Chapter 14 - Exposure
12-13/12/5

Jack tried to imagine himself as the bullet as he worked. Tried to imagine the flight through that unique tunnel of air, spinning and colliding with particles of oxygen and nitrogen as they leapt out of his path… and then finding that smooth skin, delving through epidermis and subcutaneous fat and then deep through muscle fibres and the lining of the femoral artery. Imagined cutting though that warm flow of oxygen-rich blood, and freeing it to foreign territory; and then slowing, slowing, finding a place to rest, and stopping somewhere deep and hidden. And watching as destruction unfolded, gathering pace and continuing his work as platelets flooded to the wound, and found it not to be the minor scratch they were hoping for. But something much, much worse… something beyond clotting and something far beyond what the body could heal itself.

He had sedated Kate as best as possible, instructing Hurley to crush up some sleeping pills into a small amount of water and forming a paste that could be rubbed into her mouth and hopefully find it's way through glands and blood vessels to capillaries to her brain. How he wished there was a clinical white room, a cold metal bed, fresh white sheets, an anally neat row of sterile tools laid perpendicular to the edge of a tray. A monitor to tell him her blood pressure, oxygen saturation, heart rate, respiratory rate… hell, a light to work by even. At this stage anything would be better than a small blunt knife and his own less than sterile hands, and fingers that felt clumsy as they fumbled where fingers shouldn't have been; sensing nothing but the textured mesh of muscle, the thick pulse of blood though the artery he had just reconstructed. It had taken so, so long. Each time he'd sewn the ragged edges of tissue back together, and then released the tourniquet… there would be a split second where no blood would leak, but then a single pulse would flutter along the vessel, and slowly but surely a trickle of red would appear. Cotton thread was not designed to hold as sutures did.

Sawyer watched Jack's every move throughout the hours that passed. Watched him the way a younger brother observes the older as he grows… with grudging respect, and something like maturity appearing. He at one point asked how Kate was, and was met with silence. He didn't ask again. He knew, suddenly and irrevocably, that it was not his place to ask. He had the right to know, but somehow not to ask… and so he stood and watched, silent with eyes that followed another's expert hands. He had too many stolen demons to start asking an angel's questions now. And so he turned to the biggest demon of them all, to distract himself from the image of a angel, battered and broken before him. An angel and a murderer, but somehow an angel all the same.

Sawyer could still remember those first few minutes afterwards. After the gunshots and stillness and silence, and in those last few moments where he allowed himself to believe that what he knew had just happened, somehow hadn't. A dream maybe. A nightmare. Those last few moments as his life flipped over and altered forever, as his father's blood spilled like water from his head, and soaked through a child's blanket and sheets and that space still outlined in his son's form, still warm from his little frame. A child suddenly ripped from childhood, now. And then he had crawled out, already feeling the chill of change, the still whisper of a clock which cannot turn backwards. He ignored his father's body, crawled past those boots he feared… and padded down the hall to the front door, to that mess if limbs and hair he would see for the rest of his life whenever he closed his eyes. He took his mother's arm, and ignoring the blood, ignoring the way her eyes never moved, ignoring the lack of familiar hug… wrapped himself up in that maternal hold one last time. A final time to breathe her scent, and that warmth that she held like no other… a final time to say sorry for not protecting her.

Sawyer blinked and shook his head, clearing the image. Clearing the sound of his own eight year old sobs, those which rose in pitch like a kettle boiling and gradually filled the air, the room, the house… and rose again with the knowledge that it mattered not how loud they became, for there was no-one left to tell him otherwise.

The edge of pain… there's the edge and then the fall, and this fall that seems only to progress.

I open my mouth to speak, to scream, to cry out… and when no sound comes, it's okay because at the same time you somehow appear opposite me. You say nothing, just smile the smile that says everything's be okay. I keep falling but you catch my hands, somehow slowing the descent, somehow numbing the pain through nothing but wanting to.

I want to say to you how much has changed. I want to tell you about my life before you, the bit in between those pieces you know. The middle of the puzzle when you have the outline all mapped out. I want to tell you about Tom, and about living off nothing but rice crackers and the kilometres behind me for weeks on end. I want to stand before you and peel back layers of myself until only those blackened, cancerous memories remain… I want to expose everything that is true, everything I have been false about. Exposure of everything I've worked so very hard to bury away forever.


"And this very moment
Of timid and fragile honesty
Is precious and rare
And fleeting"

And it's then I look up, and the car is dangling like a keychain from the cliff top… and I remember driving as always, always before Australia and the flight and the island. And that clock which ran forwards and you sitting beside me when I don't know you yet. The sun streams into the valley as the fall continues, and the air particles part to let me through… and you smile at me from afar, a distant promise.


"And all you feel now
Is the scarlet in the day
And even if it's real
You can't stay"

The scarlet sun is burning. The air is torched, a slick of heat and the tired groan of a weary sky. The light blinds me again, and the fall begins to slow… I try to open my eyes but the sun, that white spear, burns. I know none of this is real, but right now I can't remember what is real either… there are too many memories which could be nothing more than fantasies, or could mean everything. And then suddenly I am still, and the fall has stopped, and the pain grows like a thing alive.

My eyes flicker open and shut, and I can see you mouth something to me… but somewhere in the darknesses, somewhere in the blinks, I lose the meaning of your frantic words.

"Jack."

He didn't reply. He knew what she was going to say.

"Jack."

She's persistent. But words wouldn't change a thing. Words never could.

"She's w…"

"I know."

He didn't mean it to come out like it did. He didn't mean for the words to fire off like a gun. But then he meant to find the bullet before now, and somehow neither had happened.

Sun flinched. He wanted to apologise, but he also wanted to find that shred of silver, and one wouldn't happen until the other did. He had no energy for anything but saving a life. Kate's life.

She mewed from the makeshift bed. It was a moan and a sob collided… Sawyer caught Jack's eye and automatically held down Kate's shoulders, pressing his own weight against flesh which must not move.

Jack felt nauseous. She couldn't wake up now… his hands were still deep in her thigh, delicately excavating until metal was found. The pain had to hold her off from waking. Her brain, surely, would spare her the agony.

How is it that as soon as you stop looking for something, that's when you find it? His eyes were on Kate's flickering lids, that delicate film of tissue over emerald pools, willing them to stay closed and ignorant. It was the first time in maybe an hour that Jack had not been fully concentrating on the feel of soft viscera and muscle beneath his fingertips… and it was the first time the texture changed, to a bluntened shard of metal casing.

His fingers snapped around it. His eyes shot a look at Sawyer, and the other man realised the discovery. He nodded to Jack, something between understanding and encouragement. Sun stood and nervously, yet stoically, handed Jack tweezers procured from a make up set.

His fingers worked like forceps, separating the muscle blocking passage to the shred of silver… the sterilised tweezers, gently lowered and manoeuvred around deep veins and tough muscle fibre. Hands close to shaking, Jack found the shrapnel once more, closed those flimsy metal clamps around it. And so so delicately, edged it from the its resting place.

He watched Kate's face as she drifted in and out of coma, the dreams she must be having as her body tried to explain away the pain her rational self wanted to wake to, to put a stop to. Sun took the tweezers and crushed metal bullet from Jack, handed him the needle and thread without needing to be asked. Hurley watched with dumbfounded disbelief as Jack threaded the needle and, stitch by stitch, meshed muscle and nerve and blood vessel back together and replaced everything where it should be. His hands worked in methodical calmness, matching the serene look on his face, that mask that never betrayed.

Inside he was terrified.

Inside he was telling himself cotton thread wouldn't be good enough, wouldn't hold, would need to be taken out again. Inside he was still remembering the pool of blood and rainwater he knelt in as Kate's chest refused to rise and fall independently. Inside, because it was the safest option and the most likely one, he was telling himself she was still far too close to the edge to dare to dance.

Jack reached the skin, those flaps of flesh all that was left to sew together.

She suddenly gasped, and Kate's whole body jerked violently to the trauma suffered, as she started to fully come to and the full intensity of pain flooded her.

I stop falling. I strain to hear your words as the light takes over again, and drags me somewhere new. I wonder if you'll be coming, too. I strain to hear your shouts, and through the haze of pain and mist that swirls, I hear you.

"I love you, Katie…"

No-one's called me Katie in such a long time. I smile at how it sounds in your voice, slightly unnatural, slightly gravely, but somehow…

Right. Katie sounds right when you say it. Maybe even more right than when he used to say it...

The light takes over, and it is all I can think of. The light and the pain, and these layers I peel back to let you in. Exposure of all my truths and all my black and blue. To let you love me.

They worked together, and it was déjà vu for each. She slipped in and out of consciousness, and each time she regained it she looked at him, that look that spoke volumes despite delirium. The look that said she understood, and it was okay, and continue. He made each stitch as quickly and painlessly as possible, and tried to remind himself of the pain she must have been in. He could not imagine it. Couldn't imagine the botched repairs that would lie exposed to the outside world if it weren't for this thick sheath of skin.

He wondered if she'd ever walk again, swim again, climb again. Jack didn't have all the answers. The needle hit the skin again and again, pierced the tough tissue, and Kate's face screwed up further in fits of dreams. Pea green stitches; standard black had long ago been used up. He thought back to that first day, and the courage that emanated as she took needle and thread in hand, and namelessly made suture after suture. He thought how as much as he was physically exposed, Kate, in doing something so unnatural, so brave, had exposed so much more than he.

Jack tied the final stitch, and the relief in the caves was evident. Hurley's mop of hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat. Sun looked dazed with effort, while Sawyer let go of Kate's shoulders and wandered off around the clearing, silent with respect and relief. He ran shaking hands through dirty blonde hair, and felt the exhaustion drain into him.

Kate mewed again, louder and with more clarity. Her eyes flickered open, for longer now… and with that flash of green Jack feared he might never see again, he let himself go. He dropped tools to a hollowed coconut, and shaking with exhaustion and happiness, collapsed to his knees beside Kate's form as she slowly began the long journey of coming too fully. Sawyer and Hurley looked on, smiling but embarrassed, as the tears wracked through Jack… as he took Kate's hand in his, kissed it through wet sobs, smoothed hair from her forehead and pressed his lips, full of relief and emotion, to her forehead.

"Katie…" He sobbed, the words spilling from quivering lips. "You're okay, I've got you now, I've got you…" His arms encircled her decimated form, that skin and bones, that shattered remains.

He peeled back layers, as he stood and cried with emotion more raw than he knew he possessed… threw off those layers of aloofness and coldness, and all the barriers he had allowed himself to build up over the years.

Kate's eyes flickered open, and a singular thought reached her. The pain hadn't hit yet, and for that single millisecond as a single tear carved its way into history down her cheek, her only thought was of Jack.

Layer by layer and tear by tear, the exposure of the other began.

"Walk along here
Feel you move
Somewhere in front of me
I can't place you
With these eyes
For they doubt I can see

How could someone so beautiful
Feel something for me
Hold me and love me and touch me again
And show me why I believe"