Title: Empty
Rating: PG
Summary: She doesn’t speak, save to answer his precious few questions, and the few times he glances over at her, when her face is turned toward his just enough so that he can see into her eyes, he finds them empty and dull, barely reflecting the light at all. They look, but they no longer see, not the trees around them, not the ground beneath her feet, not even him beside her.
Disclaimer: I do not own Lost. At all. I wish but alas...
Author's Note: For zelda_zee, who asked for Sayid fic. Now, I have written Sayid a grand total of once before this, but I gave it a try, so I hope this is even remotely what she had in mind, or even remotely sounds like Sayid. I'm also using this for my psych_30 claim, #29: repression.



They stand next to each other, separated by mere feet, as their boots crunch through the leaves and grass, as they push through the undergrowth and follow the coastline that will take them back to their camp. She doesn’t speak, save to answer his precious few questions, and the few times he glances over at her, when her face is turned toward his just enough so that he can see into her eyes, he finds them empty and dull, barely reflecting the light at all. They look, but they no longer see, not the trees around them, not the ground beneath her feet, not even him beside her.

When the sun begins to set over the horizon, painting the sky in hues of pink and yellow and orange, he stops, dropping the backpack he is carrying to the ground and taking a seat on a large rock. “We should stop here,” he tells her as she comes to a stop as well, dropping down the grass and beginning to stare at the ground.

He watches her, but she doesn’t look back, instead tracing small circles in the dirt with her finger. Her actions grow more and more disconnected with every passing hour, and he wishes that he could comfort her, that he could offer her some kind of reverie from her grief and misery. He knows, all to well, however, that there is no such solution.

“We can make the rest of the journey in the morning.” She nods, but she doesn’t look up. He thinks back, to this time merely one day before, when she had looked him in the eyes and told him that if Jin were gone, she would no longer care about anything, about her own life or anyone else’s. The fact that she is sitting with him now is a testament to the opposite. She had fought. She had won.

He pulls two granola bars from his bag, suddenly aware that neither of them have eaten in at least a day, and offers one to her. She looks up, but only enough to see the food he is holding out to her. He wonders if she’ll accept it, thinks back to the days that Shannon went without food or water or sleep. But she does take it, on shaky hands, rips away the wrapping and bites into it without saying a word.

“Sun…” Her face is drawn as she looks up at him, her eyes deep pools of emotion, too many inside to pick out just one. He sees grief, sadness, pain, and exhaustion, but also guilt, fear, and rage. She is looking at him now, but her gaze is empty. He has no doubt, after several silent moments, of memories of eyes just like those, sad and empty, that those very emotions are being echoed back to her by his own eyes.

“I am sorry.”

She lowers her gaze slowly, her face hardening. He can feel her anger, her grief, even from across the twenty feet that separate them, even as her face is turned away from him.

“I should never have brought you here. Either of you,” he continues, lowering his head as well, his guilt all but consuming him. It had been an ill-conceived plan, he can see that now. He had allowed his own rage and grief to control his actions, actions which had brought about consequences that he did not know if he could live with. “I should not have-”

“Stop.” Her voice is hoarse, from screaming, from crying, from choking back sobs and curses, from suffocating on unsaid words and unshed tears. She sounds very much like she looks: ragged, tired, distant. She shakes her head slowly and it appears as though it takes all the energy left in her body to do so.

“We all made choices,” she tells him, the words catching in her throat. “You, and I, and Jin. I do not blame you for them.” A deep darkness passes in front of her eyes, the kind that he has seen before, but in people much older, people much different than Sun. “Nor him. Nor I.”

“We will return for him,” he says, barely above a whisper.

She lays herself down on a patch of grass stiffly and puts her arm behind her head, staring straight up at the canopy of branches and stars above her head. “It does not matter,” she whispers back. “He is already gone.”

As silence reclaims them, she lowers her head and closes her eyes. He finds himself unable to look away from her, unable to accept her forgiveness, unable to recognize that he could not comfort her or bring her some kind of peace. She has not asked for it, and he doubts she will, knows she will retreat into herself, into her pain, and possibly never come back out again. He has seen it before, which makes him all the more determined to not allow the same fate to befall Sun.

But there is nothing that he can say, no comfort that she will accept from him now. With distance, with time, possibly, but now he feels that the kindest thing that he can do for her is allow her to sleep, to slip away from this day, from her loss, and have at least some small form of peace.


Sun heard the sound of gunfire before it was anywhere near her. She tried to hold the pistol steady, but her hands wouldn’t stop shaking. She closed her eyes and tried to force the panic from her mind, tried to push her heart back down her throat. Every moment that passed made it harder for her to breathe.

The gunfire grew louder, more rapid, and she was sure that they were getting closer. Her stomach twisted in a painful knot, and she began to sweat.


When they came, they did so with very little warning. A small splash of water, the crash of a door thundering open, and then she was face to face with a woman that she had never met, who spoke to her as if they were friends, claimed to know who she was. Even as she aimed the gun, her hands still unsteady, the woman told her that she wouldn’t fire.

Inside of her mind, Sun saw the bodies of Jin, her husband, a man that, despite their problems, she loved more than anything in the world, and Sayid, a good friend and an admirable man in almost every way imaginable, laying on the beach, where this woman and her people had surely left them.

“I know you’re not a killer,” she says.

And I know you are, Sun thought, finding that the gun had finally steadied in her hands.

Without a second thought, she pulled the trigger.


“Jin!”

Her arms felt heavy, tired as she swam away from the boat. The gunfire had stopped and the deep, penetrating silence of the night air consumed her. The boat was moving in the opposite direction, taking them with it. She was no longer watching it, and she did not care where it went.

“Jin!” She received no answer from the darkness, only more silence.

“Sun! Sun, where are you?!”

Her head jerked left, then right in rapid succession. “Sayid?!” she called out, treading water in the middle of the ocean. “Sayid!”

The water around her pulsed, crashed against her a little harder and she turned around just as he came into view. She could barely see him, the moonlight doing little to illuminate the water around them, but he was there and he was solid and she clung to him for her life, floating with him in the water as her breath returned to her.

“Are you alright?” he asked, checking her for obvious injuries as best he could. “I heard gunfire.”

“I’m fine,” she replied, telling him all that he needs to know. He nodded, and she began to glace around them. “Where is my husband?” She felt him slump slightly, and her body went cold. Her breath abandoned her once more, coming only in short bursts that made it difficult to speak.

“Where is Jin?” she repeated, louder, and panic spread through her body.

Sayid glanced to the bank of the beach and Sun’s followed. In the darkness she can barely make out anything, but as her eyes strained and adjusted, she saw a blurry figure, an outline of something laying on the beach, in the sand.

“No.” It came out as a whisper, and she felt her whole body go slack. Sayid’s arms wrapped around her waist, held her still, as she started to shake. “No! No, it can’t…he can’t…”

She fought with all of the strength left in her body to be free of Sayid’s strong grasp, to claw her way back to the beach, to be with her husband, but he wouldn’t let go. He held her tightly in his arms until his face was in her neck and her cheek was resting tight against the side of his head. Her sobs came out shaky at first, but with time, grew more powerful, until her arms were holding tightly onto Sayid’s shoulders and her tears were falling into the ocean, mixing together with the water, and surrounding them both.


They buried him before the sun rose on that same day, in a shallow grave covered by branches from the trees around them and sand from the beach. Sayid made a small cross from twine and sticks, marking the spot so that they could return for him, bring him home.

All the while, she stood by and watched, her few movements wooden, her face haunted and lifeless. As she kneeled by his grave, speaking to her husband in Korean, tears rolled down her face. As she rose to her feet, her legs shook and Sayid caught her before she fell over.

They left an hour later, packing up the few weapons and supplies and scraps of food that they had left, and started out along the coast, back toward home. Sayid could not help but wonder if either of them could really call it that now.


He wakes up, unrested and unaware of exactly when he had fallen asleep. It is still night, and most likely would be for some time. The stars above him do little to light the world around him, but even through the darkness, he can see her, hear her.

She lays not twenty feet from him, her body curled into itself, shaking as small, agonized sobs burst forth, carried up into the night and over to where he is laying.

He has woken up like this many times, with Shannon. He would open his eyes to find her curled up far away from him, sobbing into her hands or a shirt that she used as a pillow (that he suspected had once belonged to Boone), and he would do the only thing that he could do. He would pull her close to him, hold onto her and offer her something solid, something to hold onto so that she could not slip away from him, from herself, and into her grief.

As he moves closer to Sun, he wonders what he should do, what he can say, even though he knows in his heart that there is nothing. He knows that she is so close to the grief now that comfort is nonexistent. She will feel it most intensely at first, and then it will fade, growing from a sharp, stabbing pain to an ever-present ache in the center of her chest.

He looks down at her small, shaking body, hears her anguished sobs, and his own heart hurts for her, knowing all to well the pain that she is in.

He cannot stop himself, then, from reaching out to her, from laying a hand on her arm, from laying down on the ground next to her. She turns blindly into him, burying her face in his chest, and letting her grief erupt in full force, quaking and heaving as her sobs grow more intense and painful.

His arms tighten around her back as hers do the same. He lets his chin fall on top of her head and his eyes drift slowly closed. Above the sounds of her grief, of her pain, he whispers a prayer to God. For him. For Sun. And for Jin.