Title: Fear in a Handful of Dust
Characters: Desmond, Kelvin
Rating: PG13
Disclaimer: If Kelvin was mine, he'd have suffered a much more painful death. And Desmond wouldn't have had a thing to do with it.
Word count: 1200 or so
Spoilers: for Live Together Die Alone.
Summary: For philosophy_20 #19, caught in the form of limitation.Kelvin’s shadow looks increasingly dark against the pale gold of the rock, small clouds of dust rise under his feet and intoxicate him, sort of, but he doesn’t cough. He can’t cough, not until he finds out why is Kelvin here and why he has lied to him all this time.
A/N: I have written half of this one while waiting for lectures to start, actually. Since the prompt came from an Eliot poem this wanted to be done with Eliot, but I ended up with the one I like best. This is probably weird for me but well, I'll just go with it. And I solemnly swear that the next Desmond I write, I'll have Sayid thoroughly taking care of him to make up.

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The air, it’s strange.

He doesn’t know when things became so fucked up as to say that breathing fresh hair is strange, but here he is, following Kelvin, breathing normally and trying not to shake as soon as his lungs experience again what breathing outside means.

This is what shocks him more.

Not Kelvin getting rid of that uniform. Not the fact that he has been deceived. Not the fact that there is no quarantine.

Just the fresh air is enough.

The fresh air and the sun.

It’s beating on his head, hard and hot and burning and Desmond feels like fainting. He isn’t accustomed to this anymore.

But he goes on and the more he follows Kelvin, the more he can feel the effects of three years locked underground. He’s sweating, his vision is swaying a bit, his legs threaten to give up and he’s so thirsty it isn’t even funny, but he goes on.

When they arrive among the rocks, everything looks surreal.

Kelvin’s shadow looks increasingly dark against the pale gold of the rock, small clouds of dust rise under his feet and intoxicate him, sort of, but he doesn’t cough. He can’t cough, not until he finds out why is Kelvin here and why he has lied to him all this time. Even the crashing of the waves sounds strange to him. It’s so fucked up, he thinks. What has happened since he went on a race on a boat?

Which is exactly in front of his eyes, by the way, and it’s surely not an hallucination.

Desmond thought that he had been enraged with Widmore at least those two times more than he was generally enraged with him.

Wrong.

This is enraged. Not that. This is beyond enraged and he has to thank the overwhelming sensation the outside world is having on his senses right now, otherwise... well, otherwise.

Otherwise Kelvin wouldn’t have gone past his first sentence said from behind him.

He goes way farther than one and Desmond can’t help screaming Why did you lie to me in his face because what else should he do? It’s too much, too damn much to take, not to mention the worst low blow he has probably ever received all his life.

And then Kelvin gives that answer and then all Desmond can see is red.

What do you do when you find out something like this? , he thinks for a second before losing every bit of control that was still in him. The idiot in front of him lied to him for three years, stuck him in that hole for the duration, was planning on leaving him alone because sure, he definitely was the only sucker that could be so stupid to stay there believing he was saving the world and stuff. Who cares about the rest?

No one is going to give him those three years back. That’s what burns more, even more than the sun he still isn’t accustomed to feel the heat of on his back, more than that cloud of dust he has practically eaten and that makes his lips and mouth dry.

He can’t really see the course of action. One second Kelvin is running and the one after the rock under Kelvin’s head is red with blood and Desmond’s hand is, too.

I didn’t mean to, is the only thought that he can form while he stares in horror at his fingers, red and sticky and too much fucking unreal, except that it is real.

He snatches the key not knowing what else he has to do, just knowing he’s definitely caught up and stuck and whatever.

When he raises his head, the rocks look red, a dark shade of red.

He wishes he could say it’s a cherry, bright red, but it isn’t. It’s blood, dark red. Kelvin’s shadow doesn’t exist anymore, there is only his, stretching from his feet to a rock wall nearby, darker than the red shade it has in Desmond’s eyes.

He turns, he runs, time’s running up, he thinks, while his shoes rise again dust which isn’t really red but seems so close to it.

There isn’t much dust on these rocks, only just a handful.

It gets in his eyes, prickling, making him close them while he still runs to the hatch, tears starting to form and Desmond wants to think it’s because of the dust, not because the man who stole three years of his life is dead down there and Desmond was thrown out of the army also because he wasn’t capable of killing a damn fly.

As soon as he sees the jungle, he knows the time is up. he’s so accustomed to it, he lives in such a symbiosis with it, that he can hear the alarm even if it’s too far to hear it. As soon as he steps from the rocks into the plants, the last dust rises and gets to his eyes again and Desmond has never experienced a greater fear in his whole life.

It’s different, he thinks while dodging plants.

It’s different, he thinks while running down the corridor of the hatch.

It’s different, he thinks while he enters the numbers, his hands trembling as much as everything else and that damned System Failure rips through his head.

It’s different, he thinks when everything stops.

It’s so much different, he thinks when his hands (which aren’t still bloody but it seems so) reach his mouth, shaking.

This is fear, he thinks, this is what fear means. It’s different from everything he thought it was fear.

Knowing what real fear is, isn’t exactly comforting.

End.