Remember Me {Ana-Lucia}

[Daniel Avery]

"I'm telling you, Andrew, we'll have these survivors eating out of the palm of our hands."

Daniel walked quickly through Serenity Park, his phone's earpeice firmly placed in his ear. He grinned slightly at the caller's remarks. "Yeah, I did speak with Linus. No, he's not. He's a manpulative little shit is what he is. Nah, he knows the stakes, I think. If not, Widmore'll make them clear. Plus, he's got a daughter, man. Easiest way to get to a man, Andrew. Mention his child." Daniel nodded slightly as he walked. "Yeah. Yeah, I spoke to Richard yesterday. No, I actually have an meeting with him at Middlelos at the end of the week. Yeah."

He heard barking in the distance, which slowly got louder, and he frowned as he felt two paws jump onto his suit. "Son of a--Hold on, Andrew." he said outloud, and moved, trying to brush both the puppy and the dirt from his pants. "Shoo. Leave." he told the puppy, and then smirked. "Shut up, man. I'm walking through Serenity and there's a puppy. Oh shut--"

Daniel turned around, hearing footsteps crunch on the ground, and the smile fell from his face as if it had been slapped. Ana. Ana-Lucia was standing right in front of him. "I--I gotta call you back." Daniel said, bringing a hand slowly to press on the side of his ear to end the call. His voice was slightly shocked, however, he shouldn't have been shocked. He knew she had been in town, hell, he had seen her when he had come into LAX...but standing in front of her...face to face, close enough to touch...

"Ana..."

[Ana-Lucia Cortez]

"I appreciate the coverage, man, you sure you can handle it without someone else there? I can call up Toby and get his lazy ass in gear," Ana spoke into the cellphone, one hand holding it to her ear as she tried to keep the other one firmly grasping at a leash in her hand. One the end of it was a stark black Labrador who seems rather content about running around at her feet, wagging her chubby little tail at her, seeking some sort of attention as always.

Shaking her head, she heard another reply on the other side of the phone. "Yeah, I'm only running a few errands real quick and shit. Then I gotta head over to the bro's for his kid's birthday party... Eliza, yeah. I'll be at the building by six, all right? Try to not to burn the place down this time," she joked some into the phone, shuffling around the phone in her hands, in the process, the loop of the leash momentarily escaping her hands. Almost like time work, the puppy realised this and took off.

"Lou!" Ana breathed in a call, but the puppy didn't stop to smell the roses, and instead continued to run off. "Shit!" Taking off into a run, the Latina sprinted after the runaway. Thankfully, the park was pretty much empty, no one would get in her way of trying to catch the puppy, if she could. A minute probably passed before she could in fact catch up, especially when the pup took a detour towards a figure of the man. Slowing down into a stop then, a few yards away, she breathed a sigh of relief as she was able to finally catch up, and some of annoyance.

Ana...

Though, she paused a moment as the man turned toward her. Feeling her jaw slacken some, she could only stare at the man a moment, wishing that the dog had found another person to run into and climb all over. Rolling her jaw, she pulled her eyes away, stiffly moving around him to grab at the leash's end laying on the ground. "I know you?" Ana replied, non-too-friendly at him, before she reeled Lou in, picking her up off the ground, uncaring of the fact she probably had dirt on her, and started moving down the path, without much else a word.

[Daniel Avery]

Okay, he deserved that.

As Ana walked away, Daniel moved, trying to catch up with her. "Ana! Ana, honey, wait, just--" He moved, grabbing her shoulder to stop her. "Just--just fucking STOP alright! Two minutes. Two minutes is all I'm asking for and then you can go back to--to hating me or whatever you want to do, but just give me TWO minutes to explain."

Daniel wondered partly what he could explain to her in two minutes. The fact that they had been so unhappy after they had lost the baby, the fact that they didn't really even talk aynmore except to say goodnight and good morning to when they went to bed and woke up...and the fact that when he left, he left wishing that he could stay.

He took in a breath, moving to run it through his jet-black hair as he sighed out harshly. "Look, I don't even know where to begin, so I'm just gonna start when...when I left." He started pacing slightly. "Look, I know that you can hate me forever for not telling you, for just leaving, but--but I couldn't do it. We never spoke, Ana. It's--it's like we were living two seperate lives and before you even start, I tried to talk to you. I tried to talk to you so god-damned much that I was tired of being a broken record. So I left. I fully intended to come back but the Oceanic merger happened right after the 815 crash and I was stuck in Europe for almost 2 months. I couldn't call you. Believe me, if I could have called you, I would have. But I couldn't."

He couldn't explain why he couldn't call and he hoped she didn't ask, but he knew that the whole don't ask thing was gone out the window. It would have been so easy to tell her that he could have been locked up, been silenced if he had told Ana where he was, what he was doing, about how they were scrambling to cover up the fact that the Oceanic Survivors were still alive...

[Ana-Lucia Cortez]

If Ana hadn't had the dog nestled in her arms, she was pretty sure that she would have whirled around and shoved him off. This wasn't what she wanted. She didn't want to be there, she didn't want to have this conversation, she didn't want to feel the remaining guilt that she felt, the guilt that she spent months trying to get over and still had some nagging at her daily, but definitely not as much as she had after the fact and still to this day, she had never cried over it. He made her feel guilty too, for the treatment she put him in, being silent because she didn't know what to say to him. But at the same time, she hated that he just didn't seem to care as much as her. She was convinced that was the case.

"Right, because your job always comes first, isn't that how it always worked?" she threw out the snarky reply, shrugging him off. Though, she knew it wasn't always the case, but him leaving made her feel that way. He hadn't said a word when he left, just went off to work as usual, leaving her to pick of the shattered remains of her life, because she knew he wouldn't be coming back.

"You know what, it doesn't matter anymore, Daniel," she told him, not bothering to use her nickname that she used around every turn. "The past is past, can't change it, so don't even try to smooth over it to make it better. It is how it is, accept it. Don't bat an eyelash at it. Really, I'm over it. So, maybe you should be too." The words were harsh, but he had just managed to tear into wounds. Not that she was really aiming to do the same to him, but she wanted to bolt, get out of there. End this conversation he was trying to start. Once more she made a move to turn and start heading away from him.

[Daniel Avery]

"I've put you before my job thousands of times!" Daniel protested with a frown. "You don't know how many times that I stayed with you that I could have been--" Daniel stopped, scoffing slightly. He needed to stop. "You don't know how much danger I put you in because I wanted to stay with you."

Ana spoke again, and Daniel scoffed loudly, bringing a hand up to press against his eyes. "You make this all about me, Ana. Yes, I freely and fully admit that when I left, I fucked up. But you--" Daniel's hand dropped to his side. "After the shooting, you never talked to me. You--whether you like it or not, we BOTH lost something, Ana-Lucia. You think you lost a child, but you seem to forget that I helped. I lost something, too, Ana and yet we never talked about that. We never talked about you. We never talked about what happened. We never talked about what we lost."

A sigh escaped his lips, and he moved, holding his arms out. "I was there every single day, Ana, and you ignored me! You acted like I wasn't even there and there's only so much that I can take. There's only so much I can do before I can't do anymore and...and when they called me, I told them I'd come because it was like I didn't have anything here anymore. You sit up there Ana, on your moral high-horse and yet you're so far up that you can't see the real issue. You can't see that when I was there and when I was gone...after you just stopped talking, there wasn't any difference. It wouldn't have made any difference if I was there or not because you never talked to me. You never told me how you were feeling and I'm sorry I'm not a mind reader. I'm sorry I can't know exactly what you're thinking."

Ana continued to walk, and frustrated, Danny followed, grabbing her shoulder to spin her around. "Don't walk AWAY from me! Once again, you're not fucking talking to me. I'm not going to just let this go because I can't let it go. I can't. You may think that I havn't thought of you, but I have. I've thought of you every single day since I left. I couldn't call, and that's the truth. So much shit has gone down in the last three months, you wouldn't even believe it if I told you."

[Ana-Lucia Cortez]

"Why are you doing this?" Ana questioned, her voice oddly quiet despite the fact she was raging inside. Anger, sadness, love, hate, loathing, longing, but most anger were running rampant through her veins. All the while behind her eyes began to sting, forcing her to blink rapidly. However, the second time around her voice returned to it's stronger tone as she repeated the question. "Why the fuck are you doing this?!" She didn't want to hear that he had thought about her. How the fuck could he say something like that after everything. Like it would make everything okay.

"What do you want me to say Danny, what did you want me to say? You have no idea what I went through back there, you don't know what it was like! I made a wrong call, and because of that I lost everything. Every-fucking-thing! It was my fault I lost it. I made a wrong call, and before I could even realize it I was hitting the pavement. Do you even know what it's like to think you're about a breath's way from dying? Do you even know what does to someone?" She might have been coming off a bit hysterical but she didn't care. Things that had simmered down seemed to be boiling once more, and the words were pouring from her lips.

"Would that have satisfied you then? Or what about the fact I wished I was dead. Wouldn't you have wanted to hear that, too? That I wished I died the night when I got shot, because I've felt dead every single day since then." Because she was the one at fault. It was her fault that they didn't have a child then. "Silence doesn't sound so bad now does it?" This time there was no haughtiness to her tone, just tiredness. Tired because she had been holding back those words for months, because she didn't want to hurt him, and also in her own selfish way, she wanted to push him away. She was after all a horrible person, wasn't she?

[Daniel Avery]

"It's not about satisfaction, Ana-Lucia, it's about communication!"

Daniel frustratedly spun around, his teeth clenched as he looked towards the sky. Why couldn't a plane crash on him at the moment instead of that damned Island? She continued to speak, and he clenched his eyes shut and then turned around again to face her. "I don't know what any of that feels like! That's why I wanted you to tell me, so I could take it from you! If I could have just snapped my fingers and made it all go away, if I could have blinked and have you happy and smiling at me, I would have done it in a second! I wanted to know how you were feeling, because you were a part of me, don't you understand that? I wanted us to take this on together, I didn't want stand by and watch."

When she spoke of silence, Daniel felt a laugh escape his lips, a bitter and sad laugh. "Jesus, Ana. I wanted to hear this. I wanted to hear every time you hate yourself. I wanted to hear every time you wanted to die because I wanted to be there to pick you up and I don't know why you didn't understand that. That's what I meant when I told you I would be there for you forever, but you didn't want me there. You just wanteed to push me away."

[Ana-Lucia Cortez]

There was something wet clinging against the corner of her eye before it escaped and slid halfway down her cheek before she brushed it irritably away, like a nuisance. Yes, it was true, she wanted to push him away. Get him far away from her because she felt she would hate herself less, wouldn't have a reminder constantly of what plagued her and because he didn't deserve it. Yet, in the end because of her own selfishness, she hated herself more. "How can you say that after everything? How could you look at me day by day and not hate me after everything I had done?"

How could he not hate her after the fact she'd lost his child, their child. The question was boggling to her, even if he did love her. She'd seen so many times parents separating after the loss of a child. "You deserved better... You didn't deserve a fuck up." He deserved a family. Something of which she failed to provide for him, even though it wasn't planned on to begin with. Though, they had been happy over the idea.

[Daniel Avery]

He expected another fight. He even braced himself for another arguement, another blow by blow and yet, it didn't come. Her voice was softer, and Danny's brows narrowed slightly as he listened to her speak. She was asking him why he wanted to stay after everything that had happened? She really had to ask? "If you tell me," Danny started, tilting his head slightly as he watched her, "that it was your fault that bastard shot you...then you're insane. You honestly...think that you're responsible for something that he did? Or--Or even more, you're responsible that the baby didn't live?"

She said she was a fuck up, and he scoffed slightly, raising his eyebrows slightly for a moment. "Yeah, I'm no saint either, Ana, and I'm certainly not the poster-boy for good and proper behaviour. I told you that I was happy when you found out you were pregnant. But I was even more happy when I found out you were ALIVE. This can sound horrible, but the baby...the baby came second to you."

Daniel blinked as he felt something fall down onto his head, and he jerked slightly, glancing up at the cloud-covered sky. "Shit." he whispered at the raindrops that dripped down onto his head. "Look, come with me to my apartment. We'll talk. We need to talk."

[Ana-Lucia Cortez]

Then maybe she was insane. She felt responsible for everything. She took the call, she went along with her partner, she made the call to go in the front, she let the kid reach which was her undoing. There was no way she couldn't be not responsible for it... right? Exhaling, she turned her head away some, trying to clear her head some more, all the while the puppy that she had all but forgotten about in her arms stirred a bit, bringing her head up to lick gently at her chin.

Rubbing her fingers behind the dog's ears, she continued to listen to Danny as he spoke on. About the baby. It was a strange feeling, the way her thoughts conflicted with his words. Part of her was angry he could think that way, and the other part was relieved that he wasn't holding her responsible. There was a sudden relief to this that felt like a two-ton weight had slipped off her chest, for the most part at least. She wasn't going to lie and say that it was a complete change of heart, she still ached over everything, but this just made it... just a little bit better. A little more bearable.

Glancing up as he spoke of the weather, and once Lou's head jerked up some to softly bark at the sky for the sudden surprise of raindrops. Letting her eyes drop to the watch around her wrist, checking it to make sure that she still had time before she had to be that elsewhere, she nodded. "Sure... I got some time," she told him, being oddly agreeable. She at least owed him, as well he did to her.

[Daniel Avery]

As they walked in silence, the rain started falling more. It was cold, being the end of December, and Daniel could see his breath come from his mouth. His apartment wasn't far from Serenity Park, and as the rain became more heavy, Daniel found himself lifting his briefcase up to shelter some of the rain from himself as they came upon his apartment building. The porter by the door opened it for him, nodding slightly.

"Mr. Avery."

Daniel nodded slightly as he held open the door, letting Ana pass. Shaking the water off of him, he pressed the button for the elevator, watching as it opened. He stepped in after she did, and pressed the button to his floor. He looked over at her, moving to shake the water out of his hair with a frown. Partly, he wondered now if it was wrong. Bringing Ana up to his apartment...something was wrong about it. But they were going to talk. Something they needed to do for three months, but couldn't do. He looked up at the numbers, the elevator seemingly going at a snails pace to get to his floor as the sickening silence seemed to pass over the elevator.

"It's a cute dog."

[Ana-Lucia Cortez]

In an awkward silence, Ana supposed that many topics could have popped up and the fact he chose to fill the silence to something aimed at her dog made her smirk slightly. Looking down at the cargo in her arms, the smirk grew into a smile. "Yeah, don't let the appearance fool you," she began, then letting her attention filter over towards him through the corner of her eye. "She's a handful, though I think you pretty much got the idea earlier." When she'd nearly jumped up his pants legs, which despite the situation earlier, was pretty hilarious in her opinion. Maybe if it hadn't been so dire she might have laughed.

"Not going to lie, but you looked quite readily to shit your pants," she commented dryly, which had nothing to do with how he looked when he had seen her. That look was probably more priceless, not that she would poke fun to him on it, but he looked like he was about ready to lay a egg, or maybe cow. Whatever that expression was. Definitelly, definitely seemed that way to her at least.

[Daniel Avery]

"Do you know how much these pants cost?"

It wasn't a selfish comment, but a truthful one. However, all he would have to do is call downstairs to get his clothes laundered, and the stains of dirt would be gone. Which, as he thought, made him sound self-centred indeed. "They're expensive. Dirt and expensive doesn't mix."

The elevator opened, and he exited, moving down the hall to his apartment door. Opening it, he pushed the door open and entered, tossing his briefcase on the couch as he moved to loosen his tie. He shead his jacket, tossing it onto the couch with a slight sigh. "I'm going to change. I'll be right back. Make, um...make yourself at home."

He moved into the bedroom, unbuttoning his shirt with a frown. This was wrong. They had been over and yet, they hadn't been over at all. He tossed the shirt and pants into the hamper and donned a chrisp white shirt and black pants. Buttoning it up as he came back out, he looked at Ana. "Can I get you something to drink?"

[Ana-Lucia Cortez]

Setting the pup down on the floor, thankful at least the puppy wasn't soaking wet, in fact while she might have been pretty much soaked from the rain, Lou had managed to escape drop free. At least someone was lucky, she thought, somewhat amused at that. Shrugging off her jacket, she carefully hung it on the back of one of his kitchen chairs before she looked around the room, wrapping her arms across her torso as she took in his dwellings, rubbing at her arms some.

If one word came to mind it had been that it definitely looked like a bachelor pad. An expensive one that simply rang out Danny. Books, other articles, neatly arranged, bare hardwood floors and black leather furnishing, ones that she would not be sitting on in her current condition. However, spinning around as he came back in through the door, she noted the fact that he was buttoning up his shirt, and she uncomfortably darted her eyes away, not so much embarrassed as she was trying to avoid unwelcome thoughts. "Um, no, I'm good... though do you have a towel, or something?" she asked him, somewhat sheepishly.

[Daniel Avery]

A towel, you dumbass. She needs to dry off!

"Oh! Oh, yeah, of-of course, yeah." Daniel said, nodding as he moved back into the bedroom. He grabbed a towel from the cabnet. He came back out and walked to her. Without even thinking, he wrapped it around her, stepping closer to her as he rubbed her arms. He realised what he was doing, and stopped, but didn't move. As she looked at him, he remembered all the times that he had felt surpremely happy with her, and how they outweighed the bad, yet the bad still reared it's head every once in a while. He brought a corner of the towel up, wiping at a dot of water on her cheek.

"I...I really am sorry. I just...I wasn't lying when I told you that things have happened in the past three months...but I'm really glad you weren't on that plane. You don't know how glad I am that you missed that flight."