Chapter Text
Ben moves slowly and silently through the jungle, following the monster. He’s kept his distance, and it doesn’t seem to have noticed him yet. If he’s stuck here with it, he might as well know what it does all day. He can at least try to be prepared when it comes for him, to do whatever it’s here to do. Maybe to finally judge him, without pretending to be Alex or grooming him to kill anyone this time. He wonders why the monster still looks like John, but it did die in that form. Maybe it still can’t change, or it won’t. Maybe that’s part of its justice. It’ll haunt him here forever, a merciless reminder of his worst crime and his most deeply held desire. It’ll play the devil’s part in his own little corner of hell. He can take it, he’s sure. Until it starts telling him John’s secrets again.
He watches the monster, imagining for a while that it’s really John. There’s the clean-shaven back of John’s bald head, the broad shoulders and back, thick with muscle. There’s the hand on the strap of his backpack, deeply tanned and gnarled with veins. There’s John’s way of walking, long and loose strides with a little swagger. He imagines John turning around to see him and smiling, his bad memories erased. Or having been granted a new version of his old wisdom, some sort of all-encompassing knowledge and peace that would let him forgive Ben instantaneously. He knows they’re selfish and stupid wishes, but indulges himself anyway. They could start again, if that was how things were. It could be like the dreams. He doesn’t realize he’s closed much of the distance between them, and his concentration is off. He almost trips on a vine, gasping as he starts to lose his balance. The monster freezes, then turns around.
All Ben sees in those bright green eyes is terror. The monster isn’t here. This is John.
Ben slips from tremendous relief to a fleeting joy he doesn’t dare show. He’s kept John’s true face alive in his memory for decades, scrounging pictures from the old files and from whatever scraps of John’s life he could find on the mainland. He’s memorized every feature, every line, every fleck of stubble, but the sight of it in three dimensions makes all his joints feel like melting butter. John is nowhere near joy, pale and still. Ben takes a breath to speak. John shudders. There’s nothing Ben can possibly say to make everything all right. He has to say it anyway.
“John,” he says, his voice breaking, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
John’s trembling hand finds the knife at his belt and throws it at Ben. Ben feels the sharp point of it hit him hard between the ribs, awfully close to his heart. It doesn’t cut, doesn’t even hurt. It bounces off him and lands in the grass. Ben stares at it for a long moment, dumbfounded, and looks up again in time to see John barreling toward him. He stays still and lets himself be knocked down and beaten. He deserves this. He deserves anything John can think to do, any amount of pain John sees fit to punish him with. But John’s fists don’t hurt, either.
Ben feels the pressure against skin and bone, the blunt force that knocks his head back and forth and sideways on the ground, but nothing more. He’s felt a fair amount of meaningless pleasure, and a great deal of pain he couldn’t be bothered to worry about. This is neither, and he can’t quite place where it might fall on any scale. It exists outside flavor or context. If it were anyone else hitting him at any other time, he might be fascinated. John is grimacing with effort. His face is a bloody red, dark with rage. Ben can smell him now, rain and clean sweat, just as he remembered. He closes his eyes and wishes he could bleed for John. Maybe this is hell. They have their Island, but there’s no peace, and no way to make amends.
John stops eventually, making a sound somewhere between a growl and a scream. Ben feels him moving away. There are more sounds, laced with incoherent profanity. Ben waits for John to go quiet, then opens his eyes and gets up again, careful to keep his distance. John is leaning against a tree, one white-knuckled hand wrapped around a branch. He takes a few deep, sobbing breaths. There’s no other way to calm his rage, nowhere for it to go. Ben tries not to meet John's eyes when he looks up from the tree. It’s been so long since anyone has been this angry with him. He recoils, remembering a time when he didn’t mind. He was the only one who really mattered in those days, and John was doomed to cross his path. His throat is one big lump.
“You know why that didn’t work,” John says, his voice shaking. “Don’t you?”
Ben swallows, to no avail. He’s known since he woke up in his deathbed this morning, back in his forty-year-old body and completely alone in the barracks. “Because we’re dead,” he half-whispers.
“When it happened to you, did it hurt?”
He wants to lie, wants to say he suffered like John did, betrayed and confused. He remembers last night, trying to reassure Hugo that it was okay and didn’t hurt, and Hugo crying anyway. Then a feeling like letting out a breath underwater and not needing another one. “No,” he says.
“It hurt a lot when you wrapped that cord around my neck.”
His eyes well up. “I’m sorry,” he says again, wishing it didn’t sound so ridiculous.
John’s eyes overflow, and speaking looks like a struggle. “I don’t care how sorry you are. This was my place. I was fine. I might as well be in hell now.” He wipes his tears away roughly. “You stay away from me,” he says, then grabs his knife and pack and walks away.
He’s long gone before Ben can start dragging himself back home. That night in the motel plays out in his mind, over and over. That dirty, desperate thing he did, that he can never take back or atone for. That trust he gained and threw away, yet again. He sees the man he was that night, so craven, so oblivious to the consequences. He sees the violence he did to himself, pushing what he felt for John so far down that he could barely see it, until he was leaving the room and it was too late. He shouldn’t be here. It doesn’t matter that all he wanted was to stay on the Island forever. John must have wanted that, too. Forcing him to share it with his murderer seems so cruel and pointless that Ben wonders momentarily if the old powers are back in charge here.
By the time he reaches the barracks, his misery is complete. He glances at Hugo’s house, but doesn’t have the heart to go inside again. He learned to seek comfort there in life, not consistently but often enough to surprise himself. There’s nothing there for him now. He remembers walking numbly through his own house this morning. Everything was in its place, but he opened the door to a silence and stillness he hadn’t felt since he brought Hugo to live here, after everyone else was dead or gone. He and his house had been neatly sliced out of the real barracks, and the real world, and dropped into this empty replica. There was nothing to do but wander aimlessly into the jungle, not knowing what he might find.
Ben goes back to bed. He tries to put himself back in his moment of joy at seeing John again, but can only see John’s shudder. He might as well get the box of pictures out of his bedside table, because the real John is never going to look at him without fear, or hate, or tears in his eyes. His mind drifts back to the monster, on its last night alive.
It was staring at him with a question in its eyes, doing a needlessly accurate impression of one of John’s little smiles. Ben wished yet again that it could still switch bodies. Or that it would have kept them walking through the night, or left him to sleep while it went off to cause mayhem elsewhere. Anything to avoid sitting around the campfire with it, being watched through stolen eyes.
“What is it?” Ben said, trying to keep an edge of exasperation out of his voice.
“Nothing. Just trying to see what he saw. He had such a thing about your mouth.”
“Who?”
“John Locke. Who else?”
His heart beat faster and his face burned. “Why would you say something like that?”
“Because it’s true. Don’t tell me you never noticed.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Of course you do. He wanted you. He thought you understood him, and as much as you tried to hide from him, he saw you quite clearly. Except for the times when it would have saved him from injury or death.”
Ben bit back grief, shock, a stupid little surge of happiness that John had felt something for him. He stared hard at the fire, trying to pretend it hadn’t gone blurry for a second. “That’s not true.”
“I know what I’ve seen, Ben. I’ve seen it all.”
“Well, I didn’t see anything.”
“Maybe you did, and told yourself you didn’t. You’re good at that sort of thing.”
Ben stared into the fire again, mystified. The monster scoffed. “You people,” it said, shaking its head. “You never change. Hurting each other isn’t enough, you have to hurt yourselves, too. Kill your only chance at happiness. Pathetic.”
He felt his anger building and tried desperately to rein it in before it made him say something provocative. The prospect of fleeing through the dark or becoming a stain on the nearest tree trunk didn’t excite him. “You had something to do with that. It was you in the cabin, wasn’t it?”
“Course it was. But you didn’t bother to think about that then, did you? You didn’t fight me very hard at all. Ever.”
“I didn’t know it was you.”
“Right. You thought it was Jacob tormenting you, so you sat back and took it. John Locke thought it was all part of his destiny, so he took it, too. From you, from me, from that pack of morons he crashed here with. He took it all his life. And for what? To feel special. To run around an island, playing make-believe.”
“You’re playing, too,” Ben said. It narrowed its eyes. Ben looked down quickly.
“I do what I have to do to get out of here,” it said. “You keep coming back, no matter how unhappy it makes you. But I suppose that’s your natural state. It was strange to see you happy, when you thought he’d come back to life. Such joy on your face. For that first moment, anyway. Before you remembered your lust for power again, and your jealousy about Jacob, of all people. It was something to see. It still makes me wonder what I could have gotten from you, aside from your skill with a knife.”
“What does that mean?”
“Don’t be dense. I look like him. I have his memories. I could have been him for you, just for a while.”
“But you were. You deceived me.”
“And I was barely trying. You wanted to believe it, so you did.”
His face went hotter. He wondered if he’d ever live down that shame, that failure to listen to the little voice inside that told him this wasn’t John. He was reasonably sure the disappointment of it all would never lift. “I wasn’t the only one,” he said, almost cringing.
“But they weren’t as close to me as you were. They didn’t want it nearly as much as you did. Or at all, they didn’t give a damn about him. You’re the one who said you’d do anything he asked. If I’d come to you one of those nights, in that guise, you would have been mine forever. You would have torn them all apart with your bare hands if I told you to. Because I know what he wanted to do to you. And how he wanted to do it. That was one thing he wasn’t too bad at, but it doesn’t take a lot of intelligence.”
He almost wished the monster had seduced him. Maybe that memory would have been better than the hopeless, shameful fantasies he was left with. He would have had it to hold on to, for as long as he was permitted to live. That face, that flesh, that voice crying out for him. And so much more blood on his hands. He tried not to tremble.
“Why didn’t you come to me?” he heard himself say. The monster gave him a slow smile, with so much of John in it that Ben had to look away. His body hovered between nausea and arousal.
“It’s more fun to make them kill themselves and each other. They always do, and then Jacob brings more. But not this time. John was his favorite of this batch, you know. You wouldn’t believe who his second favorite is.”
“Why are you telling me all this? Why do you always want to talk to me about him? You’re not like this with the others.”
“Because right now, I’m stuck with him. Just like the first one. The longer I use them, the more they linger. They pollute me. I look at you and get a head full of nonsense about wanting and longing and being an insufferable coward about it all. So I pass it on to you. It’s your mess, you deal with it.”
He tried not to sound hopeful. “Are you saying he’s still in there somewhere?”
“Why, do you want to try and draw him out?”
“No, thank you,” he answered automatically, not trusting himself with even a second of deliberation. It didn’t look particularly disappointed or surprised. Only bored.
“Why not?”
“Because you’re not him. He’s dead.”
“That’s what Jacob said. He stuck to it for a long time, too. Very stubborn, very stingy. He had a rough time of it, I suppose. Started blubbering as soon as I touched him, but wouldn’t let me stop. I wonder if you’d be that way. But you’re stronger than him. You’ve proven that.”
He said nothing, trying to imagine Jacob as a man, like himself. One who’d lost something precious, only to be haunted and tempted by its cheap imitation. For the first time since the night he plunged the knife into Jacob’s chest, his residual anger began to fade. He began to understand Jacob’s silence, his isolation, his surrender. After centuries of pain, Ben might not have fought back, either.
“Most people would jump at the chance,” the monster said. “One more night with the one they lost. Or gave away.”
“I’m not most people.”
“You certainly aren’t. That’s why I chose you.”
The hairs on the back of his neck rose. “When was that?”
“When you were a boy. When I made you see your mother.”
“And who decided she would die?”
“Why do you assume someone did? Maybe it just happened. It definitely worked to my advantage in the long run, though.”
Ben’s jaw clenched and his hands began to tremble with rage. He squeezed them together but couldn’t hold them still. He couldn’t fight and couldn’t flee. The best he could do was hide his face for a while.
“I should get to sleep,” he said.
“Suit yourself.”
It lay its head on its backpack and stretched out. Ben did the same with his bag, turning away and curling up on his side, as far as he could get from the monster without actually crawling away. He wondered for a second if it ever slept, but didn’t trust himself to look or ask. He stared at a leaf on the ground, seething.
“You know something?” the monster said. That voice was soft and gentle and unbearably enticing. Ben closed his eyes and tried to steel himself, wishing he could close his ears as well.
“What?” he snapped. The monster wasn’t fazed.
“You and John had the same dreams,” it said. “About being here together, just the two of you. Telling all your secrets. Touching. Being safe and happy, and not special anymore. The last time he ever woke up, it was from that dream. He thought you came to save him, and it might come true.”
Ben closed his eyes tighter. He tried to stay angry, to hate the monster more for that new wound, broad and deep. He could only muster a gratitude as deep as his misery. The monster went on, quieter than before, sad and distant.
“Jacob and I used to dream that way. I can’t remember what they were now, but they were nice like that. We weren’t made to be apart. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”
“How was it supposed to be?” Ben said, as if the monster could tell him how to fix what he’d done.
“We were supposed to hold on to each other. Carry the burden together. Stay so close that nothing could come between us. She said she made it so we couldn’t hurt each other, but that was just another lie. He could push me down into the light.”
He felt intrusive in the strangest way, listening to the musings of one dead man filtered through the likeness of another, but couldn’t help his curiosity. “He made you what you are?”
“That thing. It only looks beautiful from the outside. It rips you out of your skin and gives you another. You’re fast and strong and you can make any shape you like. But you can’t leave. He keeps you here. He makes you remember, every time you look at him. That’s what makes you hate him most. He won’t keep that sadness out of his eyes. You’d tear them out by the root if you could. If it would make you forget that night. All those nights. When he looked at you, with all the stars behind him. When he knew you, and called you by your name.”
“What is your name?” Ben whispered.
He heard the monster draw a quick breath, as if startled out of sleep. “Be quiet,” it said, its voice firm and cold again. “Go to sleep.”
The monster was neatly dispatched the next day, but never left Ben’s thoughts. It taunted him in his weakest moments, when he was alone and overheated and desperate. I could have been him for you. I know what he wanted to do to you. He tried to tell himself the monster had made it all up somehow, but his memories wouldn’t cooperate. He saw John with new eyes. There was another layer to all those long looks, those smiles, that verbal warfare. He remembered the way John cried in the motel room. Great sobs of relief. John didn’t have to die anymore. He could go home again, with the man he knew inside and out, awake and asleep.
For Ben, the dreams never stopped or changed. Over and over again, he and John told their secrets and found peace in each other’s arms. A solid month of nightmares wouldn’t hurt him as much as one walk in the jungle with John, but he wouldn’t have given up those dreams for the wide world. He’d wake up terribly happy for a second, or in tears, or sticky after his latest marathon of self-denial, then spend the rest of the day waiting to go back to sleep and see that face again. He hopes to God the dreams stopped for John. What was sublime torture for Ben would have to be screaming nightmares for the man he murdered.
He rubs the spot on his chest where John’s knife landed, pushes his finger into the hole it made, all the way through his undershirt. He gets up to look at his chest in the bathroom mirror. Not even a bruise. He stares at his face for a moment, touches the places where he should be bleeding and aching. He should look worse than he did in the armory, beaten by much heavier, angrier hands than Sayid’s. There’s nothing out of the ordinary, except for the fact that he was much older last night. He sees a man he remembers well but not fondly. Looking at him feels dangerous, like it might set him loose, to somehow do more damage than he’s already done. Ben leaves the room quickly. He has some experiments to perform.
He opens a drawer in the kitchen and stares at his sharpest knife for a time, then picks it up. It can’t be sharper than John’s, but he doubts that will make much difference. He grips it tight and lays his other hand out flat, palm up. He takes a few deep breaths. As many times as he let others hurt him in life, he’s never done himself any physical harm on purpose. If he thinks about it too long, he’ll never be able to do it. There are rules everywhere, it seems, and he needs to understand what’s possible and impossible here. He closes his eyes tight and draws the knife hard across his palm. All he feels is the smooth line of the blade against his skin. It culminates in a vague tickle. He examines his hand carefully, pulling at the skin where the cut should be. Nothing but a fading indentation.
He tries to chop at his wrist with a meat cleaver. It doesn’t cleave. He puts the knives away and digs his toolbox out from under the sink. The harder he hits himself with the hammer, the higher it bounces, until it goes flying out of his hand. The razor in the bathroom will shave the hint of five o’clock shadow off his chin, but won’t slice. When he shoves silverware into the electrical outlets, he feels a strange vibration, but no pain. He considers some outdoor experiments with heights and swimming, but John might see him. There’s still the gun.
Under Hugo’s guidance, there wasn’t much call for firearms, but it felt strange not to have one nearby. His men weren’t out there watching over him anymore, armed to the teeth and ready for anything. For a while, it was only him and Hugo, and he had a hard time believing the monster was really dead, or would remain so. A gun wouldn’t hurt it, he knew, but it would grant him the illusion of having put up a fight. He sits on his bed and takes the gun from the bedside table drawer. He thinks of John’s red face and white knuckles, and wonders yet again if John would have died more peacefully by gunshot. There might have been no final thought, no awareness of what had happened. He knows he’s edging into wishful thinking again, and forces himself to remember Richard dragging him across the beach and throwing him down in front of John’s body, his face landing right in John’s cold palm. He froze solid in warm sand, staring into that dead face. Knowing there had been no miracle and never would be. He remembers the makeshift funeral, surrounded by virtual strangers, trying not to break. Longing for comfort he didn’t deserve from people who couldn’t give it to him.
In all the years after, his regret never left him alone, seeming to grow heavier with the passage of time. It wasn’t enough. John’s rage today, his raw pain, tells Ben that there’s still a price to pay. He’ll pay forever, if that’s what’s being asked of him now. He’ll do his penance without a struggle. Ben closes the drawer, sensing the pointlessness of another experiment. Indestructible, he thinks. Well, stranger things have happened.
He’s fine until he’s in bed for the night, staring at the ceiling. He remembers his fiftieth birthday. It was like any other during that time. A beaming Hugo appeared at his door with sloppily frosted homemade cake, far too many candles on top. Ben smiled and tried to convey his thanks adequately, never able to say how grateful he was for Hugo’s trust and warmth and simple decency. The cake was better than it looked, as usual, and he tried to enjoy it without thinking of the years he had nothing. The birthdays spent cowering from sharp words and heavy fists, then sniffling in bed, his hurt and hatred festering into a source of power. He and Hugo sat on the porch and watched the sun go down, talking about their work and their people. Hugo watched him for a while, worried.
“You’re gettin’ old, dude,” he said.
Ben smirked. “Well, thank you, Hugo.”
“I can make it stop.”
“I don’t want that.”
“But…you’re just gonna get older. Someday you’ll be gone, and I’ll still be right here. I don’t think I can do this without you.”
He looked into Hugo’s strained, pleading face and swallowed hard. “You can do anything, Hugo. You’ve already done more good in a few years than he did in millennia. But I can’t accept what you’re offering. It’s a kind of power, knowing your time is unlimited. When I was the leader here, I was given a great deal of power. I relished it. I would have done anything to keep it. It didn’t matter what it cost me, or anyone else. I gave up my daughter, and I killed a man I should have followed to the ends of the earth. I couldn’t see the monster right in front of me. I’m not saying I don’t want to stay here and help you. I’m saying I don’t trust myself to live without limits. I need to know I don’t have time to make those mistakes again, when there's already so much to answer for. I need to let you lead me. That may be what I've always needed. Give me anything else, and I become a danger to myself and to this place.”
“But anybody could do that, if stuff went wrong. I could.”
Ben gave him a small, sad smile. “No, you couldn’t.”
Hugo stared at the porch floor. Vincent was sleeping at his side, head on his paws. Ben grinned. “If anyone can be trusted with immortality, it’s him. He’s probably better company than I am most of the time, anyway.”
Hugo laughed. “You just need to lighten up a little, man.”
“I try.”
“I’ll miss you when you’re gone.”
Ben’s breath caught. He never quite got used to Hugo’s affection for him, and lived with a constant low-grade fear of losing it somehow. “That may not be for a very long time. I could live another thirty or forty years. Maybe another fifty. It's not unheard of.”
Hugo smiled. “Yeah, but I’ll still miss you.”
“Likewise,” Ben said softly.
Over the years, Hugo asked him a few times if he’d changed his mind, but the answer was always no. Each time seemed easier for Ben. He never settled the question of where he might end up after death, if anywhere, but hoped it would be here. He almost looked forward to finding out. Now he knows. Maybe he can get a message to Hugo without being able to see him. He can walk around whispering until someone hears. He’ll tell them to turn the wheel until they come to a time when he was still alive. It doesn’t matter that it wouldn’t work and that dead is dead. This can’t be all there is. He’ll lose his mind.
His heart is pounding, and he’s seized by flashing memories of running through the jungle. There’s no context, only dread. He has to get away, but there’s nowhere to go this time. No one to save him, not even if he resorts to his old tricks. Only vines to trip him and stinging rain to chill him all the way through. His teeth chatter, and he hugs his knees. This can’t be happening. He can’t stay here, alone and hated and punished for all time. He can’t be dead.
He knows what’s happening to him. He remembers Hugo’s terror after they saw the Ajira plane fly overhead, carrying the last of his friends away from the Island for good. It was all real for him then, and his grip left a colorful array of bruises on Ben’s forearm. I can’t do this, he kept saying, until he was hyperventilating too badly to say anything. Ben kept up an opposite mantra until Hugo was calm again. He didn’t let go of Ben’s arm or look away from his eyes. He latched onto the only familiar thing left to him, and made a place in his enormous heart for a man who’d made him and his friends suffer immeasurably. A man he’d once tried to ward off with some sort of microwaved food product. Ben can almost laugh, slipping from panic to a kind of exhausted delirium. It doesn’t last. He knows John’s heart is closed to him, and he knows who closed it. He breaks down completely.