Part Six

Sun ran at a dead sprint all the way up the path back to the caves, ignoring the burning in her chest and the cramp that was trying to get started in her left calf. The temptation to stray off the path and find a shorter route was strong, becoming stronger the more exhausted that she became. Only the fear of becoming lost and wasting time kept her going in a straight line…and, for a moment, there was a part that was purely fear.

The Others were real. They had taken Michael's child. That meant that no one was safe traveling alone. If everything that Jin told her was true, then no one was safe at all.

'Do not think of this now,' Sun told herself, realizing that she had unconsciously begun to slow down. She forced herself back up to a sprint. 'Do not let it distract you. There will be time for fear later.' She put her hand against her side as a cramp knifed through the flesh. She should have taken the opportunity to visit a gym more often when physical fitness had still been a luxury.

The toe of Sun's sneaker caught at a loose rock just as she came back within sight of the caves, dragging her feet out from under her like a riptide. She would have fallen hard if a pair of hands had not appeared from out of nowhere to catch her. Still thinking about the Others, Sun screamed and slapped the hands away before she could shake the hair out of her eyes to see who her rescuer was. She was released quickly, almost in a panic, as soon as she caught her balance again.

Sun flipped her hair back from her eyes and put her hand against her chest, where she could feel her heart pounding so hard that it felt as if she was going to break her sternum. She looked up and realized that the person who had scared her so badly while trying to rescue her had been none other than Hurley. He was wearing an expression suggesting that Sun had scared him nearly as badly as he had frightened her.

"Bad time?" Hurley asked, holding his hands up in the universal gesture for surrender.

Sun shook her head. "No, I'm sorry. You only frightened me." Realizing that the more time she spent talking to Hurley meant the longer that Jack had to wait before he could begin his job, Sun ignored the aching in her calves and thighs and trotted the final few yards into the caves. Hurley followed closely behind her.

"Is something wrong?" he asked when Sun headed without hesitation to the side cave that Jack had set up as his infirmary. Finding the battered leather pack that Jack had been using as his medical bag since the crash, Sun peeked inside only long enough to make sure that the sewing kit and the knife were inside before she began ransacking the drawers of the snack cart. She felt rather than saw Hurley at her back.

"Dude, something is definitely wrong," he finally answered his own question in a low voice, sounding as if he might be sick.

Sun found the last few bottles of alcohol exactly where Jack had said they would be. It was a pitifully small collection. She wrapped the bottles hurriedly in a spare tee shirt so that they would not break and shoved them deep into the pack before she began looking for the antibiotics.

"There was an accident," Sun called over her shoulder as eh pulled all of the medicine bottles from the top drawer and lined them up in a row along the top of the cart. "Keflex," she breathed when she found it, and threw it into the bag. Pausing to scrutinize the labels, she tossed several more in after it.

"Um, so, when you say accident?" Hurley asked. Sun turned to look at him. He made quotation marks with his fingers. "You say it like…'accident'."

"Jin and Sawyer are back, but Sawyer is hurt. Jack is trying to help him now." Sun hesitated, aware that her actions had begun to draw a crowd and that what she was about to say could very well cause a panicked chain reaction. She leaned forward and lowered her voice. "The Others are the ones who wounded Sawyer."

"God in heaven," Hurley muttered beneath his breath. He went on, in a faux-bright tone that fooled nobody, "Well, that just makes the whole thing better."

Sun settled the pack across her shoulders. "I must go," she said. "Please try to keep everyone near the caves."

"Someone should go with you," Hurley said quickly.

Sun hesitated, thinking of the concrete proof she had been given that the Others existed and how dangerous it was going to be for her to run back down that path alone. She took a deep breath and blew it out before shaking her head. "No. I can travel more quickly if I go alone." She leaned over, massaged her calves for a few seconds, and jogged back out into the sunlight.

Sun could not sprint back to the beach as she had on her way to the caves, but she did her best. She breathed through her nose, pushed all of the fear that she could from her mind, and forced her aching legs to keep her moving. 'It does not matter that you are not an athlete,' Sun told herself, finding that her thoughts had begun to move in rhythm to her pounding feet. 'You have a job that you must do.'

When a second shadowy figure jumped onto the path in front of Sun, she no longer even had the breath to scream. Her mouth fell open, and the faint squeak that she was able to manage was quickly muffled beneath the weight of a warm, callused hand. Sun pushed it aside, her eyes wide as she recognized the owner. "Michael?" she whispered.

His eyes were wide, almost panicky. When several seconds went by without an answer, Sun was no longer certain that Michael was even hearing her. His lips were cracked, and his skin was shining but virtually sweat-free in spite of the fact that the jungle was sweltering. Sun's free hand came up to cover her mouth again.

"They took Walt," Michael said in a low, grim voice. His body vibrated with a contained violence that Sun had never seen more than hints of before. "Those sons of bitches took my boy."

Sun looked him up and down and wondered how he was even managing to stay on his feet. "Jack is this way," she said finally, taking Michael by the hand and pulling him down the path with her.

---

"She should be back by now," Jack muttered, crouching by Sawyer's side on the tarp that had been set up as an impromptu operating table outside of Sawyer's tent. The light inside had been too dim for what Jack needed to do. He looked across the crowd, to where Shannon was keeping Jin seated through an exaggerated series of gestures and was rising to her feet every few seconds to peer anxiously into the pot of water. Apparently no one had every explained the old wives tale to her.

Though the same could probably also be said for watched jungles. Jack sighed, muttered a creative string of oaths beneath his breath, and turned away. He pushed back a few strands of hair sticking to the sweat that glistened on Sawyer's face, causing Sawyer to open his eyes and look at him. Jack had not even realized that Sawyer was still conscious, so unused was he to a Sawyer that didn't take the opportunity to run his mouth.

"You got quite a mouth on you there, Doc," Sawyer said in a low, tired voice. "What would the ladies think if they knew?"

"It seems to work just fine for you," Jack said. That same lock of hair was trying to creep down into Sawyer's eyes again. Jack moved to push it back one more time, unsure of what he was doing even as he was doing it.

Sawyer made an irritated noise and made as if to shove Jack's arm away, used the wrong hand to do so, and had to let it fall back to the tarp with a quickly drawn hiss of pain. Jack put his hand on Sawyer's arm to keep it still. "Hey. I told you to quit moving."

"When we both know that ain't going to happen until the day I die." Sawyer's eyes were open again, fixing him with that criminally blue stare. Jack thought that he even sounded afraid. It was a long way from the man who had tried to goad Jack into letting him bleed out across the jungle floor.

"You're not going to die today," Jack said, speaking to soothe himself as much as Sawyer. "Neither wound looks infected yet. You've lost a lot of blood and you're going to feel like hell until you build up more-"

"No stranger to that," Sawyer muttered. Jack ignored him.

"But you're not going to die," Jack finished. "Once I take that bullet out you'll be just fine. Even have a couple of new scars to impress those ladies."

Sawyer's eyelids had been slipping downwards again while Jack spoke, but as soon as he mentioned taking the bullet out his eyes flew open again. "Goddamnit," he groaned. "Sorry, Jack, but you and me? We don't have such a great history with knives."

Because they were both exhausted and one of them had far less blood in his body than he actually needed, Jack decided that he was going to let that one slide, too. "I'll be as quick and gentle as I can," he promised. "Someone was looking out for you, Sawyer. When the first bullet struck your shoulder, it looks like it probably spun you off to the side. The second bullet broke a few of your ribs, but it didn't go deep enough to pierce any organs."

Sawyer snorted out a laugh and then winced a second later. "Yeah, someone's definitely got their eye on me. You have got to be the most stubborn optimist that I have ever met."

"If that bullet had gone straight into your abdomen, you and I would not be having this conversation right now," Jack said, hearing his voice for a moment growing sharp. Sawyer looked at him. Jack sighed and, picking up the water bottle that had been brought to him on request a few minutes earlier, unscrewed the cap. Sawyer grabbed the bottle away with his good hand before Jack could help him sit up.

"Thanks, but if we get much closer I'm going to expect dinner and a movie."

Jack let the bottle be pulled from his fingers, deciding that he had too much going on at once to ponder Sawyer's eccentricities. "Don't gulp at that," he warned instead. "Just-"

"Sip at it," Sawyer finished for him. He took a drink, clearly having to fight in order to obey his own words. "The last samurai and I already went through that puppet show."

"Convalescence will not affect your charm, I can already tell," Jack muttered. It earned him a soft and quickly aborted laugh as he leaned forward to look at Sawyer's shoulder again.

"That stopped bleeding hours ago," Sawyer muttered. He shifted and winced as he tried to find a more comfortable position. "I wouldn't have any left if the damned thing hadn't."

"Let me do my job, okay?" Sawyer flinched for a moment as Jack's fingers probed around the edges of the wound. Jack tried to be more gentle, until his fingers were moving so lightly that he wasn't sure that Sawyer could feel him at all. "I haven't been going through your tent and trading out suntan lotion for extra mangos, have I?"

Sawyer sketched out a different kind of salute than the one that Jack had frankly been expecting and did not speak again. Jack was wondering whether or not he should apologize, and also just where in the hell that impulse had come from, when he glanced up in time to see a pair of figures come running off the path. A pair, when he was pretty sure that he had only sent the one.

Jack rose to his feet before his brain had a chance to catch up with the rest of him. "Stay here," he said quickly, and "Shut up," when Sawyer snickered. He sprinted towards the pair as they ran towards him, easily outdistancing the crowd.

Sun was clenching Michael's fingers in one hand a cluster of freshly picked plants in the other; she must have paused by her garden along the way. Her knuckles were the color of pearls and green juice was winding down her fingers.

"Jack!" Sun called as soon as she caught sight of him. Her face was the color of bleached linen and there were two points of color high up on her cheeks.

Jack counted all of the symptoms of dehydration on Michael before they came within five yards of each other. "Shannon!" he turned his head to yell over his shoulder. She paused in taking the water from Jin and handing him the juice and looked up. "You have a new patient."

Shannon's eyes widened as she took in Michael's appearance. To her credit, however, she did not so much as turn her head in the direction of the whispers beginning to float through the crowd commenting on Michael's sudden arrival…and on why Walt was not with him. "Come on," Shannon said in a voice that was probably meant to be soothing. To Jack's ears, she mostly sounded scared. "There's juice and other stuff this way."

"I don't want the juice," Michael told Shannon in a voice that was much calmer than his face would have suggested. He put his hand on Shannon's and pulled it away from his arm.

Jack felt a tightening in his chest before Michael spoke again, or even glanced in his direction. It was a movement on the air, a ripple of tension that everyone could feel. "They took Walt," he told Jack. "The Others." Sayid had joined their party by this point, and his expression was one of perfect, sick dismay. "They blew up the raft, and they took him. Sawyer and Jin-"

"Are right here," Jack cut in. He gestured to where Sawyer was lying on the tarp, good arm thrown over his eyes to shield them from the sun, and to where Jin was toying with his juice and watching the conversation with concerned eyes. "Now, you're dehydrated-"

Michael stared at him, not as if Jack had stopped speaking English without warning, but as if Michael wished that he had. "What?" he managed after a long pause. "Man, I do not care if I am dehydrated, all right?" He took a step back, his voice rising. "I don't care if I turned into a damned raisin, those bastards took my boy and I am going to have him back!"

"Lower your voice," Jack said. He could feel Sawyer's eyes burning against the side of his face, but now was not the time to step over for a consult. "Before you terrify everyone." Michael opened his mouth. "You don't care. That's going to be a theme." Jack glanced towards Sawyer again and then stepped closer to Michael, who was on the verge of tears. "We will find him, okay? We will bring him home." Jack paused for only a second before he found himself uttering the words that a doctor was never supposed to say. "I promise. But we have to organize and think this through first so that we don't lose anyone else, and right now? That means taking care of the three of you." Jack waited for Michael to nod, though it came reluctantly and Jack was still half-convinced that Michael was going to bolt off into the jungle as soon as everyone took their eyes off of him. He touched Michael on the shoulder and called it a victory when Michael did not shrug him away. "Shannon will take care of you."

Michael heaved a sigh that sounded as if it hurt him, but nodded and allowed Shannon to lead him away. Jack watched from a distance as Shannon sat him down, handed him a cup of juice, and administered instructions on how to drink it. Jin brought his head close to Michael's in order to speak to him.

"Here," Sun said, pulling the backpack off of her shoulders and handing it to Jack. "I found everything that you asked for."

Jack took the pack and nodded towards the leaves that Sun was holding tightly enough to turn into a pulp in her hands. "And those?"

"Oh." Sun seemed to remember for the first time that she was still carrying them at all. She squared her shoulders and looked back up at Jack. "I am going to make a tea for him," she announced. "For the pain. It will not be strong enough for…for when you have to take it out, but it may help Sawyer sleep afterwards."

"That will be great." Jack opened up the backpack and looked inside. Sun had not only brought him the sewing kit, knife, and antibiotics that he had asked for, but also several other bottles as well. "Someday soon, you an I need to sit down and have a talk about how you know all of this."

Sun's smile was soft and filled with pride, even though it was soon eclipsed by tension and worry again. "A great deal of spare time for hobbies," she said, "and a talent for growing things."

"Good enough." Jack closed the bag and slung it over his shoulder. "Do me a favor, bring the water over?"

Sayid gave him a scrutinizing look as Jack turned back towards Sawyer. "We will have to tell the rest of the camp about the Others eventually."

Jack made note of the 'we', and he was soothed by it. "I know," he said. "But I have to do my job first."

"Jack," Sayid said gently. "Leading is your job."

Jack paused and stared for a moment as Sun hurried over with the pan of water. "I'll need your help with Sawyer," he said.

Sawyer opened his eyes when he felt the tarp shifting around him. "Hell," he said. "I'm just drawing all kinds of crowds today, aren't I?"

"It's your talent," Jack answered in a soothing tone. "You're never going to stop being mouthy, are you?"

"Not until I'm dead," Sawyer answered back. He saw the knife that Jack was pulling out of his bag and took a deep breath, visibly steeling himself. "And on this island, I don't think that even that's a guarantee."

Jack frowned and even opened his mouth to ask what that was all about before he realized that they were wasting time. "Here," he said, taking the Keflex from his bag and shaking two of them out into his palm. "These should look familiar to you."

"Second verse, same as the first," Sawyer said, and swallowed the pills along with a drink of water. Glib tone aside, Jack could still see how tense that he was. It was going to get worse before it got better, unfortunately.

Jack sanitized the knife in the water and then doused both his hands and Sawyer's wound with the remaining alcohol. "Hold on," he told Sawyer. "We're almost done, but this is the bad part." He took a deep breath, sent out a silent prayer to a deity that he had never named to keep his hands steady, and began to cut.

Blood loss or not, when Jack found the bullet at last, it took Sun at Sawyer's shoulders and Sayid at his feet to hold him down.

End Part Six