Lost Blood Sacrifice

TITLE: Blood Sacrifice

AUTHOR: Mari

RATING: R

DISCLAIMER: All characters within belong to Abrams, Lindelof, etc. Certainly not me.

SPOILERS: AU of 'Deus Ex Machina' and 'Do No Harm'.

A/N: Written as a part of the Boone ficathon, for Larinzia.

PAIRINGS: Shannon/Sayid, beyond that gen.

"No, _we're_ the survivors of Flight 815."

Boone's mouth fell open in shock of its own accord and he rocked back onto his heels. He could hear Locke yelling distantly from somewhere below him, but he could not hear the exact words over the sound of the plane creaking as it tilted. Boone snapped his jaw closed with an audible clacking and scrambled backwards, nearly falling over his own feet in the mad dash to get back. As his weight shifted once more towards the back of the plane, but it was too little and too late to stop the slow, inexorable slide towards the edge of the cliff. Boone swore and shivered to throw off the intense sense of…not déjà vu, exactly, but a heavy sense of wrongness all the same settling across his skin, gone again only a second after it had arrived. The plane slide faster, hitting some obstruction in its path with enough force to make the entire craft rattle and pull Boone's already precarious sense of balance right out from under him. He fell hard, cracking his head on one of the heroin-filled crates, and felt the skin on his temple tear with a sound that was almost wet. His vision kaleidoscoped into a thousand different stars.

Boone rolled over, groaned, and sprawled his fingers against the wound. Already he could feel blood running across his knuckles and down his wrist. 'Not dead yet,' Boone thought, and pushed himself back up to his feet as the plane continued to shake and slide. 'Get it together if you want to keep it that way.' The little mental pep talks which he had given himself from middle school all the way through being awarded his first task in the family business didn't have much of a place on the island, but old habits died hard. Boone staggered back up to his feet and tried to refocus on the plane's door, which was made rather difficult by the fact that he was seeing three of them at once. He told himself that now was time for moving and not for debating, and dove for the middle one. Luck was favoring him for the moment and Boone more or less picked the right one. 'More or less' because, while he didn't run face first into the plane's metal skin in his search for an escape route, between his weaving and the plane's hastening tilt, he felt a searing pain in first his shoulder, then his wrist, as the plane's door caught it on the way by. The cracking sound that registered in Boone's ears a second later was one of the loudest that he had ever heard. The plane cascaded over the edge of the cliff and made a long whistling sound before it struck the ground with a tremendous screaming of metal. Boone didn't have a lot of time with which to ponder his good fortune, or a lot of inclination for that matter, not while he could feel the collar of his shirt rapidly growing wet with blood. He swayed once, twice, where he stood before he slowly slid down to the ground. When the full weight of his body came down on his newly broken wrist, Boone did the only thing that any reasonable human being could be expected to under the circumstances, and passed out.

The shadows were long by the time that Boone came to later that afternoon, the sun no more than a faint pink suggestion in the Western sky. He grunted and rolled over, trying briefly to rub at his eyes with his injured hand, and oh jesus fuck did that arm take great pleasure in informing him of what a tremendous mistake he had just made. Boone grit his teeth so that he wouldn't scream and set his mind towards the task of not passing out again. Somehow he managed to hold on until the waves of pain had subsided into something akin to the time he had gotten his jaw cracked by a wayward kick in his one and only fraternity brawl. It was good to have something to compare the experience to and remind himself that he had gotten through it, at least, even if the accompanying memory wasn't one of the most fun to revisit. The other guy had started the fight by saying something about Shannon, Boone remembered, something which they had both known was true but which he had been unable to let stand all the same. Old habits.

Boone laid his injured arm down by his side and held his breath until he was certain that it was going to continue at a dull ache rather than erupting once again into a screaming cacophony. Releasing the air in his lungs on a shaky sigh, he raised his other hand to probe at the wound on his temple. Didn't need a mirror to know that this was a bad one. Not trusting his legs to hold him quite yet, Boone turned his head in the direction that he had last seen the small plane. There was nothing left of that except a long patch of ground with all the underbrush stripped away where the craft had scooted across the ground, a few flakes of yellow paint caught in the remaining strands of grass, and patches of blood where Boone's head wound had done a brisk business while he was unconscious. Just as he didn't need a mirror to tell that his head was sporting one hell of a nasty gash, he didn't need any outside opinions to tell him how lucky he had gotten. If he had been only a second slower in his mad backwards scramble…well, they were running a shortage on fully-stocked emergency rooms around here. Even if he had fallen back in the real world, the ensuing images were something that Boone found he really did not care to think about.

He used his good arm to lever himself carefully back up to his feet, holding the injured one close to his chest and swaying slightly from one side to the other as his brain did its best to flip itself upside down inside of his skull. He walked carefully to the edge of the cliff and peered over the side. The prop plane was lying in a series of pieces across the valley floor. Thinking of what could have, and very nearly had, been made Boone's stomach turn. Only a few yards away from the plane Boone spied Locke, sitting with his legs folded nearly under him and staring at the remains of the plane with the intensity of a monk. He must have crawled there while Boone had been unconscious; by squinting just so, Boone could make out the line of broken underbrush which marked the path that Locke had taken. Boone had no idea how long it must have taken for Locke to crawl that distance, or how long he had called for Boone before giving up.

"John!" he yelled down the distance which separated them, cupping his good hand around his mouth the help the sound carry. Locke turned his face up, and Boone thought that he saw something written there. Only for a second, but after if was gone Boone found himself feeling cold in spite of the fact that the day was still quite warm. "Are you all right?"

Locke nodded and cupped his hands around his mouth so that he could yell back. Whatever it was that Boone had seen on his face, it was gone now. Boone told himself that it had never been there at all. "I'm fine!" His voice broke for a second on the final word, which Boone thought that he could sympathize with. If the path that Locke had cut while crawling to the plane was any kind of indication, then the island hadn't seen fit to grant him his cure, after all. Boone hadn't believed any of that nonsense before this afternoon and still wasn't sure that he believed it now, but the fact remained that for Locke it had been as real as the law of gravity. Boone could only imagine the sort of devastation which had been left behind. After a long pause, Locke called back, "Are you hurt?"

Boone glanced down at his wrist, which was already swelling and turning a color never meant to be seen on human beings. "I hit my head," he yelled back, "and I'm pretty sure that my arm is broken, but I'm mobile."

Locke's face sagged for a moment, and Boone cursed himself for not being able to phrase things better. "That's' good!" Something sounded off in his voice, which Boone attributed to the rather pointed reminder he had received that one of them still had the use of his legs while the other definitely did not. "I don't think we can delay going to Jack any longer." There was a long pause in which Boone searched for something to say which did not involve putting his foot into his mouth as thoroughly as he had a moment before. At long last, Locke said, in a voice which was both the most gentle and the saddest that Boone had ever heard, "I'm going to need your help, son."

Boone nodded and peered at the sheer rock face that had seemed so easy to climb at the beginning of the day. That had been with two good arms and in the absence of a head wound. "I can't climb this again, John," Boone called down. "I'm going to have to find another way."

Boone thought that he saw Locke smile for a second, thought a second later that he had surely been imagining things. "Take all the time that you need. I'm not going anywhere."

There was no appropriate reply for that statement, so Boone swallowed back the platitude that had risen to his lips as he realized that Locke would only see it for what it was, anyway. He nodded once and turned away from the edge of a cliff, holding his arms out for balance as the world continued to see-saw to and fro on him. He was willing to bet that there was a nice, fat concussion lying beneath the skin to complement the cut at his hairline.

It was after full dark by the time that Boone made it back to the floor of the valley and thus to Locke. If not for the flashlight that he had shoved into the pocket of his jeans before leaving that morning, Boone was unsure that he would have been able to find Locke again at all. He wasn't even sure that he would have been able to find his way down the cliff without getting lost in the process and probably killing himself. The sense of déjà vu intensified, and though Boone was not a religious man, he could not shake the feeling that something was dogging his steps, subtly guiding him onto more stable ground when he would begin to wander off.

It was the pain from his wrist, Boone ultimately decided. He probably had more endorphins in his blood than plasma at the moment. Not to mention a headache that was making advanced trig an even more frightening prospect than it would be under normal circumstances. Clear thought was not his friend right then.

"Sorry it took me so long," Boone panted as he came back to the place in the undergrowth where he had left Locke. The apology was tumbling from his mouth before he could stop himself, though with at least one broken bone and a concussion that was still making his vision double and treble in unguarded moments Boone figured that he had earned the right to be running a little behind schedule.

Then Locke smiled his reassuring, Father-knows-best smile, and Boone forgot that he had been uneasy at all. "That's fine, son," he said, and winced for a moment. Boone started forward instinctively, but was waved off. "I'm fine." He paused, stared at Boone for a long moment, and finally whispered, "'Theresa falls down the stairs.'"

Confused and more than a touch unnerved, Boone reached up and touched at the place on his face where Locke was staring. The skin was still tacky with shed blood. After the amount that he and Locke had both seen in their hunts, this should not have been a problem. "What did you say?"

Locke shook his head, but the expression in his eyes when he looked up again was hooded. "It's nothing." He braced his weight up his hands, winced, and shook his head. "I'm going to need your help to get back to camp, Boone."

"Yeah, sure." Boone knelt down and put his good arm around Locke's back, felt Locke slide his arm across Boone's shoulders in return. Boone grunted as he took Locke's full weight upon himself. It was going to be a long trek back to the caves, and they were both already exhausted. Boone passed his flashlight over to Locke for him to hold and took a deep breath. Yeah, and they weren't going to get there any faster by navel-gazing and worrying about what had already happened.

"Ready?" Boone asked, and waited for Locke's nod before he started off. He had barely taken a step, though, before Locke gasped and jerked backwards with the force of a spasm that shook his entire body. Boone sore as they were both tumbled to the ground, twisting and only narrowly avoiding landing on his injured arm again. One blackout per day was more than enough. "Are you all right?" Boone asked, pushing himself up to his knees with one hand and returning the other to its position snugged tightly against his chest.

Locke was staring at his own legs with an expression of a person having a religious experience. He wiggled first one foot, then the other, and laughed, one of the most joyous sounds that Boone had ever heard. "Abraham and Isaac," he said in a voice so low that Boone was certain that it had been meant for Locke and Locke only. Seeming to realize for the first time had asked a question, he looked up and smiled. It was very nearly a child's smile, so light and purely happy. The expression scarcely dimmed when he glanced over Boone's wounds. Once more, he lingered over the blood that still coated Boone's face and neck. "We need to get you to Jack," he said, pushing himself back up to his feet with the ease of a man at least fifteen years younger. He took Boone's arm in his hands and turned it this way and that to examine the swelling. Even though his touch was light, pain radiated from Boone's fingertips to his shoulder. He hissed and pulled away. "You can lean on me if you need to," Locke said, and laughed a little. "Yes, you can."

The chance that he had a concussion had just gone from 'probably' to 'certainly'. Boone took a small step back, shaking his head. "How…?"

Locke's smile, if anything, grew even larger. "The island," he told Boone gently. "The island. We were tested, and we passed. I told you that there was a larger meaning to this."

Boone could not think of any tests that he had been put through over the last few days, but even that thought was washed away by a wave of elation before he could follow it to wherever it may lead. He had been raised in a land of machinery, of science, of gods that ran on the electricity and whoever had the money to buy their true names from them. The last time that he had been in a conventional church had been so that he might attend his father's funeral, and even then the God of the Bible had been overshadowed by the god of the tasteful recessed lighting. In spite of this, in spite of all this and the small lead ball in Boone's stomach which whispered that the story wasn't going to end quite so anticlimactically as that…he believed.

Boone felt a grin breaking out across his own face as he reached out with his good arm and clapped Locke on the shoulder. "You're going to have to do something about that grin before we get there," he said.

Locke laughed. "I'll do my best."

It was the middle of the night before they made it back to the caves, and the makeshift home should have been dark and littered with the dim outlines of sleeping forms. Boone had anticipated having to spend a goodly amount of time first finding Jack, as the man tended to sleep all over the place following his rounds, and then waking him up enough so that he could treat the wounds. When he saw that the patch of cleared ground in front of the caves was thick with the shadows of quickly-moving forms and that every one of their precious and not-to-be-wasted torches were blazing, Boone felt his legs drawing him to a halt independently of any signals from his brain and every hair on his body standing up as one. He glanced over at Locke and saw that every trace of the childlike, delighted smile had fallen off of Locke's face. What was left was wary, intent. Days later and still reeling, still searching for some way in which he could take this blame upon himself, Boone would realize that it was not the look of a man who was confused and searching for meaning, but instead one who knew far too much and wished that he did not.

"What…?" Boone breathed, not quite certain which question he was asking for an answer to or if Locke was even the one that he should be asking. His eyebrows drew together and he winced as his arm, which had settled into an almost companionable ache on the long walk back, flared into an agony so sudden and severe that Boone had to grit his teeth together hard to avoid crying out.

"You should find Jack," Locke said. His voice was measured and calm; Boone saw that his fingers were jangling at his sides in a manner which did not match the stillness of the rest of his body. The lead ball within Boone's stomach grew so large as to become all-encompassing, and the whispers that it had sent out hours before became screams.

"Do you know what's going on?" Boone blurted out before he could stop himself. The words hung in the air and seemed to take on a life of his own, as if they had never emerged from Boone's mouth at all but had only formed from the molecules of the island independently.

Locke looked up at him in a manner which made Boone feel as if he was in actuality being stared through, measured and weighed and dissected upon whatever mental slab Locke used to determine the worthiness of people. Or not a slab, Boone figured. An altar was more likely to be his style.

"Of course not," Locke said, returning to a version of the trustworthy and paternal smile that he had flashing on Boone ever since they had started back. "But it looks like something happened. Jack will probably have his hands full. No need for there to any other hands in the way that aren't contributing."

It was on the tip of Boone's tongue to ask what it was that Locke knew, or thought that he knew, and why it was so important suddenly that Locke keep these secrets to himself. Before he could form the words around the sudden reluctance which had locked his jaw, Locke was drifting away into the darkness as if he had been born to it, while Boone's feet were once again moving him forward without any regard for the rest of him.

Boone held his broken arm tightly to his chest and expected to have to turn his body sideways in order to shoulder through the crowd so as not to be jarred. Every one who saw him, though, was quick to step out of his way, so that he passed through the crowd without being touched by a single hand. It was then that Boone knew, before he saw Jack and Sun arguing, before he saw the bandage wrapped around Jack's arm at the elbow and the small red rose which was blooming from the center of it.

The look of such incredible compassion that Jack gave him the moment he realized Boone was there.

The from lying so still and small in the alcove that Jack had claimed as his infirmary, soaked through with deep red splotches. Those weren't roses. Boone's eyes shifted towards the place on the form where the head should have been, though he already knew that he would see hair the color of wheat and gold cascading over the edge of the airline seat that the body had been placed upon.

Boone was not aware of any change in his emotions as he walked forward, except for the fact that he felt suddenly and intensely cold. Jack and Sun both darted over to his side and were speaking to him in rapid tones as soon as they saw that he was moving forward, but Boone did not hear that either of them were saying. He walked over to the body of his sister on steady legs and flicked the blanket back from her face with hands that did not shake.

A long tear ripped its way up the side of Shannon's face, leaving one half pristine and beautiful as ever even as the other half was turned into something more fitting to the first victims of a horror show. Some attempt had been made to close the wound, Boone noted, but even without medical training he could see that one of her eyes had been torn almost completely away.

"Boone," Jack said, taking his elbow and trying to pull him away. His face was almost as white as Shannon's own. "Come away, you're hurt-"

Boone shook Jack off so that he could replace the blanket over Shannon's face. He smoothed out a crease in the fabric, leaned over the body so that he might throw up twice in quick succession, and began to cry.

---

Boone had never felt the sensation of having stitches put in without the benefit of anesthetic before. He had never felt the sensation of stitches being put in at all, in fact, not even during those much-lauded reckless teenaged years. Seemed like his stay upon Craphole Island-even by thinking Shannon's name for it Boone found that his throat was closing up and he had to struggle for a moment in order to breathe-was opening him up to a whole wide range of new experiences. He wasn't certain that anesthetic would have made any kind of difference, even, as he had yet to transition back into a place where he was feeling much of anything at all.

Jack dropped in the last stitch to close the cut on Boone's temple, tied a quick knot, and snipped off the loose thread with the pair of sewing scissors that he had pulled from his pack. "There," he said, replacing his supplies where they belonged. Jack was still deathly pale and Sun was hovering as a constant presence only a few feet away, but the prospect of having someone to care for seemed to have revived him. That was great for Jack, it really was. Boone was an old hand at that particular coping mechanism; unfortunately, it seemed to have been removed from him.

Boone realized that Jack was speaking to him. Unless he wanted the island residents to build their very first psychiatric ward in his honor, it might behoove him to listen.

"I don't think this is serious enough to need antibiotics," Jack was saying. He paused to touch at a patch of blood on Boone's neck. Since the wound itself had been cleaned thoroughly with the alcohol that had not gone towards trying to save Shannon, Boone could only assume that this was due to some unspoken guilt upon Jack's part. Boone twitched away irritably and Jack continued. "But I want you to stay close to the caves for a while, anyway, so that I can keep an eye on you. It looks like you have a pretty decent concussion, too. You won't be able to sleep for the rest of the night…" Jack trailed off as Boone made a faint snorting sound. "I didn't think that was going to be a problem, no." Jack didn't speak again for a long moment as he continued packing up his supplies. Boone caught him continuing to flick sly looks beneath Boone's way from beneath his lashes, as if were waiting for Boone to give some kind of signal that would allow him to be diagnosed and placed back within the safe bounds of a category.

His voice sounded exhausted and beaten down to his own ears as Boone asked, "How did it happen?" He reached up and fiddled with the new stitches on his head, glared and jerked away when Jack tried to pull his hand back down. The sense of foreboding in his stomach was larger than ever and only waiting for the _why_ that would complete its _what._

Jack looked relieved that Boone was finally asking at the same time that he was made anxious by having to recount it. Boone wondered, unkindly, if maybe this was the only part of being a doctor that Jack had ever failed at, having to deliver the news that he had lost a patient to the waiting families. "She went on a picnic with Sayid," Jack said, "only a short distance from here. Apparently, they wandered into some boars' territory without knowing it." Boone's head snapped up and his hand dropped, nerveless, back into his lap. Jack's eyes were dark as they stared at him, his face rendered expressionless. "They were attacked. Sayid has some fairly deep wounds that he got while trying to save your sister, but he says that when it came down to it, they only seemed to want Shannon." The lead ball exploded, leaving Boone dizzy and breathless with the poison. "She was gored so much, the internal bleeding…I tried to save her-" A note of sorrow entered Jack's voice, goddamn him. Boone thought back to his father and realized that this was the first time that he had heard a doctor deliver this news with any level of emotion greater than that required to order lunch. "But even with a transfusion she only made it about an hour after Sayid brought her back. I'm so sorry." Again with that terrible sincerity. If Boone had not been preoccupied with figuring out how he was either going to pick the lead out of his system or, worse, learn to live with it, he might even have told Jack to stop it. There was a long pause in which Boone did not need to look up to know that Jack was staring hard at him, before the doctor said, "Haven't you and Locke been trying to find the boar again for a couple of weeks now?"

"Yes," Boone said, and offered nothing else.

Jack's sigh was more the sound of a person rallying strength than one admitting defeat. He took Boone's arm in his own to examine it. Though Boone would have expected roughness after he had, essentially, told Jack to fuck off, his touch as he looked over Boone's wrist was as gentle and sure as it had been on Boone's head a few minutes earlier. "Okay," Jack said, "this is a pretty simple break. I shouldn't have any trouble setting it." He looked up at Boone. "But it's going to hurt when I pull it out straight. Probably a lot."

'Abraham and Isaac,' Boone thought, and was not certain if he wanted to laugh, cry, or be sick again. He heard himself say, "That's fine."

Jack nodded, though he was still giving Boone that speculative look that Boone did not like at all, and placed his hands upon Boone's arm again in preparation for jerking the bone out straight. "Wait!" Sun darted away from her solemn position at Jack's shoulder and returned a few seconds later with a short stick about the same circumference as Boone's thumb. "For the pain," she explained.

Boone quirked an eyebrow at her, uncomprehending, and Jack said, "I don't think that herbal remedies are quite what we need right now."

Sun gave them both a look similar enough to the one that Shannon could flash when she was feeling particularly annoyed to make Boone's throat close up. "This is not an herbal remedy," she said, and passed the stick over to Boone. When he had taken it with his good hand, she said, "Bite down on that."

Jack looked chagrined. "Right." He waited until Boone had slipped the wooden stick between his teeth, then jerked Boone's arm out with all his strength.

Boone bit down upon the stick until he heard both it and his jaw creak in unison, and his yell echoed around the caves. The pain as immediate, exquisite, and almost worse that it had felt to break the arm in the first place. He thought that he may even have grayed out for a moment, because when he came back to himself he was breathing hard and Jack had moved to a place a few feet away, where he had placed his hands upon his knees and was watching Boone with a guarded expression. Boone pulled the stick from his mouth, noting the deep tooth marks that he had put into the bark, and found his eyes being drawn to the bandage wrapped around Jack's arm. Smalls spots of blood were still creeping through the fabric, and Boone wondered how much of that blood Jack had poured into Shannon before someone had forced him to stop. If the pasty look to Jack's face or the slight tremble in his hands was any indication, then it had been a lot.

"I need to splint that," Jack said, nodding towards Boone's arm. He began pushing himself back to his feet, wobbling slightly, but Sun returned and pushed him back down by placing her hand upon his shoulder. Boone saw that she was carrying several slender sticks and someone's shirt that had been torn into long strips.

"I will do that," she said. "You need to rest."

Jack nodded, though his face suggested that he was doing so more in an effort to appease Sun than any real agreement. As Sun knelt down beside Boone and began wrapping his arm, Jack said, "I didn't get the chance to ask you how you were hurt, Boone."

'Abraham and Isaac.' It continued to echo on repeat through Boone's mind, keeping him vibrating at a speed so quick that he was amazed he had even managed to sit still for this long. He glanced towards Shannon's body, which was lying quiet and nearly forgotten on the airline seat that had served as Jack's operating table, like Sleeping Beauty after introduction into a Wes Craven film. The fingers of Boone's good hand slowly curled themselves into a fist, making Sun glance up at him with worry in her eyes, as he realized that there was someone that he needed to speak to very badly. What would happen after that, Boone was not certain. His mind skipped away from the subject every time that he tried to think that far ahead.

Jack had followed all of these movements with his eyes. His expression went from something guarded to something desperate and almost hungry. Boone wondered if, back in the real world, Jack had reacted to the deaths of all of his patients like this. "Boone," Jack said in a tone that sounded like both a reminder and a warning.

Boone jerked his eyes back to Jack with difficulty. "There was another plane," he said. "Some kind of small craft. It looked like it crashed here a few years ago. It was perched on a cliff, and I was exploring it because Locke was…I was exploring it." A subtle change tightened the skin around Jack's eyes, but it was too late for Boone to take the words back. "It started to tilt over the edge, and I had to run out of there pretty quickly. The door caught me."

"And you found this plane while the two of you were hunting boar." Boone could have read any inflection that he wished into Jack's voice, into his eyes.

"Yeah." Boone looked down to where Sun was finishing up with his arm so that he would not have to look at either Jack or the cooling meat that had once been his sister.

"You have anything else that you want to tell me, Boone?" And Jack's voice was gentle, so gentle, Boone imagined that he could cut people open without any scalpel at all, but only by knowing just how to use that voice.

'Abraham and Isaac.' It was the only the thought that counted, that willingness to give it all, but the stories never said that the sacrifice ended there, did they? They never said that there weren't other things going on behind the scenes. Boone felt cold all over, and in that moment he wanted nothing more than to tell Jack everything, about the half-heard transmission that kept getting shoved into the back of his mind by the weight of everything else that had happened since then, about the hatch that they had been squatting on their heels and staring at every day fro the nearly three weeks when they were supposed to be hunting. About the fact that there was a lingering and illogical part of Boone's brain which said that Shannon had died because of him, that he was meant to be the sacrifice all along, and that Locke had known this. He opened his mouth, snapped it closed only a second later. Jack was still watching him with an expectant expression and raised eyebrows.

"No," Boone said at long last. "I don't." He had spent far too long on waiting for leaders to issue instructions to him, bouncing from one to the other. And, okay, he might fuck it up, God knew that he had a long track record of doing just that, but he had to at least make an attempt to keep family business within the family right now.

Jack nodded and looked as if he were ready to age ten years in a moment. "All right," he said. "I doubt that you'll want to sleep, anyway, but stay awake and near the caves until at least noon tomorrow…today." Jack shook his head as if he was having trouble staying focused. "I'll have some more questions for you then, all right?" His look still said that he knew Boone had more information than he was sharing, but wasn't ready to go for a direct attack until he could figure how these pieces fit together to make a whole. Sun left Boone's side in order to put her arm around Jack's shoulders and help him to his feet.

"You need to rest," she told him in a voice which, while gentle, was nevertheless underlaid with a steel that Boone was glad he was not being asked to go against.

"I'll be ready," Boone answered Jack's question, staring down at his newly splinted arm. The swelling was going down, but already he could see ugly black bruises spreading across the skin. Sun led Jack away, and Boone went to sit beside his sister's body. He didn't cry again, and the sun had long since risen before he allowed himself to be moved.

---

It was exactly one minute past noon by Boone's watch before he bolted away from the caves, one location held intently in his mind. He bypassed Jack entirely, as the other man had apparently decided that whatever deadline he was going to give Boone in order to get his head together had already passed and was heading his way with an expression that was compassionate, but also focused. Boone had slipped away into the jungle before Jack could reach him. The shadows swarmed close around him immediately, reminding him of all the ways in which the man who had scrambled away from the plane's wreckage was not the man moving without almost no sound beneath the trees now.

And in the end, it wasn't difficult at all. Boone had come to know the jungle like he did the inside of his own house during his and Locke's trampings through it over the past several weeks, and he had had a good idea of where Locke was going to be as he set out. With the afternoon sun coming down through the trees and creating a checkerboard pattern of light and dark across his face, Boone stepped out into the small clearing that marked the hatch. He was not surprised to see Locke sitting with his back against a tree on the opposite of the clearing and staring at the hatch with an intent expression upon his face. What did surprise Boone, however, was the gentle smile that Locke turned upon him as soon as he realized that Boone was there. "Hello, son. How are you feeling?"

And a week ago the promise of acceptance and trust in that smile would have been Boone's undoing and had him catching spiders and flies on command if that's what Locke had wanted, but that was a week ago. 'Before I was poisoned,' Boone thought in a dizzy and not entirely rational fashion. He wished he could tell himself that the poisoning had been a sudden affair, but he was not that stupid.

Boone answered Locke's question with the glare that it deserved, before he took a moment to gather his nerve and spit out, "It was supposed to be me, wasn't it?"

Locke looked surprised and even a little hurt. Boone knew the first to be an utter lie but believed the second, and it was not the concussion that was making the world go wavy and sick all around him. "Supposed to be you doing what, exactly, Boone?"

Boone took a deep breath. If the feeling of faith being built for the first time had been exhilarating, then the sensation of it being torn down again was one of the blackest things that he had ever experienced. "Don't lie to me, John," he said, in a voice which belonged to a different person. This one, far apart from childish threats, would mean it when he told someone that he was going to kill them. "Whatever you do right now, do not lie to me." Locke continued to look at him, silent. The expression on his face made Boone want very badly to throw away any pretense at reason and lunge at Locke right then and there. It said that Locke was not sure what Boone was going through at the moment, but he was certain that if he just let him rail for a bit Boone would wear himself out, come to his senses, and be reasonable again. 'No,' Boone felt like saying. 'No, I don't think that's going to happen at all.' The look suggested that beneath it all Locke still thought of Boone the way that everyone seemed to, as a toddler who had to be minded at all times lest he should bump his head on a sharp corner and launch into a tantrum. And anyway, Boone felt as if he were seeing clearly for the first time in a good long while, perhaps in forever.

"My sister," Boone said in a voice which was far calmer than the one he really wanted to use, and would have used if he had been capable of. That voice would have shattered Locke into a million pieces at the sound of a note. "Shannon. She's dead." Locke's face underwent a scarcely perceptible change, far unlike the shock that should have been there and which Boone had still been scarcely hoping to see. "And I'm alive, but that's not the way that it was supposed to be, was it? That wasn't the plan."

Locke's face shifted, turned into an expression of sorrow. Boone thought that at least half of it was even real. "Boone-"

Boone did not smile. He bared his teeth. "Abraham and Isaac," he snapped. "I might be lapsed, but I'm not so far gone that I don't know how that story could have turned out." He gestured towards the place where Locke was sitting. "I see that the little relapse you were having seems to have cleared itself up."

Locke's face had retreated into a blank, calm mask. Boone wondered if Locke was thinking of all the dangerous things that Boone knew, now that the sacrifice had gone awry, and if he was afraid. God, Boone hoped so. "We each have our parts to play in the chain of events on this island, Boone. I don't control yours, and I didn't control your sister's, though I am deeply, deeply sorry-"

"Tell me another one," Boone interrupted in a voice which made him sound far more like a snotty teenager than the tone he had been aiming for. Well, he had been through a very bad 24 hours and was only now realizing that he was far more than the pawn in whatever game Locke was playing then he was the knight. Minor slip-ups could be forgiven. Boone shook his head. "Because if there is such a thing as destiny, then I get the feeling that yesterday I kicked mine right in the balls."

Locke was watching him very closely. Boone could not escape the feeling that what Locke was really doing was measuring the distance between them, and he took a small step back. Self-preservation was not cowardice, he told himself, and recklessness was not bravery. If these were lessons that he had to figure out on his own because his mentor was a sister-killing son of a bitch, then so be it. "Think about what you are doing, Boone."

"I have, John." Boone forced the fingers of his good hand to unclench themselves from a fist and ignored the blood that ran down his palms, ignored the way that he still wanted nothing more than to throw himself across the hatch at Locke's throat. A toddler, always needing to be minded in case he flew into a passion and hurt himself. It ceased now. "You should probably think twice about coming back into the camp for a while," Boone said in a low, careful voice, and walked back into the jungle.

He varied the route that he ordinarily would have taken on his way back to the caves, feeling edgy and jumpy in spite of the calm that he had displayed at the hatch. He had seen enough crime movies to understand what happened to the bit players who came up with miraculous information in the second act. Boone wondered, only for a second, if he was doing the right thing, before he thought of what had been done to Shannon's face and knew that he was.

Jack still looked as if he were two steps away from dying on the spot and someone had neglected to inform him, but his eyes were clear and sharp. He straightened as he saw Boone reenter the caves and approach him. "I was looking for you."

"Good." Boone glanced towards the makeshift infirmary, but Shannon's body had already been moved. He doubted that much blood had been doing a lot to ease the natives' nerves. Boone looked back towards Jack. "Because there are a lot of things that you need to know."

End


End file.
