Title: Still Waters Run Deep
Rating: PG
Summary: She wondered if the woman she had been three years ago would even recognize the woman that she was now.
Disclaimer: I do not own Lost. At all. I wish but alas...
Author's Note: Set a little bit before 'The Cost of Living'. Used for un_love_you, prompt #15: This is my desperation in action.



There was a time, once, when she allowed her emotions to rule her. There was a time when anyone who looked at her would know exactly what she was feeling. There was a time when she’d seen no reason to hide.

She looked back on that time and wondered how she got to this place. A place where she felt hard on the inside, and, to a certain extent, hard on the inside. She wondered if the woman she had been three years ago would even recognize the woman that she was now.

Circumstances had changed her, forced her to stay cold, distant, to survive. She couldn’t become emotional, fall apart. The person that she was wouldn’t survive on the island, wouldn’t survive captivity and imprisonment. She had forced herself to grow become hard, to bury her emotions, hide them away in a place where only she could see them, feel them.

She stayed that way for three years, blocked off. She was courteous to the people she lived with for having lack of any other choice. Ben wouldn’t let her go home, even though women kept dying. He was obsessed, and she had to shoulder that obsession as well. It maddened her, but no one knew – maybe not even Ben.

She stayed that way, until Jack. Jack wasn’t what she’d expected him to be. Maybe he was at first, maybe he’d reacted just the way she – and Ben – had expected. But the more his contempt for Ben grew, the more she thought that Jack could be it. He could be her chance. Her chance to rid herself of Ben forever.

The video had been simple enough to make. Ben trusted her, thinking he’d assimilated her long ago. She counted on that. Much in the way she was counting on Jack. Maybe he would do what she asked, and maybe he wouldn’t. She knew what the others would do to her if they found out, but she knew enough about Jack to know that he would never tell them what she had done.

So she held the cards in her hands, her face as blank as ever, while she turned them over every ten seconds or so. Her face was impassive, but her words were not. They were bold and inescapably clear. She had no way to know what Jack would do. It was really up to him. But he was the best chance she had, and she wasn’t going to let him slip through her fingers.

The woman that she had once been would never to anything like this. But that woman wasn’t her anymore. She was different. She was changed. And miles and miles below the surface, she was angry.