Land Locked
Disclaimer: Lost belongs to JJ Abrams and crew. Most certainly not me now, or ever in the future. Don't blame me for the games I play with his previously created characters. The song lyrics used as section dividersare not mine, alas, either. Instead, they belong to the genius of Bright Eyes, "Landlocked Blues" to be precise.And there is an excerpt from a poem in here; the poet is Thomas Hood, not me.
Rated: R (sex, violence, character death, language)
Summary: "If you walk away, I'll walk away." Sawyer/Kate, slight Jack/Kate, slight AU, one shot.
Author's Note: This is my first try at a Lost fanfiction. I just recently fell into the series and am completely enthralled by it. So of course I had to write something for it. This story is dark, I'll warn you now. Yes, it is a Sawyer/Kate 'romance,' but I think I'm using the term loosely. I've taken major liberties with the show, taking everything from Season One, but kind of using facts from the show for Season Two and kind of making up my own. I guess in that sense, this story is slight AU. You've been warned. Be gentle. Oh, and as a quick side-note, all the lyrics interspersed in this story are from "Landlocked Blues" by Bright Eyes. This is not a songfic, mind you. And I know, the song I used is supposedly about the war in Iraq or alcoholism and fame or some other such shit, but I thought it fit beautifully, poetically and perfectly with our Sawyer and Kate. Oh, and end of side-note: listen to the song when reading. Yeah, just do it. Makes it just a little bit better. Thanks for taking the time to read this. Leave love.
i.
if you walk away, i'll walk away
first tell me which road you will take
i don't want to risk our paths crossing some day
so you walk that way, i'll walk this way
There is only enough room for one of them on the island. She knows this much is true. She knew it at the time. It doesn't make the lesson all that easier to learn and remain learnt.
He seemed to feel the same. He made it perfectly clear the night before sailing off on a raft, the night before he climbed aboard and drifted off to sea as one of four, leaving her here, among the survivors. Waiting for either the hopeful beating of a rescue chopper, or at the absolute other end of the spectrum, the dead to wash ashore among the broken wood.
"There ain't anything on this island worth staying for."
He had told her that there was nothing worth staying for. There is nothing worth staying for. There is nothing here for him to stay for.
When she knocks the phrase around a bit, untangling the words, the spoken and the unstated, she can find the true meaning: She wasn't worth staying for.
So he ran. And she was envious for the smallest second, the smallest second that felt like five, a mural of changing license plates and nameless motels drifting through her mind. To run is to escape. To run is to be free.
She only lets the thought enter her mind for a limited amount of time. Five seconds, five seconds like Jack said. Handle fear in five and let it slip away. Count to five and think of how he left and the words he used as a farewell speech.
And then move on.
ii.
and the future hangs over our heads
and it moves with each current event
until it falls all around like a cold steady rain
just stay in when it's looking this way
She lets him kiss her. She lets Jack put his lips to her and press himself in, in, in. With bodies melding, melting, meeting in the heat, she imagined there would be more passion. She kisses him harder, runs her hand under his shirt in search of something, something, anything. Something sultry, something sticky, something to fill her head and cloud her mind.
Hipbones meet at an awkward angle, and this, her attempt to disengage seems to be failing with every stroke of the tongue and pawing of an uncomfortable hand.
His finger gets caught in her tangled curls. He pulls and it hurts, and all she can think of is how wrong this all is. It is wrong.
That doesn't mean she'll stop.
Fear and death: the ultimate aphrodisiac. She wonders why the pages of Cosmopolitan always fail to mention this.
She lets him continue to kiss her and tries to concentrate on the small moans escaping his lips and throws in a feeble attempt of her own.
Guilt has been everything but a stranger for her. It is her shadow, her best friend, worst enemy. She is so accustomed to the perennial knot at the base of her gut, twisting and wrenching its way up and up randomly and every night. She is used to it. She has blood on her hands and a guilty conscience.
Kissing Jack, letting him touch her like this, playing with her nipples and grabbing her ass, brings an altogether new definition of guilt into the fold.
She doesn't care for it much.
But she will keep falling, tumbling forward and onto the ground with him. She will listen to the water bounce off the walls of the cave and she will let him take her forward and nowhere and maybe, just maybe, for a brief time, up and out of here.
To run is to forget. To run is to pretend. And she is fleeing, yet going nowhere.
She once told Sawyer that she had never had a one-night stand, and had watched him raise his miniature bottle to his lips. Jack takes off her panties and she knows she'll need a drink once she is through with this.
iii.
and the moon's laying low in the sky
forcing everything metal to shine
and the sidewalk holds diamonds like the jewelry store case
they argue walk this way, no, walk this way
This island seems to only operate in extremes. Fiery sun and clear blue skies or rains worthy of the construction of Noah's Ark.
Today, today might be an exception.
It is 8 A.M. and she is alone.
She walks the beach, slow, oddly patient steps. She walks against the wind and wonders when the rain will start up once again.
The rain, the rain, it won't go away. It simply has come here to stay.
She wishes now, in retrospect, that she had remembered at some point to grab an umbrella.
The waiting leaves a slight uneasiness deep within her. Taut apprehension has been the lone similarities among the remaining on the island. They are all waiting. They just don't know anymore for whom. She stands along the shore and stares into the gray, the gray, the gray, and waits for it all to burst.
The quiet is ruined in one slight movement and one single sound.
She hears rustling in the bushes, and her hand immediately moves to the back of her jeans. There is no gun. There hasn't been a gun there for quite some time. Routine, instinct, Freud would have a field day. Her hand reaching for a gun, ready to fire off a shot without the slightest preamble or trepidation. She isn't sure how she feels about that.
She can hear the rustling and in her mind, she is screaming to run, to take off down the beach, a spray of sand in her wake. Run and run and run and not look back, not look at whatever it is that is threatening to burst out of the brush and into her life.
To run is to survive. But she just stands there frozen, a deer in the headlights. Frozen and still and waiting for the fall.
She hears the man's voice before she sees him.
"Doctor…we need a doctor." Out of breath and strangely foreign, she turns back to see a man, a man she had never seen before, clutching what she could only call a staff, and over his shoulder a body.
A body. A man.
Sawyer.
A part of her wishes she was already halfway down the beach, alone.
iv.
and laura's asleep in my bed
as i'm leaving she wakes up and says
'i dreamed you were carried away on the crest of a wave
baby, don't go away, come here'
The chair is uncomfortable, but then again, so is the situation.
She watches. She sits there and she watches. Crossing and uncrossing her legs, leaning in just a little bit closer, a little closer, just to make sure he is still breathing. She reels herself back in again, slouching against the unforgiving back of the chair. She will stare at every object that lines the room, her fingernails, and the floor; she will search for split ends and secrets in the walls, but inevitably, invariably, her eyes always come back to him. Her eyes always come back to him, watching with baited breath, fear lodged somewhere in her throat, afraid to break the spell and watch him slip away again.
She finds it embarrassing how she sits here day and night and watches him. It is embarrassing, but she does it anyway.
She can see the sidelong glances Jack passes her way as he bustles in and out of the room, holding medical supplies, and ironically enough, Sawyer's life, in his hands. She can see the hurt and the confusion and the look of utter rejection painted across his face. She almost hates him for his inability to hide anything. She almost hates him, but admires him all the same.
He wears his heart on his sleeve while all her clothes seem to be inside out.
She imagines she should say something to him. Some gesture of apology to bridge over the fact she fucked him and is now administering nothing short of over-the-top bedside manner to another man. But she doesn't. She remains silent. And retreats somewhere deep within her mind, replaying the what if's and the could have's at a lightning speed, racing from the raft and to this bed, the corner of the room, the sea, the globe and back again. She races through the recesses of her mind searching for just a little comfort.
To run is to hide. To run is to masquerade.
"I think he is going to pull through." Jack sounds vaguely awkward, the words forced, a little too loud. This isn't the same Doctor Jack act he has pulled day in and day out on this island. This is something else. She imagines this is the man and they are no longer role-playing anymore.
"Thank you," she whispers, denying eye contact with either man, the sleeping or the attending.
She lets time stand still for just a little, sits there in silence as Jack administers his duties. Tension, tension, tension: she can't stand it and refuses to wait for it to snap in her face.
She rises to her feet, her knees creaking in protest, arching her back and cracking her neck. "I…I think I'll go grab some food, or something. I'll be, I'll be right back."
She turns to leave, and then she hears it, Jack hears it. She wonders if Jack freezes in place the same way she does.
"Kate…"
Soft words are a foreign tongue in Sawyer's mouth. But they sound so natural, so perfect and so natural she can't help but bend.
"Come back…"
The tension is thick and the situation, uncomfortable. But she sits back down again without a word. And it is silence as usual.
v.
and there's kids playing guns in the street
and ones pointing his tree branch at me
so i put my hands up i say 'enough is enough,
if you walk away, i'll walk away'
and he shot me dead
Her mother had once had a strange romantic attachment to poetry. She had books of the shit, anthologies full of rhyming words and phrases that slithered and snaked through the mind. She was fifteen when she finally took it upon herself to try and read some of it. She couldn't find the passion or the heartbeat in the pages and left them there for a day that has yet to come.
To herself she speaks, staring out into the water, reciting words never read but heard far too often. "There is a silence where hath been no sound, there is a silence where no sound may be, in the cold grave—under the deep, deep sea…"
Now, after everything is said and done, the words don't surprise her so much. She can remember her mother washing dishes, reciting the words as she scrubbed, smiling despite the somber tone.
She can't explain the dread.
Watching the waves crest and fall, she cannot remember the poet's name. She can't remember how this beach once looked, strewn with burning luggage and sizzling steel, the struggling and the surviving. It seems so calm here, far from the remaining inhabitants and their makeshift tents, their slowly deflating spirits.
The hair goes up on her arms, there are the prickles on the back of her neck, and she knows she is no longer alone.
Holding her arms to her chest, she slowly turns. And he clears his throat. And she attempts to smile his way, a polite grin as a greeting, but she imagines it looks more a grimace than a grin and she can't quite explain why.
"You alone out here, Sassafras?"
Thomas Hood. That was the poet's name. Thomas Hood. She remembers now.
Her face slides into neutral, maybe even cold. It is plain. And there he is. And that smug smile is stretched across his face, that look that says, yes, I cheated death, care for me to tell you how? She hates it, she hates it and strangely, unfortunately, finds an unusual sort of comfort in it. She imagines that's why she resents it as much as she does, why she resents him so much.
"How's the…?" And she can't seem to finish the question, but instead gestures towards him, towards him and the bandages and the hidden blood and healing wound.
"This?" And he points to the sling, and the white bandage for once not stained red. "God damn shoulder hurts like all hell."
She pictures him out at sea, in the sun and on a raft. Sweaty and salty and sea-drenched and light. It should inspire desire, it should incite arousal. Instead it makes her sick with fear and something else entirely. Dread. She can feel the dread again.
In her mind, she can hear the pop, the bang, the gunsmoke lingering in the air. She doesn't know exactly how it happened, and she really never cares to know.
They stand there in strained silence, the sea crashing their solo accompaniment. She looks up at him, his blue eyes watching her in spite, maybe, in challenge, or simply out of scrutiny.
Her eyes find the sand again, and she digs her toe in it a bit. "You didn't have to go, you know." She doesn't know if she is blaming him for his injury or simply blaming him for everything, but the words feel good as they leave her lips.
"So this is my own damn fault, sweetheart?" His hip is cocked left and his head right. His arm is tucked into his chest and his other hand holds it there. A battle stance, neither of them going anywhere.
"You didn't have to go," she whispers back, looking everywhere but him.
And he smiles, crooked and dimpled and sad.
" 'Course I did."
And she just locks eyes with him, her mouth set firm and solemn, his still upturned in a sloppy grin.
She nods, not in agreement and he surely knows this. She nods and announces she is heading back, back wherever. Maybe the caves, maybe the other end of the beach, maybe the hatch to Jack.
He smiles again, a smirk, a mockery, and she turns and runs down the beach, her feet sinking in the sand, each step more difficult than the last.
To run is to ignore. To run is to avoid.
vi.
i found a liquid cure
from my landlocked blues
it'll pass away like a slow parade
it's leaving but i don't know how soon
She stands there, toes dug into the sand, the sun finally cresting over the waves. Red, red and spreading slowly, slowly, slowly out to her.
She knows he's next to her. He always seems to be. It doesn't seem to matter where she sneaks off to on this island, he always manages to be two steps behind her and ready to fire.
She raises a hand to her eyes, and looks down the beach. She looks down the beach and watches Charlie, Claire and Aaron sit together eating breakfast. It could almost be a family portrait, save for the lack of kitchen table, orange juice and coffeemaker.
"God, she can't raise that kid here." She says the words as she turns back to him, hand still raised, eyes still squinting.
"What you say?"
"Claire. Claire, she can't raise that baby here. Aaron. It's not…right."
"And how's that?"
"Because, I mean, think about it. He is going to grow up hearing all these stories, stories of places and people and things he will never get to see. It's like growing up blind, hearing about all these colors you've never seen and are so distant and so abstract you can't even imagine what they look like. Ice cream cones and baseball games. Carousels and swimming pools, Matchbox cars, Christmas Day, God damn Disneyland. He'll never get to live the stories he has grown up hearing."
He chuckles, the perfect word to describe his laugh. He chuckles, long, slow and deep, derisive and slightly scornful. "Freckles, we all grow up like that. Just a hell of a lot more obvious out here on the island. Ain't no different."
She wants to walk away and pretend she didn't hear the words he has spoken. To run is to deny. To run is to lie.
And it is too early to be acknowledging universal truths and maxims.
vii.
and the world's got me dizzy again
you think after 22 years i'd be used to the spin
and it only feels worse when i stay in one place
so i'm always pacing around or walking away
The fire crackles and it pops. The embers glow, smoke reaching up into the air. They've all left. They all have left. Except for him. Sawyer.
She is comfortable around him. Too comfortable. And it ironically makes her feel all the more awkward and aware.
She takes a deep breath and the smoke fills her lungs. He sits there across from her, long legs clad in denim spread out; from her view the fire consumes his body leaving his head disembodied and aglow.
He rises, slowly, from his spot on the ground opposite her. And she knows. She knows he is coming closer, that he is closing in, and she can't understand why her heart is beating like this. And she suddenly wants to leave and follow, follow the crew back to the beach, the caves, even the fucking hatch. To run is to know. To run is to believe. Sitting next to him might just be too much.
"Enjoying the heat, little lady?"
"I was." She can't help but smile a little, and he plops down next her, legs bent, hands in his lap. She listens to the wind blow through the leaves, feels the heavy humidity set upon her skin, listens to the crackle of the fire and inane banter Sawyer is attempting to spark. She bets this is what summer camp must be like. The great outdoors, the sticky sweetness of nature, that odd glow around the campfire that might not just be inspired by the burning wood. Sixteen and in love for the first time.
She feels him rest his hand upon her own and digs her fingers into the moist earth, trying to hold onto to something real.
She looks away into the jungle. And finally speaks.
"I'll only disappoint you, you know." She turns her head back to him, and watches him appraise her.
"I'm really not expecting much, Freckles."
They sit in silence until the flame finally burns out.
viii.
i keep drinking the ink from my pen
and i'm balancing history books up on my head
but it all boils down to one quotable phrase
if you love something, give it away
The first time they slept together she expected him to be more talkative. He talks, but strangely, the nicknames are missing. In between the sheets, in between her legs, she is no longer Freckles or sweetheart, baby or sugar puss. She is Kate. Kate. Just Kate. And he grunts her name like a mantra in her ear, his stubble scraping across her cheek, interspersed with profanity and the like. "Jesus fucking Christ, Kate, yeah, Kate, oh, God, Kate."
They lay on the cushions from the airplane. They lay there, and all she could feel was the sand, the grittiness sticking to her arms, her legs, her bare back, her breasts. Sand seemed to be everywhere, scratchy and abrasive, rubbing her the wrong way. She would call it awkward, but that just doesn't seem right. It was rough and uncomfortable, but she still glowed anyway.
She's not sure what that means.
She left immediately after. Pulled on her pants and threw her shirt back on. She walked barefoot back down the beach and away, shivering in the moonlight as the sweat and sand dried upon her skin.
The next morning she decided it was too risky and too dangerous to be fucking on a deserted island. Especially with him, especially him.
That really didn't stop him from coming to her the next night and her coming for him short minutes after.
She imagines that everyone knew, that everyone somehow knew the events of those two nights.
Tonight might just be their third.
She is on duty in the hatch. And apparently, Sawyer has taken it upon himself to visit. She can give him that, visiting hours. She can let him see her, but she can't let him touch her.
"What are you doing here?" Her voice is quiet and reserved, and she hopes that makes her just a little bit more authoritative.
"What do you think, sweetcheeks?"
"Please, leave."
"Nah, don't think so. You see, the thing is, Freckles, I ain't got anywhere else to go right now. Ain't got nothing else to do." He cocks his head to the side, charisma and sex appeal irritating oozing off of him and she thinks she might hate him. "Ain't got no one else I'd want to do."
"For God's sake, Sawyer…"
"You love it, sweetheart. No sense in denying it." He runs a hand through his overgrown hair, and she thinks he looks wild. And maybe he always has. It's just the hair is no longer in place, the clothes no longer clean and finally the rest of him matches the untamed savage look carried in his eyes.
"Whatcha been doin' in here all night?"
She throws a playing card down on the floor in front of her. "Solitaire. I'm playing solitaire."
He laughs at that. "Of course you are, Kate. Of course you are."
And he kisses her. Of course he kisses her. He kisses her and like always she forgets to breathe and forgets to exist and just tumbles, tumble, tumbles overboard with him. Tumbles overboard and imagines this is what life is all about, forgetting and just moving and feeling. Thought abandoned in the name of emotion.
She's afraid he is going to let her drown alone.
Her card game ruined, they lay horizontal across the floor. Limbs sliding, layers removed, and suddenly she wants to cry.
She has forgotten and now she is feeling. And it might just be too much.
She gasps for air and realizes his belt is undone and she is in nothing but her underwear. She can't breathe and it hurts too much and this has gone too far already.
She presses her hand to his bare chest. She presses it there and pushes him up and off her, their kiss ending sloppy with a resounding smack that manages to echo through her skull.
To run is to breathe. To run is to move.
"I…I can't…do this. With you. I can't. I can't." And she is on the verge of tears and he can't see this. It is set down somewhere, somewhere in her own personal rulebook, that he, he will never see her cry, he will never see her break. He won't be able to do this to her. She won't let him.
"Just leave."
She won't look. She won't.
"Yeah, right. I'll just…go." She can hear the caution in his tone and it surprises her. She raises her head as he stands up. She watches him pull his jeans up and over his skin. Watches him grab his faded t-shirt, shoes in the other hand, and walks out the door.
ix.
a good woman will pick you apart
a box full of suggestions for your possible heart
but you may be offended and you may be afraid
but don't walk away, don't walk away
"We're sinners, me and you, sugar. We're sinners bound straight for nowhere but hell."
She watches the sun set crimson, staining the ocean below it red, a deep red, a red spilling across the waves. Her hair sticks to the back of her neck and her clothes remain in a perpetual state of dampness.
"I thought we were there already."
He chuckles, slow and long, stretches his legs out before him and lays back.
"No, baby. This is paradise."
She lets the silence consume them for a second, watches as he falls back into his book. The Crying of Lot 49. The spine is bent and the pages dog-eared. She wonders if it is because of him or its previous owner. She likes to think it's him, destroying everything he puts his hands on.
"Why haven't you ever asked me what I did?"
"Excuse me?" His head rises, mismatched glasses on his face, his finger holding his spot in his book.
"Why…don't you ever ask me what I did?"
He smiles, and it is odd. For a second there, he looks approachable, he looks safe, he looks tame.
"It never really mattered."
And they sit there, in a rare companiable silence. And she relishes it, feeling an odd rise of shame for daring to think it.
She looks at him and she wishes for the leather of the steering wheel beneath her fingers, for the gas pedal beneath a lead foot. To run is to disappear. To run is to slip away. She wishes for a world of strangers and untouchables. Instead she has an island of fear. And him.
Laying back she stares at the sky, wishing for stars to count or clouds to shift into animals and familiar objects. None are granted and she is left with silence and a sea breeze.
She imagines this is the calm before the storm. The sky is cloudless, an unearthly blue, the sun shining high in the sky, and she waits, impatiently, for it all to come crashing down about them.
She remembers Artz told them it was monsoon season. She is just waiting for the clouds to bleed.
x.
we made love on the living room floor
with the noise in background of a televised war
and in the deafening pleasure i thought i heard someone say
'if we walk away, they'll walk away'
It was all bound to crash eventually. It always does.
The jungle is hot, damp, and the beginnings of a storm are just warming up, the slow, seductive rumble of thunder escorted by the erratic, dangerous lightening. And the rain, the rain falls steady, gaining speed with every footstep of her own, and every shadowy echoof his.
They were fighting, they always fight. Calm had settled in after the night she kicked him out. And hell had quickly followed. And she doesn't want to talk, she doesn't want to talk to him or talk about it or fill the air with mindless words and half-assed excuses. She doesn't want to be followed. She just wants to fall away.
"Just go! Leave! Leave me and go back." She is shaking, out of anger or out of cold and wet and rain. She is trembling and breaking and she doesn't want to have to be the one to pick up the pieces.
And he doesn't stop. Instead he grabs her arm, stoic, silent and unfamiliar.
She hits him. Violence is far from unfamiliar, but this terrain, this intimate violence is something new for her. She hits him once across the face. Watches his head whip to the side, his wet hair covering half his face. And she hits him again, pounding her fists into his chest and she is yelling and hitting him and there is rain trickling down her throat making her choke and she might be crying, she might not be, but she knows she is trying to yell, but she seems to have forgotten the words.
She has never seen Sawyer speechless before. She doesn't quite know what to make of it. It is unsettling, upsetting. She wants the sarcastic barbs to come shooting from his lips. She wants the inane nicknames and the empty conversations composed of nothing but banter and euphemistic exchanges.
He grabs one hand, a fist clenched around her wrist, tight and painful. He grabs the other, stopping a half-hearted punch and he holds her hands steady at his chest. And she is crying and she might be weak and she knows she can't handle this.
"I hate you so much…"
To run is to chase. To run is to hurt.
He kisses her. Hard and biting and equally angry. He pushes her and she falls down, landing on the jungle floor. Her head hits the ground with a hollow thud, and she can feel the mud collecting on the back of her neck. Broken twigs scratch her face as she moves with Sawyer in the dirt.
She has made her bed. And now, now she must lie in it.
She is wet and he is hard, and really, that should be all that this is about. The rain and the mud and the trampled brush matting itself to her bare back. Sawyer grunting dirty phrases in her ear, breaking the silence and joining the thunder, sending chills straight through her.
He is in her. And it isn't sweet and loving and caring and tender and the way everyone has told her it should be. Love. It is rough and it is violent and it makes her hurt from the inside to the out.
And she loves it. She hates to even thing it, to dare to admit it for the regulated five seconds, but she loves it, and lets herself slip away and in. Five seconds becomes ten becoming thirty becoming a minute and more.
She loves it and it's perfect and it is all running together and flowing without thought but merely action, passing from one to the next and yet another, and blindly, frightened, she wonders if it will ever stop.
She loves it. She loves him.
And she comes, clutching his hair in her fingers, knees squeezing his ribcage. She comes, terrified and panic-stricken, and her five seconds finally ends and all she can feel is the chill, the mud, the rain, the cold, making its way down her bare spine. She hears him whisper in her ear a steady cadence. "Katie, Katie, Katie..."
The thunder claps. And the lightening crashes.
xi.
but greed is a bottomless pit
and our freedom's a joke, we're just taking a piss
and the whole world must watch the sad comic display
if you're still free start running away
'cause we're coming for you
They found them.
They found them in the middle of the night and there wasn't a damn thing they could do to stop it.
She awoke in the middle of the night to a hand covering her mouth and an arm clutching her painfully about the middle.
Then it all went black.
They found them. And the fear that had merely moved to a continuous white noise had just shrieked itself back to life again.
She dreams that she is running. Racing across a field with itchy grass meeting her ankles and her calves but she doesn't care because she is alone and free and she is running, and running and nothing matters out here. And then it all dead ends. A cliff. And she is slipping and sliding and her feet are torn and bloody and there is nothing to hold on to. To run is to dream. To run is to fear.
She comes to slowly, her head feeling swollen and there seems to be something matted to the side of her face.
Blood. She imagines it is blood.
Her eyes flutter open, once, twice, and she gasps.
She imagines that this is what happened to every other passenger who mysteriously disappeared into the jungle. She imagines that each and every one of them sat here, in this room, horrified and shocked to find that in the heart of the jungle beat the metallic, sterile heart of a laboratory.
And there they are. The Others. They stand there, bare-foot and dirt-stained. They stand there in the cold laboratory clutching clipboards and pens and Kate feels sick. Sick with fear and apprehension.
It is so wrong she can't even count the ways. She takes a deep breath. And realizes she is not alone.
There is Sawyer. Across from her he sits, tied down, same as her, breathing heavily and still unconscious.
She closes her eyes and counts to five. And counts to five again. And again. It's not enough. She counts and she counts until the numbers become empty and meaningless and she has no idea where to turn to.
"1…2…3…4…5…"
xii.
i've grown tired of holding this pose
i feel more like a stranger each time i come home
so i'm making a deal with the devils of fame
saying 'let me walk away, please'
"Why do you run?"
"What do you fear?"
"What does this mean to you?"
"Where are you going?"
"Does it hurt you when I do this?"
"Or this?"
"Does it hurt you to watch this?"
"What do you love?"
"How do you hate?"
"Does this hurt?"
She closes her eyes, but that doesn't stop the questions, the screaming, the yelling, the begging. She never thought she would live to see the day Sawyer begged.
Slowly, she realizes it isn't him that is begging and pleading. Rather, it is her, it is Kate. And for the life of her she can't understand the words falling from her cracked lips.
Their pens keep scribbling and they whisper among themselves. She sits there untouched, save for the gash on her forehead, while Sawyer sits, a mess.
"It'll be alright. Sawyer, listen to me. It's going to be okay and you're going to be fine and we're going to be alright and we'll leave and get out of here and go back and we'll run away from here…"
"Stop lying, Katie. You were never very good at it." He breathes in deep, a heady gasp, blood trickling out of the corner of his mouth. "Besides, baby, we're out of places to run to."
To run is to bleed. To run is to break.
xiii.
you'll be free, child, once you have died
from the shackles of language and measurable time
and then we can trade places, play musical graves
till then walk away, walk away
She wonders if she should have screamed. More than that, she wonders why she didn't.
She stares, horrified, at the syringe being inserted straight into his neck. His breath is ragged, and he sits there, nothing more than a mass of blood and bruises. Broken. She stares at him and thinks, broken.
"What…what are you doing? What are you doing to him?" Her voice takes on a hysterical edge as she watches him began to shake, to tremble, and she refuses to think 'seizure.'
"We're done with him." So clinical and spoken so scientifically as though they are nothing more than an experiment, and she gets it now, that that's all they are. The control group and the experimental, pawns for a hypothesis they'll never hear the results of.
"You're done…No, no, no no no no no no no no…" She is shaking her head and can taste the bile in her mouth. Sick, she feels sick. She feels sick and Sawyer's limbs won't stop moving and his breath, why is he breathing like that?
"What have you done?" She screams it now, listens as it echoes off the steel storage units and the tiled floor.
And she doesn't understand it. Here they sit, in an immaculate laboratory, full of sterile instruments glinting in the fluorescent light, shining in their unused glory, and he, not she, has been on the receiving end of barbaric physical abuse. She doesn't understand.
A loud grunt, and his body begins to still. She watches him moan and pitch forward, and the blood, the blood, the blood she finally sees all the blood on the floor from earlier, and she watches it, the splotches, the drops, the whole streaks and the slow swirl down the drain at their feet.
She is sobbing, her chest shaking and the tears won't seem to stop, and she's pulling and pulling, pulling her wrists at the binds that tie her in place. She can feel her wrists cutting, the skin tearing, but doesn't seem to care. To run is to die. To run is to surrender. "What have you done?"
"We injected him with a serum. He will be one of us within the hour." She watches him just hang his head, the prisoner waiting for the gallows, waiting for the chopping block, waiting for the electricity.
"One of you…what does that mean? What are you? What have you done?"
"We once each sat here where you sit. There was a science team on this island once. There was a science team and they tested us. Tested us to find out what emotion meant to human beings. They wanted to know if emotion was the one thing that made humans different from every other animal. They wanted to know. So they injected us. They shot us up with the same formula now circulating its way through him. And you want to know the sick part? It's irreversible. It is irreversible and we are left unfeeling. We are the living dead."
Sitting there, she knows she will never remember this man's face. His or the Others. She will never remember what they looked like in this moment. And she just doesn't understand why.
She watches them whisper, pointing and gesturing wildly. There are smiles and eventual nods of agreement.
There are so many questions. So many questions racing through her head she doesn't know where to start.
"Why us?" she whispers, watching Sawyer, watching Sawyer watch the ground, the mosaic of his blood there.
"We wanted to learn." She feels hands at her own behind her back, and suddenly, they are free.
With a scream, she launches her fists forward, ready to kill, maim, whatever is necessary to reverse their fortunes. Instead, she finds the barrel of a gun at eye level and stares straight down into it.
"This pistol has one shot. Use it wisely."
The gun falls into her lap, and in a daze, in a nightmare, she can hear the retreating footsteps, the resounding click of the door as it is locked in place.
She has a gun with one bullet. And she imagines that They are watching her, wherever they are. She can imagine their eyes, their pens taking notes as she sits here, clutching a gun.
"Katie…"
She looks up, looks at him, and knows what he will ask.
He takes a deep breath. And laughs, chuckles, and she pretends they are on the beach. "There is…something, something I have been meaning to tell you…James, my name is James."
She stands, repeating his name softly, light sound reverberating, bouncing around the room, sounding like a mournful chorus. "James."
She kisses him once, a chaste kiss, the kind of kiss they never shared, too hurried and rushed and angry. She can taste the copper, the blood, the pain, and she backs away.
She stands there over him, a gun in her hand, directed right between his eyes. She watches the gun shake, tremble, and she understands that it is because of her. She can't hold the gun straight. She can't hold the gun, she can't shoot, she can't kill.
His face is white, pale, a ghostly shadow of what it once was. And she wants him to laugh and smile and see the dimples and hear the sarcasm and the condescending nicknames. Instead she gets a pain-stricken moan from him, and then he starts to beg.
"Come on, Kate…come on. Just end this. Pull…the fucking trigger." A broken sob escapes from her, and he just stares, stares at her, those cold blue eyes. "I can't be…one of them."
She takes a deep breath. She takes a deep breath and shudders at what she is about to do.
"I…I…"
"I know, Katie. I know. And I do, too."
She closes her eyes. There's a bang and the sound of impact. And there is Kate.
She drops the gun to the floor and listens to the metallic clang as it hits and spins. And she opens her eyes, slowly, slowly, slowly and all she can see is a sea of the dead, bouncing with the waves, being pulled under one right after the other. All she sees is a sea of dead, and her on shore, clutching the gun. And she sees him, slowly slip on down. Sawyer. James. She never really knew his name, never knew, until the minutes preceding his death at her hands.
They lied about everything, she believes, except for the one thing that really mattered.
xiv.
so i'm up at dawn
putting on my shoes
i just want to make a clean escape
i'm leaving but i don't know where to
To run is to live.
She doesn't understand it. Nor does she question it. She had dropped the gun and slowly walked to the door. A flick of the wrist, a turn of the handle, and it opened.
Kate isn't going to ask questions. She is just going to turn and walk the other way.
She can hear the distant beat of helicopters, the tops of the trees swaying unnaturally beneath the gusting winds. She can hear the beating blades, and stares up into the overcast sky.
She doesn't question it.
She's running away, Joanna Miller's passport tucked in her back pocket. It has been there for weeks, or maybe just days. At some point, time merely began to bleed and morning was night and night, day, and she wonders if it really even matters. She has Joanna Miller's passport and she is finally ready to use it.
She'll run a little farther, leaving Kate behind with Sawyer in the humid forest and the gritty sand. She will leave Kate behind with Sawyer. And she will leave Katie behind with James.
There are some prisons without bars, without handcuffs, without a room for solitary confinement. There are some prisons that span the world, that disguise themselves under bright blue skies and scorching sun.
There are some prisons just not worth escaping.
i know i'm leaving but i don't know where to
fin.