Current mood:

accomplished

Fic: Under the Twinkling of a Fading Star (Lost, PG)
Fic!

Title: Under the Twinkling of a Fading Star (PG)
Fandom: Lost
Disclaimers: Not mine, etc.
Notes: Since we hardly know anything about the characters in "Lost" yet, and since there's so much going on in the pilot which is largely inexplicable, now feels like the perfect time to have fun with AUs. So, partly inspired by yahtzee63's recent What-the-hell-is-the-story-with-this-show poll, this is the wildest AU explanation I could come up with that still fits with what we know so far.


***

The first thing Jack became aware of as he woke up was the noise. Thrumm, thrumm, thrumm – the unmistakable low pulse of something artificial. Man-made. An engine?

An engine. Plane or helicopter? It didn't matter. Rescue. Thank you, thank you, thank you God.

He opened his eyes, but the glare that assaulted him made him close them again straight away. Behind his eyelids the vague impression of a person standing at his side lingered.

"You found us," he said. His mouth was dry and his voice emerged as a rasping croak. "Thank God you found us."

"You were never lost."

The voice was male and even, almost toneless. It was also familiar, although Jack couldn't place it straight away. He tried to open his eyes again, and this time had more success. He was lying on his back in a large, brightly lit space. A black vaulted roof arched high above him, making him think – incongruously – of the dome of an observatory. Not a plane or a helicopter, then. But he could still hear the thrumming engine noise, and feel its low vibrations penetrating him where his body was in contact with the cold, hard surface on which he lay.

His head hurt, and a sharp pain flared in his right arm when he tried to move it at all. Had he broken it when the plane crashed? No – he remembered waking up in the jungle, finding the other survivors on the beach. He would have known then if his arm was injured. Then, in a rush, the memories returned – meeting Kate, going to find the transceiver, the pilot, the creature outside the plane. He'd grabbed on to the pilot's ankles in a desperate attempt to stop him being snatched away, and felt himself being swept upward too. He remembered a brief surge of terror, then nothing.

"There's something – something big – in the jungle. It got the pilot, maybe it got the people I was with – you have to look for them – "

"There's no need to be concerned. They escaped. The creature has been neutralized."

Jack twisted his head to try and get a better look at the speaker, and frowned. It was the older man he'd seen among the crash survivors – the one who looked like a vacationing businessman. "I know you. You were on the beach."

The man nodded in acknowledgement. "Locke," he said.

"I'm –" Jack started to introduce himself, but his name was lost in a fit of coughing. When Locke lifted a metal tumbler to his lips, he drank thirstily.

"Doctor Jack Shephard," Locke completed. "We know who you are."

Jack couldn't remember giving his surname to anyone he'd met since the crash – then again, everything that had happened in last couple of days was quickly coalescing into one long, nightmarish blur. He doubted he could name more than five or six of his fellow survivors, but he guessed it made sense that as the only doctor in the group he had quickly gained a degree of local fame.

The water was having a reviving effect – he must have been more dehydrated than he'd realized. Jack sat up, rubbing his aching limbs. His head hurt, too, but he was thinking more clearly with every passing minute. He replayed the start of the conversation in his head, trying to tease more meaning from it. "You said – we were never lost? So the coastguard or the navy or whoever were coming for us the whole time?" Jack shook his head, grinning. Already the dull anxiety he'd felt on the island – what if they never find us – seemed distant and irrational. This was the twenty-first century, after all. There wasn't a square foot of the planet hidden from the all-seeing eye of some orbiting satellite.

"You were never lost," Locke repeated in that same, oddly flat voice. "We've been observing you closely."

Jack stared at him, not understanding. "You arrived with the navy? No, you couldn't have – I saw you on the beach –"

Then he looked past Locke, registering for the first time the third presence in the room. It was tall, taller than a man, and looked like a jellyfish, if a jellyfish could walk around on dry land by supporting its weight on its tentacles. The jellyfish-thing swayed a little as Jack stared at it, and the bulbous, translucent sac which sat on top of its forest of thread-like fronds bobbed in a non-existent current. It had nothing even slightly resembling eyes, ears or other sensory organs, but as Jack stared at it, he had the unsettling feeling it was staring back at him.

"We do not mean you harm," Locke said and, as he spoke, the jellyfish-thing flashed a series of colors, iridescent blues and greens and yellows. The sequence of colors was synchronized exactly with Locke's voice.

The jellyfish-thing glided forward, undulating toward Jack as if being carried on a gentle wave. As it moved, it began to raise a section of its tentacles, extending them toward him. Horrified, Jack scrabbled back, out of its reach. He reached the edge of the raised stone plinth, and instinctively leaned on his right hand to balance himself. His arm immediately gave way in a burst of agony, and he fell off the plinth and on to the floor.

Left arm over his head, body curled into the fetal position, Jack was distantly aware that Locke and the jellyfish-thing were standing on either side of him like bizarre bodyguards. Or maybe psychiatric nurses.

This, he thought clearly, is more than I can reasonably be expected to deal with.
He passed out.

***

When he woke up for the second time, Jack was on the stone plinth again, lying on his back and looking up at the black vaulted ceiling above. He sat up – cautiously – and saw that Locke and the jellyfish-thing were standing exactly where they had been when he lost consciousness.

He studied his surroundings, this time in more detail. The room he was in had no windows and no visible doors. It was made of a material which looked to Jack like black marble, flecked with tiny, silvery specks. The walls, the vaulted ceiling, even the raised plinth he lay on, all appeared to be made from the same substance. He couldn't see a single join – or, for that matter, how the room was being lit.

Sitting on the end of the plinth, at his feet, he saw a tray. It was loaded with a selection of fresh fruits, something that looked like a piece of cooked fish, and another tumbler of water.

He selected one of the fruits and bit into it. It was juicy, and just tart enough to make his mouth water. The wrinkled skin was waxy in his hand. He swallowed and said, "I'm not hallucinating."

"No," Locke said.

The jellyfish-thing flushed grapefruit-pink, then quickly became translucent again. Jack looked at it. Keeping his voice steady, he said, "Aren't you going to introduce us?"

"We don't use names the way you do," Locke said. "We lack your concept of individual identity."

"You have a name," Jack said. "What does that make you? One of them or one of us?"

For a second, he thought Locke looked uncomfortable, but the expression was gone almost before Jack could analyze it. "We anticipated that direct communication might eventually be necessary, and realized the differences in our physical forms would make that difficult. Elements of our genetic material were therefore introduced to this reconstruction with the intention of creating an intermediary. An interpreter, if you like."

Jack studied Locke in silence for several minutes. He looked human – at least, the parts of him Jack could see did – but there was a curious blankness in his eyes which was –

Alien?

Jack put the fruit down, half-eaten.

"So what did you do? Swoop down in your flying saucer and beam us off the plane right before it crashed? Did you make it crash? Or just make us think it did?"

The jellyfish's tentacles quivered, and its sac flushed red for an instant. Jack wondered if that meant it was annoyed. "The plane did crash," Locke said. "We were not responsible. You are not prisoners."

"Fine. I'd like to leave the island, please."

"That will not be possible."

"You begin to see my problem, here."

The jellyfish began to move, gliding across the floor toward one of the room's blank walls. Once there, it raised a cluster of tentacles and waved them over the smooth black surface.

The entire wall shimmered and disappeared.

Where the wall had been, Jack now saw the beach where the survivors had gathered. Where the black marble floor of the room ended, golden sand began. He couldn't tell if what he was looking at was an image or an actual opening. He wondered if he could simply walk through the wide gap and out on to the shore.

Some distance along the beach, the plane's mid-section jutted out of the sand, like the skeletal remains of some fantastic sea-monster washed ashore in a storm. Around it, Jack watched a group of the passengers sifting through the detritus of the crash. He saw several he recognized, including the pregnant girl and the guy who'd helped him move her, but as he kept looking, he realized he was searching for one person in particular. Where was Kate? Maybe the creature in the jungle had got her too. Maybe she was lying injured somewhere, or worse –

Then he saw her, sitting apart from most of the rest of the group, down at the shoreline. Jack exhaled.

"Your survival is of great importance to us," Locke said.

"Why?"

"Because you are the last of your kind."

Jack looked at him. "Because –? No. I'm sorry, but no. We flew out of Sydney and we were going to L.A. Big cities. Visible from orbit. Lots of people."

"Once. No longer. They are gone."

The idea was so crazy that Jack laughed out loud. "You're telling me all of humanity was wiped out in the past three days? If this is your idea of a practical joke, I'm not falling for it. What is this, intergalactic Candid Camera?"

The jellyfish moved in front of the window on to the beach, and the light from the late afternoon sun shone through it, causing a strangely beautiful rainbow-effect within its fluid sac. It fluttered its tentacles slowly; they moved in rhythmic waves, like a Hawaiian dancer's grass skirt.

"Life," Locke said, "is a rare occurrence. We are an old race, and although we have spent most of our history searching for other intelligent species, we have found few. You were only the fourth."

"I feel special."

Locke ignored him and went on, "We rejoiced when we detected your transmissions. We turned all our attention to your world, far as it was from our own, eager to learn more about you. But our observations quickly gave rise to concern. All the data indicated that this planet was undergoing a rapid climactic shift. Our scientists debated the matter fiercely, but although we could not explain it, we could not deny the evidence. The changes we were observing were so extreme that it seemed unlikely your species would survive them."

Global warming; El Nino; melting ice sheets and four hurricanes hitting Florida in as many weeks. The thoughts were uncomfortable ones. Jack said nothing.

"We decided we had a duty to aid another intelligent species, if we could. We built ships, and we came." Locke looked down. The jellyfish became blue-purple. It looked like a giant, floating bruise. "We were too late. The catastrophe had come and gone. The planet was uninhabited, and uninhabitable."

Jack found his gaze drawn to the beach scene. The sea and the sky were blue; small, white clouds scudded overhead and the palms moved in a gentle wind from the ocean. It was all reassuringly serene. "I don't understand."

"We mourned you, and then we set about the task of healing the planet. It was –" Locke hesitated: "—an immense task. We excavated ruins, in search of viable genetic samples, and reconstructed species wherever possible. But we had little data to guide us. We could not tell which species had belonged in which environments before the catastrophe. We could not even be certain if the species we were reconstructing had existed alongside yours, or if they had become extinct eons ago."

"The polar bear," Jack said. "And the creature in the jungle…"

"Errors on our part," Locke said. "Now rectified. We knew no better."

It made sense. It couldn't make sense. An awful suspicion had begun to form in Jack's mind. His mouth was suddenly dry. "When you say you reconstructed species – you mean you cloned them, don't you?"

"Yes."

"Then where –" He didn't want to ask the question, but it was stark and inescapable. "Where did we come from? Me. Kate. The people on the plane."

"Your species had been numerous, but your genetic material is unstable and degrades quickly after death. We searched, but all the samples we recovered were tainted in some way. We continued to look. Then, when we were about to give up, we discovered a vessel which predated the catastrophe. It was at the bottom of a deep ocean trench, where it had come to rest when it crashed."

Jack closed his eyes and shook his head. He wanted Locke to stop talking, to shut the hell up. But the voice went on, soft and without emotion.

"The great pressure and lack of marine life at that depth had created an environment where decay was almost impossible. In addition, a wide variety of objects – the craft's cargo, we assumed – had been well preserved. The purpose of most of these artifacts was mysterious to us, but we studied them until we could manufacture good facsimiles. Most importantly, we retrieved 130 samples of unique genetic patterns."

Jack looked up sharply. "There are only 48 of us on this island."

"On investigation, we found not every pattern was viable. Some of our early experiments were –"

"No," Jack interrupted angrily. "No. No, this is all total crock, and I'll tell you why." He pulled down the collar of his shirt, showing Locke the top of his uninjured arm. "You see these tattoos? I got them in college. They're not part of my DNA. So if I were really a clone of myself, I wouldn't have them. But I do. Explain that."

Locke looked at him, and Jack thought he could see, for the first time, an emotion in his expression. He wished it was anything other than the one he saw. Locke's eyes were sad.

The jellyfish shifted from blue-purple to a deep green. It moved away from the window – or screen or whatever the hell it was – and took up a position in front of a blank section of the room's black marble wall. It gestured again with its tentacles.

Another, smaller section of the wall shimmered and dissolved. This time, however, it didn't reveal a view of the beach. Instead, Jack was looking at what seemed to be a large fish tank, filled with murky water and no fish. He stepped closer, curious in spite of himself.

"The conditions at the bottom of the trench favored the preservation of organic material. We were able to learn much from analyzing what we found. When we began the task of reconstruction, we sought to mimic it as closely as possible."

The tank, Jack saw, was about seven feet long, and about three high. It had, he noted uncomfortably, the dimensions of a coffin. Now he was closer, he saw there was a dark shadow suspended in the soupy fluid. It was gnarled and twisted, like a tree which had been felled into stagnant water and had rotted there. Branches twisted around each other, taking on unnatural shapes. One looked like a leg, another a head, another uncannily like an arm.

An arm which bore faint etchings exactly like those on his own skin.

Jack turned away.

"I believe you," he whispered. "I believe you, okay? Take it away."

Locke said, "We are sorry for your distress. We had hoped this would not be necessary."

"I'm a doctor," Jack said, then corrected himself: "Was a doctor. I've seen a lot of cadavers. Never thought I'd have to look at my own."

He heard a faint sound behind him, and when he turned around, the wall had become opaque again. Feeling suddenly tired, drained of all strength, Jack went back to the raised plinth where he had woken up and sat down on its edge.

"Can you make any more of us?" he asked.

"We can reconstruct more individuals from the 48 genetic patterns salvaged, yes."

"No. I meant, other than the 48 you've already…" He hated to use the word, but couldn't think of a better one: "…made."

The jellyfish fluttered its tentacles and turned a sickly yellow. Locke said, "As we stated, the genetic material of your species is –"

"—unstable. Yeah, I got that." So forty-eight was the magic number. "There were six billion of us. Six billion different people. We had cities that went on for miles. So many people, and every one of them unique…" He looked at the jellyfish-thing, then at Locke. "What happens now? To me, I mean."

"That is your decision. If you feel the rest of your species is ready to know what you now do, you can return to them. If you believe they are not, you can remain here, and observe them."

Jack nodded, slowly understanding. "That's why you separated me, isn't it? You don't understand our psychology well enough to know whether we could take knowing the truth, so you decided to try it out on one of us. That way, if I flipped, you'd only have to clone one of us again."

Locke didn't say anything, but he didn't deny it.

Jack got up and went back to the window wall. Evening was drawing in, and the shadows of the survivors as they walked along the sand were lengthening. Kate was still sitting where she had been before, down at the shoreline. The tide was coming in, and every third or fourth wave was touching her feet. She didn't seem to have noticed. Instead, she was looking out at the ocean. Looking, Jack guessed, for a world she hadn't realized yet was gone.

"How long?" he asked. "How long has it been? I need to know that."

"It took time to travel here," Locke said. "More time to stabilize your world's climate and to collect and reconstruct extinct species. Longer again to make this island capable of supporting an ecosystem. And more time once that had been achieved to locate and reconstruct your species."

"How long?" Jack pressed.

"Five thousand years."

On the beach, Kate leaned forward and rested her chin on her hands. She probably thinks I'm dead, Jack thought. Then: I am dead. I've been dead for five millennia.

Forty eight people to build a world from. He wasn't sure it was possible. He wasn't even sure he wanted to try. Yet, as he looked at the people on the beach, picking through the wreckage, comforting one another, he felt a sudden tug drawing him back to them. All they had was each other, even if they didn't know it yet.

He looked at Kate, and made his decision. Then, without looking back at Locke or the alien, he stepped through the opening in the wall and began to walk purposefully up the wide, pristine beach.

***