when she wakes up

pg | alternative episode ending

She'll be angry, when she wakes up.

She'll scream in horror when the pain makes her curious, when she reaches up to feel her head. She'll yell, rant, curse, and go off on Jack, who probably did take more than was necessary, but Sayid couldn't care less right now. She'll cry, undoubtedly, at some point, and he hopes that she'll allow him to comfort her. She'll cry, but he'll look at her with her ashen skin, sunken eyes, dry and cracked lips, look at her with a handful of hair chopped off and tell her, without an ounce of deceit, that she is beautiful.

She'll snort, turn away, cry more. She won't believe him, because it's the kind of lie men tell women all the time. She won't believe him, because she didn't have to see her lover's body lying on the ground, blood covering the face, because she didn't kneel in the mud, assume the person she loved was dead. She won't believe him, because she wasn't the one who was clutching a corpse, only to realize it was breathing.

Compared to death, everything is beautiful.

So he'll tell her, how he loves the three-inch section of stitched skin on her scalp, the skin which will never grow hair again, how he loves the scar that will form there, because it means she's going to be okay.

He will make jokes about her being hard-headed, so hard-headed that her skull can deflect bullets.

And when she wakes up, she may hate him, because he wasn't good enough to save her completely. She may hate him because he didn't knock her down quickly enough, because she will be scarred for life, because she almost died. When she wakes up, she may hate him, but he doesn't care.

As long as she wakes up.

(fin.)