Part Nine
Sawyer knew, in a part of his brain that was at present only capable of sending out the weakest and most static-filled of signals, that he was back at the caves, that he had been carried there by Jack and Sayid, and that it was long past time that he woke up so that he could tell Jack about what he had seen. He knew that horror movies and ghost stories didn't come true, that it was time to go back to the real world. He knew this.
But that part of Sawyer's mind was far away and still in shock over all the reality-bending and physics-defying things that it had already been forced to deal with over the past few days. In the meantime, he was facing wonders.
Sawyer and that Metro kid had never really stopped to chat, outside of that one time that Sawyer had berated him for being a damned stinking thief as he was kicking his ass for him, so he didn't really see why he and the puppy should be having a tete a tete now. It was that more than any other, that made the bits of himself struggling so hard to hang onto rationality want to dismiss the whole mess as a hallucination. There were many fine things that Sawyer would have liked to see acting as a salve for his battered subconscious right about then, ranging from a bottle of really good bottle of Jack Daniels to Kate with enough of the Jack already in her to ease away those lines of anxiety that seemed to radiate from her at every moment of every day, but the Martha Stewart castoff was not one of them.
And yet, there he was, just as big as a Dallas Saturday night and almost as bloody. Sawyer's eyes were drawn inexorably towards the bloody wound on Boone's chest, where shards of his own ribcage gleamed like maggots. This was only in the seconds that he couldn't spare for Boone's leg, where the angle was one never meant to be visited upon a human bone. Sawyer didn't see how the kid was managing to stay so placid and still when such a fundamental wrongness had been visited onto a major limb, and he damned sure didn't want to stick around long enough to see what would happen when Boone tried to get up and walk away.
"So you've gotten your eyeful," Boone said, a disgruntled expression moving across his face. One side of it was entirely caked over with blood. 'I shouldn't know these things,' Sawyer thought, 'because I never saw the body.' 'That don't mean a thing. The whole camp was gossiping about it. You've been reading too much, got your imagination all revved up in the meanwhile, and off we go.' 'But I didn't see it.' Sawyer really hoped that both of those voices were originating from inside his head. "Now, you want to sit down so that we can get on with this?"
Boone gestured to an unoccupied log on the other side of a fire so large and golden that it resembled something from a child's storybook more than anything that they had managed to build on the island. Boone himself was sprawled out on the ground, his good leg tucked beneath him while the bad one was extended straight ahead. The expression on his face was that of an increasingly annoyed boy king. All of that blood enhanced the impression, somehow, rather than detracting from it.
"I think I'll stand," Sawyer said in a hoarse voice, looking around. They were deep in a patch of jungle that he had couldn't remember ever seeing before, though when the size of the island was really taken into account he supposed that didn't mean much. When he sniffed at the air, he thought that he detected a very faint trace of motor oil. Chalk that up as one more wrong thing on a very long list of them, a list that began and ended with the fact that he was standing in the middle of nowhere and holding a civil conversation with a zombie, or a ghost, or…
'A hallucination,' Sawyer told himself firmly, 'and not a damned thing more than that. You're about two steps away from slipping around that bend for good, old hoss, so might ought to think about digging in those heels now.' He started to surreptitiously scan the trees for the break in the painting, the outline of the door that would take him back to the real world. For all of the problems that they were having there, at least the dead did not sit up and start talking. At the very least, give him the zipper down the monster's back that would let him know that none of this was real.
Boone shrugged and began fiddling with a patch of moss growing by his side. "Your manners are your business, man. I just thought that you might not want to be standing when you heard this news."
Forgetting for the moment the insanity which had to be close if he was actually going to talk to a figment of his imagination, Sawyer took a step forward. Anger and fear pricked parallel lines down his spine, and he imagined that if he were a cat his tail would be fluffed out larger than a bottlebrush while he hissed for everything that he was worth. "What news? What the hell are you talking about?" Sawyer realized what he was doing and tipped his head back to stare at the not-there-because-I'm-hallucinating-my-way-through-blood-loss canopy. "I'm arguing with Casper the Abercrombie Zombie." A beat later, "I'm arguing with my own pathology."
Boone smiled and continued toying with the moss. Sawyer saw that one of his fingers had been badly broken and the nail torn away, as if he had been scrambling for a grip on something and missed. Boone picked up a piece of the moss and threw it in the direction of Sawyer's ankle, the one that still burned and itched in turn for reasons that he could almost, but not quite, remember. "You were chosen." Boone flashed his eyes comically wide so that he could intone in a portentous voice, "You are the Chosen One." Much as Sawyer thought that he might have liked this version of Boone now that death had apparently removed the stick from up his ass, he was of half a mind to snap at him to stop quoting syndicated teenaged shows and come up with his own lines, before he reminded himself abruptly that none of this was real.
"We're imitating bad fantasy novels now. That's great, it really is." Boone continued to smile the eerie grin at Sawyer, making him falter for a moment before he was able to speak. Boone's tongue protruded from his lips for a moment, letting Sawyer see that it had turned completely black. Sawyer sketched out a salute and stepped backwards. "Find another Frodo, buddy. I don't know what this is about, but I already know that I don't want to play." He turned to walk away, unsure of where the door leading out of the rabbit hole was located but determined to find it all the same.
"You took one." An invisible hand pushed a needle into Sawyer's spine, filling it with ice. He turned slowly to see that Boone had gone back to playing with the moss, lifting his hand now and again so that he could examine his finger as if it were something interesting that he had found in a Petri dish. He looked up when he realized that Sawyer was staring at him. "Did you really think that you could get away without giving one back?"
"What?" Sawyer asked, his voice hardly rising above a whisper. He felt all of the blood draining away from his face.
Boone looked back at him, calm and blank, and went back to his fiddling. Sawyer did not remember giving his legs the order to move, but a second later they were doing exactly that. He lunged around the fire and didn't even feel the heat. Another thing that he didn't feel: so much as a twinge of pain fro either of his wounds. As if he needed any other signs to tell him that there was something severely fucked-up in the state of Denmark. "What do you think you're talking about, boy?" He wasn't thinking of Australia; he would not allow himself to think about Australia. What he could think about was how satisfying it would be to put his hands around the Boone-thing's neck and throttle those words right past his lips. See what happened to hallucinations or whatever the good hell he was dealing with when you took their air away from them.
The cracking of a twig beneath someone's foot stopped him where he stood within a span of heartbeats, the sound of it somehow managing to echo and reecho until it could be compared to a gunshot. Sawyer would wonder later if he had really stopped because his attention had been drawn by the sound that should not have been nearly so loud, or if he had stopped because she had wanted him to stop, if she had been in control of it all from the very beginning.
Sawyer turned his head and watched a woman-a girl-some indeterminate mix of the two-come striding calmly out of the trees towards him. She could have been anywhere from fourteen to thirty-four, Sawyer realized, and he would not have been able to tell. Her face was as smooth and gleaming as an egg or a cheap doll, lacking even the few distinguishing marks that would have made her beautiful or ugly. Sawyer felt a shiver running up his spine, looking at that thing. He glanced back and saw that Boone was watching her with a smile of bitter recognition on his face.
"Hello, Sawyer," the female said, pushing a few strands of dark hair that reminded Sawyer for a moment of Kate away from her face. He single unique feature, eyes the color of the sky on days when it was too hot for even the birds to move, gleamed for a moment with their own light.
"Well, hello there, princess," Sawyer answered back. Dream or hallucination or something in between, Sawyer wished that he had a cigarette. Never mind that he had torn through his last pack nearly a month previously. "It seems to me that I'm being offered a job here. You'll have to forgive me if I regretfully decline, though. Problems with authority, all of the old clichés."
"Not a job," the nameless female thing said, shaking her head so that her hair rippled across her shoulders and made Sawyer think for a moment of Medusa with her snakes. "Think of it more as a chance to repay a debt."
Sawyer once again felt his body go hot and cold by turns. He jerked backwards until he felt the press of bark against his back, even though the female thing was still several feet away. "You don't know a single goddamned thing about me," he whispered.
She glided closer, moving so smoothly that Sawyer wasn't sure if he had seen her legs scissoring back and forth at all, and Sawyer realized that his ability to move had been completely taken from him. The female thing, with those blue eyes that looked like bleach had been poured across the iris and turned Sawyer's own into drugstore baubles, came to Sawyer's side and pressed her lips tightly against the curve of his ear. It was the coldest kiss that Sawyer had ever received, and as he flinched away he heard her say, in a voice completely devoid of any human intonation, "Has it come back around yet?"
Sawyer lurched straight up on the pallet that he had been placed on, staring into darkness so thick that it was a living thing and feeling twin lines of fire opening up on his shoulder and his side. He heaved great gasps of air as sweat broke out all across his body, turning cold in an instant in the dense, humid air of the caves.
"Sawyer?" a voice asked, colored with a concern that Sawyer was in no condition to even make note of. There was a rustling off to his left, a female shape in the shadows that Sawyer could almost recognize, and then a pair of hands gripping at his shoulders and taking extra care of the wounded one. Slipping about in sweat as they were, to him they felt as cold as ice. He yelled something unintelligible and jerked away.
"Sawyer, Sawyer, easy, it's just me, Jesus-" It was not until a not of panic entered her voice and she turned her head to yell for Jack that Sawyer recognized her.
He fell back against the pallet, gasping, and asked, "Kate?"
End Part Nine
