Special Deliveries: Heir To His Legacy: Heir to a Desert Legacy

“It’s different,” she said, “for some. There’s liking… control, I guess, over your own life. And of course people like that. I like that. I liked it, I miss it sometimes.”

“You feel like you don’t have control now?”

“I don’t have control. You and I both know that.” He nodded once and she continued. “But then there’s… there are men, Sayid, that love to dominate. Love to control. Love to have power and watch how they can use it to control other people. And there are people who let them. Because of… of passion. That’s what I’m afraid of.”

He knew all about people like that. There were people like that who ruled countries, countries he’d had to go to war with. And in the prisons… the prisons were run by men like that. Men who liked to watch others in pain. Who liked causing it. He’d spent a year in the hands of a madman like that.

And that she’d seen something of that in him… it made him ill. That she’d seen it at all made his vision red, a haze of violence making it hard to see.

“Who hurt you, Chloe?” He knew his desire for blood was audible in his tone, knew that he sounded as enraged as he felt. Good. Let her hear it. Let her know that if it were in his power, the man who dared put his hands on her would die with Sayid’s fingers curled around his throat.

The anger was suffocating, uncontrollable, as foreign in many ways as the tender emotion from a moment ago.

Chloe blinked rapidly. “I… he never touched me. I always wondered why. But then, I think for both of them life was better if they just ignored me.”

“Who?” he ground out.

“My parents. My father. He…” She took a breath. “One of my first memories is just this one little clip. There isn’t even sound. I remember I couldn’t get something out of the fridge on my own, so I must have been very small. I was looking for my mom, so that she could get me a snack. I walked into her room, just in time to see my father put his hands on both of her shoulders and shove her against the dresser. She hit her head on the corner and fell. That’s all I remember. I have a hundred more memories like that. My mother being bruised, my father hitting her. Knocking her unconscious. And I have a hundred more memories of them kissing. Having sex against the hallway wall like I wasn’t there to walk in on my way out of my room.”

She let the breath out, a slow, shuddering sound. “I hated it. So much. I hated that he had that power over her. I hated that she let him have it. I hated their passion.”

“Is that why you’re a scientist?”

“There is passion in science, but there’s an order to it. Science is about fact, at the very least, it’s about the pursuit of fact. To discover what is. To understand the world, the universe. To know how it works.”

“You hoped it would make you understand?”

“I hoped. But I don’t. Not yet. Maybe never. No… never. I never will. There is no answer to that, there’s no logic to it. It’s emotion. And emotion is…”

“Beyond logic,” he said. “On that we can agree.”

“I’ve given everything up for Aden,” she said, her voice softer now. “And that makes sense. He can’t take care of himself and he… he needs me. But I don’t know what made my mother give up her right to basic human decency to hold on to a monster.”

“People don’t make sense,” he said. “You and I have seen that. We’ve seen the darkness that lives inside the human heart.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “That’s it exactly. And now I see it everywhere.”

He nodded. “There is wisdom in that.”

“But?” she asked.

“But, that is not how I see it.”

“How do you see it?”

“I do not speculate. I find out what is, and what isn’t, and I act. I don’t waste time on emotion, or on worrying about that darkness. Rather, when I see it, I eradicate it.”

“Do you know how much I wished I could?” she asked.” Sometimes… I wished I was strong enough to make him stop. I thought about it. Fantasized about it. And then one day I asked her why she didn’t leave. She said the pleasure he gave her was worth the pain. And I realized she didn’t want him gone. Or at least, she didn’t think she did.”

“Are they still together?”

She nodded. “But I don’t go home. Ever. It was like being in prison. I won’t ever go back.”

“No. You would never choose to go back to something like that,” he said.

He knew what a hell it was to watch others be tortured. He’d experienced it during his year in prison. It was why he never screamed. Although, he’d learned not to years before that. Pain had been inflicted on him early and often, an attempt to teach him to never break under threat of pain.

It was the one time he’d broken since Sura. And again, it had caused terrible devastation. He had deviated from the plan to prevent the enemy from capturing a man, and it had ended with the loss of so many more.

“Not every man is like that, Chloe,” he said.

“I know,” she said.

“I’m not like that.”

She looked up, her eyes clashing with his. “I just… it’s hard. Trusting. There are things I know in my mind, but…”

“Your body believes something different?” She nodded. “I know all about that,” he said. “I know about forcing your body and brain to be completely separate. To want separate things.”

“You don’t ever feel, Sayid? Do you want?”

Sayid answered without thinking. He didn’t know the answer until he spoke it. “People are born feeling,” he said. “Born wanting. I had the ability to do so torn from me at an early age.” A flash of Sura dressed in white, a veil over her face, entered his mind again. Of her being forced into a car, her screams carried over the wind…”Sometimes the desire for that, to have that back, that which other people simply… have, as innately as the instinct to breathe, is so strong I feel like it will consume me. I imagine the only thing more burdensome than feeling everything, is feeling nothing. Even when you want to.”

Tears stung Chloe’s eyes. She hadn’t expected such an honest admission. “But surely you can… surely you…”

“I was trained to be a soldier, Chloe. To carry the dreams of others inside of me. Protect the expectations, the lives of others. There was no room to carry my own inside of me, too. A man in my position can’t care for his own life, or he’ll never be able to do what must be done. He cannot want. He cannot need. He cannot love. I had to be retrained. And I was, quite effectively.”

“How?” she asked, her voice a whisper.

“Conditioning. When I gave in to a want, I was given pain in return. When I responded to the pain, more pain was administered. Until eventually, I learned to show nothing.”

“No… Sayid, surely your parents wouldn’t have allowed such a thing.”

“My parents didn’t raise me. My uncle did. And while it is easy to sit here and be horrified by the method, I cannot deny that in the end it saved my life. I would never have survived being a prisoner of war if not for that training. And if it had taken root a little stronger, I never would have been taken captive in the first place.”

“Tell me,” she said.

He wanted to. He wasn’t sure why. “We were passing through a heavily forested area on our way to the enemy encampment to rescue men who had already been taken. Ours was meant to be a covert mission. No loss of life on either side if it could be helped. Alik Vasin was the tactical mastermind behind it, and Alik’s intelligence never fails.”

“What happened?”

“I failed. Because I saw two soldiers attempting to rape a woman and I moved out of hiding to stop them.”

“And did you?”

“It was the last thing either of them did,” he said, his tone grim. He didn’t regret what he’d done to those men. He never would.