title: Notes From a Cage

rating: pg, for mild violence

summary: A brief look at Ben Linus' thoughts during his time in captivity

pairing: assumed Ben/Annie, or at least one sided!Ben/Annie

"She got sick!" he speaks, voice hard-edged, hot and defiant. Leaning back against the cold wall of the armoury, Ben closes his eyes. The chill of the wall seeps into his skin, stealing some of his feverish heat, numbing his pain just a little. He can live with pain, though: the bruises and cuts, his split lip and black eye and the blood that has soaked into his shirt where the arrow first went in; all of these things are bearable. It is the emotional pain that wears him down: the endless bark of Sayid's interrogation, the repeated requests for information he is too tired to keep straight.

"She got sick," he hears himself mumble, heading towards delirium. Infection spreads across his shoulder. Blood slowly seeps away. I'm Henry Gale, he tells himself, of Minnesota, he remembers, picking up the story line. His brief memories of the man are gone, replaced with his own face, as though he lived that kind of life once, in a dream. It blends skilfully into a lie. Crashed here in a balloon, in the middle of the jungle, he reminds himself, to keep the story going. Of course he'd heard that French woman, Rousseau, speak. She had thought he was unconscious, but he had been awake enough to hear when she had warned Sayid that, for a time, he would lie. She had been wrong only in the duration. Beatings, threats: he would never stop lying. That was not how he worked. Ben was not designed to give in without a fight, to go only halfway. He would keep up the lie until death if he had to.

Disgusted, weighted under guilt they try to disguise and dismiss, his captors finally leave. Ben raises his head with the slamming of the door. Ropes, tied in slipshod knots a first year Boy Scout would scoff at, bind his wrists and ankles, raising welts. His shoulder is smouldering fire where the arrow went in, and he alternately sweats and shivers as the fever rages. Rather than complain or demand the doctor give him something out of their limited stash of medications (certainly never allowing himself to think of the sterile, well-stocked facilities back at the Staff), Ben draws comfort from the strange hazy heat. He lets it lull him, allows it to slow his breathing, turn him into a creature without sentiment or need.

She got sick, he thinks, but this time, it is not the false persona's imaginary wife of which he thinks. Annie, not Jenny, certainly not Emily. Ben's lies, like all good falsehoods, are woven from truth. A thread of reality, that is all that is required for the most convincing of deceptions. It is how he teaches himself to believe. Closing his eyes, Ben leans his head back against the wall. Beyond the confines of his cell, he can hear the crash survivors, arguing. Arguing about him, specifically. There is slim satisfaction in that. Making an impression, he thinks, with amusement. How easy they are to break. No one has tied and trussed them, or pounded them into dark oblivion. They have not been locked up in little cells or ruthlessly interrogated, but they are more out of control than he is, more scared and desperate, less able to think. It's rather comic, really.

Annie, he thinks again, with a sigh, and lets himself dissolve into memory. He can see it all with startling clarity. His thirteenth birthday, sitting beside her on those swings. Long, sun-drenched weekend days spent on the dock, their feet in the water, sweaty fingers meeting, discreetly holding hands. Laughter, hair ribbons, a chaste first kiss while waist-deep in the salty ocean, the press of her lips unexpectedly on his. Of course, Ben cannot avoid the memories of the sickness. Richard always swore it was not their doing, that the so-called Hostiles knew nothing of the virus that swept through the bunkers, killing twenty. Ben had left it at that, not really wanting to know, but the fact remained that only Dharma people had sickened and died during that hellish month four years before the final purge.

Annie had been one of the last to catch the illness. She had been twenty-two by then, no longer a plain Jane tomboy, but pretty, and Ben had not been the only one who had noticed. Before she died the fever had raged against her. With hot red cheeks on paper pale skin, she'd called for more blankets, more sweaters. He had been there constantly, to take away the coats and quilts she cried for, to force her to drink the cold water she refused, and to insist she swallow the antibiotics in spite of her sore throat and utter exhaustion. The guilt had been oppressive and heavy, a constant curtain around him. Then, abruptly, one clean beautiful morning after a heavy rain, she was gone. That very evening they had wrapped her in white and set her on a raft, lit with a torch and pushed out to sea. The funeral ritual of the Hostiles, the only thing the Dharma Initiative ever really learned from the natives of the island.

Idle in his cell, Ben wonders if the sickness ever left the island. Danielle Rousseau has always feared it, he knows, and remnants and splinter groups made up from the few Dharma survivors hide in quarantine, still. He has heard Rousseau's cries for over a decade, echoing through the jungle whenever their paths cross too close. As always, she screams for Alex, where is Alex, and mourns the members of her crew that she once claimed had sickened and died. Ben knows that, sick or not, they died at her hand, but it is also true that a week after Alex's birth, Danielle fell ill, enabling them to take the infant without a fight. Rousseau has never ventured into the barracks, and Ben wonders, sometimes, whether she attributes Alex's absence to her own hand or some terrifying disease. He also has not failed to notice the stash of yellow protective gear in the underground station where he is now prisoner, having glimpse it when the doctor was patching his shoulder. It could mean nothing, could mean everything.

He thinks of Annie, the twin wooden dolls. Part of her is still with him, back in the neat yellow house, where the carved image of her rests upon a table. Part of him went with her, the doll of him that was set aflame on the raft with Annie's body, along with the island blossoms and palm fronds and bitter farewells that sailed away with her. Always together, he thinks, remembering. Now we'll never have to be apart.

Footsteps, right outside the door. Ben opens one eye, hearing the door whine metallically as it is opened. Someone in the kitchen swears; presumably the doctor. Shephard, in Ben's limited experience, has a tendency for temper, and a penchant for control. He has no interest in this, only the man's medical skills. He allows his mind to wander. Ben pictures Annie at nineteen, walking beside him through the jungle. He can almost see her: laughing, picking up a hibiscus and wearing it in her hair like a 1950s movie star. He can almost feel her catching his hand. Ben knows the fists will strike out again -- already the demand for answers has been renewed, this time by new blood: the tart, angry-faced woman Ana Lucia. She is so driven by pent-up fury and guilt that her violence distracts her; he could kill her if he wanted. Will kill her, more than likely, as it is inevitable she will foolishly let her guard down once her temper spikes.

He lets Sayid's fists strike without fighting back, though his mouth opens, speaking urgently in Henry Gale's tremulous, Minnesota voice. "I've already told you!" Ben says, but he is only half paying attention to the interrogation game now. Mostly, he is concentrating on Annie. If he thinks of her hard enough, he does not feel the punches rain down, can barely hear the demands for information. Ben is not altruistic. He is a predator, and a skilled survivor. But he would have done anything to save Annie, and as the beating intensifies, he knows she will be the one to see him through.