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janie_tangerineOkay, last commentary of the bunch, always for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
falafel_musings, for What'll You Do Now, My Blue Eyed Son?, aka how yours truly got wordy when talking about Boone and marches. And that'd be it. Beware because it's veery wordy.
The first time Boone goes to a march, he is nine years old and it’s the last time he sees his father alive.*
* So, this was my flashing-the-hell-out-of-Boone fic. Thing is, this is probably the one where I’ve taken the most liberties with a major character’s background, but thing is, canon doesn’t really tell us nothing about Boone apart from the Shannon facts, that he works in a wedding company, that he’s a liberal and his mom is a bitch. So I went and gave him a whole and thorough backstory and I can assure you that I’ve thought about it more than it would be sane to. This was supposed to be about his going to marches wherabouts and ended up becoming quite more than that but since I had started with that idea, I opened it like this in order to give a quick idea of the subject. Also, it was implied that I was going to try and explane Boone’s relationship with his father, which is something that the show never considered anyway. And which is why I titled this after a Bob Dylan song which happened to be kind of fitting.
--
Since he had been old enough to sense it, Boone had always had the impression that his father and his mother really didn’t have any business together. They probably were together because, seeing things straight, they actually never were in the real sense of the word. They were opposites, but not the kind of opposites that attract each other.
His father was a photographer for National Geographic; he was home only one week per month, passing the remaining three usually on the other side of the world. His mother had always worked for the wedding company, as long as Boone remembered; they were well-off, sure, unless they wouldn’t have been able to afford a nanny, but especially when he was very young, he rememberd his mother being home only in the evenings. He never really understood why did she need so badly to get the company started until he actually knew what getting a company started meant, but by that point he didn’t really feel the need for her to be at home anymore.*
* A point that I always wondered about Boone was how was he so different from his mother. I can concede that the kid was probably the kind that you spoil to death and that doesn’t really have a problem for his life as soon as his parents get him a job, but you have to concede me that there was more to Boone than that. Apart from that White Rabbit outburst at Jack he never behaved like a spoiled superficial kid and that he’s quite selfless; also, if you see Abandoned, you can see how different from his mother is. So one answer that came to me was that he might have taken from his father, who of course doesn’t exist in canon Lost. So I made him up in a way that I thought could be plausible in order for him to have had some good influence on his son. Also, I always pictured Boone’s parents as at least estranged. I had his father working for National Geographic because since Boone was alone with Theresa when she fell down the stairs it meant no one was around much and if I wanted him to be alive, he had to have a job that kept him far from home a lot and photographer looked like a plausible one. Also, it was a bit of a homage to Clint Eastwood’s character in The Bridges of Madison County, but bear with me. I had a serious crush on him in that movie.
Well, truth to be told that need had stopped when Theresa fell down the stairs.
But anyway, that’s another story.*
* I actually think that it’s the most important thing that has ever happened in Boone’s life apart from the crash. Even more than his thing with Shannon, but that’s not the place to discuss this.
It wasn’t also that his parents didn’t have much business together; it was that they were from two completely different worlds, or so it seemed to him.
He always traveled; once he told Boone that he was sorry not to be at home more, but he just couldn’t stay in the same place for too long, or go to work to the same office; Boone, especially lately, thought that he had always understood it better than he let on. He had never been angry at him for that; it’d have been pointless. Because being away, that was his job after all. While it wasn’t his mother’s, who hated to travel and hated leaving Malibu even to go someplace else in California but never found the time to come home for lunch.*
* I might not have been exactly fair to Sabrina here, but I loathe that woman as I loathe few characters on Lost. I tried to be as fair as possible though, but I can figure her never being home anyway and so I drew the parallel on that.
Her favorite movie was Love Story, his was Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Boone had always loved that title, for some strange reason; it made him kind of annoyed when people just said Dr. Strangelove*).
* It makes me annoyed, too. As hell.
He voted Democrat, she voted Republican; he listened to rock or folk music from the sixties and seventies, she claimed that music was something too shallow to care about but then used trash top ten country music chart as background whenever she felt the need not to be in silence. Sometimes he wondered why did they even get together in the first place. He found it hard to believe his father when he told him that they had met at university and that she had just turned different after the first year of marriage.
Later, after crashing on an island, Boone would have thought about it more deeply; after all, his dad had already the job with the magazine while she had started the wedding company on her own and had been alone with it most of the time also when she was pregnant; he never had that good of a relationship with her even if they got along fine, but after almost dying, he could see where she had come from and maybe also why she was so different from his father, in the end.*
* That was actually me trying to justify her attitude and coming up with a plausible explanation to her distant behavior; sure, we’ve only seen her with Shannon, but she’s so different from Boone (or his fictional dad here) that if I wanted to make the whole backstory plausible I needed to have her coming from a much different place. I can see someone hardening in such a condition and so I went with that.
But that isn’t the point.
Sure, he spent more time with his mother than with his father. That was a given. He didn’t think that whenever she spoke about him at dinner, she tried to be mean with purpose. It just was her nature, he figured.
It wasn’t that she was angry at him because he wasn’t home most of the time, but maybe he could just have been less selfish and found a normal job; it wasn’t that the music he listened to was bad, but well, it was all hippie and idiotic, he could improve his tastes a bit; it wasn’t that voting the Democrats was bad, but it was at least a bit dangerous for the country, wasn’t it?*
* That is actually that kind of talk that is aimed to make the absent person look in a negative light without being blunt about that; in such a condition, I could see her doing it just as I could see Boone shrugging and not caring about it.
One would have figured that he had a stronger bond with her, after all.
Point is, it was all the contratry.
When his mother’s friends came over at the weekend and he had to make presence, they all said the same thing.
Oh, he’s all Robert, isn’t he?
And he was, at least on the physical side. He had his father’s blue eyes, his chestnut hair; his mother always said that she hoped for him that the perpetual flush on his cheeks would disappear because while it was alright with his father it really wasn’t nice for a man.*
* That was when I went on giving Boone a stronger bond with him than with her. If you think about it, it’s not like he ever mentions his mother on the island or in the flashbacks; it’s probably because they only thought her in S2, but I had a point to prove here.
They saw each other one week per month, but during that week, he always was at home. Dinner time was mostly awkward and his parents never talked to each other, but it was alright.
The day after he arrived, his dad spent two or three hours processing negatives in the cellar; then, when he was back from school, they used to watch together all the pictures he took and he had a story for each of them; the ones he decided he wasn’t going to give to the magazine, he gave Boone.
Boone still had an album with all of the National Geographics outtakes; it was in his room in his bilocal in Malibu when Oceanic Flight 815 crashed on the wonder known as Craphole Island.*
* I picture Boone as someone who really gets attached to things. I think he would have never threw such a thing away, especially when, as I pointed out later, it became mostly what he has left of his father and probably just reminds him fond memories.
While they sorted his father’s photos, he always put his favorite music on; it was Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Simon and Garfunkel, The Beatles. When he was six or so, he had decided that his favorite song was The Sound of Silence; his dad thought that it was a bit depressing actually, but he liked it alright. He didn’t think it was depressing. Sad, maybe, but not depressing.
It has always been his favorite song, all things considered.*
* Now, when I heard the infamous he goes to marches line, my wheels started turning. I realize that I might have given Boone a sort of old fashioned music taste, but at least about The Sound of Silence I always thought it was so him that it had to be a song he liked. So it became his overall favorite in my canon and here I was just linking his taste with music he grew up with. It’s probably a personal thing because I’m way too fond of the songs I grew up with myself. Here, apart from Simon and Garfunkel, I gave him the basics of the 60s/70s music and probably something way too pacifist/Woodstock-like, but that’s just how I see him.
During those twelve weeks per year (nine years, minus four because they really hadn’t started before he was five years old, it meant sixty weeks? Yeah, sixty) they always ended up talking about issues that Boone would have later recognized for much more important that they seemed at the time.
It wasn’t hard to ask him at that time whether there was the death penalty in the places where he went, and it wasn’t hard, after not much time, to see how actually cruel and stupid it was. It wasn’t hard to ask him why he frowned while reading the paper and he said that if people just couldn’t buy guns the States would have been a better place.*
* There we start with the marches against guns business. Then again, I might have wrote things from a POV a tad too personal, but I don’t think I was too wrong on having him forming himself an opinion at an early age with a sort of adult imput. Not that one can’t form one later, sure, but it happens.
Boone guessed that he had more or less picked his side in 1989, when his mother had voted for Bush and his dad for Dukakis. It was the first and last time he had heard them really screaming at each other and he couldn’t make out the terms of the argument truth to be told, but it had been violent.*
* Never happened with my parents, but there’s a reason for which I never talk politics when I know someone is of my exactly opposite opinion. 95% of the times it gets way too nasty.
He had seen the debates with his mother during the electoral campaign and well, he might have been seven but he had always thought that Bush really looked like an idiot, no offence intended. And he was pro-death penalty and pro-guns and pro-a-lot-of-other-stuff that he really didn’t like. Sure, picking sides didn’t mean that he had decided he was going to vote Democrat, but he surely had decided that he wasn’t ever going to vote for someone who was pro-guns and pro-death penalty, though it was a thought he never shared with anyone. He feared it was going to sound ridiculous and they’d have probably told him to stop thinking about things he didn’t understand. Maybe he didn’t understand them at all, but some, he thought he did.*
* He couldn’t have understood much more at that age, but it seemed plausible to me that he should have picked sides at least based on those two basic matters.
In March 1991, two days before leaving for New Zealand, his dad had told him he was going to a march against the Gulf War and that he wasn’t probably be going to be back soon.
Boone had asked him whether he could come, too. His mother, who was hearing all the conversation from the next room, had stormed in asking him if he ever knew what the Gulf War was. She was sort of shocked when he told her that he knew alright, and he did. He watched the news once per day and he sort of read a newspaper they gave for free to the last year students at his school. Sure that he knew what the Gulf War was. It went unsaid that he didn’t like it one bit.*
* This is probably all personal experience in the sense that when I was nine or ten at school there was some hour where there was a general reading of a newspaper commenting the news. Of course it wasn’t anything detailed or too complex, but it helped you form an opinion and there’s a reason for which newspaper exist. For me Boone’s Gulf War was the Kosovo war, but I just figured that at that age one could be at least aware of what happens outside the walls of his room.
Then she had started saying that marches weren’t the place for anyone under sixteen years old and that he surely wasn’t allowed to, but then his dad had shrugged and told her that why not, if he wanted? He was the one taking the responsibility, anyway.
She had eventually relented and they had gone to the march.
His dad had brought a sign with the copy of a picture he had taken in Iraq a couple of years before, Boone didn’t remember what it was but he was half-sure that it was taken in a camp hospital, with Stop the war NOW written in red under it; as soon as they arrived, he had actually felt somewhat scared.
There was an awful lot of people, much moise, someone screamed against Bush (he remembered hearing a couple of son of a bitch in the first ten seconds they were there); but as soon as they started walking, he hadn’t even thought about it.*
* If swearing isn’t the first thing you hear when you go to a march it’s at least between the first five.
Almost everyone had a sign and there were quite some people singing; at one point, they passed a group of girls singing Blowin’ in the Wind (which was Boone’s second-favorite song by the way); his dad chatted quite amiably with some random people passing and once in a while they stopped to drink some water. It wasn’t much hot truth to be told, but it sure was tiring.
Even if it was, his feet didn’t start to hurt until they got home.*
* Personal experience again. Your feet start to hurt either when it’s over or when you take off your shoes, never when you actually do the march.
Two days later his dad left and the plane that was supposed to bring him to New Zealand crashed somewhere in the Pacific; one day in October 2004, Boone would have reflected on the irony.*
* This was just me wanting to make Lost-like connections, but I thought it was indeed some case of bad karma.
There hadn’t been a funeral; the bodies never were retrieved. Boone remembers crying for three days after getting the news and he was never ashamed to admit it.*
* He doesn’t seem like one who would be ashamed to admit that he has been crying.
His mother had seemed somewhat shaken at least, but she hadn’t cried. Or at least, not in his presence. Months later, when she started seeing someone else, sometimes she would start to say that he had been an idiot and should have just searched an honest job; Boone let her talk and always settled to go back to his room and look at his photo album, usually the pics taken in Japan. They had something that made him feel calmer.
Then his mother married Adam Rutherford and Shannon came into his life and into the room they shared because so it’d have been better for bonding; Boone hated that word, but he genuinely had liked Shannon. He was never too fond of her father, though they had always been civil and never had a lash-out. He was his mother’s new husband, nothing more than that; but he never had a problem in referring to Shannon as his sister, at least until he understood that he was in love with her.*
* In Abandoned there really was no reference at any eventual relationship between Boone and his stepfather. I always assumed they had a civil one without getting involved in each others’ business, or so it seemed plausible to me after having a look at how Mr. S. played Boone in Abandoned. So I went with it. But I had to point out that Shannon is a whole different matter.
But that is another story.
Shannon’s father didn’t go to vote, he said that it was a waste of time and that no one was good to rule that country*. When he said it the first time, he was eleven or twelve at that time, Boone thought he understood why he and his mother got along much better than his mother and his dad ever did. He hadn’t liked that sentence, though. His father always said that going to vote was the most powerful weapon they had, even more than guns; two years after his death, Boone had started to understand what he meant.**
* Which is more or less what 90% of the people I know that don’t go to vote say. Which always makes me sort of frustrated because I think that one should always vote when there’s the right, but whatever.
** Well, that was my opinion.
He was secretly glad when Clinton won the elections. Well, not so secretly because Shannon had noticed that he was more hyped up than usual, but he had dismissed it. Maybe he understood something about it, but he surely didn’t have any title to talk about it.
--
The second time went to a march, he was fourteen and more than a march it was a sit in outside a federal prison where some man incarcerated under dubious charges was going on an electric chair.*
* I can totally picture Boone as a death penality opposer. It’d just make irony with how he ended on the show, I know, but I mean.
Of course, when he said that he had been thinking about it, his mother had forbidden it ab-so-lu-te-ly. Adam hadn’t said anything, he had made clear that he knew where they stood and that he didn’t have a saying about Boone’s matters (though his mother had about Shannon’s and Boone never really liked it); but that evening Boone had told Shannon he was going anyway.*
* That’s a thing that has always bugged me. It didn’t seem like, at least on the show, that Shannon’s father had anything to say regarding Boone’s education or whatever, at least since it was never mentioned, while it’s clear that Boone’s mother plays a big role in Shannon’s lide. Which always seemed pretty unfair to me but however.
He managed to convince a couple of friends, even if they both left at the middle of the march because they were tired; he spent the whole afternoon and most of the night with a group of college students outside the gates of the prison until someone made them go away saying that they could scream how much they wanted, that son of a bitch was dead anyway.
The college students thing was actually fun; he had been alone for a while after his friends had left when a girl which was about eighteen or nineteen had asked him what he was doing there alone. He had shrugged and answered her earnestly, saying that his friends had left and that he was going to do the sit in anyway.
She had looked someway between amused and impressed and asked him whether he wanted to do the march with her friends, they were from Berkeley or someplace like that and maybe it wasn’t a good idea that he stayed alone among so many people, even if it wasn’t too big of a march. He had said yes and he had joined the college students group. He had probably impressed one of them, a twenty-year old with a guitar slung over his shoulder and a Bob Dylan t-shirt who was seriously amazed at his proficiency in remembering all of Simon and Garfunkel’s discography.
He had arrived home at four in the morning.
His mother had stayed awake that whole time and well, he and her rarely had a row all their lives, but that had been a particularly nasty one. He didn’t even like to think about it, but he had let her scream, then told her very calmly that it was what he believed in anyway and he had gone into his room, where he earned an impressed look from a twelve-year old Shannon. She said she didn’t think he’d have had the guts to go.*
* Thing is, I’m certain he had guts and a whole lot of them. He was just unlucky when it was time to show it, but I could really see him standing up for his decisions here.
“Well, now you know better.”, he had answered before crashing into his bed.
--
At sixteen he had finally found some friends who were serious about what he was serious about; those were the years in which he had spent too much money on comfortable shoes.
He had lost count of how many marches he had gone to; but he could remember at least three against the free trade of guns in the USA* (and Shannon always used to mock him about those, since her dad and Sabrina both owned a gun; Boone didn’t even want to know where they kept them), another four against the war in Kosovo, at least five against the death penalty (during one he had also ended up in jail for one night, earning no thanks from his mother nor from Adam), one when some idiot in a university in Alabama or somewhere like that tried to get evolutionism banned from the teaching program.
In 2000, on the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the People’s Liberation Army invasion of Tibet, he had gone all the way to San Francisco in order to go to a march there; his mother hadn’t liked it one bit.**
* He doesn’t believe in guns. HE GOES TO MARCHES! *cough* sorry.
** I actually don’t have an idea whether such a march really took place, but it was really the anniversary of the Tibet invasion. I remembered it because I had to study it once and decided to have it in.
One of the ones he remembered most was the second against the war in Kosovo, where he had wore his dad’s grey t-shirt with a peace symbol on it. He had kept it when he and his mother had gone through his father’s belongings after he died and even if it always was too large for him, he loved wearing it.*
* This actually came from another fic I wrote; there was this drabble from Shannon’s POV where she remembered him wearing that shirt and well, since it was where this fic came from, I gave it the necessary space.
--
On his first election, he voted for Al Gore; Shannon actually had to console him when the results were definitive because he had rarely felt so miserable all his life and he had left the dinner table as soon as his mother had started with the See, I told you that Democrats are really good for nothing and it was good that a sane, solid.... He didn’t even want to hear the end of that sentence.
It was probably the only time in which Shannon had really tried to make him feel better even if she had already understood what kind of leverage she had on him. It was that night he was going to think about catching flights in order to bring her home just four years later.*
* Well, here we go on personal experience again because I wrote this thing ten days after the elections here in which the side I voted for lost, and not for a short number of votes as in the Gore/Bush elections. I’ll admit that I was sharing a bit of my inner frustration here, but I guess it just helped me by this point.
--
After the college, when he went to New York in order also to be as far away from Shannon as possible, he didn’t renounce going to marches.
The one he remembered better was the one pro gay rights at Stonewall; even if he had never really considered being with a man he had always been pretty open minded and if he marched for the rights of women in Islamic countries (well, that one was mostly fault of a very feminist ex girlfriend of his) he didn’t see why he shouldn’t for the homosexuals’ rights, especially when it was a much closer issue.*
* In my canon, he’s bisexual and he had a pretty fair number of same-sex relationships while he lived in New York. I always saw him as bisexual and when it was canon that he lived in NY, well, the idea just took place in my head and stayed there.
He had wore his David Bowie shirt and had even brought a rainbow bracelet; that night, after the march, he had gone to some random bar where a consistent group of all the other marchers had gone. It was the first time he actually had sex with a random male stranger in said person’s apartment (protected, of course) and he probably shouldn’t have told Shannon over the phone, three months before Adam died in that accident. She had always used it when she needed a snarky remark at him; she would also use it before boarding plane 815.*
* I can also see him not objecting to having sex with random people. One could say that it was also because he needs to take his mind off Shannon, but it’d be unfair. I always thought that his character wasn’t over at his relationship with her and I just can picture him as heaving a sexual life; maybe not that healthy, but I can’t see him keeping himself celibate because he’s in love with his step sister.
--
There are a number of reasons for which Boone likes marches.
Sure, walking for a good number of miles, wearing his peace t-shirt and singing Masters of War is the best he can do to feel close to his father, because that’s what happens; but it’s not just that.*
* And I think it’s a legit way.
The point is that it feels just good.
It can be a small march or there can be hundreds of people around him, but he always feels like they are all on the same page of the same book, like there’s some sort of greater harmony in what they do; when he marches, he knows he’s standing up for something he believes in. And it isn’t that he goes to every possible march he can find even if he doesn’t believe in it, it’s not some compulsive instinct; whenever he marches, he really believes in what he marches for.*
* Personal experience here again. You can be as tired as ever, but as long as you’re in with a bunch of people that are there for the same reason as you are and you think you can make a tenth of a difference, now that’s a hell of a sensation.
He doesn’t like guns, he hates the idea of the death penalty, he’d want everyone to have the same rights, he doesn’t like the Patriot Act; Shannon says he’s a true liberal down to his bones and well, she’s right. He is and he’s damn proud of it.
When he goes to a march, there’s also another feeling he cherishes.
No one pretends anything from you; everyone knows that if they’re doing this, it’s because they’re a minority and that most likely it won’t bring any result in the near future. They all know it, but that’s exactly the point; you go and you make the majority hear you even if they don’t want to. If they aren’t ever going to see their state death penalty free during their lives, is not the point. Because at least they’re doing something instead of doing nothing and he never can shake the feeling that he’s doing something also for a greater good and that maybe he’s being helpful to someone else. Just maybe, but it’s a damn pleasant feeling. Going on marches feels good, it’s one of the few things he does when he never fails to feel happy even when he’s tired and his feet ache.*
* Same as the commentary above; while you think you can make a tenth of difference, you also realize on a rational level that 90% of the times it won’t accomplish much. But you don’t care anyway and you feel allowed to think that it’s for the greater good, which is an attitude that I always loved in Boone. I just can relate his need of feeling helpful to the fact that he goes to marches.
He had tried to bring Shannon a couple of times, but it’s really not her thing.
During marches you get tired and your feet hurt and when you arrive at home you’re sweaty and dirty if it’s summer, freezing if it’s winter and probably freezing and wet if it’s autumn or spring and it rained. It isn’t for her and he had understood it right away. Well, her loss.*
* Of course, you really can’t go to a march whenever you care about how pretty you look in the whole bunch.
Nothing, for him, is ever going to feel better than grabbing the hand of the first person next to you, on most cases you don’t even know the name, and start singing Where Have All the Flowers Gone. Or We Shall Overcome. Because yeah, the seventies might have passed, but they still did it.
--
One day, when he’s seventeen, he tells Shannon that if he dies before she does, he wants We Shall Overcome or The Sound of Silence played at his funeral. He doesn’t know why the hell he did it. The thought just came into his head and he had decided that he had wanted at least someone to know. Surely Shannon wouldn’t have freaked out as his mother would have.
She looks at him like he’s completely crazy. He just smiles and shakes his head; he had put on his comfortable blue jeans, his dad’s shirt and his worn out sneakers before asking her. Then he grabs a sign with NO GUNS written in red letters and heads out of the room.*
* That’s actually the scene of my previous fic from which everything started. And I’m just fond of the image, too much for my own good.
--
Flight 815 crashes and he’s damn glad the gun wasn’t his business. Kate can have it; he had never took one in his hands and the second he did, his fingers had started trembling.*
* I think he must have really stressed himself that time. *pets him*
He doesn’t like guns. He hates guns.
He denies going to marches because shit, what the hell you do in presence of an obviously skilled soldier, of a Lara Croft double and of a Rick Blaine counterpart that doesn’t look as pacifist as you are?* But fuck no, he doesn’t believe in guns. They never accomplish a thing, he knows it for sure. He has also told Shannon more than one time, but she never was too willing to listen to him, on that issue.
* I figured he’d have felt a tad intimidated in such company.
About three weeks or so after, when word is that Jack has locked all the guns somewhere, he lets out a breath of relief. Shannon may be pissed off, but he’s glad he did. Guns aren’t of any good. He just knows it.
--
He doesn’t like Hurley’s Patriot Act, either. He doesn’t like when someone asks him private questions without a reason and it’s not that he doesn’t like Hurley, because he does. It just makes him a bit unsettled. That’s why he suggests the manifest. At least if Hurley just crosses the names, he won’t need to go and ask him why the fuck he was on the flight.
Like hell he’s going to tell him why.*
* I also can see him caring a lot about his privacy. I mean, the bare fact that he uses Patriot Act to describe Hurley’s (kind of innocent after all) survey shows that he does deeply care about it. Also, the fact that he suggested the manifest only shows that he was pretty smart, or at least smarter than half of the camp since no one thought about it before ;)
--
There are three main thoughts going around his head, among the perpetual pain his body is in, when he wakes up from that fall and Jack is pouring his own blood in his arm.
One: at least no one shot me.
Two: where is Shannon?
Three: would Charlie play The Sound of Silence at my funeral?*
* I had already written a full length fic about that scene and had included it in another couple ones, which is half of the reason why I went straight to the point here and closed it in two lines. There wasn’t the need of a long death scene here and I wouldn’t have had the force of will to do it anyway. Here I just tried to merge canon with my fanom. In the sense that thoughts 1 and 3 are according to my fanom, 2 is according to regular canon and the fact that I mention Jack doing the transfusion just shows that I am delusional and that I do have a OTP. Sorry.
--
Shannon doesn’t really want to disturb them.*
* I don’t write Shannon much, but here I decided that it would have been best to close with her POV. I’ll have to say it was fairly easy to write; but after all, Shannon during The Greater Good is a character with whom I can’t help identifying.
Claire is holding her newborn baby and Charlie is at a small distance, smiling at him. Shannon would like to smile, too. She just can’t.*
* Well, here I should feel a bit ashamed, but I really, really felt terrible at that scene in Do No Harm where everyone is there smiling except for Jack and then Shannon and Sayid come closer. It might be the worst of that episode for me and I figured that Shannon wouldn’t have had it in herself to go to Claire in order to congratulate.
She’s dirty and her hair is still wet; there’s mud in her shirt and among the loose strands of her hair; she has barely washed her face before breaking down crying again. She can feel the trigger snapping under her fingers and she can’t help hating Sayid even if he was right and she knows it.*
* I stressed on the fact that she’s dirty and feeling probably horrible because it’s a complete difference from your regular S1 Shannon and I liked how it was done on the show.
She doesn’t want to go there and ruin their pretty picture. They don’t need sadness, not right now.
But there’s something that Shannon can’t help shaking from her mind.
He’s in front of her, seventeen, that damned extralarge grey shirt with the peace symbol hanging loosely on his frame.
Shan, can I ask you one thing?
You’d do it even if I told you that you can’t.
Well, it isn’t something I’d ask of you everyday
Just tell me.
If I were to die before you...
Boone, what the hell..
Let me finish. If I were to die before you and before my mother... well, could you manage to have The Sound of Silence played at my funeral? Or We Shall Overcome.
That’s crazy. You aren’t going to die.
Well, that really wasn’t the point.
But why would you ask me that now?
Just forget it.
He smiles and leaves the room. Going to a march, of course. *
* Same scene, but Shannon’s POV again this time. I figured that if there was anything she could do for him at this point she’d have tried it.
Shannon doesn’t even know the words to The Sound of Silence. She only knows it was his favorite song and she probably never heard it fully.*
* Shannon doesn’t look much to me like the person who likes Simon and Garfunkel.
There are a lot of things she knows about him but she doesn’t really know, either. She knows his favorite book was On The Road but she never read it because it didn’t seem interesting enough, she knows he hated when people said just Dr. Strangelove instead of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, but she has never seen that movie and wouldn’t really know the difference. He had asked her to go to a march a couple of times. She always said no. It was going to ruin her feet, her shoes, she could get sunburned or soaked wet, it wasn’t good for her hair; all those excuses had seemed enough at the time, united to the fact that well, he really believed in that while she really didn’t have an opinion.*
* She also doesn’t look to me like one who would get interested in politics or social matters, even though it doesn’t mean she isn’t a good person. It’s just something that would have been completely different for the both of them and since I can imagine Boone going shopping with her but not her going to marches with him, by this point I figured she’d have regretted it.
They all seem so petty now. Her feet ache and her hair is terrible and she is soaked to the bones and she’s covered in mud. Not so different to how it would have been if she went with him once. Now she regrets it, not because it might have made a difference because hell, neither Boone was so much of an idiot to believe it could actually make a difference, but because she felt like they hadn’t shared enough and what they had shared wasn’t what they needed.*
* I think this is one of the basic points in the Boone/Shannon relationship. I am convinced that they only shared their UST and not, you know, as many sibling moments as would have been sane.
If she thinks about his lips on her skin that night, about his teeth lightly grasping her shoulder, about his fingers running through her hair, she wants to throw up because that had been her lowest point. Not his, bless him, not his; she had known and he had always tried to reprime it. She had been the one to bring it out, he’d never had done it otherwise. She hadn’t loved him that way. She can’t really blame him for drifting away like that.
If only she had acted differently, if only she had gone to one march then just for the heck of going, if she hadn’t acted on what he felt for her, if she had spared him two kind words after it, maybe he would be there now. But he isn’t and she can’t bear thinking that she can’t even fulfill the only wish she knows he had.*
* Also, I might be biased but I think that the responsibility for the Sydney mess is mostly hers. Right, he had feelings for her, but it’s not like he ever acted upon them and it wasn’t like he hadn’t tried to refuse her when she came upon him. I’m not saying that he’s a saint and she isn’t, far from that, but I just think that it was Shannon’s lowest point. Especially since she did it out of last resort and not because she had any feelings of that kind for him, which I guess it’s something she’d have regretted a lot in retrospective.
She takes a breath and starts for Claire’s tent. She’s sorry to, but she needs to.
She raises a shaky hand when they notice her and tries to smile. Failing miserably.
Shannon knows that the mere sight of Claire’s baby should be enough to bring out a small smile at least; it isn’t and she can’t pretend.*
* I don’t see Shannon much as a children person and I think she wouldn’t have felt much involved even if Boone hadn’t died. But I guess she couldn’t pretend anything by this point.
“Hi, Shannon.”, says Claire, trying to keep her voice at an even tone. Well, she had been talking to the baby before, Shannon wouldn’t want her to adopt the sad tone if she isn’t. She has every right not to be.
“Hi. Listen, I’d really... Charlie, can I speak with you one second?”
“Sure.”, he answers, a bit surprised. Of course. She hasn’t spoken a word to him since asking him for that fish. Of course he’s surprised.*
* That scene is just one of my favorites. I figured that Charlie would have felt kind of terrible after finding out she was using him, but he’d have forgotten it as soon as she tried talking to him again. Since they hadn’t really interacted after I figured it was Shannon’s doing. And anyway, I was slashing Boone and Charlie so hard at that point that it wasn’t even funny. During the fish scene, of course.
They walk a bit in silence until Shannon is sure they’re far enough from Claire’s tent and from anyone for that matter. She takes a breath.
“Is there something you need?”, he says, more gentle than she’d deserve.
“Yeah. Well, it’s not for me. Not really. Do you... do you like Simon and Garfunkel?”
Charlie looks a bit startled by that question, but he nods.
“Well, yeah. Not my favorite cup of tea but they’re the basics. I mean, if you’re a musician you’ve got to know at least their most famous stuff. They’re pretty requested.”*
* Charlie doesn’t look to me like the world’s greatest Simon and Garfunkel fan either, but if he plays the guitar I guess he would have had to know at least a handful of songs.
“Can I... ask you a favor?”
“Sure. But what...”
“Boone. Once, when he was... feeling suicidal... or something, he told me he’d have liked The Sound of Silence played at his funeral. I just... I had completely forgotten it until today and well, I don’t even know the words and I guess no one has a record player here. The funeral is already done but I was wondering if you could... you know, just, play it over there? It’s... there’s nothing else I can think of doing for him when I wasn’t even...”
She starts crying again and she feels just useless; she can’t even sing him his favorite song when she knew by heart a damn French song from a cartoon about fishes.* Charlie puts a hand on her shoulder, a sort of butterfly touch but it’s there. She raises his eyes and he looks uttermost serious.
* I guess she’d have felt terrible at that.
“I can. I mean, I know it. I can do it, it isn’t really a problem. I’ll go get the guitar and then we can go. Do you want anyone else?”
“No. Just you will be fine. Thank you.”, she manages to say in a breath before he nods and goes back to his tent.
He’s back three minutes after with the guitar under his arm; she turns and they go up on the hill. The grave is still fresh and she feels like throwing up. She just can’t stomach the sight of it.*
* Neither could I, but we had all assumed this.
Charlie’s hand is on her shoulder again.
“Are you alright? Sorry, that was a stupid question.”
It was less stupid than it seemed.
“No, it wasn’t. Don’t.. don’t worry about me. You know what, I’ll just sit there. Just don’t worry about what I do.”
For once, this isn’t about me., she thought, but kept for herself while she sits on a tree branch near there, looking at her broken sandals and at the dry mud around her ankles.*
* I always thought that Boone’s story was too much about Shannon than about himself. I mean, it looks to me like they only wrote him in relation to her (or Locke, or Jack) and I never really liked that since I thought he was a strong enough character on his own. Which is why I had that line, I wanted the scene to be about him.
Charlie sits in front of the grave; first he plays a couple of chords, then stops; she looks at him, realizing that he’s trying to remember how it goes. She waits for a minute or two; then he stops trying, murmurs something like got it and starts playing something she thinks she recognizes. He stops again, smiling in satisfaction.
“Right, I got it. I can go now.”
He starts playing the song then and she tries not to listen to the words; she realizes that hearing them may lead her to realize something about why the hell that was his favorite song and she can’t find it in her, not when she has just stopped crying. But then she catches a line and she can’t help it.
..People talking without speaking, people hearing without listening, people writing songs that voices never share... and no one dare disturb the sound of silence...
Her head snaps up, looking straight at Charlie, who is closing his eyes and just singing it; she suddenly feels a lump raising in her throat.
.."Fools," said I, "you do not know silence like a cancer grows, hear my words that I might teach you, take my arms that I might reach you.”, but my words like silent raindrops fell, and echoed in the wells of silence...
She doesn’t cry because she can’t find any tears to shed anymore but suddenly she understands a lot of things. After all, he was always trying to tell her something. Also to Sabrina, now that she thought about it. Both of them had never caught the message. No wonder than after it he did the only selfish and convenient thing he did all his life, accepting that job at the wedding company. Sabrina thought she should have been proud of it, but Shannon now thinks that maybe he did it just because he was tired of trying to reach out to the both of them and it was just more comfortable if he just settled on letting them believe whatever they wanted.*
* I always thought that Boone + wedding company = not a good match. And since it was the first thing your rich spoiled kid does (accepting the job that your parents provide for you), it would be easy to think that he was your usual spoiled rich kid. But since I do not share the opinion, I always figured that he took the job in order to make some money soon and then finding something more suited. I also think that there were serious communication issues between him and Shannon and I could see said issues being also between him and his mother. I thought that here he just did the easy thing so that his mother could say she was proud and all that jazz and Shannon would have had a reason not to like him. But then again, I think about Boone way too much.
And the people bowed and prayed to the neon god they made, and the sign flashed out its warning, in the words that it was forming, and the signs said: "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls and whisper'd in the sound of silence."
She doesn’t think she understands that last part. Maybe it will just be a secret he’s carried to the grave and that she was never meant to find out.*
* I have this idea that he was doomed by silence all of his life (he doesn’t communicate with Shannon, he presumably doesn’t with his mother, he dies because Locke wants to keep secrets and so on). Maybe that’s why I think he’d like the song.
Charlie stands up and goes near her.
“Well, that was it. Not a very brilliant performance I’m afraid, but..”*
* I figured he’d try to lighten up the situation stressing his eventual flaws. I mean, he does much in this fic without doing actually much, but I figured I owed him three lines.
“It was perfect. Thank you.”, she answers, taking the hand he offered her to stand up.
They leave and she turns for one second, watching the shilouette of the cross standing against the last rays of the setting sun.
Shannon smiles just slightly; maybe she has just did something for him, once.*
* Oh, she has. No doubt about that.
She hopes he could appreciate it someway.*
* Seeing my ghosts theory, he’s appreciating it quite a lot. Anyway, just for closure, I think I wrote this mainly because I wanted to show that Boone is a strong character that could have had a story on his own and that there’s a lot to tell beyond the pretty. It’s just that sometimes I happen to stumble into the occasional fic where the guy is written just as the dumb-but-pretty stereotype or the dead weight in Shannon’s life or the sacrifice the island demanded and I think I had stumbled upon one at the time and it just leaves me shrugging. I think he can/could have been a compelling character, it’s just that they never took the effort with him. Which is why I do it ;), but I probably am rambling here. Thanks for sticking with this if you made it this far ;)
End.
falafel_musings, for What'll You Do Now, My Blue Eyed Son?, aka how yours truly got wordy when talking about Boone and marches. And that'd be it. Beware because it's veery wordy.The first time Boone goes to a march, he is nine years old and it’s the last time he sees his father alive.*
* So, this was my flashing-the-hell-out-of-Boone fic. Thing is, this is probably the one where I’ve taken the most liberties with a major character’s background, but thing is, canon doesn’t really tell us nothing about Boone apart from the Shannon facts, that he works in a wedding company, that he’s a liberal and his mom is a bitch. So I went and gave him a whole and thorough backstory and I can assure you that I’ve thought about it more than it would be sane to. This was supposed to be about his going to marches wherabouts and ended up becoming quite more than that but since I had started with that idea, I opened it like this in order to give a quick idea of the subject. Also, it was implied that I was going to try and explane Boone’s relationship with his father, which is something that the show never considered anyway. And which is why I titled this after a Bob Dylan song which happened to be kind of fitting.
--
Since he had been old enough to sense it, Boone had always had the impression that his father and his mother really didn’t have any business together. They probably were together because, seeing things straight, they actually never were in the real sense of the word. They were opposites, but not the kind of opposites that attract each other.
His father was a photographer for National Geographic; he was home only one week per month, passing the remaining three usually on the other side of the world. His mother had always worked for the wedding company, as long as Boone remembered; they were well-off, sure, unless they wouldn’t have been able to afford a nanny, but especially when he was very young, he rememberd his mother being home only in the evenings. He never really understood why did she need so badly to get the company started until he actually knew what getting a company started meant, but by that point he didn’t really feel the need for her to be at home anymore.*
* A point that I always wondered about Boone was how was he so different from his mother. I can concede that the kid was probably the kind that you spoil to death and that doesn’t really have a problem for his life as soon as his parents get him a job, but you have to concede me that there was more to Boone than that. Apart from that White Rabbit outburst at Jack he never behaved like a spoiled superficial kid and that he’s quite selfless; also, if you see Abandoned, you can see how different from his mother is. So one answer that came to me was that he might have taken from his father, who of course doesn’t exist in canon Lost. So I made him up in a way that I thought could be plausible in order for him to have had some good influence on his son. Also, I always pictured Boone’s parents as at least estranged. I had his father working for National Geographic because since Boone was alone with Theresa when she fell down the stairs it meant no one was around much and if I wanted him to be alive, he had to have a job that kept him far from home a lot and photographer looked like a plausible one. Also, it was a bit of a homage to Clint Eastwood’s character in The Bridges of Madison County, but bear with me. I had a serious crush on him in that movie.
Well, truth to be told that need had stopped when Theresa fell down the stairs.
But anyway, that’s another story.*
* I actually think that it’s the most important thing that has ever happened in Boone’s life apart from the crash. Even more than his thing with Shannon, but that’s not the place to discuss this.
It wasn’t also that his parents didn’t have much business together; it was that they were from two completely different worlds, or so it seemed to him.
He always traveled; once he told Boone that he was sorry not to be at home more, but he just couldn’t stay in the same place for too long, or go to work to the same office; Boone, especially lately, thought that he had always understood it better than he let on. He had never been angry at him for that; it’d have been pointless. Because being away, that was his job after all. While it wasn’t his mother’s, who hated to travel and hated leaving Malibu even to go someplace else in California but never found the time to come home for lunch.*
* I might not have been exactly fair to Sabrina here, but I loathe that woman as I loathe few characters on Lost. I tried to be as fair as possible though, but I can figure her never being home anyway and so I drew the parallel on that.
Her favorite movie was Love Story, his was Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Boone had always loved that title, for some strange reason; it made him kind of annoyed when people just said Dr. Strangelove*).
* It makes me annoyed, too. As hell.
He voted Democrat, she voted Republican; he listened to rock or folk music from the sixties and seventies, she claimed that music was something too shallow to care about but then used trash top ten country music chart as background whenever she felt the need not to be in silence. Sometimes he wondered why did they even get together in the first place. He found it hard to believe his father when he told him that they had met at university and that she had just turned different after the first year of marriage.
Later, after crashing on an island, Boone would have thought about it more deeply; after all, his dad had already the job with the magazine while she had started the wedding company on her own and had been alone with it most of the time also when she was pregnant; he never had that good of a relationship with her even if they got along fine, but after almost dying, he could see where she had come from and maybe also why she was so different from his father, in the end.*
* That was actually me trying to justify her attitude and coming up with a plausible explanation to her distant behavior; sure, we’ve only seen her with Shannon, but she’s so different from Boone (or his fictional dad here) that if I wanted to make the whole backstory plausible I needed to have her coming from a much different place. I can see someone hardening in such a condition and so I went with that.
But that isn’t the point.
Sure, he spent more time with his mother than with his father. That was a given. He didn’t think that whenever she spoke about him at dinner, she tried to be mean with purpose. It just was her nature, he figured.
It wasn’t that she was angry at him because he wasn’t home most of the time, but maybe he could just have been less selfish and found a normal job; it wasn’t that the music he listened to was bad, but well, it was all hippie and idiotic, he could improve his tastes a bit; it wasn’t that voting the Democrats was bad, but it was at least a bit dangerous for the country, wasn’t it?*
* That is actually that kind of talk that is aimed to make the absent person look in a negative light without being blunt about that; in such a condition, I could see her doing it just as I could see Boone shrugging and not caring about it.
One would have figured that he had a stronger bond with her, after all.
Point is, it was all the contratry.
When his mother’s friends came over at the weekend and he had to make presence, they all said the same thing.
Oh, he’s all Robert, isn’t he?
And he was, at least on the physical side. He had his father’s blue eyes, his chestnut hair; his mother always said that she hoped for him that the perpetual flush on his cheeks would disappear because while it was alright with his father it really wasn’t nice for a man.*
* That was when I went on giving Boone a stronger bond with him than with her. If you think about it, it’s not like he ever mentions his mother on the island or in the flashbacks; it’s probably because they only thought her in S2, but I had a point to prove here.
They saw each other one week per month, but during that week, he always was at home. Dinner time was mostly awkward and his parents never talked to each other, but it was alright.
The day after he arrived, his dad spent two or three hours processing negatives in the cellar; then, when he was back from school, they used to watch together all the pictures he took and he had a story for each of them; the ones he decided he wasn’t going to give to the magazine, he gave Boone.
Boone still had an album with all of the National Geographics outtakes; it was in his room in his bilocal in Malibu when Oceanic Flight 815 crashed on the wonder known as Craphole Island.*
* I picture Boone as someone who really gets attached to things. I think he would have never threw such a thing away, especially when, as I pointed out later, it became mostly what he has left of his father and probably just reminds him fond memories.
While they sorted his father’s photos, he always put his favorite music on; it was Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Simon and Garfunkel, The Beatles. When he was six or so, he had decided that his favorite song was The Sound of Silence; his dad thought that it was a bit depressing actually, but he liked it alright. He didn’t think it was depressing. Sad, maybe, but not depressing.
It has always been his favorite song, all things considered.*
* Now, when I heard the infamous he goes to marches line, my wheels started turning. I realize that I might have given Boone a sort of old fashioned music taste, but at least about The Sound of Silence I always thought it was so him that it had to be a song he liked. So it became his overall favorite in my canon and here I was just linking his taste with music he grew up with. It’s probably a personal thing because I’m way too fond of the songs I grew up with myself. Here, apart from Simon and Garfunkel, I gave him the basics of the 60s/70s music and probably something way too pacifist/Woodstock-like, but that’s just how I see him.
During those twelve weeks per year (nine years, minus four because they really hadn’t started before he was five years old, it meant sixty weeks? Yeah, sixty) they always ended up talking about issues that Boone would have later recognized for much more important that they seemed at the time.
It wasn’t hard to ask him at that time whether there was the death penalty in the places where he went, and it wasn’t hard, after not much time, to see how actually cruel and stupid it was. It wasn’t hard to ask him why he frowned while reading the paper and he said that if people just couldn’t buy guns the States would have been a better place.*
* There we start with the marches against guns business. Then again, I might have wrote things from a POV a tad too personal, but I don’t think I was too wrong on having him forming himself an opinion at an early age with a sort of adult imput. Not that one can’t form one later, sure, but it happens.
Boone guessed that he had more or less picked his side in 1989, when his mother had voted for Bush and his dad for Dukakis. It was the first and last time he had heard them really screaming at each other and he couldn’t make out the terms of the argument truth to be told, but it had been violent.*
* Never happened with my parents, but there’s a reason for which I never talk politics when I know someone is of my exactly opposite opinion. 95% of the times it gets way too nasty.
He had seen the debates with his mother during the electoral campaign and well, he might have been seven but he had always thought that Bush really looked like an idiot, no offence intended. And he was pro-death penalty and pro-guns and pro-a-lot-of-other-stuff that he really didn’t like. Sure, picking sides didn’t mean that he had decided he was going to vote Democrat, but he surely had decided that he wasn’t ever going to vote for someone who was pro-guns and pro-death penalty, though it was a thought he never shared with anyone. He feared it was going to sound ridiculous and they’d have probably told him to stop thinking about things he didn’t understand. Maybe he didn’t understand them at all, but some, he thought he did.*
* He couldn’t have understood much more at that age, but it seemed plausible to me that he should have picked sides at least based on those two basic matters.
In March 1991, two days before leaving for New Zealand, his dad had told him he was going to a march against the Gulf War and that he wasn’t probably be going to be back soon.
Boone had asked him whether he could come, too. His mother, who was hearing all the conversation from the next room, had stormed in asking him if he ever knew what the Gulf War was. She was sort of shocked when he told her that he knew alright, and he did. He watched the news once per day and he sort of read a newspaper they gave for free to the last year students at his school. Sure that he knew what the Gulf War was. It went unsaid that he didn’t like it one bit.*
* This is probably all personal experience in the sense that when I was nine or ten at school there was some hour where there was a general reading of a newspaper commenting the news. Of course it wasn’t anything detailed or too complex, but it helped you form an opinion and there’s a reason for which newspaper exist. For me Boone’s Gulf War was the Kosovo war, but I just figured that at that age one could be at least aware of what happens outside the walls of his room.
Then she had started saying that marches weren’t the place for anyone under sixteen years old and that he surely wasn’t allowed to, but then his dad had shrugged and told her that why not, if he wanted? He was the one taking the responsibility, anyway.
She had eventually relented and they had gone to the march.
His dad had brought a sign with the copy of a picture he had taken in Iraq a couple of years before, Boone didn’t remember what it was but he was half-sure that it was taken in a camp hospital, with Stop the war NOW written in red under it; as soon as they arrived, he had actually felt somewhat scared.
There was an awful lot of people, much moise, someone screamed against Bush (he remembered hearing a couple of son of a bitch in the first ten seconds they were there); but as soon as they started walking, he hadn’t even thought about it.*
* If swearing isn’t the first thing you hear when you go to a march it’s at least between the first five.
Almost everyone had a sign and there were quite some people singing; at one point, they passed a group of girls singing Blowin’ in the Wind (which was Boone’s second-favorite song by the way); his dad chatted quite amiably with some random people passing and once in a while they stopped to drink some water. It wasn’t much hot truth to be told, but it sure was tiring.
Even if it was, his feet didn’t start to hurt until they got home.*
* Personal experience again. Your feet start to hurt either when it’s over or when you take off your shoes, never when you actually do the march.
Two days later his dad left and the plane that was supposed to bring him to New Zealand crashed somewhere in the Pacific; one day in October 2004, Boone would have reflected on the irony.*
* This was just me wanting to make Lost-like connections, but I thought it was indeed some case of bad karma.
There hadn’t been a funeral; the bodies never were retrieved. Boone remembers crying for three days after getting the news and he was never ashamed to admit it.*
* He doesn’t seem like one who would be ashamed to admit that he has been crying.
His mother had seemed somewhat shaken at least, but she hadn’t cried. Or at least, not in his presence. Months later, when she started seeing someone else, sometimes she would start to say that he had been an idiot and should have just searched an honest job; Boone let her talk and always settled to go back to his room and look at his photo album, usually the pics taken in Japan. They had something that made him feel calmer.
Then his mother married Adam Rutherford and Shannon came into his life and into the room they shared because so it’d have been better for bonding; Boone hated that word, but he genuinely had liked Shannon. He was never too fond of her father, though they had always been civil and never had a lash-out. He was his mother’s new husband, nothing more than that; but he never had a problem in referring to Shannon as his sister, at least until he understood that he was in love with her.*
* In Abandoned there really was no reference at any eventual relationship between Boone and his stepfather. I always assumed they had a civil one without getting involved in each others’ business, or so it seemed plausible to me after having a look at how Mr. S. played Boone in Abandoned. So I went with it. But I had to point out that Shannon is a whole different matter.
But that is another story.
Shannon’s father didn’t go to vote, he said that it was a waste of time and that no one was good to rule that country*. When he said it the first time, he was eleven or twelve at that time, Boone thought he understood why he and his mother got along much better than his mother and his dad ever did. He hadn’t liked that sentence, though. His father always said that going to vote was the most powerful weapon they had, even more than guns; two years after his death, Boone had started to understand what he meant.**
* Which is more or less what 90% of the people I know that don’t go to vote say. Which always makes me sort of frustrated because I think that one should always vote when there’s the right, but whatever.
** Well, that was my opinion.
He was secretly glad when Clinton won the elections. Well, not so secretly because Shannon had noticed that he was more hyped up than usual, but he had dismissed it. Maybe he understood something about it, but he surely didn’t have any title to talk about it.
--
The second time went to a march, he was fourteen and more than a march it was a sit in outside a federal prison where some man incarcerated under dubious charges was going on an electric chair.*
* I can totally picture Boone as a death penality opposer. It’d just make irony with how he ended on the show, I know, but I mean.
Of course, when he said that he had been thinking about it, his mother had forbidden it ab-so-lu-te-ly. Adam hadn’t said anything, he had made clear that he knew where they stood and that he didn’t have a saying about Boone’s matters (though his mother had about Shannon’s and Boone never really liked it); but that evening Boone had told Shannon he was going anyway.*
* That’s a thing that has always bugged me. It didn’t seem like, at least on the show, that Shannon’s father had anything to say regarding Boone’s education or whatever, at least since it was never mentioned, while it’s clear that Boone’s mother plays a big role in Shannon’s lide. Which always seemed pretty unfair to me but however.
He managed to convince a couple of friends, even if they both left at the middle of the march because they were tired; he spent the whole afternoon and most of the night with a group of college students outside the gates of the prison until someone made them go away saying that they could scream how much they wanted, that son of a bitch was dead anyway.
The college students thing was actually fun; he had been alone for a while after his friends had left when a girl which was about eighteen or nineteen had asked him what he was doing there alone. He had shrugged and answered her earnestly, saying that his friends had left and that he was going to do the sit in anyway.
She had looked someway between amused and impressed and asked him whether he wanted to do the march with her friends, they were from Berkeley or someplace like that and maybe it wasn’t a good idea that he stayed alone among so many people, even if it wasn’t too big of a march. He had said yes and he had joined the college students group. He had probably impressed one of them, a twenty-year old with a guitar slung over his shoulder and a Bob Dylan t-shirt who was seriously amazed at his proficiency in remembering all of Simon and Garfunkel’s discography.
He had arrived home at four in the morning.
His mother had stayed awake that whole time and well, he and her rarely had a row all their lives, but that had been a particularly nasty one. He didn’t even like to think about it, but he had let her scream, then told her very calmly that it was what he believed in anyway and he had gone into his room, where he earned an impressed look from a twelve-year old Shannon. She said she didn’t think he’d have had the guts to go.*
* Thing is, I’m certain he had guts and a whole lot of them. He was just unlucky when it was time to show it, but I could really see him standing up for his decisions here.
“Well, now you know better.”, he had answered before crashing into his bed.
--
At sixteen he had finally found some friends who were serious about what he was serious about; those were the years in which he had spent too much money on comfortable shoes.
He had lost count of how many marches he had gone to; but he could remember at least three against the free trade of guns in the USA* (and Shannon always used to mock him about those, since her dad and Sabrina both owned a gun; Boone didn’t even want to know where they kept them), another four against the war in Kosovo, at least five against the death penalty (during one he had also ended up in jail for one night, earning no thanks from his mother nor from Adam), one when some idiot in a university in Alabama or somewhere like that tried to get evolutionism banned from the teaching program.
In 2000, on the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the People’s Liberation Army invasion of Tibet, he had gone all the way to San Francisco in order to go to a march there; his mother hadn’t liked it one bit.**
* He doesn’t believe in guns. HE GOES TO MARCHES! *cough* sorry.
** I actually don’t have an idea whether such a march really took place, but it was really the anniversary of the Tibet invasion. I remembered it because I had to study it once and decided to have it in.
One of the ones he remembered most was the second against the war in Kosovo, where he had wore his dad’s grey t-shirt with a peace symbol on it. He had kept it when he and his mother had gone through his father’s belongings after he died and even if it always was too large for him, he loved wearing it.*
* This actually came from another fic I wrote; there was this drabble from Shannon’s POV where she remembered him wearing that shirt and well, since it was where this fic came from, I gave it the necessary space.
--
On his first election, he voted for Al Gore; Shannon actually had to console him when the results were definitive because he had rarely felt so miserable all his life and he had left the dinner table as soon as his mother had started with the See, I told you that Democrats are really good for nothing and it was good that a sane, solid.... He didn’t even want to hear the end of that sentence.
It was probably the only time in which Shannon had really tried to make him feel better even if she had already understood what kind of leverage she had on him. It was that night he was going to think about catching flights in order to bring her home just four years later.*
* Well, here we go on personal experience again because I wrote this thing ten days after the elections here in which the side I voted for lost, and not for a short number of votes as in the Gore/Bush elections. I’ll admit that I was sharing a bit of my inner frustration here, but I guess it just helped me by this point.
--
After the college, when he went to New York in order also to be as far away from Shannon as possible, he didn’t renounce going to marches.
The one he remembered better was the one pro gay rights at Stonewall; even if he had never really considered being with a man he had always been pretty open minded and if he marched for the rights of women in Islamic countries (well, that one was mostly fault of a very feminist ex girlfriend of his) he didn’t see why he shouldn’t for the homosexuals’ rights, especially when it was a much closer issue.*
* In my canon, he’s bisexual and he had a pretty fair number of same-sex relationships while he lived in New York. I always saw him as bisexual and when it was canon that he lived in NY, well, the idea just took place in my head and stayed there.
He had wore his David Bowie shirt and had even brought a rainbow bracelet; that night, after the march, he had gone to some random bar where a consistent group of all the other marchers had gone. It was the first time he actually had sex with a random male stranger in said person’s apartment (protected, of course) and he probably shouldn’t have told Shannon over the phone, three months before Adam died in that accident. She had always used it when she needed a snarky remark at him; she would also use it before boarding plane 815.*
* I can also see him not objecting to having sex with random people. One could say that it was also because he needs to take his mind off Shannon, but it’d be unfair. I always thought that his character wasn’t over at his relationship with her and I just can picture him as heaving a sexual life; maybe not that healthy, but I can’t see him keeping himself celibate because he’s in love with his step sister.
--
There are a number of reasons for which Boone likes marches.
Sure, walking for a good number of miles, wearing his peace t-shirt and singing Masters of War is the best he can do to feel close to his father, because that’s what happens; but it’s not just that.*
* And I think it’s a legit way.
The point is that it feels just good.
It can be a small march or there can be hundreds of people around him, but he always feels like they are all on the same page of the same book, like there’s some sort of greater harmony in what they do; when he marches, he knows he’s standing up for something he believes in. And it isn’t that he goes to every possible march he can find even if he doesn’t believe in it, it’s not some compulsive instinct; whenever he marches, he really believes in what he marches for.*
* Personal experience here again. You can be as tired as ever, but as long as you’re in with a bunch of people that are there for the same reason as you are and you think you can make a tenth of a difference, now that’s a hell of a sensation.
He doesn’t like guns, he hates the idea of the death penalty, he’d want everyone to have the same rights, he doesn’t like the Patriot Act; Shannon says he’s a true liberal down to his bones and well, she’s right. He is and he’s damn proud of it.
When he goes to a march, there’s also another feeling he cherishes.
No one pretends anything from you; everyone knows that if they’re doing this, it’s because they’re a minority and that most likely it won’t bring any result in the near future. They all know it, but that’s exactly the point; you go and you make the majority hear you even if they don’t want to. If they aren’t ever going to see their state death penalty free during their lives, is not the point. Because at least they’re doing something instead of doing nothing and he never can shake the feeling that he’s doing something also for a greater good and that maybe he’s being helpful to someone else. Just maybe, but it’s a damn pleasant feeling. Going on marches feels good, it’s one of the few things he does when he never fails to feel happy even when he’s tired and his feet ache.*
* Same as the commentary above; while you think you can make a tenth of difference, you also realize on a rational level that 90% of the times it won’t accomplish much. But you don’t care anyway and you feel allowed to think that it’s for the greater good, which is an attitude that I always loved in Boone. I just can relate his need of feeling helpful to the fact that he goes to marches.
He had tried to bring Shannon a couple of times, but it’s really not her thing.
During marches you get tired and your feet hurt and when you arrive at home you’re sweaty and dirty if it’s summer, freezing if it’s winter and probably freezing and wet if it’s autumn or spring and it rained. It isn’t for her and he had understood it right away. Well, her loss.*
* Of course, you really can’t go to a march whenever you care about how pretty you look in the whole bunch.
Nothing, for him, is ever going to feel better than grabbing the hand of the first person next to you, on most cases you don’t even know the name, and start singing Where Have All the Flowers Gone. Or We Shall Overcome. Because yeah, the seventies might have passed, but they still did it.
--
One day, when he’s seventeen, he tells Shannon that if he dies before she does, he wants We Shall Overcome or The Sound of Silence played at his funeral. He doesn’t know why the hell he did it. The thought just came into his head and he had decided that he had wanted at least someone to know. Surely Shannon wouldn’t have freaked out as his mother would have.
She looks at him like he’s completely crazy. He just smiles and shakes his head; he had put on his comfortable blue jeans, his dad’s shirt and his worn out sneakers before asking her. Then he grabs a sign with NO GUNS written in red letters and heads out of the room.*
* That’s actually the scene of my previous fic from which everything started. And I’m just fond of the image, too much for my own good.
--
Flight 815 crashes and he’s damn glad the gun wasn’t his business. Kate can have it; he had never took one in his hands and the second he did, his fingers had started trembling.*
* I think he must have really stressed himself that time. *pets him*
He doesn’t like guns. He hates guns.
He denies going to marches because shit, what the hell you do in presence of an obviously skilled soldier, of a Lara Croft double and of a Rick Blaine counterpart that doesn’t look as pacifist as you are?* But fuck no, he doesn’t believe in guns. They never accomplish a thing, he knows it for sure. He has also told Shannon more than one time, but she never was too willing to listen to him, on that issue.
* I figured he’d have felt a tad intimidated in such company.
About three weeks or so after, when word is that Jack has locked all the guns somewhere, he lets out a breath of relief. Shannon may be pissed off, but he’s glad he did. Guns aren’t of any good. He just knows it.
--
He doesn’t like Hurley’s Patriot Act, either. He doesn’t like when someone asks him private questions without a reason and it’s not that he doesn’t like Hurley, because he does. It just makes him a bit unsettled. That’s why he suggests the manifest. At least if Hurley just crosses the names, he won’t need to go and ask him why the fuck he was on the flight.
Like hell he’s going to tell him why.*
* I also can see him caring a lot about his privacy. I mean, the bare fact that he uses Patriot Act to describe Hurley’s (kind of innocent after all) survey shows that he does deeply care about it. Also, the fact that he suggested the manifest only shows that he was pretty smart, or at least smarter than half of the camp since no one thought about it before ;)
--
There are three main thoughts going around his head, among the perpetual pain his body is in, when he wakes up from that fall and Jack is pouring his own blood in his arm.
One: at least no one shot me.
Two: where is Shannon?
Three: would Charlie play The Sound of Silence at my funeral?*
* I had already written a full length fic about that scene and had included it in another couple ones, which is half of the reason why I went straight to the point here and closed it in two lines. There wasn’t the need of a long death scene here and I wouldn’t have had the force of will to do it anyway. Here I just tried to merge canon with my fanom. In the sense that thoughts 1 and 3 are according to my fanom, 2 is according to regular canon and the fact that I mention Jack doing the transfusion just shows that I am delusional and that I do have a OTP. Sorry.
--
Shannon doesn’t really want to disturb them.*
* I don’t write Shannon much, but here I decided that it would have been best to close with her POV. I’ll have to say it was fairly easy to write; but after all, Shannon during The Greater Good is a character with whom I can’t help identifying.
Claire is holding her newborn baby and Charlie is at a small distance, smiling at him. Shannon would like to smile, too. She just can’t.*
* Well, here I should feel a bit ashamed, but I really, really felt terrible at that scene in Do No Harm where everyone is there smiling except for Jack and then Shannon and Sayid come closer. It might be the worst of that episode for me and I figured that Shannon wouldn’t have had it in herself to go to Claire in order to congratulate.
She’s dirty and her hair is still wet; there’s mud in her shirt and among the loose strands of her hair; she has barely washed her face before breaking down crying again. She can feel the trigger snapping under her fingers and she can’t help hating Sayid even if he was right and she knows it.*
* I stressed on the fact that she’s dirty and feeling probably horrible because it’s a complete difference from your regular S1 Shannon and I liked how it was done on the show.
She doesn’t want to go there and ruin their pretty picture. They don’t need sadness, not right now.
But there’s something that Shannon can’t help shaking from her mind.
He’s in front of her, seventeen, that damned extralarge grey shirt with the peace symbol hanging loosely on his frame.
Shan, can I ask you one thing?
You’d do it even if I told you that you can’t.
Well, it isn’t something I’d ask of you everyday
Just tell me.
If I were to die before you...
Boone, what the hell..
Let me finish. If I were to die before you and before my mother... well, could you manage to have The Sound of Silence played at my funeral? Or We Shall Overcome.
That’s crazy. You aren’t going to die.
Well, that really wasn’t the point.
But why would you ask me that now?
Just forget it.
He smiles and leaves the room. Going to a march, of course. *
* Same scene, but Shannon’s POV again this time. I figured that if there was anything she could do for him at this point she’d have tried it.
Shannon doesn’t even know the words to The Sound of Silence. She only knows it was his favorite song and she probably never heard it fully.*
* Shannon doesn’t look much to me like the person who likes Simon and Garfunkel.
There are a lot of things she knows about him but she doesn’t really know, either. She knows his favorite book was On The Road but she never read it because it didn’t seem interesting enough, she knows he hated when people said just Dr. Strangelove instead of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, but she has never seen that movie and wouldn’t really know the difference. He had asked her to go to a march a couple of times. She always said no. It was going to ruin her feet, her shoes, she could get sunburned or soaked wet, it wasn’t good for her hair; all those excuses had seemed enough at the time, united to the fact that well, he really believed in that while she really didn’t have an opinion.*
* She also doesn’t look to me like one who would get interested in politics or social matters, even though it doesn’t mean she isn’t a good person. It’s just something that would have been completely different for the both of them and since I can imagine Boone going shopping with her but not her going to marches with him, by this point I figured she’d have regretted it.
They all seem so petty now. Her feet ache and her hair is terrible and she is soaked to the bones and she’s covered in mud. Not so different to how it would have been if she went with him once. Now she regrets it, not because it might have made a difference because hell, neither Boone was so much of an idiot to believe it could actually make a difference, but because she felt like they hadn’t shared enough and what they had shared wasn’t what they needed.*
* I think this is one of the basic points in the Boone/Shannon relationship. I am convinced that they only shared their UST and not, you know, as many sibling moments as would have been sane.
If she thinks about his lips on her skin that night, about his teeth lightly grasping her shoulder, about his fingers running through her hair, she wants to throw up because that had been her lowest point. Not his, bless him, not his; she had known and he had always tried to reprime it. She had been the one to bring it out, he’d never had done it otherwise. She hadn’t loved him that way. She can’t really blame him for drifting away like that.
If only she had acted differently, if only she had gone to one march then just for the heck of going, if she hadn’t acted on what he felt for her, if she had spared him two kind words after it, maybe he would be there now. But he isn’t and she can’t bear thinking that she can’t even fulfill the only wish she knows he had.*
* Also, I might be biased but I think that the responsibility for the Sydney mess is mostly hers. Right, he had feelings for her, but it’s not like he ever acted upon them and it wasn’t like he hadn’t tried to refuse her when she came upon him. I’m not saying that he’s a saint and she isn’t, far from that, but I just think that it was Shannon’s lowest point. Especially since she did it out of last resort and not because she had any feelings of that kind for him, which I guess it’s something she’d have regretted a lot in retrospective.
She takes a breath and starts for Claire’s tent. She’s sorry to, but she needs to.
She raises a shaky hand when they notice her and tries to smile. Failing miserably.
Shannon knows that the mere sight of Claire’s baby should be enough to bring out a small smile at least; it isn’t and she can’t pretend.*
* I don’t see Shannon much as a children person and I think she wouldn’t have felt much involved even if Boone hadn’t died. But I guess she couldn’t pretend anything by this point.
“Hi, Shannon.”, says Claire, trying to keep her voice at an even tone. Well, she had been talking to the baby before, Shannon wouldn’t want her to adopt the sad tone if she isn’t. She has every right not to be.
“Hi. Listen, I’d really... Charlie, can I speak with you one second?”
“Sure.”, he answers, a bit surprised. Of course. She hasn’t spoken a word to him since asking him for that fish. Of course he’s surprised.*
* That scene is just one of my favorites. I figured that Charlie would have felt kind of terrible after finding out she was using him, but he’d have forgotten it as soon as she tried talking to him again. Since they hadn’t really interacted after I figured it was Shannon’s doing. And anyway, I was slashing Boone and Charlie so hard at that point that it wasn’t even funny. During the fish scene, of course.
They walk a bit in silence until Shannon is sure they’re far enough from Claire’s tent and from anyone for that matter. She takes a breath.
“Is there something you need?”, he says, more gentle than she’d deserve.
“Yeah. Well, it’s not for me. Not really. Do you... do you like Simon and Garfunkel?”
Charlie looks a bit startled by that question, but he nods.
“Well, yeah. Not my favorite cup of tea but they’re the basics. I mean, if you’re a musician you’ve got to know at least their most famous stuff. They’re pretty requested.”*
* Charlie doesn’t look to me like the world’s greatest Simon and Garfunkel fan either, but if he plays the guitar I guess he would have had to know at least a handful of songs.
“Can I... ask you a favor?”
“Sure. But what...”
“Boone. Once, when he was... feeling suicidal... or something, he told me he’d have liked The Sound of Silence played at his funeral. I just... I had completely forgotten it until today and well, I don’t even know the words and I guess no one has a record player here. The funeral is already done but I was wondering if you could... you know, just, play it over there? It’s... there’s nothing else I can think of doing for him when I wasn’t even...”
She starts crying again and she feels just useless; she can’t even sing him his favorite song when she knew by heart a damn French song from a cartoon about fishes.* Charlie puts a hand on her shoulder, a sort of butterfly touch but it’s there. She raises his eyes and he looks uttermost serious.
* I guess she’d have felt terrible at that.
“I can. I mean, I know it. I can do it, it isn’t really a problem. I’ll go get the guitar and then we can go. Do you want anyone else?”
“No. Just you will be fine. Thank you.”, she manages to say in a breath before he nods and goes back to his tent.
He’s back three minutes after with the guitar under his arm; she turns and they go up on the hill. The grave is still fresh and she feels like throwing up. She just can’t stomach the sight of it.*
* Neither could I, but we had all assumed this.
Charlie’s hand is on her shoulder again.
“Are you alright? Sorry, that was a stupid question.”
It was less stupid than it seemed.
“No, it wasn’t. Don’t.. don’t worry about me. You know what, I’ll just sit there. Just don’t worry about what I do.”
For once, this isn’t about me., she thought, but kept for herself while she sits on a tree branch near there, looking at her broken sandals and at the dry mud around her ankles.*
* I always thought that Boone’s story was too much about Shannon than about himself. I mean, it looks to me like they only wrote him in relation to her (or Locke, or Jack) and I never really liked that since I thought he was a strong enough character on his own. Which is why I had that line, I wanted the scene to be about him.
Charlie sits in front of the grave; first he plays a couple of chords, then stops; she looks at him, realizing that he’s trying to remember how it goes. She waits for a minute or two; then he stops trying, murmurs something like got it and starts playing something she thinks she recognizes. He stops again, smiling in satisfaction.
“Right, I got it. I can go now.”
He starts playing the song then and she tries not to listen to the words; she realizes that hearing them may lead her to realize something about why the hell that was his favorite song and she can’t find it in her, not when she has just stopped crying. But then she catches a line and she can’t help it.
..People talking without speaking, people hearing without listening, people writing songs that voices never share... and no one dare disturb the sound of silence...
Her head snaps up, looking straight at Charlie, who is closing his eyes and just singing it; she suddenly feels a lump raising in her throat.
.."Fools," said I, "you do not know silence like a cancer grows, hear my words that I might teach you, take my arms that I might reach you.”, but my words like silent raindrops fell, and echoed in the wells of silence...
She doesn’t cry because she can’t find any tears to shed anymore but suddenly she understands a lot of things. After all, he was always trying to tell her something. Also to Sabrina, now that she thought about it. Both of them had never caught the message. No wonder than after it he did the only selfish and convenient thing he did all his life, accepting that job at the wedding company. Sabrina thought she should have been proud of it, but Shannon now thinks that maybe he did it just because he was tired of trying to reach out to the both of them and it was just more comfortable if he just settled on letting them believe whatever they wanted.*
* I always thought that Boone + wedding company = not a good match. And since it was the first thing your rich spoiled kid does (accepting the job that your parents provide for you), it would be easy to think that he was your usual spoiled rich kid. But since I do not share the opinion, I always figured that he took the job in order to make some money soon and then finding something more suited. I also think that there were serious communication issues between him and Shannon and I could see said issues being also between him and his mother. I thought that here he just did the easy thing so that his mother could say she was proud and all that jazz and Shannon would have had a reason not to like him. But then again, I think about Boone way too much.
And the people bowed and prayed to the neon god they made, and the sign flashed out its warning, in the words that it was forming, and the signs said: "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls and whisper'd in the sound of silence."
She doesn’t think she understands that last part. Maybe it will just be a secret he’s carried to the grave and that she was never meant to find out.*
* I have this idea that he was doomed by silence all of his life (he doesn’t communicate with Shannon, he presumably doesn’t with his mother, he dies because Locke wants to keep secrets and so on). Maybe that’s why I think he’d like the song.
Charlie stands up and goes near her.
“Well, that was it. Not a very brilliant performance I’m afraid, but..”*
* I figured he’d try to lighten up the situation stressing his eventual flaws. I mean, he does much in this fic without doing actually much, but I figured I owed him three lines.
“It was perfect. Thank you.”, she answers, taking the hand he offered her to stand up.
They leave and she turns for one second, watching the shilouette of the cross standing against the last rays of the setting sun.
Shannon smiles just slightly; maybe she has just did something for him, once.*
* Oh, she has. No doubt about that.
She hopes he could appreciate it someway.*
* Seeing my ghosts theory, he’s appreciating it quite a lot. Anyway, just for closure, I think I wrote this mainly because I wanted to show that Boone is a strong character that could have had a story on his own and that there’s a lot to tell beyond the pretty. It’s just that sometimes I happen to stumble into the occasional fic where the guy is written just as the dumb-but-pretty stereotype or the dead weight in Shannon’s life or the sacrifice the island demanded and I think I had stumbled upon one at the time and it just leaves me shrugging. I think he can/could have been a compelling character, it’s just that they never took the effort with him. Which is why I do it ;), but I probably am rambling here. Thanks for sticking with this if you made it this far ;)
End.
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no subject
Date: 2008-09-24 11:02 am (UTC)I also imagine Boone as bisexual. Well, I'd have really like to imagine him as gay, cos I was never fond of the incest story. It's also true that Boone's story largely revolved around Shannon, but that's not a bad thing for me. I'm a huge fan of 'the supporting character'. They are the most generous of characters. I had really hoped to see Boone's spirit live on through Shannon and her flashbacks. I felt super-pissed when they killed her too, effectively closing the book on both characters.
Thanks for all your musical/political insights. Your sensitivity and depth of thought is very admirable in your writing.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-24 02:49 pm (UTC)it would have been very interesting to see Boone's stance as a humanitarian explored and developed, especially on this island which is pro-war, pro-torture, pro-execution, pro-genocide, pro-human sacrifice, etc
Amen, sister, amen. I totally word this. And while I'm not really fond of the whole incest thing, I can't deny that he likes women, too. But I mean, in the Nikki/Paolo thing Shannon made some reference at him having boyfriends or something so I guess it isn't even too far from canon. And I wouldn't have minded for his story mainly revolving about her if they just cared to give him also his space. And word about the Shannon (non existent apart from one) flashbacks *sighs*. I was also fed up because he didn't get a flashback in his dying episode but since it was Jack and everyone knows that I shipped them it was better him than anyone else.
And providing insights is my pleasure ;) glad you enjoyed this! *is still flattered*
no subject
Date: 2008-09-24 02:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-24 03:04 pm (UTC)Reading this just made my day because that's exactly what I was trying to do here. And also the canon bit. I mean, I was alright with the whole supporting character policy as Falafel pointed out above, but I just wish they had given him a real story before, you know. And I put way too many personal experiences here but it happened that I knew what I was talking about ;)
(Son of a bitch? Was Sawyer there too!)
Maybe! Though I have heard worst than that and probably said worst ;)
And yeah, it was definitely out of love. Quite much ;) ♥ I'm really glad you enjoyed the commentary!