Tea and Oranges
Disclaimer: Not mine
Characters/Pairing: Sawyer/Kate
Word Count: 2734
Rating: light R
Summary: Sawyer still flies. He still takes airplanes and has his baggage checked and claimed, because when it all comes down to it, he's just the kind of bastard that has always enjoyed little more than tempting fate and laughing as the sky begins to fall.
Author's Note: Not sure where this came from. I've written my fair share of Lost fanfic, but I've come to the realization that I have not written a single post-island fic. So this is it. It's told from Sawyer's point of view in a kind of fragmented style, and Kate is in it, so yeah, I'm including it in my fanfic table of doom. Please, as always, do read, review and enjoy! Thanks!
Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by
You can spend the night beside her
And you know that she's half crazy
But that's why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges
That come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her
That you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer
That you've always been her lover -
The beach will never be the same for him. He realizes this, fourteen stories up, far too early, the sandy shore stretching out and into the Gulf below him.
The morning dawns with a too bright sky and nothing reflects off the still ocean waters. They just sit there, blue, blue, blue and Sawyer wrenches the curtains shut and falls back into bed.
It has been one year, two months and six days. It has been one year, two months and six days and it has yet to feel anything close to normal.
He thought his days on the island would end in death and blood and terror because in the back of his mind, there was no escape, no escape but death amidst the trees and at the hands of the Others. Instead, he was freed into a field, the same field as before, after a week or so of captivity marked by boredom rather than torture, and the sky was clear and the helicopters were coming, arranged above in a neat little row, like the flocking geese of fall.
They landed and they were alive, and as they stepped down and off the helicopter, dry land, the mainland, under their feet, Jack had laughed and said he'd be damned if he ever stepped foot on another plane again.
Sawyer still flies. He still takes airplanes and has his baggage checked and claimed, because when it all comes down to it, he's just the kind of bastard that has always enjoyed little more than tempting fate and laughing as the sky begins to fall.
The sun peeps through the crack of the curtains. Sawyer rolls over.
He has a real job now. The kind of job men settle for but never strive towards. He has an office (a promotion from the standard cubicle because that salesman's smile really does earn a pretty penny) and his own computer, personal phone line, and wannabe actress cum secretary. He has a paycheck with his name on it. He has vacation time.
You could call him reformed. You could call him reformed save for a promise still beating unfulfilled within him and the fact he keeps a 9 mm in his glove compartment. Fully loaded.
He threw his suitcase on the bed. Switched on the TV to ESPN and exhaled long and slow.
Sawyer placed the gun in the drawer, right in there next to the Bible. It's ironic and poetic and strangely right. There has always been something biblical about vengeance and revenge and sons and their fathers.
He checked the drawer again before falling asleep.
The hotel bar is more akin to a tiki lounge, all Bob Marley cover bands and girly drinks with umbrellas swaying in alcohol right next to the straw.
Sawyer makes his way across the bar and the man looks the same as he did in the picture and there's not an ounce of comfort in that thought.
Sawyer sidles up next to him, friendly, wan smile on his face and the man turns to face him, old con artist grin and penchant for turning strangers into false friends.
"Beautiful day, ain't it? Just the kinda place to forget about your worries, get lost and that old chestnut." A glass of whiskey glitters in the man's hands, matching the look in his eyes. Happiness. Sawyer, James, whoever he is anymore, thinks it's happiness the man is wearing like a prized medal about himself. "What do you say?"
"Couldn't agree more." He slides onto the barstool, his chest tight and he ignores it. He ignores and takes a deep breath, turning towards the bartender. "I'll have what he's having."
"Good man." Another deep swallow follows and Sawyer watches the older man out of the corner of his eye: the day-old stubble, the graying temples, the tan and creases along his eyes. He feels sick.
"You an old Southern boy, too?" the man asks.
"Tennessee. Born and raised."
"I'll be damned. Lived there a bit myself. Beautiful country, beautiful women." And it's like déjà vu and they're not really here, out by the sea, near the beach and the sunshine, the pina coladas and the women; they're in Sydney, at a shrimp truck with murder and fate and revenge on their minds.
The man extends his free hand. "You can call me Sawyer, son."
"James Ford."
He drinks too much, but he tells himself as he waits for the elevator to ascend, the situation called for it.
He runs a hand through his hair. It's mid afternoon and the elevator fills with bikini-clad women destined for the pool and an eventual ugly sunburn. Sawyer finds that none of them are worth a second glance.
Sawyer, Thomas Sawyer, he had later introduced himself with a loud laugh. Tom fucking Sawyer's my name, he said. And James, Sawyer, James Sawyer Ford, felt sick and he wanted little more than to slap the used car salesman's smile off his George Hamilton tanned face.
The elevator doors open with a ding and he turns the corner, heading down his hallway.
Halfway down he stops dead in his tracks.
It's her.
She's paler here. The freckles stand out, far more noticeable along the bridge of her nose and her cheeks are stained pink as opposed to a sun-drenched tan. Her makeup makes her look more severe, less natural, and her hair hangs long and straight and styled and he thinks this isn't right. She's not supposed to be normal, she's supposed to be wild and they're not supposed to be here, in the hallway of a four-star hotel, mid-afternoon, a year plus more out of touch and lost. He's not supposed to be drunk and she's not supposed to be wearing a hotel maid's uniform.
Closing the distance between them, he tries to forget how much he missed her.
"What are you doing here?" she asks, no inflection or discernable interest in her tone, but even if her voice says bored, her face says shocked, absolutely fucking shocked.
"Could be asking you the same question. Didn't realize scrubbing toilets and twirling a feather duster was your calling, sweetheart."
She glares at him.
"Kate, for real, what the hell are you doing here?"
"Sara." She points to her nametag for unneeded emphasis. "My name is Sara now."
"Shut the fuck up, Freckles. You ain't fooling nobody."
"It's been awhile," she says, lightly, conversationally, and he guesses this is as close as he is going to get to her confessing that she missed him as much as he missed her.
"Yeah. It has."
She drives too fast and rides the bumper of the car in front of her. The houses they pass are sad, desolate, shaded behind the bending boughs of palm trees and uncut grass.
Her house looks old, dilapidated and relatively unlived in.
She turns the car off and they find themselves in darkness, sitting side-by-side in an Oldsmobile he would guess is half as old as she is.
"Come on in," she whispers.
They don't talk about the island. They don't talk of the others. They don't discuss Jack's remarriage or the fact that while Hurley was wandering that long lost beach his assets on the mainland quadrupled and he's now worth somewhere around half a billion. They don't mention Charlie or the VH-1 special (Behind the Music: Driveshaft) or E! (True Hollywood Story: Charlie Pace). They don't laugh about the bastardization of their story at the hands of Jerry Bruckheimer and his film crew (Flight 815 – Crash Landing This Christmas at a Theatre Near You) or the bad, big-name casting decisions that followed soon thereafter (starring Ben Affleck, Kate Beckinsale, Matthew McConaughey and Will Smith).
They never mention Michael or Walt, on the island, or here, in this strange replay of the real world as they left it, even though Michael and Walt are the only reason why that helicopter burst through the clouds and the Coast Guard crashed over a wave, calling messages of salvation through a bullhorn.
They never mention the island on the news. It's just…The Island. No name, no description: just a mass of land that served as the crash pad for a jumbo jet thousands of miles off course. That should have been the first clue.
No one ever utters the word Dharma.
Kate was the first to get it. Handcuffed in federal custody, she heard the triumphant news reports and the 20/20 interviews and there was always something missing. Dharma. The island.
The third and the fourth clue: John Locke went missing and Mr. Eko sometime thereafter. That's when it started making sense, puzzle piece style.
The Dharma Initiative had never been acting alone.
Kate tried to use it to her advantage. Let me go, let me go, or it's all out there, in the public, primetime with Barbara Walters or Katie Couric and they'll hear about the hatch and the button and a man who wasn't really named Henry Gale.
It just seemed to make her all the more a threat and they called her insane and dangerous to humanity and she was going to be sent to a prison without bars but instead Plexiglas and padded walls and the assurance that there was no exit but only an entrance.
The next day a prison guard was dead and Kate was nowhere to be found.
They don't talk about any of this. There really wouldn't be a point.
He meets up again with her by the pool. She smiles a smile she probably doesn't mean and he follows her as she enters the hotel.
He keeps his sunglasses on, like this is Risky Business or Top Gun and he's Tom Cruise, desperately trying to pull off badass, but failing almost miserably. "Weather gets a little rough out here, I imagine."
"I've seen worse." She doesn't smile or bat her eyelashes or turn her words into some kind of ill-defined euphemism. She says that she's seen worse, and he knows she can't mean the island, because despite the torrential downpours and glaring sunlight, the weather never made the waves crash angrily or the trees sway dangerously.
She takes the service elevator and leaves him waiting by the door.
He shoots him.
He shoots him and he feels everything but glory.
He feels tired.
He really doesn't feel at all.
He watches the blood stain the man's shirt and remembers him smiling and laughing in the bar just yesterday. He remembers hiding under a bed in Tennessee and he remembers the two gunshots and the echo that remained. Until now.
Walking back to the rental car he can hear the surf. He leaves the body behind.
Key in the ignition, and he always thought he'd feel more relieved.
There is a knock on the door, and he doesn't ask who it is. He opens it and isn't surprised.
Kate stands there, awkward pose, staring at his chest rather than his face.
"Girl Scout cookies for sale already?" She doesn't smile, but his own grin is large enough and false enough to cover the both of them.
"Can I come in?"
"Of course."
He shuts the door behind her.
She kisses him. He always imagined it the other way around but finds he likes it better this way.
"Sawyer," she breathes, and she says his name the same way people make promises they actually intend to keep, they way people say 'forever' and 'I love you.' And she says Sawyer, she calls him Sawyer, and he feels cold and almost sick, because Sawyer, he isn't real, he isn't real and he is dead, rotting somewhere in the midnight calm, not holding her, not underneath her, bucking up and against her. Kate.
He holds her by the shoulders and tells her she has to stop.
"Don't…don't call me that." He can't breathe and her fingernails are digging into his arms and he's pretty sure that it was never supposed to go like this between the two of them.
"That's not me," he spits out, and his voice almost cracks, and this is too much. There's a gun in the drawer next to the bed, there's a gun with a bullet missing, a bullet now lodged between the eyes of a man named Tom Sawyer who ruined his life and now he's in bed with a runaway girl who calls herself Sara or Kate or Everything and he might just actually love her.
She doesn't say anything at first, and he would say that she looks scared, but they're not on the island, they are in the real world and in the real world, Kate doesn't do fear and she's never afraid.
"Alright," she says, and she doesn't ask questions and the skin of her neck still tastes like the wild; it still tastes like the jungle and the terror and everything strangely right.
"James," he whispers in her ear. "My name is James."
She repeats it like it's foreign and he kisses her to keep her silent.
His heart pounds and his pulse rushes loudly in his ears, and he comes.
It sounds just like the waves crashing on a beach that never existed, save for the two of them.
He wakes up to an empty bed and curses under his breath, into the dim and empty room.
He was supposed to be gone first.
He walks to the lobby, sleep deprived and homesick for a home that in all actuality hasn't existed for over twenty years, and stops at the front desk, hands splayed on the cold marble.
"Hi, I'm looking for Sara. Is she here?"
The employee behind the desk stares at him blankly.
"Sara? Is she here? Is Sara here?"
Pablo, the employee's name is Pablo, answers him, all broken English and only halfway intelligible. "Oh, si, senor. Eh, la bonita o la grande?"
"La bonita, I guess."
"Sara…eh, ella no esta aqui. Como se dice – she leave, yes? She leave. This morning. She come in and she take her money and she say she leavin'. Lo siento, muchacho."
"Muchas gracias."
He sits at the edge of his bed, head in his hands.
He opens the drawer slowly.
His gun is gone. His gun is gone and next to the Bible rests a tiny toy airplane, crooked on its side.
This isn't the end. It's never the end.
The sun sets an angry orange and it's beautiful and it's ugly and it's right and the sand shimmers in the dimming light outside his closed window.
He slips the airplane in his pocket and shuts the door behind him.
He has a plane to catch.
And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbor
And she shows you where to look
Among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed
There are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love
And they will lean that way forever
Suzanne – Leonard Cohen
fin.