Title: Possibilities
Rating: PG
Summary: Jin would return to her, or he wouldn't. She could no longer bear to sit along the beach and watch him build the means to leave her. She could no longer watch Michael do the same.
Disclaimer: I do not own Lost. At all. I wish but alas...
Author's Note: Remember back when Michael wasn't a traitorous bastard so much as he was just mildly annoying? Well, try to remember that Michael while reading this. Set sometime after '…in Translation'. Used for au100, prompt #80: healing.



She had overheard Shannon saying, once, that the island was a chance for a new life. Because of what had happened, they all now had a chance to start over, with a clean slate. It didn't always feel that way at first. Guilt tended to weigh on her heavily from day to day. But on other days, she felt energized and brimming with possibilities. Of how she could change, how to do things differently this time. Of who she could be now.

The person that she was, her nature, had taken over before she had realized it. She couldn't stop herself from trying to protect Jin by hiding things from him, by lying outright. She couldn’t think of anything else to do but sink into old patterns, into the behaviors and patters that she knew, that were familiar.

But when she realized the chance that she had in this place, the opportunities it had given her, her attitude had changed. Jin had abandoned her, left her alone; maybe he thought that was what she wanted, maybe he was too ashamed to face her day in and day out. She did not know. But she knew that she could do nothing about it, that she had tried so many times to no avail.

Jin would return to her, or he wouldn't. She could no longer bear to sit along the beach and watch him build the means to leave her. She could no longer watch Michael do the same.

A new life. She thought of it, day in and day out. She wondered what she wanted out of it, what she would do with it, who she would spend it with. What did she want her new life on the island to be like?

It was the middle of the night that she finally decided that she had everything worked out. She was wide awake and showed no signs of not being wide awake any time soon. She sat up, purposefully, and pulled back the opening of her tent. There was no one about, only the moon shining over the ocean, the fires burning along the beach.

Her strides were confident, deliberate. They were the strides of a woman who finally knew what she wanted out of her life and intended to get it. They weren’t the strides of a woman trying to appease a husband, or a father, or a family so mired in tradition that her needs were secondary to theirs. They were the strides of a woman who intended to take what she wanted out of life every moment from now on.

She stopped when she saw him, sitting in front of a large bon-fire in front of his tent. He pokes it with a stick, shifting the logs, making the fire grow. He looked like he was sighing, like he was deep in his own thoughts. She didn’t doubt that he was, and momentarily considered turning back, saving this for another time. But, she looked at his face, drawn and encumbered with heavy thoughts, and she thought that, maybe, he might need her tonight too.

“Sun,” he said, looking up, startled. She smiled and sat down next to him, leaving some space between them, not putting all of her eggs in one basket right away. “You’re awake?”

“So are you,” she replied. He nodded, sadly, and cast his eyes back toward his tent. Inside, Sun could see the outline of his son, sleeping soundly as the waves rolled against the beach and crashed in the distance, as the fire crackled and spit its embers onto the sand.

“Are you worried about the raft?” she asked. He ran his hand tiredly over his face, and she knew that she was right, that she had hit on why he was sitting outside of his tent in the middle of the night, staring at the fire, alone with his thoughts. That is, until she had come along.

“Do you think it’s gonna work?” he asked her, like he needed to know. Sun smiled, almost sadly, because she knew the answer. She laid her hand softly on his arm and nodded.

“I think it will,” she answered, and one of his fingers shifted toward her arm, ran along it. A small tremor ran through her, and her breath caught. Their eyes locked for a second before they both looked away, before their hands separated and they found places in the sand to stare.

“I can’t…” he said, standing quickly, and looking around as if he were thinking of going running away. But he didn’t move, and neither, she found, could Sun. She remained seated on the log, looking up at him in the light of the fire. “I can’t be doing this with you.”

“And why is that?” Sun asked. He looked down at her with wide eyes.

“You’re married,” he replied, as if she had forgotten. She stood next to him, reached for his arms and held them in her hands. This time, he didn’t move, didn’t blink, just gazed at her.

“My husband left me,” she told him. “This place, this island, is my chance to have a new life. To be a new person.”

Slowly, he held her arms loosely in his hands the way she did his, and he lowered his gaze. “I’m leaving on the raft as soon as it’s done,” he told her, almost regretfully. He had never sounded that way before, like he wanted to do anything but get off the island as fast as the winds would carry him.

Sun nodded, because she always knew that, because she had known that long before she had come here. “I know,” she said. “All I need…all that I am asking for…is a possibility. That’s all.”

He nodded a few times, looked down at her hands and held onto her arms a little bit tighter. “I think I can give you that,” he said, and she nodded, smiling as their foreheads came together, as they leaned their, in each other’s arms, in the light of the fire, under the glow of the moon.

She felt uplifted, content in a way she could barely recognize. Because that was all she had needed, to reach out and grab hold of one of life’s many new possibilities.