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The first thing she remembers about waking up is the taste of the sand, packed into the crevices of her molars. The salt flavor, the dryness at the back of the tongue. There's a long scratch that runs the length of her arm and burns. Her shirt (one of her best) is blackened by the soot in the air.
Around her, people are screaming. Fires are burning. A man gets sucked into the engine, 30 feet away, and there’s an explosion, louder than anything else, and brighter.
--
It's so strange to her, being stranded on a deserted island. It's like something out of a movie and she knows, when she gets home, when they get rescued, Lorelai will hug her to death and then crack jokes about volleyballs. When it becomes clear that rescue isn't coming any time soon...well, she tries not to think about that.
She tries not to think about the noises in the jungle, either. The crashes, bangs and groans they hear at night.
--
Things she most misses about home: fresh coffee, new books, fabric softener, Friday Night Dinners. Lorelai.
--
She makes a sort of lean-two out of a chunk of the wreckage, lines the bottom with airline blankets and asks a man in a University of Wisconsin sweatshirt to help her build a fire close enough that it'll keep her warm at night. It’s not home, not even homey, but when the rains come—and they do come, falling fast and wet and without warning—it keeps her dry.
--
While the US Marshall dies slowly, several hundred yards away from where she's set up her shelter, she tries not to listen to his groans.
She's one of the miraculous few to have found her own luggage, right on top of the pile and not even wet, and she lays credit to the luck she's always had at baggage claim that it didn’t wind up drowned, lost forever. She's even got her carry-on: her laptop, her iPod, five books of five different genres in addition to the handful in her checked luggage. She trades Sawyer the laptop and books she's already finished for a couple bottles of SPF 50 and three additions to her (weak, damp) library. But she keeps her iPod till the battery runs out, halfway through an Elvis Costello song.
It's stuck in her head for the next three weeks.
--
She doesn't realize he's there till the third day on the island, when she spots him rifling through a pile of suitcases across the beach, a cut over his left eye and another by his ear She can't believe he was on the same plane, that she didn't see him till now.
God, she's stranded on a deserted island with Jess fucking Mariano.
The thought makes her a little sick, a little dizzy. It's like the first time she was drunk, almost, and she felt the world come into clearer focus. That was on a beach, too, thousands of miles away, a different lifetime. (Only a few months back.)
She's not sure if Jess has noticed her, if he's just avoiding her because the last time they talked... The last time they talked she told him "no."
--
She approaches him on the fifth day. (She's keeping a count of the days in her head. She's too scared to write the numbers down, too scared that means this is real, that she's really here.)
She says, "Jess," and he looks up.
He looks the same. Of course he looks the same, it was only two months ago that she sent him running, sent him careening towards a life where they weren't ever going to be a "they" again. An "us." And part of her is still furious, still boiling over with the anger that comes with getting left behind. Most of her, though, regrets it.
He doesn't look surprised and she knows that means he knew she was here. He made a conscious decision not to approach her, not to even look at her. When she sits down in front of him he folds up, tucks his elbows in against his sides and smoothes down the open pages of his book. He doesn't say anything.
"Hi," she says.
He nods—the slightest nod she's ever seen, but a nod none-the-less—and she moves on. "What are you reading?"
He shows her the cover and it's instantly clear that Sawyer's traded him one of her books. He must know, her name is neatly printed on the title page of each volume she offered. “I enjoyed that one.”
He still hasn’t said anything, he won’t look at her, and she feels as though she’s talking to a concrete wall for all she’s getting back. “Alright,” she finally says. “Don’t talk, then.” She waves her own book. “I’ll just…sit here and read.”
--
That’s how the next few days go. When the weather holds and the sun burns bright across the beach they sit side-by-side in the sand, immersed in their own books. He doesn’t speak to her, much, but he seeks her out, sometimes, even clasps her hand during the makeshift memorial service.
--
It’s been a week on the island. Her skin—too fair for weather like this—is chapped from the sun; just moving hurts and she leaves her hair in a tangled knot on top of her head because she can’t bear the pain of the brush’s teeth on her scalp.
When people start talking about moving inland, to the caves, she doesn’t want to go—she wants rescue, a long shower, her mother’s arms around her shoulders.
It’s Jess that tells her she doesn’t have a choice.
“Staying here is pointless,” he says when she winces turning a page.
She looks up at him, a little shocked to hear him speaking. “Not if there’s a ship or a plane that comes.”
“There are people staying behind.” He puts his own book—another of hers—down. “If rescue comes—”
“When rescue comes.”
“When rescue comes, they’ll come get us.”
She packs up her bags, he packs up his, and they move inland.
--
She has never seen so much death as she does on the island. When they get Jack and Charlie out of the cave-in alive—all of them dusty from hauling rocks—it’s like a little miracle. She cries herself to sleep that night, so relieved, so terrified. And the thought that any of them could go next makes her sick. In the morning she throws up behind a rock, but it doesn’t make her feel any better.
--
“You don’t want to play?” she asks him when they hear about the Golf Tournament. He laughs and it’s the first time she’s heard the sound since high school.
“Have I ever struck you as the golf type?” he asks. “I don’t think I’d even know how to hold a club.”
--
They have been on the island for two weeks. It feels like months, sometimes, when she wakes up sore and startled.
Inland, her skin has begun to peel. Sun brings her aloe—she can’t get past the irony, Sun curing her sunburn—and it helps, but there are times the itching drives her mad.
Jess is a calming influence.
“Scratching it isn’t going to help,” he tells her, his eyes fixed on the page before him. “Unless you think Zombie Chic is a look that’s going to work for you, but I doubt it.”
The next time she goes to scratch at a raw patch of skin his hand reaches out to stop her, and his fingers wind themselves around hers.
--
“Hey guys,” Hurley asks, “could I just, maybe, ask you two some questions?” He’s got a pad of paper in his hand, wrinkled a bit from where it must have dried, and he shifts his weight about a little, standing over them.
“Questions about what?” she asks, looking up from where she’s spreading aloe over the skin of her ankle.
“It’s just this…census thing,” he says. “So we can get stock of who we have on the island.” He flashes the pad so that she can see it. “You know, ‘cause of Claire. The nightmares.”
She nods. The screams woke her up last night—woke them all up—though she hasn’t been sleeping well anyway. “What do you want to know?”
Jess is still pretending to ignore Hurley, but she can tell from the way he’s stiffened beside her, the transition in the way he holds himself, that he’s not really reading anymore.
“Well, umm…” Hurley flips through some pages till he finds one that’s blank and taps at it with his pencil. “I guess…what are your names?”
“Rory,” she says. “Well, Lorelai. Gilmore. Rory for short.”
“Rory,” he repeats. “Cool. And your surly boyfriend?”
She feels all the muscles tighten at the base of her neck. “Oh, this is…he’s not…I mean, his name—”
“I’m Jess,” he says next to her. “Mariano.”
“Rory and Jess. Rory and Jess.” Hurley shrugs. “Reason for travel?”
“What?” Jess asks.
“Why were you on the plane?”
“I was on a class research trip,” she says, “studying marine life.”
“And you, Dude?” Hurley asks.
Jess shrugs. “Just traveling.”
“Cool. Sounds like fun, man. Where are you guys from?”
She says “Connecticut” while he says “New York.”
“Long way from home, dudes,” Hurley says. “Long way from home.”
--
He wakes her up a little after midnight, day 17.
“Happy birthday,” he whispers. The caves are quiet, now; Claire is gone. She sighs and her very breath seems to drip and echo against the rocks.
“I had forgotten.”
“I’ve been thinking about it for days.”
She reaches a hand out between them in the dark. “It doesn’t really seem to matter here.”
“I guess not.”
--
They don’t talk about it. About the giant polar bear in the room…or the jungle as it were. They talk about books, about school, about what Luke and Lorelai might be doing right at this very moment—they don’t talk about them.
It might be self-preservation. The only escape from a fight around here is the jungle, and she knows better than to go wandering off on her own. She’s less sure about him, so she doesn’t bring up anything that might cause him to walk away from her—she’s seen enough of his retreating back to last her the rest of her life.
They aren’t together—there has been no verbal agreement of any sort—but they are. They spend every waking moment in each other’s company. They sleep beside each other at night. Excusing bathroom breaks and the occasional solo beach excursion—for firewood or to deliver water or just to help out with whatever project is taking place at the moment—they are each other’s everything.
And though they are often ignored by the group as a whole, there’s no denying that everyone thinks of them as some sort of unit. There is no Rory without Jess, no Jess without Rory.
--
“I’m not some goddamn lending library,” Sawyer says when she trades in another stack of books, but he gives her something new anyway. “This is the last of my stash, Sunburn,” he tells her, “so preserve it, ‘cause it don’t look like we’ll be getting a replenishment anytime soon.”
--
When her sunburn has healed, they both start spending more time at the beach.
It’s been more than a month on the island. She’s learned to walk on sand, to pee in nature, to handle death and murder and terrible, terrible destruction. She’s starting to feel useless, restless.
Then Boone dies.
--
She didn’t know him. Not really. She knew who he was, of course, had seen him on the beach, at the caves, but, aside from on the beach, in the immediate aftermath of the crash, when he asked her for a pen, she’d never talked to him.
It was just that he had always been so unnecessarily, so obnoxiously helpful, always willing to lend a hand no matter the problem.
He was always getting in his own way.
But now he’s not there, he’s unavailable for help, useful or not, and she can’t shake the feeling in her gut that, without him, they’re doomed. Now, without their over-eager helping hand, they’ll never make it off this island alive.
And then there’s the baby. The little point of light in one of the darkest nights they’ve seen on the island.
--
She’s mostly lost track of when it is outside. On day 42, she sits down to calculate the date, because no one seems to know and it feels wrong, not knowing the baby’s birthday.
She’s hardly allowed herself to think about the real world going on without her. Aside from her concern for Lorelai (and for her grandparents, her father, for Luke and all her loved ones), she can’t bring herself to believe that there’s still a world out there. But it’s the date that throws her, November 2. It’s Election Day. Somewhere beyond the horizon, things have kept spinning. (The part of her that longs for ivy covered walls and the neurotic pitch of Paris’s voice come finals week wonders, idly, who won.)
--
When she was four, Lorelai invented a game called Island Hopping. They played it in the potting shed at night, and it would always wind her up before bed, get her blood pumping and her heart racing. They’d end up giggling, the two of them, in a heap in the middle of the room, and it was how she knew that Lorelai wasn’t like anyone else’s Mom. She was special.
The game was this: starting from the small mat at their front door, with the furniture rearranged and pillows spread out in strategic places, you had to make it to the other side of the room without touching the floor.
Lorelai was better at it. Her longer legs allowed her to leap farther. Sometimes she could make it from the couch to the bed in one giant jump. But she didn’t have her daughter’s knack for planning ahead. She could only see one step to the next—Rory could plot an entire course from the front door.
--
The weight of the island sits between her shoulder blades.
She has seen and felt more pain in the past 42 days than she did for the first 20 years of her life. She has had to reconcile herself with the reality that people die every day—real people, not just names in articles.
“When we get out of here,” Jess says to her after Boone’s funeral, “you’re going to make one hell of a war correspondent.”
“I don’t even know if that’s what I want anymore,” she tells him. “I don’t think I was built for this.”
He takes her hand.
--
They both help to shift Michael’s raft up and off the beach, into the water. Jess is beside her, in front of her, and she watches the way his shoulders strain and slide beneath his t-shirt, beneath his skin.
She almost loses her focus, almost loses her grip on the bamboo.
They wave to the makeshift crew as they head out to see, all of them saying silent prayers for their own salvation.
--
Shannon isn’t the same without Boone. Of course, she’s got every reason to lose herself a little, but that doesn’t mean her stories of ghosts and whispers in the jungle are any more believable.
But they’re all panicked, now, huddling in the caves like they’re really any safer here.
When Jack comes back with yet another heroic speech—“Like season 7 of Buffy all over again,” her inner Lorelai quips—she tries to remain calm. Jess’s hand slips in hers, and he’ll never admit to it, but she knows he’s just as scared as she is.
--
She has tried to pretend like the more supernatural elements of life on this island aren’t real—even random guest appearances by polar bears could be explained…somehow—but then she starts seeing ghosts.
It’s Boone first. He walks right up to her in the jungle and asks her for a pen. When she blinks, he’s gone. She puts it off to lack of sleep, to the threads of her brain slowly unraveling.
But then she sees Arzt. He starts talking to her as soon as she sees him, rattling on a mile-a-minute about chromosomes, 23 pairs and gene mutations (high school genetics filtered through her terror, she tells herself). He disappears just as fast.
Of course she’s heard the monster a few times, seen a wisp of black smoke out of the corner of her eye in the jungle, but she’s never been face-to-face with it like some have.
It’s become real, and she has to accept that either she’s completely lost it—a definite possibility, she has to admit—or there really are ghosts, apparitions. She wants to believe she’s lost it, and that scares her most of all.
And then there are the Others, titled like some pretentious rock band, and this is where she finds herself really scared. Ghosts and monsters…at least she can pretend they’re not real.
--
Jess volunteers them for a shift in the hatch. After a shower she feels better than she has in weeks, and when she lies down on one of the bunks she can feel each of the muscles in her back beginning to unknot in a slow line up her spine.
“Comfy?” he asks, standing over her, and she smiles up at him.
“What brought on the volunteerism?” she asks. “You’ve never really been the type.”
He shrugs. “I thought we could use a night indoors. Can’t argue with running water…or actual beds, for that matter.”
In the hatch they fall into an almost creepy domesticity, even in just a few hours, even with Jack and Kate, Locke and Charlie…everyone coming in and out, their roles seem different down here.
As comfortable as she is stretched out across a mattress for the first time in months, she feels off balance. After her turn at the computer, punching in the numbers that run through her head like a mantra (4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42, 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42, 4, 8, 15…), she climbs up onto the top bunk and curls in beside him. He shifts to accommodate her in the bed and they spend the night like that—excepting their alternating trips to the computer—wrapped in each other’s arms.
--
The next morning she punches in the numbers and then takes another shower. She stands beneath the nozzle with her face upturned and her eyes closed for as long as she can stand the heat. The water smells a little funny, a little sulfurous, goes cold on her every few minutes, but the shower itself is so relaxing she doesn’t mind.
She towel dries her hair while she pads across the living space to wake him.
“Is it my turn?” he asks when she shakes him awake.
“Not quite yet,” she says. “I thought you might want a shower before our shift is over.”
“Are you saying I smell?” he asks. He wraps an arm around her waist and pulls her down beside him on the bunk. “You didn’t seem to mind last night.”
She starts giggling and they end up twisted around each other on the bed.
--
She likes Rose. Rose seems like the sort of person she would have known in Stars Hollow, warm and motherly.
She’s not much for jungle trekking and grand adventures (though there’s no denying that she’s worked up some killer leg muscles over the past month and a half with all the walking she’s done), but she wants to help. That’s where Rose comes in, keeping her busy, giving her assignments, chores. Mostly she does laundry—a never ceasing pile of laundry—rubbing her hands raw to get everything clean.
--
There’s always some new danger, some new threat. It’s terrifying, and she often wakes up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, certain that she’s heard something moving nearby.
Of course, logically, she knows it’s probably someone turning over in their sleep, or snoring, maybe. But she doesn’t know if she can trust that anymore. She doesn’t really know if she can trust anything at this point.
--
It’s not all darkness, doom and gloom. It would be easy to think that, that there’s no light at the end of this tunnel, but there is. She laughs—she laughs every day.
She laughs when Rose and Bernard fight, always about something trivial, Bernard trying to prove something that doesn’t need proving and always looking the fool next to smart, confident Rose.
She laughs when Aaron does something new. Wiggles his nose some new way or reaches up to grab at her hair while she watches him. (She babysits a lot now that Charlie is off with the priest from the tail section—Claire doesn’t like to talk about it.)
She laughs every time Sawyer gets knocked down a peg.
She laughs when Hurley hands her a can of real, honest-to-God (instant) coffee, the DHARMA Initiative logo stamped across the side and that smell, when she peels the top off, of waking up in her mother’s house, of Jess’s t-shirts in high school and Luke’s, after-hours, and home.
She laughs when Jess runs his thumb over the spot on her side that makes her jump, a spot he finds by accident one day. She laughs at that until she stops laughing because the longing grows too strong. And the longing grows and grows.
--
They have this routine, now, the whole lot of them. This back-and-forth, into the jungle and out again, always some new mission, some new war to wage, some new problem to solve.
And now all the problems have mounted, with Walt captured and everyone running after him or not running after him or running after Michael running after him. When Jack and the woman from the tail section, Ana Lucia, start talking about an army, when Sun gets captured and Sawyer steals the guns and everyone starts freaking out, or freaking out even more than they already were…it’s hard not to get wrapped up in the whole thing. Sometimes it feels as though they’ve all lost sight of any hope that they might be rescued, someday.
--
She hears “Moonlight Serenade” playing from half-way down the beach and it feels like she’s jumping through time, into her own childhood, the summers when weddings at the inn would run late into the night and she would lie on the grass outside, flat on her back, looking up at stars that never looked quite the way they do on the island.
The romantic notions that she’s carried through life were built largely out of books and movies, but those summer weddings played a role, too. She can remember the way the bride and groom would keep dancing long past any of their guests, tracing tight circles on the temporary floor (installed in the garden that morning). When she hears the music on the beach, something in her gut aches for that romance, imagined or not, and this is when something shifts.
They are lying side by side, stretched across an Oceanic blanket in what was once her tent and is now, essentially, their tent, and when she hears the music she feels her entire body tune in to it, winding up her spine and into her joints. The music overpowers her, takes control of her body until she’s hovering over him, with a palm pressed into sand that’s still warm from the sun that set hours ago, and a leg swung out across him.
“Hi,” she says, and he says, “hi,” and then they are pressed together on the sand.
--
“57 days,” he says in the morning, while he’s buttoning a shirt that’s just a little too big for him.
“What?”
“57 days,” he repeats. “That’s how long it took you to jump me.”
She throws a paperback at him and laughs.
--
They’ve been on the island for two months, but it feels like it might be two years.
They find the food, dropped in the jungle by someone, somehow, and with the kitchen restocked everyone seems a little calmer, a little happier.
Of course, it all goes to hell two days later, when the prisoner from the hatch kills Ana Lucia and Libby. During the funeral she watches Hurley and tries not to think about what would happen—what she would do—if she lost Jess.
It’s a little like everything’s happening at the same time, with the boat and Desmond arriving and Jack and Kate and Sawyer and Hurley following Michael out into the jungle. She’s mostly finding herself distracted, though, with this new/old facet to her relationship with Jess.
And the sex, oh man is it good.
--
They’re sitting outside of their tent when the sky turns violet and violent, and when everything goes blue and green again, there’s a Geronimo Jackson album sticking out of the sand right in front of them.
“I have never heard of this band before in my life,” Jess says, once they’ve recovered from the shock.
“I have,” she says. “Mom had a cassette of Magna Carta when I was little—it was the only thing that would put me to sleep, most nights.”
--
It is raining. Her tank top is sticking to her skin and her hair is plastered to her forehead, her cheeks and the back of her neck. She can feel the water running down the line of her jaw and when she opens her mouth, gasping for breath, it runs over her lips.
Her back is aligned with the trunk of a tree, Jess’ hand is wound through the wet cotton of her shirt, his fist pressed against her side, his mouth on her neck, their bodies moving together in the rain.
--
She doesn’t know much about Nikki and Paolo. They mostly kept to themselves, and they were always running off into the jungle on some new adventure, just the two of them. But she still feels it when they die.
She’s felt every death on the island, like something compressing inside of her.
--
Sawyer brings them a stack of four books, and when she tells him she doesn’t have any to exchange he says, “consider them a gift, Sunbu—Rory.”
She laughs, just a little uneasy, and says, “why?”
“No reason. Just,” he turns away from her, one hand up in the air, “wanted to do something nice.”
--
No one trusts Juliet, or Jack by extension. Even when Juliet saves Claire, no one’s willing to believe that she’s really switched sides.
But that doesn’t stop her from trying—to make friends, to worm her way into their not-so-merry band of survivors.
She’s pouring herself a bowl of DHARMA brand cereal when Juliet approaches her.
“Can I have some of that?” Juliet asks, pointing to the box. She says, “I’m Juliet, by the way,” and then, “I guess you already knew that.”
They eat cereal in silence for a little while, and she’s trying not to be rude, but she’s not exactly inclined to make small talk with one of them.
“So, that guy over there, the one that’s glaring at me,” Juliet says, “is he your boyfriend?”
She looks up, towards the tent, to where Jess is watching them. “He’s just a little overprotective,” she says. “And he doesn’t trust you. No one does.”
“Can’t say that I’m particularly surprised.”
“Can you blame them?” she asks, setting her empty bowl down on the counter.
“No,” Juliet admits. “I can’t.”
--
She finds out about the woman from the helicopter when Hurley lets it slip.
Knowing Lorelai thinks she’s really dead, that there’s probably been a funeral for her back home, something more lavish than she would have wanted and paid for by her grandparents because that’s what they know how to do, that people cried over her—that the people she loves had to deal with that kind of loss…it makes her sick.
But the thought of rescue, the knowledge that there’s a boat out there, just 40 miles off the coast, that’s going to take her home, to Lorelai and Stars Hollow and her grandparents and Yale…it swells up in her chest so that she can hardly breathe.
She pulls Jess into their tent to tell him the news, and she watches as his face falls, the way he looks over her shoulder, out to where Sun is washing dishes in the ocean.
“I’m sorry,” she says, “I thought you’d be happy to hear that we were getting rescued.” And he shrugs his shoulders and turns away.
--
When Sawyer plays Juliet’s tape for everyone, and they find out that she was searching for pregnant women in their camp, Jess gives her a strange look, like fear mixed with concern. It’s not hard to figure out why Juliet was asking her questions.
Afterwards, Jess asks her, “are you?”
“No,” she says. “No, I’m not.” And she can see it in his eyes…they’re both relieved.
--
Soon, Jack is leading them out to the radio tower, every one of them, to turn off Rousseau’s signal and contact Naomi’s boat, and rescue starts to seem that much closer.
Jess talks about staying behind, taking Bernard’s or Jin’s place at the beach, waiting for the Others, but she flat out refuses. “You’re coming with me,” she says, “and you’re staying with me.”
The walk is long, and she can feel each step in the balls of her feet, in her legs. Sweat rolls down her spine, gathers where the strap of her bag crosses her chest and behind her ears.
When the group meets up with Ben and Alex her stomach tightens and Jess’s arm comes out in front of her, defensive. She puts a hand on his shoulder, to calm him. Everyone is terrified already, afraid that their plan has failed, that Sayid and Jin and Bernard are captured, or worse. And when Jack returns from his tête-à-tête with Ben, his hands nearly as bloody as Ben’s face, that fear mounts.
They hike the rest of the way to the tower with Ben at the end of Rousseau’s rope, and for the first time they feel like maybe, just maybe, they’re the ones on top. Like things are finally going their way.
But then she’s only a few feet away when Locke kills Naomi. It’s horrifying, and she feels a little sick. Naomi’s eyes are still open, and she thinks someone should go over and close them, but she doesn’t have the guts to step out into the line of Locke’s gun, and when he walks away—that’s when the call goes through.
That’s when they get found.
--
There’s still a buzz of excitement as they walk back to the beach. Even with the disappearing dead girl and Ben’s threats and everything that has happened, everything that has gone wrong, they’re all so relieved.
That is, until they reach the front end of the plane, still where it landed in the jungle 91 days ago, and Desmond tells them all Charlie’s message—the one he died to share.
“I think we should go with Locke,” Jess says, pulling her away from the group a bit, just as it starts to rain.
“Are you crazy?”
“You heard Charlie’s message.”
“Just because the boat doesn’t belong to the person we thought it belonged to doesn’t mean it’s not going to take us home.”
“Then why did they lie?” he asks, grabbing her forearm. “What possible reason could they have for lying?”
She pulls away from him. “Why don’t you want to go back?”
He doesn’t answer her, though. Just turns to face the jungle. “I’m going with Locke,” he finally says. “You can come with me or not, but I’m going.”
She goes, too.
--
She goes with him, but she doesn’t talk to him. She chooses to walk ahead instead, with Claire and Hurley. To keep her distance.
When they find the girl in the water, the chatty English redhead with the big smile, she relishes the chance to rest. She’s not used to these treks through the jungle, not like some of the others, and that’s all they’ve been doing for the past two days, it seems.
The soles of her feet ache.
She doesn’t much like Locke, or trust him for that matter (wasn’t it just a few hours ago that she watched him throw a knife into a woman’s back?), and she thinks it’s more than a little bit stupid to be walking away from their doctor, from the man that’s kept them safe—or as safe as possible—for the last 91 days.
She doesn’t like being so close to Ben, either, with his steady bug-eyed gaze and his creepy calm voice. He asks for a sip of her water at one point, but Jess says, “don’t talk to her,” and Rousseau yanks at the rope binding his wrists before she can respond, anyway.
She’s the one with Vincent’s leash when Charlotte tells them about the GPS transponder, and Locke gestures for her to bring the dog to him.
“Tie this around Vincent’s neck,” he says, handing her the transponder, and she wants to ask him why, but she keeps her mouth shut, attaches the transponder, and lets go of the leash. “Go on, Vincent, get,” says Locke, and the dog runs off into the jungle.
When Ben gets a hold of the gun a few hours later she grabs for Jess’s hand, behind her. She’s still angry, still frustrated, but he’s the one she trusts. He’s the thing she clings to.
The knowledge that Ben might still be the one manipulating them, even while they’ve got him on a literal leash, is unsettling.
--
Locke assigns them houses like dorm rooms, everybody paired off. She thinks about taking the second room in Claire’s house, but she ends up staying with Jess.
In their room, she starts questioning him again.
“What’s wrong with going back?” she wants to know.
He doesn’t want to answer, but she keeps it up, asking over and over again. “What’s so much better about staying on this island?”
“In case you hadn’t noticed,” he finally says to her, “I haven’t exactly got anything to go back to. There’s nothing waiting there for me.”
“What about me?” she says. “What about the things that are waiting for me?”
It’s a selfish argument, she knows, but she makes it anyway, and she watches the pain rise in his face.
“You’re always going to have me, Jess,” she finally says.
--
In the morning she wakes up and he’s making her breakfast. Eggs and the DHARMA coffee she’s gotten used to.
It’s strange, waking up in a real bed, with sheets that smell like detergent and a bedside table and a lamp she can switch on and off, on and off. This is a house, an actual house, a bit like something off a movie set, but real none-the-less; there’s a fully stocked bookcase in the living room and in the backyard there’s a swing-set, a picnic table. In front there’s a porch.
It’s hard to miss her tent on the beach when she’s got a library and a front porch.
--
“Merry Christmas,” he says, when he wakes her up two mornings later.
“Christmas?” she asks, and he nods.
“I found a calendar in the kitchen.”
She sits up in the bed, leans back against the headboard. Through the window she can see outside, where it is lush and green and bright.
“It doesn’t seem like Christmas.”
That night Locke invites them all over for dinner, and with Ben at one end of the table, looking more in control than ever, it’s hard to feel like they’re really celebrating anything.
--
He wakes her up in the middle of the night, fully dressed and with both of their bags packed. “I was wrong,” he says, as he hands her her clothes. “And don’t say ‘I told you so,’ because I really did think we were doing the right thing, going with Locke, but we weren’t. And we need to leave.”
“Now?” she asks, still half asleep as she pulls on her jeans. “It’s the middle of the night.”
“If we leave during the day—I don’t know that Locke will give us the option.”
“You really think he’d keep us here against our will?” she asks.
“To be honest?” he sighs, hands her a backpack, “I wouldn’t put anything past John Locke.”
They sneak out the back door of their house just after midnight, and make their way to the tree line as quietly as they can. They walk as far as the sonic fence in silence.
“We don’t have the code,” she says when they get there. “How are we going to get through without melting our brains?”
He laughs, holds up a piece of paper with four numbers on it. “What kind of amateur do you take me for?” he asks. He bends down to punch in the code—1623.
“Where did you get that?” she asks.
“Swiped it.” He smiles at her, then step across the barrier. “When I got up to use the bathroom at dinner.”
“I guess some good does come out of teenage hoodlum-hood.” She follows him across.
--
They walk for three days, and neither of them is really sure if they’re going in a straight line, or where it is that they’re going, which way to go if they’re going to find the beach, but they keep on walking. And walking and walking and walking.
On the third night they stop in a clearing to sleep. They are worn out, exhausted, but they both lie for a long while, staring up into the trees.
“Are you still awake?” she asks eventually, turning onto her side to face him.
He nods in the dark.
“We’re going to be okay, right?” she asks.
“Of course.”
A few hours later she wakes up to a rustling in the foliage. “Jess,” she says, shaking his shoulder, “Jess!”
“What?” he asks, his eyes bleary and his voice thick.
“Someone is coming,” she says.
They scramble into the brush just as someone stumbles into their clearing.
“That’s Claire,” she whispers to him. “What’s Claire doing in the middle of the jungle?”
“Maybe she left,” he says. “Like we did.”
“And she didn’t take Aaron with her?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask her?”
But she doesn’t. She stays where she is, hidden from sight in the brush, until Claire has moved on.
--
They get to the beach a day and a half later. The whole beach seems to be buzzing—everyone is rushing about and it’s ten minutes before Rose spots them, hovering at the tree line.
“Rory!” Rose shouts when she sees them, and moments later they’re both surrounded and enveloped by the arms of their fellow survivors.
“I thought you went with Locke,” Rose says. “We didn’t think we’d ever see you again!”
“We left,” she says. “We were wrong to go with him, so we left. Took us awhile to get back, though.” She smiles. “Jess refused to stop and ask for directions.”
It’s not long before they’ve been filled in on what’s happening. The freighter off shore, the zodiac raft and the physicist shepherding them off the island, five at a time.
“He’s just left with the first group,” Rose tells them. “Sun and Jin and the baby, Judy and Adelina.”
“Aaron’s here?” she asks.
“Sawyer and Miles found him in the jungle.”
“What about Claire? She didn’t make it back?”
Rose looks down and sighs. “They said she wandered off in the middle of the night.”
--
They don’t make it to the freighter, but it’s just as well. They watch it explode in the distance, sitting between Rose and Bernard on the beach.
Rose sits silently next to her, and Bernard says, “some things are just too good to be true.” She reaches for Jess’ hand.
“I’ll be at the church,” Rose says eventually, “if anybody needs me.”
--
The buzz starts in the earth, and whirrs up like a machine turning on, growing louder and louder as the sky brightens—like when the hatch imploded, only whiter and harsher and louder.
Then it’s gone, but she can still hear it echoing in her ears, and around her the beach is just people, about fifteen of them, and their campsite is gone.
“What the hell is going on?” Neil yells.
--
They’ve both got their backpacks, still on their backs, which is more than most of the others on the beach can say. There’s not much in them that’s of any use, though, just a change of clothes, two bottles of water and three paperbacks each.
“You’re just about the worst packer I’ve ever seen,” Rose tells Jess when she sees what they have. “What about matches, a knife?”
“Yeah, well wilderness survival skills aren’t really a necessity when you’re growing up in Manhattan,” he tells her. “How was I supposed to know what we would need?”
--
They keep happening, these flashes, and every time it feels a little like the world is turning over on its side. Each time they try to light a fire, to gather food, to stay alive, and each time it’s like the work they did was for nothing.
She doesn’t want to believe that they’re actually traveling in time (in time!), but there’s a man from the Oxford physics department telling her it’s so, and he’s so earnest, so genuine, that it’s hard not to believe him. And it doesn’t hurt that the landscape keeps changing around them, with things coming and going—she watches a mango on a tree nearby as it appears and disappears and appears again, but slightly larger now.
“We’re actually time traveling,” she says to Jess, her voice all shock and disbelief. “How is that even possible?”
After the fourth flash it’s dark outside, and everyone is tired and frustrated.
And then the arrows start flying, shooting flames through the sky, over the beach, into the sand and the trees and the people around them. Neil goes down first, and then several more after him, and they all start running, following Sawyer’s command to head for the creek.
They get separated from the crowd, though—if you could call it a crowd, so thinned by their attackers—and end up alone by the water.
“What did he mean, creek?” Jess asks. “He couldn’t have been a little more specific?”
“Considering there were flaming arrows involved, I think we can cut Sawyer some slack,” she reminds him. “Just this once.”
“I’ll be more inclined to cut him some slack if we can actually find him,” Jess says.
They don’t find him.
--
“I wonder when we are,” she says. They’re sitting on the bank with their feet in the water.
There have been five flashes, now, and the jungle is quiet around them, and calm.
“Hey guys!” they hear from behind them, and when they turn, there’s Hurley and Michael and Jin, carrying golf clubs. “We’re heading up to play some golf, you wanna come?”
They’re both startled, surprised, but she has enough sense to remain calm.
“Not today,” she says. “Maybe some other time.”
“Was that what I think it was?” Jess asks when they’re gone.
“Yeah,” she says, “I’m pretty sure it was.”
--
After their face-to-face encounter with the past, they decide it’s time to move inland, where they’re less likely to run into anyone else, or themselves.
Time keeps shifting around them, enough that they’ve lost track of how many times and where they might have been, and they’ve both got terrible headaches. Sometimes they hear shots in the jungle, terrible screams, but they both keep moving, neither one of them willing to look back.
“How much longer do you think this will keep up?” she asks. They’re still walking, dragging their feet through the undergrowth.
“I have no idea,” he says, just as his nose starts bleeding. “Not much longer, I hope.”
Just as he says it there’s another flash, stronger than any before, and the whole earth seems to move below them, like they’re standing on a subway platform as the trains rush by. When it ends there’s a sense of finality, and their headaches disappear.
“Do you think it’s over?” he asks.
--
They look for clues as to when they might be, but there’s not much indication in the middle of the jungle. The closest thing they get to figuring it out is a sighting of a DHARMA van, not rusted out and dead like the one Hurley found, but shiny, new, like it was just manufactured.
“I think this might be the seventies,” she says, when the van has rumbled past them in the jungle. “Or the early eighties, maybe?”
“Do you think we’re stuck here?”
“Yeah,” she says. “I think we probably are.”
--
“Somewhere out there,” she says, “my mom is just a kid.”
It’s 1974. They find a calendar in one of the DHARMA stations, or what will be one of the DHARMA stations; it’s just a construction site, now. They sneak in after dark, when the workers, in their uniform jumpsuits, have headed home for the night.
“We could go to the Barracks,” she says. “The DHARMA Initiative—they were peaceful, right?”
“I guess,” Jess says. “Up until they got wiped out by the Others.”
“Don’t you think we would have seen them by now? The Others?”
Jess shrugs. They’re in a clearing, lush and green and dripping from rain that’s only a few minutes gone. “If we see them…well then we see them. I wouldn’t be surprised if we did. But I don’t see any point to worrying about it.”
She drops her backpack and slides her back down the trunk of a tree till she’s sitting on the damp ground. “This is where all those adventures Jack lead might have come in handy,” she says. “Maybe we’d know how to track someone…or how not to leave our own tracks.”
“I doubt it.”
She sighs, leans her head back to stare up into the trees. “What are we going to do, Jess?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” he says. “But we’ll figure something out.”
--
They find the sonic fence a few days later.
“Think the code is the same?” she asks, kneeling down to look at the keypad.
“I’d say that’s highly unlikely.”
“The wrong code is sure to trigger some sort of warning system…”
“Think they’ve got a doorbell?” He tosses is bag down and runs his hands through his hair.
“Probably not.” She sits down, cross-legged in the dirt. “What are we going to say, anyway? Hi, we’re from the future, and by the way, we swear we’re not Others.”
“I don’t know.”
--
It’s Sawyer that finds them, the next morning. He comes out to the edge of the fence, stands on the other side, gives them a big smile and says, “didn’t think we’d ever see you two again.”
He punches the code into the keypad, turns the dial and ushers them across the invisible line.
“Lucky it was me that found you, too. The DHARMA folk and the Hostiles ain’t exactly braiding each other friendship bracelets.”
“Hostiles?” she asks, following him uphill, toward the Barracks.
“S’what they call the Others. And before we get back to their home base let me fill you in on the story you’re gonna have to follow.”
By the time they meet Horace, half an hour later, she’s Rory Hayden, a researcher brought on board their salvage vessel, and he’s Jess Danes—a sailor.
--
There’s no rescue, now. No, “when I get off this island,” or “when the helicopters come to get us.” There’s just a new life, with new hopes and new dreams and every day a new day to get through, and another day after that.
When she wakes up mornings he’s lying next to her in bed, an arm slung around her waist or dangling over the edge, their alarm clock beeping the time and everything outside the same idyllic green as it was the day before.
She’s got a job teaching the kids in English and History. Sawyer—LaFleur—fudges a bit on her qualifications, says she’s done with school (somewhere out there Yale’s only just started accepting women, so she says she went to Smith, like her grandmother before her), and they start her out almost immediately. “We’ve been looking for someone to fill the spot, anyway,” Horace tells her, “so I guess it’s our lucky day that you lot got shipwrecked here.”
Jess gets a job constructing DHARMA stations, and when he comes home nights he’s exhausted.
They build a life on the island, don’t even think about asking for a ride home. “Whatever happened, happened,” Daniel tells them, “there’s no sense waiting around to warn yourselves not to get on the plane—that’s just a bad idea all around.”
At night, she thinks about her mother back home, growing older (nine, now, then ten), heading towards a future she never predicted for herself. She thinks about her grandparents, about her friends who aren’t even born yet. She thinks about how the pain she’ll cause is in the future—about how it’s not something to be worried over, how it’s nothing she can change.
She thinks about settling, about how her childhood was filled with bigger dreams than the things she finds here, and about how this has never felt like that.