Fault Lines
The plane hits an air pocket and the two of them are pushed sideways by the turbulence. The girl, Jack can't remember her name, is thrust bare assed into the toilet paper roll. Her jeans, discarded on top of the toilet seat, slip unnoticed to the floor. The sink that Jack is holding on to rattles and sounds as though it might come loose.
The jolts continue, like tiny earthquakes, and Jack's mind slides upwards into a semi consciousness that he tries desperately to push away.
He wonders what the hell he's doing here, fucking this girl while his father is snug in a box somewhere beneath him. But the turbulence subsides, and the girl pushes her hips foreword and Jack is thankfully helpless to do anything but submit to the oblivion that edges in around the corners of his eyes.
His mind can't keep up with his own urgency. Thoughts, only half formed, are abandoned as he slides his hands up her unfamiliar body. This is what he wants, this is what he tells himself he needs. Something empty and void of emotion and completely foreign to him. He looks at her and is somewhat shocked when he realizes he doesn't care if she gets off or not. He wants this now, wants to feel it right now. Her eyes are blank when she meets his, but she closes them quick as she arches her back.
Minutes later, as he bends to pull up his pants from around his ankles, he asks her, "What do we do now?" There's a beat, and through some miraculous trick of short term memory, he tacks her name onto the end of the sentence. "Ana Lucia."
She angles out of his way and reaches for her own pants. Her voice is low when she answers, lower then he remembers it being at the bar.
"Now you go back to your seat, Jack. And I go back to mine." She holds her jeans in front of her, a moment of modesty that he's surprised by. Jack shifts his eyes away from her, ever the gentleman.
He makes no apologies, there's none of the normal caveats one sees in bad movies. "I don't normally do this sort of thing." Or "This is the first time I've fucked a complete stranger in an airplane bathroom." It is of course, but he doesn't say it. Instead he smiles at her and says "42F?"
She grins back and nods, "42F."
He slides the door open, making the exit as slim as possible. And, almost as an afterthought, he reaches back in for his suit jacket.
He slips it on as he heads back to his seat, glancing back towards the door when he hears it open again. He sees her walk towards her seat and away from him and he hopes he never sees her again.
He glances furtively around the cabin, suddenly ashamed of himself. No one looks back at him or seems to care. Until his eyes land on a blond head that seems vaguely familiar. The guy looks shady to say the least and Jack is sure he must be some kind of con artist. And his blue eyes shoot straight through him, like he knows parts of Jack that Jack doesn't even know. Jack is unnerved, he nods an acknowledgement and then turns away.
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He sits where jungle meets shore, little tufts of dry grass shoot out from the sand. He absently skims his hand over the tips of the grass, imagining he's running his hands over something else entirely.
He glances towards Sawyer's shelter on the outskirts of the camp. He's not there.
Jack removes his backpack and scoots his body down into the sand. He can feel where his loose shirt has pulled up and the dry, hot sand presses against his bare back leaving tiny imprints.
The air is oppressive, threatening to break. Clouds that form on the edge of the horizon, far out to sea are tinged with yellow. He closes his eyes against the bright sun and sky and feels the sticky, motionless air heavy on his face.
Earthquake weather. That's what his father would have called it. As if there were such a thing.
He remembers the first time he heard him use the term. He was ten and his father was driving him to school, a rare occurrence to say the least. It coincided exactly with what his science class had been studying, plate tectonics and continental drift and the different ways plates can collide to form mountains and valleys and split apart oceans. Always through fierce, rash means like earthquakes and volcanoes.
That afternoon, as he chased Elsie Pritchard on the play ground, just as he was gaining ground, the earth had swung violently beneath him. He lost his footing and sprawled face first on the black top as the ground continued to lurch and sway.
Three things, his father, science class, and Elsie Pritchard, had met to form an irrational fear of earthquakes that Jack would carry with him for far too long.
For weeks afterwards, he had dreamt that his house lay directly over the San Andreas Fault. In the nightmares, he was always in the kitchen. First, he was clearing the table, then later, eating breakfast, Cheerios or Total, none of that sugar laced crap for the Shepard household. It didn't matter what he was doing, the same thing always followed. The earth would move. A crack, tiny at first but growing larger by the second, would separate the house in two. He would watch as his parents, stuck on the opposite side of the devide, grew further and further away from him while he stood helpless with his bowl clutched in his hands.
His mother told him over and over that the world simply couldn't split open like that. It was scientifically impossible. Southern California would not actually break off and sink into the Pacific. Finally, she grew impatient with his constant worrying and she stopped trying to comfort him. Stopped even listening to him at all.
And as Jack grew, the fault line shifted. He no longer believed that the San Andreas was beneath his child hood home. He had somehow carried it with him.
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He jerks awake, and the sun is much lower in the sky now. There's also far more clouds than there were before. How long had he been asleep?
He lifts his head off his backpack and again glances towards Sawyer's shelter. He's sitting there in his plane seats, facing away from the surf, pretending to read a book. Jack knows his glasses are gone. As he lifts his head further, straining for a better view, Sawyer lifts his eyes to meet his.
He holds his gaze for a minute, then flops his head back onto his backpack and feels a ripe piece of fruit squish beneath it. Mango from the smell of it.
He just wants to lay here for the foreseeable future. Wants to stop the anger that's constantly bubbling just beneath the surface, ready to erupt at the slightest provocation. Wants to stop trying so hard to care about everybody else when the emotion of it is rapidly leaving him day by never ending day.
There's such an attractive pull to this whole not caring thing. He wants to drown in it, never go back to that place where he worries too damn much about people and things he has no control over anyway.
Against his will almost, he lifts his head to locate Sawyer again. He's gone again.
He can feel his normally tight grip on himself loosening.
And he doesn't ask himself why. Why Sawyer is the first person he looks for whenever he comes to the beach. Or why Sawyer is the only one who can set his blood to boiling and his heart to pounding. Why Sawyer is the only person on this godforsaken island who can make him feel anything at all.
He doesn't ask because he doesn't want to know the answer.
And the plates shift. He thinks he must be gearing up for some kind of meltdown. Maybe he's in the throes of it already.
His thoughts muddle as the first raindrops fall on his closed eye lids, soaking him to the skin within minutes.
He just lays there, marveling in the physicality of it. He's neither hot nor cold, just wet. Individual drops slide back into his cropped hair, making his head tickle and itch.
Out of nowhere he feels a hand grip his forearm, then jerk him upwards. Before he opens his eyes, he knows it's him.
Sawyer's looking at him like he's crazy. He probably is.
"What do you think you're doing?" Sawyer yells at him in an effort to be heard over the pounding rain. "You'll catch your death of cold."
Jack laughs at the old fashioned phrasing, but allows himself to be pulled towards Sawyer's shelter. For once, it's nice to be lead.
Sawyer has pulled the plane seats inside, they're dry and comfortable. Jack sits and glances around. He's never been in here with out some sort of ulterior motive, pills or supplies that Sawyer has pilfered. His eyes land on the rifle stowed in the corner. Sawyer sees that he's seen, but neither of them acknowledge it. That's a fight for another day.
Sawyer retrieves his book from his rumpled bed and plops down next to Jack, their thighs dangerously close.
Jack leans back and closes his eyes, under the pretense of getting comfortable, he moves and his leg rests lightly against Sawyer's.
"You'll strain your eyes." He says without opening his own.
Sawyer sighs heavily, placing the book face down on his knee.
"What do you suggest we do, Doc. Talk?"
Jack smiles and puts his hand on Sawyer's knee to still him. He hears a sharp intake of breath, but doesn't move his hand.
"Just sit, Sawyer. Think you can just sit quietly?"
He shrugs like a chastised child. "What, you got a headache or something?"
"Something like that." He answers.
It's the last thing either of them says for quite awhile, Jack removes his hand rather reluctantly. But Sawyer moves so their legs are pressed more firmly together.
There's plenty of room, either one of them could shift slightly and break this contact. But neither does, and they remain that way, watching as light leaks from the world while the rain continues its torrent.
Sawyer's got a good view of everyone else. They can see Kate, crouched in her small shelter, her knees close to her chest. She alternates between staring out to sea, and shooting worried looks in their direction. She probably thinks they'll end up killing eachother.
Ana Lucia sprints down the beach toward her own Shelter. The one Jack helped her build. She's still wearing the same goddamn jeans, the ones she was wearing when he screwed her in the bathroom.
Jack and Sawyer don't speak for what could be hours. Sawyer breaks the silence as the last rays of light sink into the sea.
"Better bunk up here tonight, Doc. I don't think its gonna let up."
Jack looks at him, wondering if he's serious. He's an antagonistic bastard, hell bent on getting the best of him. And he succeeds every fucking time. Jack knows this, so he wonders where that guy is right now.
"What?" Sawyer asks, "You got a better offer? I mean, its no Hatch bunk, but its certainly the Hilton by tarp tent standards." He gestures around to the other ramshackle shelters.
Jack grins, there he is, the sarcastic sonofabitch he knows, the Sawyer he can deal with.
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Hours later, Jack wakes up to Sawyer rustling behind him. It's now fully dark and Jack can see next to nothing.
"Here." Sawyer says begrudgingly and Jack feels something soft hit his face. He reaches up with both hands and feels nothing but Sawyer's own hand. One hand clutches at his wrist while he runs the other runs over his fingertips trying to figure out what exactly he's is giving him.
It's an airplane pillow, probably the smallest one ever made. Jack smiles into the dark as he puts it under his head. Sawyer tries to pull his hand back, but Jack doesn't loosen his grip. Impulsively, he kisses his open palm.
Sawyer jerks his hand away and Jack knows he's fucked everything up. His heart breaks a little in the dark.
But then Sawyer's hands are on his face, and he can feel hot breath at his mouth seconds before Sawyer kisses him. The kiss is almost timid, but as Jack opens his mouth and envelopes Sawyer's tongue, it becomes exploratory and sensual.
Jack sits up and blindly reaches for Sawyer's waist in the black, his hands colliding with the soft flesh above his hips. Sawyer's fingers are laced behind his neck, and as he breaks the kiss momentarily, he slides his hands down Jack's shoulders and all the way down his arms. He kisses him again as he finds his belt buckle. Jack lifts Sawyers shirt over his head and quickly finds his mouth again.
As Jack leans back to lift his butt into the air and push off his pants, his head slams into something. Sawyer's hands slip behind his head as he mummers an awkward apology. One hand cradles the spot where a bump is forming, while the other feels around for whatever he hit.
It's the gun, Jack knows it before Sawyer does. But as Sawyer finds it and makes to move it out of the way, he suddenly stops. Jack can barely make him out in the moonless night. He hears him double check the safety, then through the thing out of the small doorway. He hears the whistle as the carrel catches the wind.
"Sawyer-" He starts to reprimand him, tell him anyone could find it.
"Shut up, Jack. You think too much." He says as he pulls his pants the rest of the way off.
Jack silently curses the dark. He wants to see Sawyer's pupils dilate around blue halos. Wants to see the hot flush of arousal at Sawyer's cheeks that he alone is responsible for. Especially wants to see his pained expression as he comes.
He'll have to satisfy himself with his low, breathless moans. He wonders if their barely stifled gasps and groans have made it to the ears of the other survivors. He would feel thankful that Sawyer's distanced himself so much from the group, but he's too far gone to care, at least right now.
Its not till much later, when Sawyer's breathing has grown sleepy and rhythmic, that Jack wonders if this is all some sort of grand scheme, some play that Sawyer's got all worked out. But as he drifts off, Jack knows that even if it is a con, no one is that good a salesman. Not even Sawyer.
The fault line that runs down the middle of him, from the base of his throat to the center of his abdomen, is finally still.