Sawyer was a lazy bastard, but not half as much a slacker as everyone thought. But that sign? Bernard's S.O.S. sign? It might have made sense back on planet Earth. Here, wherever this was, a sign wasn't gonna do it. They probably didn't even speak English in this freaky part of the galaxy. They weren't getting off this rock until it exploded and threw them all back where they came from. An admirable effort, really, but no way was it worth his time and muscle to build. Let the rest of the survivors occupy themselves with such busywork.
Sawyer was content to treat the Island as some sort of deranged paradise--what was there to do here, really, except lounge? He had only three genuine goals for his time on this place: He wanted to kill them--one of them, at minimum, or all of them, if he was granted the opportunity; he wanted to f--k Kate until she screamed and make love to her until she purred; and he wanted to leave something behind. Damned if he was going to waste any good portion of his life on Pitcairn here and not have it matter.
That was why the recent demolishment of his tent was a good thing in the end. Knock it down and built it back bigger. What did they call those shiny new mansions back in Florida? Starter castles? He'd have one of those by the time he was done here. Before long, when he was more sure they weren't all being punk'd, he'd build something real. Something solid. None of this Hooverville s--t for the long-term. And when they were rescued, or when he was killed, whichever came first, there'd be something left of him here--a chimney, a foundation. More than the memories and mere rags left behind by Shannon and Boone. Damned if he'd be remembered by the contents of his luggage.
But, for now, more floor space. He'd pulled the windows higher up, too, so passers-by could not so easily spot an unexpected sleeping form. Kate had nearly dozed off on his doorstep more than once. Someday she'd give up and crawl inside, instead of dragging herself back to her pathetic little shower-curtain shelter. When that day came, he wanted it so she felt safe...unwatched. She'd told him more than once that she hated to be monitored. Hated the feeling of being judged and picked apart. She didn't have much of a reputation--being a wanted fugitive and all--but hell if he'd drag her down any further. If she ever spent the night at his place, he wanted to protect that choice, not leave it open for public discussion at the morning koffee klatsch.
The palm fronds were to muffle the screaming--and the purring.
…
As the late-afternoon sun danced with the clouds rolling above the island, Sawyer approached Jin. The fisherman sat under a palm tree on the beach, working his way through a large pile of Pacific perch, newly plucked from the sea to feed the ever-hungry survivors of Oceanic Flight 815.
"Hey, Chewie," said Sawyer.
Jin replied him a suspicious look, one that read approximately, "What the heck do you want, bonehead?"
Secure in the knowledge of Sawyer's semi-permanent self-absorption, Jin assumed he would not be called upon to do much during this encounter and continued to gut the giant perch he held in his hands.
"Your mother was a dirty slut, and your father smelt of elderberries," said Sawyer, testing.
Jin replied with a look that read, approximately, "English is still not Korean, bonehead."
Sawyer--satisfied that Jin hadn't secretly become fluent in English, Sun-style--sat down next his fellow raftmate.
"Nice day," said Sawyer.
Jin did not speak.
"The doc doesn't even like her, you know. He doesn't like any of us! I mean, he's decent to the blonde and the dog, but hell, I'm decent to the blonde and the dog, so it's not like that's some great achievement. He just plain doesn't like her as a person. The goddamn doctor thinks she's about as sturdy as a gum wrapper and half as smart. If I were her, and he talked to me the way he talks to her, I'd tell him he was cruisin' for a bruisin' and then skip right to the bruisin'," said Sawyer.
Jin replied to Sawyer's rant with a look which could be interpreted to mean, "Catharsis-much?" (If the interpreter happened to own a particularly good Korean-English dictionary.)
"Exactly!" as Sawyer dug the heel of his boot deep in the sand.
And then, after a long pause, "I kinda miss her."
Jin responded to Sawyer's frown by ripping the intestines out of a fish and throwing them down the beach for the seagulls to enjoy.
Jin asked Sawyer if he wanted to help disembowel the fish and gestured with the knife toward his pile of fresh, ungutted catch.
Sawyer said, "Thanks Chewie. Don't mind if I do," and picked up one of the newly prepared fish filets.
And with that, Sawyer stood up and carried the fish away to his campfire. Jin merely shook his head in response, resigned to his own language barrier and to the intractable problem that was Sawyer.
…
Jack's opacity frustrated her. Maybe it was living this island--seculsion from the world had made her forget how people looked, what their expressions meant. Maybe it was that so much of what they experienced was so big. Mortal terror in the face of ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties; overwhelming joy at the birth of "their" baby, Claire's baby; maybe those feelings were so intense that anything subtle or delicate was simply crushed under the weight of it all.
But Sawyer put the lie to that theory...She understood every word he didn't say.
So why was Jack such a blank? She could read Sawyer. She understood Sun. Even when she was with reserved, undemonstrative John, she felt his warmth and humanity shining through. But Jack? Not so with Jack. She'd posited that they were damaged goods, the both of them, and he'd replied with...nothing?
What was that expression? What had that face meant?
"Kate, look alive."
"What?"
Jack had stopped short in the woods.
"You didn't hit your head when the net dropped, did you?"
"Me? What? No. No, you broke my fall. Thanks," she said, smiling.
"Well, you're acting like you suffered a brain injury. Try to concentrate on what we're doing here, okay," said Jack.
"I was just thinking," said Kate, wondering again what it was, exactly, that they were doing out here.
Jack's intensity was admirable, but she couldn't help but think, "You don't call them, they'll call you." The Others would never emerge from their holes and warrens on Jack's command, if only to prove that they were the ones in control.
"You've got to hydrate," said Jack, handing her the water bottle.
"Right," said Kate, taking a swig.
"Let's go."
"Jack--"
"Come on. We've still got a long way before we hit the line," said Jack
Kate sighed. Fine. Perhaps he'd be more receptive to her theories about communicating with the Others once he got to the line and was roundly ignored by the jungle. She didn't have the energy to throw a tantrum, certainly not one of the magnitude necessary to throw Jack off his chosen path. So she would wait, patiently, until Jack was ready to hear her. Until then, she could only march along behind him and smile secretly to herself, imagining the wonderful fit that Sawyer would be throwing right about now, had he been the one invited along on this little outing. They felt so similarly, so often. He could be her voice at the times when she felt tapped and drained of momentum and power. If only he were here now.
But he wasn't. She'd left him behind to go away with Jack, and that meant she'd have a very testy Tennesseean on her hands when she got home. He would never understand howshe felt about Jack. He would never understand that she felt that Jack, oddly, needed her help.
Jack was so isolated by his goodness, by his astonishing capacity for rendering salvation. He'd always stood alone, fearless, ready to act, while the rest of them could only, barely, react, could only find the strength to do what was right or necessary after he barked a name, once, twice, three times. "Hurley, don't you dare faint on me!" "Kate!"
She'd known since that first day, since that ridiculous day when they'd fallen out of the sky, that she was put on this Island to be Jack's partner. To have his back. To be the person who watched over Jack Shephard as he, in turn, watched over his flock.
Sawyer, with all his impatient jealousy, would never quite understand. She was afraid to try and explain, for fear the words would get tangled and his idea of it would be permanently, irrevocably wrong.
…
He was saving the mussels for dinner. Jin's fish was meant to tide him over, because he couldn't help but think she'd be back at sundown and if he had a pail full of mussels waiting to be cooked, maybe she'd stay with him. If he played dumb, like he had no idea to cook mussels, maybe she'd believe that was why he hadn't eaten them yet.
When he really needed her, or if she really need him, or when they could create a reasonable simulacrum of the same, they were allowed to put aside their endless power struggle and be kind to each other.
Clucking--that's what he called it in his head when fussed over him. He didn't need a mother, hen or otherwise, but if he didn't know better, he might think she enjoyed putting his affairs in order. He'd noticed how much she wanted to do the first night he was back in the camp, after they'd made the long trek from the hatch to the beach. He was exhausted, sure, but by no means incapable of taking care of himself. None of it seemed to matter to Freckles. The proud, cold girl he'd left behind was gone, replaced with some sort of nurse-concubine ready to humor his every whim--well, most of them, anyway--and reluctant to leave his side, no matter how much he provoked her.
That whole first night she'd made like he got shot on purpose, and treated him as he weren't responsible enough to have charge of anything but sitting still. She shooed away the looky-loos, made off with the clothes he'd worn on Ana-Lucia's disastrous remake of the Bataan Death March (allegedly to wash them), kept the fire going, and made him drink so much water that he felt like he'd swallowed a lead balloon. And then she put him to bed and set herself in his chair, curled up but watchful, like a housebound cocker spaniel who fancied herself a Rottweiler.
It was a good time for them. He pretended to need her, she pretended to be a civic-minded young lady volunteering her time with the needy and disabled.
These days, the closest they could come to replicating that period of gentility and kindness was if one or the other could manufacture a new task or errand of such plausible challenge that help might be reasonably needed from the other. So...mussels.
She would help him, because the truth was he did need her. More than any of the rest of the fools on this island. And that truth shone through the layer of lies and feints it was buried under.
That was the funny thing. For all the overproduced melodrama that stood as their relationship, they were both so transparently devoted to each other. Why the hell couldn't they just admit it?
…
It was cool in the jungle. Cold even. The ocean breezes cooled down their beach every night, but somehow the campfires and the company and their jury-rigged shelters kept everyone warm enough. Out in the jungle, in a rainforest rainstorm, there was nowhere to hide that wasn't swamped in water. There was nowhere to turn. It was all wet splinters and sloppy mud and slimy creatures emerging into the drench.
Soaked to the skin, Kate wondered at times like this if Sawyer didn't have the right idea not wearing underwear. And with the staying home.
Jack had been screaming at the top of his lungs for almost an hour now. The bellow with which he'd begun had been worn down to a flat, hoarse bark. He'd cut back to a shorthand, a brief outline of their situation, and stalked back and forth, from the treeline to the black rock that marked the line. Prowling and raging into the air, Jack had become a virtual short course in fanaticism. He was raving in a manner that would make Rasputin proud, and that reminded Kate, oddly, of her mother's lectures on smoking. Funny how Ma had always fought tooth-and-nail against her daughter's briefly held high school habit of smoking but said nothing against her husband's life-long habit of drinking to excess. That was the problem with fanaticism--it lacked perspective.
She was bone tired. Her hands and feet were cold and worse, stiff. Gathering firewood was a nearly unbearable chore. Something about this expedition had worn her out. Her neck and lower back were in a mortal struggle against each other to determine which muscles could draw together tightest and make her the most tense. Rolling her neck in futile attempt to unwind the clench, Kate had a vision of herself in a laudromat the first month she'd been on the lam. Montana. Thunder-black clouds outside. Cold. Alone. Depressed. The kind of depression that felt so bad it didn't even hurt anymore, just stole every good thing out of the air, out of life, and left the sufferer completely bereft of hope or the will to fight. Her body was nearly rigid, but her morale was limp and weak and all-too-close to shredded, like wet tissue. She could not find the strength to express her only wish of the moment: She wanted to go home. She wanted to go home, but Jack's mission was so much more intensely felt than her own. So, she would stay.
But as she always did when trapped somewhere she did not wish to be, she sequestered away her true wishes. She locked them in a room, as she was locked away, and visited when she could.
She wanted to walk into camp and see the fires. She wanted to hear the perpetual party murmur of her friends--gossiping and detouring through the stories of their lives and arguing over the best way to combine the ingredients in their strange larder. She wanted, she admitted in secret, to find Sawyer at his place. She imagined he'd be sitting--waiting--outside, probably risking his eyes even further by reading after dark. If she walked up to him with just the right look on her face he wouldn't fight her when she went into his tent. If she walked up to him with just the right look on her face, he would just drop his book and follow her inside. She loved where he lived. She loved the greed that allowed him--and her, by association and extension--to enjoy so many of the little luxuries that stood out against the background of their castaway poverty: blankets and pillows, first among them. She would earn her keep by stripping in front of him--these miserable clothes could not be shed fast enough. And then she would put on one of his shirts, something he'd worn--something that smelled of his sweat and cologne--and then she'd crawl into his bed and sleep forever. And he would smirk at her until he exhausted the smirk and was forced to admit, by expression, not confession, that he liked her. And even though she was a half-naked woman in his bed, he would leave her be until she was ready for him. Maybe in the morning? Maybe when she woke up beside his warm, hard length. Maybe if she looked at him just the right way, he wouldn't tease her too much, wouldn't make her feel like they were engaged in an perpetual battle and she was always the loser. Maybe he'd just touch her and pull her close--so warm--and nuzzle her neck and press himself against her and nibble her ear and kiss her, like he had so many weeks ago.
"Kate!"
"What?"
"You're still doing that brain damage thing. Let's start this fire. It's getting chilly."
Getting, Jack?
Kate couldn't help but feel a little resentful, to think it was a little unfair for Jack to keep her away from home just so he could commandeer her attention and her Campfire Girl skills on this fool's errand.
Perhaps if she was quiet he'd leave her to return home in dreams. That, perhaps, would keep her warm when the fire--and Jack--left her all too cold.