Nightmares
May. 8th, 2008 11:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tellshannon815Title: Nightmares
Fandom: lost
Characters: Ben, Libby, Ana Lucia, Michael, Walt, Karl, Alex, Sawyer, Locke, Sayid, Desmond, Claire, Hurley, Charlie
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Spoilers right up through Season 4, especially 4x09. Mentions of character deaths. Speculation about Libby's backstory.
Pairings: slight Alex/Karl
Summary: The above characters reflect on the nightmares that haunt their sleep. (Note: Sayid's section is set pre-rescue.)
Inspired by final flashforward scene in 4x09.
Ben doesn’t know how Widmore has the gall to sit there in front of him and talk about the nightmares he’s having. Widmore’s not the one who sees his daughter die in front of him night after night. And Widmore’s not the one who hears himself deny Alex to Keamy over and over again, claiming that she means nothing to him.
I didn’t kill your daughter, Widmore had said. You did. And ever since he said that, that’s what Ben’s been seeing in his nightmares. He see himself holding the gun to Alex’s head, knowing what’s going to happen, but powerless to prevent it. Just as he had been that day. Ben thought by denying Alex that Keamy would lose all interest in her. He’d always prided himself on the way he managed to get other people to do what he wanted and let them think it was their own idea. And the one time that had failed him was the one time it really mattered.
Alex had always understood the way Ben operated. He had to believe that she had understood his intentions, that she knew he loved her.
But Ben knows that the only way the nightmares will stop is when he avenges Alex’s death.
When he has killed Penelope.
And Ben hopes the thought of that will end up giving Widmore nightmares of his own.
Libby used to have recurring nightmares about her husband, ever since he went overboard the Elizabeth during that argument. Sometimes she relived that day. Other times she would see herself strangling him, stabbing him, shooting him. Some around her wouldn’t have blamed her if she really had.
Her father had her admitted to Santa Rosa after that, along with the guy who kept muttering numbers to himself and the overweight guy who kept talking to someone who wasn’t there.
She kept seeing herself killing her husband, because she believed the accident was her fault. Eventually, Dr. Brooks managed to convince her that it wasn’t. The nightmares ceased, and eventually Libby was discharged.
But what they never knew was that Libby sometimes used to have nightmares about Desmond, the guy she’d given the boat to for his sailing race and hadn’t been seen since. At the time, she’d just been desperate to get rid of the boat with all its reminders. Now she wonders if the boat is jinxed.
No one knows what happened to Desmond. But Libby’s determined that she’ll find out, so the nightmares will go away.
When Ana Lucia closes her eyes, she dreams of Zack and Emma, reaching out to her, asking for help. Sometimes she dreams of Goodwin, pleading with her not to kill him. Sometimes he is already dead, chasing her through the jungle with the stake still embedded in his chest.
And sometimes she dreams of Nathan, staring at her with dead eyes. I trusted you to keep me safe, Ana Lucia. And you failed me.
Libby tells her she only did what she had to do. But Ana knows she failed them all by continuing to put her faith in Goodwin. The cop, whose role in life it was to protect people from the bad guys, had been the one to place them all in danger.
The night after Shannon’s death, she appears to Ana Lucia in a vision, blood pouring from her mouth. Then the face changes to Danny, saying You killed our baby, Ana Lucia.
She hasn’t had that nightmare in a long time. But she has it all the time now.
Ana knows that Henry Gale is one of Them.
But she can’t bring herself to kill him.
Because she knows what she’ll see in her nightmares if she does.
Michael didn’t think about the consequences at first when he killed Ana Lucia. All he saw was the chance to get Walt back.
Libby had been a mistake. But Hurley was right. There would have been no other way.
The first time Michael thinks about the consequences of his actions is when Walt makes an offhand remark about how people will react to their story when they get home. Michael freezes. He knows they can never tell anyone anything. Because people will know what he did.
At night they appear to him, Ana Lucia and Libby. You’re going to pay for what you did, Michael, Ana informs him. Libby appears sorrowful as she asks What would your son think of you if he knew?
No! Michael yells. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Libby.
In the daytime, when he’s with Walt, Michael manages to bury the nightmares. Knowing he has the love of his son is enough to sustain him. But one night, Walt hears Michael shout out in his sleep. He asks who Libby is, and why Michael is sorry. Michael had never intended that Walt would know what he had done. But he hadn’t banked on it coming out like this. Walt’s a perceptive kid. He can’t be fobbed off with a lie.
Maybe, somewhere in his mind, Walt will understand that Michael did it for him.
But the look on Walt’s face as he takes it all in is worse for Michael than any nightmare could possibly be.
Walt is too afraid to go to sleep at all.
He didn’t know Ana Lucia and Libby. But he sees his father turn the gun on them every night. Sometimes, Michael turns the gun on Walt.
I did it for you, Michael had said the day he confessed all. Walt wonders if in some way that makes him to blame, since if it hadn’t been for Walt, Michael wouldn’t have killed those women. Michael tells him that it isn’t true, that it was because of the Others, but the nightmares don’t stop. They don’t even stop when Walt leaves Michael and moves in with his grandmother.
Every day, Walt’s grandmother asks him what’s on his mind. But Walt can never explain. Because he doesn’t want her to see what he sees every night.
Every morning, Karl wakes up convinced that the last few days have been a dream, that he is back in Room 23. The video flashes before his eyes, repeating its eerie message: God loves you as He loved Jacob.
Sometimes he sees the dead birds, the ones that appeared when the kid was in there. He knows this is crazy. Walt’s gone now, and the birds never appeared after he left.
And sometimes, he thinks it’s Alex coming to rescue him, but instead he sees Ben. You thought my daughter was coming to get you, he says. She’s not coming, Karl. It’s just you and me.
When he wakes from the Room 23 dream, it always takes him a few minutes to realise that he’s not there any longer, that it was all just a dream, that Alex got him out of there.
It’s much easier for him to come to himself after that when Alex is with him. Alex is the one good thing in Karl’s life since his parents brought him here when he was a kid. When Alex is there, the video and Ben cannot hurt him any more.
Nothing can hurt Karl when Alex is around.
But what he doesn’t know is that Alex is facing night time demons of her own.
Alex doesn’t remember her mother.
Daddy’s always told her that her mother died when she was a baby. When she got older, she started asking more questions, but her father doesn’t want to answer them. Alex tries asking other people, like Richard, but nobody will tell her anything.
One night she has a dream. She’s a young baby again, being rocked in the arms of a woman she believes is her mother. Alex tries to look at the woman’s face, but before she gets a chance, she is snatched from the woman’s arms. Then she hears screaming in a language she doesn’t understand.
She has the dream again the day Sayid Jarrah tells her she looks like her mother. Alex couldn’t understand the remark at the time. If her mother had been dead for as long as Ben claimed, how could Jarrah have known her?
The day Ben tells Alex that Danielle Rousseau is her mother, she has the same dream again. Except this time, she can see her mother’s face. And she sees the face of the person snatching her from Danielle’s arms.
The face is Ben’s.
And Alex finally understands what her nightmare is about.
The man in Sawyer’s nightmares never used to have a face.
He’d often wondered what the man looked like, the man Sawyer who had conned his parents out of their money. In Sawyer’s nightmares, the man is there, a shadowy figure in the background as his father turns the gun on his mother and then himself.
As Sawyer grew older, he began to have dreams in which he killed the man he blamed for what had happened to his family.
But never once did he see the man’s face.
He’d about given up hope of finding out who the man really was. Especially after what happened with Hibbs. He sure as hell never expected to meet the son of a bitch on this goddamn island.
Sawyer barely remembered his mother. But from what little he did, and from his dreams of her, he believed she loved him. But when he gave the letter he’d written all those years ago to Cooper, the man had laughed in his face. He’d told Sawyer that his mother had begged to be taken away from the life she was leading.
This man had haunted Sawyer’s nightmares for many years. And with one careless remark, he’d now stolen his dreams, too.
Sawyer still has the dreams. But now, the man he sees is Cooper.
He thinks he preferred it when the man didn’t have a face.
In Locke’s nightmares he is always paralysed again. He tries to put one foot in front of the other, but he is unable to move. When he awakes from the dream he always has to prove to himself that he can still move his legs.
Sometimes he dreams that he has been forcibly removed from the island against his will. He awakes, somewhere on the mainland, to find his legs beginning to seize up. We have to go back, he cries. But no one listens to him.
Once, the night before he and Boone discovered the Beechcraft, he thought that dream was about to become a reality. But then Boone became the sacrifice that the island demanded, and Locke regained the use of his legs.
He’d dreamed about the Beechcraft before they found it, and something about Boone’s past that turned out to be true. Now Locke fears that these nightmares will also come true.
He’s willing to do anything to prevent escape from the island.
He doesn’t expect anyone else to understand his reasons.
But he’ll do whatever it takes to stop his nightmare becoming a reality.
For Sayid, the worst thing had always been not knowing.
As long as he was unsure whether Nadia was alive or dead, his subconscious was able to supply him with any number of visions. Sometimes she came back to Tikrit for him, only to be executed. Sometimes he shot Omar, only to look down and see that he had in fact shot Nadia with his own gun.
He thought the nightmares would stop when he found Nadia in Los Angeles. But he still doesn’t know if what he was told was even true. And he can’t ever know for sure while he’s still on this island.
He has to get to L.A., to find out what has really happened to Nadia. Because it’s the only way the dreams will go away.
Desmond wishes what he was experiencing was a nightmare. But this one isn’t going to go away when he wakes up.
He’s seen Charlie electrocuted, drowned while rescuing Claire, shot through the throat with an arrow from one of Rousseau’s traps. Every time, he’s managed to prevent it. But he knows he can’t keep doing that forever. Ms Hawking told him all about course correction. Desmond can try all he likes, but Charlie’s fate is sealed.
Desmond wonders if Charlie’s been having nightmares of his own since the day he broke the news. Charlie hasn’t said anything. But he probably wouldn’t tell Desmond anyway.
He tried to change the past once, right after he turned the fail safe key. He failed. Now he knows he can’t change the future, either.
Night after night, Desmond is awakened by visions of Charlie’s death.
And he knows there’s only one way the visions will stop.
Claire still remembers the nightmare she had right before she was taken by Ethan. She remembers Locke telling her it was all her fault, how she should’ve kept the baby.
After Charlie’s death, she has another nightmare. But this time it is Richard Malkin who appears to her.
I warned you, Claire. I told you you mustn’t allow another to raise your
baby.
What are you talking about? Claire asks.
I’m talking about Charlie Pace.
Charlie? Claire stammers. What?
I warned you that your baby must be raised by you and you alone. And you didn’t listen to me. You let Charlie Pace play an active role in raising your baby.
She looks at him, and realises that he has one black and one white eye, as Locke in her earlier nightmare.
You’re not real! Claire yells. Leave me alone.
Malkin disappears. But the horror remains.
And Claire finally knows what the psychic meant.
Hurley should be used to seeing dead people.
He saw the victims of the deck collapse often enough when he was in Santa Rosa. But he hadn’t known them. They were just shadowy faces to him.
And they weren’t really there. This one is.
Every night, Charlie comes to him. He tells Hurley that he still has work to do. He gives him messages to give to the Oceanic Six, like the one about Jack not raising the baby.
Nobody believes Hurley.
They tell him he’s just having nightmares. But Hurley knows it’s real. He’s not crazy. And he’s not having bad dreams. Charlie’s really here. He’s telling Hurley what will happen if they don’t take any notice of the messages.
Hurley sees it all.
And he knows that they have to go back.
He just doesn’t know how to convince them.
Charlie hadn’t known it was possible to still have nightmares when you were dead. He still remembers the old nightmare he had on the island, the one where his mother appears to him and tells him he has to protect the baby. She’s appearing to him now. But now he has to protect all of them.
He’s starting to understand now how Des must have felt. Because now he’s having the same visions. He knows what will happen if they don’t go back. He’s warned Hurley, but no one’s taking Hurley seriously.
Charlie’s going to have to go back himself. He has to warn the Oceanic Six.
His mother told him once he’d be the one to save the family.
Now he’s fulfilling her prophecy. Because he’s going to be the one to save the island family.
Fandom: lost
Characters: Ben, Libby, Ana Lucia, Michael, Walt, Karl, Alex, Sawyer, Locke, Sayid, Desmond, Claire, Hurley, Charlie
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Spoilers right up through Season 4, especially 4x09. Mentions of character deaths. Speculation about Libby's backstory.
Pairings: slight Alex/Karl
Summary: The above characters reflect on the nightmares that haunt their sleep. (Note: Sayid's section is set pre-rescue.)
Inspired by final flashforward scene in 4x09.
Ben doesn’t know how Widmore has the gall to sit there in front of him and talk about the nightmares he’s having. Widmore’s not the one who sees his daughter die in front of him night after night. And Widmore’s not the one who hears himself deny Alex to Keamy over and over again, claiming that she means nothing to him.
I didn’t kill your daughter, Widmore had said. You did. And ever since he said that, that’s what Ben’s been seeing in his nightmares. He see himself holding the gun to Alex’s head, knowing what’s going to happen, but powerless to prevent it. Just as he had been that day. Ben thought by denying Alex that Keamy would lose all interest in her. He’d always prided himself on the way he managed to get other people to do what he wanted and let them think it was their own idea. And the one time that had failed him was the one time it really mattered.
Alex had always understood the way Ben operated. He had to believe that she had understood his intentions, that she knew he loved her.
But Ben knows that the only way the nightmares will stop is when he avenges Alex’s death.
When he has killed Penelope.
And Ben hopes the thought of that will end up giving Widmore nightmares of his own.
Libby used to have recurring nightmares about her husband, ever since he went overboard the Elizabeth during that argument. Sometimes she relived that day. Other times she would see herself strangling him, stabbing him, shooting him. Some around her wouldn’t have blamed her if she really had.
Her father had her admitted to Santa Rosa after that, along with the guy who kept muttering numbers to himself and the overweight guy who kept talking to someone who wasn’t there.
She kept seeing herself killing her husband, because she believed the accident was her fault. Eventually, Dr. Brooks managed to convince her that it wasn’t. The nightmares ceased, and eventually Libby was discharged.
But what they never knew was that Libby sometimes used to have nightmares about Desmond, the guy she’d given the boat to for his sailing race and hadn’t been seen since. At the time, she’d just been desperate to get rid of the boat with all its reminders. Now she wonders if the boat is jinxed.
No one knows what happened to Desmond. But Libby’s determined that she’ll find out, so the nightmares will go away.
When Ana Lucia closes her eyes, she dreams of Zack and Emma, reaching out to her, asking for help. Sometimes she dreams of Goodwin, pleading with her not to kill him. Sometimes he is already dead, chasing her through the jungle with the stake still embedded in his chest.
And sometimes she dreams of Nathan, staring at her with dead eyes. I trusted you to keep me safe, Ana Lucia. And you failed me.
Libby tells her she only did what she had to do. But Ana knows she failed them all by continuing to put her faith in Goodwin. The cop, whose role in life it was to protect people from the bad guys, had been the one to place them all in danger.
The night after Shannon’s death, she appears to Ana Lucia in a vision, blood pouring from her mouth. Then the face changes to Danny, saying You killed our baby, Ana Lucia.
She hasn’t had that nightmare in a long time. But she has it all the time now.
Ana knows that Henry Gale is one of Them.
But she can’t bring herself to kill him.
Because she knows what she’ll see in her nightmares if she does.
Michael didn’t think about the consequences at first when he killed Ana Lucia. All he saw was the chance to get Walt back.
Libby had been a mistake. But Hurley was right. There would have been no other way.
The first time Michael thinks about the consequences of his actions is when Walt makes an offhand remark about how people will react to their story when they get home. Michael freezes. He knows they can never tell anyone anything. Because people will know what he did.
At night they appear to him, Ana Lucia and Libby. You’re going to pay for what you did, Michael, Ana informs him. Libby appears sorrowful as she asks What would your son think of you if he knew?
No! Michael yells. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Libby.
In the daytime, when he’s with Walt, Michael manages to bury the nightmares. Knowing he has the love of his son is enough to sustain him. But one night, Walt hears Michael shout out in his sleep. He asks who Libby is, and why Michael is sorry. Michael had never intended that Walt would know what he had done. But he hadn’t banked on it coming out like this. Walt’s a perceptive kid. He can’t be fobbed off with a lie.
Maybe, somewhere in his mind, Walt will understand that Michael did it for him.
But the look on Walt’s face as he takes it all in is worse for Michael than any nightmare could possibly be.
Walt is too afraid to go to sleep at all.
He didn’t know Ana Lucia and Libby. But he sees his father turn the gun on them every night. Sometimes, Michael turns the gun on Walt.
I did it for you, Michael had said the day he confessed all. Walt wonders if in some way that makes him to blame, since if it hadn’t been for Walt, Michael wouldn’t have killed those women. Michael tells him that it isn’t true, that it was because of the Others, but the nightmares don’t stop. They don’t even stop when Walt leaves Michael and moves in with his grandmother.
Every day, Walt’s grandmother asks him what’s on his mind. But Walt can never explain. Because he doesn’t want her to see what he sees every night.
Every morning, Karl wakes up convinced that the last few days have been a dream, that he is back in Room 23. The video flashes before his eyes, repeating its eerie message: God loves you as He loved Jacob.
Sometimes he sees the dead birds, the ones that appeared when the kid was in there. He knows this is crazy. Walt’s gone now, and the birds never appeared after he left.
And sometimes, he thinks it’s Alex coming to rescue him, but instead he sees Ben. You thought my daughter was coming to get you, he says. She’s not coming, Karl. It’s just you and me.
When he wakes from the Room 23 dream, it always takes him a few minutes to realise that he’s not there any longer, that it was all just a dream, that Alex got him out of there.
It’s much easier for him to come to himself after that when Alex is with him. Alex is the one good thing in Karl’s life since his parents brought him here when he was a kid. When Alex is there, the video and Ben cannot hurt him any more.
Nothing can hurt Karl when Alex is around.
But what he doesn’t know is that Alex is facing night time demons of her own.
Alex doesn’t remember her mother.
Daddy’s always told her that her mother died when she was a baby. When she got older, she started asking more questions, but her father doesn’t want to answer them. Alex tries asking other people, like Richard, but nobody will tell her anything.
One night she has a dream. She’s a young baby again, being rocked in the arms of a woman she believes is her mother. Alex tries to look at the woman’s face, but before she gets a chance, she is snatched from the woman’s arms. Then she hears screaming in a language she doesn’t understand.
She has the dream again the day Sayid Jarrah tells her she looks like her mother. Alex couldn’t understand the remark at the time. If her mother had been dead for as long as Ben claimed, how could Jarrah have known her?
The day Ben tells Alex that Danielle Rousseau is her mother, she has the same dream again. Except this time, she can see her mother’s face. And she sees the face of the person snatching her from Danielle’s arms.
The face is Ben’s.
And Alex finally understands what her nightmare is about.
The man in Sawyer’s nightmares never used to have a face.
He’d often wondered what the man looked like, the man Sawyer who had conned his parents out of their money. In Sawyer’s nightmares, the man is there, a shadowy figure in the background as his father turns the gun on his mother and then himself.
As Sawyer grew older, he began to have dreams in which he killed the man he blamed for what had happened to his family.
But never once did he see the man’s face.
He’d about given up hope of finding out who the man really was. Especially after what happened with Hibbs. He sure as hell never expected to meet the son of a bitch on this goddamn island.
Sawyer barely remembered his mother. But from what little he did, and from his dreams of her, he believed she loved him. But when he gave the letter he’d written all those years ago to Cooper, the man had laughed in his face. He’d told Sawyer that his mother had begged to be taken away from the life she was leading.
This man had haunted Sawyer’s nightmares for many years. And with one careless remark, he’d now stolen his dreams, too.
Sawyer still has the dreams. But now, the man he sees is Cooper.
He thinks he preferred it when the man didn’t have a face.
In Locke’s nightmares he is always paralysed again. He tries to put one foot in front of the other, but he is unable to move. When he awakes from the dream he always has to prove to himself that he can still move his legs.
Sometimes he dreams that he has been forcibly removed from the island against his will. He awakes, somewhere on the mainland, to find his legs beginning to seize up. We have to go back, he cries. But no one listens to him.
Once, the night before he and Boone discovered the Beechcraft, he thought that dream was about to become a reality. But then Boone became the sacrifice that the island demanded, and Locke regained the use of his legs.
He’d dreamed about the Beechcraft before they found it, and something about Boone’s past that turned out to be true. Now Locke fears that these nightmares will also come true.
He’s willing to do anything to prevent escape from the island.
He doesn’t expect anyone else to understand his reasons.
But he’ll do whatever it takes to stop his nightmare becoming a reality.
For Sayid, the worst thing had always been not knowing.
As long as he was unsure whether Nadia was alive or dead, his subconscious was able to supply him with any number of visions. Sometimes she came back to Tikrit for him, only to be executed. Sometimes he shot Omar, only to look down and see that he had in fact shot Nadia with his own gun.
He thought the nightmares would stop when he found Nadia in Los Angeles. But he still doesn’t know if what he was told was even true. And he can’t ever know for sure while he’s still on this island.
He has to get to L.A., to find out what has really happened to Nadia. Because it’s the only way the dreams will go away.
Desmond wishes what he was experiencing was a nightmare. But this one isn’t going to go away when he wakes up.
He’s seen Charlie electrocuted, drowned while rescuing Claire, shot through the throat with an arrow from one of Rousseau’s traps. Every time, he’s managed to prevent it. But he knows he can’t keep doing that forever. Ms Hawking told him all about course correction. Desmond can try all he likes, but Charlie’s fate is sealed.
Desmond wonders if Charlie’s been having nightmares of his own since the day he broke the news. Charlie hasn’t said anything. But he probably wouldn’t tell Desmond anyway.
He tried to change the past once, right after he turned the fail safe key. He failed. Now he knows he can’t change the future, either.
Night after night, Desmond is awakened by visions of Charlie’s death.
And he knows there’s only one way the visions will stop.
Claire still remembers the nightmare she had right before she was taken by Ethan. She remembers Locke telling her it was all her fault, how she should’ve kept the baby.
After Charlie’s death, she has another nightmare. But this time it is Richard Malkin who appears to her.
I warned you, Claire. I told you you mustn’t allow another to raise your
baby.
What are you talking about? Claire asks.
I’m talking about Charlie Pace.
Charlie? Claire stammers. What?
I warned you that your baby must be raised by you and you alone. And you didn’t listen to me. You let Charlie Pace play an active role in raising your baby.
She looks at him, and realises that he has one black and one white eye, as Locke in her earlier nightmare.
You’re not real! Claire yells. Leave me alone.
Malkin disappears. But the horror remains.
And Claire finally knows what the psychic meant.
Hurley should be used to seeing dead people.
He saw the victims of the deck collapse often enough when he was in Santa Rosa. But he hadn’t known them. They were just shadowy faces to him.
And they weren’t really there. This one is.
Every night, Charlie comes to him. He tells Hurley that he still has work to do. He gives him messages to give to the Oceanic Six, like the one about Jack not raising the baby.
Nobody believes Hurley.
They tell him he’s just having nightmares. But Hurley knows it’s real. He’s not crazy. And he’s not having bad dreams. Charlie’s really here. He’s telling Hurley what will happen if they don’t take any notice of the messages.
Hurley sees it all.
And he knows that they have to go back.
He just doesn’t know how to convince them.
Charlie hadn’t known it was possible to still have nightmares when you were dead. He still remembers the old nightmare he had on the island, the one where his mother appears to him and tells him he has to protect the baby. She’s appearing to him now. But now he has to protect all of them.
He’s starting to understand now how Des must have felt. Because now he’s having the same visions. He knows what will happen if they don’t go back. He’s warned Hurley, but no one’s taking Hurley seriously.
Charlie’s going to have to go back himself. He has to warn the Oceanic Six.
His mother told him once he’d be the one to save the family.
Now he’s fulfilling her prophecy. Because he’s going to be the one to save the island family.