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actual-lea · 10 days

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Believe it or not, this fic is definitely still a thing so read it if you wanna?

AO3 | First chapter | Previous chapter

"You'd better come and see this," is the first thing that Milo, Theresa's nurse, says to Abigail when she walks through the door. He's out of breath from running halfway down the stairs, and the startled look in his eyes is so alarming that Abigail doesn't even pause to step out of her shoes; she just follows him up to Theresa's room without a word.

When she enters, Theresa turns to look at her. To look at her, not through her, and not her five or ten or God knows how many years younger. Abigail approaches the bed cautiously, in case any sudden movement might break the spell.

Theresa smiles. “Good to see you, Abby.”

Abigail laughs at that, because she doesn’t know what else to do. “Supposed to be my line, you know,” she says. Distantly, she notices that Milo has gone, leaving her alone with her sister for however long this lasts.

Theresa’s gaze, still lucid and more focused than it's been in years, drifts around the room, taking in the small space. When she turns back to Abigail, there’s something like realization in her eyes. ��What year is it?”

Abigail hesitates. Informing Theresa of the current date has never been a good idea, based on past experiences. But then, she’s never directly asked for it before. “It's 2007."

Instead of panic, those focused eyes light up with something like excitement. “Bring me a pen.”

Abigail has to leave the room to find one, her movements hurried, almost frantic; what if she returns to find Theresa gone again, lost somewhere in the past, if she’s even conscious at all?

But no, Theresa’s right where and when she left her, sitting up in bed with her hands neatly folded over the edge of her blanket. Maybe it’s only Abigail’s imagination, but she looks healthier, less pale than usual, an impression that’s only helped by the way her face lights up again as Abigail hands her the pen. There's a notepad on the table beside the bed, and Theresa leans over to reach it.

"What is it?" Abigail asks as she starts scribbling.

"It's a long story," Theresa says, and her silence spells out the unspoken implication: there isn't enough time to explain. "Is your passport still valid?"

Abigail blinks. It's been years since she thought about her passport at all. She'd gotten it in preparation for a holiday to Australia that never materialized. That was before everything; before their father's cancer diagnosis, before the accident. "I'd have to check, but I think so," she replies. "But, why–"

"I need you to fly to Los Angeles, and give this to Daniel."

Another blink. "Come again?"

"I can tell you exactly where to find him," Theresa says, as if it’s a perfectly reasonable request.

"Are you out of your head?" Abigail says without thinking, and Theresa looks up from the page for the first time. “You want me to make a bloody pilgrimage all the way to the States, just to see Daniel Faraday? Why in God's name would I do that?”

“You want me to get better, don’t you?" Theresa says, unfazed. "This is how I get better. This is how it all starts." She sketches out some sort of diagram while Abigail watches in stunned silence. “On the twentieth of September, this year, you’ll find him at this address.” She flips the paper over and scribbles something down before resuming her drawing on the other side. “He’ll be sitting outside on the north end of the building. He’s carrying a plastic bag and wearing a red plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up.” She pauses and smiles, like she's laughing at a joke only she can hear. “His right shoe is untied.”

Abigail stares at her, bewildered. Theresa's spent years adrift in the past, but she's never predicted the future before.

"I know it sounds strange," Theresa says, as if reading her mind. "But you have to trust me, okay?" She pauses again, looks up, waits for Abigail to nod once, mechanically, before ripping the paper free of the notepad and handing it over.

She blinks at it, more confused than ever. "What...is it?"

"Daniel will know what it means," Theresa says with certainty.

Abigail is quiet for a long moment. This is absurd. Her sister's mind must be lost, again, somewhere different than usual, and yet...

She meets Theresa's steady gaze. There's an almost unsettling clarity there, a firm sense of conviction and purpose that Abigail hasn't seen since...

Well, since before the accident. Before her sister was taken away from her, by the very man that she's being asked to seek out.

"Be nice to him, okay?" Theresa adds, reading her mind again, and Abigail tries not to flinch. "He's going through a lot."

She laughs at that. "Trying to talk me into it?" She looks up at Theresa again. "Honestly, getting to see that bastard miserable isn't the worst incentive I can think of, if–"

But her sister isn’t looking at her anymore. She’s staring down at the blank paper in her hands, thumbnail picking at the side of the pen like she isn’t sure what to do with it anymore.

Abigail’s heart sinks back into the pit it had only just managed to climb out of. “Theresa?” she says gently. “Are you still with me?”

Her sister turns to her, eyes wide and distant. “I had a bad dream,” she says, in a small, childish voice.

------

“So, what does it mean?”

Daniel shakes his head at Abigail’s question without looking up from the page. Gun to his head, he could never have conjured a mental image of her elegantly scribbled handwriting, but seeing it now in front of him, there's no question that the diagram is definitely Theresa’s handiwork.

Nine neat circles, with labels like Event A, Event B, and so on, all connected within an intricate web of lines, four of them named: real time, space-time, imaginary time, and imaginary space. The rest aren’t labeled at all, but instead denoted by equations, complex formulas with vaguely familiar symbols and constants, concepts that he can’t quite wrap his head around anymore, at least not without a cheat sheet to remind him which letters mean what.

"This is…really advanced stuff,” he says, finally, a laughable understatement. “I mean, this is beyond the scale of anything we ever…”

The most inscrutable pieces of the puzzle are the words scrawled across the top of the page: FISSION CHAIN REACTION. The equations all relate to theoretical physics, not nuclear reactions. How would fission factor into any of it? Unless, somehow, that’s what one of the “events” refers to.

But no, that can’t be right. A fission chain reaction describes an ongoing process; he would never call the day-to-day functions of a nuclear reactor an “event” in space-time. It would have to be a specific instance – some kind of sudden, massive release of energy, something on the scale of Chernobyl, or…

He looks up. “Wait, where are you going?”

Abigail turns back to face him with a sour expression. “I’m going home.”

“But, we–" He gets to his feet with a slight wince. “We’ve gotta figure this out, if Theresa–”

“No, you’ve gotta figure it out,” she corrects. “I did what she asked, and I don’t want anything else to bloody do with you.”

He blinks. “But you– You're not even the least bit curious about-”

He shrinks against the wall when she whirls around to stomp toward him. She stops just short of shoving him, though, like reaching the end of an invisible tether. “I've done what she asked,” she repeats through clenched teeth. “So we're finished.”

And then she storms across the grass to a taxi in the parking lot and disappears without looking back.

------

The SUV is still parked by the hospital’s entrance, and so is Abaddon, who watches Daniel approach with a faintly amused look on his face.

“I’ll need full access to everything you have,” Daniel says. “Every single piece of intel Widmore has about the island.”

“Of course.” Abaddon opens the door for him.

“I’m not finished.” Daniel settles into the backseat and pauses to catch his breath while Abaddon gets behind the wheel. “There's some additional information that I… Things I can’t research on my own. Secrets that only someone with Widmore’s influence might be able to get their hands on.” He fiddles with the seat belt. “I mean, really secret stuff. Classified military operations, that sort of thing.”

“That can be arranged.” Abaddon’s eyes bore holes into Daniel’s forehead from the rearview mirror. “In the meantime, Mr. Faraday, I’m here to take you anywhere you’d like to go.”

“I gathered that.” Across the grass, the city bus he’d intended to board pulls up to the crowded stop. He could still make a run for it, theoretically, provided that his lung doesn’t give out halfway.

Instead, he digs his journal out of his pack and gingerly folds Theresa’s diagram to place it inside, along with the photographs he’d taken from his mother’s office in the church - more fragments of the bigger picture that refuses to fall into place.

He finds Abaddon’s eyes, still watching him expectantly. “Do you have a phone I can borrow?”

------

“So, your girlfriend can see the future?” Hurley says.

Daniel scratches his head. “…Yes?” He’s drowned out by a particularly loud truck speeding past on the nearby highway. “Not exactly,” he says instead once the sound fades. How any of the patients milling around the small green space of Santa Rosa can be unfazed by the constant road noise is beyond him.

Hurley waves away a fly from the half-eaten sandwich on his plate and slides his bishop across the chessboard. "Then, how'd she know where you'd be?"

"It's…hard to explain," he says, for what must be the fifth time since the start of their conversation. "Time doesn't move in a straight line for her, it…” His eyes land on the board game boxes stacked on the other end of the picnic table. “It's like a puzzle, with all the pieces switched around. Even though some of the shapes still fit together, the picture doesn't make any sense. But occasionally, a few of the right pieces match up with each other through pure luck, and you get a glimpse of how it's actually supposed to look."

Hurley stares at him blankly. "Uh…"

He shakes his head. "Essentially, a piece of her mind from sometime in the future happened to link up with her mind in the present. That future version of her was coherent enough to realize what was happening, which means that version of her must have gotten better somehow." He taps the sheet of paper on the table. "That's why she gave me this, so that I could set everything in motion to make that future a reality."

Hurley rubs one eye. "I still don't get what any of this has to do with the island."

Daniel stares at an empty square of the board. "I don't…fully understand it, either," he admits before absently making his next move. "But I know that the island can heal her, and that's reason enough to find a way back. I can figure the rest out later."

"Dude, I'm not sure going back is such a good idea," Hurley says with a frown as he captures the last of Daniel’s pawns. "Plus I'm not even sure how you would do it."

"That's…why I'm here, actually." Dan clears his throat. The DHARMA orientation photo from 1977 is still tucked between the pages of his journal, weighing down his pack like a chunk of radioactive metal. There will be no un-opening that can of worms, so he's saving it as a last resort; if all else fails, he can show it to Hurley as proof that the decision has already been made. Instead, he keeps his eyes on the board and picks a piece at random to move. "I think the key to getting back is you, and Jack, and Kate."

Hurley’s frown deepens. "What makes you think that?"

“It's hard to explain.” Daniel shifts awkwardly in his seat. “Uh, it’s your move.”

Hurley moves his queen. “How do you know the island will fix her in the first place?”

“Because… It’s what fixed me.” He clears his throat again in the uncomfortable silence and moves his knight another three spaces to block the queen’s path. "Before the island, I was… I– I had a condition that was…similar, to what Theresa's been living with."

“But, you weren’t in like a coma or whatever before the island, right?” Hurley guesses, to a hesitant nod from Dan. The queen takes the knight. "So, you must've gotten some better without it, right?"

"Yes, but…" He shakes his head and moves his one remaining rook. "It took years, of…specialists, and EM therapy, and–"

"Did you take her to the same specialists?"

He has to stop himself from saying that he could never have taken Theresa anywhere, not without incurring the wrath of her sister. "The process was…prohibitively expensive," he says, grimacing at how pathetic the excuse sounds.

Hurley doesn't seem to notice, or he doesn't care. "I can pay for it."

"I'm not asking you to do that,” Daniel says, shaking his head automatically.

“Why not?” Hurley leans back in his seat. “I don’t know if you keep up with the news, dude, but I’ve kinda got more money than I know what to do with. Even from in here,” he gestures to their surroundings.

Daniel shakes his head harder. “I really can’t ask you to do that. It’s not– This isn’t your responsibility, and besides, if her sister found out it was my idea, she’d never–”

“So don’t tell her,” Hurley says, like it’s the simplest thing in the world. “Look, all I gotta do is talk to my parents, they talk to the finance guy, finance guy talks to the doctor or lawyer or whoever and then boom, everything’s covered.”

“Hurley–”

“So it’s settled!” Hurley says with a grin, like a gotcha, relief in his voice. “I'm gonna pay for it, and she's gonna get better, and then nobody has to go back to the island.” He looks down at the board, grins even wider, and sweeps his own rook across the board triumphantly. “Check and mate, dude.”

#lost #fanfiction #daniel faraday #abc lost #lost show #a place to call home #the way home

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