Part Seven
Jack dropped the final stitch into Sawyer's shoulder and snapped the thread off with the small set of scissors that had come with the sewing kit. "Done," he said. "I'll wrap your ribs as soon as we get back to the caves. Don't have the supplies here, but I didn't want to let that bullet work any deeper."
Sawyer had been pale and quiet ever since the bullet had been pulled out. Jack could see wrinkles left in the tarp where he had been clenching it in his fists. "Caves?" Sawyer asked, opening his eyes again. They had a moment alone while Sun went to fetch the mystery tea, but Sawyer was keeping his voice pitched low all the same. Jack felt his eyebrows beginning to lift.
"It's not safe here any longer," Jack said.
"Wasn't safe here to begin with," Sawyer groused, but his tone said that he was arguing more out of habit than any real dedication. He poked at the short line of stitches in his shoulder and winced. "I owe you one."
Jack reached out and pulled Sawyer's hand away from the stitches, saying, "You picked at all of your scabs when you were a kid, didn't you?"
Sawyer snorted. Under different circumstances, Jack thought that he might even have smiled. "Yeah."
"Figures." Jack straightened as he saw Sayid approaching from one side and Sun from the other. "I'll add the surgery to your tab."
The corner of Sawyer's mouth twitched up for a moment before he grew somber again. "Jack?" he asked in a voice that Jack swore sounded hesitant.
"Yeah?"
Sawyer noticed Sayid and Sun for the first time, and his expression turned hooded. "Tell you later." When a frown line appeared between Jack's eyes, Sawyer added, "If you're going to wind up thinking that I'm crazy, then I'd rather we do it without an audience."
"All right," Jack said slowly, making a note to watch Sawyer extra closely. Even with the blood loss taken into account, this didn't sound like him.
"Here," Sun said, kneeling by Sawyer's side. She handed Sawyer an airline cup filled with a brown-green liquid. "This will help you with the pain."
Sawyer grabbed the cup from Sun's hands before she even finished speaking. "Darlin', you're beautiful." He took a long drink, grimaced, and went back for another.
"It will make you sleep," Sun cautioned.
Sawyer's smile was tired but, so far as Jack could see, genuine. "That's not going to be a problem. Right now I don't feel good for much else but sleeping." He lifted his eyebrows at Jack, who wondered what the hell had happened out there on that ocean to make Sawyer so subdued now.
"Later," Jack promised. He turned back to Sayid. "Has Michael said anything?"
Sayid made a seesawing gesture with his hand. "A little. He wants to speak with you."
Jack nodded, though he made a mental note to hold that group meeting as soon as possible. "Okay." He let Sayid lead him over to where Jin and Michael still sat. They both looked better for having had the chance to sit in the shade and rehydrate, though in Michael's case that was still a relative term. He rose to his feet as soon as he saw Jack approaching. Jin rose along with him, wearing a concerned expression.
"Well?" Michael asked as soon as Jack came close. He wasn't in danger of yelling anymore, but there was a flat, grim look to his eyes that reminded Jack of his own in the mirror in the first days after losing Sarah. "We going to go find my boy, or what?"
Jack sat down on a log near the fire, hoping that by taking a seat himself he would be able to encourage Michael to do the same. Michael threw him an impatient look as he paced back and forth. "All right, Michael," Jack said. "Tell me everything that happened."
Michael did not stop packing, and his hands had begun to clench and unclench themselves into fists spasmodically. He seemed calmer, though, now that he had something to do. "Two nights ago," he said. "The same day that we launched. Sawyer caught something on the radar, so I sent off the flare. We…" Michael trailed off and sighed. "Man, we drew them right to us."
"There was no way that you could have known this would happen," Jack said gently. He waited for several moments for Michael to continue on his own before he prodded in a soft voice, "And?"
"They came on a boat," Michael said. His voice grew louder as he was distracted from his own sense of guilt by placing it back onto the deserving party. Jack heard whispers beginning to travel through the crowd behind him and ignored them all. In a few minutes it wasn't going to matter, anyway.
Michael shook his head. "We thought that we were going to be rescued. We never stood a chance."
"You thought that it was a rescue craft?" Sayid asked, stepping forward. "It was not a sailboat like your own?"
Michael shook his head. A humorless smile took his face and transformed it. Jack didn't think that it was a favorable change. "No, man. Near as I could tell, it was a fishing boat. Spotlight, gasoline powered engine, the whole works." Michael paused long enough to turn the smile into an unhealthy laugh. "I even heard a damned radio crackling in there."
A sense of cold ran down from Jack's head and all of the way into his toes. Looking at the faces of everyone close enough to hear, he see expressions there identical to the one that he was sure must be mirrored on his own face.
Michael snorted and kicked dirt into the fire. "Yeah, those Others, seems like they have all kinds of hidden talents that we didn't know about." His scuffing grew harder as Michael's voice rose towards a yell, until he was in danger of putting the fire out altogether. No one moved to stop him. "Gotta wonder, just how long have they been playing us? Since Claire was kidnapped? Since the crash?" Michael paused and snorted. "Hell, for all we know, it may even have been since before that."
"Michael, calm down," Jack said, but his voice was so overwhelmed by the rising whispers that he had to trouble even making himself heard or following the order himself, let alone issuing it to anyone else. How long?
"I'm going to get my son back," Michael told Jack, as if he had not heard him speak at all. "That is one promise that I am going to keep."
"We are all going to get him back," Jack said, and realized that he was also making a promise. "But if the Others are this sophisticated, then we're going to have to make plans in order to pull it off. The first thing that we need to do is get everyone off of this beach." Jack stood and felt Sayid's eyes following him closely. He turned back to face the waiting crowd.
"This throws the hatch into a whole new light, doesn't it?" Sayid murmured.
"Yes." Jack heard a note of resolution in his voice that had not been there a moment before. He raised it loudly enough to be heard by all. "Everyone, listen carefully. I want you to grab all of your things and head back up to the caves." A ripple ran through the crowd as if it was a living thing, unease so strong that it was nearly tangible and needed only one good spark to turn it into an outright panic. "The beach is not safe for any of us right now. I don't know when it will safe again. Grab everything that you didn't take with you the last time we went up, especially materials that can be used to make shelters outside of the main caves and alleviate crowding."
"Why?" The young woman who wore the midriff-baring top so often asked. She looked scared. She also looked, Jack noticed, just a little defiant. "I thought the only threat was the crazy French lady."
Jack caught himself glancing at the sun, the only reliable indicator of time that they had left. "I'll explain as soon as I know that everyone is safe," he said. "Right now, I just need all of you to trust me when I say that we need to get off of the beach as soon as we can."
"It's not that we don't trust you, Jack," Charlie said. He was standing at the front of the crowd, where he had thrown his arm around Claire's shoulders at the first hint of danger. Claire, for her part, had her eyes widened about as far as they could go and was clutching Aaron so tightly to her chest that he was beginning to make soft whimpering noises of protest, gearing up for a full-blown wail. "It's just that there are a lot of secrets being kept on this island, yeah? And I've yet to see any good coming out of any of them." A few cries of approval rose from the people clustered behind Charlie. "So if you want us to move again, then at the very least think that we deserve to know why before we make up our own minds."
Jack liked Charlie and on a good day could even find himself thinking of Charlie as a little brother that he never got to have, but when the enthusiastic noises of agreement behind Charlie grew even louder, there were a few seconds when Jack was very tempted to hit Charlie across the mouth. Bright sunshine or not, the beach seemed made for panic on some fundamental level that was sealed into the sand, while the caves were not. Jack had been hoping to wait until they were back in the relative cool and rationality before he was forced to scare everyone right out of their minds. Jack stopped himself from glaring in Charlie's direction only by an extreme act of will as he said, "The Others. They're real."
As Jack had expected, the blood immediately drained from the faces of everyone present, and frightened voices rose until they sounded like the rustling of leaves. For one second, Charlie looked as if Jack had struck him before his expression grew shuttered and stubborn once more. "That's impossible," he said. "Rousseau invented the Others. She took Claire's baby. She probably helped Ethan take Claire when she was still pregnant." With his expression dark and angry, the burn on his head looked more unsettling than ever. "An adventure, if you haven't forgotten, that ended with me dying."
"You were blindfolded when Claire was taken, Charlie, you don't know what happened." Jack spoke in a gentle, appeasing tone, but Charlie still back up as if Jack had spat on him.
There would be time for patching up egos later. Jack raised his voice to speak to the rest of the crowd, though he could not stop his eyes from being drawn back to Charlie's forehead again and again and again. "Jin, Michael, and Sawyer were attacked while they were out on the raft by a group of people with guns and a gasoline-powered boat." A string of gasps and frightened cries began to ring out, so Jack hurried on while he still had control. "They hurt Sawyer, they destroyed the raft, and they took Walt. I don't see how any of that could have been caused by Danielle Rousseau."
Charlie's face went dark in a way that Jack had never seen before, but the other castaways were listening to him. One of them, Jack noticed, was Claire. "We're not going to let them take Walt without a fight." Jack found that he warmed to the speech as he gave it and wondered if this was what leadership was finally meant to feel like. "But we need a safe place to plan if we're going to get him back. The caves are the closest thing that we have to that. I can't force any of you to go if you're dead-set against it. I can only remind you that we've stuck together this long because we're safer as a group than we are alone."
A man that Jack dimly remembered as being named Larry nudged his way to the front of the group. "You said that these 'Others'-" He made a face as he spoke, the way that he would while saying 'vampire' or 'bogey man'. "You said that they attacked from a ship with a gasoline engine?"
"Yeah, I did," Jack said, not entirely certain where Larry was going with this.
"Don't boats like that usually have radios?" Larry's eyes began to gleam with hope that he was hardly managing to keep contained. The heads of everyone around him began to swivel, many of them wearing the exact same expression. "So, if we do fight the Others, and we manage to beat them or at last steal one of their boats, then we might be able to go home."
"Yes." Jack had not even thought of it until that point. The word tasted sweet on his tongue, and he wanted to say it again. "Michael heard something that crackled like a radio from inside the Others' ship. Yeah, I think it's definitely possible."
The glowing look was traveling from person to person like contagion, and Jack was sure that it was also reflected on his own. Only Sayid, he noticed, was not sharing the expression, maintaining instead hooded eyes and a carefully blank face. Within seconds, the energy of the mob had transformed from a state tiptoeing towards panic and into a pure and brilliant joy. Jack thought that the villagers who chased after Frankenstein with their pitchforks and their torches had felt something like this, and if they did?
'Let them come,' Jack caught himself thinking. 'If the monster in this movie is the kind that looks normal but steals away little kids, then plans be damned and let them come.' He realized that he was close to grinning on the giddy high of revelation. Jack did his best to ignore the solemn way that Sayid was regarding them all.
"Fuck," Larry said in an awed tone, managing to turn the obscenity into something nearly spiritual. "We could go home." He shook his head quickly, as if he needed to remind himself to come back to reality again before he could make the story come true. "If we can fight better from the caves, then let's go to the caves. I don't know who these people are, but I'm sick of letting them our next moves for us."
Larry and several of the other castaways glanced towards Claire then, their most visible symbol of what had happened the last time that they had allowed themselves to be fearful and passive. For her part, Charlie had her hand pressed to her temple and her eyes pressed shut against the light, as if it was hurting her. Aaron began to make the soft whimpering noises of a baby working his way up to a full-blown wail, but his mother's hand did not find its way down into the sling to soothe him.
Jack had just started towards her, concerned, when Claire opened her eyes again. Little by little, the lines of pain began to smooth themselves out. "I agree," she said, looking towards Larry. "I want to go up to the caves, too."
Charlie stared at her as if she had slapped him. "You're believing this?"
"You've wanted me to move back up the caves for ages, Charlie," Claire said in a conciliatory tone that Jack could see beginning to work on Charlie within seconds in spite of his best efforts to resist it. She noticed that Aaron was beginning to fuss and lifted him up into her arms. He quieted immediately, stuffed his fist into his mouth, and goggled at them all. "I don't want him to grow up here. I don't want him to grow up somewhere where he could be hunted for his whole life."
Charlie took a deep breath, huffed it out, and nodded. "All right," he acquiesced, but still did not look pleased.
Jack clapped his hands together to draw everyone's attention back onto him. If they could find a way to preserve the glow that he saw on all of their faces, he thought, then they would never need their homemade torches again.
If this went well, if they managed what the thing that Jack was not allowing himself to think about directly from a primitive fear of jinxing it, then they would not need their homemade torches for much longer, anyway.
"Take everything that you can carry," Jack said. "Not just the things that you'll need immediately. We could be staying up there for a while." He waited until everyone had scattered back to their shelters to begin packing before he walked back over to Sawyer. Sayid's eyes were heavy and intent upon the side of his face. "Will you help me get Sawyer back to the caves?" he asked. "We can come back for his things later."
Sayid nodded and bent with Jack to slide his arms beneath Sawyer's back. Sawyer hardly stirred as he was lifted to his feet, his own exhaustion and Sun's concoction doing their work well. Jack made a mental note to ask her what she had put into it, so that he could preserve the heavy sedatives for as long as possible. Emergencies were certain to arise, now that they had committed themselves to staying on the wide-eyed no longer.
Sayid waited for the silence between them to become heavy and pregnant enough to almost be a physical thing before he said, "What you are urging them towards is open warfare."
Jack looked over Sawyer's lowered head so that he could meet Sayid's gaze. Sayid's face was smooth, his eyes as dark and unreadable as they had been moments before, but Jack still thought that his next words would be the ones that sealed or shattered loyalty between them.
'I didn't ask for this,' he wanted to say, even though he knew that it was only an excuse. Asked for or not, this was his situation. It was long past the time that he began to explore these new boundaries and find out if he was really worthy of them.
"We didn't ask for this," Jack said finally, which was at least marginally better. Sawyer made a soft, pained sound without actually waking up, and Jack shifted him into a more comfortable position without fully registering what he was doing. "Do you think that we're doing the wrong thing?"
Sayid paused and looked pained. "We have come to a place where all of our other choices are worse," he said. "But listen to me on this, Jack: do not relish it, and do everything that you can to stop them from enjoying it, also."
'I will,' Jack thought, surprised to hear himself saying instead, "I'll need your help."
Even though the pained look deepened, Sayid nodded. "Then you have it."
"Thank you." As they carried Sawyer up the path to the caves, Jack thought that, no, there was no part of him that would enjoy it. If it returned a child to his father, though, and gave them another chance-their best and possibly their final chance-to see civilization again? Then there was definitely a part of Jack, frustrated and tired and strung out to his limit by the need to be watchful, that would not mind.
End Part Seven
