"I would offer you my pulse,

I would give you my breath."

Ani DiFrancoChapter Twenty-Five

When she's come back, carrying an armload of relatively dry wood, the men have changed into their respective clothing. For the most part, it seems to fit—Heather took a pair of Jack's pants, though the legs were a slight too short on Sawyer, and Sun had found Jin pants that fit well. Michael's appeared to be somewhat baggy, but no one was complaining. She had done well in the brief amount of time she had.

"There's matches in the front of the bag, get them out for me?" Sawyer shuffles through the bag from where he's sitting, tosses the small flap to Heather, who promptly lowers herself. Jin helps her get the fire going.

"You didn't bring clothes for Walt," Michael says, voice low. There is a sharp tension in the air, but Heather doesn't raise her voice to him. She's exhausted, doesn't want to argue. Now that the immediate crisis has been resolved and her adrenaline levels depleted, she feels hollowed out. "Why didn't you bring any clothes for Walt?"

"Because I knew they took him."

"And how did you know that?"

He has every right to ask, Heather thinks, and sighs. She rubs at her ears for a moment, and with one knee curled to her chest, suddenly appears how she feels: weak, small, tired.

"I was dozing, back at camp. Waiting for them to come back from blowing the hatch open. And I… I saw it. I think Walt sent it to me."

"If you saw it back at the camp, and they hadn't done that yet, then that means you were there tonight," Sawyer asks, and she can tell that he doesn't want to make her look bad in front of Michael, but he, as always, has a curiosity that needs to be sated. "Which means you'd have had to get all the way here in a few hours. And you… you got us maybe, at most, an hour after it happened." There is a pause, Heather hangs her head, thinking of how to answer this. He was right, there wasn't much sense in it.

"You're lying, aren't you? There no way you could have gotten here that soon. You knew it was going-" Michael starts, and Jin looks worried at the growing anger in his voice.

"I'm not lying." Her voice, instead of strong and defiant, is thin, wavering. She's tired of arguing and tired of running and tired of trying to protect and tired of being too late. "I don't know. That's the answer. The island either made the night longer, or stopped time."

"You're nuts-"

"Don't you think I know how it sounds?" She asks Michael, eyes glistening, on the verge of breaking down. Heather still hasn't fully recovered from the incident with Walt, and the event of dragging the three of them to her wasn't exactly fun or easy. "You of all people should know that there are… unexplainable things in the world. Especially here. Walt was different. He told me to come, and maybe it was like time lag, only the opposite way around. That's just it though. He told me to come. And I did."

"Well we need to go find him, and you're taking me to him."

"Well since you asked so nicely," Heather retorts—her voice isn't as waspish as she wants it to be, belying her frustration and exhaustion.

"I'm not joking with you."

"And I'm not taking you anywhere. Not until we've gone back to the caves."

"The caves? Why-"

"Sawyer was shot Michael. They don't know if I went insane and just ran off into the jungle, or if you all really were hurt. Besides, Sun deserves to know that Jin is alive." Jin looks over to her at this.

"I-"

"God damn it Michael, listen to her!" Sawyer, knowing that Heather prefers to speak for herself, bites his tongue for as long as he can. "She just pulled you out of the fishbowl so you could rescue your son, and you're treating her like shit. No one's going anywhere tonight." Michael's jaw drops, and then he stands in a huff.

"They took my son." He stands up, but they can see him sit down again about ten yards away, looking out over the ocean. Jin sighs, walks over to Michael; he does not sit directly next to the angered man, but close enough to offer some form of stoic comfort. Heather turns to Sawyer, and he hates how old, how beaten she looks. The woman takes his arm gently, pushes back the short sleeve to inspect the wound.

"You took this out with your fingers, didn't you?" There isn't any humor in her voice that Sawyer can detect, just edge-of-collapse weariness.

"Yeah. Bad?" He asks her in a serious tone, and suddenly she cups a hand to the side of his jaw and pulls him forward, kissing him hard. When she breaks the kiss, he musters up a mock-grin, though his heart isn't in it: "That bad, huh?" Heather laughs, but it breaks early, sounds too much like she's choking down a sob.

"I can't fix it." Her voice is thick with guilt. Sawyer blinks for a moment, and then understands—she must have been planning to do for him what she did for Walt.

"I wouldn't want you to. Then you'd be able to read my min-" Again, playing for humor, but this time she cuts him off.

"It's because They did it. I've run out of favors. The island's gone." Her voice is distraught, and she digs her nails into her temples, hands clenched into claws.

"Stop!" He takes her wrists, and though he winces at the pain in his shoulder, is able to bring them away from her face. When she looks up at him from under a mass of tangled hair, he can barely recognize her: she looks lost, frightened, alone. He realizes that he's seen her upset, seen her angry—but this is new to him, and it hurts. "Hey, I wouldn't be asking you to do that anyway. I wouldn't let you. Listen to me. It's not your fault."

"I'm sorry." Heather chokes a few tears well up dangerously close in her eyes, and Sawyer holds her with his good arm.

"No. We'll go back to the caves, and Jack will fix me up good as new." He says it as confidently as possible, but the way she's acting is worrying him. "What you need to do right now is rest."

"So do you," She says dryly, and Sawyer smiles, allows himself to tilt his head in the familiar way. Her brow becomes less furrowed, and he takes this as an improvement, though it isn't a smile.

"Not in a sleeping Cinderella mood, cupcake."

"It was Sleeping Beauty. Cinderella was the one with the pumpkin and the glass slipper." Sawyer rolls his eyes, pulls her up to kiss her forehead, and Heather thinks about what the older black woman on the beach had asked her—did Sawyer say he loved her?

Yes. The answer was yes.