Fragmented

"This misshapen knave - his mother was a witch..." ~ Prospero

* * *

Things proceed. A great many entries might be summed up this way; simpler than the Goldberg intricacies I weave to obscure what is really going on. A man is moved, another, then another. I watch them all as best I can and they do not know it. It is like the hatch again, then. Behind a closed door, my shoulder on fire, I still observed. Nothing simpler. Now the hatch is the world itself, the door between each of us a throng of people.

It doesn't make them – or me – any safer. A door's just a door, a transition between one place and another, and it's easily moved out of one's way. Cold comfort that there had been little need for a door to be opened. Until now. And now JL is my door. Was. Is. I don't know, but what he set in motion I can use. He came to Los Angeles to die and so he did. My contribution is minimal.

Whatever happened, happened.

EH knows that very well.

~*~

(flick, flick goes the page)

~*~

Is the island a panopticon or is it the entire world? And if J is watching, what is the purpose? Still, and still I question too much out here. Reminders of doubt. I want to go home, or so I tell myself. I march as they do, towards something that cannot be commanded but only obeyed. There is no choice.

~*~

(flick, flick)

~*~

I remember a dream I had when I was very young. It's one of the few things that I have left from before the island. Everything else is vague wisps; the voice of some distant relative reduced to a garbled hum, a flash of garish color, the scent of something sweet, like forest loam. Was that the cemetery? Was I ever taken to see her? I can't remember anymore. Can't picture it. If I ever saw her grave then my memory can only picture the island's charnel pit.

But I remember that dream.

It was a mirror – or maybe it was a thin wall of water, it doesn't matter in a dream – and in it I saw myself as an adult. Here it played a trick on me; there was no real face to recall, nothing for me to say ah! so that's what I will look like. Just me, knowing it was me, and half of this future's face was ruined.

That had detail, that I remember. Scars that looped and curled along the throat and cheek like whorls in an ancient, flaking tree. Some were older than others, healed into a kind of elegant pattern. Others were deep and scabbed, an ugly dark brown. My lip was pulled down very slightly from one of these, forever dour, and the scar that ran from it disappeared somewhere under my chin. They miss the eye only barely, these marks either of strange fire or claw or both, although some jagged, horrible thing marked the bridge of my nose. Like something's talons had just begun to pull away before tearing it fully off.

Dream, not nightmare. It was like having half of me put permanently in shadow, or a mask. I found it easier to look at than the normal side, like each little line had a story that could be told. Didn't matter if it was true, just a story that you could fall into and not come out again. And I reached out to touch this other face, put my fingers to that mirror, and then there was nothing but cold. I began to smile, half my face feeling like it was gone, and that was it.

I woke up with my hand pressed against the wood floor of my first home. And my face, wedged against a pillow so heavily that it would be marked with it. Just that, simple marks.

I remember being disappointed. Nothing else from those years. Just disappointment.

Suppose that too is a fair summary of things.

~*~

(flick, flick)

~*~

Did they leave her to rot? I would give anything to know. I dreamt they left her among the bones, that Dharma ossuary (and his skull, how was his skull there? We left him to wither where he fell, not with them) and that the thing in the jungle came to eat her. I heard the smacking and cracking sounds of it and when I woke up my pil...~ (unfinished, scratched, marked out)

No.

~*~

(flick, flick)

~*~

I'll steal that one, too, and be damned for it. A girl and a boy, whisked off from their mothers because of the island. Because of me. Like Eden, but cursed, and all the names of the beasts are the names of secret sin. The apple's wormed but it'll taste like honey right up till the moment one bursts against your lips and you taste the infection.

And you'll eat anyway, eat it all up because someone told you to.

~*~

(flick, flick)

~*~

Isn't a one of us that place hasn't ruined. I'll tell people it is salvation and that we do our hidden 'god's' work, but lying is what I do. I should be a Catholic, then, and tell Thomas to go forth and fear no more. What God needs a feeble thing like what we all are? No wonder he doesn't speak. Why should he?

But he did once. I didn't hear it, but he did. What does that mean?

~*~

(flick, flick)

~*~

Only a madman will write my elegy when this is over.

~*~

(It falls shut)

~Fin

(ABC's LOST is not my creation, nor do I claim any ownership or rights to the above content beyond that of the average godforsaken fanfiction writer. All errors are my own. Shards will continue – if they do or must – in a new collection.)

2009/13/11 MDS