InsaneJournal

this is the WORST jj abrams drama

WHO Milo Canonici and Luz Martin
WHERE Lord of the OHH SHIIII (flies)
WHEN January 16th, morning in the real world
RATING pg
SUMMARY oh here go hell come
STATUS complete



Milo had gone to bed broody, but that wasn’t unusual. Most days ended with something setting him off. It didn’t take much. Stray comments, a tense work day, the dog breathing too loudly... Milo was an irritable fellow, when he let himself be. So, his night had ended like many others- until he started to dream.

It’s an extremely vivid dream. It starts with him romping on the beach with other boys. Somewhere in his mind there’s the knowledge he just fainted. It makes sense somehow. He’s always been a bit on the frail side, hasn’t he? He kicked at the tide and splashed up to his knees, contemplating his life. In the back of his brain is a knowledge of who he’s supposed to be here. A boy named Simon who’s a bit on the frail side, in a place where there’s no adults. Exploration was now the name of the game.

The reflection of himself in the water caught his eye. Even broken by ripples, it does not meet the expectation of he boy he thinks himself to be. He’s older and worn; wrinkled and white-haired. Part of the dream, Milo thought, but a part of him was mildly discomforted by what he saw. He reached over and pinched one large, weathered hand with the other.

“Ow!” The pain is immediate, but it doesn’t wake him up. His eyes drifted to the other boys, then back to himself. Another pinch brought the same result. With a small, rising sense of panic, he pinched himself a third time. I am perfectly awake, he realised. “What in the hell...”

Luz was rather aware that something was wrong when she woke up on a beach. Mostly because in all of her long years of long, intricate dreams, she had never dreamt of herself as a boy. And clearly, obviously, horrifyingly, she was a boy. A boy. A.... boy...

A bunch of other young boys in funny shorts and knee socks, or just in their gross underwear, played about on the hot beach around her, splashing in the water, playing with palm leaves or throwing sand at one another. Luz sat off in the shade, fully clothed, knees up to her even flatter chest. When she pulled at her hair so she could see it, she found it still dark and curly. She was still Luz. But she was a boy. If she had been a girl, she might have begun to cry, but boys were different like that. She did not cry, she just sat still, looking around her, wondering, swearing to herself. Wishing her mother was here. This was the worst Martin Luther King Jr. Day ever. Seriously.

Eventually she stood up, and walked across the beach toward the water, and tried to look at herself in the ever moving waves. She knew she was a boy, she wanted to see it. But in the broken water she saw herself, like she ought to be. She nearly cried again, and wrapped her arms around her chest and looked around, lost and lonely and afraid. This was not cool. Not even a little bit.

He’s awake. This much as been established. He is awake and he is somehow two different people. Himself, and a boy named Simon. On a beach, where he’s aware there’s been a bit of a plane crash and now there is no adults. That familiar, niggling feeling washes over him again, but he can’t place it. The ‘a bit of a plane crash’ alarmed even him. It’s like being ‘a little bit pregnant’. He turned from the water to survey his surroundings. Playing boys, no adults, and-- well, one boy looked quite sad. That was something different.

Milo sucked in a calming breath (nope, didn’t work) and started towards the boy. Very familiar. Taller than him, bizarrely enough, because he is still rather short compared to what he sees in the water. The world looks different from down here. Bigger, somehow. He scratched at his sunburnt stomach nervously as he approached the other boy and winced. Hopefully, that would tan soon..

“You all right?” he asked, dismayed to find his voice that of a squeaky young man. Stranger things have happened, the rational part of his mind wanted to think, but he was very sure nothing this strange ever had.

Luz looked up when one of the boys came to talk to her. She did not feel like talking, or playing games, or doing anything that the other boys were doing. She wanted to be a girl again. She may not have been very good at it! Or gotten much use out of it, but Luz wanted to be a girl again! And not some boy on the brink of puberty. Girl puberty had been bad enough, she didn’t need this. She didn’t want this. True, she’d dreamed all of her life of being on a big, open, beautiful sandy beach with the sun shining hard down on her, but that was when she was the daughter of Apollo. Now she was the son of... a navy commander?

“No I’m not alright!” Luz said, in an appropriate tone for someone that was twelves years and some months old. “Nothing here is right and I want to go home!’

She looked behind her toward the forest, looking at the boys playing in the trees, seeing one boy with glasses watching her curiously. What a weirdo. She looked back out down at the water, looking at the moving image of her eighteen years and some months old true self.

And then she looked over and nearly stumbled into the water, eyes wide and mouth open. She jerked her body to the smaller boy who had spoken to her and grabbed him by the shoulders. “Mr. Canonici?!” she yelled, her voice mixing with the laughing boys around them.

His first reaction was to pull away with a hiss. His shoulders were burnt! What was his problem?! Milo turned and fanned one stinging shoulder with a hand, blowing on it in vain. That hurt. A lot. “What?” he snapped, his boy voice full of all the usual surly growl he had in day to day life. “Are you crazy? That hurt.” A. Lot.

Scowling, he trudged a few steps away from the grabby-handed boy and scooped up some water to soothe his shoulders. It only helped a little. He frowned down in the direction he thought the boy’s reflection would be in, but--

No, that was Luz. He blinked a few times and raised his head to look at her fully. Had she been standing there the whole time? He could have sworn she was a boy a moment ago, but. But! Was he hallucinating? Another glance at the water showed his true self, not the Simon he was almost-sort-of convinced he was when he wasn’t staring at himself. Panic was an unbecoming reaction, he knew, and an impossible one if there was a child (well, one he knew) around.

“Luz,” he said quietly, inwardly cringing at that stupid small voice. “What do I look like to you?”

Luz almost wanted to laugh when he said her name. It felt vaguely like he was confirming she wasn’t crazy, that she hadn’t entirely lost her mind. She smiled at him, never gladder or more surprised in her life to see one of her friend’s fathers. She took a few steps closer to him, not about to touch him again but not wanting him to wander too far off. He had suddenly become very precious to her. A part of her was thinking oh good, a friend. Another part was glad to see an adult, even if he didn’t look like an adult. Well, he sort of did.

“You look like a child shaped Mr. Canonici!” she said excited, and that was the best she could describe it. It was vaguely like a dream, where you are in a room with a bathtub, but know in that dream-like way that you are in your kitchen.

Her expression fell slightly though, because this wasn’t a dream, and yet it made no sense. “Mr. Canonici what is going on? Why the hell am I a boy? Why are we on a beach? Why do I keep wanting to call myself Ralph?” It wasn’t even a cool name. If she was a boy, she wanted a cool name, like Liam.

Ralph, too, is also vaguely familiar. Milo rubbed at his eyes, irritated and confused and frightened. Why does it sound so familiar? It’s both on a level of things he knows and things he knows he knows. His lips pursed as he looked back to little boy Luz. “What else you do want to do?”

Milo knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to not be dreaming of Luz being a small boy. If it wasn’t a dream, he wanted this terrible reality to end. There had to be a way to make it stop, to leave this place...

His head swung instinctively to look towards the mountain situated on the island. There was something important about it, he got the feeling. He eyeballed the pink rock in the distance for a long, silent moment before he turned back to Luz. “You been up there yet?”

She wasn’t sure what he meant, and her eyebrows narrowed slightly in confusion, but she thought about it. She looked around, listened to all of the boys playing, saw the sun up ahead, the wind blowing through the tops of the trees. Everything seemed fun. One of those moments that should have been great if it weren’t just so wrong feeling. Nothing could ever be perfect, there had to be something wrong somewhere.

“I want to go home,” that was the only thing both parts of her could agree on. The part that was Luz, the part that wanted to be called Ralph. They both wanted to go home.

Luz looked up and had to shield her eyes slightly from the sun. It wasn’t hard to see what he was referring to. It was sort of the uppest of places it looked like someone could go. “Maybe?” she asked feeling like she had to think about everything twice now. “I bet you could see forever from up there, though,” she said, still looking at it. It did seem like something was missing. “...If this is an island, we probably shouldn’t be here.” She wanted to ask him if he’d seen adults, but, they were adults. Normally.

Luz turned back to Simon. Milo. “We should start a fire, before it gets dark.”

A fire. “So that we know that we can have one,” Milo nodded. “And then we can be rescued.” ‘Familiar’ seemed to be the go-to, frustrating feeling of the day. The mention of the fire helped a small but, though. Slowly, a picture was being formed in his mind. Everything would fall into place eventually. He hated that feeling, as many times as it happened to him in his old age. Young age. Whatever. Petulance was a part of both brackets, it seemed.

A glint of pink in the water distracted him enough to snap out of it. He fished beneath the surface for the object, almost sure of what he’d find before he looked. A conch shell. Sure enough, the smooth, salmon pink shell appeared in his hands when they emerged. He shoved it at Luz without looking at her, eyes narrowed towards the mountain.

“I get it. Kind of.” A finger swayed in the mountain’s direction, then back to her. “Blow it. Use it to call the other kids so we can go up the mountain. Then we’ll start a fire.” A beat passed, and he took a moment to look at her fully. “Don’t argue with me about this. I think I might know what this is. I’ll explain when I’m sure.”

Rescued! Right! Luz liked that word very much. They needed to start a fire, a real big one in case a ship or plane went by it could see the smoke. That seemed like such a good idea she almost didn’t question when he handed her a giant wet and sandy shell. She didn’t really see the point in the shell yet, but she took it from him, thinking about that fire, thinking about ways to get out of here. A ship would come in no time. “We need to make sure it’s an island, first,” she said mostly to herself.

She didn’t think about arguing with him until he told her not to. “No, tell me now,” she told him, her focus back on him, thinking again of him as Milo Canonici. Right, she needed to remind herself of that. He was Anya’s gray haired old man. Who had been kind to Luz and mean to Lydia. He had grounded Anya because Luz had gotten drunk. He wasn’t indeed a boy smaller than her. He was an old man twice her age. “We’re in this together,” unless there were others, that was an interesting thought. “So tell me now, I can help.” She felt rather confident, and she wasn’t quite sure why. “And then I’ll assemble the boys and start the fire.”

Luz looked around them again, that boy with glasses still watching them, or her. She didn’t know what to think really, she thought so many things, but only some of them made any sense. They did have to get the boys together, see if there were any adults, get everyone’s names, see if there was anyone else here she knew. Then... they would need to look after themselves.

Milo was a grown man. He didn’t need to listen to Luz. And yet, there was something in him that reacted to the confident stance. It just seemed right. Learning if it was an island seemed the natural order of things, and then they could start a fire. Somehow, the conch had seemed imperative to all of this. The realisation of where they were and what was to happen still remained out of reach, somewhere just above his short boy head. He frowned and toed the sand beneath his feet, frustrated.

“When I figure it out, I’ll let you know.” A clump of sand went sailing past them as he kicked it. Somehow, the childish action was immensely satisfying. He smiled, pleased with himself. “Until then, just blow the damn thing and let’s see if it’s really an island. And stick together. Okay?”