TITLE: Five Kisses

RATING: PG-13

DISCLAIMER: All characters in Lost belong to Damon Lindelof and JJ Abrams. Not little ol' me, and there is no profit being made here.

SPOILERS: Basic S2.

PAIRING: Sawyer/Ana Lucia

AUTHOR'S NOTES: This is written in response to Pearl-O's 'Five Kisses' meme, which rose up and ate my brain. #3 is a slight continuation of 'Foot Soldiers', but beyond that they all stand alone.

I.

If the redneck's fever didn't come down soon, they were going to lose him. They were probably going to lose him, anyway, unless that doctor they had on the other side had some kind of miracle drug stashed away in his suitcase. Hell, and that didn't even factor in how many people she was going to see die in getting Sawyer's ass over there just so that he could die among a few familiar faces.

Ana Lucia knelt beside the makeshift stretcher that had been carrying Sawyer ever since his own legs had refused to do the job any longer, staring down at his face as it twisted with whatever fever dreams were running through his head. They didn't look like peaceful ones. Ana Lucia had watched the man with the fracture leg die back on the beach, back when she had no way to intervene. Those dreams were going to get much worse before it was all over.

She hadn't had a way to make the passage out any easier then. She did now. Ana Lucia let her fingers drift across the butt of the gun for a moment, tucked as it was within easy reach in the waistband of her jeans. It would make everything easier, both on her and on their chances of making it to Jack's camp with all of their lives and limbs. It would sure as hell make it easier on Sawyer, if his chances were as slim as she thought they were and he was only taking his sweet-ass time finding his way to that light.

"Don't even think about it, baby doll."

Ana Lucia hadn't realized that he was lucid. As flushed as his face was, she hadn't even realized that he was still capable of it. Sawyer's eyes did not open, and he was speaking so softly that she had to lean very close in order to hear him. "You think you got an all-access pass to what's going on in my head?" she asked him. Sawyer's breath moved over her cheek as he exhaled, hot enough to hurt. Jesus, he had to be sitting at at least 104.

There were those pretty blue eyes, finally opening up to look at her. It took Sawyer a few moments to focus on her face. "Sure, I do," he whispered. "You're wondering about whether or not you'd be wasting that last bullet by putting it into my brainpan. Ending this little dance right now." Something of the truth must have shown on Ana Lucia's face, because Sawyer chuckled. "You ain't as complex as you think, girl. I know your type. Did it once, and now you almost want to do it again, just because you're scared you got the taste and you want to make sure. You and me, we ain't as different as you want to think." Sawyer chuckled again. "Back off. I'm not bowing out yet."

And before Ana Lucia could stop him or even think about moving away, Sawyer tilted his face up to meet hers, mouth on mouth with an intensity that a man as sick as he was should not have been able to manage. She allowed it for one shocked second before she shoved herself backwards and out of reach. Before Ana Lucia could berate him for it, though, Sawyer's eyes were rolling back in his head and he was gone again.

"He's a damned lunatic," Ana Lucia muttered to herself, but she still pulled her hand away from the gun. "Okay, folks, break's over. We're wasting more daylight than we can spare."

II.

If Sawyer had spent one more day in that hatch, he would have gone right out of his mind. If Sawyer had spent one more day in that hatch, Jack would have gone out of his mind. Sawyer fidgeted as Jack checked the bandage one more time to make sure that he wasn't going to pull out any of the stitches, and he fidgeted even more when Jack announced that he was going to accompany him down to the beach, "just in case."

"Jesus, Jack, I'll holler if I fall and can't get up," Sawyer huffed, feeling like a kid being told that he could not go outside until it stopped raining. The hatch was full of closed corners and dark shadows that he could not adjust to after the wide open sky, and it made Sawyer's skin crawl.

"So humor me. I want to get you out of here as badly as you want to go." Jack's hand on Sawyer's uninjured shoulder was much friendlier than his words would have suggested.

It was all that Sawyer could do not to run out into the sea and roll around in it, hell, and on the sand, too, as soon as he caught sight of his beach again. There were probably not a lot of stranger places that could be called home, but home it had become all the same. Sawyer realized that he was grinning like an idiot, and that Jack also had a smile on his face. He rolled his eyes when he caught Sawyer looking.

"Go on, you moron. Try not to undo any of the work that I did."

Sawyer gave him a good-natured salute with a certain finger and ambled over to his tent to see how many of his belongings had been harvested in his absence. He couldn't help but notice the female figure struggling to build a fire all by her lonesome as he did so.

"Come on, now, outgoing girl like yourself? Tell me that you can't make friends."

Ana Lucia paused and pursed her lips for a moment before she looked up. "There something that you want from me?" she asked.

"Yep. Seems to me we got a little unfinished business between us. Seems to me you owe me something." Sawyer pointed at his shoulder, still swathed in bandages beneath his shirt. "Since you're looking a little lonely without any rocks to throw at people, I aim to collect on my debt."

"I saved your damned life, you-fine." Ana Lucia cut herself off with a savage chopping motion. She didn't have any rocks to throw, maybe, but Sawyer still saw her give a few speculative looks to the sticks that she was working with as she stood up. Ana Lucia dusted her hands against the legs of her jeans, her expression wary. "And just how do you mean to collect on this debt you think you're owed?" she asked.

She was probably expecting him to smack her one. It had crossed his mind, but she had caught him on a good day when he was in a good mood, and there was a certain satisfaction that he had always found in shocking people. Sawyer stepped close, grinning down at Ana Lucia as she refused to back away. She didn't flinch when Sawyer grabbed her arms but did when his mouth covered hers, flinched harder when it was soft and gentle. Neither one of them knew how to handle something that was not a fight.

Sawyer brought him hand up to tangle in Ana Lucia's hair, always back in that ponytail when he bet it would be gorgeous swinging free. Well, he never had moved past the stage where he tugged at a girl's pigtails.

Ana Lucia stared at him for a long time when he finally released her, that familiar bitch-line already drawing itself down between her eyes. On this side of the island, though, there wasn't a whole lot that she could do about it.

"Fine," Ana Lucia repeated, drawing her hand slowly across her mouth. "So we're even." She gave him the faintest suggestion of a smirk before she turned and walked away.

III.

Ana Lucia read Romeo and Juliet when she was a freshman in high school and swore never to do it again. So some of the language was pretty, when she could muddle through it, but at its core it was about two idiot kids who were so wrapped up in their own problems that they couldn't see the damage that they were doing to everyone else. That might be Shakespeare's kind of hero, but Ana Lucia could never quite manage that trick. She always saw everyone else, always caught herself calculating the numbers.

Had she known that she would be living it fifteen years later, she might have paid a little more attention.

"Fuck," Ana Lucia said as she watched Kate and Jack emerge from the jungle together, Kate's hair tousled into a cloud around her face and Jack's shirt so wrinkled that she was amazed that he had even managed to button it back correctly. While the war with the Others was at a temporary impasse, there were only so many things that a person could do to make a lazy afternoon pass more quickly. It sure looked like Kate and Jack had found at least one of them.

"I'll do us both a favor and avoid stating the obvious." Ana Lucia no longer jumped when Sawyer crept up behind her to offer his own special brand of color commentary. She glanced quickly over her shoulder and saw that Sawyer was watching the same scene that was keeping her so engrossed. There was an expression in his eyes that wanted to be hurt, had he not cauterized it so quickly. "But amen, sister."

Ana Lucia spared one more glance for the happy lovers before she caught herself saying suddenly, "Come here," and putting her hand on the back of Sawyer's neck when he turned towards her. She pulled his head down and kissed him once, testing the waters, and then again when she was favorably received. Sawyer tasted like mangos and a sharp male undertone that, she remembered, was purely him.

Sawyer let Ana Lucia guide the kiss, only putting his hand beneath her chin to tilt her face up and into a more comfortable angle. "I'm not going to argue with pretty women throwing themselves at me," he said when she finally pulled away, "but you want to tell me what that was about?"

Ana Lucia kept her hand on the back of Sawyer's neck. "We're both sober this time," she said rather than answering directly. "Let's go make do."

IV.

Sawyer was exhausted. Sawyer was hurting from a half-dozen small wounds, Sawyer was covered in a lot of blood that was his own and a lot more that was not, Sawyer was pretty sure that if he gave in to the sneaking urge to start screaming now then he would never stop again.

But he was alive, oh, God, he was alive, and even though he was surrounded on all sides by the carnage of a battlefield and didn't have the first clue where Freckles or Jack might be, that was the sweetest news that he had received in a long time. Sawyer started to drag his hand through his hair, grimaced when it got caught in the gore, and dropped it back to his side. So this was a new feeling, maybe, but he thought that it was one he could get used to.

"Sawyer!" Ana Lucia came limping out of the labyrinthine structure that made up the Others' base-had made up the Others' base now, Sawyer guessed. Her face was drained free of blood, probably because most of it seemed to be staining her leg from the thigh down.

"Michael found Walt," she said. "That kid, he was supposed to be ten, right?"

Sawyer hesitated for a moment when he heard the 'supposed to'. "Yeah," he said slowly. "Why?"

Ana Lucia shook her head. Her eyes were dark and grave, more intense than he could remember seeing her in a very long time. "Wait until you see it." She turned to disappear back in the direction that she had come. Sawyer grabbed for her arm and spun her back around before she could go more than a few feet. "Sawyer, what-"

Sawyer chose not to answer verbally. He gathered her to him instead and kissed her for all that she was worth and then some, bending her over backwards in a fashion that Clark Gable himself would have been proud of. Ana Lucia went stiff in that way she had, telling him without saying a word that he was being an idiot, and Sawyer did not care. He needed to find Kate and Jack and he needed to come up with some way of doing this that didn't let either of them know how worried he had been, but he could do that in a few moments. Ana Lucia made a small sound of acquiescence into Sawyer's mouth, tasting of blood and sweat and relief, and they were alive, alive, alive.

V.

Sawyer watched as the island grew small behind the rescue boat, until it became a dot on the horizon that he could almost convince himself he had imagined. He put his hand over his eyes to shield them from the power of the setting sun.

"Mini malls, bitch," he repeated his promise. "See if I don't."

"You talking to yourself now, cowboy? 'Cause this is a hell of a time to go crazy."

And he was usually the one who got to sneak up on her, too. Sawyer turned and paused only long enough to see Ana Lucia grin at him before he grabbed her up and swirled her around, planting his mouth down hard on hers. She went rigid in mock indignation, as if he didn't know all of her tricks by now, so he kept kissing her until she went pliant again, making a soft, pleased noise into his mouth.

"Crazy as a loon," Sawyer whispered, pulling back for a moment until he realized that he was just standing there with his arms full of laughing, happy, squirming woman and not doing anything about it. That seemed like a hell of a thing to put to waste, so Sawyer leaned down and kissed her again.

End