The Woman from the Plane [Lost Fanfiction]

Chapter 22: To Murder and Create

It took Ben a moment to understand what he was looking at. It was a wedding ceremony—Alpert officiating, though he looked quite a bit older, which struck Ben as very strange.

Stranger still was the man standing next to Alpert—beaming through happy tears at the woman across from him.

He flipped to the next photo—another from the wedding, a closeup of the happy couple. She smiled at the man so playfully—the joy on her face was undeniable. She loved him.

The next one—a candid. The pair of them laughing at something on the steps of a half-finished building. He was looking at her out of the corner of his eye—and there was something Ben couldn't really put his finger on in his gaze. He loved her too. He really loved her.

He was so lost in thought that he didn't hear her getting out of bed. She found him sitting at the table, staring at the photos spread out in front of him.

"Oh," she said simply, and he looked up at her.

"You married him?"

She nodded and gave him an expectant look—she'd anticipated a slew of questions to follow, but he was silent for a while.

He picked the first photo out of the pile. "I have never been this happy," he told her. "Not once in my life."

"I know," she said, nodding. "Neither had I."

"How long were you married to him?"

She sat down, sighing. "Almost twenty-two years."

He looked up at her sharply.

"We both got the Richard Alpert special as our gift that day," she explained, tapping the photo with her index finger. "Twenty-two years. Then your tumor came back. And you died."

She said it matter-of-factly, but he could tell that it was through a clenched jaw. She didn't want to cry.

"It was your choice to let it take you. You'd been given a second chance at life, you said, and you had done it right. You'd loved and been loved, and you had learned to be kind, and it had all been enough. It was just your time to go. But it killed me to watch you in so much pain. You never forgave yourself for Alex—not for a moment. I think part of you decided it was what you deserved."

He touched her arm gently.

"You had this thought that the Orchid could send me back and I could save Alex—we figured out how to make it work. We knew there was no undoing what had already happened—but there was a chance that with the Orchid, we could create another future. We did what we could to ease your pain, but you didn't want to lose your mental acuity, so we couldn't do much. I stayed with you until the end. We buried you next to her. And the next day, I left."

"I woke up in Tunisia on September 20th, 2004—thirty-four years in the past. The version of myself that was alive at that time dropped dead the day that I arrived."

"The girl in the newspaper?"

She nodded. "It hasn't been that long—I guess I'm still grieving you."

He eyed the tear that rolled down her cheek and reached out to wipe it away with his thumb.

He didn't speak for a while. He stared at the photos spread out on the table, his eyes drawn again to the adoring, happy smile on his own face—so unfamiliar that he barely recognized himself.

"I suppose I understand."

"Understand what?"

He pulled one of the photos across the table with his index finger and tapped his own smiling face. "How he could feel like this."