Sawyer sat smoking on the edge of the sea, feeling the warm salty waves froth up and crash onto his feet. He was getting soaked. He didn't care. The sea's rhythm was entirely tranquil and constant, like the breathing in and out of a sleeping child.

Blowing the last of the smoke off of his lips in twisting ribbons, he threw the butt as far as he could into the water. In his head he had been keeping count: he only had two left.

If they stayed on this island any longer (which was highly likely), Sawyer knew he was going to have to make some decisions. Quitting smoking for one—though that wasn't really a decision and more something he would be forced to do from a lack of provisions.

And eventually, he'd have to decide whether or not to keep fighting. He couldn't remember any facet of his life that he hadn't treated like an enemy and fought against—it was how he had lived for as long as he could remember: he lived as though he was at war with the world. Not only that, but he'd been pretty successful; the only time he ever flourished was in the face of adversity.

The waves moved in again and enveloped him in their warmth, this time soaking his up to his knee. The tide was coming in.

As the waves receded, leaving him wet and shivering, a memory escaped from that drawer he kept locked inside his mind. In an instant, an entire day flashed before his eyes—it was after his parents had died. The government had shipped him off to live with his chain-smoking aunt with platinum blonde hair and breast implants. In a small Jersey town, his story spread like a wildfire and pretty soon he had a million kids following him around school asking questions; some of them sympathetic, some of them filled with morbid curiosity, and most of them tenacious and judgmental. As a child Sawyer had simply kept his mouth shut, never speaking to anyone, and never answering anyone's questions.

In this place however, silence only encouraged those around him to further antagonism—he was a match waiting to be lit, and they were simply pouring on more and more gasoline. And then came the day when he finally caught fire, beating a kid to a bloody pulp at twelve years old after the kid had called his mother a whore.

His fists began falling like rain on the boy's face while a strange music hummed a deafening windy melody in his ears; the crimson exploding like fireworks in front of his eyes inhibiting his thoughts. And when he was through, he stood up and walked away, left with a strange intoxicating blend of power and the sense that maybe in living like this, he could be finally free from the millions of expectations and opinions that the world rained down upon him. That day he'd gone home, stolen his aunt's cigarette stash that she had hidden under the couch cushions, and had driven away in the old Chevy Bel-Air that she'd kept locked in the garage. She wouldn't miss it anyways. She always took the bus.

And there he had begun his fight. He hated the world—why not give the world a reason to hate him?

Laying back on the sand now, he was realizing that the fight had begun to take a toll on his mind.

Sawyer had his arms spanned out as he lay prostrate across the velvet sand, with the warm breath of the waves routinely blowing against him in submersion. His eyes remained open, even as the salt of the sea bit into them with every wave in stinging sweetness. He never closed his eyes if he could help it.

Slowly, Sawyer began to hear muffled hush steps in the sand, and he looked up to see Sayid standing next to him.

"Get up."

Sawyer sat up and brushed dripping strands of salt sandy hair out of his face, and looked up at him with contempt, refusing to move.

"What are you here to accuse me of this time? Stealing Christmas?" Sawyer asked with a placidly calm grin on his face. Sayid continued to look at him stolidly.

"Get up."

"What'll it be today? A few broken ribs, some cigarette burns? Limited supplies round here, you'll have to get creative with the torture methods."

Sayid continued to look at him, refusing to move until Sawyer complied. Taking his time, Sawyer slowly stood, taking off his shirt and wringing it out. The smirk never left his face.

"Well?" Sawyer said eventually, after putting his shirt back on and smoothing himself out. Sayid looked at him peacefully a moment more before speaking.

"Hit me." he said, keeping his eyes locked intently on Sawyer's. "Just once. As hard as you like."

All Sawyer could do was continue to smile while he stared placidly, trying to figure out Sayid's angle. Everybody has an angle, he thought. Sayid's black eyes, full of meaningful nothingness, stared back at him. His face was made of stone. Just watching and waiting for Sawyer to respond. Sawyer turned away slightly, looking at the ground laughing under his breath.

With hardly a change he spiraled back in a kamikaze motion, punching Sayid full in the face with the momentum of his entire body. It was enough to send Sayid flying into the sand.

Sawyer's face had changed in an instant from cocky and nonchalant to jaw-clenching, seething anger; he suddenly found himself transported back to that day behind the seven eleven when he'd blown up at that kid and watched the blood pour from his nose as he punched him over and over and over until his knuckles were numb and stained with his own blood, as well as the blood of his adversary. It took Sawyer a moment to realize his hands were shaking.

This time was different, he told himself. I only punched him once.

Sayid was slowly picking himself up, rubbing his jaw a little with his calloused cinnamon hands and spitting out blood into the sand. He smiled knowingly.

"Here." he said, pulling something out of his back pocket and dropping it with a spray of sand at Sawyer's feet. "In case you wanted a more conventional Christmas present. I'm pretty sure you haven't hoarded any of these yet."

Sawyer picked up the object. It was a deck of cards, haphazardly kept together with a newspaper band. Decorated on the fronts of each card was an old forties painting of Bourbon Street.

Sayid held out his hand to shake, and Sawyer looked at him for a moment with an expression of anger mixed with confusion still prevalent on his face. Then with a slow steady rise of his hand, like a conductor about to catalyze a symphony, Sawyer took his hand and returned the gesture.

With a curt nod and that same wise smile on his face, Sayid turned without a word and walked the other way, leaving Sawyer to shuffle his cards and ponder.

An hour later Sayid was sitting in the caves swishing water in his mouth to keep from getting sores where Sawyer had punched him. He looked up at hearing a noise on the edge of the caves and there was Jack, walking towards him with that confident, downtrodden gait, like a general beaten down by too many lost battles. He sat down next to Sayid, eyeing the handkerchief next to him, which was now dotted here and there with spots of blood.

"Something happen?" Jack asked, halfway curious.

"Nothing you need to worry about. Christmas present."

"Who the hell gave you a punch in the mouth for a Christmas present?"

"It wasn't my Christmas present. It was Sawyer's."

Jack looked at him a moment, and then both began to laugh, the laugh that you get when you learn to stop caring so much. The laughter died down, and both sat silent, staring at a fixed point on the opposite side of the cave wall.

"Funnily enough, that's why I'm here." Jack said at last. He pulled a small book out of a bag and handed it to Sayid.

"It's a journal." Jack went on, explaining. "I figured you didn't really need anything—after all you could probably pull some MacGyver shit and make anything you really needed. . . ."

Jack took a breath, his eyes still focused on the stone wall in front of him.

"But you seem like a guy who has a story to tell. . . and since it's pretty clear that you're not the type of person who tells that stuff to other people, I figured that you should have some way to document everything." Jack's eyes softened, and he looked at Sayid.

"Merry Christmas, Sayid."

"Thank you." he said back with a smile, like those words were the revelation he'd been looking for all along. He was holding it in one hand, weighing it as though it were a precious object.

Without any provocation, Sayid began to laugh again, looking at the journal and its empty pages.

"Maybe for my birthday I can get a pen." he said in between the laughter. After a moment, Jack joined in. They went on like that for a long time.

Nothing else to do today but laugh, he thought, and appreciate the irony.

"Hey Jack!" Jack turned and looked behind him from where he sat, sharpening wood into spears. He looked up and immediately smiled to see Kate running towards him, looking unburdened for once. Maybe it was some trick of light, he thought.

Kate rushed up and sat down next to him on the rough bark of the log.

"Wanna take a moment out of being the great white hunter to get a Christmas present?" Jack laughed. His sense of humor had stubbornly returned to him after his visit with Sayid.

"Sure." He put down the knife and the sticks. "Hit me with your best shot."

The small ribbon of space his arm and hers hummed with electricity.

"You've got to close your eyes first." she said softly, a hint of a smile playing on her face.

The last thing he saw was that expression and his vision faded into black and his eyes closed.

"Now what?" he asked, scrunching his face to keep his eyelids shut.

"Hold out your hands."

Jack did as he was told. Something of weight was placed in his hands, and he felt between his thumb and forefinger the worn corner of a book cover, so old that the paper felt like warm cotton cloth in his hand.

"You can open your eyes now."

Jack looked at the book in his hand. An aged, incredibly well-read copy of The Essential Ralph Waldo Emerson rested in his hand. White creases threaded their way like veins across the spine and cover. Inside there was hardly a page where some sentence wasn't underlined.

Jack looked up at her with a question in his eyes. Kate looked back at him with an almost-smile threatening its way across her face. Jack felt her fingers weave in with his own, and she gave his hand a slight squeeze.

"I told you that you needed to learn to be comfortable with yourself. I can see the demons your chasing around in that head of yours." she looked at him with a serious expression, pausing a moment, then glanced down at the book. "Read some of this—Emerson's pretty wise about being able to live through hell without losing yourself along the way."

Jack let his thumb slide slowly over the frayed edges of each page, as if he was trying to taste the content.

"It used to be mine—but I've decided now I've pretty much gotten everything I can get out of that book. It's your turn now." Kate gave him a small smile. She was still holding his hand. Jack used it to pull her into a hug, savoring a moment of his arms wrapped around her. Slowly, Kat relaxed a little, unused to human contact.

"Thanks Kate." This book had meant a lot to her, he knew.

Never can tell, he thought. Maybe this could tell him what he had been running away from. What he was running towards.

"Thanks." he repeated, then slowly let his arms melt off of her. She stood up.

"I guess you can get back to that now." she said, pointing to the stick he'd been sharpening. She looked down one last time at the book in Jack's hands. "Take good care of that. It's my bible."

Kate turned, and walked with slow steps back to the beach. Jack watched her go until she was completely out of sight before returning to work.