a moment Gault thinks it's in excitement, as if he hasn't heard a question this good in a long time.
"Are you sure that's what you want to know?"
"Yes."
"His life was not particularly interesting."
"Tell me."
“Fine.” Jacob sits up straighter. “Normally I tell people to sit, but I think you can take this standing.”
Gault sits anyway.
"Martin Christopher Keamy was born in 1975, in Ely, Nevada," Jacob says, and regret curls into Gault, so sharply that for a moment he remembers what it was like to really have a body. He's spent his last dime on a rigged game he won't win. But he's flushed, too, especially thick in the air, waiting to watch his coin drop.
"His father was David Keamy, who had returned from Vietnam and retired from the Marine Corps the year prior. His mother was Gretchen Keamy, a waitress who lived with her parents during most of her marriage, while David was overseas. David left Gretchen for his AA sponsor when Martin was three years old. He moved to Montana and rarely saw his son. Gretchen moved to Las Vegas and continued to take waitressing jobs until she met and married Raymond Coyne, a Mormon minister with whom she had another son, Raymond Jr. Martin was a poor student who played football and decided when he was very young that he would join the Marines. After high school, he did, and he served with distinction until he was discharged for having an inappropriate relationship with an officer. He worked as a bouncer until he met a man who asked him to kill his brother-in-law, and thereafter began a new career. A political kingpin he was hired to protect in Uganda told Charles Widmore that Martin Keamy would work for anyone who fed him like he had nothing to lose. Widmore hired him to capture Ben Linus, and he died trying."
Gault walks from the cabin without looking back. He doesn't know where he's going, but then again maybe he does, because when he looks up, he's on the beach.
Keamy is sitting down now, still staring at the ocean.
"You know," Gault calls as he walks toward him. "There's a man on this Island who will tell you anything you want to know."
Certainly Keamy doesn't know what Gault has just done. But he won't look at Gault, and doesn't, in fact, seem to even really be looking at the ocean.
"I don't want to know anything," he mutters.
“Nothing? He’ll even tell you the future, if you like.”
Keamy finally looks at Gault, horrified and surprised, still, that he could be so stupid.
“The future? What future? That’s the last thing I want to hear about.”
Gault knows now how ghosts can have revenge on each other. He's not sorry for his. Keamy, probably, is not sorry for killing him.
"Cheer up, mate," Gault says. He sits down and puts an arm around Keamy, more a gesture of petulant irony than anything else, though he does wish that he could still feel the warmth and weight of another person, even him.
"Hell could have been a lot worse," Gault says.
Keamy scoffs. “What are you doing in hell?” he asks. “Who’d you kill?”
“Nobody. Get it? I guess I was supposed to shoot you when I had the chance.”
“There’s no such thing as hell, anyway,” Keamy mutters. He looks back over his shoulder as if he’s afraid the devil heard him say so, then puts his elbows on his knees, hides his face. Gault is stupidly pleased when he doesn't try to leave or even ask him to get lost, and he realizes at last how glad he is that Keamy is stuck here, that he'll never get away.
"You know what's the worst fucking part?" Keamy barks suddenly, and Gault shakes his head.
"I keep hearing all this shit -- in my head -- stuff I don't want to know." Keamy looks at Gault like he should have an answer for this. "It's like the fucking military all over again."
"Nobody told me anything when I was in the Royal Navy," Gault says. Keamy gives him the disbelieving stare.
"What the fuck does that have to do with anything?"
Gault laughs so hard he falls backward. Or maybe he does the falling on purpose, because it's what he would have done, back when he had weight and breath and a relationship with gravity. Keamy stares at him like he was staring at the ocean, waiting for a resolution.
"How about it, Martin," Gault says. "I got shot in the heart, you got stabbed in the neck. Tick, tick, tick. Boom."
"I wish I could have at least seen the ship blow up," Keamy says, so wistfully that Gault laughs himself into something that feels like revival, but only briefly.
"You and me both, mate."
Keamy grins at him like he did when Widmore introduced them, like this is the start of something that only one of them will walk away from. Gault is so relieved to know that neither of them is going anywhere, and he realizes with a belated epiphany that he is far more wicked than Keamy ever knew how to be.
"You've got to ask a question," he says when Keamy pulls him up so that they are again, ridiculously, huddled together.
"Huh?"
"Of Jacob, that bloke who can tell you anything. You can't waste that. At least ask another one for me."
"What the hell does anything matter now? What do you want to know?"
"Were you really named after a saint?" It's a follow-up question he didn't feel entitled to ask Jacob.
Keamy shakes his head, not in answer to the question, but as if Gault keeps failing to learn the same lesson.
"Yeah, okay?" He throws out his hands. "Patron saint of soldiers. What difference does it make?"
Gault doesn't respond, and doesn't say anything when Keamy reaches over to put his fingers in the hollow of his throat. There's nothing, not the faintest flicker of a ghost of an echo of a pulse. Gault would fake it for him if he could. Keamy takes his hand away, looks out at the horizon again.
"Jesus," he says. "That didn't go the way I thought it would."
He could be talking about a number of things. The mission to capture Linus. The hollow of Gault's throat, the heartbeat he's got the balls to look for even after he stilled it himself. Life in general.
"There's got to be something you want to ask," Gault says. Keamy moans, rubs his face. Gault feels normal for a moment, and thinks that if they can just irritate each other until the end of time, they might pull one over on hell, get away with being only slightly miserable.
"You were in the Navy," Keamy says. "Were you in Vietnam?"
That wasn't what Gault meant by something he must want to ask. Keamy should go to Jacob, take advantage of the one allowance this place offers. But Gault goes along with it, because maybe it's better that they only get answers from each other.
"Yeah," he says. "Sort of."
"What was it like?" Keamy's voice is so buried that Gault probably wouldn't hear it if they weren't both dead and didn't need to say any of this out loud anyway.
Gault doesn't really know. He was on a ship, ferrying supplies more often than troops, he saw it from afar. He remembers standing at the stern one night and thinking he heard gunfire, explosions, but it turned out to be the ship's malfunctioning refrigeration equipment, blowing out for good below deck.
"It was intense," Gault says. "It was the most intense experience of my life." Keamy doesn't need to know what he's really talking about, and he won't guess, because to him it was just killing time on a job that ended badly.
Gault has thousands of stories about Vietnam. Keamy won't care that none of them are really his. Gault has read novels about the war, seen movies, heard rumors on the ferry from men who were really there, who saw everything.
Keamy uncurls while Gault talks, spills his legs out on the sand like he once did on Gault's bed, drops his hands between them and lets his shoulders sink. He's been waiting a pretty long time to hear this, and Gault might have known that even if he'd asked Jacob a different question.
"What about your kid?" Keamy asks suddenly, cutting Gault off in the middle of a story his regular bartender told him about Binh Gia.
"What about him?"
Keamy doesn't say anything. He spreads his hand out in the sand, picks it up.
"It's weird how you can do that and not leave an imprint," he mutters.
Gault takes that as an apology, goes on with his story.
*
Ten thousand miles away and twenty years later, Daniel Faraday sits Indian-style in his backyard in New Haven, attempting to fix his daughter's telescope. She doesn't really care about the thing, about astronomy or science in general, but maybe that's why he's so determined to fix it. The lens sits on the grass, reflecting sunlight. It's a cloudless day, and he's supposed to be getting ready for his oldest son's graduation from high school.
"Dan," Charlotte calls from the back door. The New England hardness that has crept into her accent since they moved here is never more evident than it is when she says his name. He turns back, gives her a wavering smile.
"We'll be late," she says. She tosses out her hands, lets them slap her sides. She's wearing that green dress that Dan likes. She hardly ever wears dresses. He smiles again.
"I'll be right there!"
She knows he doesn't mean it, goes back into the house with a groan. He turns back to the telescope, and his hands are shaking. He isn't sure why. Sometimes, outdoors, in direct sunlight like this, he starts to remember.
There was a special on television last night, something about the Oceanic Six and the twenty year anniversary of their return. They've all since disappeared, even the baby. Dan squints up at the sky and thinks about that baby, who is probably taller and stronger than him now, a man. That, or he's dead.
He doesn't think so, though. Sometimes he wonders if he's the one who died, if he's stuck in some half-reality, a skew that he was lucky to float into. It was too easy, and he's been trying to figure out why. Desmond and Penelope Widmore pulled him out of the ocean with the others in his raft, onto a ship that bore him safely to real land, the sort that couldn't spontaneously disappear. He returned to America in obscurity and lived like a ghost for a year, rarely leaving his rented apartment in Boston. Then Charlotte showed up at his door, beaming and explaining nothing. Daniel didn't want an explanation, just wanted her arms finally around him.
It's been too easy, and something about the way he left that island has always bothered him, like a misplaced negative sign in an otherwise elegant equation that nevertheless makes the rest useless. Not that his life has been useless. It's been good, actually, but that's the troubling part.
He has dreams sometimes. Not exactly nightmares, but he doesn't look forward to them. He dreams about that island that shifted and whispered and didn't exist in any sort of universe he could make sense of. Widmore had enticed him with promises of unique phenomena, but there was more to it than that. He's still stuck on the day he left, the raft and that last look at Charlotte, and the captain of the freighter stepping out of the jungle to give him a grocery list he'd written three years ago. He said Daniel might need the list to steady himself while he drove the others to safety, but it was after he reached land that Daniel needed the list most. Until Charlotte returned to him, he studied it, rearranging the words into every possible permutation, investigating it as if it was a code, something for him to decipher. After he married Charlotte, he put it away, tucked it into his wallet. Like the island, and what happened to his wife in the year that she spent on it without him, it was not given to him to solve.
This is hard for him to accept. It's in his nature to puzzle things out, but maybe less so, now. He lets his children's teenage motivations remain opaque, and Charlotte's implacable calm, her quiet refusal to discuss the things that still haunt him. He looked up that freighter captain when he returned to America, and found that he'd been declared dead, a victim of malfunctioning scientific equipment on Widmore's research freighter that exploded and killed everyone on board, including Daniel Faraday and Charlotte Lewis. Their new last name is Faris, a combination of the old ones. No one has ever come looking for them. Daniel had to give up his career -- Dan Faris doesn't have a doctorate -- but independent research suits him better than teaching, and he's funded by a Charlotte Lewis Memorial Grant.
"Dan!" she calls again, this time through the window. "Leave that thing, will you? We've got to get moving, the traffic will be bad."
"Coming, coming," he mutters, trying to fit the telescope's lens back into its casing. It's suddenly too big, which doesn't make any sense.
Daniel leaves the telescope parts on the grass and stands, looks up at their house. Graduation ceremonies exhaust him, and he doesn't see why finishing high school should be considered such an accomplishment, though for his oldest son, who is more interested in sneaking girls into his second story bedroom than academics, it actually is quite an achievement.
He's lucky, he knows, to have these sort of petty concerns, these suburban problems. He's lucky to have Charlotte, was close to becoming a real ghost when she found him in Boston. Every night before bed, he wants to ask her how she got off the island, why she came back to him.
He thinks it might have something to do with Huston Gault.
Still standing in the middle of the backyard, he hears the doors on Charlotte's car opening out in the driveway, the sound of his children's voices as they climb in, and he takes his wallet out of his back pocket. The pencil markings on the grocery list are worn almost completely away. He can see most of the word "crackers," but that's about it.
It doesn't matter. He memorized the list, and he remembers the most obvious message he found in it, the one that should seem nonsensical but always tugs at him, even looking now at this now disintegrating piece of paper. The words "come back" were spelled down the paper with the first letter of each word, and he was the one who wrote it, so he should have known that, should know what it means.
He walks forward to the car, carefully folding the list back into his wallet. He thinks of Huston Gault telling him to go, then giving him this paper that asked him to come back. But Gault didn't write the message, Daniel did, some other Daniel who might as well be a stranger after all that's happened.
Daniel didn't want to go that day, but not until Gault told him he should. Before that, he'd been determined to leave as soon as possible. He would never have let Charlotte stay if he hadn't spoken with Gault, and he doesn't know why. He felt she would be safe with him. The man was inconsequential on the freighter, hardly even in command, but on the island, Daniel felt like he had the power to keep Charlotte alive.
"Everyone ready?" she asks when Daniel climbs into the passenger seat. She looks into the backseat for unenthusiastic responses from the kids. Sometimes she complains that they're such Americans, as if that's Daniel's fault. She was the one who was afraid to go home after she came back from the island.
Daniel watches the usual scenery pass as they drive toward the high school. He can't shake the feeling that his whole life is some sort of mystery that he was supposed to eventually understand but never will. He knows he's lucky not to understand, that understanding would likely kill him, but he's afraid sometimes that Charlotte is withholding important information, that she doesn't want him to know what happened to her because it means she's won, she's solved something that he gave up on.
Sometimes it feels like he hasn't given up, though what he can do about investigating that long ago part of his life, he doesn't know. He could ask his wife, who would smile and laugh and change the subject. He could search newspapers for the name Huston Gault, as if he's a kind of keystone. Once he even went to the grocery store and bought all of the things on the grocery list, but no sudden realization or time shift or death ray struck him as he left the store.
"Try not to fall asleep at the ceremony, Dad," his son says, leaning forward to poke his shoulder. Dan shakes out of his thoughts, laughs as if this is a ridiculous idea and not actually very probable.
"Are you alright?" Charlotte asks, with a grin that makes him want to say yes, he is. And he is, mostly.
"Sure, sure." He pats her knee and looks out the window. He wishes that he didn't feel that Huston Gault handing him that list saved both of them, because then he could wish that he never had, and he wouldn't have to see Gault standing there, all the time, like it's painted inside his eyelids, Gault watching Daniel leave with that note clutched in his hand, the list that was asking him already: come back, come back, come back.
Author: hollycomb
Pairing: Martin Keamy/Captain Gault
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers: All available spoilers
Summary: The post-finale epilogue; earlier installments can be found here.
Not needing to sleep anymore is the hardest adaptation. Gault has considered trying it, but is afraid that if he shuts himself down for too long he won't return to even this paltry form. Though his new non-life is mostly a nightmare, he's not ready to stop existing entirely. He's afraid, too, that he might find out he can't erase what's left of himself no matter how long he shuts his eyes, and he doesn't want to know yet that he's going to be here forever.
Haunting the living is mandatory. There is nothing else to do. Keamy was of course Gault's first choice, but he's dead now as well and less interesting for it. Gault did get to see Keamy's final moments play out, and enjoyed how sloppy and oddly talkative he became after encountering Gault in the jungle near the Orchid. He credited himself entirely for Keamy's mad attempt to become a proper villain, explaining his plans and spouting bad poetry about the way Linus' daughter died, which ended up getting him killed despite his truly poetic insurance policy, the heart rate monitor, the thing Gault died asking about, which perhaps explains a lot and brings this whole catastrophe to a neat end. Or maybe it was Keamy being stabbed in the neck that did that.
Gault spent time with Keamy while he recovered from being shot, the breath knocked out of him. He sat beside him and watched him take huge gulps of air, staring at the sky and trying to regain his bearings. Gault couldn't be sure at that point if Keamy saw him or not. If he did, he made no indication, simply stumbled up and headed after Linus, followed him into a chamber deeper than hell to meet his death.
Keamy's last heartbeats pumped the blood right out of his neck, and Gault hung back in the corner, wanting to intervene partly because he didn't want to share all of eternity with Keamy, but mostly because it didn't seem like a real ending, just an offshoot of some more important story.
He knew from the beginning that Keamy wouldn't last long here. There is a savageness to this place that is much more complex than Keamy's own. Gault watched John Locke try to save him, frantic and shouting at Linus. There was a tenderness in it that had nothing to do with Keamy, but Gault still appreciated that someone was desperate to feel the last weak beats of his heart. Keamy coughed out another threat as he died, saying Widmore would someday find Ben, as if he would do so to avenge his low-level thug's death.
Keamy's ghost took one look at Gault and disappeared. He's seen him twice since, moping near the coastline like he's waiting to get picked up and taken away from here.
The Island is densely populated with ghosts, something Gault found rather hilarious at first, but now just annoying. He avoids most of them, but doesn't mind the company of Claire, who is from Sydney. Keamy killed her, too. He and Claire share an interest in Charlotte and Miles, who spend most of their time arguing and failing to successfully track the group led by Richard.
"Do you think they'll fall in love?" Claire asks Gault one day, when they've followed Charlotte and Miles to a rocky beach where they've stopped to eat and rest.
"I doubt it," Gault says. He reclines on a rock, wishing he could feel the sun on his face. He even misses pain, would do anything for a burn across the bridge of his nose.
"Why not?" Claire asks. She's always wanting something to happen, has already grown bored with the slow progress of human drama.
"He's a prick."
"Well, she's not so great, she complains all the time."
"If he's a prick and she's a nag, why would you want to see them fall in love, anyway?"
"It's not that I want it," Claire says. "I just thought, maybe."
When Sawyer and Juliet begin having an affair, Claire starts following them around the Island instead. Gault is not interested in watching other people have sex with bodiless nostalgia, and he continues wandering alongside Miles and Charlotte, until Miles finally turns on him and glares.
"What the hell do you want?" he shouts.
"Who are you talking to?" Charlotte asks, and Gault smiles.
"Going to let her think you're crazy?" he asks.
"I don't care what she thinks."
"What who thinks?" Charlotte asks. "Are you -- what are you doing?"
"It's the captain of that freighter," Miles says. "He's been following us."
"The -- what?" Charlotte laughs in confusion. "Have you gone mad?"
"Just leave us alone!" Miles shouts at Gault. He grabs Charlotte's wrist and pulls her away. Gault considers walking after them -- what could they do to stop him? -- but turns around instead. He wonders whatever became of Faraday. The freighter exploded, but he might have gotten to the helicopter. Gault is fairly sure he would know if Faraday had died. He would have shown up by now.
He finds Claire sitting alone by the lake inside the now deserted compound where she died. She's at the end of the dock, her feet in the water, and he can tell by the expression on her face how disappointing it still is to not be able to feel it, cool on her skin. He sits beside her and looks for their reflections in the water, knowing he won't see them.
"So, Miles can see us but Charlotte can't," he tells her. She shrugs.
"What's wrong?" he asks. He pats her back, can't really feel her like he would if they were alive, there's no breath and no warmth and nothing really solid about either of them, but she's more concrete and immediate to him than the wind or the sun or the water.
"I just don't understand," she says. "Why are some of the people who died here, and some aren't?"
"Search me. I don't think you'll get very far trying to put a logic to it."
"It's just that I knew someone," she says, quiet and staring at the motionless surface of the lake. "Who died here."
"What, and he hasn't shown up?"
"I loved him, was what I mean to say." She looks at Gault, heartbreakingly pretty, preserved forever with perfect skin that isn't skin, watery eyes that were actually burned away by an explosion. She's shown him her body, lying blackened in the compound behind them. They've yet to find his.
"I loved him," she says again. "And he's not here."
"But he died on the Island?"
"In the ocean. Like you."
Gault makes a motion like a sigh. It feels different without real breath to expel.
"I've got the bloke I was fucking wandering around here somewhere," he says, trying to lighten the mood.
"You what?" She laughs, and he's glad he's humiliated himself, both because it's good to see her laugh, and good to know that his soul, or whatever's left of him here, can still experience embarrassment.
"He's the fella who killed us, actually."
She laughs harder, throws up her hands. He can't help but join in, glad that he's not the only one who has posthumously found humor in this.
"No accounting for taste, eh?" he says.
"I think I knew all of this," she says, wiping at her eyes as if there were tears of laughter there. "I think I already knew. It's funny how that works."
"It is," he agrees. Knowledge clouds his consciousness like balloons floating along a ceiling. When something he already knows is actually articulated, it's as if one of the balloons pops, and the details spill out like air, inconsequential but clear.
"You should go and see him," Claire says. She kicks her feet through the water, and the surface of the lake stays perfectly still.
"What for, a chat? Should I go and gloat that he's been murdered now, too?" He's considered it.
"Just go see him." She looks at him, and Gault understands. One of her balloons has popped.
"Should I give him hell for killing you?" Gault asks, standing.
"If you want," Claire says. "It'd be a waste of time, though."
"Time, well." Gault turns to leave. "We've got plenty of that."
*
Keamy is much more locatable than he was when he was alive. Gault finds him on the beach, standing and staring out at the ocean with an expression of accusation. He seems reluctant to stray very far from the water, and also determined not to turn back to look at the Island, as if it will have him for good when he does.
"Keamy!" Gault calls, afraid that if he surprises him he'll flick away instantly. Keamy peeks back over his shoulder, turns around again.
"Get lost," he says.
"Make me."
Keamy offers no response, only folds his arms over his chest and stands up straighter. Gault thinks he looks shorter now that he's dead. Maybe he's slouching.
"Linus got away," Keamy says after a long time has passed, Gault refusing to leave or be the first to make a concession.
"Yeah, I noticed. He also killed you."
Keamy glowers at the water, his eyes almost shut against the sun. Gault wishes it would rain, can't believe it hasn't yet.
"Sorry, is that still a touchy subject?" Gault asks. More than rain, he wants to rile Keamy. This won't be any good if he can't shake him up the way he did before he died, again turn him into an ineffectual issuer of elaborate threats.
"Just go away," Keamy says. Gault does, not understanding what Claire thought either of them would get out of this. He turns back when he gets to the tree line and sees Keamy still standing there, his shoulders raised up. He's not slouching, he's wincing, or bracing himself, or just frozen into an uncomfortable posture like a startled bird, hoping he won't be seen.
"No one's coming back for you," Gault shouts. He hates Keamy for killing him when he would have died anyway, hours later. What difference did it really make? He couldn't have stopped Keamy. He wouldn't have fired.
"How was I supposed to know that?" Keamy shouts, and Gault feels as if he's been caught with his pants down.
"Let's agree not to read each other's minds," he calls back, mostly because he's disappointed that he can't read Keamy's, though he hasn't really tried yet, probably doesn't want to know.
"Fine," Keamy says. "You're the one who -- why don't you go bother those fucking scientists?"
"They told me to get lost, too."
Gault sees the corner of Keamy's grin, and he doesn't understand why this should make him feel better. He walks away, dizzy with disorientation like that he experienced after first arriving here, and he takes hold of a tree to steady himself. He doesn't know why he's still afraid to break apart. There's nothing here worth saving. He shuts his eyes and tries to find Faraday, but he's long gone.
"Have you been to see Jacob yet?" someone asks, and Gault shoots up, scrambling against the tree trunk and expecting its bark to scrape him through his shirt. He keeps waiting to get hurt again, to be relieved that he still can be. Probably everyone here is waiting to be told that there's been a mistake, that they're still alive.
Alex is the one who is asking him about Jacob. She's alone, which is unusual, and the way she is looking at Gault makes him uneasy, as if she's the only one here who might still be able to hurt him.
"Who?" he asks. "What?"
"Jacob," she says, like he should know the name, and maybe he does. He shies away from the knowledge, leaves it alone. He doesn't like not earning these things, not needing to wonder.
"No," Gault says. "I haven't seen him."
"Well, you ought to." Alex is staring at Keamy. Gault wonders if he can feel it on the back of his neck, like hairs rising. What sort of revenge can ghosts take on each other? There's got to be a reason they're all still around, and Gault is afraid -- or certain -- that it's something dark. He's more troubled by the fact that he doesn't want any sort of revenge than he is by this premonition.
"He'll answer a question for you," Alex says. "One question, anything you want to know. Even if it's about the future. Or what would have been the future."
"Is that what you asked about?" Gault knows it's a nervy question, but it's more polite than peeling back his hesitation and letting himself know anyway.
"I haven't asked anything yet," Alex says. "I'm still thinking. You only get one question." She's looking at Gault like she knows he's already made up his mind. He leaves her with Keamy, not headed in any particular direction. He might know what his question will be, but that doesn't mean he's ready to ask it.
*
Like Claire, he keeps waiting for certain dead people to show up, though his people didn't die here, not even in the ocean. More than anyone, he wants to see his younger sister. He had two sisters, an older one who hated him at first sight, and his younger sister, Carla, who was big-eyed and a little slow, always on his side. She died at seventeen, in her drunk boyfriend's car. He wouldn't mind seeing his Mum, either, only a few years dead from some mysterious heart condition that she hid from the family all her life. He prays his father won't ever stumble out of the jungle. He would just call Gault a fag and ask him what the hell he expected to come from all of that.
Nobody shows, just Claire, and sometimes Alex, her mother and boyfriend trailing her as if she's got a body left to guard. There are a few others; nobody remarkable. Gault tries to be glad that Faraday got away, that he's not here to stutter and need reassurance. He misses giving him things: the gun, the raft. He misses taking things from Keamy, too. The gun, the raft. Bracing himself against the mattress in the stateroom and just taking all he could.
Sometimes he feels stir crazy, trapped in his non-body, unable to take comfort in any of the things he used to subject himself to. There are also times when he's just charmed by the fact that he never has to worry about taking a piss again, suffering a hangover, getting shot in the chest. The sand doesn't stick to his skin the way he always hated when he was alive. But the sun doesn't touch him, either, and that's the one thing he can't get past.
He imagines that all of this must be doubly hard for Keamy, who never had much of an inner life, as far as Gault could tell. He watches him like he watches the living, from afar. Keamy keeps his eyes on the horizon, and Gault wants to ask him what the hell he's looking for out there, remembers him watching the ocean from the windows of the steering room on the night of the bad storm.
Finally, he just goes to the cabin.
Claire is hanging around in the clearing outside, leaning against a tree with her arms folded and looking like she's been scolded, sent to her room. Gault stands beside her and stares at the cabin. The stream of constant whispering that sits in the back of his mind like a different kind of hangover altogether quiets when he sets his eyes on it.
"Have you gone in there yet?" he asks Claire.
"Yeah." She pushes away from the tree, narrows her eyes. "I think he might be a liar."
Gault knows she only wants to believe this, that she didn't get the answer she wanted. He wishes he felt a manic urge to protect her like he did with Faraday. It was as addictive as anything, having a sense of purpose. But Claire is already dead, and if she's here to be saved in some other way, Gault is pretty sure that's somebody else's job.
Claire leaves him alone with the cabin, and Gault watches her go. She's careful with her steps through the jungle, the way she learned to walk when she was pregnant. If someone she loved died here, why would this place keep him from her? Gault moves toward the cabin with a kind of righteous fury, though that is not the question he is going to ask.
He hesitates when he reaches for the doorknob. More virtuous questions prickle through him. What will become of his son? His wife, will she remarry? He's afraid he knows the answers. Vera will find someone and Sammy will hate him at first, but by high school graduation he'll be calling him Dad. God knows what he'll think about the man he used to call that. If Jacob knows as well, Gault doesn't want to hear it.
He could ask questions about this place, about the fate of the world, about why he's here. He could ask Jacob who the hell he thinks he is. But he knows enough about this goddamn place already, doesn't care much about the rest of the world, and as for why he's here, he suspects it has nothing to do with him in particular. He's like a bug that's been sucked into a vacuum, crawling around in the dark and the dust, trying to figure out what he did to deserve this when he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Jacob's cabin is both dark and dusty, and it looks like it belongs to some other place, like it's got too long a history to have originated here. There is a man sitting in a chair. Gault can't see his face. It occurs to him that the man might not have one. He shuts the door behind him and feels as if he's been taken hostage.
"Well?" Jacob says, when they've both been silent for a long time. The questions Gault should ask bubble under his lip, and he holds them back, terrified that he'll slip up and do the right thing, ask about something that matters.
"Tell me everything about Martin Keamy," he says before he can.
Jacob shifts in his chair, and for a moment Gault thinks it's in excitement, as if he hasn't heard a question this good in a long time.
"Are you sure that's what you want to know?"
"Yes."
"His life was not particularly interesting."
"Tell me."
“Fine.” Jacob sits up straighter. “Normally I tell people to sit, but I think you can take this standing.”
Gault sits anyway.
"Martin Christopher Keamy was born in 1975, in Ely, Nevada," Jacob says, and regret curls into Gault, so sharply that for a moment he remembers what it was like to really have a body. He's spent his last dime on a rigged game he won't win. But he's flushed, too, especially thick in the air, waiting to watch his coin drop.
"His father was David Keamy, who had returned from Vietnam and retired from the Marine Corps the year prior. His mother was Gretchen Keamy, a waitress who lived with her parents during most of her marriage, while David was overseas. David left Gretchen for his AA sponsor when Martin was three years old. He moved to Montana and rarely saw his son. Gretchen moved to Las Vegas and continued to take waitressing jobs until she met and married Raymond Coyne, a Mormon minister with whom she had another son, Raymond Jr. Martin was a poor student who played football and decided when he was very young that he would join the Marines. After high school, he did, and he served with distinction until he was discharged for having an inappropriate relationship with an officer. He worked as a bouncer until he met a man who asked him to kill his brother-in-law, and thereafter began a new career. A political kingpin he was hired to protect in Uganda told Charles Widmore that Martin Keamy would work for anyone who fed him like he had nothing to lose. Widmore hired him to capture Ben Linus, and he died trying."
Gault walks from the cabin without looking back. He doesn't know where he's going, but then again maybe he does, because when he looks up, he's on the beach.
Keamy is sitting down now, still staring at the ocean.
"You know," Gault calls as he walks toward him. "There's a man on this Island who will tell you anything you want to know."
Certainly Keamy doesn't know what Gault has just done. But he won't look at Gault, and doesn't, in fact, seem to even really be looking at the ocean.
"I don't want to know anything," he mutters.
“Nothing? He’ll even tell you the future, if you like.”
Keamy finally looks at Gault, horrified and surprised, still, that he could be so stupid.
“The future? What future? That’s the last thing I want to hear about.”
Gault knows now how ghosts can have revenge on each other. He's not sorry for his. Keamy, probably, is not sorry for killing him.
"Cheer up, mate," Gault says. He sits down and puts an arm around Keamy, more a gesture of petulant irony than anything else, though he does wish that he could still feel the warmth and weight of another person, even him.
"Hell could have been a lot worse," Gault says.
Keamy scoffs. “What are you doing in hell?” he asks. “Who’d you kill?”
“Nobody. Get it? I guess I was supposed to shoot you when I had the chance.”
“There’s no such thing as hell, anyway,” Keamy mutters. He looks back over his shoulder as if he’s afraid the devil heard him say so, then puts his elbows on his knees, hides his face. Gault is stupidly pleased when he doesn't try to leave or even ask him to get lost, and he realizes at last how glad he is that Keamy is stuck here, that he'll never get away.
"You know what's the worst fucking part?" Keamy barks suddenly, and Gault shakes his head.
"I keep hearing all this shit -- in my head -- stuff I don't want to know." Keamy looks at Gault like he should have an answer for this. "It's like the fucking military all over again."
"Nobody told me anything when I was in the Royal Navy," Gault says. Keamy gives him the disbelieving stare.
"What the fuck does that have to do with anything?"
Gault laughs so hard he falls backward. Or maybe he does the falling on purpose, because it's what he would have done, back when he had weight and breath and a relationship with gravity. Keamy stares at him like he was staring at the ocean, waiting for a resolution.
"How about it, Martin," Gault says. "I got shot in the heart, you got stabbed in the neck. Tick, tick, tick. Boom."
"I wish I could have at least seen the ship blow up," Keamy says, so wistfully that Gault laughs himself into something that feels like revival, but only briefly.
"You and me both, mate."
Keamy grins at him like he did when Widmore introduced them, like this is the start of something that only one of them will walk away from. Gault is so relieved to know that neither of them is going anywhere, and he realizes with a belated epiphany that he is far more wicked than Keamy ever knew how to be.
"You've got to ask a question," he says when Keamy pulls him up so that they are again, ridiculously, huddled together.
"Huh?"
"Of Jacob, that bloke who can tell you anything. You can't waste that. At least ask another one for me."
"What the hell does anything matter now? What do you want to know?"
"Were you really named after a saint?" It's a follow-up question he didn't feel entitled to ask Jacob.
Keamy shakes his head, not in answer to the question, but as if Gault keeps failing to learn the same lesson.
"Yeah, okay?" He throws out his hands. "Patron saint of soldiers. What difference does it make?"
Gault doesn't respond, and doesn't say anything when Keamy reaches over to put his fingers in the hollow of his throat. There's nothing, not the faintest flicker of a ghost of an echo of a pulse. Gault would fake it for him if he could. Keamy takes his hand away, looks out at the horizon again.
"Jesus," he says. "That didn't go the way I thought it would."
He could be talking about a number of things. The mission to capture Linus. The hollow of Gault's throat, the heartbeat he's got the balls to look for even after he stilled it himself. Life in general.
"There's got to be something you want to ask," Gault says. Keamy moans, rubs his face. Gault feels normal for a moment, and thinks that if they can just irritate each other until the end of time, they might pull one over on hell, get away with being only slightly miserable.
"You were in the Navy," Keamy says. "Were you in Vietnam?"
That wasn't what Gault meant by something he must want to ask. Keamy should go to Jacob, take advantage of the one allowance this place offers. But Gault goes along with it, because maybe it's better that they only get answers from each other.
"Yeah," he says. "Sort of."
"What was it like?" Keamy's voice is so buried that Gault probably wouldn't hear it if they weren't both dead and didn't need to say any of this out loud anyway.
Gault doesn't really know. He was on a ship, ferrying supplies more often than troops, he saw it from afar. He remembers standing at the stern one night and thinking he heard gunfire, explosions, but it turned out to be the ship's malfunctioning refrigeration equipment, blowing out for good below deck.
"It was intense," Gault says. "It was the most intense experience of my life." Keamy doesn't need to know what he's really talking about, and he won't guess, because to him it was just killing time on a job that ended badly.
Gault has thousands of stories about Vietnam. Keamy won't care that none of them are really his. Gault has read novels about the war, seen movies, heard rumors on the ferry from men who were really there, who saw everything.
Keamy uncurls while Gault talks, spills his legs out on the sand like he once did on Gault's bed, drops his hands between them and lets his shoulders sink. He's been waiting a pretty long time to hear this, and Gault might have known that even if he'd asked Jacob a different question.
"What about your kid?" Keamy asks suddenly, cutting Gault off in the middle of a story his regular bartender told him about Binh Gia.
"What about him?"
Keamy doesn't say anything. He spreads his hand out in the sand, picks it up.
"It's weird how you can do that and not leave an imprint," he mutters.
Gault takes that as an apology, goes on with his story.
*
Ten thousand miles away and twenty years later, Daniel Faraday sits Indian-style in his backyard in New Haven, attempting to fix his daughter's telescope. She doesn't really care about the thing, about astronomy or science in general, but maybe that's why he's so determined to fix it. The lens sits on the grass, reflecting sunlight. It's a cloudless day, and he's supposed to be getting ready for his oldest son's graduation from high school.
"Dan," Charlotte calls from the back door. The New England hardness that has crept into her accent since they moved here is never more evident than it is when she says his name. He turns back, gives her a wavering smile.
"We'll be late," she says. She tosses out her hands, lets them slap her sides. She's wearing that green dress that Dan likes. She hardly ever wears dresses. He smiles again.
"I'll be right there!"
She knows he doesn't mean it, goes back into the house with a groan. He turns back to the telescope, and his hands are shaking. He isn't sure why. Sometimes, outdoors, in direct sunlight like this, he starts to remember.
There was a special on television last night, something about the Oceanic Six and the twenty year anniversary of their return. They've all since disappeared, even the baby. Dan squints up at the sky and thinks about that baby, who is probably taller and stronger than him now, a man. That, or he's dead.
He doesn't think so, though. Sometimes he wonders if he's the one who died, if he's stuck in some half-reality, a skew that he was lucky to float into. It was too easy, and he's been trying to figure out why. Desmond and Penelope Widmore pulled him out of the ocean with the others in his raft, onto a ship that bore him safely to real land, the sort that couldn't spontaneously disappear. He returned to America in obscurity and lived like a ghost for a year, rarely leaving his rented apartment in Boston. Then Charlotte showed up at his door, beaming and explaining nothing. Daniel didn't want an explanation, just wanted her arms finally around him.
It's been too easy, and something about the way he left that island has always bothered him, like a misplaced negative sign in an otherwise elegant equation that nevertheless makes the rest useless. Not that his life has been useless. It's been good, actually, but that's the troubling part.
He has dreams sometimes. Not exactly nightmares, but he doesn't look forward to them. He dreams about that island that shifted and whispered and didn't exist in any sort of universe he could make sense of. Widmore had enticed him with promises of unique phenomena, but there was more to it than that. He's still stuck on the day he left, the raft and that last look at Charlotte, and the captain of the freighter stepping out of the jungle to give him a grocery list he'd written three years ago. He said Daniel might need the list to steady himself while he drove the others to safety, but it was after he reached land that Daniel needed the list most. Until Charlotte returned to him, he studied it, rearranging the words into every possible permutation, investigating it as if it was a code, something for him to decipher. After he married Charlotte, he put it away, tucked it into his wallet. Like the island, and what happened to his wife in the year that she spent on it without him, it was not given to him to solve.
This is hard for him to accept. It's in his nature to puzzle things out, but maybe less so, now. He lets his children's teenage motivations remain opaque, and Charlotte's implacable calm, her quiet refusal to discuss the things that still haunt him. He looked up that freighter captain when he returned to America, and found that he'd been declared dead, a victim of malfunctioning scientific equipment on Widmore's research freighter that exploded and killed everyone on board, including Daniel Faraday and Charlotte Lewis. Their new last name is Faris, a combination of the old ones. No one has ever come looking for them. Daniel had to give up his career -- Dan Faris doesn't have a doctorate -- but independent research suits him better than teaching, and he's funded by a Charlotte Lewis Memorial Grant.
"Dan!" she calls again, this time through the window. "Leave that thing, will you? We've got to get moving, the traffic will be bad."
"Coming, coming," he mutters, trying to fit the telescope's lens back into its casing. It's suddenly too big, which doesn't make any sense.
Daniel leaves the telescope parts on the grass and stands, looks up at their house. Graduation ceremonies exhaust him, and he doesn't see why finishing high school should be considered such an accomplishment, though for his oldest son, who is more interested in sneaking girls into his second story bedroom than academics, it actually is quite an achievement.
He's lucky, he knows, to have these sort of petty concerns, these suburban problems. He's lucky to have Charlotte, was close to becoming a real ghost when she found him in Boston. Every night before bed, he wants to ask her how she got off the island, why she came back to him.
He thinks it might have something to do with Huston Gault.
Still standing in the middle of the backyard, he hears the doors on Charlotte's car opening out in the driveway, the sound of his children's voices as they climb in, and he takes his wallet out of his back pocket. The pencil markings on the grocery list are worn almost completely away. He can see most of the word "crackers," but that's about it.
It doesn't matter. He memorized the list, and he remembers the most obvious message he found in it, the one that should seem nonsensical but always tugs at him, even looking now at this now disintegrating piece of paper. The words "come back" were spelled down the paper with the first letter of each word, and he was the one who wrote it, so he should have known that, should know what it means.
He walks forward to the car, carefully folding the list back into his wallet. He thinks of Huston Gault telling him to go, then giving him this paper that asked him to come back. But Gault didn't write the message, Daniel did, some other Daniel who might as well be a stranger after all that's happened.
Daniel didn't want to go that day, but not until Gault told him he should. Before that, he'd been determined to leave as soon as possible. He would never have let Charlotte stay if he hadn't spoken with Gault, and he doesn't know why. He felt she would be safe with him. The man was inconsequential on the freighter, hardly even in command, but on the island, Daniel felt like he had the power to keep Charlotte alive.
"Everyone ready?" she asks when Daniel climbs into the passenger seat. She looks into the backseat for unenthusiastic responses from the kids. Sometimes she complains that they're such Americans, as if that's Daniel's fault. She was the one who was afraid to go home after she came back from the island.
Daniel watches the usual scenery pass as they drive toward the high school. He can't shake the feeling that his whole life is some sort of mystery that he was supposed to eventually understand but never will. He knows he's lucky not to understand, that understanding would likely kill him, but he's afraid sometimes that Charlotte is withholding important information, that she doesn't want him to know what happened to her because it means she's won, she's solved something that he gave up on.
Sometimes it feels like he hasn't given up, though what he can do about investigating that long ago part of his life, he doesn't know. He could ask his wife, who would smile and laugh and change the subject. He could search newspapers for the name Huston Gault, as if he's a kind of keystone. Once he even went to the grocery store and bought all of the things on the grocery list, but no sudden realization or time shift or death ray struck him as he left the store.
"Try not to fall asleep at the ceremony, Dad," his son says, leaning forward to poke his shoulder. Dan shakes out of his thoughts, laughs as if this is a ridiculous idea and not actually very probable.
"Are you alright?" Charlotte asks, with a grin that makes him want to say yes, he is. And he is, mostly.
"Sure, sure." He pats her knee and looks out the window. He wishes that he didn't feel that Huston Gault handing him that list saved both of them, because then he could wish that he never had, and he wouldn't have to see Gault standing there, all the time, like it's painted inside his eyelids, Gault watching Daniel leave with that note clutched in his hand, the list that was asking him already: come back, come back, come back.