i'm on a roll, i'm on a roll
this time, i feel my luck could change
kill me sarah, kill me again with love
it's gonna be a glorious day
The irony of the situation didn't escape him. That he was the one to leave in the end, after he'd so fervently dreaded her departure for so long. He'd spent months waiting for it on tenterhooks, waiting for the inevitable crash and burn of their relationship, mentally steeling himself for the worst whenever her laughter echoed sourly in the cavernous hallways of their new home or her eyes wouldn't meet his over her half-full glass of wine. He'd prepare for the dull metallic taste of defeat and thank a God he didn't believe in when she looked back at him. Crisis averted. Disaster postponed. However you wanted to put it.
At night, the thrum of the air conditioner and her steady breathing his only consolation, he'd envision the million ways it could play out--the inexhaustible possible permutations of this was a mistake, you failed, I don't want you. All the scenarios ended the same way, though. A slammed door. An empty room. A bottle of something strong melting down his throat.
Week after week passed and the paranoia, like the California heat, only grew worse. He left the windows open and threw off the blankets (she curled into him in her sleep, seeking refuge from the chill), and yet found his skin flushed with fever. He could feel where this was headed, feel it in the way they were both trying so hard, trying too hard. And with one too many drinks in his system and one too many lies hanging in the still air between them, he couldn't find any way to stop it. A ring. A child. A home. A family. All the things that they had together. All irrelevant, all powerless to stop the fierce unthinking onslaught of their past. (Or maybe he just wasn't trying hard enough, never hard enough.)
So he ran away, and she stuck with her commitment, and wasn't destiny a fickle bitch?
That was the most ironic part. But not the worst. No--the worst part came after, in little flashes of painful sudden clarity. He'd get up for work in the pale half-light of morning, in the empty apartment that was sterile and cold, and suddenly it would be right there--yes, of course I will, yes!, one hand tracing the nape of her neck and the other twisting in her hair--and he'd have to call in sick, the hand that wasn't holding the phone furiously fumbling for a drink, a pill, anything.
After the eighth consecutive day of this, he didn't bother calling in at all.
pull me out of the aircrash
pull me out of the lake
i'm your superhero
we are standing on the edge
The decline was in the little things, as decline always is. He couldn't even buy a razor, for one. He couldn't buy a damn razor to get rid of the quickly thickening scruff on his face, because it would only remind him of her (he wasn't even sure which her he meant at this point).
Hurley was right--he did look weird with a beard, when he bothered looking at himself at all. But so much the better, he'd think, because it wasn't like anyone was going to see him like this.
How very wrong he was.
John came to him in the back of an ambulance, his head bruised and bloody like something from his past, and that was where it all began to go downhill. (He was Locke on the island, but "John" seems kinder when he's talking to an old man with a cast on his leg and confusion in his eyes.) He had to go back, John told him. He was never supposed to leave. He was angry and just slightly drunk and he couldn't listen to this shit, not again, he didn't need this. He got up and was almost out the door, but then John mentioned a man named Christian.
And so he bought a ticket to Sydney.
the head of state has called for me by name
but i don't have time for him
it's gonna be a glorious day
i feel my luck could change
Sometimes, when he could vaguely sense that he was too far gone, too high to be cognizant (that was an oxymoron right there, but he was a doctor and he knew how to diagnose), she visited him. Which she varied. Sarah--pale, but happy, and laughing wordlessly as though she enjoys the sublime irony (he can't even fix himself). Juliet, virtuously angry, because doctors make the worst patients, tearing the bottle from his heavy hands and smashing it against the wall (in the morning, he cuts himself on the broken glass, and can't remember how it got there). Kate, Kate is there always, an everlasting presence pulsing with the vein in his forehead, stinging with every swallow, sharply pulling him back to that place where there are no excuses.
But they weren't his only visitors (hallucinations, he'd've said when he still cared about such petty distinctions). Claire, reproachful and violent; Sawyer, smirking up at him from the bottom of the glass, infuriatingly right; Charlie, chummy in that ingratiating way people have when they want something, though what exactly he wanted Jack could never quite figure out (he should've been satisfied; he'd stayed away from Aaron, hadn't he?); Jin, mouthing wordlessly for help, someone help. He begs them all for forgiveness, tells them all the ways he'd do it differently if he had the chance, but the words are brittle and they break before they've half-left his mouth.
All the people whose lives he'd either taken or ruined. Too many to name, all of them ghostly and bleeding, staring at him as though they could murder him with their eyes (probably could, actually, he was weak enough for that). His father, too, but his father was everywhere, and Jack didn't jump or stare at his recurring appearances anymore. His presence was almost comforting, actually. The one person who'd stuck with him through all this. The one person who could possibly understand.
The irony of that didn't escape him, either.
pull me out of the aircrash,
pull me out of the lake,
'cause I'm your superhero
we are standing on the edge
He still reads the paper, when he can get his hands to hold onto it without trembling. Old habits die hard, and all that. It's vaguely satisfying seeing little columns about himself, about the tragedy that is Dr. Jack Shephard , hero turned junkie, stuck in the B section behind the more important things, like Pakistan and oil rigs and the upcoming election.
He always reads the obituaries. Another habit from his past life. He always checked them religiously in the weeks after one of his surgeries went wrong, wanting to see the name of a former patient flash before his eyes and land in his gut, the sour taste of guilt and lessons learned filling his throat like a sickeningly heady drug. He'd always been something of a masochist.
Jeremy Bentham. He's halfway swallowed a pill when he reads the name, and he almost chokes it back up again at the sight of the stark black newsprint. Bentham --how ironic, he thinks through a haze of disbelief (Jack took an entry level class in philosophy in college; it was the only subject he ever flunked), and he double checks it, the details of the death, the apartment, the age, the body, everything. But the double checking isn't necessary, because he knows that it's John, beyond a doubt, he always knew it really, John, dead and gone.
So Jack finds a bridge, closes his eyes (he feels his heart stutter and slow in his chest, and it's almost like being alive) and asks for forgiveness for one last time.
we are standing on the edge