Chapter 21: Rousseau's Return
POV: Rousseau
Danielle Rousseau crouched in the jungle's shadow, watching the beach camp with eyes that had learned to see truth through sixteen years of isolation and madness. The survivors moved through their daily routines, building their shelters and tending their fires, believing themselves safe in their fragile civilization.
But one of them was different. Wrong, like her.
The young man they called Mac—she'd been watching him for weeks, studying his impossible constructions and supernatural healing. He built things that shouldn't stand, healed injuries that should have killed, moved through the world with knowledge that belonged to someone else.
Time was wrong around him, bent in ways that reminded her of the island's deeper mysteries. He didn't belong here, not like the others. He was displaced, pulled from somewhere else and dropped into a story that wasn't his own.
Just like she'd been pulled from her research expedition and thrust into a nightmare of whispers and betrayal and children stolen in the night.
Today, she would finally approach him. The Others were moving again, and warnings needed to be given before it was too late.
Danielle emerged from the tree line heavily armed, her rifle held ready but not quite threatening. The camp's sentries saw her first—shouts of alarm spreading through their settlement as people reached for weapons and defensive positions.
Mac's danger sense flared immediately, but differently than it had with Ethan. Danielle was dangerous—sixteen years of survival had honed her into something predatory and unpredictable—but malice wasn't driving her actions. Desperation was.
"I need to speak with Sayid," Danielle called out, her French accent thick with urgency. "The Others are moving. You have perhaps days before they come."
POV: Mac
Mac's head exploded with memory fragments as Danielle spoke. Images cascaded through his consciousness: Alex, daughter, Ben, betrayal, a woman driven mad by isolation and loss. The pain was excruciating, white-hot spikes driving through his skull as his borrowed memories tried to surface fully.
He staggered, blood streaming from his nose as the visions overwhelmed his ability to process them. Through the agony, he heard Danielle's voice continuing her warnings about the sickness and her dead team, about dangers that moved through the jungle with inhuman patience.
"You've heard the whispers," Danielle said, her eyes locking onto Mac's face with uncomfortable recognition. "You know what they mean."
Mac wiped blood from his nose, trying to regain composure while his head pounded with almost-memories that felt more real than his actual experiences.
"I've heard them," Mac admitted, seeing no point in denial when Danielle's supernatural awareness clearly pierced through normal deception.
Sayid approached cautiously, his interrogator instincts activated by the appearance of someone who might have answers to questions that had been haunting them for weeks.
"You're French," Sayid said. "From the transmission we picked up?"
Danielle nodded grimly. "Sixteen years I have been warning. Sixteen years the signal has played while I tried to survive what this island does to people."
She gestured toward the jungle with movements that carried the weight of accumulated trauma.
"They took my daughter. Just a baby, but they took her. Said she was sick, but the sickness was in them. In all of us, eventually."
Jack had joined their group, his medical training focusing on the mention of sickness that might threaten their community.
"What kind of sickness?" Jack asked. "Viral? Bacterial? Something we can treat?"
Danielle's laugh was bitter and broken. "Not that kind of sickness, Doctor. This sickness is in the soul. It makes you forget who you were, makes you serve the island's will instead of your own."
Mac felt ice forming in his stomach as implications crystallized. If the island could change people's fundamental nature, bend their personalities to serve its mysterious purposes, what did that mean for someone like him who'd already been changed by forces beyond his understanding?
"There is a ship," Danielle continued, shifting to more practical matters. "The Black Rock, deep in the jungle. It carries dynamite, weapons, supplies you will need when they come for you."
Mac's construction sense processed the impossibility immediately. A ship in the middle of the jungle meant either massive tsunamis or the island itself had moved. His Phase Two abilities now included historical structural analysis, letting him read the story written in displaced architecture.
"How did a ship end up inland?" Mac asked, fascination overriding caution.
Danielle studied him with renewed interest. "You see it too, don't you? The wrongness. This island moves, changes, brings things from other times and places. The ship arrived the same way you did—pulled from where it belonged and dropped where the island needed it."
Before anyone could ask what that meant, Danielle had already moved on to tactical concerns.
"I will show you the way to the Black Rock. But you must go soon. The Others know you found their spy, know you killed him. They will respond with force."
Mac volunteered immediately, partly to gain access to the supplies they needed but mostly to escape Danielle's knowing stare. Her supernatural awareness made him feel exposed in ways that threatened everything he'd built.
Before the group dispersed to plan their expedition, Danielle pulled Mac aside for a conversation that felt both necessary and terrifying.
"You don't belong here," she said quietly, her voice carrying absolute certainty. "Not like them. I can see it—you're displaced, pulled from somewhere else."
Mac's heart stopped. No one had ever seen through his cover story so completely, so effortlessly.
"Time is wrong around you," Danielle continued. "The island knows you're anomalous, but it hasn't decided what to do about you yet."
Mac tried to deny it, tried to maintain the fiction that he was just another crash survivor with unusual abilities.
Danielle laughed bitterly. "I've been here sixteen years, boy. I know impossible when I see it. Your secret is safe with me—we're all impossible here, in our own ways."
She walked away without explanation, leaving Mac shaken to his core by the realization that someone had finally seen his true nature and chosen alliance rather than exposure.
"She knows what I am," Mac realized with a mixture of relief and terror. "Not the specifics, maybe, but she understands that I'm fundamentally wrong for this reality. And instead of exposing me or demanding explanations, she's offering... what? Understanding? Partnership? Warning?"
Mac watched Danielle disappear into the jungle, her movements carrying the fluid grace of someone who'd learned to be part of the island's ecosystem rather than fighting against it. For the first time since his transmigration, someone had seen him clearly and chosen to keep his secrets.
But that validation came with its own dangers. If Danielle could sense his temporal displacement, others might eventually develop the same awareness. And not all of them would be as willing to let sleeping anomalies lie undisturbed.
Mac returned to camp knowing that his careful facade had been pierced by someone who understood impossible things because she'd lived them for sixteen years. The weight of that recognition settled on his shoulders like a new responsibility—to live up to whatever trust Danielle had placed in him by choosing silence over revelation.
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