For the latest edition of the Briefs, I've gone back to now-familiar stomping grounds - Lost - specifically, the characters Hume and Faraday, who have become my two favorite people to write about from the Lostverse. Hopefully, y'all agree and enjoy what is the opening to a new story that will be finished sooner than later!
Spoiler alert: Spoilers for up to the season six finale of Lost. Takes place post-series, AU in many regards.
Still
Alive. LOST AU. Characters: Desmond Hume, Daniel Faraday, references to other characters. Prompts used: island, shadows.
He
woke up with a mouthful of dirt, clawing at what should have been the
sky, desperate to be free of this prison. He was dying, now he was
dead, he had just been shot,
and now a man with ageless eyes was burying him underneath a tall,
tropical tree—
Hands
shook him out of his half-asleep stupor. "Daniel. Daniel!"
The
remnants of a nightmare thought long past dropped from Daniel
Faraday's mind as soon as they came, and he saw where he was—not in
a dirt grave,
but in a bed,
safe and sound and thousands of miles away from the island he’d
escaped from. It had been a few months since he left the island on
his half-sister Penny Widmore's boat, but for him it felt like only
yesterday, and the creeping terror of the place still lay in hiding
in the physicist's psyche.
Soft
light from the bedside table revealed the owner of the hands who had
yet again delivered Faraday from himself. Creases of worry became
increasingly visible the longer Desmond Hume looked at his house
mate.
He
would have to go back to his equations in the morning, Daniel
thought, all of the constants and variables still left unstudied.
Life and death, light and darkness, the ideas that haunted him since
Ann Arbor and the experiments—
"Daniel?"
Daniel
managed to blink himself back into the present at the sound of
Desmond's voice. "Sorry," he mumbled. "I was thinking
about my work..." He shifted around in the oversized T-shirt and
pajama pants that Desmond had lent him for sleeping in.
"You
were having a bad dream again, weren't you?" Desmond asked.
The
other man scratched his neck. "Maybe."
"You
were screaming in your sleep.
If Charlie had been around,
it would have woken him up."
"Sorry.
I'm not…" Daniel paused, searching for the right words, then
continued, "I'm not used to this place anymore. I'm not used to
any
place anymore, I guess."
His
eyes moved past Desmond for a moment, to the Los Angeles skyline
draped in the shadows of the night, illuminated by brief points of
light from the city below. "When I close my eyes, it's like I'm
back in the ground," he added.
Desmond's
face softened. "S'all right, Dan. We're never going back to that
place—not you, or me, or Penny, or anyone else."
"But
why—" Daniel started but did not finish: but
why am I alive?
"Come
on." Desmond stood. "Let's go for a walk."
----------
Desmond's
neighborhood,
at one in the morning,
was blissfully dead. There was no explaining why a member of the
Widmore family, by marriage, would be walking around in a bathrobe in
the middle of the night, followed by another Widmore, by blood,
wearing clothes one size too big and looking like he hadn't combed
his hair since the seventies. They stuck to the sidewalk, and Desmond
realized that Daniel had walked out of the house without shoes.
Again.
"I
don't want to sound like you're being an annoyance—God knows Charlie adores you,
and Penny really values you—but what can we do now to help you, you
know, recover?" Desmond gestured vaguely as he talked.
"Is
this how it works? I'm supposed to recover?" Daniel studied
Desmond from an angle. "Did you?"
"I'm
fine."
"You
were the Dharma Initiative's favorite electromagnetic toy for years,
how are you fine?"
"I
just am, all right? This isn't about me—"
"Why
not?"
"Dan—"
"I
died on that island!" Daniel had stopped in his tracks. "I
died, my own mother killed me, I was buried and left in the ground,
and then I was alive. I know what's wrong with me. I should be dead.
Why aren't I dead?"
Desmond
grasped Daniel by the shoulders, as if anchoring the man in place.
"Look at me. You deserve to be alive. Don't feel guilty about
not being dead. Maybe it was a miracle, maybe it was a gift from the
island, but it worked,
and you're here."
"That's
it. That's the thing, isn't it?" A light entered Daniel's eyes,
like lightning. "The island. It brought me back. We all had a
purpose and that's why the island kept us alive. So—so my purpose
isn't over, is it? I'm not done with that place, am I?"
"You're
done," Desmond said. He only sounded half-convinced.
"But
is it done with me?"
"Fuck
the island. You're home now."
Daniel
blinked, the look in his eyes replaced by confusion. "I'm home?"
Desmond
put one arm around Daniel's shoulders and felt the other man slump
forward. "If you want it, brotha, yeah. You've always been
home."
"Thank
you," Daniel mumbled into Desmond's shirt.
In
the corner of Desmond's eye, a figure flickered into view under a
broken streetlamp. The figure watched them from across the street
without saying a word. The man nodded,
before disappearing soundlessly into the shadows.
"You
can't have him."
"What?"
Daniel looked up.
"Nothing."
Desmond turned, Daniel still in his grasp. "Just thought I saw
someone I should have punched in the face long ago."
They
walked away from the place where Ben Linus had been watching them,
back toward the quiet rooms of Penny's house, one of the few places
of refuge for two men spun around in time and space.
----------
In
the morning, Daniel faced the day with a full cup of coffee, an empty
notebook on the bedside table, and a phone in his hand. The place
where Eloise Hawking's gun had met its target over thirty years ago
twinged inside of his chest as he sat on the bed.
"Moth—Mom?
It's me, Dan. Call me back. I want to know what happened after I
died."
The
peaceful feeling he’d been expecting as he hung up didn't come.
There was only anxiety and a restless fear over what was about to
happen.
Five
minutes later, the phone rang.
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