Lost fic: Vigilantes [Ben, Locke and Hurley gen]

[amatara]

Almost finished a first, very rough draft for my Yuletide assignment (which is proving to be a fun, if challenging, change from what I usually write) so I’m leaving it to stew for a day or two before I start reediting. Meanwhile, I can make good on my promise for more Lost fic!

So, I think I’ve finally reached a point where I can begin to write Locke & Ben in tandem, even if it’s just exploratory snippets rather than anything epic. In my re-watch, I’m almost up to Life and death of Jeremy Bentham, probably tackling it tonight if time allows. Knowing what I know now, that post-resurrection Locke isn’t Locke after all, watching these last episodes has been leaving me a little downcast. Up until this point I (wrongly) recalled that, after Ben moves the island and leaves Locke in charge, there’s still a few happy moments for Locke there, one or two days where he’s just the leader of his people and at least has something to carry him though the rest. But, apart from a few stray conversations, there’s actually not much comfort there at all. Oh, John.

Anyway, here be fic to ease the sorrow.


Title: Vigilantes
Summary: If it could only be as simple as Locke, Ben, and Hurley, out camping. Except, after Alex is killed, and before Ben turns the wheel, nothing's simple anymore. Least of all finding Jacob. Missing snippets from “Cabin Fever”, after Locke suggests to set up camp for the night.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Spoilery for the events up to Cabin Fever, and very vaguely foreshadow-y for some of what follows.
Author’s notes: Thanks to Selena, for suggesting the characters and setting. “Optimum combination of characters”, indeed!  At that point, I had no idea what you were referring to, did I? *grin*

Vigilantes


I.

“He takes first watch?” Hurley asks, still sounding breathless. His tone, Ben notes, is less hostile than surprised, and of course Hurley’s tone never lies. How that comes as a relief and not a nuisance, is as clear a warning of his own mental state as anything. By all rights, he should be fighting it, of course, except he doesn’t know if he wants to. Yet.

“Rest easy, Hugo. I’m sure John sleeps with a knife,” Ben says, dryly, from where he’s loading the rifle. But his heart’s not in it; not that Hurley is likely to realize. John, on the other hand…

Truth be told, he can’t name the last thing his heart was in, short of… well. Short of summoning monsters for vengeance. Fighting Widmore – yes, but, before today, more out of necessity than anything else. Pulling the trigger on Locke – most definitely not. He‘d hoped it would, if not feel like a victory, then at least lift some of the numbness he seemed to have been dragging around for – weeks? Months? But of course, that had been an idle hope. And of course, he should have known that, too.

“We’re on the same side now, Hugo,” John replies, stoking up the campfire with patient nudges, feeding it twig by little twig. “Actually, we’ve always been. Some of us just didn’t realize it yet.” He doesn’t look at Ben when he says it, and Ben doesn’t look back. Instead, he clicks the barrel in place and puts the weapon across his knees, watching the firelight skitter across the metal.

“If you say so, dude,” Hurley shrugs, but he still pulls a face as he lowers himself next to his backpack. “So, um – you’re cool with him, like, trying to kill us, and blow up our camp, and – stuff?”

“What’s done is done, Hugo,” John says, retrieving a bottle of water to take a long swallow. He offers the bottle to Hurley, who shakes his head. “We start with a fresh slate. No grudges.”

Ben wants to say wrong, but now isn’t the time.

II.

While John’s little speech could hardly have reassured him, Hurley’s still snoring the second he puts his head down. More than that, he does it less than two yards from where Ben’s sitting, keeping watch, gun a steadying weight in his hands.

He’d be jealous, he thinks, if he had any jealousy left, but he must have ran out. That, and to watch Hurley sleep is strangely relaxing – not at all like watching John sleep, which is like counting the beats between lightning and the next thunderclap. But Hurley, never mind the wary remarks, the little sideways glances, has to be physically incapable of sustaining distrust for over an hour.

Of course, Hurley’s attitude is exactly the kind that gets one killed here. The kind the island has no patience with. Ben would know, having catered to the island’s impatience on more than one occasion. He’d know, having borne the brunt of it too.

Sleep of the innocent, he muses. He’s sure he didn’t sleep like that, even when he was still an innocent. Or maybe he never has been.

Innocents don’t take their mothers’ lives, after all. Or their daughters’.

III.

He forgot about the blood. At least, until he’s holding his hands up to the fire, finally giving in to the craving for warmth. They’re filthy, streaked with splotches of red that, in the firelight, could be any color at all. For a second, he’s tempted to leave them like that, but there’s such a thing as too much symbolism.

“Yours?” John asks, lifting his head from his backpack like he’s been awake the whole time. He says it off-handedly, as casual as if he were asking about the weather. Except nothing John says ever is.

“Hers,” Ben says, scrubbing his knuckles, then his wrists, with a handkerchief that was still impossibly clean when he found it. “Just thought I’d solidify the metaphor, John.” He tries to make his voice sound just a little fragile when he says it – or maybe he doesn’t try at all. It doesn’t matter either way. He stares absently at a bruise on his forearm, large and yellowish and none too recent, that somehow he doesn’t know where he got it.

“Here,” John says, using his free hand – the one that’s not holding a knife – to dig through his pockets, then throw something to Ben. He makes no attempt to catch it, instead scoops it up from the grass. It turns out to be a smallish flask, filled with something that, when he unscrews the cap and smells it, is clearly alcohol but not any more definable than that. “Warm yourself up,” John adds, a flicker in his eyes that could be any emotion, or none at all.

Ben lifts his own eyes to the canopy, more because it beats meeting John’s than because he actually expects to see something there. It’s been a while since he slept out in the open, without even a tent for shelter, so yes, he's cold, but he knows for a fact he wasn’t showing it. John’s doing better, he thinks, in getting under one’s skin – even though his skin John never had much trouble getting under in the first place.

“Thank you,” he replies, in the tone he knows John knows means something else entirely, “but I’ll pass. Besides, it’s an illusion that alcohol does anything but lower the body temperature, rather than raise it.”

If he didn’t know any better, he’d swear John had to smile at that. “Never underestimate the power of illusion,” John says, with a toss of his head. He closes his eyes, leans back on the jacket he’s using as a pillow. Ben relaxes his hands, minutely, around the gun on his lap. “By the way, Ben –” John pipes up, without opening his eyes. “What is it with you and pain?”

“I –” He blinks. “Excuse me?”

“I keep trying to figure it out, but I can’t. All I can tell is, you’re not just indifferent towards it, you go searching it out. If pain doesn’t find you, you find it. Why? As a bargaining chip? As – penance?”

“Why is everything penance to you, John?” he retorts, with more vigor than he feels. “I assume you believe being shot and left in a mass grave was penance, too?”

John’s eyes open again, but don’t try to find his. “As a matter of fact, I do.” And of course, Ben doesn’t say how he’s suspected it was penance for him, more than John. Or perhaps not more, but –

“You know how they say what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger?” He curls his fingers around the trigger, feeling the chill of it against his skin.

John pushes himself up, just slightly. “It’s… what they say, yes.” But he sounds intrigued despite himself.

“Well, it doesn’t, John,” he says, with an intensity that takes him by surprise. “What kills you doesn’t make you stronger. It dulls the feeling, but not enough. Never enough. So don’t get too attached to anything in this place. Not even the island itself. Especially not the island. Because when you do, sooner or later, something – or someone – will ask it as a sacrifice.”

“I’m aware of that,” John answers, with perfect sincerity, and Ben smiles a joyless little smile heavenwards.

“No, John. I don’t think you are.”

IV.

“So why do you call him John, anyway?” That’s Hugo’s voice, coming not from beside him, where it should be, but somewhere above him, which can’t be right at all. Ben jerks back to awareness with a start, to a sputtering fire and a leg that’s numb from sitting.

“Whoa – ease up, dude,” Hurley mutters, as he grabs for the rifle. “No need to, like, use that, or anything. I thought you were awake, I just got up to, you know… Call of nature and all?”

Ben nods, warily, the rush of adrenalin giving way for exhaustion. That, and a dull ache at his midriff that, impossibly, reveals itself as hunger. Which is fitting, really. You start out by missing something – rest, food, a loved one, faith – then in the end, once you’ve passed through the loss, you no longer even realize it’s there. And then something reminds you.

“What were you saying?” he asks, rubbing his calf with one hand while he tries to remember the question.

“Locke,” Hurley clarifies, still looking a little wide-eyed, but sitting back down anyway. “Why d’you keep calling him John? No one calls him that but you.”

“Well, then, maybe that’s your reason right there,” Ben sighs. “Or something else. Some claim that calling people by their first names – their real first names – gives you power over them. You do know that myth, don’t you, Hugo?” He says it slyly, without even knowing why, but Hurley’s face is a cautious blank.

“I know it, dude.” Hurley’s pupils glint in the firelight. “I just don’t think it’s playing fair, that’s all.”

V.

“Get some sleep,” John says, in a tone that’s not actually gentle, but not quite the poised neutral that it was. Ben holds out the gun, relaxing his grip only when John’s hands have tightened around it, and even then, it feels like losing something. Like handing over the weapon means letting down his guard – which is exactly what it means, but it’s bad enough without John knowing. “Let go of the rifle, Ben,” John says, like he does know. Well, of course he would. “Don’t worry. It’ll still be here tomorrow.”

He doesn’t add So will I, but Ben knows it’s said anyway, between those murky lines of meaning that are John’s alone. For once, that thought’s not quite a burden.

Sleep is an illusion, he thinks, but when he puts his head down, Hurley’s rhythmic breathing in his ears, it sneaks up on him like rain in the night.

There is tomorrow. And they’ll still be here.

 

Comments

[kass]

You start out by missing something – rest, food, a loved one, faith – then in the end, once you’ve passed through the loss, you no longer even realize it’s there. And then something reminds you.

Oh, wow. This is awesome.

[amatara]

Thank you so much! *beams*

[selenak]

Ohhhhh, I like it, very much indeed. Captures Ben's numbness after the event, with strong feelings flickering through. Locke asking him re: pain (and also Locke saying that yes, he sees it as a penance) was such a good touch, as was Hurley's response to Ben's first name taunt. You really write the three of them suberbly.

[amatara]

Thank you! To be honest, writing from Ben's POV (I'm still finding my way with Locke, so I don't think I could manage his just yet) felt like a bit of a gamble here, because it's always hard not to write Ben as more fragile than he is, and writing him from his own perspective made that even riskier. So I'm really happy you think I pulled it off! *beams* As for Hurley, I love how he never gets rational concerns get in the way of saying exactly what he's thinking, which is a trait Ben is hardly accustomed to. Oh, and that last bit was my own attempt at in-character h/c - be it involving a gun, not a piano as in yours. *g*

By the way, re-watching Jeremy Bentham last night, I realized only now how masterfully the writers pulled that off: showing us a supposedly resurrected Locke before they proceed to have Ben strangle him (ohh, that scene!) so that, even if we register the tragedy of it, it doesn't quite affect us as it would have otherwise - because hey, Locke's fine, isn't he? And then upon re-watch, it's only those glimpses of the Sideways 'verse that keep it from being unbearable; without those, that scene would have killed me, rather than almost killed me. And now I wonder if I'll keep having that "Boo! Get lost, impostor!" reaction everytime I see Fake Locke being treated as the real one for the rest of this season. Probably so. :)

[selenak]

One of the reasons why I felt downright warm about Jack (to my surprise) by the time he died was that the show gave him not one but two scenes in which he told Smokey he was dishonouring Locke by wearing his face and was no John Locke. Mind you, I like Smokey as a character in his own right, but I still resent him as a Doylist level because I suspect the major reason why Locke died was because the producers wanted Terry O'Quinn as the Big Bad for the final season, but they didn't want to evilfy Locke. I sometimes wonder about that Sideways 'verse to ours where Smokey gets played by Titus Welliver througout and Locke survives. :)

That strangling scene was unbearable intense the first few times around when I didn't know about Smokey; haven't rewatched it since. "I shall miss you, John." Oh Ben, you self-sabotaging idiot.

[amatara]

Well, I do have a thing for deeply tragic endings like Locke's (or Londo's, or, to some extent, Snape's) so I don't think I resent him being killed in that way, or at that point in canon, even if I find it hard to bear. I also love the poetic irony in the fact that Locke, who had a miserable life, a miserable death, was used in more ways than he could imagine, and was able to spend far less time on the island than he had deserved, could still look back on his own life and feel at peace with it. Whereas Ben, who also had a miserable past, but spent many good years on the island too, first as a leader in his own right, then under Hurley's wing, and at least tried to take his destiny into his own hands, apparently had too many regrets to find that peace. Which isn't to say that, like you, I'm tempted to wonder how things would have turned out if Locke had lived. (Which is a question I'm sure Ben asked himself often enough, after it was just him and Hurley left. Self-sabotaging idiot, indeed... *shakes head tearfully*)

As for the strangling scene: I'm still trying to figure out at which point exactly Ben decided to kill Locke. I don't think he entered that room with the intention to kill (though, being Ben, I don't doubt he had already given the matter some thought and decided that yes, he would kill Locke if he had to) but I'm not sure what caused him to change his mind. It could either be the mention of Sun (and the wedding ring, and John's promise not to bring her back, which of course Ben couldn't allow) or the mention of Eloise Hawking (which was the final part of the puzzle he needed to find the island again), and I really can't pinpoint anything in Michael Emerson's performance that gives it away. I suspect it was the revelation about Sun, mostly because I don't see Ben killing Locke out of pure jealously at that point (after all, what's left to be jealous about?) so simply having learned about Eloise doesn't seem like a good enough reason to me. But desperation and the fear of not getting back to the island in time if they did it Locke's way (which would mean keeping that promise to Jin) would definitely have been an incentive for Ben.

[selenak]

Well, Ben came armed with disinfectants, so he was at least prepared for that eventuality. But I don't think he was already determined, either. I even think that his shock at the sight of Locke attempting suicide and intensity at persuading him to live was 90% not faked.

However: Locke mentioning Eloise - whom he couldn't know about in normal ways - proved to Ben yet again that Locke was chosen by Jacob/the island in a way he was not. (After all, nobody mentioned anything about BEN going/needing to go back, and he knows very well Widmore never managed to once he was banished. (Little could he know...) And suddenly there's that old "did I go through everything just so that JOHN ends up as the chosen one after all?!?" feeling. Add the timing factor and Sun, and he gives in to his worse self.

Also: I haven't rewatched for a while, but isn't Ben aware that flight 815 had Christian Shephard's body on board and could that if they recreate (some) circumstances for the return, they need a dead body with an emotional connection to at least one of the passengers?

[amatara]

Did Ben have the disinfectants on him as he entered!? LOL, now there's something I hadn't considered before! I'd actually imagined him leaving Locke's body in there while he calmly popped out to the local supermarket to buy the stuff he needed to dispense of the evidence. Maybe that was why he got rid of his jacket so quickly when he hauled Locke to the chair - he just didn't want the whole kaboodle of spray bottles and towels and gloves to totter out of his inside pocket! That would have been a bit of a giveaway. ;)

Locke and Eloise: your arguments are definitely good ones, but I'm still not sure. Partly because of all the jumping back and forward in time, I still have that whole off-island period mixed up in terms of who was aware of what at which point in time, and who was pursuing which goals for what reason. One of the things I'm not sure about is where Ben knew Eloise from (was the still on the island when he joined the Others? no idea) and therefore which significance it had to him to hear her mentioned by Locke. But I think we're in complete agreement about the gist of it: while I don't believe Ben, at that point in time, would have killed Locke purely out of spite (he'd done exactly that, after all, on the island, and look where it got him), spite could certainly have been the thing that pushed him over the edge. Without that last flash of jealousy, he might even have tried to convince Locke to talk to Sun anyway (after all, it's Ben - he always has a convincing argument up his sleeve, whether a true one or not) instead of just dismissing Locke's way - and therefore Locke - as a waste of time and/or more trouble than it was worth.

Re: Christhan's body: as I said, the timings are still kind of muddled to me, but I don't think we're given any clue that Ben knows about the needing-a-body thing before Eloise tells them. So if he knows, he doesn't spill it to anyone else until he's had it confirmed by her. Also, it's a bit of a mystery to me how Ben even knows the mechanics of being able to return to the island - assembling the same group of people, etc etc. I think he was aware about that part of it, at least, before he met Eloise, so it's quite possible he knew the rest as well.