How Juliet Burke forgot Benjamin Linus

A/N: This is a crossover with the concept of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind but no knowledge is needed.

The first thing she did when she arrived home, after changing her name and her various cards and numbers was go find a Chipotle. She needed something mass produced, un-unique to make her forget where she had been. But she had some kind of un-deletable class. It shone threw even as she ate her taco's daintily, wiping away little smears of sour cream from her cheek. As her now quite, almost cloudy eyes grazed over people, nameless, meaningless people that she ached to become. She meant nothing to herself and the only person, two people really were far away.

Rachel, and Julian, the nephew she never met could never meet. Because for all intents and purposes she was dead. Cancer.

Rachel, she had been told, visited her grave on the day of her birthday.

Juliet had no grave to visit. She drunk the last swirl of beer at the bottom of her glass, and then through the brown twisted glass, she saw something that caught her eye, a word on a billboard in plain black and white.

Forget.

It was a verb she had longed to embrace the moment she had fired a gun and hit a man, a living breathing man, or perhaps her regret began the moment she couldn't love him. The moment when she didn't have enough courage to both confront him, change him, and love him. The moment when she gave up.

It must have been a moment much like this one, peering subtly over other peoples heads, looking for an escape, or perhaps it wasn't a moment at all.

She wrote down the address on a napkin.

"MM, allrighty, name please," the blond secretary says slowly. Juliet is unused to this, being thought stupid. But she supposes they delayed way she reacts to everything, even to herself, makes people view her differently.

Juliet moves a strand of her now brown hair out of eyes and says, "Rosaline Manet."

"You need to deposit all of your items in the box." She doesn't look up from her computer where she is typing furiously.

Juliet takes out a single photograph, a copy of The Grapes of Wrath, Mice and Men, Anna Karina, Carrie and finally a small golden chain and locket. All of her items look small and afraid in the basket she yearns to take them out to spare them. But she doesn't and is less amazed by her control then she once would have been.

"Are you sure you got everything," the woman says condescendingly, looking at the small assortment of items with a mixture of curiosity and self-righteousness. She just works here, sees weakness everyday, she fancies she has never experienced it herself. Maybe she just forgot about it.

"I just moved," Juliet airily explained. The words seemed as small as the items in the box, shining and solitary.

"These items will all be burned," the woman said, although her voice lacked the mechanization that the words themselves seemed to imply. "Or we can store them for an extra charge."

Juliet didn't ask how much. "Burn them."

"Alright then, you'll just come this way and Dr. Earhart will see you right away." The secretary looked like a giraffe in her red pumps as she stumbled around the corral leading into her small cubicle, and then out leading Juliet to the office.

The meeting was full of formalities and legalities. In a word, forgettable.

They came to her apartment which was a metropolis of boxes and a hurricane of dust and half-moved in furniture, on Tuesday. She had made the bed specially for them, literally made. It had taken some time to assemble the cheap futon but she glowed with satisfaction and self-insufficiency when it was finished, no matter how dinky it was in actuality.

Her buzzer rang like an angry swarm of mosquito, she knew all about those, and she answered it more than a couple of minutes late, after moving Godzilla like through sky-skrapers of cardboard. IT was harder to do damage than not to, so she did.

"Hello, Rosaline Manet."

"Yeah this is Fredrick and Jonathan, from the clinic."

They sounded slightly drunk and proud of the secrecy. Juliet knew that secrecy was nothing to be proud of, but so what. She was tired of all of this, of everything. “Come in, it’s a mess, sorry.”

“No problemo,” the short one with flaming red hair said, looking around the variety of packages and such. “Umm, we’re gonna need some space.”

Juliet turned around to look for the other guy but he was already gone. “I’ll just clear out these boxes and you--” she turned around to look for either of them but they were both gone. Wearily she began to move the boxes but her arms ached so much and she could feel something like tears gathering in the base of her throat. She expected fear, terror even, but she just felt this inescapable regret. She had left the island, him, but she couldn’t escape it.

Except for now she could. She moved the boxes with removed vigor, clearing a small space besides her bed. Muffled steps and grunting wafted up from the stairs but she didn’t turn around, just kept on reconfiguring boxes like one of those pictures with only one empty slot. Behind her Juliet heard a deep thud and the floor vibrated underneath her toes.

“You, Rosaline Manet, do hereby sign to give up all memories regarding the aforementioned subject, known to you as Benjamin Linus. You have declined to tape your true memories, which means that no matter what goes wrong you have no option of legal recourse against the clinic,” the red-headed one said, holding out to her a clipboard and a pen.

She didn’t look at her own trembling hand as she signed. “So I just get in the bed and you put those on me.” Instead she looked at the tall black machine that they had somehow fit through her doorway. It seemed to old to really be capable of much, but from her time on the island she knew not to trust appearances of machines.

“Yep,” said the taller one, sitting down on his chair, twirling around once and beginning to type something in.

Juliet looked at them both warily, took a deep breath, and laid down.

- - - - - - - - - - --

It wasn’t her first memory of him that she saw, but it was one of their first. It began with her knocking on his door, and listening to her favorite song through wood, laughing at him humming along before he even saw her. He had a terrible voice and Juliet was much meaner than she seemed, though she would never actually say anything. “Hey,” she said timidly when he opened the door.

“Hello Juliet,” he sounded surprised, Juliet thought strangely.

“I have muffins,” she said smiling, looking him through the corner of her eye, but the surprise was only a flash.

“Come in.” He touched her elbow lightly guiding her inside and now she was perplexed. He was not the touch-y feely type as far as she could tell. She set her muffins down on the counter and looked around. Why was his house empty? There was supposed to be a book club, the first book club.

“I brought the Stienbeck.” She wondered if he would catch the implication that it wasn’t Stephen King, and how interested and excited she was to be trying something new. How ready she was to be brave and interesting, how ready she was to impress someone.

He smiled a smile she had never seen before. It was just a little twisted, just a little too knowing and she found herself surprised at how thrilling it was. He looked at the muffins intently, too intently and then delicately removed the book from top of them. “May I.”

She had to stop herself from blushing, but he was so polite. “Of course, but save some for the others okay.” It was embarrassing she thought, how playful, how free she was being, it really wasn’t professional, she felt so awkward.

He gave that same knowing smile, before biting into one. The room was perilously silent, and she waited for him to spit them back out or grimace. He smiled, this time a real one and said, “delicious.”

She moved to sit down on the couch and he moved to join her leaving the muffins on the table. “Have you read this before,” she began, biting back a stutter. She used to stutter when she was younger, nothing terrible but she had been incredibly shy.

“Its my favorite book,” his tone was so nostalgic but his eyes, his clear, deep blue eyes were focused right on her. His attention was electrifying almost confrontational but in such an easy subtle way.

She looked away first biting her lip. “Really? I don’t know it was just too distant for me I couldn’t really become connected to the characters they were all symbols for things. They were so cold too, they just kept on moving. It should have been heart-breaking but…” she trailed off as she noticed that he was looking at her with a strange kind of emotion. “What,” she said annoyed brushing a hair out of her eyes. She immediately regretted sounding annoyed but, he just put her in this really weird place.

“I told you two lies.” He began, and Juliet’s brow furrowed. “Grapes of Wrath isn’t my favorite book, Mice of Men is, though I’ve only recently changed my opinion, and there is no bookclub today, though that wasn’t a lie either. I’ve just misled you a little, can you forgive me?”

“I-” Juliet knew what she was supposed to say next. She was supposed to forgive him, have coffee chat about Stienbeck, argue about Stephen King even ask one faux paux question about the island. But it didn’t happen. It was unhappening.

Slowly molecule by molecule her memories began to unravel and she was only sad and a little bit regretful.