Five Minutes
(A/N: Ems023, this one's for you. I hope you like it.)
A few seconds after Ben had accepted Hurley's offer to help him run the Island, the shriek of airplane engines pierced the sky. Hurley looked up as the pale underbelly of Ajira 316 streaked overhead. That plane had brought him back to the Island, and Jack to his doom.
Almost.
Almost? Hurley's internal scream matched the roar of the plane. Something thrummed through him like a musical note, a low bass thump which echoed through the rocks beneath his feet.
Near the stream bed, Ben draped a wet rag over Desmond's forehead. When Desmond struggled into a sitting position, he almost knocked Ben over. "What the bloody hell was that?"
"Your ride," Ben answered in a dry voice.
Hurley shot to his own feet, scattering pebbles in every direction. The thrumming grew louder, less like the vibration of a plane, and more like a beating heart. But a fading one, from the sound of it.
Jack's gone, he had told himself just a few moments before, and then he believed it. Now he wasn't so sure. He pulled Ben to his feet with one great hand, and lifted Desmond with the other.
"Hugo," Ben started to say. "Desmond's been unconscious, he needs more time—"
"No time, dudes," Hurley said, practically dragging them away from the golden water which poured into the Island's heart. "If you lose me, follow my trail."
"Lose him?" Desmond said to Ben, half-sarcastic.
Hurley didn't care. With Ben and Desmond trailing behind, he sprinted into the jungle as the two men vanished in his wake.
Hurley had no idea how he knew that Jack didn't stay at the bottom of that glowing well, but had instead washed up broken and bleeding outside a rocky spring. It didn't matter, because Jack was running out of time.
Never had Hurley's feet flown through the jungle as quickly as they did. No one told him that becoming protector of the Island meant that he could run swift as a deer crossing a mountain-way, with no catch of the breath, no exhaustion, no endless regret for being so soft and out of shape.
As the jungle flew by in whirls of green, he smelled rather than saw the streaks of blood which led from the spring to the bamboo forest. The heartbeats which he followed were growing slower now, more faint. By the time he crashed through to the clearing in the midst of the bamboo grove, the beats had fallen silent.
Jack lay in a blue and bloodied heap with Vincent at his side. The dog broke into high-pitched yipes, and Hurley flung himself down next to the dying man.
Five minutes, Hurley told himself. He'd once heard on a TV show that if your heart stopped, five minutes was all you got till your brain started turning to mush.
Jack's paper-white face was studded with black stubble, his eyes unmoving under closed lids. Panic ripped through Hurley. What the hell was he supposed to do now? It was like never having seen a car before in your life, then suddenly being forced to drive. Useless, he told himself in the same old sad litany. Helpless, worthless, couldn't do anything without messing it all up, what had Jack been thinking? He couldn't keep a goldfish alive, much less the Island.
Much less Jack.
Vincent gave a short, low woof. He stared at Hurley with brown eyes full of perfect doggy trust. Hurley was the human, after all. He'd figure it out, right?
Right.
The seconds ticked away as Hurley studied the long black line of blood which ran from Jack's right side down to his work boot. Steeling himself, he lifted the crusted blue t-shirt, and almost fell over at the sight of Jack's wound. Dumb as Hurley felt, he remembered that when somebody stopped bleeding, that's when they were really in trouble. Well, that was obvious.
Up above, the plane split the sky again. Circling, probably, until Frank knew it was safe to take off across the open ocean. To Hurley's new senses, the people on board glowed like tiny candles in a night-time window: Frank and Miles in the cockpit; Richard and Sawyer alone and terrified in their solitary seats; Kate and Claire clinging to one another with shaking hands and tear-streaked faces.
Wait, there was another glow too, tinier and fainter than the others, tugging away at Hurley's attention. Someone else on board, clearly. He shrugged it off because the seconds were adding up to minutes, and each minute brought Jack closer to death.
Hurley thought about doing CPR like he'd seen in movies, but was afraid he'd mess it up. Tears of frustration stung his eyes, and he couldn't wipe them because his hands were coated with dried blood. When Vincent nudged Jack hard with his nose and gave another determined, "Woof!" Hurley got the point.
He picked Jack up in his arms while Vincent licked the side of Jack's face. Jack felt lighter than he should have, at over six feet tall and made of muscle. For an instant Hurley's gut clenched with fear, because it wasn't mass that Jack was losing, but his life force itself.
There had to be something he could do, if he could only piece together what it was. Too bad wizarding wands didn't grow on Island trees, or that there was no tropical Hogwarts to teach you spells like Instantaneum revivum. Once again, he sank under a wave of helplessness.He rested his hand on Jack's forehead, cool despite the jungle heat.
All at once it came to him.
When he was in seventh grade, he'd lost his Earth Science notebook. It was a big deal, because he'd already been marked down for half a dozen assignments, and missing this one would be the last straw. In tears he'd gone to Grandpa Tito, because Mom was exhausted from her new job, and he knew that first she'd yell, then cry when she didn't think he could hear her.
Pray to St. Anthony, Grandpa Tito had said. But remember, if he answers your prayer, offer him a sacrifice. That's how you say 'thank you.'
Pray Hurley did, and the notebook turned up in the garage next to the oil cans. He swore he'd stay off sweets for a week, even though that only lasted four days. St. Anthony must have been down with it, though, because Hurley didn't flunk Earth Science.
"Please let Jack live," Hurley said to the rustling jungle, the sky, to anyone who would listen. "I won't make him take it back, even though I wanted him to. I'll keep it, I swear, so he can go home. If you just let him live I'll do this job, no matter what."
Nothing happened. Maybe, though, the sun slanted through the trees at a slightly different angle, or something changed in the air, because Jack's face looked edged with pink, not deathly white as before. Hoping against hope, Hurley brought his ear down close to Jack's mouth, and a tiny flutter of breath ruffled his hair. Vincent gave a snuffle and resumed cleaning Jack's face where he had left off.
Hurley had never seen anyone get born, but Kate had told him how it went with Aaron, how he had come out blue and quiet, then blossomed into noisy, rosy life right before her eyes. It was like that with Jack. He filled his lungs with a long indrawn sigh, then open his eyes as the air rushed out of him.
Desmond and Ben crept into the bamboo clearing. Hurley kept one hand firmly on Jack, and with the other waved them to be quiet.
Jack opened his eyes, his body still snug in Hurley's embrace. Instead of struggling to get out, he ran his hand down to his side, feeling for his wound.
"Don't, Jack," Hurley said. "Just leave it alone."
He raised scared eyes to Hurley's face. "It's going to need surgery, at the very least."
"No, it won't," Hurley said softly, more sure of this than anything in his life, as Ben and Desmond slid close to the two of them.
Jack breathed in and out hard, as if stunned to feel air move through him again. "I had this dream, it was crazy..." He shook his head as if to flick the vision away.
"Let me guess," said Ben. "'It was a place. And you, and you, and you were there.'"
Hurley chuckled as he lowered Jack to the ground. "Ben, that was in The Wizard of Oz. This is real life."
Chuckling back, Jack said, "Are you sure?"
"I had one of those too, brotha," Desmond put in. "Did you see the one you loved?"
Everyone waited a few heartbeats for Jack to answer. When he did, his voice was low and sad. "No. I woke up before then." He hesitated. "Did you, Desmond?"
"Aye. Thought I'd be there for sure. Instead, here I sit."
"We're gonna get you home, Desmond," Hurley said. "According to Ben, we can."
"How?" Jack said. "I saw the plane. It's gone."
"Yeah, I know. But Claire was on it, and Kate, just like you wanted. Sawyer too."
Relief welled up in Jack's eyes. "Of course you knew that. I saw it, too, but I wasn't sure."
Hurley drew in a long breath. Clear as if he could see the plane with his own eyes, he sensed it out over the ocean, humming along despite all the broken parts. "Dude," he whispered to Jack. "They're there. They're okay."
He swept his new senses around the airplane cabin like someone searching for the source of a faint sound, and pinpointed the source, right where Kate sat.
Within where Kate sat.
"Oh, sweet Mary," Hurley whispered, thinking of that other little light, the one he hadn't accounted for earlier.
"What's wrong?" Jack and Ben said at the same time.
Jack added in all seriousness, "You asked me to take it back once I fixed what was broken with the Island. I'm ready to."
"Nope," Hurley said with a grin. "I got this, Jack. Ben and me are gonna get you home, you and Desmond both. Pronto."
Two months later, Hurley woke early on a green-gold morning in his Barracks house, still lost in the echoes of a dream. A long one, one of those you watch like a movie. As he lay under the covers, morning birdsong mixed with the chatter of the new people who had been straggling into the Barracks by ones and twos, day by day.
It hadn't been a dream at all.
He had seen Jack walk up a long stone pathway to the front door of a big white house. The cabby carried his small suitcase to the door for him, because he was still weak from his wound and couldn't manage it. He gave the cabby two twenties, then rang the doorbell.
Kate answered, her eyes warm and a glowing smile on her face. Little tow-headed Aaron pushed past her, running so fast that he almost cartwheeled over, shouting, "Jack! Jack!"
Aaron raised his arms to Jack, begging to be picked up. Kate lifted him instead, and Jack followed her into the sun-drenched living room of the house he'd grown up in. An older woman put her hands to her face, overcome with emotion but fighting hard not to break down. That had to be Jack's mom; Hurley remembered her from the funeral. Tears ran down her face this time, too, but the happy kind.
Then his pounding heart had almost split his chest in two, because next to Margo Shephard stood Claire, warm and golden, not bedraggled and sad as he'd last seen her.
They surrounded Jack, wrapping him in their arms and hearts. Kate took his hand and pressed it to her slightly-curved stomach, then whispered, "Welcome home."
(the end)