mysticalchinchilla
Cadet
Lost
They’re not spies, but they still have secrets.
rated: PG (for vague action violence and Weiss' dirty mouth) - this will go up very quickly!
genre: action/adventure/drama/mystery
a/n: This is AU - they're not spies, and none of them know each other. I also wanted to clarify that this isn’t a crossover – not really, anyway. Although there are, obviously, substantial elements stolen from Lost, including elements of some characters, not to mention the premise, this story has separate mysteries, and a different overall plot from Lost. The Alias characters are not spies. Some of them, perhaps, lead very similar lives to the ones on the show, but for the most part, they’re just normal people.
Not all the relationships – either romantic or familial – will be the same as in canon.
Not everyone will last.
a/n (part 2): this site, it seems, automatically censors the word "c***" - see, they just did it again. Anyway, the word "c***pit" is used in this story a couple times, and will crop up a lot in future chapters, since it's about... ya know... a plane. Since I hate asteriks it's going to be c-ckpit. Just in case you cared...
Enjoy!
------------------------------
1. Prologue
A plane from Sydney to Los Angeles. Two hundred and forty-seven strangers brought together for fifteen hours. You could be sitting next to anybody. A teacher; a genius; a criminal; a banker; a spy. For fifteen hours, strangers sit beside each other in silence, then depart, never even having learned each other’s names. But in a heartbeat, everything can change.
----------
Something was exploding in the distance. Blinking irritably, Sloane opened his eyes. He was lying on his back on a beach. People were screaming. Someone was shouting the name Sydney. Metal was screeching. He sat up slowly, looking blankly down at his body, vaguely surprised that he was all in one piece. His suit wasn’t even slightly charred. A small miracle, he thought.
“Would you care to help out, sir?” someone asked him. “People are dying.” He turned his head to regard the woman who spoke so coolly. She was standing with her hands in her pockets, regarding him lazily with hooded eyes. Her lips twitched into a slight smile, and she ran a hand across the back of her short brown hair.
With a nod, Sloane stood gingerly. “What happened?”
“The plane exploded in midair,” the woman explained. “It was torn apart. Maybe a third of it landed on the beach over there.” She pointed to the chaos that was slowly rippling outwards from the burning behemoth that was one third of a commercial airliner.
“What’s your name?” he asked her.
Her smile was unnerving. “Ekaterina.”
He smiled back. “Arvin.”
Sloane didn’t quite feel like moving – he was still amazed that he could. And Ekaterina wasn’t in any hurry herself. So they stood together and watched from a distance as some were saved and some died and some became heroes.
----------
Francie ran through the burning debris, past a pregnant woman in the arms of a shaggy-haired youth. A dark-haired girl was dragging an unconscious man in a suit away from the wreckage, but Francie lost sight of them when a jet of flame shot out of one of the engines, seemingly engulfing them.
“Sydney!” someone shouted. “Sydney!” Francie ran past the shouter, past a middle-aged African-American man staring around dazedly, past a pretty blonde boy struggling to resuscitate a small man in a bulky jacket. She wasn’t sure what she was running to or what she was running from, all she knew was that if she stopped she might never be able to start again.
----------
Fire roared out of one of the engines. A man had been standing too close and had been sucked in. Spattered with his blood, her face and clothes feeling slightly burnt, Sydney glanced around her. A dark-haired girl was standing over an unconscious man in a suit. The girl was trying to drag the man away from the fire, but there was a deep gash in her shoulder that prevented any sort of efficiency.
“Need help?” Sydney called, rushing over. She remembered the girl from the plane – they had been sitting next to each other. And the girl had been very rude.
Shaking her head doggedly, the girl gave up on trying to pull the man. “I tripped when the… when the engine exploded. Caught my shoulder on something,” she muttered, gesturing to the bloody wound. Her accent was Spanish, or perhaps South American. “He’s heavy.”
“Here,” said Sydney, grabbing the man under his armpits and heaving him as far as she could. “Stay with him,” she told the girl when they were at a safer distance.
She began to run back towards the crash site, but the girl called after her. “Hey! What’s your name?”
“Sydney!” she called back, hearing the name echoed in her father’s voice. She turned to see him rushing towards her. “Where have you been?” he demanded.
But there wasn’t time. People were dying.
----------
Sydney lugged her suitcase after her, trying to maneuver the thing through the narrow aisle. Sixteen D and E. She turned to her father, but he had already seen the seat numbers and was struggling to get his case in the overhead compartment. Without a word, he took her suitcase and thrust it above his head into the bin. Sydney turned back to the seats.
“Aisle or middle?” she asked her father.
He looked at her blankly. “Doesn’t matter.”
She shrugged and took her seat in the center, next to a dark-haired girl who appeared to have fallen asleep listening to an ipod. After a quick glance through the magazines and safety manuals in the seat pocket in front of her, Sydney contented herself with asking her father to get a magazine out of her suitcase. With a stony glare, he complied, and Sydney buried her nose in Entertainment Weekly.
The rows behind them began to fill up, and slowly the rest of the passengers took their seats. Just as it looked like they might take off, a shaggy-haired young man in glasses and a suit ran to his seat a couple of rows behind Sydney and Jack, panting heavily.
“Sorry, sorry,” he was mumbling under his breath. A stewardess gave him a funny look as he hurriedly shoved a briefcase into the overhead bin. “Sorry,” he mumbled again, climbing over someone to get to his seat. The engines began to rev up, and the plane started taxiing towards the runway. A voice came over the intercom and began to detail safety procedures in a droning voice. The seat in front of her seemed to rock violently at the mention of possible disasters. At the end of the speech, the pilot demanded that all electronic devices be shut off.
Since the girl next to her obviously hadn’t heard this, Sydney nudged her shoulder. The girl stirred.
“¿Que passa?” she grumbled.
Sydney didn’t really speak Spanish, so she just hoped that the girl spoke English. “You should turn off your ipod – we’re taking off.”
“Whatever,” was the reply, as the girl switched the ipod off and turned her shoulder to Sydney.
----------
“We need to find the c-ckpit,” Jack declared forcibly to Sydney. “Perhaps the radio is intact – we might be able to send a signal to help the search parties.” He glared around at the other survivors. The explosions had subsided and people had had a good sit-down, assessed damage, found their bags, licked their wounds. A young man with a crooked tie was supervising a medicine-hunt from a shabby “hospital” he had erected. Sydney noticed the dark-haired girl with her sleeve ripped open, the wound in her shoulder sewed closed. The man she had been helping was lying nearby, a wad of cloth pressed into his side.
“We’ll go in the morning, dad,” Sydney said. “For now, let’s get some rest, okay?”
Jack nodded. “That’s sensible. We wouldn’t be able to see anything in the jungle during the night.”
He lay down, and wrapped himself in a thin airplane blanket. Soon he was snoring softly, but Sydney couldn’t bring herself to sleep. She looked around at her fellow survivors. Scattered, lost, alone – all of them. The man who had come late had found the food and was passing it around, helped by a young black woman. He looked haggard, and the girl looked like she was in shock.
The man with the crooked tie, who Sydney presumed to be a doctor, was gathering all the Aspirin and prescription medicines that people were bringing him, wiping sweat from his brow, ordering someone to check a bandage, dolling out antibiotics for those with major wounds. Even from a distance, she could tell that if he didn’t stop soon, he would likely collapse.
----------
He should have known this would happen. Planes were just too dangerous. Marshall didn’t like dangerous – he liked cute and fluffy. The trouble with cute and fluffy was that it usually turned out to be worse than things like, say, dinosaurs. He would take that t-rex from Jurassic Park over a Pomeranian any day.
After that blond man – the one who had been late – Will, was it? After he had gone to find food, he had left Marshall with the pregnant girl. It was sort of awkward. Marshall was always awkward with girls.
“You know I… I didn’t get your… your name…” he said falteringly to her. She was young, and pretty, and pregnant, and that intimidated him. Her eyes were very blue, too. She turned to him.
“Carrie.” She smiled, sort of sadly. “You are…?”
He gulped. A girl had just asked his name. “Uh…” What? Huh? What was his what? Oh, his name! What was his name? “It’s… uh… M-Marshall.”
Carrie smiled at him, and he smiled nervously back. His hands didn’t know what to do with themselves – they were fidgeting uncontrollably. So he sat on them.
----------
On a trip to the bathroom, Marshall noted each electronic device in use. They had been in the air for almost two hours, and lethargy seemed to have set in over the passengers on Oceanic Flight 815. In the row behind him, a dark-haired woman was listening to an ipod. A few more rows back, the shaggy-haired young man in glasses was typing sluggishly on a laptop. A row in front of Marshall and to the left, a middle-aged African-American man was also using a laptop, in his case to send emails. A woman that Marshall presumed to be his wife was leaning over his shoulder, pointing out spelling mistakes.
As he sometimes did on long plane-rides like this, Marshall started making up stories about the people around him, mainly to stave off the boredom. An interesting-looking blonde boy that Marshall had seen in the last row of first class became, in his mind, a spy as suave and devil-may-care as James Bond. He could imagine the boy in a dapper tuxedo, drinking wine, smilingly daring his enemies to tie him up and throw him in the scorpion pit.
The woman behind him reading a magazine he imagined to be a dangerous criminal on the run from the law. This thought, however, made him quite uncomfortable, so he changed his assessment of her to a housewife with two children, on her way back from visiting her father, who was running from the law. And lived in a cave to hide from the vigilant pursuit.
To explain the Spanish girl’s petulant non-responsiveness and the circles under her eyes, he decided that her brother had been brutally murdered in mysterious circumstances, and she was hunting his killer separately from the police. Who never knew anything anyways.
Because he had been late, Marshall made the shaggy-haired youth into a corporate businessman who went on frequent ‘business trips’ because he was cheating on his wife. With… Marshall pondered for a moment… the Prime Minister of Australia. Why not? he reasoned. Stranger things have happened. And the Prime Minister had held the young man up until he had almost missed the flight. Because the Prime Minister of Australia? Horny as hell.
Secure in the knowledge that he had created some interesting but wildly improbable fantasies, Marshall hacked into the plane’s computer to check that everything was alright, then began an email to his mother.
----------
Dawn broke, very slowly it seemed. Vaughn hadn’t slept, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to until the rescue team came. People were dying. Some of the wounds had been relatively minor – the Spanish girl would be fine, Francine or whatever was in shock but she seemed to be okay as long as she was moving, and though Marshall had had to be resuscitated by that blonde kid he was in perfect condition. But the Spanish girl had been dragging a man in a suit, and he definitely wouldn’t be okay. Someone else had lost a leg.
The sun was swelteringly hot only a few hours after the sun had risen. Flies had started buzzing around the sick and wounded, and it was a full-time job keeping those he could alive. He had already stopped trying with a middle-aged woman – it was too late and he had too many people to take care of. Better to let her die in peace.
Alice was helping him as best she could, but she was as weary as he and wasn’t a doctor.
“You should get some rest,” he told her, taking a bandage out of her hand. “We can’t afford to have you collapse from exhaustion.”
“Alright,” she whispered. There were dark circles under her eyes. She kissed him, then went to find somewhere to lie down. He kept working. There was nothing else to be done.
----------
There was something about that woman – Sydney. Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Maybe it was the habit she had of tucking her hair behind her ear or the way she held her shoulders. Whatever it was, there was something about her that reminded Nadia of herself.
“Going somewhere?” she asked, approaching Sydney and an elderly man who was probably her father. They were looking off into the jungle, talking quietly between themselves. The man had found a backpack and had stuffed it full of water bottles.
The man’s eyes were agate-hard. “It’s none of your business.”
Nadia shrugged. “It’s just that if you were planning to find the c-ckpit, I saw smoke in the jungle over that way.” She pointed. “I could go with you.”
Sydney exchanged a skeptical glance with the man. She nodded almost imperceptibly. He shook his head, a restrained but forceful gesture. Nadia decided to cut in. “I’m going with you,” she informed them. “You can’t boss me around.” Without a word, the man stalked off into the jungle, leaving the two young women in his wake. “I’m Catherine, but the way,” Nadia called after him. “My friends call me Kate…”
He turned and glared at her. “Jack.”
----------
Nadia leaned her seat back further, ignoring a slight grunt from the man behind her as it cut into his space. He was a big man, so she didn’t really blame him for being annoyed at having his already cramped legroom constricted. But she couldn’t bring herself to care enough to do anything about it.
We took a walk that night, but it wasn’t the same.
We had a fight on the promenade out in the rain
She said she loved me, but she had somewhere to go
She couldn’t scream while I held her close
I swore I’d never let her go.
Static crackled through the headphones. Nadia glanced down at a blinking notice saying the batteries were dead. She pulled the headphones out of her ears and stuffed the ipod angrily into the bag at her feet. The stupid thing had given out after only three hours. The woman next to her looked up briefly from Entertainment Weekly. Until the hazel eyes had once again disappeared behind the magazine, Nadia just glared. But once the woman was safely tucked away behind pictures of Nicole Kidman’s latest hit, she pulled the letter out of her pocket. Almost lovingly, and certainly with care, she smoothed out a wrinkle on the envelope. It wasn’t addressed to her; it was addressed to the Argentine embassy in Sydney, which had forwarded it to Lucia Martinez. And had been intercepted by her.
It was typed, rather than handwritten, printed on official paper with a seal at the top and a photocopied signature at the bottom. Like plastic roses on a grave, it made her almost physically sick. She wasn’t sure why she kept it, even. It was bland and official and offered nothing more than the simplest details. Perhaps she kept it because she was afraid that if she threw it away, she might wake up one morning and call him, or even roll over and expect to see him lying next to her. Snoring like a train wreck, or just woken up and scratching his moustache.
She didn’t open the envelope and read the letter again. She didn’t have to.
----------
Sark watched the frenzied activity from the door above the plane wing. It was liked watching ants in an ant-farm. He smiled as his gaze found another suitcase, and he quickly pulled it from the wreckage. He had collected quite a stash over the past few hours, and he intended to hoard it.
“Are you alright?” someone called nearby. At first Sark thought the speaker was addressing him, but then he saw a middle-aged black man standing with his back to Sark and the plane, staring out across the trackless waters. “You okay?” the speaker called again, coming to stand by the black man’s side. It was a chubby, tallish man, Sark noted, that had called out. Mid-thirties, he would guess. Sark’s keen, icy eyes noted the indent on his finger where he had once worn a wedding ring.
The black man nodded. “Yes, thank you.” He wouldn’t look at the other man.
“I’m Weiss,” said the chubby tall one, sticking his hand out. The older man didn’t return the courtesy. “I’m sorry… I just thought I could help,” Weiss said awkwardly.
The older man looked at Weiss unblinkingly, a small hint of a smile crossing his face. “Dixon.” He looked back over the waters. “My… my wife was in the back of the plane.”
Weiss blew out a breath. “Wow… I’m sorry.”
Dixon shook his head. “Don’t be. She’s alive.”
“How can you know that?” Weiss asked, confused.
Dixon just smiled. “I know.”
----------
They were running out of food. Forty-eight survivors, about a hundred meals they had salvaged. It wasn’t enough to go around. He sat down and wiped some sweat from his forehead. He hadn’t seen Lauren since before the crash, he didn’t know where she had gotten to now. It was, he had to admit, a possibility that she hadn’t survived. But he hadn’t seen her among the dead, either.
People were dying, and he was thinking about some woman he had spent maybe an hour chatting with. With a groan, he stood up and went over to the man who was probably a doctor.
“Can I help?” he asked, concern lighting his eyes.
“Of course…”
“Will.”
The doctor smiled. “Will. I’m Michael. Could you get a couple of people and try to set up some kind of shelter?” He gestured around him at his patients. There weren’t too many of them, but they were all sporting horrendous wounds. Will gulped. He didn’t like blood. “You can probably find a tarp or something.”
Will nodded. “Yeah. Sure.” He looked around until his eyes lighted on Francie sitting nearby. They had met last night while handing out food together, so he felt relatively comfortable about approaching her now.
“Could you help me?” he asked. She looked up.
“M… Michael says I’m in shock. From the crash.” Her eyes were wide and scared. Will sat down next to her.
He nodded. “Yeah. I don’t blame you.”
“It’s weird, you know?” she said, turning to him. “I mean, look over there.” Will looked in the direction she nodded in, towards two men standing near the tide line, looking out over the waters. The younger man – tall and bulky – had his hand on the other man’s shoulder, and the older man – middle-aged, intelligent and calm looking – was talking in a low voice. “I bet they’re friends for life now,” Francie said, “the way they’ve been talking. They would never even have met if we hadn’t crashed. We’re here for who knows how long—” Will thought about interrupting her to insist that they would be rescued soon, but decided against it. “—and the people we meet we might never forget. In a weird way, this is a good thing. For us who survived, I mean. People who go through hell together come out much closer for it.”
----------
Will Tippin adjusted his glasses blearily. Four hours on a plane and another eleven to go. And just his luck to be late, of course. The blonde woman to his right gave him an agreeable smile. He felt sort of vaguely guilty. Jenny would kill him. But Jenny, he told himself, would never ever know.
The story on a new breed of artichokes didn’t want to be written. He’d get through maybe two words, then spend the next ten minutes just staring at the screen, unable to believe that he had written the phrase “genetically superior artichokes.” So he saved what he had and shut the machine down.
“Care for a drink?” he asked the blonde woman.
Her smile, he decided, was quite disarming. “Sure,” she said, her voice thick with a British accent.
He ordered them drinks – pathetically watered-down stuff was all they were allowed to sell on planes – and turned to the woman. “My name’s Will,” he told her, offering her his hand.
She took it. “Lauren.” A sherry and a gin and tonic arrived and were placed on the tray tables in front of them. “What’s your business, Will?” she asked him, taking a sip of the drink.
He shrugged. “Just… you know… business,” he murmured evasively. “I’m a journalist, so… I had to go to Australia to meet a source of mine.”
Despite the fact that this was a lie, and not even a very good one, since most sources were fine talking over the phone or via email, Lauren appeared to believe it. “I was in Australia on business, too,” she told him, leaning forward confidentially. “I’m actually traveling incognito, sort of. I’m in politics.” Will’s eyebrows rose.
“Don’t you guys get, like, private jets and stuff?”
She laughed charmingly. “Only in the movies. I’m not really high up in politics – I’m about on par with the Mayor’s secretary’s secretary. But I do occasionally get to run exciting errands for the Governor. All very hush-hush.” She grinned. “I suppose I’m making a bigger deal out of it than is really appropriate. It’s only level two clearance.”
Will grinned back. “Well considering that I’m level zero clearance, it’s all pretty exciting to me. What exactly is it you do, or can’t you say?”
“I work for the NSC. Basically I write reports for a living.”
Will nodded. “Basically I do the same thing, except your reports are on terrorists and stuff, and mine are on genetically altered artichokes.” He laughed along with her, and drank his gin and tonic, and forgot all about Jenny and how she would kill him.
----------
“We were coming back from a vacation.” Dixon laughed quietly, happily. “She always gets so annoyed, because I bring my laptop on vacations and check my email. She says vacations are just for us.” He was smiling, remembering his wife.
“Got any kids?” Weiss asked.
Dixon nodded, and took his wallet out of his pocket. “Steven, he’s eight, and Robin – eleven.” Several pictures of children, a boy and a girl, at varying ages, were placed into Weiss’ hands. He chuckled, looking at photos of a little boy with ice cream smudged all over his face, of the girl in a black velvet dress at the piano, of both of them having a snowball fight.
“They’re cute,” he said.
“They were staying with my mother for the week – Diane decided we should take a vacation just for us. A second honeymoon of sorts.”
Second honeymoon. The words brought no feeling so much as bitterness to Weiss. He smiled at Dixon, giving no hint of the anger he suddenly felt. Not at Dixon, not at all. It was much deeper, almost painful. But Weiss didn’t like dealing with pain, so he grinned heartily and patted Dixon on the shoulder. And he thought about the better times.
----------
Five hours into the flight, with a grueling ten hours to go, Eric Weiss got up to go to the bathroom. He was glad for a chance to stretch his legs, and the girl in front of him seemed to insist on keeping her seat pushed as far back as it would go. What a self-centered b-tch, he thought to himself as he glared at the back of her head. But, because he was Weiss, he could never actually say anything out loud.
The bathroom was even tinier than his seat, if that was possible. He wasn’t really fat, but he certainly wasn’t little, either. How did Michael Jordon go to the bathroom on a plane? How did summo wrestlers? They probably got private jets, Weiss reasoned bitterly.
On the way back, he passed a middle-aged black woman headed for the bathroom in the rear of the plane – the only one that seemed to be vacant. He also tripped over some guy’s feet. The man was wearing a dress shirt and tie, and was sprawled over two seats with his legs hanging out into the aisle, fast asleep.
“Some guys just have it so good,” Weiss grumbled to himself as a blonde woman gently moved the man’s head so she could sit down, then placed his head on her lap. Nobody let Weiss sleep on their laps. Even his gigantically fat dog shied away from Weiss sleeping anywhere near him. It was the snores, Weiss knew, but what could a guy do? Some people just snore.
The seatbelt sign came on as the pilot’s voice droned, “We’re experiencing some minor turbulence. Please return to your seats and fasten your seatbelts.”
---------------------------------------------
Alias characters, and all elements stolen from Lost, belong to J.J. Abrams and ABC. “Jenny Was A Friend of Mine” (lyrics) by the Killers. No copyright infringement is intended. You can sue me, but all you’ll get is 67 cents and some pocket lint. If you really want my pocket lint, you’re welcome to contact a lawyer. Or you could just ask nicely. After all, it’s damn fine pocket lint, but let’s try to keep this out of the courts, if possible.
They’re not spies, but they still have secrets.
rated: PG (for vague action violence and Weiss' dirty mouth) - this will go up very quickly!
genre: action/adventure/drama/mystery
a/n: This is AU - they're not spies, and none of them know each other. I also wanted to clarify that this isn’t a crossover – not really, anyway. Although there are, obviously, substantial elements stolen from Lost, including elements of some characters, not to mention the premise, this story has separate mysteries, and a different overall plot from Lost. The Alias characters are not spies. Some of them, perhaps, lead very similar lives to the ones on the show, but for the most part, they’re just normal people.
Not all the relationships – either romantic or familial – will be the same as in canon.
Not everyone will last.
a/n (part 2): this site, it seems, automatically censors the word "c***" - see, they just did it again. Anyway, the word "c***pit" is used in this story a couple times, and will crop up a lot in future chapters, since it's about... ya know... a plane. Since I hate asteriks it's going to be c-ckpit. Just in case you cared...
Enjoy!
------------------------------
1. Prologue
A plane from Sydney to Los Angeles. Two hundred and forty-seven strangers brought together for fifteen hours. You could be sitting next to anybody. A teacher; a genius; a criminal; a banker; a spy. For fifteen hours, strangers sit beside each other in silence, then depart, never even having learned each other’s names. But in a heartbeat, everything can change.
----------
Something was exploding in the distance. Blinking irritably, Sloane opened his eyes. He was lying on his back on a beach. People were screaming. Someone was shouting the name Sydney. Metal was screeching. He sat up slowly, looking blankly down at his body, vaguely surprised that he was all in one piece. His suit wasn’t even slightly charred. A small miracle, he thought.
“Would you care to help out, sir?” someone asked him. “People are dying.” He turned his head to regard the woman who spoke so coolly. She was standing with her hands in her pockets, regarding him lazily with hooded eyes. Her lips twitched into a slight smile, and she ran a hand across the back of her short brown hair.
With a nod, Sloane stood gingerly. “What happened?”
“The plane exploded in midair,” the woman explained. “It was torn apart. Maybe a third of it landed on the beach over there.” She pointed to the chaos that was slowly rippling outwards from the burning behemoth that was one third of a commercial airliner.
“What’s your name?” he asked her.
Her smile was unnerving. “Ekaterina.”
He smiled back. “Arvin.”
Sloane didn’t quite feel like moving – he was still amazed that he could. And Ekaterina wasn’t in any hurry herself. So they stood together and watched from a distance as some were saved and some died and some became heroes.
----------
Francie ran through the burning debris, past a pregnant woman in the arms of a shaggy-haired youth. A dark-haired girl was dragging an unconscious man in a suit away from the wreckage, but Francie lost sight of them when a jet of flame shot out of one of the engines, seemingly engulfing them.
“Sydney!” someone shouted. “Sydney!” Francie ran past the shouter, past a middle-aged African-American man staring around dazedly, past a pretty blonde boy struggling to resuscitate a small man in a bulky jacket. She wasn’t sure what she was running to or what she was running from, all she knew was that if she stopped she might never be able to start again.
----------
Fire roared out of one of the engines. A man had been standing too close and had been sucked in. Spattered with his blood, her face and clothes feeling slightly burnt, Sydney glanced around her. A dark-haired girl was standing over an unconscious man in a suit. The girl was trying to drag the man away from the fire, but there was a deep gash in her shoulder that prevented any sort of efficiency.
“Need help?” Sydney called, rushing over. She remembered the girl from the plane – they had been sitting next to each other. And the girl had been very rude.
Shaking her head doggedly, the girl gave up on trying to pull the man. “I tripped when the… when the engine exploded. Caught my shoulder on something,” she muttered, gesturing to the bloody wound. Her accent was Spanish, or perhaps South American. “He’s heavy.”
“Here,” said Sydney, grabbing the man under his armpits and heaving him as far as she could. “Stay with him,” she told the girl when they were at a safer distance.
She began to run back towards the crash site, but the girl called after her. “Hey! What’s your name?”
“Sydney!” she called back, hearing the name echoed in her father’s voice. She turned to see him rushing towards her. “Where have you been?” he demanded.
But there wasn’t time. People were dying.
----------
Sydney lugged her suitcase after her, trying to maneuver the thing through the narrow aisle. Sixteen D and E. She turned to her father, but he had already seen the seat numbers and was struggling to get his case in the overhead compartment. Without a word, he took her suitcase and thrust it above his head into the bin. Sydney turned back to the seats.
“Aisle or middle?” she asked her father.
He looked at her blankly. “Doesn’t matter.”
She shrugged and took her seat in the center, next to a dark-haired girl who appeared to have fallen asleep listening to an ipod. After a quick glance through the magazines and safety manuals in the seat pocket in front of her, Sydney contented herself with asking her father to get a magazine out of her suitcase. With a stony glare, he complied, and Sydney buried her nose in Entertainment Weekly.
The rows behind them began to fill up, and slowly the rest of the passengers took their seats. Just as it looked like they might take off, a shaggy-haired young man in glasses and a suit ran to his seat a couple of rows behind Sydney and Jack, panting heavily.
“Sorry, sorry,” he was mumbling under his breath. A stewardess gave him a funny look as he hurriedly shoved a briefcase into the overhead bin. “Sorry,” he mumbled again, climbing over someone to get to his seat. The engines began to rev up, and the plane started taxiing towards the runway. A voice came over the intercom and began to detail safety procedures in a droning voice. The seat in front of her seemed to rock violently at the mention of possible disasters. At the end of the speech, the pilot demanded that all electronic devices be shut off.
Since the girl next to her obviously hadn’t heard this, Sydney nudged her shoulder. The girl stirred.
“¿Que passa?” she grumbled.
Sydney didn’t really speak Spanish, so she just hoped that the girl spoke English. “You should turn off your ipod – we’re taking off.”
“Whatever,” was the reply, as the girl switched the ipod off and turned her shoulder to Sydney.
----------
“We need to find the c-ckpit,” Jack declared forcibly to Sydney. “Perhaps the radio is intact – we might be able to send a signal to help the search parties.” He glared around at the other survivors. The explosions had subsided and people had had a good sit-down, assessed damage, found their bags, licked their wounds. A young man with a crooked tie was supervising a medicine-hunt from a shabby “hospital” he had erected. Sydney noticed the dark-haired girl with her sleeve ripped open, the wound in her shoulder sewed closed. The man she had been helping was lying nearby, a wad of cloth pressed into his side.
“We’ll go in the morning, dad,” Sydney said. “For now, let’s get some rest, okay?”
Jack nodded. “That’s sensible. We wouldn’t be able to see anything in the jungle during the night.”
He lay down, and wrapped himself in a thin airplane blanket. Soon he was snoring softly, but Sydney couldn’t bring herself to sleep. She looked around at her fellow survivors. Scattered, lost, alone – all of them. The man who had come late had found the food and was passing it around, helped by a young black woman. He looked haggard, and the girl looked like she was in shock.
The man with the crooked tie, who Sydney presumed to be a doctor, was gathering all the Aspirin and prescription medicines that people were bringing him, wiping sweat from his brow, ordering someone to check a bandage, dolling out antibiotics for those with major wounds. Even from a distance, she could tell that if he didn’t stop soon, he would likely collapse.
----------
He should have known this would happen. Planes were just too dangerous. Marshall didn’t like dangerous – he liked cute and fluffy. The trouble with cute and fluffy was that it usually turned out to be worse than things like, say, dinosaurs. He would take that t-rex from Jurassic Park over a Pomeranian any day.
After that blond man – the one who had been late – Will, was it? After he had gone to find food, he had left Marshall with the pregnant girl. It was sort of awkward. Marshall was always awkward with girls.
“You know I… I didn’t get your… your name…” he said falteringly to her. She was young, and pretty, and pregnant, and that intimidated him. Her eyes were very blue, too. She turned to him.
“Carrie.” She smiled, sort of sadly. “You are…?”
He gulped. A girl had just asked his name. “Uh…” What? Huh? What was his what? Oh, his name! What was his name? “It’s… uh… M-Marshall.”
Carrie smiled at him, and he smiled nervously back. His hands didn’t know what to do with themselves – they were fidgeting uncontrollably. So he sat on them.
----------
On a trip to the bathroom, Marshall noted each electronic device in use. They had been in the air for almost two hours, and lethargy seemed to have set in over the passengers on Oceanic Flight 815. In the row behind him, a dark-haired woman was listening to an ipod. A few more rows back, the shaggy-haired young man in glasses was typing sluggishly on a laptop. A row in front of Marshall and to the left, a middle-aged African-American man was also using a laptop, in his case to send emails. A woman that Marshall presumed to be his wife was leaning over his shoulder, pointing out spelling mistakes.
As he sometimes did on long plane-rides like this, Marshall started making up stories about the people around him, mainly to stave off the boredom. An interesting-looking blonde boy that Marshall had seen in the last row of first class became, in his mind, a spy as suave and devil-may-care as James Bond. He could imagine the boy in a dapper tuxedo, drinking wine, smilingly daring his enemies to tie him up and throw him in the scorpion pit.
The woman behind him reading a magazine he imagined to be a dangerous criminal on the run from the law. This thought, however, made him quite uncomfortable, so he changed his assessment of her to a housewife with two children, on her way back from visiting her father, who was running from the law. And lived in a cave to hide from the vigilant pursuit.
To explain the Spanish girl’s petulant non-responsiveness and the circles under her eyes, he decided that her brother had been brutally murdered in mysterious circumstances, and she was hunting his killer separately from the police. Who never knew anything anyways.
Because he had been late, Marshall made the shaggy-haired youth into a corporate businessman who went on frequent ‘business trips’ because he was cheating on his wife. With… Marshall pondered for a moment… the Prime Minister of Australia. Why not? he reasoned. Stranger things have happened. And the Prime Minister had held the young man up until he had almost missed the flight. Because the Prime Minister of Australia? Horny as hell.
Secure in the knowledge that he had created some interesting but wildly improbable fantasies, Marshall hacked into the plane’s computer to check that everything was alright, then began an email to his mother.
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Dawn broke, very slowly it seemed. Vaughn hadn’t slept, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to until the rescue team came. People were dying. Some of the wounds had been relatively minor – the Spanish girl would be fine, Francine or whatever was in shock but she seemed to be okay as long as she was moving, and though Marshall had had to be resuscitated by that blonde kid he was in perfect condition. But the Spanish girl had been dragging a man in a suit, and he definitely wouldn’t be okay. Someone else had lost a leg.
The sun was swelteringly hot only a few hours after the sun had risen. Flies had started buzzing around the sick and wounded, and it was a full-time job keeping those he could alive. He had already stopped trying with a middle-aged woman – it was too late and he had too many people to take care of. Better to let her die in peace.
Alice was helping him as best she could, but she was as weary as he and wasn’t a doctor.
“You should get some rest,” he told her, taking a bandage out of her hand. “We can’t afford to have you collapse from exhaustion.”
“Alright,” she whispered. There were dark circles under her eyes. She kissed him, then went to find somewhere to lie down. He kept working. There was nothing else to be done.
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There was something about that woman – Sydney. Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Maybe it was the habit she had of tucking her hair behind her ear or the way she held her shoulders. Whatever it was, there was something about her that reminded Nadia of herself.
“Going somewhere?” she asked, approaching Sydney and an elderly man who was probably her father. They were looking off into the jungle, talking quietly between themselves. The man had found a backpack and had stuffed it full of water bottles.
The man’s eyes were agate-hard. “It’s none of your business.”
Nadia shrugged. “It’s just that if you were planning to find the c-ckpit, I saw smoke in the jungle over that way.” She pointed. “I could go with you.”
Sydney exchanged a skeptical glance with the man. She nodded almost imperceptibly. He shook his head, a restrained but forceful gesture. Nadia decided to cut in. “I’m going with you,” she informed them. “You can’t boss me around.” Without a word, the man stalked off into the jungle, leaving the two young women in his wake. “I’m Catherine, but the way,” Nadia called after him. “My friends call me Kate…”
He turned and glared at her. “Jack.”
----------
Nadia leaned her seat back further, ignoring a slight grunt from the man behind her as it cut into his space. He was a big man, so she didn’t really blame him for being annoyed at having his already cramped legroom constricted. But she couldn’t bring herself to care enough to do anything about it.
We took a walk that night, but it wasn’t the same.
We had a fight on the promenade out in the rain
She said she loved me, but she had somewhere to go
She couldn’t scream while I held her close
I swore I’d never let her go.
Static crackled through the headphones. Nadia glanced down at a blinking notice saying the batteries were dead. She pulled the headphones out of her ears and stuffed the ipod angrily into the bag at her feet. The stupid thing had given out after only three hours. The woman next to her looked up briefly from Entertainment Weekly. Until the hazel eyes had once again disappeared behind the magazine, Nadia just glared. But once the woman was safely tucked away behind pictures of Nicole Kidman’s latest hit, she pulled the letter out of her pocket. Almost lovingly, and certainly with care, she smoothed out a wrinkle on the envelope. It wasn’t addressed to her; it was addressed to the Argentine embassy in Sydney, which had forwarded it to Lucia Martinez. And had been intercepted by her.
It was typed, rather than handwritten, printed on official paper with a seal at the top and a photocopied signature at the bottom. Like plastic roses on a grave, it made her almost physically sick. She wasn’t sure why she kept it, even. It was bland and official and offered nothing more than the simplest details. Perhaps she kept it because she was afraid that if she threw it away, she might wake up one morning and call him, or even roll over and expect to see him lying next to her. Snoring like a train wreck, or just woken up and scratching his moustache.
She didn’t open the envelope and read the letter again. She didn’t have to.
----------
Sark watched the frenzied activity from the door above the plane wing. It was liked watching ants in an ant-farm. He smiled as his gaze found another suitcase, and he quickly pulled it from the wreckage. He had collected quite a stash over the past few hours, and he intended to hoard it.
“Are you alright?” someone called nearby. At first Sark thought the speaker was addressing him, but then he saw a middle-aged black man standing with his back to Sark and the plane, staring out across the trackless waters. “You okay?” the speaker called again, coming to stand by the black man’s side. It was a chubby, tallish man, Sark noted, that had called out. Mid-thirties, he would guess. Sark’s keen, icy eyes noted the indent on his finger where he had once worn a wedding ring.
The black man nodded. “Yes, thank you.” He wouldn’t look at the other man.
“I’m Weiss,” said the chubby tall one, sticking his hand out. The older man didn’t return the courtesy. “I’m sorry… I just thought I could help,” Weiss said awkwardly.
The older man looked at Weiss unblinkingly, a small hint of a smile crossing his face. “Dixon.” He looked back over the waters. “My… my wife was in the back of the plane.”
Weiss blew out a breath. “Wow… I’m sorry.”
Dixon shook his head. “Don’t be. She’s alive.”
“How can you know that?” Weiss asked, confused.
Dixon just smiled. “I know.”
----------
They were running out of food. Forty-eight survivors, about a hundred meals they had salvaged. It wasn’t enough to go around. He sat down and wiped some sweat from his forehead. He hadn’t seen Lauren since before the crash, he didn’t know where she had gotten to now. It was, he had to admit, a possibility that she hadn’t survived. But he hadn’t seen her among the dead, either.
People were dying, and he was thinking about some woman he had spent maybe an hour chatting with. With a groan, he stood up and went over to the man who was probably a doctor.
“Can I help?” he asked, concern lighting his eyes.
“Of course…”
“Will.”
The doctor smiled. “Will. I’m Michael. Could you get a couple of people and try to set up some kind of shelter?” He gestured around him at his patients. There weren’t too many of them, but they were all sporting horrendous wounds. Will gulped. He didn’t like blood. “You can probably find a tarp or something.”
Will nodded. “Yeah. Sure.” He looked around until his eyes lighted on Francie sitting nearby. They had met last night while handing out food together, so he felt relatively comfortable about approaching her now.
“Could you help me?” he asked. She looked up.
“M… Michael says I’m in shock. From the crash.” Her eyes were wide and scared. Will sat down next to her.
He nodded. “Yeah. I don’t blame you.”
“It’s weird, you know?” she said, turning to him. “I mean, look over there.” Will looked in the direction she nodded in, towards two men standing near the tide line, looking out over the waters. The younger man – tall and bulky – had his hand on the other man’s shoulder, and the older man – middle-aged, intelligent and calm looking – was talking in a low voice. “I bet they’re friends for life now,” Francie said, “the way they’ve been talking. They would never even have met if we hadn’t crashed. We’re here for who knows how long—” Will thought about interrupting her to insist that they would be rescued soon, but decided against it. “—and the people we meet we might never forget. In a weird way, this is a good thing. For us who survived, I mean. People who go through hell together come out much closer for it.”
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Will Tippin adjusted his glasses blearily. Four hours on a plane and another eleven to go. And just his luck to be late, of course. The blonde woman to his right gave him an agreeable smile. He felt sort of vaguely guilty. Jenny would kill him. But Jenny, he told himself, would never ever know.
The story on a new breed of artichokes didn’t want to be written. He’d get through maybe two words, then spend the next ten minutes just staring at the screen, unable to believe that he had written the phrase “genetically superior artichokes.” So he saved what he had and shut the machine down.
“Care for a drink?” he asked the blonde woman.
Her smile, he decided, was quite disarming. “Sure,” she said, her voice thick with a British accent.
He ordered them drinks – pathetically watered-down stuff was all they were allowed to sell on planes – and turned to the woman. “My name’s Will,” he told her, offering her his hand.
She took it. “Lauren.” A sherry and a gin and tonic arrived and were placed on the tray tables in front of them. “What’s your business, Will?” she asked him, taking a sip of the drink.
He shrugged. “Just… you know… business,” he murmured evasively. “I’m a journalist, so… I had to go to Australia to meet a source of mine.”
Despite the fact that this was a lie, and not even a very good one, since most sources were fine talking over the phone or via email, Lauren appeared to believe it. “I was in Australia on business, too,” she told him, leaning forward confidentially. “I’m actually traveling incognito, sort of. I’m in politics.” Will’s eyebrows rose.
“Don’t you guys get, like, private jets and stuff?”
She laughed charmingly. “Only in the movies. I’m not really high up in politics – I’m about on par with the Mayor’s secretary’s secretary. But I do occasionally get to run exciting errands for the Governor. All very hush-hush.” She grinned. “I suppose I’m making a bigger deal out of it than is really appropriate. It’s only level two clearance.”
Will grinned back. “Well considering that I’m level zero clearance, it’s all pretty exciting to me. What exactly is it you do, or can’t you say?”
“I work for the NSC. Basically I write reports for a living.”
Will nodded. “Basically I do the same thing, except your reports are on terrorists and stuff, and mine are on genetically altered artichokes.” He laughed along with her, and drank his gin and tonic, and forgot all about Jenny and how she would kill him.
----------
“We were coming back from a vacation.” Dixon laughed quietly, happily. “She always gets so annoyed, because I bring my laptop on vacations and check my email. She says vacations are just for us.” He was smiling, remembering his wife.
“Got any kids?” Weiss asked.
Dixon nodded, and took his wallet out of his pocket. “Steven, he’s eight, and Robin – eleven.” Several pictures of children, a boy and a girl, at varying ages, were placed into Weiss’ hands. He chuckled, looking at photos of a little boy with ice cream smudged all over his face, of the girl in a black velvet dress at the piano, of both of them having a snowball fight.
“They’re cute,” he said.
“They were staying with my mother for the week – Diane decided we should take a vacation just for us. A second honeymoon of sorts.”
Second honeymoon. The words brought no feeling so much as bitterness to Weiss. He smiled at Dixon, giving no hint of the anger he suddenly felt. Not at Dixon, not at all. It was much deeper, almost painful. But Weiss didn’t like dealing with pain, so he grinned heartily and patted Dixon on the shoulder. And he thought about the better times.
----------
Five hours into the flight, with a grueling ten hours to go, Eric Weiss got up to go to the bathroom. He was glad for a chance to stretch his legs, and the girl in front of him seemed to insist on keeping her seat pushed as far back as it would go. What a self-centered b-tch, he thought to himself as he glared at the back of her head. But, because he was Weiss, he could never actually say anything out loud.
The bathroom was even tinier than his seat, if that was possible. He wasn’t really fat, but he certainly wasn’t little, either. How did Michael Jordon go to the bathroom on a plane? How did summo wrestlers? They probably got private jets, Weiss reasoned bitterly.
On the way back, he passed a middle-aged black woman headed for the bathroom in the rear of the plane – the only one that seemed to be vacant. He also tripped over some guy’s feet. The man was wearing a dress shirt and tie, and was sprawled over two seats with his legs hanging out into the aisle, fast asleep.
“Some guys just have it so good,” Weiss grumbled to himself as a blonde woman gently moved the man’s head so she could sit down, then placed his head on her lap. Nobody let Weiss sleep on their laps. Even his gigantically fat dog shied away from Weiss sleeping anywhere near him. It was the snores, Weiss knew, but what could a guy do? Some people just snore.
The seatbelt sign came on as the pilot’s voice droned, “We’re experiencing some minor turbulence. Please return to your seats and fasten your seatbelts.”
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Alias characters, and all elements stolen from Lost, belong to J.J. Abrams and ABC. “Jenny Was A Friend of Mine” (lyrics) by the Killers. No copyright infringement is intended. You can sue me, but all you’ll get is 67 cents and some pocket lint. If you really want my pocket lint, you’re welcome to contact a lawyer. Or you could just ask nicely. After all, it’s damn fine pocket lint, but let’s try to keep this out of the courts, if possible.
