Part Thirteen

Sawyer listened to the conversation going on between Jack and Kate as he would one taking place in a foreign language, one where he knew only one word out of every five and was desperate to catch up in any way that he could. Truth be told, the trials and tribulations of any castaways not located in the cave where Jack seemed determined to plant him like a damned tree were not of much concern to him right at the moment. Not yet, anyway, though he had the feeling that they would be again soon. One problem at a time, even if the two of them were going to collide together very soon.

Sawyer smoothed the leg of his jeans back down, exhaling the air in his lungs slowly to stop himself from doing…something, as half-formed memories that shouldn't be real, couldn't be real, broke free to swirl around the inside of his head again. Maybe yelling. Maybe calling that bitch out on the carpet and telling her where she could shove her job offer-her demand.

Sawyer glanced up and realized that Kate was giving him one of her doe-eyed worried looks. It wasn't a concern of theirs, not until he got the chance to sit still for a spell and figure out what was going on. He wasn't just dreaming any longer, wasn't just sweating off whatever the hell that Sun had fed him.

Wasn't dreaming, all right. Might be going crazy, though.

Sawyer ran his fingers absently over the denim, tuning out most of the urgent conversation still taking place between Kate and Jack a few feet away. He still held the bottle of aspirin clasped loosely in the other hand, but it sure seemed like he had finally found something strong enough to push pain into the farthest and most easily forgotten corner of his mind without medical help. There was a set of bruises in the shape of fingers wrapped around his ankle. Now, Sawyer would freely admit that he didn't remember a lot of that night and badly wanted to believe that he had hallucinated the parts that he did remember, but he was still pretty damned sure that Jin didn't pick him up out the waves like a fish by his ankle. That was a grip that you used when you were trying to pull someone down deeper into the water, not up and out of it.

And if Sawyer wasn't bouncing right out of his mind and something worthy of that Straub book was happening to him, then what was that something that had tried to pull him deeper down into the water. Sawyer exhaled again and heard a high whistling noise that he scarcely recognized as having come from himself.

Jack and Kate had finished their little tete a tete and were heading for the door, Jack throwing some drivel back about the aspirin that Sawyer barely bothered to listen to. He threw off a mock salute to send Jack on his way so that he could pause and think in peace, focusing instead on Kate. She regarded him solemnly, her face blank now that there were other and more important storm clouds on the horizon and she had something else to focus on. 'You're good, Freckles,' Sawyer felt like saying. 'But you're not that good.' Her hurt was still telegraphed loud and clear through the tightness around her eyes. Sawyer hoped that his apology was equally legible in his face, not for what had happened between him and Jack, but for the way in which she had discovered it. Kate's face went back to a mask of professionalism the likes of which he had never seen on her before a bare second later, so that he could not be sure that his message was received.

Jack paused before exiting so that he could cast Sawyer a look of his own, delivered in a sideways glance and over so quickly that Sawyer would have no trouble believing that Jack himself was even unaware of it. The look was filled with such a complicated stew of emotions that Sawyer did not even know where to begin if he wanted to untangle them all, except that in any other situation it would have been enough to turn his stomach to lead and send his feet carrying him straight out the door. He didn't like it when things were complicated, not when there was any hope in hell of avoiding it. The glance that Jack cast towards him, brief though it was, promised nothing but complication. Sawyer should have known that Jack would not be the sort of person to just let it be whatever it was. Had to go and make it into some kind of country-Western song.

Sawyer could feel a scowl breaking out across his face. And he had to pick an island to have his next fling on, too, the one place where he had nowhere to run to once the itch had been scratched.

If that itch had in fact been scratched. Sawyer's scowl deepened as he began to struggle with the aspirin's cap. Major surgery, and all he got was fucking headache medication. Mark that down as one of the doctor's flaws, as Sawyer did not have the time to pause and review all of the others. He had gotten better medication that this when he had had his wisdom teeth pulled.

Sawyer got the bottle open at last amidst much wincing and muttering of oaths and shook out a handful of the pills into his palm. He felt as if he could swallow the entire bottle without doing more than making a dent in his pain. Jack could take his warnings and do whatever he wanted with them (even now, Sawyer was willing to admit that he had a few suggestions). Sawyer had walked through hangovers in which he had taken more aspirin than Jack was wanted to allow him and suffered no ill effects.

And he had not been bleeding from a dual set of bullet wounds then, either. Sawyer paused, rolled his eyes towards the ceiling, and pushed out a long-suffering sigh before he shook all but the allowed four pills aback into their bottle. Oh, but he was in deep. "You and me, Jack," Sawyer said, popping the pills into his mouth and reaching for the water bottle. Once he had taken a swig, he finished in a voice loud enough only to be heard by himself, "Seems we got a few things that still need to be hashed out."

When the last bitter aftertaste of the aspirin had been washed down his throat, Sawyer returned to a moody study of his ankle, where the bruises were hidden beneath the denim. And if Jack didn't mind going to bed with a crazy man, well, then they would be all set, wouldn't they? Sawyer could hardly believe that he was the first one on the island to start cracking up; with enough time, they ought to all be sitting out on the beach, staring out at the sea and rocking themselves. The French chick would probably make for great company once they were all more inclined to share her frame of mind.

Almost as if he was being guided by some force originating from outside of himself, Sawyer found himself reaching out to pull the denim up on his ankle again. He didn't feel crazy, but he supposed that the true straitjacket cases never did. And thinking that you were crazy didn't rule the possibility out, either, or otherwise there would not be so many people who checked themselves into mental hospitals without having to be bodily hauled in. An unseen hand glided up Sawyer's back, and he shivered. Sure, and he was already on an island with polar bears, sentient boar, and child-stealing monsters who seemed to stay only because they liked the view. Maybe they were all nuts, and the whole exercise was only their way of feeding each others' collective insanity.

A line drew itself between Sawyer's eyes as he stared down at the perfect finger marks that had been imprinted into his skin, too small to have come from Jin's hand even if he had somehow managed to get himself flipped upside and had to have been hauled up like a recalcitrant kitten. Damn it, but Sawyer wished that he could remember anything real beyond the crack of the bullet striking his side and the second, similar sound his body had made when it hit the water. All he had were flashes, snapshots taken mostly out of focus, and he might as well have nothing all for all the good that they did in figuring out what had happened.

No. That wasn't entirely true. He remembered a sense of revulsion so great that even the recollection of it was staggering, though he could not say where it had come from.

Sawyer ignored the swift and angry scolding he received from his wrapped ribs and leaned forward, tracing his fingers across his ankle. The skin surrounding the bruises was warm and familiar, but the marks themselves felt as if they had been dipped in ice, a sensation that made his entire body then go freezing. Sawyer drew his lips back from his teeth at the pain, forced himself to touch the skin again. The cold snatched at his hand the way that the first few seconds of a winter wind could before one had a chance to brace themselves and prepare for it. Oh, if was going crazy then he was definitely going to do it in fine style.

'Not crazy. Just a stubborn son of a bitch.'

Sawyer jumped and swore once, pressed his hand to his side and swore again when the movement proved to be a costly one. The voice seemed to echo all about the cave and straight from the depths of his own skull between one moment and the next, simultaneously a shout and a whisper. Sawyer felt an urge to clap his hands over his ears even as he knew with the same certainty that told him there that there was a bright and blameless sun shining outside that it would do no good. This voice came from no human throat. As stripped of inflection and normal intonation as it was, Sawyer was forced to wonder if the throat it had once issued from had even been human. It was only be remembering the form that he had last seen it take that he was even able to convince himself that it was even female.

"Thought you were supposed to be my nighttime pathology," Sawyer gritted from between teeth clenched together so tightly that it was a wonder he was even able to produce sound. If he dug his fingernails any more deeply into the cave floor, he would be in danger of peeling them back entirely.

'It was crowded in there.' A thin line of blood ran from one of Sawyer's cuticles. 'And you weren't paying attention.

Sawyer gave vent to a hoarse laugh, taking care to keep it pitched low so that the people in attendance of the commotion outside would not be able to hear. He would like to keep his impending insanity a private matter for just a while longer, thank you so very much. "Well, Dream Date, did you ever pause to wonder if maybe that's because you're not real?" His voice rose towards a dangerous volume and he had to pause, breathing heavily, until he was able to bring himself under control again. Sawyer realized the damage that he was on the verge of doing to his hands and forced himself to flex his fingers until the stiffness went out of them. The blood from his torn cuticle was already drying into a thin brown crust. Sawyer muttered to himself, "Tell you what, old hoss, this is a new one."

'Jack saw the bruises. You watched him look.'

"Then I put them there myself." Sawyer pressed his palms to his temples, only to drop them back into his lap when he realized how that must look. "Just like I'm talking to myself now. Lady, ain't you ever heard of psychotic memory lapses?"

'No. Neither have you.'

Sawyer made a huffing noise, even though by now he had to admit to himself that he was beginning to get really scared. When a complete mental meltdown was the least dangerous of all of your possible explanations, he figured that it might be time to admit that you were in over your head. "What, don't I get the whole heaven and earth speech, at least?" He waited, his head tilted to own side, for a few more neurons to misfire and send out another batch of their crazy-paste. When none came, Sawyer let loose with a shaky laugh that he had not known he still had and said, "Come on, now. Hamlet? Can't say you're a villain worth shaking over if you don't know your classics."

'I never read it.' For a moment the voice sounded almost unnerved, almost as if it were coming from a real human being. An unseen hand took an ice cube and ran it up and down Sawyer's spine. Of all of the tasty treats that his subconscious could come up with, he doubted that many of them were of a mind to show them the soft underbelly of the human condition. He exhaled through his nose.

'Get off your ass,' the voice repeated grimly, regaining some of its cool, my-isn't-this-distasteful distance, and was followed by a shriek that made the ice cube at the base of Sawyer's spine spread all through the rest of his body. He knew of only one candidate on the island within the right age bracket to make a sound like that. Unluckily for them, he couldn't say that he had a tremendous track record when it came to saving this one.

"Okay, Dream Date, you have my attention." Sawyer spread his hands out carefully over the tops of his knees so that he could not clench them into fists again. He was likely to pop the nails right off like the tabs on soda cans if the radical shift that his mood had taken over the last thirty seconds was any indication. "Now how about coming back and explaining to me one more time just what in the hell you are and how you mean for me to go about getting off my ass, all right? Your recruitment methods ain't exactly the most cordial that I've ever run across." An echoing silence greeted him, and Sawyer felt his entire body tense up even further. "Uh-uh-uh, sweetheart, I don't think so. You want my help, you're going to lay it all on the line and stop being a metaphysical cock tease here, so that we both know what we're dealing with."

Positioned so nonchalantly that he could almost believe that it had been an accident, Sawyer noticed that the Straub book had worked its way free from the pile of novels that Kate had brought for him. Ghost Story.

Sawyer heard a snarling noise and did not believe until later that it had even been him and leapt up to his feet with a speed that he knew as soon as he was upright had been a mistake. The world swirled and tilted around the edges; Sawyer did not care. The book was in his hand within one second and hitting the cave wall in the next, pages making a fluttering sound as if they were trying to fly away from his next burst of rage. Sure, a self-aware book, and why not, when he was already hearing voices in his head? When he was about two steps away from seeing if he couldn't find a My First Straitjacket kit amidst the last of the airplane rubble?

"I don't think so, you self-important bitch," Sawyer said, becoming aware that his voice had risen high enough to draw quite the crowd, if the ruckus outside had not been more interesting. "We're not going to play that game. You want me to trot along like a good little puppy, I want to know who's actually holding the leash." Sawyer breathed out a laugh and felt his lips twisting into a savage grin. "We bring our own ghosts, hot stuff, and I'm afraid you just ain't much competition compared to what I already brought to this party."

Nothing but silence came back at him. Sawyer swore, bitterly and at length. He realized as he wound down that his ribs were slicked with wetness and for a moment he was afraid that had had pulled out another set of stitches in his haste to prove himself worthy of being the island's first mental patient. He didn't understand until a beat later that, icy feeling overtaking his body or not, he was still sweating like a man who had just run a marathon. The salt was stinging in his numerous small cuts, not to mention the bullet wound itself. Sawyer swore again and, as he found his eye coming to rest once more on the Straub book's cover. He had thrown it with enough force to send a long white crack running up the spine, so that it almost seemed to be smiling at him. All that darkness, surrounded by a single point of light. Sawyer thought that it looked like a beacon. Or possibly an eye, he could not be sure which. Sawyer kept a tight leash on his laughter, afraid that if he began again he might not be able to stop.

Jack had been right, loathe as Sawyer was to admit it even to himself. He was not ready to be on his feet again quite yet. Sawyer could picture all of the remaining blood in his body sloshing its noisy way down towards his kneecaps, oh so very far away from his brain where he really would have liked for it to stay for a spell. He put his hand out to steady himself against the wall as swirls of purple and yellow began to encroach upon the corners of his vision. He put his head down, focusing on getting one foot out ahead of the other and nothing else. Sawyer didn't need to see the path in order to know where he was going, not with the sounds of the crowd whipping itself into a panic to guide him, but oh how that journey getting there was not the most fun one that he had had in a while.

Locke was talking about that damned hatch that he had been so proud of over the last week or so when Sawyer entered the main cavern. Sawyer nearly snorted aloud. Give him something constant, anything constant, and he felt better already. "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." Every head in the cave turned in his direction. Sawyer took in all of the their expressions and was tempted to tell them that, nope, he would wager each and every one of them a hundred bucks that he had just gotten the bigger shock to the system. He licked his lips instead, still tasting sea salt and the faint trace of Jack there, and tilted his chin in Jin's direction. Sun was speaking Korean to him at an amazing speed, but Jin's eyes were already locked with Sawyer's, as if he knew what Sawyer was going to say. "Me and him, we might have a pretty good idea of another lead worth trying."

End Part Thirteen