I've only written Shannon dead. huh.
Title: Half-life
Characters: Shannon & some Libby
Raiting: PG
Word Count: 1030
Disclaimer: I own nothing, least of all these characters and/or setting
A/N: from a prompt at hiatus_stories: Shannon and Libby in the afterlife. Gossiping.

They wander. They haven’t left yet. Shannon wonders if she’s supposed to, but where would she go?

They’re all here. Scott and her Boone and Libby and Ana and people whose names she never bothered to learn. They all died and they’re all still here, but she’s mainly alone. They all are. She’s not sure why it’s like that, but she doesn’t try and change it.

She sees Libby more than most. It’s almost a regular thing.

Which is odd because, well they never really met before, did they?

Maybe that’s why it’s easier with her, there’s no before to compare to whatever this is.

***

She remembers a movie about ghosts in a house who wouldn’t leave. The couple died and they got a handbook or instruction manual or something. It read like stereo instructions. But Shannon died and no one told her what to do or where to go and she’d give anything to puzzle through confusing language if only it told her what the hell was going on. This is not like she thought it would be.

Not that she had ever thought about it much. She didn’t expect angels and trumpets and cherubs napping on clouds. She did expect peace.

What she got was this.

***

She feels a spike of something sometimes. A thing that tethers her close to this place and makes the staying sort of bearable. She felt it a lot more at the beginning and she thought maybe it was heaven and that it would always be this way.

She knows now that she feels it when he thinks of her. It’s become less frequent, but it hasn’t gone away. The last time she felt it was when she watched them bury Eko.

That night she had crawled into bed next to him. It was the loneliness that made her do it. He never knew she was there and she touched his hair with out touching it and kissed his jaw without kissing it and felt close to real.

He had had such violent dreams that she never tried it again.

***
Libby holds her hand and sometimes they whisper even though no one’s around to hear them. It feels like gossip and Shannon likes it because it reminds her of before. Not before dying but before coming to the island at all. Back when she had friends she actually chose rather than people she was thrown together with and forced to interact with. They could grab lunch or drinks and talk about those things that used to hold so much weight. Things she can only recall now if she concentrates really hard.

It’s nice when Libby’s around.

***

Maybe she can leave when they leave. Maybe a boat or a plane will come one day and take all of them away, back to their lives and families and people they get drinks with on Saturday nights. Maybe when that happens things will click and she’ll get to wherever she’s going too.

Or maybe they’ll leave her behind and never know it.

***

She and Libby never talk about the heavy stuff. They never talk about Ana Lucia or getting off the island or the men who maybe loved them just a little. Shannon thinks she might like to, she thinks Libby might understand. She bases this assumption on little more than the fact that she too is blond. Ridiculous yes, but the idea remains. The thing is, whenever she gets close to broaching the heavy subjects, her memory starts to go all fuzzy and she has trouble making the words come out.

Instead they talk about clothes.

They wear what they died in. Changing doesn’t seem to be an option, so each of them wears the same clothes day in and day out. There are no blossoming blood stains on their chests and stomachs though. Shannon’s pink top and white camisole are pristine, just like her white tennies. Her clothes never wrinkle or smell or get dirty, it’s oddly efficient and terribly boring. Just because Shannon died, it doesn’t mean her fashion sense did.

Libby’s taste isn’t her taste. Actually, Shannon doesn’t think that what Libby has could be called taste at all. She doesn’t say this though, it seems rude.

They rehash the same subjects, wondering about poor saps that have had the misfortune of dying naked, or in inappropriate or uncomfortable clothing. And as much as Shannon longs for some Jimmy Choos, her Nikes work well on the island terrain.

Libby has a theory that being naked wouldn’t matter because the dead are impervious to cold and heat. But the weather on the island is so temperate they’ll never really know.

Once Libby mentioned that even without the whole dying thing, Ana Lucia probably would have stuck with the black tank top and jeans anyway. Shannon can’t remember laughing that hard before or after being shot.

***

She’s never spoken to Ana Lucia. Not once. She’s seen her a little, but they seem to have reached an unspoken agreement about mutual avoidance.

But the island is small, comparatively, and the dead run in the same loose circles. Avoidance only goes so far. When they do happen to have contact, Ana Lucia looks at her with sad yet simultaneously blank eyes.

Shannon tries to make herself care. She tries to make herself feel anger or resentment or forgiveness or compassion or anything really. But none of that comes. She doesn’t care one way or another.

It’s all the same to Shannon.

***

Dying is weird and death is not what she thought it would be.

She feels just as lost now as she did before, except now existence is tinged with an intense nostalgia she never felt in life. She longs for things she can’t articulate and knows she’ll never get them anyway.

She knows her story doesn’t have an end. It goes on interminably. And there’s no conflict to make things interesting and there won’t be any character development that makes all of this mean something. There’s not even sex to move things along.

There is only here, and there is only her, and she is ever the same.