I was a heavy heart to carry

Though Ryan may have insisted before that Lucy's mood brightening had nothing to do with his being around, the fact that she'd been feeling better over the past few days than she had in months seemed to dictate otherwise. She wasn't sure what it was about him, but she didn't think she needed to, either. It was enough that he'd been feeling the same way she had for all that time; knowing that, she saw no reason to question it.

One of the up sides to what had wound up happening with them was that she no longer needed an excuse to drop by his hut. After the long walk from the treehouse, she was tired and it was late afternoon by the time she got there, but it was better than running all that way. The door was closed, but she couldn't help but smile when she reached it, raising one hand to knock and then rocking back on her heels expectantly.

Maybe they were taking it slow, and maybe the island wouldn't let it last all that long, but that didn't mean she wasn't going to enjoy it.

It had been a long, long time since Lucy Carrigan set foot in a church. Certainly not in the six months and some-odd days that she'd been on the island, and there hadn't been time in New York, not between juggling protests and her waitressing job. No, she remembered the day exactly, and every detail of the circumstances.

Daniel's funeral. What would have been almost a year and a half ago, were she still back home. She could still picture all of it, feel the warm spring rain and hear the customary gunshots as they lowered his casket; in a way, it was what had kept her away from churches in the time that followed. They were all marked, as it were, with the memory of his death.

She found it oddly fitting, then, that what brought her back into one was the realization that it was Memorial Day. The exact reasoning behind it, she couldn't quite put her finger on, but it felt fitting, for the first time since then. And maybe she needed it, now. It wasn't as if things had been going especially well over the past few weeks, and she'd done a bunch of things she wasn't particularly proud of. She wouldn't count on it, but there was still that off chance it could do her some good.

It wasn't just Daniel she prayed for once she was on her knees in the church, speaking in a voice so hushed it was hardly recognizable as her own, though he was a big part of it -- sweet Daniel, who she'd moved past so quickly, after what people called a perfect relationship. It was Daniel and all the boys who'd died, ones she'd heard about and known peripherally and seen on TV and not. After them came Paco, who she'd been missing more and more since she ended things with Jude; she still didn't know what had happened to him after the riot, or whether or not Jude's story about the bomb was to be believed, but in a way, if it was, it would have made him a casualty of sorts, too, which fit him in with the rest of the list. From there, she'd reached the point of not thinking about what she said, and she moved on to her family back home, and the people she'd known who disappeared, and then, finally, her brother. Max, and everything that had gone wrong over the past few months. She may have hardly been speaking to him anymore, but that didn't change the fact that there was nothing she would have done for him, that she would put his well-being over hers no matter what, that she was still harboring all sorts of guilt about the incident with the morphine.

Before she realized it, she was brushing away tears that were rolling down her cheeks, sniffling gently. It was hardly infrequently that she wished things could have gone back to the way they were when it was all simpler, before the war tore everything apart, but she couldn't remember a time she wanted it more than she did in that moment.

[Find her in the church, or outside it, following the post.]

When she got back to the hut, Max was gone.

It was more unsettling than she ordinarily would have let herself admit, but she had no choice in the matter, it seemed. With as worried as she'd spent the past few weeks being, her first thought was the worst, and she'd hardly hesitated before running out of her and Max's hut.

If, as she couldn't help but think, something bad -- like what happened before -- was going on with Max, she'd have to go to Jude. She didn't especially want to see him, but he was Max's best friend, and would have to know what was going on. There was the chance, too, she reminded herself, that she was overreacting; if that was the case, Jude might have some idea of where Max would be.

Still, by the time she finally reached Jude's hut, flushed from running and her hair tousled, she didn't even think to knock before opening the door and walking in. What she saw then was enough to stop her dead in her tracks, eyes wide, mouth hanging open. Jude would know where Max was, alright; they were lying next to each other.

For what felt like forever, she stood there silently, speechless, until finally, she managed to clear her throat. The last thing she wanted was for them not to realize she was there. She'd been saying the first thing that came to her mind all day, but even still, what came out this time was a surprise.

"So," she began slowly, an incredulous look on her face, "that's the way it is."

It was early Thursday afternoon when Lucy stopped by Penny's bus. She still hadn't found a dress yet -- mostly, she got things in fluorescent colors, things that belonged more on the streets in the East Village than at a ball held by Jane Bennet and Anne Boleyn -- and, as a last resort, she figured there would be no harm in seeing if Penny had anything that might be wearable.

The door of the bus was open and there was music playing, so after standing outside for a few seconds, she decided to take the other girl up on her open invitation and just walk right in. "Hey, Penny?" she called out hesitantly as she climbed up the few stairs to the inside. "You here?" It seemed like a fairly nonsensical question to ask, but it was courtesy all the same.

Things ended. It was the natural course of life, she knew that; people died, they moved on, the world changed, and sooner or later, even whatever you came to depend on the most would fall through or just cease to exist. She'd experienced that plenty in her relatively short life, but not, it would seem, enough to expect it.

And so, three days after that surreal version of a Halloween, Lucy was in front of her hut, sort of not really pacing (she'd deny it, if asked, but the paths she walked were close enough to it that she might as well have been). Where losing Max had been tragic - a tragedy that still hadn't faded, judging by the dog tag that still hung around her neck, below her shirt - losing Daniel had been numbing, and now there was Jude, and she couldn't quite make sense of that. It was hard to be sad, really, when she'd stumbled into some random bus (after running through the jungle, running for her life, and all she'd been able to think about, every step, was Max; he died that way, she thought, being shot at by someone who'd been called an "enemy" for no good reason; he'd been killed and she, somehow, had made it) to find Jude with his head in some girl's lap, just weeks after he'd accused her of being unfaithful. She couldn't regret it, couldn't feel too bad about it, especially not when it had been so much her desicion - "You don't owe me anything," she'd protested, when he'd tried to tell her nothing had happened, "we aren't together anymore." Hardly clean and simple, but at least it was an official end to things. Still, whether she'd been the one to do it or not, that didn't stop it from feeling strange - maybe she'd been right, maybe all they'd done was play house for a while and it was all comparatively meaningless and she'd find someone else, like she'd been told, but even after all those months of growing apart and the fighting they'd done both home and here, part of her still missed him (more of an idea of him, who she'd wanted him to be, not who he really was, in the long run). She'd made the right desicion, that was undoubtable, and yet -

She'd made the right desicion, and that was what mattered. One hand pressed gently to her chest, where the dog tag rested, she stopped walking to lean against the wall of her hut, not wanting yet to go inside. This was fine, she told herself, taking in one deep breath. It's gonna be alright.

[Dated to November 3rd, and locked to Veronica.]

The rhythmic whirring of the washer had Lucy, curled up in a ball on top of it, half-asleep, her head pressed against her knees. The quiet defeat of this place had taken a lot out of her in the time she'd been there, more than seemed reasonable, and the gentle rocking had been the only thing to relax her for a long five days. There was no reason, not really, to wash the clothes she'd arrived in - New York in winter was hardly a tropical island, she'd never wear her heavy coat or her turtleneck, and she was still wearing the nearly-sheer tank top she'd work underneath (revealing the bruises on her arms, beginning to fade), though paired now with a long skirt from the clothes box, one that reminded her of the bus trip with Doctor Robert and only made her long more for home.

With no reason to fight, she was getting more and more restless, the stillness enough to drive her mad, she was sure; "safe" or no, Max was still being shot at in some jungle, Jude was in jail if not dead, everything was left wrecked and there was nothing she could do. Even when it had seemed useless, being able to act had given her a sense of security, a sense of importance, futile as the efforts may have been. It was something, not just sitting complacently like the rest of this population seemed to be doing; the idea of there being "another you" at home was little solace, or the war ending in those few years' time she'd been told (a few years wouldn't save Max, wouldn't bring him home, wouldn't bring back the countless of other people who, she was sure, were still dying by the second).

It was a train of thought she couldn't seem to avoid, apparently, and there, perched on the washing machine, which really didn't help the situation, her eyes had gone red and watery before she could even realize it. She slid to the floor, ending in a crouch, spine pressed against the cold metal of the washer and rubbed one hand over her face to brush any tears away, then combed the fingers back through her loose blonde hair. "It's gonna be alright," she murmured to herself, a cold, melancholy echo of Jude's shouting at her back in New York, tilting her head backwards, hands still tight in her hair by the back of her skull. "It's gonna be alright."