Title: Blame
Rated: M, language
Characters: Michael, Sawyer
Notes: Spoilerage for Exodus 2 & 3. I don't cover it in th is fic, but in my mind, it rained after it happened, dousing the fire on the raft and leaving it semi-able to float. No sails or anything, but able to float.
It's really kind of amazing to him, and he's never actually sat down and thought about it before, but until that night, he'd never been shot before. All the bar fights, all the cons gone wrong, all the toe to toes he's had, and he was shot by a man who looked like Captain Ahab straight out of Moby Dick before he even had time to pull the trigger.
He can't help but think it should have gone a little more to the left. A little lower. A little more directly in the heart. He can't help but think that might somehow make it easier on Michael, and for once in his life he thinks he wishes he could have done that for him. That's the least he could have done.
Because as it stands right now, he's sitting on a badly burned and barely floating raft next to a deadly silent man with no more son by his side, and hating himself more than he has in a long, long time. If anyone had asked him a few weeks ago if that was possible he would have said no, but it turns out self-hatred has depths unexplored on every level.
Jin is leaning over the edge of the raft, a broken piece of raft fashioned into a spear in his hand, trying to catch anything that could pass as food. He's been doing so for the past four hours at least, and to no avail. Sawyer is hungry, and tired, but mostly he's sick to his stomach. He looks at Michael and sees that far away look he knows so well from the mirror and his gut clenches and he thinks he might actually do it. He might actually throw up.
Michael's eyes shift and catch him looking at him and he sighs, looking away again. "What, Sawyer?"
"Nothing," Sawyer said, frowning and looking away as well. "I just- nothing."
"How's your shoulder?"
Sawyer sighs, bending his head. "It's fine, Mike."
"Still bleeding," Michael asks, sitting up and scooting closer to him, lifting the edge of his ripped apart sleeve. "No. Looks like it stopped."
Sawyer resists the urge to jerk his arm away. He can't stand to be touched right now. He's got that old familiar feeling of being bad luck to anyone in his vicinity, but if Michael needs to pretend to give a shit about his wound, well... he'll let him. "It's fine."
Jin lets out a litany of consonants that surely have to be curses and Michael almost smiles. Almost is the operative word though, and he lets go of Sawyer's shirt and sighs heavily as he looks back in the direction from which they'd come. "Hell of a rescue, huh," Michael says, looking at Sawyer from the corner of his eye, trying to smile and failing pretty badly.
Sawyer keeps his gaze away cause he can feel it building in his chest. The rage. The recklessness. The trapped-in-a-cage feeling that he's felt all his life. Because he doesn't cry. He doesn't know how to cry, he hasn't cried in years. Every time that feeling comes, he strikes out at the nearest thing. A hard fist. A glass bottle. A quick fuck. He's out of options on this raft, and for a brief moment he almost wonders if Michael would mind too much if he just took the gun he somehow managed to keep a hold on out and shot himself in the head. At least that would give him some release.
"Would you stop it, man," Michael's saying, laying a hand on Sawyer's arm. "Just. Stop."
Sawyer looks at him, frowning. "Stop what? I'm not doing anything."
Michael's eyes meet his and it physically hurts him. He can actually feel a dagger going in his heart. "Yeah you are, man."
Sawyer sighs a grumble out and jerks his gaze away, staring back out at the ocean. "I don't know what the fuck you're--"
"It wasn't your fault, man," Michael says, squeezing Sawyer's arm lightly. "So stop it."
Sawyer closes his eyes and turns his head away from him. "Yes it was."
"No, it wasn't," Michael says, his voice strong for the first time since it happened. "This fuckin' thing, this whole thing? It's fucked, but it's not our fault. We were doin' the best we could. We were doing all we knew how to. It's fucked, Sawyer, but you need to stop shouldering this one, okay?"
"How can you say that," Sawyer says, finally looking at him. "How the... I made you fire the flare! I wouldn't shut the fuck up about it!"
Michael sighs. "I was gonna fire it anyway," he says, shaking his head. "I thought you were right from the get go, but I needed to think."
"I wasn't right, Mike," Sawyer says through the grinding of his teeth. "I was dead fuckin' wrong, and your son got took for it. And I didn't do shit about it."
Michael looks at him and this time the smile is real. Small, but real. "Yeah. You didn't do shit. Sawyer, you took a fuckin' bullet in the shoulder."
Sawyer shook his head. "Fat lot of good that did us."
"We were out numbered," Michael says, his hand finally slipping off of Sawyer's arm. "There were five of them, three of us. Each and every one of them had a gun, and we only had one."
"I could have gotten one of them tough," Sawyer says softly, staring hard down at the bamboo beneath him. "If I'd shot one of them, maybe--"
"God, man," Michael says, squeezing his eyes shut. "Just stop it. Jesus, man, you have no idea."
Sawyer sighs and looks away. "Sorry."
"You have no idea what kind of person you are, you know that," Michael continues. "You think you're shit, and you act like you're shit, but you're not. You're just not, man."
Sawyer can feel the burn in his eyes and he blinks and hopes he can blame it on the salt in the air. "You have no idea who I am. What I've done."
"I know what you did," Michael says looking up at him. "What you tried to do for my boy. It didn't work, and you got shot for it, but you tried." He shook his head and looked up at the sky as the tears begin to fall down his face again.
Sawyer marvels for a moment at how Michael can cry so freely without losing any of his masculinity, how he can do it with no concern for what others might think. He blinks and finds maybe he still can cry, because he can swear he feels them behind his eyelids. "Mike--"
"If anyone has the right to be pissed at you, to blame you, to think this is your fault, that you didn't try hard enough, it's me," he says, looking at him. "And I don't. So you should stop."
Sawyer takes a deep breath and looks straight into his eyes. "I'm sorry."
Michael's mouth quirks up in the vaguest of smiles. "I know."
"I wish I could have done something different. I wish it were me instead of him." Sawyer breaks off, rolling his eyes. "God, none of this is coming out right. It's all so fucking inadequate."
Michael's hand lands on Sawyer's arm again and just rests there. "I get you, man," he says softly, closing his eyes to the sun above them.
"Yeah," Sawyer says, sighing. "I guess you do."