Title: Self-Preservation
Fandom: Lost
Summary: One Shot. An exploration of why Sawyer needed to leave on the raft in season one. Sawyer didn't need to be on the raft due to any sense of heroism or to satisfy a death wish, no matter what Michael chose to believe. Nor, did he want to leave because there wasn't anything worth staying for as he'd told Kate.
AN: This isn't the first piece of fanfiction I've ever written but it is certainly the first in quite some time. I figured I'd get my toes wet and see how the water feels. This is also my first attempt at writing in this fandom, and the show as a whole, though I've seen it all the way through twice now, is relatively new to me so please be gentle.
Sawyer didn't need to be on the raft due to any sense of heroism or to satisfy a death wish, no matter what Michael chose to believe. Nor, did he want to leave because there wasn't anything worth staying for as he'd told Kate. No, Sawyer's reasons for needing to get off the damn island were far more basic than that, to put it simply, self-preservation.
Sawyer was self aware enough to realize that from the night of his parents' deaths onward, a time when he was another person entirely, just a young boy named James, he'd began shutting himself off from people and from any emotion other than that of grief and rage.
It would be difficult for any eight-year-old shattered by the tragedy of murder suicide not to, never mind one who'd witnessed the whole sordid event, and then went on to lose his grandmother to loss and despair and his uncle to the effects of a terminal brain tumor.
After that it was off to foster care, where he was shuffled from one broken home to the next. It was there that he learned to protect himself, using his ability to read, his love for books, as an escape from his sad reality. So much reading garnered him a way with words, words he wielded with sarcasm, a potent defense mechanism that kept others from seeing his vulnerability.
Such a defense mechanism deterred others from getting close to him, which prevented him from learning to love himself or anyone else, and pushed him to cut his losses and run by the tender age of sixteen.
Further down the line, during his years of conning unsuspecting women much like his mother, he'd lost any respect for himself. His self-hatred so strong because of who he'd become that the only thing that kept him alive was his quest for revenge against the man he held responsible for his parents' deaths. The real Sawyer.
His thirst for revenge was how he'd wound up in Sydney, looking to kill Frank Duckett, a man whom had once been a conman that went by the name of Sawyer or so he'd been lead to believe by Hibbs. Sawyer had been surprised by his inability to execute the man he'd believed to have killed his parents in that first attempt.
It was all he could do not be sick as he'd walked back to his car, gun in shaking hand due to the enormity of having come face to face with his demons no matter how badly he'd thought he wanted it.
After having sped out of there as if the devil himself were on his heels he'd driven around aimlessly in search of a bar, intending to drink himself into oblivion. The man he'd met in the first bar he came by, Christian, Jack's father as it turned out, convinced him to give killing Duckett another try when he'd asked if whatever it was that Sawyer needed to do would ease his suffering.
As he had believed that killing the real Sawyer would give him the closure he'd needed since a child he went back to confront Duckett, this time not hesitating to lift the gun and pull the trigger.
The initial relief he felt upon releasing his pent up rage was short lived when Duckett revealed, as he'd lain dying, that he wasn't the real Sawyer, that Hibbs had simply lied in order to get Sawyer to do his dirty work.
The horror he'd felt upon realizing he'd killed an innocent man, had hardly faded when he'd gotten into a drunken bar brawl that wound up getting him deported from Australia and sent home to the States on Oceanic Flight 815.
Oceanic Flight 815, which had crashed on this godforsaken Island of Mystery, forcing him whether by fate or circumstance to live with the forty-something-odd other survivors. At first his defense mechanisms had been firmly in place, sarcasm his first weapon in an arsenal of them, pure venom pouring from his lips when nearly anyone dared to speak to him.
At some point after he'd been tortured by Sayid something had shifted, a crack had formed in his defensive armor. Bitter smirks began giving way to the occasional genuine smile, his nicknames once scathing insults began to sound more like endearments, and where once contempt and amusement reined something akin to fondness began to grow.
It was upon sudden awareness that he'd made a real connection with Kate, had come to understand her, care for her even that he realized he'd begun to form attachments. It scared the ever living shit out of him, and if his feelings for Kate were a sign that he'd begun losing his grip then his newfound empathy for Jack, upon the realization that he was Christian's son and that he and Sawyer weren't so different after all must have spoke volumes.
Ultimately, Sawyer's cognizance of his newly forming attachments resulted in the epiphany that Sawyer didn't know how to deal with this, hell couldn't deal with this. He wasn't the type of person that could love someone, nor was he the type of person someone should be able to love.
So, Sawyer didn't need to be on the raft due to any sense of heroism or to satisfy a death wish, no matter what Michael chose to believe. Nor, did he want to leave because there wasn't anything worth staying for as he'd told Kate. No, Sawyer's reasons for needing to get off the damn island were far more basic than that, to put it simply, self-preservation. If there was one fact that Sawyer could count in this fucked up world, it was that it was best to do the leaving before you got left.
The End.
AN 2: I hope you enjoyed reading this fic as much as I enjoyed writing it. I'd really appreciate some feedback if you wouldn't mind, and constructive criticism is always welcome.
Thank You,
Alaina