Spider and Sparrow, pt.I
Sunday, December 17th, 2006 03:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
orange_crushedI'll be upfront, this may never get finished. I do have another part waiting, at least. The project was the true definition of madness, anyway. Set around the first season of Lost, and a future stemming from the second season of Veronica Mars: crossover fic. I have taken great liberties with all seasons of these shows; whatever I don't seem to be dealing with here, didn't happen.
So. Madness.
Spider and Sparrow.
Later he'll haul wood for a fire with the rest of them, and Veronica will fall asleep with a pregnant girl's head resting on her shoulders, and nobody will cry.
ONE: victory champagne.
There's warm light through leaded-glass windows, victory champagne, her hands turning rose and violet under the glow of cellophane. She’s unwrapping her present. It’s simple origami, okay, not so very origami at all- neat, but requiring too much tape. He might be her father but he’s still a man.
“You got me a speakerphone ?” Keith shrugs, preens, mock-sighs.
“Every girl’s dream.”
They’ve had three-quarters of a bottle by now, but she was already drunk on the idea of possession. Me mine mine. Still, thirty-dollar champagne is thirty-dollar champagne. This office is going to have her sense of style, her sense of organization, her vanilla-scented candles and bamboo screen from IKEA. Oh, and one of those little round rugs with the woven circles. “You’re going to fit clients in here somehow, I imagine.”
“That’s what the giant shoehorn will be for.”
“Will you advertise the painful squeezing on your shingle, or have that available purely as an add-on ?” She rolls her eyes and pretends to smother him with a pillow; he rolls, deflects, smirks. “I can’t hide my glee under cover of sarcasm any longer. Veronica- no, no, don’t give me that look. The speakerphone was a warm-up.” He pulls a folder out from underneath the couch cushions. This is not exactly what she wants to happen next- she wants to eat pizza and fall asleep, not have her proverbial guts ripped out. "Are you going to open it ?"
“Um, no.” Veronica puts her drink down, a little harder than she meant to. “No.”
“It'll answer at least one question.”
“No, I don't think so.” She wants to open the folder, touch the insides, read and skim and devour. But she can’t. She won’t. That ship has sailed far off into the horizon, thanks, a horizon she no longer wants to imagine or look at or acknowledge in any way. D-E-N-I-A-L. But there's always curiosity; oh damn the genetics. She’s frightened of the contents- photos of him happily married. His cellblock number. His autopsy photos.
“It’s okay,” he says gently, and she remembers the most important thing about her father: that he loves her.
“I asked you for this, like, four years ago. This makes you crazy, or really slow.”
“Why not both ?” She takes the folder- it’s as light as the air she’s breathing, in her hands; hands which may or may not have become suddenly unreliable. Maybe she’s dreaming this. She certainly has in the past. The file slips open. It is not, as she feared, gruesome crime-scene photos; nor a coroner's report. Just plane tickets. “The last, the best, the real-deal confirmed sighting.” Keith kisses the top of her head. “I’d rather you didn’t go, but I know that you will, and I figured I could at least puppet-master a few details in my dotage.” She elbows him, but distractedly.
“Dotage." She touches a nervous finger to the printed page. "So. Why- why Sydney ?”
“The surfing's great.”
She remembers this conversation now, in an ache of time and grief; like skin’s memory of a bruise.
She used to think she'd marry Logan Echolls.
Under a canopy of starlight or a canopy of jungle trees like the ones she's staring up at. Or at the edge of a waterfall; and then they themselves would fall into cool water and darkness, Mr. and Mrs. Logan Echolls at the end of the world. Jungle trees ? Perhaps she's fallen into a screensaver.
Now there's a bug crawling on the sole of her feet. Where are her shoes ? There really ought to be shoes. Next she's going to be babbling about the spider. There's a spider. She's an old woman and she's swallowed a fly.
Ferns are brushing the tips of her fingers; she can't quite place the sensation- like trickling your fingers across miniblinds in the slanting summer sun. They're warm like that, and pliant. They hang across the window by his bed. It's important, suddenly, to remember where he sleeps. Where he used to sleep. Before she died and went crazy over this spider. Everything smells like dirt.
She sits up and shuts her eyes, counts to ten, breathes big deep slow breaths through her stomach, very musical theatre of you. She listens.
No, it's just a noise; a horrible, eardrum-splitting noise. Repeating. She looks around and rubs her eyes, rubs her hands on the back of her jeans and stumbles over her own legs getting up. She leans on a tree and looks down at herself for the first time. The backs of her hands are bloody. She puts them to her hairline- bingo. That explains the disorientation and the crazy, and the rebellion of her legs. Head wounds are the ugliest kind; but as she gingerly feels her scalp, it doesn't seem like her skull's caving in. She imagines she'll know when that happens. The cell phone is still in her jacket pocket, and she flips the pad open. Daddy- what will she say ? I'm standing in a forest, come get me ? I think I used to be on an airplane, where the hell are my shoes ?
She dials for an operator and there's nothing. Not even a busy signal. She texts her father anyway, because it never hurts. Doesn't go through. She hopes it'll get there someday. Like, before she bleeds to death.
Okay. So there's a sound. In the vicinity of over there. Veronica pulls herself up, snaps the top button of her jeans back into place. She needs some control.
She's still a Mars.
On the plane she drank a diet cherry cola, no straw, no napkin; water droplets glistening in the spaces between her fingers when she sets the cup down. There's an antiseptic, close-air smell; the familiar coffin charm of hospitals and economy class. The man next to her seriously has the cleanest fingernails she's ever seen.
"Heading home ?" he asks. Hint of a self-deprecating smile, eager and puppy-doggish, and she's reading him like a book. Veronica doesn't have time for daddy issues anymore- or, wait. She does. Because this is now officially the longest flight of her life.
"Yeah," she says, and settles into the seat. "I long for the gentle, womanly embrace of LA." He laughs, just a little.
"Native, then."
"Sort of." If she paid attention, she'd notice she was creasing and uncreasing the corners of her magazine. "I left Southern California and came back again- marking me as a masochist."
"Or an amnesiac."
"Sometimes both." She relaxes a little. "On business ?" No, almost certainly not. He's chained to a beeper, somewhere, if she ever saw one. Although, Australia ? Hopefully a bail jumper rather than a failed internet marriage, because she really can't bear to hear about the latter.
"No," he says, and taps the stewardess for a drink. She suspects she's accidentally hit a nerve; and she knows she's right when he chugs the plastic cup and falls silent, staring out the window.
The plane begins to shake.
"Fan-fucking-tasti-" she starts, but she doesn't get to finish. No wry face, no shared exasperation with her seatmate. There's a sound like a sledgehammer. He leans over her head, arms cradling her, and she has about two seconds to consider what a great guy he must be. A metal case pops out of a rack and slams down onto his neck. There's a sickening snap before she finds her lungs and screams them empty. He goes limp over her and the world gets very fucking dark.
Somewhere along the way- the shoes.
When she falls exhausted in the shade of a tree, hands bloody from carrying people out of the wreck, with a t-shirts wrapped around her head, she asks: "Did anybody see the plane blow up ?" They all stare at her for breaking some kind of morbid silence they've been carrying.
"The fuck are you talking about ?" That's the the redneck with the problem keeping his top button buttoned. "I think we all fucking saw-"
"I'm asking, did anybody see the plane blow up. As in, fire and smoke ? I don't remember hearing an explosion. I don't remember anything like that."
"She's right." This from a quiet guy, his arms around a skinny blonde. "We just fell."
"I was asleep," the blonde chimes in. She starts combing her hair- yes, Veronica thinks, how pressing. "I always sleep on airplanes."
"Very helpful."
"Why don't you-"
"Shut it, Shannon."
It continues like that for a while. Veronica eventually gets up and sifts through piles for her suitcase; remarkably, it's there. The file is there, too, smiling in an annoyingly unwrinkled way from the bottom of the bag. She strips off her bloodied jacket and pulls a sweatshirt over her head. The redneck wolf-whistles.
"Wow." Veronica turns, shades the sun from her eyes, and smiles at him. "I'm so lucky to have crashed with a real grown-up aboard." He says nothing, just smirks and turns to the water, wading up to his knees. Later he'll haul wood for a fire with the rest of them, and Veronica will fall asleep with a pregnant girl's head resting on her shoulders, and nobody will cry.
It's only the first day.
TWO: shell-games
What she thinks she'll hate the most, when this is a memory, are the vines. They're everywhere. They seem to grow in her sleep; the hateful twisting, choking shapes, as wide as child-fingers, reaching out from every tree and bush and rock. The guy with the case of knives, John, he gave her one to cut open a locked suitcase and now she uses it what seems like every day. To cut vines. To cut endless goddam vines, just to walk anywhere- even to go to the bathroom.
"Hey," Boone says, and she stands up a lot faster than she intended to.
"Don't you-" and there's a pause, where she giggles. "Don't you knock ?"
"Oh, shit, I'm sorry." He turns away, and covers his eyes like a grade-schooler, and the whole effect is really charming. Veronica zips up her jeans and wipes her hands on, well. Never mind. "I'm really sorry. I'm leaving."
"It's okay. This would be embarassing if there were stall doors, or doors at all, or anything normal. But the world is my bathroom now." Ugh, her hands still feel icky. "So there's really no escape."
"Gross."
"Very."
He's picking fruit, so she tags along. He's tied a long-sleeved shirt around his neck and tucked the waist into his pants; so the mangoes bump along with walking like a sleeping baby, giving him an enormous round belly. She wishes her camera lens had survived the fall. It would be a great collection when she returned: a belly full of mangoes, that kid and his dog curled up together in the sand, the pregnant girl with the big tarp for an umbrella. Everywhere she turns there's gorgeous scenery; that, and vines. The light here is beautiful. It is the most unnaturally natural place she's ever seen.
And that's the whole thing, really. There's nothing natural about this paradise. It rains on a timer and there's a cord running from the water to the jungle, and every time she tries to get into a conversation with someone they clam up and walk away. She's tired of verbal shell-games, and she's pretty sure that there was at least one killer and a handful of nutcases on the plane. The sleuthing would be a welcome distraction, but it's not, because it's real, and she's sleeping in a pup tent made of a dead woman's coat and blanket. She's watched people die, helplessly. If Keith was here it would be better.
He'd know what to do.
She misses her father. She stops and stands, and tries to calm the rising panic in her chest. "I-" she begins, and stumbles over the words. "Why are we doing this ?"
"Hmm ?"
"Why are we doing this ?" she nearly shouts. There's a stone in her stomach and it won't go away. "Why are we- picking fruit ?" Boone's dark eyes are confused and gentle, and they're absolutely killing her. Who said she liked dark eyes ? She hates dark eyes now. They're his eyes.
"We're picking fruit so we can eat," he says, not unkindly. "Do you want to take a break ?"
"I want to go home !" The birds are startled out of the trees above her. She knows she's being terribly rude. "I want- I want to go home. I want somebody to do something, to go somewhere, to get help or send help; I want to go home." She puts a hand to her face, to stop the throbbing in her healing forehead. "I can't play island adventure anymore. I need to do something." She looks at Boone and waits for him to sigh, and rub her arm, and say comforting useless things like I know or we're all in this together, and then she'll have to jump off a cliff or just cry for the rest of her life.
But he doesn't.
"Okay," he says, and his face changes into something harder. Stranger. "You're in luck, because I found something to do."
Boone looks at John like John will smack him with a rolled-up newspaper for bringing her here, but he doesn't. Shortage of newspaper. John seems too pleased, anyway, with whatever's going on- the proud father vibe is strongest around him. He puts his hands on his hips and cocks his head, looks at her looking at his efforts.
"Congratulations," Veronica murmurs, staring at the pit and the giant gas tank sticking out of it. "You birthed a fallout shelter."
"Interesting choice of words, Veronica." He uses her name a lot, like a guidance counselor, or a priest. "Birthed."
"Not particularly."
"So what do you think ?" Boone asks. He's digging his heels into the wet dirt, hands shoved in pockets. She realizes now that the dark stains on his jeans aren't boar's blood, just mud and grass. He hasn't been hunting. Neither of them have, judging from the size of the hole.
She stares into the darkness of the underground.
"I think it'll kill us," she says.
Okay, the melodrama aside, it's just one more thing to stumble over in the Jungle of Awkward. John seems to think it's the second coming of color television, or maybe Buddha trapped in a tin can. She has to admit there's something to it. Boone takes her back to the others and makes her promise not to tell; well, he begs, and she says alright for now; and then he tells her that John is really okay, actually really great, but that she shouldn't let him smear peyote in her hair.
Veronica thinks she might go hang out with the guy who can't speak English for a while.
Instead she passes the fire, and grabs some fish from the metal tray resting in the coals. It's meltingly hot and salty-sweet in her hands, burning her tongue and trailing juices down her chin. The strangeness of this place, the taste of fine fish eaten off of dirty fingers, the fact that there's a hint of parsley in the mix. Sun's good with plants- she must have rubbed it in before it grilled. They live simply, if not well.
"Veronica." Sayid nods at her from the darkness. She can see Shannon behind him, sleeping, curled like a trusting question mark around her magazines.
"Hey." They both look without turning their heads, survey the landscape- is it a futile gesture ? Nobody could be watching. Nobody would care. One more thing from a past life that they can't let go of. "It's uh- it's both infinitely less, and infinitely more interesting than you thought."
"Oh yes ?" Veronica finds great amusement in his practiced mildness.
"It's a hole in the ground."
"It's- excuse me ?" Sayid coughs slightly. "Am I to understand that they've both gone mad ? A hole in the ground ? Is there an accompanying sandcastle ?"
"Yes. It's really something."
"What ?"
"No, no." She laughs almost silently, with a hand pressed to her face. "There's no sandcastle. It's this- door thing. A kind of hatch in the ground. Attached to a huge tank. Everything's metal, with a glass window in the door. I'm not sure how far underground it goes, but they've dug at least ten feet down already."
"Hmm." He watches as Veronica draws it out in the sand- a small square inside a large circle. "Do you think it could be opened ?"
"They're trying."
"Ah, well." He smiles, and she's reminded of the person he keeps claiming to be. "Then do you think I could open it ?"
So. Madness.
Spider and Sparrow.
Later he'll haul wood for a fire with the rest of them, and Veronica will fall asleep with a pregnant girl's head resting on her shoulders, and nobody will cry.
ONE: victory champagne.
There's warm light through leaded-glass windows, victory champagne, her hands turning rose and violet under the glow of cellophane. She’s unwrapping her present. It’s simple origami, okay, not so very origami at all- neat, but requiring too much tape. He might be her father but he’s still a man.
“You got me a speakerphone ?” Keith shrugs, preens, mock-sighs.
“Every girl’s dream.”
They’ve had three-quarters of a bottle by now, but she was already drunk on the idea of possession. Me mine mine. Still, thirty-dollar champagne is thirty-dollar champagne. This office is going to have her sense of style, her sense of organization, her vanilla-scented candles and bamboo screen from IKEA. Oh, and one of those little round rugs with the woven circles. “You’re going to fit clients in here somehow, I imagine.”
“That’s what the giant shoehorn will be for.”
“Will you advertise the painful squeezing on your shingle, or have that available purely as an add-on ?” She rolls her eyes and pretends to smother him with a pillow; he rolls, deflects, smirks. “I can’t hide my glee under cover of sarcasm any longer. Veronica- no, no, don’t give me that look. The speakerphone was a warm-up.” He pulls a folder out from underneath the couch cushions. This is not exactly what she wants to happen next- she wants to eat pizza and fall asleep, not have her proverbial guts ripped out. "Are you going to open it ?"
“Um, no.” Veronica puts her drink down, a little harder than she meant to. “No.”
“It'll answer at least one question.”
“No, I don't think so.” She wants to open the folder, touch the insides, read and skim and devour. But she can’t. She won’t. That ship has sailed far off into the horizon, thanks, a horizon she no longer wants to imagine or look at or acknowledge in any way. D-E-N-I-A-L. But there's always curiosity; oh damn the genetics. She’s frightened of the contents- photos of him happily married. His cellblock number. His autopsy photos.
“It’s okay,” he says gently, and she remembers the most important thing about her father: that he loves her.
“I asked you for this, like, four years ago. This makes you crazy, or really slow.”
“Why not both ?” She takes the folder- it’s as light as the air she’s breathing, in her hands; hands which may or may not have become suddenly unreliable. Maybe she’s dreaming this. She certainly has in the past. The file slips open. It is not, as she feared, gruesome crime-scene photos; nor a coroner's report. Just plane tickets. “The last, the best, the real-deal confirmed sighting.” Keith kisses the top of her head. “I’d rather you didn’t go, but I know that you will, and I figured I could at least puppet-master a few details in my dotage.” She elbows him, but distractedly.
“Dotage." She touches a nervous finger to the printed page. "So. Why- why Sydney ?”
“The surfing's great.”
She remembers this conversation now, in an ache of time and grief; like skin’s memory of a bruise.
She used to think she'd marry Logan Echolls.
Under a canopy of starlight or a canopy of jungle trees like the ones she's staring up at. Or at the edge of a waterfall; and then they themselves would fall into cool water and darkness, Mr. and Mrs. Logan Echolls at the end of the world. Jungle trees ? Perhaps she's fallen into a screensaver.
Now there's a bug crawling on the sole of her feet. Where are her shoes ? There really ought to be shoes. Next she's going to be babbling about the spider. There's a spider. She's an old woman and she's swallowed a fly.
Ferns are brushing the tips of her fingers; she can't quite place the sensation- like trickling your fingers across miniblinds in the slanting summer sun. They're warm like that, and pliant. They hang across the window by his bed. It's important, suddenly, to remember where he sleeps. Where he used to sleep. Before she died and went crazy over this spider. Everything smells like dirt.
She sits up and shuts her eyes, counts to ten, breathes big deep slow breaths through her stomach, very musical theatre of you. She listens.
No, it's just a noise; a horrible, eardrum-splitting noise. Repeating. She looks around and rubs her eyes, rubs her hands on the back of her jeans and stumbles over her own legs getting up. She leans on a tree and looks down at herself for the first time. The backs of her hands are bloody. She puts them to her hairline- bingo. That explains the disorientation and the crazy, and the rebellion of her legs. Head wounds are the ugliest kind; but as she gingerly feels her scalp, it doesn't seem like her skull's caving in. She imagines she'll know when that happens. The cell phone is still in her jacket pocket, and she flips the pad open. Daddy- what will she say ? I'm standing in a forest, come get me ? I think I used to be on an airplane, where the hell are my shoes ?
She dials for an operator and there's nothing. Not even a busy signal. She texts her father anyway, because it never hurts. Doesn't go through. She hopes it'll get there someday. Like, before she bleeds to death.
Okay. So there's a sound. In the vicinity of over there. Veronica pulls herself up, snaps the top button of her jeans back into place. She needs some control.
She's still a Mars.
On the plane she drank a diet cherry cola, no straw, no napkin; water droplets glistening in the spaces between her fingers when she sets the cup down. There's an antiseptic, close-air smell; the familiar coffin charm of hospitals and economy class. The man next to her seriously has the cleanest fingernails she's ever seen.
"Heading home ?" he asks. Hint of a self-deprecating smile, eager and puppy-doggish, and she's reading him like a book. Veronica doesn't have time for daddy issues anymore- or, wait. She does. Because this is now officially the longest flight of her life.
"Yeah," she says, and settles into the seat. "I long for the gentle, womanly embrace of LA." He laughs, just a little.
"Native, then."
"Sort of." If she paid attention, she'd notice she was creasing and uncreasing the corners of her magazine. "I left Southern California and came back again- marking me as a masochist."
"Or an amnesiac."
"Sometimes both." She relaxes a little. "On business ?" No, almost certainly not. He's chained to a beeper, somewhere, if she ever saw one. Although, Australia ? Hopefully a bail jumper rather than a failed internet marriage, because she really can't bear to hear about the latter.
"No," he says, and taps the stewardess for a drink. She suspects she's accidentally hit a nerve; and she knows she's right when he chugs the plastic cup and falls silent, staring out the window.
The plane begins to shake.
"Fan-fucking-tasti-" she starts, but she doesn't get to finish. No wry face, no shared exasperation with her seatmate. There's a sound like a sledgehammer. He leans over her head, arms cradling her, and she has about two seconds to consider what a great guy he must be. A metal case pops out of a rack and slams down onto his neck. There's a sickening snap before she finds her lungs and screams them empty. He goes limp over her and the world gets very fucking dark.
Somewhere along the way- the shoes.
When she falls exhausted in the shade of a tree, hands bloody from carrying people out of the wreck, with a t-shirts wrapped around her head, she asks: "Did anybody see the plane blow up ?" They all stare at her for breaking some kind of morbid silence they've been carrying.
"The fuck are you talking about ?" That's the the redneck with the problem keeping his top button buttoned. "I think we all fucking saw-"
"I'm asking, did anybody see the plane blow up. As in, fire and smoke ? I don't remember hearing an explosion. I don't remember anything like that."
"She's right." This from a quiet guy, his arms around a skinny blonde. "We just fell."
"I was asleep," the blonde chimes in. She starts combing her hair- yes, Veronica thinks, how pressing. "I always sleep on airplanes."
"Very helpful."
"Why don't you-"
"Shut it, Shannon."
It continues like that for a while. Veronica eventually gets up and sifts through piles for her suitcase; remarkably, it's there. The file is there, too, smiling in an annoyingly unwrinkled way from the bottom of the bag. She strips off her bloodied jacket and pulls a sweatshirt over her head. The redneck wolf-whistles.
"Wow." Veronica turns, shades the sun from her eyes, and smiles at him. "I'm so lucky to have crashed with a real grown-up aboard." He says nothing, just smirks and turns to the water, wading up to his knees. Later he'll haul wood for a fire with the rest of them, and Veronica will fall asleep with a pregnant girl's head resting on her shoulders, and nobody will cry.
It's only the first day.
TWO: shell-games
What she thinks she'll hate the most, when this is a memory, are the vines. They're everywhere. They seem to grow in her sleep; the hateful twisting, choking shapes, as wide as child-fingers, reaching out from every tree and bush and rock. The guy with the case of knives, John, he gave her one to cut open a locked suitcase and now she uses it what seems like every day. To cut vines. To cut endless goddam vines, just to walk anywhere- even to go to the bathroom.
"Hey," Boone says, and she stands up a lot faster than she intended to.
"Don't you-" and there's a pause, where she giggles. "Don't you knock ?"
"Oh, shit, I'm sorry." He turns away, and covers his eyes like a grade-schooler, and the whole effect is really charming. Veronica zips up her jeans and wipes her hands on, well. Never mind. "I'm really sorry. I'm leaving."
"It's okay. This would be embarassing if there were stall doors, or doors at all, or anything normal. But the world is my bathroom now." Ugh, her hands still feel icky. "So there's really no escape."
"Gross."
"Very."
He's picking fruit, so she tags along. He's tied a long-sleeved shirt around his neck and tucked the waist into his pants; so the mangoes bump along with walking like a sleeping baby, giving him an enormous round belly. She wishes her camera lens had survived the fall. It would be a great collection when she returned: a belly full of mangoes, that kid and his dog curled up together in the sand, the pregnant girl with the big tarp for an umbrella. Everywhere she turns there's gorgeous scenery; that, and vines. The light here is beautiful. It is the most unnaturally natural place she's ever seen.
And that's the whole thing, really. There's nothing natural about this paradise. It rains on a timer and there's a cord running from the water to the jungle, and every time she tries to get into a conversation with someone they clam up and walk away. She's tired of verbal shell-games, and she's pretty sure that there was at least one killer and a handful of nutcases on the plane. The sleuthing would be a welcome distraction, but it's not, because it's real, and she's sleeping in a pup tent made of a dead woman's coat and blanket. She's watched people die, helplessly. If Keith was here it would be better.
He'd know what to do.
She misses her father. She stops and stands, and tries to calm the rising panic in her chest. "I-" she begins, and stumbles over the words. "Why are we doing this ?"
"Hmm ?"
"Why are we doing this ?" she nearly shouts. There's a stone in her stomach and it won't go away. "Why are we- picking fruit ?" Boone's dark eyes are confused and gentle, and they're absolutely killing her. Who said she liked dark eyes ? She hates dark eyes now. They're his eyes.
"We're picking fruit so we can eat," he says, not unkindly. "Do you want to take a break ?"
"I want to go home !" The birds are startled out of the trees above her. She knows she's being terribly rude. "I want- I want to go home. I want somebody to do something, to go somewhere, to get help or send help; I want to go home." She puts a hand to her face, to stop the throbbing in her healing forehead. "I can't play island adventure anymore. I need to do something." She looks at Boone and waits for him to sigh, and rub her arm, and say comforting useless things like I know or we're all in this together, and then she'll have to jump off a cliff or just cry for the rest of her life.
But he doesn't.
"Okay," he says, and his face changes into something harder. Stranger. "You're in luck, because I found something to do."
Boone looks at John like John will smack him with a rolled-up newspaper for bringing her here, but he doesn't. Shortage of newspaper. John seems too pleased, anyway, with whatever's going on- the proud father vibe is strongest around him. He puts his hands on his hips and cocks his head, looks at her looking at his efforts.
"Congratulations," Veronica murmurs, staring at the pit and the giant gas tank sticking out of it. "You birthed a fallout shelter."
"Interesting choice of words, Veronica." He uses her name a lot, like a guidance counselor, or a priest. "Birthed."
"Not particularly."
"So what do you think ?" Boone asks. He's digging his heels into the wet dirt, hands shoved in pockets. She realizes now that the dark stains on his jeans aren't boar's blood, just mud and grass. He hasn't been hunting. Neither of them have, judging from the size of the hole.
She stares into the darkness of the underground.
"I think it'll kill us," she says.
Okay, the melodrama aside, it's just one more thing to stumble over in the Jungle of Awkward. John seems to think it's the second coming of color television, or maybe Buddha trapped in a tin can. She has to admit there's something to it. Boone takes her back to the others and makes her promise not to tell; well, he begs, and she says alright for now; and then he tells her that John is really okay, actually really great, but that she shouldn't let him smear peyote in her hair.
Veronica thinks she might go hang out with the guy who can't speak English for a while.
Instead she passes the fire, and grabs some fish from the metal tray resting in the coals. It's meltingly hot and salty-sweet in her hands, burning her tongue and trailing juices down her chin. The strangeness of this place, the taste of fine fish eaten off of dirty fingers, the fact that there's a hint of parsley in the mix. Sun's good with plants- she must have rubbed it in before it grilled. They live simply, if not well.
"Veronica." Sayid nods at her from the darkness. She can see Shannon behind him, sleeping, curled like a trusting question mark around her magazines.
"Hey." They both look without turning their heads, survey the landscape- is it a futile gesture ? Nobody could be watching. Nobody would care. One more thing from a past life that they can't let go of. "It's uh- it's both infinitely less, and infinitely more interesting than you thought."
"Oh yes ?" Veronica finds great amusement in his practiced mildness.
"It's a hole in the ground."
"It's- excuse me ?" Sayid coughs slightly. "Am I to understand that they've both gone mad ? A hole in the ground ? Is there an accompanying sandcastle ?"
"Yes. It's really something."
"What ?"
"No, no." She laughs almost silently, with a hand pressed to her face. "There's no sandcastle. It's this- door thing. A kind of hatch in the ground. Attached to a huge tank. Everything's metal, with a glass window in the door. I'm not sure how far underground it goes, but they've dug at least ten feet down already."
"Hmm." He watches as Veronica draws it out in the sand- a small square inside a large circle. "Do you think it could be opened ?"
"They're trying."
"Ah, well." He smiles, and she's reminded of the person he keeps claiming to be. "Then do you think I could open it ?"
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Date: Monday, December 18th, 2006 12:09 am (UTC)Ferns are brushing the tips of her fingers; she can't quite place the sensation- like trickling your fingers across miniblinds in the slanting summer sun.
The light here is beautiful. It is the most unnaturally natural place she's ever seen.
Incredible.
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