La Mer

by aurilly

Summary:

Saito hires the team to find out why crash-survivor Sayid Jarrah has been assassinating prominent businessmen. It sounds like an easy job, but only once they're in the dream do they realize all their research was based on a lie. (aka, why Sayid ended up in the Dominican Republic in season 5)

i. “Lie to them. If you do it half as well as you lie to yourself, they’ll believe you.”

Only eight passengers escaped the aircraft when it sank into the Pacific. Together, they floated to the uninhabited island of Membata. Of those eight, Boone Carlyle, Charlie Pace, and Libby DeGroot died during the survivors’ three months on the island, and Kate Austen gave birth to her son, Aaron. On January 8, 2005, the six remaining survivors (Sayid Jarrah, Jack Shephard, Hugo “Hurley” Reyes, Sun Kwon, Kate Austen, and Aaron Austen) found a raft that had floated to their shores. They rowed it ten miles to the nearby island of Sumba, where they finally found rescue.

It was like clockwork. Five minutes after the unexpected courier had delivered the sealed envelope of documents and photographs, Cobb’s phone rang. He stopped in mid-paragraph to answer. The call was coming from a screened number.

“Hello?”

“Have you read it yet?” Even though it had been six months, Saito’s clipped voice was still all-too familiar.

Cobb should have known. He sat down, his eyes on the children playing with hula-hoops in the backyard and his mind wishing this conversation wasn’t happening. Flipping through the pages in front of him, he replied, “Just the overview page. What’s going on?”

“I know you said Fischer would be your last job of this kind, but I am hoping you will consider taking on another assignment for me.”

Cobb’s fingers drummed an anxious beat on the table. Technically, he knew he could say no. But practically, he knew he wouldn’t. Crime had bound them together: him, Saito, all of them—hell, even Fischer, regardless of whether or not he’d ever know it. Saito could and would keep coming back, but with the tacit understanding that nothing too morally reprehensible would be required.

“Depends on what it is,” he finally replied, fingers quickening their rhythm. The last job still rankled at the back of Cobb’s conscience. He couldn’t watch the news for fear of seeing reports on Fischer’s company; he didn’t want to know how well it had worked. He went back to the photograph on the cover sheet, where a serious-looking man with hauntingly sad eyes stared back at him. “I’m guessing the job’s on Sayid Jarrah?”

“You have heard of him?”

Of course, Cobb had heard of him. The whole world had heard of him. It had been a couple of years since the height of the Oceanic Six’s fame, but given the ubiquitous news coverage the crash and the six survivors’ miraculous reappearance had received at the time, no one would ever forget their faces and names.

So yeah. Cobb knew who the guy was. But the files in front of him didn’t specify what he was supposed to do with him. “Are you asking me to do another inception?”

“No, what I’m asking is much easier than that—someone of your talents will find it laughably simple. For the past two years, Sayid Jarrah has perpetrated targeted assassinations on a number of high-ranking businessmen around the world. Most recently, he killed an associate of mine in the Seychelles.”

Hero turned villain. Nice.

“If everyone knows he did it, then why isn’t he in jail?”

Smug and secretive, Saito replied, “Just because I know does not mean everyone knows.”

“Fine, then. But why don’t you hand the evidence over and have him turned in?”

“If I do that, I will never find out why he is killing these people. I will never find out for whom he is working, and what targets are next on his list. Discovering these facts is much more productive than bringing him to justice. He has killed executives of Widmore Industries, a competitor of mine. He has killed the remnants of a secretive scientific research group called the Dharma Initiative, which I unsuccessfully tried to acquire in the 80s. I want to know why he has done this and how much he knows. The people he’s killed are already dead; locking him up will not bring them back.”

Saito’s idea of justice—or, rather, his lack of an idea—was unsurprising.

“So you want me to get this information via extraction. Why? Why not just…”

Saito spared Cobb from having to ask the unsavory question they both knew was coming. “He’s a former torturer for the Iraqi Republican Guard. My sources doubt he will respond to traditional methods of… interrogation.”

Watching the kids play, and knowing how indebted he was to Saito just to be in the position to make choices like this, Cobb weighed his options.

Saito was Machiavellian, but he wasn’t evil. Looked at in a certain way (in the way of a man who has already resigned himself to accepting the job), Cobb would be helping to save the lives of Jarrah’s future victims. It was something he could get behind. What Saito might choose to do with that information was none of his business.

“I can’t do this alone,” he said.

“So reassemble your team,” Saito replied, as though it were just that easy.

It wasn’t just the dreaming Cobb was nervous about (he hadn’t engaged in controlled dreaming since the last job); it was who he could find to do this with. Everyone had scattered as soon as they disembarked at LAX, both to cover their tracks, but also in order to deal with their own issues. Miles had mentioned that Ariadne was back in Paris, more confident in her skills, but less enthused about assigned projects than she had been before. Eames had gone off to wherever it was that Eames always went, blending in everywhere but fitting in nowhere. Yusuf was back in Mombasa. And Arthur…

“I don’t know where they are,” Cobb explained.

“I do,” Saito said.

Apparently it was just that easy. After that, everything magically began falling into place, as it seemed to whenever Saito got involved in something.

Saito was too busy with business to be part of the team this time… or so he said. Cobb had a feeling that either he now trusted them enough to do the job without him, or he was too traumatized by what had happened the last time; either way, Saito wasn’t the type to admit either of those things. Together they decided that LA should be the team’s base of operations. Not only did Cobb live there, but LA was pivotal for this particular subject; the few friends Sayid Jarrah had were there, as well as his long-abandoned house. Saito’s men would track Jarrah’s movements and, when Cobb and his team were ready, he would arrange for them to travel to wherever in the world Jarrah might be.

Yusuf was the first to arrive. The ideas that were slowly fleshing out in Cobb’s mind didn’t sound like they’d call for the kinds of complex drugs they’d used the last time, but Yusuf was still necessary, if not for his unique skills, then at least for morale. It wasn’t the job that would be difficult (Saito was right that it seemed pretty straightforward); the rub was going to be reforging that camaraderie among the team after such a long separation and traumatizing last job.

Yusuf and Cobb spent a couple of days stalking Jack Shephard and Kate Austen and pretending to visit a patient at Hurley Reyes’s mental hospital in order to learn more about Jarrah through his friends. All three of them wore a version of the same haunted sadness that lay behind Sayid Jarrah’s eyes, not only on the cover of Cobb’s folder, but in every single picture of the man.

“If you’d lived through a plane crash and watched three of your fellow survivors die on an island somewhere in the Pacific, you’d look like that, too,” Yusuf remarked. It was the logical answer, but Cobb had a nagging feeling that there was something more.

Arthur came next, looking somewhat worse for wear, but with an even more impressive than usual amount of research already completed. He’d been wandering for the past few months, taking on odd jobs, none of which fit. He didn’t need the money—Saito had paid them all obscenely well. Of all of them, Arthur was the most enthusiastic about the job. Thinking about it through the lens of the project, Cobb decided that Arthur was a lot like Jarrah; both craved structure and order, and yet existed in a contradictory nomadic state.

As the days went by, it became difficult for Cobb to look at anything except through the lens of the project. Despite his initial reluctance, the more he looked into the case, the more he found himself drawn to it, and the more he felt a strange kind of kinship with the subject, torturer and murderer though he might be. Like Arthur and himself, Jarrah had always been good at getting into people’s heads. For years he’d roamed the earth in search of a woman, based on little more than guilt and a fleeting memory, and now that she, his wife of only nine short months, was dead, he’d turned to a life of crime. It was a dedication to a romantic ideal that Cobb understood all too well, with all of its potentially unhealthy consequences.

Together, Cobb, Arthur, and Yusuf built on the preliminary research Saito had provided. They learned everything they could about Jarrah and his life. For one thing, he didn’t have much of one. He had no living family, no former lovers except for Nadia, and no friends except his fellow castaways, with whom he hadn’t kept in touch since Nadia’s death. Sayid Jarrah was less rooted in reality than most projections.

They discovered how to break into Jarrah’s house in Malibu. No one had lived in it for two years; Jarrah had left LA to bury Nadia back in Iraq, and had never returned. Arthur disabled the security system; Ariadne would need to spend a lot of time there when she arrived, learning the layout and memorizing the details.

“This should be easy for her. Jarrah only spent a few months here, and it’s been so long since he was last here that he won’t notice if anything is off,” Yusuf remarked on their way back to the loft one night.

“He’ll notice,” Arthur replied. “From what I can tell, he’s the kind of guy who would notice a hair out of place. But it’s okay. Ariadne won’t mess up. It’s Eames who has the hard job.”

The two people in question arrived the next day at the loft Cobb had rented for meetings. Ariadne was tanned and jet-lagged, and Eames was tanned and pretending not to be jet-lagged. He strolled into the loft carrying nothing but an apple, while Ariadne came with a stack of photographs, drawings, and painstakingly detailed topographical maps of a minuscule island in the South Pacific.

“I get sent to a bloody war zone, while little miss architect gets to loll at the beach. Where’s the justice in that?” Eames asked after finishing his description of his time in Iraq learning about Nadia.

“It isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I don’t know how they lived on that island for three months. It was tiny. I had every detail memorized by the second day.”

Cobb had sent Ariadne to the previously unknown but now world-famous island of Membata without having a crystal clear idea of what he wanted her to do, but after a few days spent walking around Jarrah’s house and learning about the man, he felt comfortable proposing his final plan to the group. “I’m thinking of doing the job in two levels. One will be the island. We’ll take you to Jarrah’s house tomorrow to help you prep for the other level.”

“So what’s the plan?” Arthur asked.

Cobb leaned forward in his chair and clasped his hands together. “Here’s what I’m thinking. Jarrah’s been traveling; Saito will tell us where to find him when we’re ready. We’ll make sure he’s drugged—lightly, though; this job isn’t nearly as complicated as the last one. As for strategy…” Cobb looked around the room and realized that although Arthur and Eames were well-versed in this stuff, Ariadne and Yusuf were still rookies at the heist aspects of this business. “It’s possible to make someone confused between real life memories and the dream.”

He looked at Arthur for support; they’d done this kind of job before and Arthur had always been better at teaching than he had. Turning to Ariadne and Yusuf, Arthur continued for him, “Basically, we create a situation that is tied to a particular point in his past. We get Jarrah to believe that everything that’s happened in reality since that point was a dream.”

Ariadne’s head nodded slowly, and Cobb wondered if maybe she’d experienced this phenomenon before naturally. “How do we do that?”

“Two levels of dreaming,” Cobb explained. “First level, we drop Jarrah in his house in Malibu. The only time he’s lived there was during the nine months between being rescued and when Nadia was killed, so he’ll date himself into a narrow timeframe—the timeframe we want. This’ll be Arthur’s dream. It starts with Jarrah in his bedroom, blinds closed, clock saying midnight. Every reason for him to believe it’s bedtime. There’s a glass of water on the night stand. It’s drugged. As soon as he’s in bed and asleep, we go in with the PASIV and send him to the next dream.”

“And within the dream, he dreams of the island, right?” Ariadne guessed.

“Right. That’ll be Yusuf’s dream, if that’s okay with you.” He turned towards Yusuf, who smiled in agreement.

“Just use the bathroom this time. There’s nothing worse than a tropical paradise in the rain,” Arthur chided. Yusuf grimaced, tired of the teasing.

Cobb continued. “It’s the perfect location for two reasons. First, it’s a nice, contained space—like you said, Ariadne, tiny and boring. Plus, there were only ever seven other people on the island with him, so no matter what happens, there are only seven projections he can muster to attack us, which makes things relatively safe. The other reason for setting it there is that I want to give him a nightmare. And what better setting for a nightmare than the place he was stranded for three months?”

“How do we do that?”

“We ambush them. Ariadne can enter the dream on the island to monitor where Jarrah and all the projections are and let us know which angle to hit them from. Then the rest of us can come on a boat—”

“What boat?” Arthur inquired.

Eames sighed. “Our imaginary boat. It’s a dream, Arthur, You so often fail to remember this crucial concept.”

Nipping the inevitable snark war in the bud, Cobb continued, “Yeah, our imaginary boat. We get to the island, pretend to be pirates, rough Jarrah and his friends up a bit… you get the idea. We make sure Eames dies first—”

“I’m so honored to be your sacrificial lamb.”

“—so he has time to kick back into the LA dream. He and Arthur wake us all up so we get out of the room before Jarrah wakes up to find ‘Nadia’”—Cobb gestured at Eames—“in bed with him.”

Ariadne’s eyes grew bright with excitement, as she started to grasp it. “So, you’re saying he’ll think that it’s still the nine months when they were together, and that everything that’s happened since then—her dying, him killing people—he’ll think all that was a dream he had just before the island nightmare?”

“With the proper guidance, yes,” Eames confirmed, also having gotten the idea. “He’ll think that he’s just woken up from two separate nightmares, one in which he went on a two-year killing spree, and the other in which he and his friends were taken hostage on the island. Given that the latter never happened, he’ll be relieved and that much more likely to interpret the former as a dream, especially when he finds himself so comfortably in bed with his wife. And then Nadia—meaning me—will coax out of him the content of his dreams, specifically the first one. And that’s how we’ll find out who he’s working for and why.”

Cobb nodded. “Exactly. I think it’ll work. But the whole thing relies on you two,” he said, pointing at Eames and Ariadne, “being at the top of your games.”

“Membata won’t be hard,” Ariadne reassured all of them. “There isn’t much to it. Just some sand and a few trees. And I doubt Jarrah’s house will be too complicated. Not like last time.” Cobb noted that she looked almost disappointed.

“I have to say, this will be the first time I’m impersonating someone I never met, but the particulars of this case make it potentially feasible.” Eames yawned and leaned back in his chair.

Arthur frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’ve spoken with everyone on three continents who ever knew Nadia. She sounded… perfect. Beautiful, brilliant, brave, heroic, forgiving. You get the picture. Bloody saint, it sounds like.”

Ariadne looked up from her notes, forehead wrinkled in a question. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

Eames shrugged. “Ideals are wonderful, but they don’t make for the most exciting roles.”

Cobb wasn’t so sure about that. In his experience, it depended on the individual. At any rate, Nadia sounded like she’d been lovely, exactly the kind of woman who might inspire an eight-year quest.

Bringing them back to the job, Arthur pointed out, “It doesn’t matter. Nadia’s the only option we’ve got. Unless you can find me someone else he was sleeping with. And trust me, I’ve looked. The guy was practically a eunuch.”

“It’s always about sex with you, Arthur, isn’t it?”

“Oh, shut up, Eames.”

Cobb rolled his eyes. The team was definitely back together again.

The next few days flew by with finalizing plans and teaching the team Ariadne’s plans. Finally, they flew Saito’s airline to Sydney, where his spies said Jarrah had just checked into a swanky hotel.

“Is he on a job, or is a this vacation?” he’d asked Saito on the last phone call before they left.

“My men have not been able to find out. I trust you are prepared for either eventuality.”

“Sure.” Cobb wasn’t sure what the difference between the two eventualities was (both cases involved a dangerous assassin), but Saito liked a confident captain, so he played the part.

It wasn’t hard to find Jarrah, sitting alone at the hotel bar with his eyes glazed over, a million miles away.

“What’re you drinking?” Cobb asked in a friendly manner just after sliding into place two stools down from him.

It took awhile for Jarrah to look up and respond; it was like getting an answer from a corpse that needed reanimating first. “MacCutcheon.”

Cobb flashed the warm, personable grin that had never failed him in the past; Jarrah’s face remained impassive. This was going to be harder than he’d expected. “I’ll have what he’s having.”

“You sure?” the bartender asked and passed him the menu so he could see the price.

“I’m good for it.” Or rather Saito was good for it, but no one needed to know who was paying his bills. The bartender shrugged and poured a small amount of scotch—Cobb couldn’t see the label—into a glass. He took a sip and whistled. “Thanks for the recommendation.” Then after a convincing pause, he said, “You look familiar,” Cobb said, pointing at Jarrah as if he was halfway to figuring it out.

Jarrah simply looked bored; after almost three years, these kinds of encounters must have become more and more annoying.

Without looking up he stated, “You know me from the news.”

This was the moment. Cobb scooted over to sit next to him, a perfect picture of feigned eagerness. “Are you a politician? Let me guess which country…”

But Jarrah cut him off, finally making eye contact. “I am the survivor of a plane crash. Oceanic 815. That is why I look familiar.”

Cobb whistled. “Right. You’re right. The Oceanic Six, right? Living on nothing but coconuts and fish for three months? That was the most amazing story.”

Jarrah closed his eyes, as if in pain. “Yes,” he hissed, sounding oddly flat about it. “Just us six and some coconuts.”

“The plane took off from Sydney, didn’t it?”

“It did.”

“Sydney to LA, right? Longest flight in the world. Only route I’d believe a pilot could get lost flying. Twelve hours,” Cobb announced.

“I wouldn’t know. In my case, it took three and a half months.”

The fact that that flight was where it all ended—or began, depending on how you looked at it—for both of them, was not lost on Cobb. He stared into his drink. You and me both, he thought. Recovering, he said out loud, “Wow, you must have nerves of steel. If I were you, I’d never come back. You here on business?”

“No.”

Cobb noted that he didn’t say he was here on pleasure either, though. Now that he’d been forced to engage somewhat, Jarrah’s eyes narrowed.

“But why is it that you look familiar? Perhaps you do know me from somewhere other than the news.”

It wasn’t often that people outside of law-enforcement recognized him; the story hadn’t been well-publicized. However, whatever he could do to draw this man in and learn something more about him before starting the job would be helpful.

“You might have read about me. My wife died. They said I killed her.”

“Did you?” Jarrah studied him, and Cobb could sense something dark, something shared behind those huge eyes. No judgment, only empathy, and it drew him in. He was glad they weren’t on comms yet; the others didn’t need to hear this.

“No. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t my fault,” he answered, more truthfully than he had any business doing. It was the first time he’d said it out loud.

He could see why Saito had struck out the possibility of interrogating this man; Cobb was here to do an extraction, and already he felt that he was the one being laid bare. This guy was good, really good; he didn’t know why Jarrah had ever felt the need to physically torture anyone. It seemed unnecessary, given his skills.

“My wife died as well… And so…” Jarrah drifted off again. “And now it’s as if she never existed. It might as well have all been a dream.”

He was lost in drink and depression; in such a state, this man was a threat only to himself.

“I’m so sorry,” Cobb replied, understanding all too well to spout the kinds of platitudes anyone else might have.

Jarrah didn’t respond, but it didn’t matter. Cobb had accomplished his mission. Somewhere between the coconuts and the wives, Cobb had managed to pass his hand over Jarrah’s glass and drop a few grains of a compound Yusuf had whipped up into the man’s scotch. It was designed to dissolve into alcohol, without producing adverse side effects on someone already intoxicated. It would keep Jarrah sleepy but not irrevocably knocked out.

No one wanted to deal with limbo again, not after the last time.

After another five minutes of silence, Jarrah got up and nodded goodbye. Cobb looked at his watch. The guy would be asleep in fifteen minutes, tops. It would take another fifteen minutes for the others to silently break into the room and set up. Arthur would take care of everything.

In the meanwhile, he needed that half hour to recover from their conversation.

By the time he was knocking three times—two long, one short—on the door of room #1623, he’d pulled it together. Yusuf opened the door. Everything was set: Jarrah was in bed fast asleep; everyone was sitting in tippable chairs; the PASIV was out.

Cobb nodded, took his seat, and together, they plugged in and passed out.

---

ii. “Guys... where are we?”

On screens in a tiny room that Ariadne has carved out of an impossible corner of the house, Arthur and the team watch as Jarrah stirs in his bed. The blinds are drawn and the negligible amount of light that seeps through the edges isn’t enough to make anyone want to get up. After looking around him in slight confusion, he gives into the comfort, drinks the water on the nightstand, and gets back under the covers.

As soon as Jarrah’s asleep, the team quietly moves to the bedroom. Arthur stands with his hands in his pockets as the others sit on the floor beside the bed and get the PASIV ready. Again.

It’s all going according to plan, just the way Arthur likes it. Maybe this job is what he needs to get his groove back. The others may have gotten a thrill out of the Fischer job, but Arthur’s happiest when everything works like clockwork. This time, he’s researched every possible facet of the case; there won’t be any surprises. He’s even triple-checked that Jarrah has never had dream security training. In fact, it’s pretty clear that he’s never even heard of the concept of shared dreaming. Between that and Cobb’s assurances that Mal has been dealt with (more reassuring was Ariadne’s confirmation of this fact), he’s feeling confident about this one.

“See you later,” he says smugly as he watches unconsciousness overtake them.

***

Ariadne’s on her back in the middle of a bamboo grove, the sky impossibly blue overhead. Branches from taller trees sway above her, dancing to a rhythm she can’t follow. She loves this feeling—knowing she’s in a dream, but still reveling in that sense of delight at how her own imagination can surprise her.

And that’s when she realizes something’s wrong: she isn’t supposed to be surprised. Not in a place she’s not only created, but also been to.

There’s no bamboo on Membata.

She sits up, and that’s when she sees the next sign that something is amiss. A white canvas sneaker hangs off a branch a few feet away from her. But even stranger is the way it doesn’t simply hang; it shimmers into existence, as does the branch. It starts out as a transparent, watery outline, but quickly solidifies, taking on color and tangibility faster than Ariadne can process what’s happening. If she didn’t put bamboo in the dream, she definitely didn’t put random Keds. That’s a level of detail and creative license that she hasn’t yet achieved, and, despite her confusion, she makes a mental note to start working towards that.

The shimmering is happening all around her: trees appear out of nowhere to fill in the jungle landscape; rolling hills come into view. The transformation completes itself in seconds, so quickly and seamlessly that if she hadn’t known it should look otherwise, she wouldn’t even have noticed.

She picks herself up and brushes the soil off the back of her pants. She doesn’t know how this happened; her first thought is that the drafts somehow got mixed up with some other ones, but unless Cobb has been sketching on the side, she doesn’t know of any other island dreamscapes the team could have created.

This is a place she’s never seen, never imagined, and definitely never built. But whatever it is, it’s beautiful—too beautiful to resent for not being hers. Still, Ariadne’s fingers itch to drag the scenery back to the way it should be—the way she planned it—but her better judgment stops her. She remembers what happened the last time she went crazy with revisions while in someone else’s dream.

In the meanwhile, she decides she might as well try to stick to the plan, as much as is still possible, until she can figure out what’s going on. She tries to call Cobb, Yusuf and Eames, who should be on a boat about half a mile offshore, but no one picks up. She assumes it’s because they aren’t yet in range, though why a dream walkie-talkie should be subject to those kinds of laws, she doesn’t know. In the meanwhile, she makes her way through the utterly unfamiliar flora, trying to get to the beach she can hear but not yet see. Even though something strange has happened to the island, she figures Jarrah and his six or so friends should be around, somewhere.

Within a few minutes, she’s reached where the jungle meets the coast. The trees grow shorter and sparser and the soil gives way to sand in the kind of arbitrary but perfect line that only nature can create… yet another reminder of the differences between her island and this one, the difference between unpredictable imagination and hyper-controlled design.

Okay, maybe she does resent it, just a little.

The walkie talkie finally vibrates against her thigh. Ariadne’s about to barrage Cobb with questions, but before she can, Eames pipes up with a remark so unexpected that she all but loses her train of thought.

“Ariadne, is there a boozy Scotsman haunting your past you’ve neglected to tell us about?”

“What?”

Cobb, reassuringly calm, explains, “We just had an altercation with a guy on a sailboat. Bearded. Drunk. No pants. Thick accent.”

“Scots. Utterly incomprehensible,” she hears Eames muttering in the background.

Carefully, Ariadne asks, “What kind of altercation?”

“The kind where he pulled out a rifle and started yelling at us. Something about being ‘hostile’ and ‘trapped in a snowglobe’. He called us his 'brothers', shot at us, and then tripped over his feet and fell back into the hold. None of us recognized him, so we wondered if maybe he’s someone you brought here.”

“No, I don’t know any Scottish people, and all the guys I know keep their pants on.”

“You poor girl,” Eames sympathizes, and Ariadne purses her lips in annoyance. He doesn’t realize it (or at least she wants to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he doesn’t realize it), but Eames sometimes cuts too close to the quick.

“I only built the ocean out a couple of miles. Maybe he ran into the edge, and that’s what he meant about being trapped in a snowglobe?”

She can all but hear Cobb nodding to himself, mentally running down the list of theoretical possibilities and agreeing with her. “Makes sense. But the main question is, who is he? If he isn’t one of ours, he must be someone Jarrah knows. He was too specific, too well-drawn, to just be a nameless filler projection.”

“But the Oceanic Six were rescued by a raft that happened to float towards the island. Not by a Scotsman in a fancy sailboat,” Yusuf counters.

Ariadne figures this is as good a segue way as any. “Speaking of things that shouldn’t be here…”

“Yeah, we were going to ask about that. We thought Membata was a tiny, flat strip of beach. This looks more like… Hawaii.”

“It started out right, but then…” She doesn’t know how to describe the shimmering.

“We saw.”

“How does that even happen?” she asks, still trudging through jungle and brush, following the tree line in search of the beach where she’ll find Jarrah and his friends.

Ariadne can hear waves both near her and through the walkie as water splashes against the side of the boys’ boat. The noise makes it difficult to hear Cobb’s attempt at an explanation. “I’ve read theories about this, but I’ve never seen it pan out before now. Basically, the idea is that the mind doesn’t have to limit its projections to people. It can create places, too, or in our case, it can correct places. So as soon as we got here, Jarrah’s subconscious filled in what you built to turn it into what he remembers.”

The perfectionist in Ariadne bristles at the word choice. “But I built the island he remembers. Every rock. Every tree. There’s nothing to correct.”

“I know. But for some reason, Jarrah’s subconscious wants the island to look like this. Where are you?”

“Close to the shore. I’m looking for the camp.” Ariadne’s still hidden by the trees and bushes, but the landscape opens up into the most gorgeous beach she’s ever seen. What she sees makes just as little sense as the rest of the island.

Spread out along the beach are at least thirty makeshift shelters, all fashioned out of bits of tarpaulin (where’d they get that from?) and airplane parts. But even more shocking is the throng of people milling around; they’re sitting, swimming, washing clothes, playing cards, roasting pigs over a campfire…

Ariadne has read over and over again about how only eight passengers escaped the plane before it sank to the bottom of the ocean and how they’d floated to this shore; the airplane parts that these shelters are built out of can’t exist. She’s watched interviews in which they described in great detail how they’d subsisted on nothing but coconuts and fish—no pigs, no industrial-sized cans of food that Ariadne can see lined up on a hand-made shelving structure. During her visit to the island the survivors had sworn they’d spent their time stranded on, she’d seen for herself how there were no building materials, no bamboo or cutting tools; there’s no way these people could have created any of this.

“This is all wrong,” she says, more to herself than to the team.

“What do you mean?” is Cobb’s worried reply. In the background, she can hear Yusuf and Eames bickering about how to sail the boat, probably unaware of the complete dissolution of the plan she now knows won’t work at all.

“The camp I’m looking at is… huge.”

“How huge?”

Ariadne scans the group she’s looking at, adding up the clusters of people surrounding the various stations. “Forty people huge.”

“That’s impossible,” Cobb yells into the walkie.

“Tell that to all these people. Tell that to your drunk Scotsman. Tell that to the island.” She picks up the binoculars that hang around her neck and peers through them for a better look at the action. “The ambush isn’t going to work. There are too many of them. And… Where’d they get the guns from?”

“Guns?” Cobb asks sharply. After the Fischer case, the impossibility of the projections being armed was the one element of this job to which the whole team had been looking forward. Now that expectation, too, has proven false.

“There’s a blond guy with a shotgun. And a bald guy organizing a case full of knives.” Finally, Ariadne’s eyes fall on people she recognizes—people who actually belong in the dream. “I see Kate Austen and Jack Shephard. She has a pistol in her back pocket. And she’s not pregnant.”

“Maybe she’s already had the baby,” Cobb reasons, now unable to mask the worry in his voice. He’s an architect as well: a control freak like her, like all of them (except maybe Eames). “Any sign of Jarrah?”

Ariadne looks more closely, and finally spots their subject chopping wood with a short guy she recognizes from the photographs as Charlie Pace, one of the three crash survivors who didn’t survive the island. Sayid and Charlie appear to be building some sort of communal dining area for the camp. Keeping the builders company are Sun Kwon and a couple of unfamiliar blonde girls of about Ariadne’s age, one of whom is holding a baby.

“Yeah, you’re right. Kate’s already had it. Sayid’s with Sun and Charlie and the baby. He looks… relaxed.” Ariadne remembers Eames remarking how Sayid never once smiled in any of the interviews or photographs he looked at in his research. The sight of him grinning as he chops and chats is almost as shocking as the giant island and the inexplicable crowd on the beach.

“Well, let’s keep him that way, at least for now,” Cobb reminded her. “We don’t want him siccing all these people on us when we aren’t ready for it. And no matter what you do, don’t try to force the dream back into the structure you built. We don’t have manpower or firepower to deal with fifty angry projections.”

A nasty thought occurs to Ariadne. “If the landscape is also part of his subconscious, does that mean the island could attack us?”

“I guess, technically, but it’s too unlikely to be worth worrying about. We’ll moor the boat and come find you.”

“Okay. I’ll check in with you in a little while.” She takes a deep breath as she turns off the walkie and puts it in her pocket. This is the first time she’s ever been on her own in one of these dreams, and while she’s high on the responsibility she’s been given, she wishes things were going more according to plan.

Just as she’s about to walk into the camp, she feels a hand on her shoulder. She spins around to see a large man with a friendly face smiling down at her. She recognizes him as Hurley Reyes, one of Jarrah’s fellow survivors.

“Hey, can you help me with something?” he asks, looking sheepish.

This is the moment. Either he’ll accept her as part of the dream or he’ll alert the rest of the projections to her intrusive presence.

Slowly, she replies, “Sure. What with?”

“Jack asked me to bring some supplies down from the hatch, but it’s too much for one person, and I don’t have time to make multiple trips. I’m on button duty in an hour.”

The hatch? Button duty? Ariadne thinks to herself. She has no idea what he’s talking about, but it’s clear she needs to go with the flow. Aloud, she replies, “Sure!”

“You’re the best, dude.”

Although Hurley checked himself into a mental institution only months after returning from the island, Jarrah’s subconscious doesn’t appear to think of him as crazy. Chatting beside her as he leads her back into the jungle, this projection of Hurley couldn’t be happier or saner. She wonders where the disconnect lies.

***

Arthur checks the monitor one last time. The drugs are working and Jarrah’s out cold; he won’t be waking up anytime soon. Other than the soft snoring that comes through the speakers in his observation room, the house is blissfully silent. The city is blissfully silent.

Arthur has the whole world to himself.

This is his favorite part. It’s the reason why he always volunteers for this role. There’s a quiet and a calm at this point of a job that never occurs in reality, or even in any other kind of dream. The subject’s asleep, and the rest of the team is in another level.

Where Eames finds himself in other people, Arthur finds himself in solitude.

He tiptoes downstairs in his socks, minding the creaky floorboard he knows from having memorized the plans. His goal is the study in which he knows he’ll find a bottle of MacCutcheon scotch. The best stuff on earth. It’s in a locked desk drawer, separate from the rest of the bottles in the liquor cabinet in the next room. Arthur knows the key is under the rug; he can’t imagine why anyone would hide good stuff like MacCutcheon until he’s pouring himself a glass and notices a little card tied around the neck of the bottle. Inside is written Congratulations, Sayid! in neat, feminine handwriting, with a happy face beside the words. Directly underneath, in a bigger but equally precise man’s handwriting: May you find happiness, brother. One day, when all this is over, I hope we can meet again. The card is unsigned, but the picture of a bride and groom on the front clearly labels it as a wedding present, dating it to less than a year old in this dream’s timescale.

Except that Sayid Jarrah’s brother died during the first Gulf War, 12 years ago.

After turning the card over and over in his fingers and his mind, Arthur still doesn’t know what to make of it. He puts the bottle back in the drawer and takes his glass into the living room. The couch is stiff under his hamstrings as he sits down; the leather is too new to have much give, just as it should be if Jarrah’s only had it for a few months. From his seat, he surveys the room, feeling appreciative of every aspect of his surroundings.

Ariadne’s got a gift, that’s for sure. Arthur always enjoys her creations; they’re organized, detailed, and warm, but without being sentimental or nostalgic. They’re perfect recreations of the assigned place, but somehow they still feel like her.

He itches to go for a drive; she’s built the entirety of LA, just in case, and she’s put in all sorts of secret short-cuts to beat traffic. Arthur’s sure the beach level is just as well-crafted and he hopes the others are enjoying the South Pacific sunshine (Yusuf had joked about bringing his favorite swim trunks), but he’s always preferred something more structured. Something more like this.

It isn’t even close to being the biggest house in the neighborhood—Jarrah could have afforded a mansion with the millions in sympathy money the airline gave them all—and it’s very blandly decorated. Arthur’s been in Best Westerns with more personality. There’s nothing that signals ‘tortured Iraqis’ or ‘miraculous survivor’ or ‘newlyweds’ or really anything at all. It’s a minor observation, but it’s been nagging him; Ariadne’s a genius at understanding locations, and Eames is brilliant at reading people (not that Arthur would ever pay him that compliment to his face), but Arthur’s specialty has always been reconciling the space between. Spaces like here, where people have left their marks but aren’t around to distract. Only here, where everything’s quiet and distractions are stripped away does it become obvious what fits and what doesn’t. There have been a couple of jobs where he and Cobb failed to extract the necessary information from the subject’s mind, but Arthur’s ability to sleuth in the projected space had still rendered the missions successes.

Arthur knows better than anyone that projections exist in real life, too—obscuring, tricking, complicating.

He wanders around the house, investigating the details he didn’t have time to ponder during research. There are no photos here, no mementos. It’s as though Sayid and Nadia wanted to pretend they had no past, either together or apart. Given the pasts they did have, Arthur isn’t surprised.

Something tells him to head back to the study. That drawer’s the only locked place in the whole house; the only person Jarrah could have been hiding anything from is Nadia, and Eames had mentioned that she never touched alcohol.

Sayid Jarrah’s Bluebeard drawer turns out to be mostly empty, and what little is in there is fucking random. Other than the scotch, there’s nothing but a folded black tank top, crusty and stinky with dried sweat and seawater. It’s tied neatly with a necklace made out of gold and beads.

There’s only one thing the shirt can be: the one he was wearing on the island. However, except as a form of self-torture, Arthur isn’t sure why anyone would want to keep something so viscerally reminiscent him of the worst three months of his life. The necklace makes even less sense. He knows Nadia never wore jewelry, so it can’t be hers. And even if Jarrah was somehow, unlikely as it is, secretly carrying a torch for Kate Austen or Sun Kwon, this girly-girl accessory doesn’t look at all their style. And none of this explains the hidden bottle of $25,000 scotch.

And then a sound breaks Arthur’s perfect, ethereal silence.

”La mer, qu’on voit danser…”

It’s a woman’s voice, singing. Arthur recognizes the tune as that Bobby Darin song, but the words are incomprehensible. French.

”Le long des golfes clairs…”

He cranes his neck to look outside a nearby window and just barely glimpses a long pair of women’s legs as they disappear around a corner in the backyard. The woman is out of sight, but the song she sings still wafts towards him.

“…à des reflets d’argent, la mer, des reflets changeants sous la pluie…”

Arthur grits his teeth and hesitates where he stands, unsure if he should head back to the surveillance room to find this person or to the bedroom to make sure nothing happens to Jarrah.

One thing’s for sure: he’s going to kill Cobb, if not in reality, then at least in this dream.

***

By the time Ariadne and her new best friend Hurley are approaching the camp again, her previous level of confusion can’t possibly compare to what she’s feeling now. Her arms are full of gear, her back is weighed down by a pack full of food, and her head is spinning.

“Can you give these diapers to Claire and the batteries to Sayid?” Hurley shoves the wares into her arms. “If I don’t get back to the hatch on time, Locke’s gonna kill me. Or the world’s gonna end. Or something.”

Ariadne’s learned by now what he means by ‘the hatch’ and ‘button duty’, but knowing doesn’t always mean understanding, especially not in this place. Especially when not even Hurley understands.

“Sure,” she says. Nice as he is, she’s desperate to be rid of him so she can find the team and fill them in.

“Thanks a million, dude,” he says, dumping his pile of supplies beside what is presumably his tent, and then taking off faster than Ariadne would have thought possible for a man of his size.

She looks at the diapers and then down the beach, trying to guess who Claire might be. The same blond girl from earlier is still hanging out with the baby, so Ariadne figures she’s as good a guess as any. She trudges down to where the girl sits, rocking the baby in a cradle expertly fashioned out of branches and twigs. Ariadne tries to act normally, hoping no one will notice that she doesn’t belong.

When she reaches the makeshift shelter, she drops the diapers on top of two stacked suitcases. “Hurley said to give these to you,” she whispers, ready to take off before the girl can see her face.

Looking up, she sweetly responds in an Australian accent, “Hey, thanks!” Ariadne turns to walk away, but hears her continue talking to the baby. “Mummy’s got some clean diapers for you, Aaron!”

Ariadne stops, and frowns. ‘Mummy?’ She glances to where Kate Austen is sitting, cutting the hair of that good-looking guy who’d been holding a gun before, and not exuding the slightest bit of maternal aura. She glances back at Claire and the baby, who, now that she’s looking closely, are spitting images of one another…

However, soapy baby drama isn’t what she’s here for, and at this point, the list of things that don’t add up is entirely too long for Ariadne to get bogged down on something so irrelevant, so she gets back on task. She spots Sayid way down the beach, past all the tents and people, curled up on a blanket with the other blond girl who’d been hanging around him and Charlie earlier. They’re sitting in front of a tent, one that looks newer and less haphazardly built than the rest. An interesting structure that someone put a lot of thought and care into; it’s a home, not a survival necessity. A yellow Labrador lies curled up at their feet, the finishing touch on this unlikely picture of domesticity.

This is the first time Ariadne’s gotten close to him. Seeing him asleep in his hotel room for a minute, or asleep in the last dream level didn’t count. This is him, moving, interacting, being a real person instead of just a collection of words and pictures in documents that Arthur gives her to read. In fact, besides her teammates, he’s the only real thing in this whole dream.

Sayid’s too wrapped up with Leggy Blonde to notice Ariadne’s arrival. Typical, she thinks, just before clearing her throat. Even after years of living in Paris, where making out in the street is de rigeur, PDA of this sort still makes her slightly uncomfortable. Finally, they look up. Sayid regards Ariadne with a leftover glow while Leggy Blonde holds her hand over her forehead and squints.

“What’s with the scarf? It’s ninety degrees here.”

Ariadne’s fingers fly to her neck-kerchief. “I… I…” She decides to leave the comment dangling. “Hurley told me to give you these,” she says, trying to quell the awkwardness, and hands Sayid the case of batteries.

“What are you making now?” the girl asks playfully. “More sonar made out of twigs?”

He smiles mischievously, and again, Ariadne marvels at how different he looks here—happy—a far cry from the sourpuss in the photographs. “No, some of this is to fix the walkie talkies from the hatch. The rest is for a surprise.”

The girl smiles up at Ariadne. Proudly she tells her, “He thinks of the best surprises.”

Then Sayid looks at her, too, and she can feel him really seeing her for the first time. His forehead wrinkles and his eyes narrow. Ariadne’s palms start to sweat, because here it is, here is where he’s noticing that she doesn’t belong, that not only is she not one of the eight official crash survivors, she isn’t even part of the inexplicable throng in this dream. And, just to remind her that Leggy Blonde and everyone else here are nothing more than extensions of Sayid himself, the girl’s smile of pleasure transforms into a smirk of suspicion that matches her boyfriend’s.

The dog barks.

When, almost immediately, a strong hand comes from behind to grab her shoulder, she thinks, Crap.

“I see Ariadne here got your batteries for you,” a man’s voice says from behind her. It’s Jack Shephard, clenching her shoulder and speaking to Sayid. Ariadne gapes, wondering how he knows her name…

“Ariadne?” Sayid’s looking between her and Jack, questioning and just as confused as Ariadne herself. But finally, with the lack of any other explanation, he (and in tandem, the blond girl) relaxes and resigns himself to her inclusion. She can easily imagine his thoughts: If Jack knows her, then she must be… I must have had too much sun today…

“Yes…” Sayid says slowly, finally breaking his focus on Ariadne to get back into the moment. “I should have the walkies fixed by tomorrow morning.”

“Not tomorrow,” his girlfriend reminds him. “We have a date tonight, remember? Down the beach, by the cliffs?”

“Shannon,” Sayid begins, trying to cajole her. The name rings a bell. Ariadne can’t remember why exactly, though.

“You promised.”

This almost does it for Sayid. Ariadne can see the weight the word holds for him. But just to seal the deal, Shannon leans into his ear and sing-songs, “Come on. Relax. Live a little. Everyone’ll get by for a night without you. Won’t they, Jack?”

She’s like a siren, except that, knowing what Ariadne does about Sayid, it’s less temptation and more good advice. She wonders where this Shannon person is back in reality, or if she’s just a made-up dreamgirl; either way, it sounds like he could use a little more temptation of this sort.

“It’s fine,” Jack says. “You two go have fun. I’ll hold down the fort until the morning.”

Kate Austen and the guy she was hanging around before stroll over. They look like… Ariadne can’t tell. She knows that in real life, Kate Austen and Jack Shephard fell for each other on the island and are still serious—living together—but it’s obvious that in the context of this dream, she and this man have a thing.

Watching them approach (well, Kate approaches; the guy swaggers), and glancing behind them to where Charlie Pace is playing songs on his guitar for Claire, Ariadne notes to herself that Sayid’s subconscious has, bizarrely, paired not only himself but also all of his friends off with unreasonably attractive fictional blond people.

She doesn’t know what that says about him. But then again, she doesn’t know what any of this says about him.

The new man is carrying a roll of paper under his arm, and, when he reaches where they’re all sitting, he drops it into Sayid’s lap.

“What is this?”

“French chick said to pass this along to you,” the man drawls in a Southern accent; somehow the perfectly harmless words come out like an insult.

Sayid blinks up at him. “Rousseau was here? Why didn’t she come speak to me in person?”

The man flops down to sit beside them. “Beats me. But it ain’t like I was gonna invite her in for tea, if you know what I mean.”

“My guess?” Kate offers, her arms crossed and her mouth serious as she sits down beside her (boy?)friend. “This is her idea of a peace offering to the camp. But I saw her. She’s still nervous around us. She took one look at Claire and ran off.”

“She better be embarrassed, after the stunt she pulled,” the Southern guy adds.

Sayid’s barely listening. He’s studying the papers. “You can’t blame her for what she did. She lost a child. She’s lived alone for 16 years. Her mind…” He trails off, engrossed.

Shannon leans over to look with him. “Looks like another project, huh?”

He smiles up at her. “Yes, it does.”

“What is it?” Jack asks.

“It’s a map of another Dharma station,” Kate explains.

“Did she say anything when she left this?” Sayid asks Kate.

“She said she found it in the jungle. But she has no idea where the station itself is.”

“Whatever it is, it looks extensive. It also is where the power source for the hatch is located. Look here,” Sayid says, pointing at one of the quadrants. “And here. This is the customary blueprint of a generator. If we can find this place…”

“Then what, Mohammed?” Sawyer says, and Ariadne is shocked at how offensive this guy is. She’s even more shocked at how no one seems to even blink; it’s as if he’s desensitized them all.

“I’m sure we could find some use for it. We could amplify our distress signal, rig a powerful light that might attract the attention of passing planes. Who knows?”

“If you want to go look for it, just let me know,” Kate says.

“How come I’m never invited on these hikes?” Shannon pipes up.

Sayid looks at her as though he’s never realized that she feels excluded from whatever it is they’re talking about. “You came the first time and proved invaluable. You’re always welcome.”

She looks at the ground, too flustered by the compliment—because it’s about something real, not about being pretty, Ariadne can tell—to make eye contact. She digs her index finger into the sand. “I don’t know about invaluable… Me and my shitty French.”

“It isn’t… shitty.” He says it like a man who isn’t at all used to swearing in English, which is understandable, given it’s his second language; the words don’t fly off his tongue with the same relish.

“Woah, woah woah,” Sawyer interrupts. “Hold on a minute there, Pippi Longstocking, Malibu Barbie. Who’s goin’ anywhere? Especially on wild goose chases psycho Frogs are putting us up to.”

“Sayid’s right. If there’s a power source on the island, we have to try to find it. It might be our ticket to getting rescued,” Jack argues.

Suddenly remembering something from her engineering classes, Ariadne feels bold, wants to play her part and contribute. “It might not be that hard. If this place is generating enough energy to power the entire island, it’s got to be emitting an electromagnetic current. Can’t we somehow harness the electromagnetism in the hatch to hone in on a direction? We could fan out around the island and use the walkie talkies to triangulate the signal.”

The speech takes all the air out of her; she inhales a much-needed deep breath and hopes that wasn’t completely off.

It goes over well; Eames would be proud of her. Jack compliments her on the idea; inside, she feels something warm and proud coiling.

Sayid nods, though he still remains vaguely confused by her presence. “It’s an excellent idea, Ariadne. However…”

“Let me guess,” Shannon says, and then adjusts her inflection to fake a deep-throated, not-quite British accent that Ariadne thinks is supposed to be Sayid’s, even though it’s a terrible imitation. “You don’t know how long the batteries will last.”

Kate and Sawyer snicker. Jack starts to laugh, too. Ariadne doesn’t get it. Sayid does though, because his eyebrows draw closer to one another and his nose flares, like someone who is only now, at 30-odd years old, finding out what it’s like to be teased.

“It’s a legitimate concern,” he replies, amused, not angry.

Shannon grins through her laughter; it’s shy and unpracticed, like she’s re-learning how to form the expression again. She’s beautiful, her tan more perfect than the others, who just look brown. Shannon reminds Ariadne of the girls she used to watch from afar in high school. The effortlessly pretty rich girls who did ballet and had no idea how many problems it was possible to have. Or at least Ariadne thought, until she heard them puking in the upstairs bathrooms that hardly anyone ever used. She doesn’t keep in touch with anyone from high school beyond two equally nerdy classmates, one of whom is in med school now, and another guy who’s teaching English in Mongolia. But she wants to call her friends, let them know she’s found even more proof that high school doesn’t mean anything. Because who’d have thought that quiet, goody-two-shoes Ariadne would end up on her second heist as part of a team of international mind criminals, or that one of the pretty girls from school would end up stranded on an island and dating an Iraqi torturer-turned-assassin.

She knows there’s more to it than pithy, phrase-long descriptions. There’s more to what Ariadne is doing than petty crime, just as she has a feeling there’s more here than a grown-up Valley Girl and the alpha male with the dark past and future who’s presently doting on her.

But then she remembers that Shannon’s fictional. All of this is fictional.

And that’s when Ariadne realizes she doesn’t want it to be. She wants this to be true even though there’s no way it can be. All of it: the bamboo grove; the hatch; happy, healthy Hurley; the twinkle in Sayid’s eyes; the way Dr. Jack Shephard (on whom she’s had an uncharacteristically silly celebrity crush ever since the story of the Oceanic Six broke almost three years ago—she’ll die before she lets any of the guys find out, though) is sitting only a foot away and nodding at her with approval.

“Hey,” Shannon says, poking at Sawyer with a sneaker-clad foot. “Can you watch Vincent for us tonight?”

At the sound of his name, the dog sits up and goes to Sayid for some petting; his tongue wags. Ariadne pities the poor thing; the island is swelteringly hot—miserable conditions for such an adorable furball.

She pulls on her scarf, undoing it a bit.

Sawyer shakes his head. “Me and animals don’t have the best track record on this island.”

“I don’t think Vincent has it out for you,” Kate says.

“What does he need watching for anyhow?” Sawyer grumbles. “Far as I can tell, he can look after himself better than any of us can.”

“You’re a good watchdog, aren’t you, Vincent?” Shannon asks the dog playfully while rubbing him about the face. “You’ll protect the camp from the rumble in the jungle tonight, won’t you?”

“I’ll watch him,” Kate offers, while Ariadne asks herself what the hell that was supposed to mean.

“Thanks.”

“I’d better get going. Have fun tonight.” Jack gets up and tugs on Ariadne’s arm. She lets him pull her to her feet, leans into him for a sexy second as she sways into a balanced stance. It leaves her slightly off-kilter. “Can you help me with something down at the hatch?”

She gulps. “Okay.”

The panic returns, just as strong as the last time someone here asked her to accompany him to the hatch. Maybe this is all a ruse, a long con. Sayid’s a wily guy, Ariadne knows that much. Maybe that whole scene was just a way for him to put her off her guard, make her think everything is okay, but really, Jack’s just been pretending to know her, and is about to put a hit on her. He’s her femme fatale… except a guy.

God, she’s been watching too many film noirs lately.

But still.

As Jack leads Ariadne away, Shannon and Sayid go back to canoodling, as if on a double date with Sawyer and Kate. The dog stretches and yawns.

“It’s a good thing I arrived when I did.” Jack’s voice crackles and statics like a radio dial turning between stations. Soon, the even tones of the doctor are morphing into a familiar British drawl. “You looked like you were in need of some assistance.”

She peers at him. “Eames?”

Jack’s face remains, but shimmers like the sneaker in the jungle, as if by letting the voice go, Eames has broken the perfect wall of his disguise, and his real, incorrigible self now fights to reveal itself.

“In the flesh. Or, at least, someone else’s flesh. Very handsome, though the cut-off sleeves and rough stubble are doing him no favors. However, I think I’ve discovered how you like your valiant heroes, Ariadne. You prefer rugged to besuited. Interesting.” The wink he gives her is beyond smug. He knows. She’s mortified. Not to mention irrationally bummed.

None of it, the shared laughs, the familiarity, was real.

Like she always does with emotions she doesn’t know how to handle, she channels her disappointment into inquiry. “But how? You didn’t even practice how to be him!”

Eames shrugs. “All I needed was in his bio: a spiral surgeon with a god complex and some daddy issues. He’s a type. I winged it. Rather well, I might add.”

Ariadne darts her eyes around, scanning the camp for doppelgangers. “Where’s the other Jack? If Sayid sees two of you here…”

“Don’t worry. He went to fetch water with Sun Kwon’s husband at some caves. He won’t be back for awhile.”

“How? Sun Kwon’s husband died in the crash. Sayid wouldn’t know him.”

“There are a lot of people Sayid shouldn’t know. And yet, here they are, in all of their rag-tag glory.” He purses his lips in a way that, even if she didn’t already know it was really Eames, Ariadne might have started to suspect.

“Where are the others?”

“Just past the tree line and down the beach. We’ll reach them in a minute.”

“How come you were in the camp? Has the plan changed?”

“I came to look for you,” Jack—Eames—says, just as she spots the others hiding in some bushes. “We were getting worried.”

“Where have you been?” Yusuf asks as soon as they’re out of sight of the camp. “You never checked in like you said you would.”

Ariadne tells them of the hatch, and her heart leaps as she thinks of it again. She’d loved it. Beautiful, with soaring ceilings and majestic domes. A recreation of daylight so perfect you might forget you were in a bunker. Rooms interconnected yet separate. 70s hippie-dom harmoniously married to 80s modernism. Ariadne has always had a weak spot for the academic lines of those time periods. The hatch, as Hurley had called it, was amazing, more paradoxical than any of her her professors’ best creations: an incongruous metal world buried inside an island, built for a simple yet enormous purpose. She wishes she could have met the architect. She’d asked, but Hurley didn’t seem to know anything about it.

“It was built by that research company Saito was interested in,” she finishes. “The Dharma Initiative. Their logo is all over the place, on all the food, on all the equipment. And there’s a computer in there, with a timer. They have to enter a code into a mainframe computer and push a button every 108 minutes, or else this guy named John Locke—”

“The philosopher?” Yusuf asks incredulously, but Ariadne simply shrugs and keeps going; she might as well get the full insanity out before they start laughing.

“—says the world will end. Or something.” Hurley’s words seem like the only proper ones to describe it. “None of them are very clear on that part.”

“Jarrah didn’t strike me as such a Freudian head case, but this is staggering,” Yusuf comments. “The idea of the world ending because someone fails to enter a code into a computer… 17th-century philosophers… It sounds like a dystopian novel waiting to be written.”

“It isn’t Freudian if he doesn’t care.” The knowledge she’s picked up from chatty Hurley tumbles out of her mouth before she’s even decided for herself if the details of this dream are worth taking seriously. But these are the rules of the world they’re in right now. “Aside from how the supplies can improve life here at camp, he’s not really interested in the hatch or the button or the arguments Jack and Locke have been having about whether or not to keep pushing it. Apparently he spends most of his time building things to make everyone more comfortable, thinking of ways to communicate with the outside world, and hanging out with his girlfriend.”

“You’re well caught up on the local island gossip,” Eames teases.

“Hurley can’t keep his mouth shut. He’s really sweet, though. Or at least, Sayid thinks he is.” She keeps having to remind herself that everything here has been colored by his perception. Changing tack, she asks her burning question. “So, who’s the girl? She wasn’t in the research brief.”

“That sort never are, darling,” Eames informs her.

“She is in the research,” Cobb states. “I recognize her face from a news clipping Arthur had. She’s Boone Carlyle’s sister, Shannon.”

And that’s why the name sounded familiar. Ariadne has seen it in connection to this case, but not at all in connection to Sayid himself. “But she never made it off the plane. Only Boone did. And he died before they were rescued.”

“So, either Jarrah met Shannon in Australia and has included her here…” Yusuf offers.

“Or he’s harboring some sort of repressed desire for Boone that is manifesting itself in a projection of his sister…” Eames counters.

“Or they’re lying,” Cobb says with finality.

“I liked my idea better,” Eames mutters.

“Lying about what?” Ariadne asks.

“About everything—about the crash, abut where they were, about who survived. When you’ve done as many jobs as I have, you learn how to tell the difference between someone whose subconscious is making things up on the fly and someone who’s recreating the past. These are definitely memories.”

“That’s impossible, though…” Ariadne and Yusuf say simultaneously. The reasons why it’s impossible are so many that they pause before trying to enumerate them. Cobb takes advantage of the break to cut in.

“Put aside logic and just look around you for a minute. Look at them.” He points through the trees at all the people milling around the camp.

“What about John Locke? You’re trying to tell me he’s back from the dead?” Yusuf, still stuck on this, scoffs.

“For what it’s worth, this one wasn’t British,” Eames pipes up, serious when required. “This was someone else entirely—a crazy old coot with a million knives. And like our hirsute Scot, I could tell he was someone Jarrah knows, not a random creation. Everyone I spoke with was.”

Putting the debate to rest, Cobb adds, “I didn’t memorize the passenger list, but if there was someone on the plane named John Locke, Arthur will know.”

“So what do we do?” Ariadne asks.

Cobb peers through the trees and at the beach camp. Turning back to face them, he says, “We stick to the plan. We give him a nightmare.”

“There isn’t much nightmarish about being surrounded by friends on Fantasy Island. According to Ariadne, they even have all the amenities in that hatch of theirs,” Yusuf notes.

Cobb shakes his head. “We kill the girl and take our chances fighting the projections. And then we get the hell out of here.”

“What? Why?” Ariadne still has trouble remembering that they aren’t actually killing anyone. But even so… it seems a shame to turn what is such a beautiful (if insane) world into a tragedy, regardless of whether or not that was the original plan, regardless of the mission. “There’s got to be another way.”

“It’s the easiest way to go ahead with the plan, even with all this. He’ll wake up in his house, beside his wife, after a nightmare.”

“They’ll be heading down the beach by themselves soon,” Eames suggests. “They’re going on some sort of overnight date. I imagine privacy is hard to come by here.”

Yusuf peers through the brush. “I think they’re getting ready to leave.”

“Let’s go,” Cobb says.

Ariadne’s heart sinks as they make their way through the woods. They’re hidden by trees as they walk parallel to Sayid and Shannon, who carry packs with blankets and supplies down the beach, hand in hand as the sun begins its afternoon descent. She knows this was the plan, and she’d been on board with it, but now…

Cobb must sense her consternation, because he comes to walk beside her. “It’s okay, you know. This isn’t real.”

“I thought you just said it was,” she snaps as she shoves branches out of her way with unnecessary force.

After that, they walk in silence, except for Yusuf huffing, “Funny how these people think it’s romantic to go camping when they’re already camping.”

After a few hours of walking, the terrain changes; sand gives way to rocks. It’ll be sunset soon enough. Ariadne only realizes they’ve been walking uphill for the past hour when she finds herself near the top of a cliff and completely winded. The trees here are thinner and don’t provide as much cover, so keeping the couple in sight while staying out of sight now requires binoculars.

There’s an overhang where a sheet of rock juts out to create a more open version of a cave. Shannon and Sayid head right for it. They’ve obviously been here before. The team watches as they lay out their blankets and water and other supplies. Sayid sets up a tiki torch even though it isn’t dark enough yet to need it.

It isn’t long before Shannon gets up. Sayid tries to pull her back, but she makes a coy motion with her head and wriggles out of his grasp. The words, ‘I’ll be back in a minute’ float over to where Ariadne and the boys are hiding.

“What in the world is she doing?” Yusuf asks as Shannon skips off into the woods by herself.

Ariadne’s the only one who gets it; she’s the only one who’s a girl. “She has to pee,” she says glumly, knowing what’s coming.

Cobb pulls out his gun.

The guys charge ahead. Ariadne hangs back. It doesn’t matter if it’s only a dream. This pre-meditated murder still feels ugly, tainting the beautiful island that she feels possessive towards, even if it isn’t hers.

She crouches underneath a bush and looks away as Cobb, Yusuf and Eames surround Shannon. She refuses to listen as Shannon screams; she squeezes her eyes shut as two shots go off, hopes she never has to find out which one of them fired.

She wants to throw up when, in the distance, she hears Sayid screaming Shannon’s name. There’s rustling in the trees and she knows he’s coming to investigate.

When she finally dares to look up, Shannon’s still flopping and staggering about in the center of the circle formed by Cobb, Eames, and Yusuf, the bullet hole in her gut is beginning to bleed. Sayid arrives quickly, and shoves them out of the way to catch her just before she falls. Shannon doesn’t even get to speak before she’s gone.

Sayid hugs her close and his face goes slack. Ariadne thinks she’s never seen pain like this before. It’s anguish of the mind, just as painful and real as anything that happens up above.

He doesn’t need to say anything for her to know they’re screwed.

***

From the surveillance room, Arthur watches as Jarrah starts to twitch in his sleep. Whatever they’re all doing in there, the plan seems to be working. However, they’d better finish up quickly, or he’ll have to start pulling them out.

With Mal around somewhere, he’s got to be extra careful.

He takes his gun, activates the silencer, and locks the door behind him so she can’t get in while he’s out.

When he gets to the bedroom, Jarrah isn’t the only one shaking and kicking. Now Ariadne’s making little whimpering noises. If one of them doesn’t wake up soon, he’s going to start pulling them out. Arthur begins dragging everyone into chairs or placing them on the edge of the bed to facilitate the kicks.

Eames is a lot heavier than he looks, the bastard.

***

Ariadne emerges from her cover, and the boys brace themselves and point their guns, ready for all fifty projections to start rushing at them; that’s what always happens.

The thing is, that isn’t what happens. Not here. Instead, she hears an eerie noise, like a taxi cab receipt printer that’s been possessed by a demon. It’s barely audible above the other sounds of the jungle, over Sayid’s silent despair (so much louder than sobbing could ever be), but it fills her with fear. The others seem to hear it, too, because she catches Yusuf looking around for the source, too. It’s his dream; he needs to take more care than the rest of them to make sure he survives whatever’s coming so this place doesn’t collapse.

Meanwhile, there’s a wild galumphing noise—different from the terrifying ch-ch-ch-ch that she can’t make sense of. A white blur is heading towards them at a hideous pace. This is something more tangible, animal. Cobb takes aim and shoots, twice, but the bullets barely slow whatever it is down. As it approaches, the shape sharpens into something more familiar. It’s a bear, white in a way that Ariadne knows she should recognize, but can’t place, can’t reconcile, here in the jungle. Cobb’s throat is already being slashed by the weakened creature’s giant claws by the time she realizes what it is: a polar bear.

A polar bear on a tropical island.

“Well, that’s novel,” Yusuf remarks beside her. He and Eames shoot a few more rounds into it and the beast collapses, but it’s too late for Cobb. She looks away from the sight of her friend, mutilated and bleeding on the ferns—green and red colliding like some kind of psychotic holiday scene—but the alternative view isn’t any better; Sayid’s rocking back and forth on his knees, still clutching Shannon’s limp corpse to his chest.

“Who are you?” he screams at them, the words laced with more danger than Ariadne’s ever faced. For the first time, she gets it, sees how the sad-faced man from the pictures, and the tentatively relaxed guy back on the beach could have become the cold-blooded killer Saito had hired them to investigate. That Sayid Jarrah had never felt real to her before, but now that she’s seeing him, she’s terrified.

“You’re them, aren’t you? The Others? You’ve already killed her. Wasn’t once enough?”

Ariadne isn’t sure who they would be except for ‘others’, but she’s quickly learning that words have different definitions here. She looks at Eames for support; he always knows what to say.

“What is he talking about? How could someone have already killed her?” she whispers.

Eames is steely-eyed as he cocks his gun. “He’s waking up,” he mutters back. “His conscious memory is seeping in. We’re almost at the end.”

But Sayid doesn’t get a chance to attack them, because just then, a nearby tree is uprooted, by nothing that Ariadne can see. She, Eames, and Yusuf huddle closer to one another as a loud mechanical grating fills the air. There’s a noise like an elephant roaring, but she still can’t see what’s doing this, which is odd, since it’s got to be something not only enormous, but also just a few yards away.

“What is that?” Yusuf yells.

Sayid simply laughs, low and dangerous and vengeful.

“It’s a security system for the island,” he growls.

Ariadne doesn’t know what’s going on, but she has a feeling that they’ve just summoned the darkest part of him, the darkest part of anything she’s ever encountered. They had wanted to give him a nightmare; they hadn’t expected to have it turned around on themselves.

It’s time to run.

“No matter what happens,” Eames shouts at Yusuf, “you have to hold on. Hold on for as long as you can. I need to know what happens! Promise me!” There’s desperation in his eyes and Yusuf nods slowly before sprinting away.

Ariadne and Eames look at one another. Whatever is in the jungle is going to be after them next. They’re so busy trying to get a glimpse of the monster that they stop registering Sayid, who’s now leaping at them.

Ariadne goes down, crushed underneath his weight. She loses sight of Eames as she and Sayid roll through the jungle. Her nose ends up smushed into the soil, and she feels something dark and malevolent whoosh over her head.

The roaring noise starts up again, and she hears a high-pitched squeal that would be funny in any other circumstance. It’s Eames. Fighting Sayid so she can pick up her head to see, she goggles as a column of black smoke inexplicably wraps itself around Eames’s waist, lifts him high into the air, and begins flinging him like a wet rag doll against high branches. There are sickening cracks as bones and branches break against one another.

***

After watching everyone muttering and thrashing for the past minute, Arthur’s about to give Ariadne a kick, but he’s distracted by Cobb jolting awake. It’s a good thing Arthur’s fleet-footed, because his hand over Cobb’s mouth is the only thing stopping him from screaming.

“I’ve got you,” he whispers, pulling the IV out of Cobb’s wrist and helping him to his feet. “What’s happening back there?”

“Po… polar bear,” Cobb rasps, his voice dry as he picks himself up off the floor.

Arthur had been about to give Cobb a piece of his mind, but… “What?”

“I was killed by a polar bear. Things aren’t going the way we planned.”

Arthur frowns. His beautiful job is falling apart. “You don’t need to tell me that. Mal’s here.”

He can tell that the problems on the island aren’t attributable to Mal, because Cobb’s confused by this news. “No, she can’t be. I told you. It’s sorted.”

“Not well enough. She’s here. Singing old French songs just like she always did when she was working in the garden, remember?”

Cobb nods, but before he can answer, Eames jolts up. “Well, that was unexpected.”

“What happened to you? Did you see what was making that noise?” Cobb whispers, and Arthur can tell that whatever’s going on is out of his depth. But he did the research and it was perfect. Everyone was prepared. He doesn’t understand what can have gone wrong.

Eames has never been one to mind the decibel of his voice, so he doesn’t whisper back when he replies, “The origin of the noise is what did me in. Sentient black smoke. I mean, honestly.”

“It wasn’t a dinosaur?” Cobb asks, baffled.

Arthur pauses. “What?! What are you talking about?”

Sitting on the floor, Eames shakes his head and leans back against the side of the bed. He tries to hide his leg behind a chair, but not before Arthur’s noticed how badly it’s shaking, how badly all of him is shaking. However, his voice is deceptively calm as he ignores Arthur and clarifies for Cobb, “No. It was smoke. It picked me up and knocked my head against trees until I died. Most painful.”

Arthur moves to wake Ariadne, but Eames’s hand on his elbow stops him.

“Not yet. Please.” Eames so rarely says ‘please’ that, despite his better judgment, Arthur draws back.

“Someone needs to explain what’s going on right now.”

Just to infuriate him, Eames doesn’t explain. Instead, he lazily asks, “By the by, Yusuf and I have something of a wager going on… do you remember if there was a passenger on Oceanic 815 by the name of John Locke?”

Arthur’s photographic memory immediately recalls the list of names and headshots that were listed in Time magazine’s memorial issue about the crash. “Yeah. Middle-aged bald guy.” He watches as Eames and Cobb nod slowly at one another.

With his usual brevity, Cobb finally satiates Arthur’s curiosity, rattling off, “Jarrah and his friends are lying. Their plane crashed on some crazy island, not in the ocean. A whole lot more of them survived than came back or were reported.”

Arthur nods as he takes it all in. The tank top and the necklace and the scotch make a lot more sense now. “Let me guess… he got together with someone from the flight?”

Hopefully, Eames adds, “Perhaps I can impersonate the new girl instead? At this point, I know her better than I know Nadia.”

Cobb shakes his head no. “No, we stick to the plan. You’d better start prepping.”

Ariadne sits up with a gasp, clutching her neck so hard she’s practically strangling herself.

“Was it the sentient smoke or the polar bear?” Arthur asks lightly, trying to keep up.

She’s still feeling her neck as she shakes her head no. “Neither. I was running and then I stepped on something… something metal. There was a click and then some ropes moved in the bushes… And then my ankle was caught in the trap and there was an arrow headed right for my neck and…” She’s still panting and terrified. They all are.

“We’d better get Yusuf out,” Arthur says. He can’t have the entire team this much of a mess, no matter how interesting Yusuf’s manner of death is sure to be if he stays.

“No!” Eames and Ariadne both almost shout, which doesn’t make sense given what they’ve just been through.

“He said he’d stay. Finish it out to the end.”

This is getting ridiculous, and it’s Arthur’s responsibility to put his foot down. “We have a job to do. We get Yusuf out, we unplug Jarrah, and we get the hell out of this bedroom.”

“What if we carry Yusuf and the PASIV into the surveillance room?” Ariadne suggests. “Even after we take Sayid out, the dream would still be there for Yusuf, right?”

“I guess so.” Arthur isn’t usually one to feel left out, and he really had wanted to stay here, but they’re all so breathless and excited that part of him wishes he’d shared whatever experience has affected them like this.

Or maybe he doesn’t.

“If Yusuf said he’d stay, let’s do that,” Cobb agrees.

Arthur shrugs and moves to change the time on the clock to nine in the morning. “Fine. It’ll take all of us to move him, though. We’ve got five minutes between when we unplug Jarrah and when he wakes up. Eames, get ready. It’s show time.”

---

iii. “This woman, when she asks you what you did to be with her again… What will you tell her?”

Eames gives himself the once-over in the mirror over the dresser. Thick brown hair, a mouth made more for stoicism than for laughter, eyes serene and honest. He’s rather beautiful, if he says so himself.

“You know, I’m quite beautiful,” he says out loud, mouth chomping in every direction as he poorly stifles a grin of self-satisfaction.

“Shut up and get in bed,” he hears Arthur grunt through his earpiece.

“If I didn’t know better, Arthur, I’d think you were propositioning me.”

There’s no time to continue the pleasantries further, because Jarrah is already fidgeting in his sleep, the drugs of the PASIV machine wearing off now that the IV has been taken out of his arm. Eames slinks (not his personal shuffling gait) towards the bed, starting at the foot and crawling upwards until he—she—is curled up by the pillows like a cat.

It’s because Nadia reminds him of a cat; the movements feel natural for this body. For some reason, other people’s movements come so much more easily than his own. They always have. He long ago figured out that the movements that ‘fit’ usually turn out to be the ones the subject expects, and the secret to this job is doing what the subject wants the ‘projection’ to do, not what Eames thinks a real person would do.

He stretches his newly slender form down the bed, sticking his toes underneath the sheets so that soon he’s snuggled under them with Sayid, spooning him.

This is when the rush kicks in. This is when it always does.

Even more than the delectable naughtiness of the entire endeavor, what makes this his favorite thing is the intimacy. He’s been brother, mother, sister, enemy, anonymous one-night stand, adored film star, character from a novel. He’s been all things to all people in dreamland—some of them things he’s never been in real life.

It’s a higher high than the best drugs—moral ambiguity, sexual ambiguity, every kind of ambiguity. For example, what exactly does this qualify as: Eames rubbing the top of his—Nadia’s—small, acid-scarred foot against Sayid’s leg. It’s what she would have done, he assumes, as his wife; does it matter that it’s something Eames has less than no problem doing himself? He’s a man and a woman, a lover and a plant, a friend and a stranger all at once, embodying the desires and restrictions of both and neither.

Jarrah smells good, feels good, oozes vitality like nothing else—or at least he did back on the island. He isn’t handsome, not like the matinee-idol doctor Ariadne fancies, or the in-your-face sexy redneck they’d chatted with on the beach, or even the tiny but perfect-looking Arthur (not that Eames would ever admit it to Arthur’s face), but there’s a magnetism here that most people are probably too blind, too superficially-oriented, to feel instead of see. However, just as that impossible blonde must have done, Eames feels it.

The thing is, even more than the fact that this is the first role he’s ever felt under-prepared for, he’s wondering if Nadia had ever known the man he and Ariadne have just met, the man Sayid thinks of himself as when all the darkness is stripped away. That Sayid hadn’t shown up in any of the interviews or picture Eames studied for this job. That Sayid could not have been more different from the depressed killer and torturer who will doubtless wake up in a minute.

Eames’s cold-hearted ADHD has lost interest in whatever is left of the original mission. After seeing that island, what does it matter whom this man is killing and why, in life’s humdrum reality? How pedestrian it all is. However, if there’s a possibility that all that was real—so much realer than any place Eames has ever been—that’s all the incentive to keep going he needs.

Sayid’s stirring even more now. It’s almost time.

***

This is why he (almost) never goes into the field.

Yusuf hasn’t stopped running since he left Ariadne and Eames. He has no idea how far he’s run or where he is or if Jarrah is on his tail or not.

It’s always the same; he thought this time, by going with them, he’d avoid finding himself the only one alone battling a horde of projections, but apparently not. And this time he actually finds himself missing the vans of armed killers. They’d be easier to handle than what’s after him.

At this point, he isn’t sure what there is left to discover. Yes, he’s made a promise to Ariadne and Eames to stay and explore, but there isn’t much to do when the subject is onto him and he’s hopelessly lost, miles away from the camp. Trees don’t divulge secrets.

Although, in this place, perhaps they do.

Just as the thought occurs to him, he begins to hear whispers all around him. He stops to look around him, but there’s no one there. It sounds like a multitude, though, whispering with too many H’s and S’s but not enough vowels to make proper words.

That’s all it takes for him to start running again, hoping they don’t follow him.

He’s never thought of himself as particularly fleet-footed, but despite the wild terrain, he’s making excellent progress. Fear is a extraordinary motivator.

As he runs, probabilities and scenarios run through his head. Arthur will have to take Jarrah out sometime soon. He isn’t completely sure what will happen. The projections usually stop, but in this case, that could mean the island will disappear along with the people. Or it could mean…

However, after seeing the way Cobb and Eames died, Yusuf doubts it’s worth making conjectures.

The brush becomes too thick to continue running in the jungle, so he heads for where he knows the beach is. He ducks underneath some branches and sprints back out into the sand. It’s colder now, here, and not just because of the setting sun and the chill breeze coming off the ocean. It’s because of the shadow.

Yusuf’s always had a weakness for antiquity, and just down the beach is an enormous, hopelessly ancient ruin, a vestige of what must have been something along the lines of the Colossus of Rhodes. It is, or was, a statue of some someone—or something—that would have been over a hundred feet tall had it still been whole.

All that’s left is a single, sandaled foot carved out of stone. It only has four toes.

It’s so far beyond, and so different from, all the other strange things they’ve seen here that he stops to gape. There’s almost no time to process it, though, because suddenly everything starts to go white, and there’s a ringing in his ears.

***

Eames places his hand on his husband’s shoulder (the only way this works is to fully inhabit the role) and gently shakes him, providing the comfort he’s going to need not only after what he’s just experienced.

“Sayid,” he says softly, in that strong yet sweet accent he knows Nadia had. “Sayid.”

“Shh…” Sayid mumbles, nuzzling under the caress, and then his eyes snap open, wide and frightened and disoriented. He turns over, making it so that Eames’s hand strokes around his shoulder. His eyes finally focus and squint and he jumps away from her. “Nadia?” he asks, sounding surprised.

First impressions are everything, and if this is to work, if Sayid is to believe that this is real and that everything that’s happened in the past year and a half was a dream, then Eames has to be perfect. And he has to be perfect now.

But he can’t. It’s always been his weakness. No matter what the risks are, even if the job is falling apart and the priority is to salvage, Eames has always wanted to know. To know those deep dark secrets that lurk in the mind, to learn the truths that have been squirreled away, to see past the lies that everyone else believes. And there have never been secrets, truths, or lies like these before. The best thing, the smart thing, to do right now would be to play it safe, ask his questions, do the job. But that isn’t going to happen. Not when this is his only chance to find out what the hell all that insanity on the island was about.

So, instead of saying, ‘Yes, it’s me, darling,’ he replies, “Who else would it be?”

Still sweetly, though. At the end of the day, Eames is a professional.

At any rate, it doesn’t throw Sayid off much more than the safe response would have, for, after blinking a couple more times, he goes with it, just as he went with it when Eames-as-Jack had smoothed over Ariadne’s presence in the camp. “No one else, my love,” he replies, but it’s hesitant. And in a second he’s gripping her tightly, clinging. Clinging in the way of a man who thought his wife was dead would. Clinging in the same way he’d just been gripping Shannon’s corpse.

Eames nuzzles against him even more, drinking in the heat radiating off Sayid’s body. “You were thrashing about in your sleep. Was it a nightmare?”

Sayid slumps and relaxes into the pillow, his mind somewhere distant and his voice even farther away. “It ended as such, yes.”

“The island?” Eames usually eases into things, works up to his interrogations, but he’s too curious about this case, too impatient.

Sayid nods.

“Tell me about it? Talking it through is the best way to—”

“It was nothing.” Sayid abruptly sits up and swings his legs over the side of the bed. He leans forward, not ready to get up, but no longer wanting to lie down. Eames crawls up behind him and cranes his head around to kiss him.

Sayid tastes like ash and smoke; Eames has kissed enough people in dreams to know that the subject dictates his or her own taste, which means that Sayid had an even more tragic case of self-loathing than they had anticipated.

“It was not nothing. You’re upset. You can tell me.”

Sayid stiffens before suddenly standing up, leaving Eames’s arms clasping the air. “It was the same dream I always have. I’ve told you about it before. We were on the island. We were… we were running out of food.”

Through the earpiece he’s wearing, Eames hears Ariadne shouting the question that’s pounding through his own veins but which he can’t ask. “Food? What?!”

“Are you sure that was all?” Eames asks slowly, with as much concern as he can muster and thinking as hard as he can about how he’s to get around such a blatant falsehood.

Sayid is already halfway across the bedroom, but he glances over his shoulder back at Nadia. “Yes, that was all,” he confirms sadly.

For all his talent at extracting the truth from people (Eames notes to himself how useful this man would be on the team; too bad he’s the mark), Sayid Jarrah is a terrible liar.

Perhaps he is simply doing the decorous thing. Eames doubts describing dreams of other women to one’s wife is ever a good idea, even when one is married to a saint like Nadia. Women are still women.

And men are still men.

Stretching out his arms towards Sayid, Eames whispers, “Come back to bed.”

Sayid is either more than a man or less, because he doesn’t go for it. He stops, but not to give in. Eames follows his gaze as it travels from Nadia’s warm, open face down her arms, until it comes to rest on the palms of her hands, which are covered in burn marks and scars, with fingernails that have grown in crooked after having been pulled out one too many times—possibly by Sayid himself so long ago. Like the feet Eames now tries to hide under the covers, they’re the only not beautiful parts of Nadia’s body.

Eames watches Sayid stare at those hands, at the permanent reminder of his crimes, at the guilt that he’s married and goes to bed with every night, inescapable and loving and forgiving and damning all at once.

“We were simply hungry,” Sayid repeats unconvincingly. “It was only a dream, probably because I’m hungry right now. I’ll turn on the coffee machine.” With that, he slumps out of the bedroom. Eames can hear him descending the staircase, the vitality he’d so recently admired completely gone from his step.

“I’ll be down in a minute,” he calls after him.

Eames looks down himself at Nadia’s hands to drink in the sight that has just put her husband off so completely. It’s horrible, what they did to her, truly horrible.

“What are you waiting for?” he hears Arthur admonishing through the earpiece. “Follow him!”

“I know what I’m doing,” he mutters in response, annoyed that anyone—especially Arthur—would have the gall to try to instruct him in his own specialty. Sayid needs some space. This is the best way to play him; Arthur doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

“There’s a gun in the top drawer of the dresser. Mal’s here somewhere. If you see her, you know what to—” Arthur continues, but is interrupted by Cobb.

“I told you, it can’t be her! Did you actually see her face?”

“No, but…”

The only thing Eames needs less than Mal is Cobb being in denial about it being Mal, but he still grins: the worse it gets, the more he enjoys himself.

The little nightie Nadia’s wearing has nowhere to hide anything, so he changes into a loose sundress with deep pockets that’s hanging behind the door.

He’s about to head downstairs when he hears another outburst from the team.

“Oh my god!”

“Who the hell is that?”

“I told you it wasn’t Mal!”

Eames wants to tell them to pull themselves together and explain, but he can’t, not with Sayid so nearby. At any rate, it doesn’t matter, because he figures it out for himself in a few seconds. He moves quietly down the hallway.

Sayid is standing stock-still at the bottom of the stairs, so shocked by whatever he’s looking at that he doesn’t notice Nadia coming behind him.

“Shannon?” He goes—blunders, really—off the staircase and around the corner into the living room, out of sight.

Eames’s thoughts are full of inarticulate question marks and exclamation points, popping up like comic book profanities. Intriguing as this new development is, he’d felt sure the man’s despair on the island had been real; if there was ever a real Shannon, Eames would have sworn she’d died in Sayid’s arms like he’d said. And if that’s true, then she can’t be here.

He creeps to stand on the bottom step and peers around the wall, trying not to be seen.

Despite steeling himself, it’s hard not to chuckle when he catches sight of Shannon lolling on the couch, her legs thrown over one arm and her head resting on the other, as she does a crossword puzzle and sings idly to herself in what sounds like French. She looks for all the world as though she’s supposed to be there… perhaps she is? Delicious thoughts of polyamorous relationships flit through Eames’s head until he comes to his senses. Sayid may be far and away more interesting than he’d originally assumed, but he’ll never be that interesting.

“Shannon? Is it really you?” Sayid whispers and pulls her to her feet and into his arms. Whatever is going on here, he’s as surprised to see her as the team is.

Eames stifles another chuckle when her response to his melodramatically posed question is to roll her eyes and lash out at him with a sarcastic whip. “No, it’s Taller Ghost Claire. Of course it’s me, silly.”

“You can’t be here,” Sayid whispers, but he holds her even tighter.

Shannon pretends to take offense and mock-tries to wriggle out of his embrace. “Well, that’s rude.”

Sayid stretches his arm out to pull her back. “I mean, you’re dead. You died on the island.”

Given that they just watched her die in the dream, either Yusuf’s drugs have unduly addled Sayid’s mind, or Cobb is truly a genius; given his respect for both men’s talents, he’s willing to bet on the latter. Yusuf never makes mistakes.

Regardless, Eames knows this can’t be good; if Shannon is actually dead, Sayid will know this is a dream. He keeps his hand primed on the gun in his pocket; just because she isn’t technically Mal doesn’t mean she isn’t figuratively Mal. Explaining why Nadia shot the ex-girlfriend stalking her husband will be easier to handle than Sayid seeing through the set-up.

However, Shannon promptly establishes herself as the most helpful projection Eames has ever encountered, because she solves the problem by explaining away the impossibility of her own existence.

Shrugging, she says, “So? Hurley sees dead people from the island all the time.”

“Yes, but Hurley is insane,” he tells her, but it sounds more like he’s trying to tell himself.

“No, he isn’t.”

Sayid looks down and nods. “I know.”

It’s an odd conversation they’re having, to say the least.

Eames follows Sayid’s gaze down towards Shannon’s feet, to the gaudy, multi-colored, expensive-looking heels she’s wearing. “You’re wearing them,” he whispers.

“I really did like them, you know. I just never got a chance to wear them before... you know. They look good, don’t they?”

“Beautiful.”

She tosses her hair, in the way of a woman who is accustomed to such compliments, but who is still pleased to hear them, does. “Yeah, well… looking good is one of the perks of being dead. Did Hurley tell you about Charlie?”

“Yes. Seeing Charlie is the reason Hurley had himself committed.”

“Well,” Shannon continues, gesticulating excitedly, “he looks amazing. Like, a million times hotter than he ever looked when he was alive.”

“Are you telling me you’re involved with Charlie now?” Eames can hear Sayid trying to sound playful, but it just comes out baffled and depressed. Not to mention ridiculous.

Shannon raises an eyebrow that all but says, ‘You’ve got to be joking.’

Sayid pulls her in tightly again. “I had to check.”

Still encircled in his arms, Shannon leans to the side and looks Eames right in the face. She waves. “Way to be a lurker, lady.”

Through the earpiece, Arthur’s screaming at him to shoot her and explain away why later. He’s been screaming it during this entire exchange, but Eames can’t do it. This is too much fun. There’s got to be another way.

Eames avoids asking ‘who is this woman?’ in case Nadia is supposed to know, so he goes with, “What is she doing here?” straddling the line between ‘what is she doing here?” and ‘what is she doing here?’ so that Sayid can react to whichever one is the correct inflection for the situation.

“You can see her?”

“Of course, I can see her. She’s standing in our living room.”

For a moment, Eames fears he’s made a misstep; perhaps according to the rules laid out by Sayid’s subconscious, ghosts such as the ones Hurley apparently sees aren’t visible to anyone except the intended viewer. But then he remembers that Shannon herself addressed Nadia, which means that Sayid wants—needs—Nadia to see her for some reason.

Eames notes that Sayid doesn’t let go of Shannon’s hand as he makes the introduction. “Shannon, this is Nadia.”

“Oh right. From the picture. What are you guys, like, married now? Oh god, you are, aren’t you?” It would be impossible for anyone to register more scalding levels of scorn. “I thought you were done with that.”

“I…” Sayid is embarrassed and uncertain, two emotions Eames is pretty sure he’s unaccustomed to feeling.

The blatant confusion is more than enough to go on. This is the time to put on the pressure and get answers, even though there’s a sassy ghost in the room doing her unknowing best to make him laugh. Feigning righteous indignation, Eames draws himself up to full height. No one, not even saintly Nadia, would have put up with being called a ‘that’.

“Who is this woman?”

If Shannon’s ghost is a pure projection of Sayid’s own issues about and longing for her, then his reaction to Nadia’s question says volumes more about his issues with his wife. The expression on his face is of guilt beyond anything Eames has ever imagined. It’s even beyond Cobb, whom he’s always thought of as an extremist case.

And that’s when he knows deep down that somehow, impossible as it sounds, it was real. Is.

But the twist (as if they needed another) is that Nadia is not exempt from the lies the Oceanic Six have been telling. She knows just as little as they do. Which means that the original plan will never succeed. There is no way Sayid is going to tell her about the ‘dream’ he had about assassinating people, not when his subconscious is busy with all this.

He finally understands the haunted expression Sayid and his fellow survivors wear. The lie is killing them. He’s desperate to be exposed.

“Wait, so she has no idea who I am?” Shannon disengages her hand and abruptly sits back down on the couch. She pulls her knees into her chest, toes wriggling just off the edge of the cushion. “This is gonna be good.”

Eames is in agreement. Questioning and seductive, he repeats Nadia’s husband’s name, ordering an explanation. “Sayid?”

Gone is the self-assured leader, the some-time assassin. He’s been replaced by a more flustered version of the man they met on the island. “This is Shannon. We… Nadia, I think you ought to sit down.”

***

The ringing gets louder and more painful, like a zillion bees dive-bombing his ears. The light becomes so bright, it’s like looking into the sun, despite the fact that the sun has set. The sky—or what little Yusuf can see of it out of his nearly-blinded eyes—has turned purple and there’s an awful pressure in his head.

He wakes up on his back, on the floor of the tiny room where he started. Arthur’s watching the surveillance cameras. Ariadne and Cobb kneel down to greet him.

“What happened?”

Yusuf wipes his nose and checks his fingers; he feels like his nose is bleeding, but it isn’t, at least not here, or anymore. “I stumbled upon an ancient ruin. Like something out of Ancient Rome. Then there was an awful noise and everything whited out.”

Cobb tries to explain. “Since Jarrah redrew Ariadne’s plans, the dream couldn’t sustain itself without him. It evaporated.”

He shakes his head, both to indicate disagreement and to hopefully rid his ears of the remaining ringing. “No, I’ve been in situations where the dreamscaper has been pulled out. This was something stranger than that. Something more specific.”

“Shocker,” Ariadne says dryly.

Changing the subject, Cobb asks, “Yusuf, is there any way your compounds misfired?”

Yusuf feels just as annoyed at the implication as Ariadne had sounded back when they were on the boat. “In what way?”

“We’ve got a situation here.” Cobb points to the monitors Arthur’s watching. Jarrah is there, along with ‘Nadia’ and…

“What is she doing here?”

“He says she died on the island. He thinks she’s some sort of ghost, and get this: he’s not at all phased by the concept. Is there any way he’s confusing reality with the dream we just had?”

“You mean the opposite of what we planned? No. The compounds don’t work like that. They can’t. The dose we gave him was almost entirely sleep medication. The plan seemed so airtight that anything else seemed unnecessary; these scenarios play out better when they’re driven by the strength of the architecture and performances. If he says she died on the island, then she died on the island. The fact that we recreated the circumstances was mere coincidence.”

“I don’t care where she died. I don’t want her in my dream. Eames, get rid of her,” Arthur barks.

“No! This is our only chance to find out what was going on,” Cobb argues. “She’s our only link to the island.”

“I don’t know what happened to you guys down there, or what you saw, but I’m here to do a job. What I care about is getting it done, and this woman can’t help. She’s a complete anomaly. She doesn’t belong. She’ll screw everything up. She already has.”

“You don’t know that,” Ariadne interjects.

“You’re all too attached. I let it slide the last time, but I am not letting your shit ruin this job, not again,” Arthur snits at Cobb.

“This isn’t Cobb’s baggage, though. This is Jarrah’s. Everyone needs to calm down,” Yusuf tries to order, but his voice trails off. Plus, his heart isn’t in it; his mind is still lingering on the sight of the statue.

***

Arthur and Cobb are screaming contradictory instructions into Eames’s ear. Arthur wants him to kill the blonde and get back to the job and Cobb wants him to sit down and get the story.

He sits.

“What is going on?” he asks. “Where did she come from?”

Finally, Eames knows something in these dreams that other people don’t. He knows the answer to questions Sayid hasn’t even thought to ask yet.

Sayid turns to Shannon, brow furrowed. “Where did you come from?”

“I’m not allowed to tell you that. You’ll find out when it’s your time.”

It’s nice to see that Sayid’s subconscious is humble enough not to try to come up with explanations for the afterlife. What’s heartbreaking is that he looks just about ready to take the necessary step to join her.

Eames brings him back to the land of the living by repeating his name. “Sayid?”

He clears his throat. Simply, he answers, “We lied.”

Eames’s pulse quickens. It’s coming out now. “What do you mean?” Forget the job. Forget the entire assassin brouhaha. This is the only thing that matters.

“The plane didn’t sink into Sunda Trench. It crashed on an island. An impossible island. 48 of us survived, all relatively unharmed. We made shelters on the beach. There was plenty of food and water. Basic survival was easy. The real difficulties came from… less expected sources.”

Shannon snorts and scoots closer to Sayid on the couch. “Understatement of the century.”

Playing in this space requires walking a very fine line. On the one hand, Eames can’t imagine how anyone’s wife would stand for this, but on the other hand, it’s a dream and Sayid thinks Shannon’s a ghost; either his subconscious isn’t tethering the dream too tightly to reality right now, or else his everyday reality isn’t too tightly tethered to anything. Given the theories the team has, it’s probably the latter. At any rate, if Eames makes a scene, he might not get any information, so he pretends not to notice or not to be bothered by the fact that Nadia’s currently playing third wheel in her own home. “And you two?” he asks.

They glance shyly at one another.

“There was a French woman living on the island before we crashed. She’d been stranded there for sixteen years. We met—”

Shannon leans forward to clarify for Nadia. “Just as an fyi, by ‘meet’, he means she caught him in some crazy death trap in the woods and then tortured him.”

There’s an exclamation in the surveillance room, and Eames knows that Ariadne’s finally learned the cause of her hitherto inexplicable demise.

“She can’t be held responsible. Her mind was gone.”

“Oh, please. She was totally going to keep you as her sex slave if you hadn’t run away. Which means she was smart, not nuts.”

Sayid is rendered momentarily speechless by this, and Eames battles back yet another laugh. Shannon takes advantage of the pause to wrap up what promises to be a convoluted story by getting to the point.

“Basically, Sayid stole some maps and papers and stuff from her, but they were all in French, and I was the only one around who spoke any French at all, even though it wasn’t much. So he asked me to help him translate and we started hanging out and… you can guess the rest. Then some bitch shot me.”

“It was an accident,” he seethes through tightly clenched teeth, the calm of that statement obviously coming with so much forced restraint that Eames is glad, for everyone’s sake, that it was an accident, because if it hadn’t been, there would have been hell to pay.

“I see,” Eames replies.

Shannon scoffs, not nastily. “Do you? Because I was there, and I didn’t get it. Hell, I’m dead, and I still don’t. So much for ghostly omniscience, right? Speaking of which… I know what happens when you die.”

“You see the future, too?” Eames asks archly, as though he has not by now learned to roll with whatever punches this case has in store for him. For all he knows, perhaps Shannon was psychic; he’d believe just about anything at this point.

“No.” She points at Sayid. “I know because he knows. Don’t you, Sayid?”

“It was only a dream,” he says softly.

“You also said Walt was only a dream. How’d that pan out for you?”

Eames has no idea who Walt is; all that matters is that the mention of him mollifies Sayid and that there’s now a segue way to talk about the assassinations. This woman is an expository treasure. Just when he’d written it off as a lost cause, the job is back on. “What happens when I die?”

“He loses it,” she says matter-of-factly. “He starts hurting people again. He starts working for Ben Linus. And flat-ironing his hair. It’s completely ridiculous.”

Eames idly wonders which she finds more ridiculous: the murders or the hair.

“I was doing what I thought was necessary to protect—”

“Bullshit.”

In the surveillance room, he can hear the others trying to process this—the first relevant piece of information they have so far ferreted out.

“Ben Linus. Is that someone from the plane?”

”Nope, nobody by that name was on Oceanic 815. Eames, ask them, because it’s got to be somebody else.”

“Who is Ben Linus?”

Sayid opens his mouth and makes a face that suggests he would like to explain, but can’t because the story is too elaborate and involved to know where to begin. After everything he’s seen so far, Eames finds himself sympathizing.

“He is liar and a monster.”

“Look who’s talking…” Shannon’s voice is laced with something more cutting than her habitual sarcasm.

Sayid looks as though he’s been slapped in the face. He finally remembers where he is, who is in the room, what has just been revealed. “I’m sorry, Nadia. I’m so sorry.”

“Why did you lie, Sayid?” Eames packs as much hurt and betrayal into Nadia’s voice as he can. Sayid’s face falls even further, if possible.

“I had to. We all had to. Jack said—”

“Fuck Jack,” Shannon spits. “If you’d listened to Hurley and held your ground, you could have talked him out of it. He always listened to you. You’re the only one he ever listened to.”

“I’m so sorry.”

Eames isn’t sure which of the two women the apology is directed towards.

“You promised you’d never leave me. You promised,” Shannon urges, and for the first time, Eames starts to worry that maybe this is a Mal situation, after all. The gun sits heavy in his pocket. However, they’ve already shot this girl once today. He certainly isn’t going to be the one to do it again.

He’s getting just as soft as Ariadne in his old age. He doesn’t even have it in him to interrupt their tête-a-tête.

“I didn’t leave you. You died. You left me.”

“What if it had been different? What if you’d been the one who died, and Boone and I had gotten rescued?”

“I wish it had been different. I would gladly have switched—”

But Shannon smacks his hand away and cuts him off so she can finish. “And what if I’d just gone on and pretended I’d never met you? How would you feel? What if when I got home, I’d started fucking my brother again? Huh? It really seems like I might as well have never stopped. You know what? Maybe I should go fuck Boone again right now.” She spits out the words like venom, biting her lip before the Fs so that each ‘fuck’ stings.

She stands up in a huff, and this time, Eames isn’t acting, isn’t impersonating, when his jaw hangs open. All he can do is follow her with his eyes, follow Sayid’s arm as he tries to hold her back.

“Shannon, please,” he begs.

Eames hasn’t been legitimately shocked in years, but this, this is the most surprising revelation yet, beyond anything that has happened so far. The other things were almost magical, easier to write off than this sordidly realistic bombshell. He’s speechless, his mind too numb to even ask himself whether or not Nadia would be equally shocked. Probably anyone would be, though. The rest of the team in the surveillance room certainly is, for they’ve gone just as silent.

Shannon glances at him and rolls her eyes. “What?” she challenges, leftover vitriol now directed towards Nadia. “Trust me, we weren’t even close to the most fucked-up people on that island.”

She lets herself be pulled back to the couch, though.

“It isn’t… It isn’t what it sounds like,” Sayid tries to explain to Nadia, but the attempt is lame. Eames has a feeling it’s exactly what it sounds like, or at least very nearly.

“Sayid?” They’ve moved away from the mysterious Ben. He makes a last-ditch effort to work on the case and assert Nadia’s presence, but it’s hopeless. The other woman is derailing things just as surely as one of Mal’s trains. If Nadia had been a real projection, Eames thinks she probably would have left by now; they’ve all but forgotten she’s there. Perhaps that in itself means something.

Slowly, things start to click into place.

“Go back,” Shannon begs. “Go back to the island. They need you. Claire, Sawyer, Juliet...”

“I can't go back.”

“You mean you won't.”

“No, I mean I can't. The island disappeared. It’s gone. They’re gone.”

“Nothing's ever gone. Look at me; I'm dead, but I'm still here. Right?”

"Yes, and how could I ever leave you again?" He reaches out to touch her face, but she presses her palms into the leather of the couch and pushes herself backwards, away from him.

“I don't want this Sayid anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

He doesn’t understand; Eames does.

“Don't you remember?” she reminds him. “You. The real you. That guy who spent a whole afternoon making glasses for Sawyer, even though he was an asshole who called you names—called all of us names. The guy who sat around and listened to Hurley talk about cheesy 80s movies and liked it. The guy who helped Desmond call his girlfriend even though it didn't make any sense and was a waste of the batteries. The guy who chopped wood with Jin and built shit with Charlie and fixed the world-ending computer or whatever the fuck it was, just because someone asked you to help... the guy everybody trusted and the mention of whose name made everybody feel safe. The guy who had no idea he was using the cheesiest ever pick-up lines on me. And I mean it: ever, like, to the point where they didn't even make any sense. That was you. This guy? Who lives in this ridiculously ugly house—seriously, who decorated this place?—and then kills people because he can't move on with his life... that's the guy you were before—the guy who got his best friend killed just to get her”—she points at Nadia—“address. He’s the same as the Shannon who fucked her brother for a plane ticket home. Gross.”

“I do not know if the man you know still exists. I was only that person for a few months. You told me everyone got a new life on that island. You were right. But then we left and it all vanished, literally. We had nothing to go back to but our old lives.”

“You didn't have to. Go back. Find a way to be that guy again. Otherwise? I'm totally going to start going out with Charlie. Either him or that Scott guy… or is it Steve…? I always mixed them up…”

Neither Eames nor Nadia has any place in this scene, so he keeps silent, watching and studying and wishing he could forge a piece of furniture and fade into the woodwork. He watches as Shannon plies the same wiles he’d watched her use back on the beach with Kate and Sawyer, the same irresistible supplications. He watches as Sayid has the same reaction to her all over again.

Eames thought he’d seen all the twists there were to turn. But never did he expect all of this utter insanity to come down to a broken man’s need for a sodding pep talk from his secret dead girlfriend. It’s all so darkly absurd.

Inception wasn’t part of the plan, but that’s what this has turned into—the most elegant and organic one imaginable, because it’s being driven by the subject himself. The team is only facilitating the realization of truths that have long been straddling the line between the conscious and the subconscious.

“Are you sure she’s even real?” Shannon asks, pointing, and for a moment, Eames panics, worries he’s gotten so engrossed over the past few minutes that the disguise has started to slip. But, as before, Shannon dispels the fears she herself incites. “Or is she just a dream… some built-up perfect person for you to beat yourself up about because she'll always remind you of what you did to her? To other people, too? Why don't you just get the fuck over it, already, and stop? Go be the person you want to be. Start over. You did it once. I did it. We did it together. Why can't you do it again?”

And just like that, Shannon—Sayid, himself, technically—puts her finger on the part of this case that’s been poking and prodding and nagging at Eames like a hangnail. Nadia’s got one, as a matter of fact, so he chews on it as he watches this soap opera unfold. For the first time he pities her, the real Nadia, that blameless woman who’d never deserved to be saddled with so much metaphorical weight, or to represent so much irresolvable self-loathing.

Eames stares at Shannon, spoiled, flawed, the kind of woman capable of sleeping with her brother for money.

Ideals are wonderful, but sometimes putting two wrongs together makes them better than they were alone.

And sometimes the understudy steals the show.

He stands up. “Sayid, may I talk to you for a minute? Alone?”

***

“Where is he going? What the hell are you doing, Eames?” Arthur asks.

“He’s helping him let her go,” Yusuf says, mostly to himself. He knows Eames. He knows him better than any of them do. They’ve shared dreams—educational, experimental, recreational. They each know how the other’s mind works.

“Who? Shannon? How’s he going to do that? It’s the same as Mal, except he’s buried her deeper than you ever buried her, Cobb. He’s not even allowed talk about her.”

Yusuf looks at Cobb. If there’s one other person in the room who will get it, it’s got to be him, but he’s staring transfixed at the screen, his mind too far away to be of any help right now.

“This isn’t the same,” he tries to explain, now that it’s all up to him. “It’s the opposite. It’s Nadia he needs to let go of.”

“Shouldn’t it be Shannon? She’s dead,” Ariadne points out.

“They’re both dead,” Yusuf reminds her. “We’re not going to find out who Ben is, not here. But we can get him to stop killing. Am I right, Eames? Cough if you agree.”

A dainty catch of breath echoes through the microphones.

Arthur is visibly frustrated. “That’s not our job.”

Cobb’s finally comes out of his reverie with new determination. “It is now.”

***

Arthur and Cobb are barking contradictory instructions into his hear, and Ariadne’s trying to calm them down, but Yusuf’s the only one who gets it.

Far from proving a boring second act to the island, this level is just as much of a topsy-turvy world, in keeping with the first. And far from being a boring role, this is turning into the best part he’s ever played.

He leads Sayid into the foyer.

“Why did you lie, Sayid? And don’t blame it on Jack. You are too strong-willed to follow another’s lead so blindly.”

“I was trying to protect you. There are people who want the truth kept secret, dangerous people who would kill anyone who threatens to expose it.”

“Who? Why?”

“International financiers and... I don’t know exactly.”

Eames can read the honesty in his face; Sayid genuinely doesn't know much about the work he's been doing. This mysterious Ben Linus has got to be incredible, a true mastermind, to get someone as thorough and inquisitive as Sayid to do anything without proper explanation.

Since that line of inquiry won't lead anywhere, he changes tactic. Drawing on one of the few things that have come up that he does know about, he asks, “Is it true? About your friend? That you allowed him to die to find me?”

He knows the whole ugly story. It was all in Sayid’s CIA file, though who in Saito’s organization had the clearance to get that kind of information is beyond Eames.

“I’d spent eight years looking for you. Most of my entire adult life. The end was finally in sight and I made a choice. I’m not proud of what I did.”

“It would have been better never to find me than to pay that price. I’m glad the plane crashed. I’m glad we didn’t meet under those circumstances. I’m glad news coverage of the rescue allowed me to find you. However, it looks like you found something else in the meanwhile.”

Sayid looks between Nadia in front of him and Shannon, who’s investigating something at the far end of the living room and pretending not to listen.

“I am so sorry. All these years, I've wanted to show you I was a better man than the one you saw the last time we’d met. I wanted to be better, for you.”

“Not for yourself?”

It’s the other half of the pep talk. It feels rushed and nonsensical, but it’s the best Eames is going to be able to do with the limited time and information he has. If the team had planned this going in, they could have done a more thorough job, but as it is, this is going to be a salve, not a cure.

Eames can almost see the lingering threads that won’t end up getting cut right now.

“Goodbye, Sayid.”

“I’m sorry,” he repeats, for the millionth time, and Eames knows Sayid is apologizing not just to Nadia, but to everyone he's ever hurt, the many faces she represents. He knows what the punchline has to be, and it doesn't even require acting, because Eames actually believes it. He was on the island; he's seen for himself what Shannon was describing.

“You are a good man. But you didn't need me in order to know that. You never should have let yourself believe that you did.”

Sayid nods and watches sadly as Eames slips on the flip-flops that Nadia keeps by the door.

Eames shuts the door behind him and blinks against the bright sunshine. There’s a BMW in the garage with Nadia’s name on it, and he intends to go for a drive.

After all that, he's earned it.

***

They’ve been listening silently for the past few minutes, but now everyone lets out a collective breath.

“Let’s leave them here for a little while, just to let it sink in. Eames,” Cobb shouts into the microphone, “wait for Arthur. He’s the dreamer, so he has to stick around until the end. Arthur, you should go for a drive around the city until the dream plays out.”

“A drive? Maybe this wasn’t such a waste of time, after all,” Arthur says. “Can you handle the rest?”

“Ariadne, Cobb and I can get out of here and pack up in the hotel room,” Yusuf offers. “By the time we take Eames out, and then you, all we’ll have to do is close the door behind us.”

“Fine. See you back in Sydney.” Arthur sticks a walkie-talkie in the back of his pants and tiptoes out of the surveillance room.

“It’s a shame you all can’t see him right now. He looks like Spiderman in a three-piece suit, shimmying down that gutter pipe.”

Eames's voice is light, but Yusuf knows him too well to think he's feeling as flippant as he sounds.

“Just get as far away from here as you can,” he says into the microphone. “We’ll take care of the rest. Enjoy the ride.”

“Always.”

“So now what? Do we have enough to go to Saito?” Yusuf asks his two remaining teammates. There’s a story here, in bits and bobs that need to be sorted out and dissected before being pieced back together. The parts make so little sense alone they must make sense as a whole; otherwise, this was nothing more than a diverting hallucination. And if that’s all it was, he might as well have stayed in Mombasa.

Cobb shakes his head. “We’ll tell Saito we need more time. We’ll tell him we need to run a control.”

“A control?” Ariadne asks.

Yusuf nods. The scientist in him approves. “An extraction on some other member of the Oceanic Six. We find out from someone else who Ben is. We see if the dreams line up. If they do, then…” The implications on his worldview if they are right are too vast to fully contemplate right now.

“Smoke monsters and polar bears and Roman ruins in the Pacific?” Arthur, who’s still listening through the walkie, scoffs, contemplating it for him. He wasn’t there. He’ll never understand.

“Imagination, darling, imagination. I’m going to put you on a diet, starting tomorrow. Six impossible things before breakfast. What do you say?”

“Move over, Eames. I’m driving.”

The last thing they hear before the signal fades is Eames teasing, “If we run this control, we should do it on Jack Shephard. Ariadne will enjoy that.”

“Eh?” Yusuf asks, not really listening because he’s watching the screen showing the living room, where Sayid’s handing Shannon a gold and bead necklace, which causes her to flail with excitement. It must have been hers, the only token of the island he was able to take with him.

She’s dead and he’s dreaming, and as far as the world knows, they never even met.

Instead of explaining Eames’s comment, Ariadne merely sounds annoyed. “Can we do Kate Austen? This whole thing with the baby is going to bother me…”

---

iv. “You needed them... To remember, and to let go.”

Sayid awoke the next morning, his arms wrapped tightly around…

…his pillow.

The hair he felt tickling his cheek was his own. The tangled sensation around his legs was the sheets wrapped around him. The soft, smooth texture pressed against his nose was satin and stuffing, not skin. The lingering perfume he swore he could smell must have been imaginary.

Waking to this reality was more devastating than any of the actual nightmares he’d lived through.

Just like every morning for the past three years, he was reminded that she was gone. They were all gone.

The problem he’d been trying to escape returned anew. It had followed him from Moscow to Korea to St. Tropez to Sydney, right back to the start. It had been following him for a decade.

“Go live your life,” Ben had said. What life? He had never had a life, and every attempt to create one had been snatched from him with senseless violence.

And then he remembered, and upon remembering, he clung.

He lay for a minute, savoring the fading phantom physicality of a dreamworld that had somehow been combined with the island—itself as prone to vanishing as a dream.

It was only a dream. But just because it had taken place in his head didn’t mean it wasn’t true. If it wasn’t, then the island was no more than a collective madness existing in the minds of six people. And Sayid knew it was more than that.

“Everyone gets a new life on this island.” He could still hear her voice, calm over the crackling flames. She had been right then; perhaps she could be right again.

Within an hour, he had filled out an online application. Within a day, he was boarding a plane for the Dominican Republic. By the end of the week, he was once again feeling the sun on his face, crunching sand between his toes, listening to the sound of waves, sweating through a black wife-beater, relishing the satisfaction of leading a group of random strangers in building a community. He and his Habitat group built a school, dug a well, planted a garden. Everyone listened to him, not because he was famous or because they feared him, but because he was capable. He’d done all this—chopping, building, organizing, leading—before. He was good at it; it was the only thing he’d ever been better at than interrogating. It’s just that the island had been the only place he’d been allowed to discover that fact.

For the first time since leaving the island, Sayid felt something close to peace. No, this wasn’t the island, and no, the people he was here with didn’t mean anywhere near as much to him as his group of rag-tag survivors had. But like on his island, this was a place where he had no past, just present, and where he was being asked simply to help.

It was enough.

It couldn’t last, though.

It never did. Not in this life.

“Sayid! You have a visitor,” one of his teammates announced one afternoon.

He put his hammer down and looked around, his eyes finally alighting on the very last person he expected to see.

“Hello, Sayid,” Locke said.

~fin~

Et d’une chanson d’amour
La mer
A bercé mon coeur pour la vie