Rising back up to the surface, Johanna heard another noise. She looked back and forth quickly, scanning the vast ocean around her, but heard nothing. She looked over at Boone, who had fallen asleep on the rocks.
"Help!" she heard a scream. Again Johanna looked around, but, again, saw nothing.
"Hello?! Is anyone there? Boone?" She looked around but Boone was gone. Creeped out, Johanna began swimming back to the shore, ready to leave and call this her mind hallucinating. Maybe Jack would find something to help her.
"Somebody help me!" Johanna looked behind her, seeing the same baby blue eyes that haunted her for years. "Please help me! You can't leave me!"
It wasn't possible, it just wasn't possible. He was dead, she was sure of it. But was she? For all she knew, that boy could have survived. He could have lived his life again, he could even be sitting on this plane!
"You can't leave me!" The boy was shouting. He was drowning, poor Matthew was drowning and she was sitting there, watching him die all over again. Then he spoke one last time, breaking her out of her reverie, her self-pity, guilt and doubts of his actual existence.
"You can't leave me again, Johanna! You already left me once, you can't leave me again! I know it!" And he was right. Physically all she had to do was keep on swimming in the opposite direction. Just keep swimming and eventually this hallucination will disappear, or if he is really there, he will sink under the water, and nobody would know he even existed. He would be the forgotten survivor, barely a whisper in her mind, nonexistent in others' minds. But he was right. You can't leave me again! Mentally, emotionally, she could not do it, could not let this boy die again. Could not feel emptiness and alone because she once again avoided the situation, and made that young boy pay the price.
"Dammit!" She turned back towards the drowning boy and made her way towards him, not looking up until she knew she was near him again. She looked up, but the boy was gone. Johanna threw her fist in the water, screaming out of frustration. Either he had died again because of her, or her mind made all of it up.
"You're too late." She spun around and saw the boy again, but he was fine, floating in the water as if he was a vacationer at the beach basking in the sun. He looked upon her one last time and smiled. The smile unhinged her, it was chilling and not human. His eyes were turning red and his skin black, his body then started to turn to smoke until a large black smoke hovered over her and then the water pulled her down, and the nightmares that have haunted her dreams became her reality. Death's grip grew tighter and tighter around her throat, and Johanna's life flashed before her eyes. Who would remember her? Who would care about her death? And then it came to Johanna. Matthew was never the forgotten survivor, it was Johanna.