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To be a pilot was to live with the constant awareness of chance. Call it luck, call it fate, call it whatever you liked, but never forget it would kill you the second you took your eyes off the controls. Pilots did everything they could, but there was always the possibility that the stars would align, a miracle would occur, and you would get screwed in precisely the wrong way. And if that happened you had to deal with it, no matter how bullshit unfair bad luck it was.
But this kind of bad luck? Frank Lapidus did not sign up for this.
Well, he did sign up to fly Ajira 316. It was a good route: the Guam hop (KGUM), as far south as he would let himself go after The Island Adventure, then on to Tokyo (RJAA), sometimes out to New Delhi (VIDP). And it was nice to see Jack Shephard again, in a casual sort of way. Of the people whom Frank had met on The Adventure, Jack fell on the good side. Jack had been, if not exactly competent, at least trying his best. Frank gave him an A for effort. So it was nice to see Jack again, and it wouldn't be the worst thing to chat with another survivor without worrying about being shot. Maybe they could link up in Guam for a meal after landing.
But when he asked what the doc was up to out there, Jack didn't answer, and a little light started flashing on the console of his brain. Frank kept talking while the rest of him scanned the cabin, and sure enough he saw the rest of them. He was about to try some desperate joke about a reunion for the Oceanic Six, and shouldn't they be flying Oceanic in that case, when far in the back he spotted Benjamin Linus. That was about where the wheels came off the wagon.
"Wait a second," he told Jack, and caught Ben's eye briefly. Ben just stared back over the rims of his silly little glasses, unapologetic, as if this whole thing were his idea. Which it probably was. Shit. Benjamin Linus brought nothing but trouble, and worse. That guy made Frank felt like a chess piece. Ben carried something bigger with him, like destiny or fate, and Frank didn't care for that kind of thing. It sounded way too much like gravity, to which he flipped the bird on a regular basis. But Benjamin Linus was here, and so were the rest of them, and Frank faced the slow realization that his life just got complicated again.
He looked at Jack. "We're not going to Guam, are we."
Jack only smiled awkwardly. Frank sighed and asked him when and where and was he supposed to fly a specific bearing this time too, but Jack didn't know any of that. Of course not. Like this would be easy. But when Frank asked him how they were planning to get back out the doc blinked and looked confused, like he hadn't even considered the question. Oh boy. So he told Jack to sit back down, he had to go make some adjustments (because he did) and retreated to the cockpit.
Back in the pilot's seat he glanced over the board, then pulled out the flight manual and flipped to the emergency landing procedures.
Should've stayed retired, bucko, Frank told himself. Oh, not retire from flying, not till he's dead, but from this endless commercial grind. Somehow the airlines did their damndest to suck all the joy out of his life's calling. He'd flown the big boys, taken in the jumbo jetliners all around the world, and now he was ready to kick back with a little Diamond two-seater and enjoy the freedom of the open sky. He'd done decently well off the edges of the Oceanic Six's fame, and he'd been smart enough to get paid for The Adventure up front (turned out to be a real good idea, seeing as how no one else on that freighter made it out alive). But if he were being honest it still wasn't enough to quit working, not if he wanted to keep flying, and he wasn't going to get there any time soon on a commercial pilot's salary either. All the money really meant was that he didn't have to worry about taking a second job like some of the other pilots. He'd even been able to stay unemployed for a bit after The Adventure, and pay to get recerted when he resigned himself to getting back behind the yoke. He'd done alright with helicopter charters after leaving Oceanic, but that had ended in the deep blue waters of the South Pacific. No more helos, not after that crash. So that left the military and the small charters business, and he was too old and stubborn for the military. And there wasn't money in the small plane business, not unless you were very lucky. So in the end the commercial airlines had been the only way to put avgas in the tank and food on the table, and he'd sighed and signed back up and maybe had a word with a couple people who didn't want certain things known to get himself reinstated at captain instead of having to work his way back up the seniority ladder.
And, to his mild surprise, he found himself content with the new boundaries of his life. There was a time when that wouldn't have been true. Frank had always been good at taking apart a situation and analyzing the details. That talent has kept him alive more than once. So when he noticed Seth Norris, or rather the lack of Seth Norris, he'd kept pulling on that little string until the whole deception unraveled, and he'd been pretty excited to find out what was hiding underneath. He had been hoping for some kind of CIA conspiracy, an illuminati kind of thing, or maybe even aliens. Aliens!
He was not expecting a cow. He was not expecting to get shot at, a lot, even though he hadn't done anything to deserve it (as far as he knew). He was not expecting to get wrapped up in an insane little war that had nothing to do with him, playing out between two gangs of people who all seemed to be lying to each other. After a little while, in between getting shot at, he'd even started to feel sad the big secret had ended up being so wretchedly ordinary.
Then the world had bloomed into incandescence, brimming over with that rising singing light, and he'd seen an entire island disappear right in front of him. Poof, gone, now you see it, now you don't. It had been shocking, awe-inspiring, and - really quite beautiful. In a gut-wrenching-terror sort of way. And it had been enough as far as Frank Lapidus was concerned. Curiosity satisfied. Ambition realized. Sufficient strangeness had touched his life. The truth was out there, it was way weirder than he ever dreamed, and he now entertained the notion that it could stand to be someone else's problem.
But apparently what Frank Lapidus wanted didn't mean shit. The truth had come back for him. The world had made it his problem. Fairly disproportionate retribution for sleeping in three years ago, if you thought about it. Here they were, the Oceanic fucking Six (plus one) and he was once again their fucking chauffeur. Great. How the hell had they sucked him back into this, dammit!? There was a reason he refused to take South Pacific routes, not even on open pickup to make extra hours. Guam wasn't even anywhere near there!
Then again, it was a magic teleporting island. It might, possibly, be on the way.
Frank took a deep breath, folded up the anger, and stowed it away in favor of more important things. He didn't remember a whole lot of runways on that island, and while Jack might not have contemplated the return trip, Frank was sure as hell not spending the rest of his life on a rock without a single decent barbeque joint. So in between checking the magnetic compass needle as often as possible he started a mental inventory of things to be done to get the plane ready for a very hard, emphatically unscheduled landing. He went back over the emergency procedures, decided they were woefully lacking, and while his copilot Cooper watched the controls he pulled a pen from his shirt pocket and started writing in the extra pages at the back of the flight manual, Emergency Weird Shit Checklist.
Benjamin Linus again. That guy's bad news, he grumbled to himself. He's not allowed on my plane anymore.
* * *
Frank sensed the hum before he heard it. He'd been wondering whether he'd know when it started, and now he had his answer: his control yoke shivered minutely and the black Pacific night felt suddenly charged, luminescent. Frank propped up the flight manual next to his yoke: Emergency Weird Shit. He flicked on the "Fasten Seatbelt" sign with a certain grim trepidation, then checked off item number one. Cooper looked at him oddly. If only he could even begin to explain what was about to happen.
A jolt, turbulence that wasn't turbulence. Item number two: he released their heading and focused instead on keeping the plane level. Another jolt, and another; Cooper started saying something about rough air. Frank didn't bother answering, and then it didn't matter because the sound began, an ear-splitting, overwhelming silver drone coming from everywhere at once. The yoke got harder and harder to move until the plane stopped responding at all, gripped entirely by whatever force was dragging them in. The jolts merged into a continuous rattling shaking. Then the real light started to rise around them, filling the cockpit and flooding his mind, at once stunning and familiar. Welcoming, in a deep and unsettling way. Frank tightened his grip on his useless yoke and willed the aircraft to stay together. The light overwhelmed his view out the windows, then of the board, the fuselage torqued around him in a direction that aluminum should not go - a wrenching roll that almost pulled them down and then-- they were through.
The light blew away like mist. Frank had one tiny splinter of a second to contemplate how screwed they were. Both engines were screaming, choked-off and spinning down. His copilot was flipping switches frantically, trying to restart, but nothing wanted to answer. No power, no lift, and oh, it was suddenly broad daylight, Cooper was panicking next to him, all the instruments were going nuts, the magnetic compass was actually spinning, the airframe still shuddered queasily in the wake of something massive, a familiar ridgeline loomed up far too close for comfort, and it was all up to him.
Good thing I made a checklist, he thought, and got down to business.