Title: "You Will Rise"
Author: monimala
Fandom: "Lost"
Rating/Classification: SAC, slash/het, Sun and others (guess who!).
Disclaimer: Bad Robot! Title from the Tom McRae song of the same name.
Summary: All Sun wants.
Notes: For Michy, because you've been awesome. Thanks for everything, Babe.
She plucks flowers from their stems as she walks, bending the stalks and crushing the blossoms between her fingertips. The sickly-sweet scent sticks to her skin, the sap clinging to her as she rolls the petals against her palms. And she moves towards the sound of the waterfall.
It isn't like the ocean at all. Like Jin whispering, constant, in her ears. No. It is loud, a rush, words crashing together and falling like the plane from the sky. Like the others as they argue. Like the Arab when he hefts his ax and thunders into the jungle after a fight with the American who always looks as though he's mocking the world.
She follows the water. It is her guide.
Sun wipes her hands on her shirt. It is filthy, stiff and crunchy with sea salt, and all she wants to do is strip it off and submerge herself...to be clean for the first time in days. No...months. No...lifetimes.
Somewhere between home and this island, she started thinking in English. She can't remember when. Only that she needed her mind to be hers and hers alone.
She knows, now, that Jin never understood her. Not even when she dreamed in Korean.
She used to watch "Baywatch" in their flat and shape her mouth like the pretty blond girls'. Now, when she touches her lips they are cracked and dry. And all she wants to do is scream loud enough to shake the birds from the trees.
The pool is secluded, the banks strewn with wreckage. Some of it is in neat piles and other bits were left untouched. She overheard the woman, Kate, tell the boy and his sister that none of them wanted to pick up the dolls. So, still they lay, their synthetic hair tangled, looking like death. She kneels down, closing the wide blue eyes of the nearest one, and the bristly plastic eyelashes are like pins that are too dull to draw blood.
She wonders...are her own eyes the same? Blind. Unseeing. Dull.
No.
Because she *does* see.
Bodies shadowed in the water, half-hidden by low-hanging palm fronds and vines. Laughter runs deep beneath the falls. Pure, crystal clear and drinkable.
They are the same bodies that tore apart Jin and Michael...that clasped them and kept them from further harm. Light and dark. Yin and Yang. Not so angry, not so mocking at all.
Oh, she thinks. How strange.
How beautiful.
Sawyer's fingers dig into Sayid's shoulders before skating down his arms and resting in his hands. At first, she thinks they are play-fighting...then dancing ...but they kiss, open-mouthed and still laughing...and, "oh," she whispers.
She fumbles with buttons.
Her shirt drops away, into the grass.
The men look up. Calm, dark, eyes and a wide, wolfish, smile.
"I am Sun," she tells them.
"I know," whispers the one.
"Well...rise and shine," drawls the other.
And it isn't like the ocean at all.
--end--
October 28, 2004.