Chapter One
The ice clanked against the glass in Jack's hand, the slight tremble of his grip giving it an extra jump.
He ran his other hand through his slightly thickened hair and sighed heavily as he brought the cold glass to his lips, moving it past the coarseness of hair around his lips and tilted his head back far as he drank heartily, the smooth clear Vodka pouring straight down his throat.
When the glass was empty, Jack dropped it carelessly onto the progressively messy counter before him, and turned to sit in the barren emptiness of his darkened living room.
The worn armchair was placed directly in front of the television and night after night, there he would sit, falling asleep as he let his mind fade away into the nothingness of the screen; anything to keep him from remembering, anything to keep him from reliving the truth.
He hadn't worked in weeks and the conditions of his apartment were becoming increasingly disturbing, though he truly hadn't noticed. His days consisted now of scrambling for the nearest drink in a valiant effort to numb the pain.
And as hard as he tried, no matter how much he drank, the faces and voices of the past lived within him; their shadows constantly crying out for help.
Some days he could actually convince himself that the lies they told had actually been truth; that no one had survived the crash and life on the island had never been at all. He would tell himself that all the things that happened, all the people he had come to know, everything, was a hallucination, a dream, memories from some other life untold.
In his entire life, Jack had never felt so alone.
His only friend the bottle, his only thoughts of his mistakes…
He felt he was waiting, just waiting, for the pain to end.
And as he sat there, yet another empty night, his legs sprawled messily as he stared blankly into the TV, a knock sounded at his front door.
Jack, at first believing he had imagined the noise, continued staring, focused on forgetting.
The knock sounded again and Jack felt jolted from his stasis as he turned disbelievingly towards the door.
No one had come to see Jack in a long time and his imagination ran wild as he slowly and unsteadily rose from his seat.
Practically staggering across the room, the door seemed ominous in appearance and the dulling light bulb in the hallway only accentuated it.
Probably a salesman or something….
He swung the door open, almost falling as he did, and found himself staring into the face of someone he thought he would never see again.
There stood John Locke, the coy smile he remembered so well from his mind, stretched across his aging face.
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