Part Twelve
Jack was not used to waking up slowly. On more than one occasion he had skipped the waking up part altogether, having worked all the way through the night on one problem or another. When he did find time for rest, he generally snapped back from it wide-awake from one second to the next, already looking for the next problem. So, no, he was not the sort to laze about and watch Sunday mornings turn into Sunday afternoons.
Jack opened his eyes and stared up at the roof of the cave, becoming confused when it was not the same pattern of rock that he had been staring up at for nearly a month. A bit more of the fog lifted from his brain as Jack realized that the sunlight curling into the cave was a far richer butter-yellow than the one that normally greeted him when he woke up. "What time is it?" Jack muttered to no one in particular, sitting up to rub at his eyes. When his elbow impacted warm flesh, he froze. The lingering feeling of waking up slowly vanished before it had time to really begin.
As soon as Jack touched him, Sawyer lurched straight up on his pallet, wide-eyed and panting. He put his hand to his side as soon as he was fully awake and the pain caught up with him and spit out a string of obscenities so long and garbled that Jack could only make out one word out of every three. Few of them were flattering. Jack felt his eyebrows crawling up towards his hairline.
"Um," Jack tried, putting his hand against Sawyer's shoulder to steady him before he pulled the stitches out all over again. He didn't have a lot of experience with one night stands. It was possible that there was a skill to this.
Sawyer shot him a look filled through and through with poison, though Jack wasn't sure that the hate had anything to do with him. "Fucking blue-eyed bitch," Sawyer muttered, dragging his hand through his hair, and Jack's eyebrows climbed even higher. Not once, he noted, did Sawyer make any move to twitch Jack's hand away.
"Pleasant dreams?" Jack asked, mostly for the sake of having something to say. While he felt more rested than he could remember in weeks, Sawyer had deep circles painted beneath his eyes and small indentations worn into the flesh of his lower lip, as if in his sleep he had been chewing at it.
Sawyer threw another glare Jack's way, and this time he could be sure that he was actually the intended target. "Like a lamb," Sawyer snapped, seeming to realize that Jack's hand was on him for the first time. He carefully removed it from his shoulder, pressing his thumb directly into Jack's palm for a moment. Jack curled his fingers around Sawyer's wrist and felt the blood rushing beneath the surface. His skin warmed. 'Really not good at one night stands.'
"Oh, Jesus," Sawyer said, noting the way that Jack was looking at him. There was still a faintly glazed look to his eyes, as if he was still looking for something to fight and Jack just happened to be the best thing available. "This isn't the part where we question our sexuality and talk about our feelings, is it? End it all with a manly hug?"
The blood that had been pooling in Jack's hand and, to be fair, a few other places fast-tracked its way into his face. "No," he said, pulling his hand away from Sawyer's grasp. "This is the part where I thank you for being a good lay and get the next dose of your antibiotics." Jack tipped an imaginary hat in Sawyer's direction and made as if to get up to his feet.
Sawyer looked briefly shocked, then grinned. He leaned back against the pallet and rubbed his hand over his face. "Damn, Doc. Never figured you for the love 'em and leave 'em type. Guess I learn something new every day."
"Guess we both did." Sawyer's eyebrows quirked upwards, but he let the opportunity for color commentary pass. Jack stood and, placing his hands into the small of his back, arched to relieve some of the ache put there by the cave floor. "In case you haven't noticed, Sawyer, you tend to take people's better instincts from them and hide them wherever you keep all the rest of your stash."
"Yeah, but you didn't seem to have much trouble finding that," Sawyer grumbled. He rubbed his hand over his face again, pulling an expression as if he found something disgusting there that he could not quite rid himself of.
"Did you sleep all right?" Jack asked, mentally giving himself a kick. When Sawyer looked up at him, he clarified, "You kicked me several times last night."
Sawyer grimaced. "That crap Sun gave me after you were done playing Operation. It's been giving me dreams." Jack's eyebrows pulled together in a concerned line, but Sawyer was fishing around for his shirt and did not see it. "Sorry," Sawyer said at long last and in a grudging tone of voice. He found a shirt and slipped into it, looking up at long last so that he could give Jack a smile too angelic and winsome to be real. "If it helps your ego any, you weren't so terrible yourself."
"Thanks." Jack snorted. "You're a darling. How are you feeling this morning, anyway?"
"Like I got shot and then run over by a boat, what do you think?" Sawyer groused. He noted the way that Jack was looking at him and sighed. "Just be liberal with the aspirin, all right?" Sawyer finished buttoning up his shirt and looked around the cave again. His eyes lit up when he saw his boots.
"Oh, no, you're not going to go moving around for at least a day or two," Jack said. He reached out with his foot and pushed Sawyer's boots out of reach. "Not until you're caught up on blood and sleep." Sawyer gave him a stubborn look, but before he could snap something back they both heard a feminine voice calling Sawyer's and Jack's names.
"Sawyer, is Jack in here?" Kate appeared in the doorway of the infirmary cave and flushed a deep scarlet, ducking her head and stepping partway out again. "Sorry, I didn't think that I was…interrupting anything."
Jack realized after a moment's confusion what it was that Kate meant. Of the two of them, the one currently shirtless was not the one that Kate had probably expected. Sawyer smirked and, after a moment of rummaging around behind him, came up with Jack's tee shirt. He threw it towards Jack and then leaned over, wincing and muttering obscenities beneath his breath, to hike up the leg of his jeans and look at his ankle. Jack saw a frown line flicker between Sawyer's eyes, but he really wasn't interested at the moment. He quickly pulled his shirt back over his head. "Kate, I-"
She waved her hand at him. "None of my business, Jack, really. I should have knocked on the…rock, or something." The blood had still not drained away from Kate's face, but now that the shock was wearing off Jack could see a deep well of hurt coming up to take its place.
Jack looked to Sawyer for help, hoping against hope that he would use that tongue of his for good rather than evil for once. Sawyer, however, was engrossed in whatever it was hat he had found on his ankle. By craning his neck, Jack was able to see a ring of dark purple bruises circling the skin. Given that the rest of Sawyer's body was peppered with similar marks, Jack did not see what it was about this particular set that warranted the intent, almost hungry expression on Sawyer's face. Seeing that no aid was going to come from that quarter, Jack turned back to Kate. "I'm sorry, I don't think that either one of us planned for this."
Kate barked out a laugh, still wearing an expression that did not know whether shock, anger, or hurt was supposed to dominant. "Okay, I don't even know which 'either of us' is being addressed here." She shook her head, rubbed at her eyes, and went through a half-dozen other different fidgeting rituals as she tried to get her composure back. Jack, unsure of what he was supposed to do when she had so clearly spoken the truth, remained quiet so that he could give her at least that much. There had been a tension running between all three of them since the very first days after the crash, first with Kate standing at the apex but then gradually shifting until, looking back now, Jack realized that it had been weeks since any of them had been the single dominant object of desire.
When viewed in that light, the whole 'one night stand' plan seemed less likely to work by the second, and not least because being trapped on an island didn't leave any of them with a lot of places to run to.
"And no one here owes anyone anything," Kate continued. "Except that now maybe you and Sawyer owe each other something-" She shut her mouth with an abrupt clacking sound. "There's no way to end this conversation gracefully, so I think I'll cut my losses and just end it."
"You're getting yourself awful worked up over nothing there, Freckles," Sawyer said, smoothing the leg of his jeans back down. All of the blood seemed to have evacuated from his face. Jack thought that he was speaking from a script that he only half remembered or understood. "Much as I get a kick out of seeing you blushing so pretty, ol' Doc here was just doing his duty and checking on his patient." Sawyer rolled his shoulder and winced when the motion was too much. It pulled some animation back into his face, and for that Jack was glad. Sawyer was still wearing an expression around his eyes as if he had been struck hard with a two by four seconds before and still wasn't entirely sure what he meant to do about it. "Making sure I don't die as soon as I get off the operating table."
Kate's face softened; she still looked as if there were about a thousand other places on the planet that she would rather be in that moment, many of them filled with lava. "You're a good liar, Sawyer," she said, "but you're off your game today." She tried to smile at Jack and he saw that, though she might be a liar accomplished enough to put all of the rest of them to shame, Sawyer was not the only one having a bad day. The way that she reached for his hand and squeezed it still felt genuine. "Take care of yourself, Jack."
Sawyer had pulled Jack's pack over to him in the background and was digging through it, presumably for the aspirin. "Don't poison yourself," Jack told him, and was given a nonchalant middle finger in return. There was still a tightness in the planes of Sawyer's face that made Jack think of an actor soldiering on in spite of the fact that his role had long since ceased to amuse him, and he thought that if there had been any alcohol left in the pack Sawyer would not have bothered with the aspirin at all.
Something in Jack's tone must have betrayed him, because Kate's entire face froze, turning her into someone else entirely. To avoid the awkward silence that seemed determined to stalk up on them whether they liked it or not, Jack asked her gently, "You were looking for me?"
Kate startled hard and clapped her hand over her mouth, a look of pure horror crossing her features. The last shred of something nice, maybe even something normal, fled the cave with its tail between its legs. Even though he could not predict her exact words, Jack was sure that whatever Kate was going to say next would make sure that the normalcy did not come back for a good long time, if ever. "I came in, and then I saw the two of you, and-never mind." Kate cut herself off by making a savage chopping motion through the air. "Shouldn't have gotten distracted." Jack waited impatiently for her to go on. "The group that Sayid went out with yesterday afternoon. They haven't come back yet."
Normalcy made a yipping sound as it was hunted down and fatally wounded. Sawyer had stopped going through Jack's pack and was sitting with the aspirin bottle in his hand, watching them through narrowed eyes and trying to put together all of the parts of the story that he had not been conscious for. Jack felt as if every drop of blood in his body had fled for parts unknown, leaving only ice in its place. And with the ice, clarity of a fierce kind that he had never known before. "What's going on now?"
"That's why I came to find you," Kate said. A bit of defiance and 'So there' had come into her voice, reminding Jack of their argument from two nights before. "Locke's organizing another party to go rescue the rescuers." She lifted her eyebrows slightly, asking Jack to take note of which side she was standing on now. He felt warmed by it. "They're already talking about going down the hatch."
"What?" The word exploded from Jack's mouth, followed by a long stream of obscenity that proved what extensive time in Sawyer's company could do for someone's vocabulary. Kate watched him with the impassive look that she could get sometimes, the one that invited stranger or friend alike to read any emotion that they wanted onto her face with about an equal chance of being right. "Why?"
"The Others are probably the reason that our group didn't come back," Kate said evenly. She was till wearing that shuttered look. "The Others are probably the ones who made that hatch. You have to admit, Jack, it doesn't make a complete lack of sense."
"Yeah, but…" Jack ran his hand over the top of his head, wishing for once that his hair was long enough for him to tug at it in frustration. "Kate, we blew that thing open with dynamite." They both ignored Sawyer as he snorted in either awe or disbelief. "Half the island had to have heard it. Even if the Others do control that hatch, at this point they know that we know about it." Jack had never been in the military or had any exposure to games of strategy before that moment, but as the words exited his mouth he knew that he was right. "None of us are warriors. Surprise, if we really are going to attack, is the only chance that we'll have."
The corner of Kate's mouth twitched up enough to make Jack think that she was trying to smile. "Why do you think I'm here?" she asked.
"Are people listening to him?" Jack asked in lieu of direct response. Kate's look was more than enough answer, and Jack blew out his breath angrily. The feeling of being in way over his head in a politician's shark tank was back, but Jack was slowly coming to realize that he didn't have a lot of options outside of trying to swim, anyway. "He's not even the leader yet!"
"Jack," Kate said. Gentle as her tone was on the surface, there was a line of steel glittering brightly and dangerously for anyone who happened to scratch the surface deeply enough to see it. Not for the first time, Jack wondered at the woman she must have been before arriving in their little paradise. He was glad to have her on his side now. "Neither are you, not officially. You want to keep them from going out, you have to convince them."
Jack froze for a moment, then nodded. "I'll be out in a minute." He put his hand on Kate's shoulder and squeezed in some mixture of thanks and apology. For what, even he could have completely said. Kate's fingers touched at Jack's wrist and fluttered away before he could do much more than register the contact. Her blush was coming back. Jack turned back to Sawyer and noted that he was still holding the bottle of aspirin in his hand. "No more than four, Sawyer, I'm serious. Your blood doesn't need to be any thinner." Sawyer made an exasperated face at him and sketched out a mock salute that Jack was surprised to see did not include his middle finger, but he didn't seem inclined to argue. Sawyer's face was still set and pale. Jack would have put it down to continuing effects from the blood that Sawyer had lost, had he not seen Sawyer looking so healthy only moments before.
The main cavern was in an uproar when Jack walked in with Kate by his side. Everyone was trying to speak at once, no one was even attempting to listen to what the other person might be trying to say in the first place, and the result was an indecipherable din. Jack hugged against the wall and ignored Kate's confused look, for a few seconds relishing the sensation of not being the one immediately sought out and pressed for answers. There was already someone filling that role in his absence. Jack could not contain his small thrill at seeing that the spell did not seem to work quite so well on a crowd as it did when he was going one on one.
"People, people," Locke was saying, holding up his hands for quiet. Gradually, the chaos began to die down. Jack folded his arms over his chest and leaned further back against the wall. "We've been attacked. We're all scared. But we do have a way to get our people back, or at the very least learn what happened and avenge them." There were more murmurs and outright shouts of agreement in response to that last part than Jack thought should have made any leader comfortable.
"At what cost, John?" he said, pushing himself away from the wall at last. Kate stayed in the place that he had vacated. She crossed her arms over her chest and watched him intently as he went, making Jack wonder again how many skills that she possessed that she had not shared with him yet.
Locke snapped his head in Jack's direction when he heard his voice. "Going down into that hatch when we have no weapons, no idea of what we'll be facing when we reach the bottom?" Jack asked. "It this about finding our people, or is this about your quest?"
Locke's lips turned up. The smile almost reached his eyes. "No expects a victory to be handed to us, Jack," he said. A stirring ran through the crowd; though they had all sure been thinking of war, Jack wasn't sure that any of them had worked up the courage yet to say it out loud. "But I don't see any other way to go about it. That hatch is the only solid lead that we have pointing to where the Others might be hiding."
"That's not exactly true." Jack turned when he heard the voice. Sawyer was leaning against the opening to the infirmary cave. He was still deathly pale, and now a fine sheen of sweat could be seen glittering on his forehead. Sawyer licked at his lips and nodded towards Jin, to whom Sun was translating at a furious rate. "Me and him, we might have a pretty good idea of another option worth trying."
End Part Twelve
