Part Fifteen
Plastic or not, if Jack threw those water bottles into his pack much harder he was going to break them. The resources that had come along on the plane were scarce enough as it was. He finished filling one and screwed the cap back on, pausing and forcing himself to take several deep breaths until he could put it back calmly. For the moment he was alone while everyone else busied themselves with getting their own gear together.
Jack rubbed his eyes to ward off the tension headache that was trying to throw down roots under his skull and looked up at the place where Sawyer was putting together his supplies, or at the very least was hovering over the backpack that would hold them. He had buttoned up his shirt so that the worst of his injuries were hidden from view, but even from a distance Jack could see that if he were to magic the sunburn away Sawyer's face would be the color of milk. Sawyer passed his hand over his eyes every few seconds in a gesture eerily similar to the one that Jack had just made, and his eyes were only opening at half-mast. Kate appeared to be doing most of his packing for him. She caught Jack's eye and lifted her eyebrows slightly, jerking her head in Sawyer's direction. 'Do something about this!'
Jack lifted his shoulders and pulled another empty bottle from his pack so that he could fill it. 'What do you expect me to do?'
Kate got a determined look on her face and, bending her head quickly to speak to Sawyer, picked up two empty water bottles. She marched over to where Jack was kneeling. "You need to put a stop to this!" Kate hissed to Jack from the corner of her mouth as she uncapped one of the bottles and thrust it beneath the flow of the water. Her knuckles were wrapped very tightly around the neck of the bottle. Jack wondered if she was imagining her fingers doing the same job around the neck of someone else, and the corner of his mouth quirked up. Sometimes, he and Kate were on the same wavelength so much that it was scary.
"Who do you expect me to do?" Jack hissed back. He forced his fingers to uncurl one by one from the neck of the bottle, realizing that he was picturing Sawyer's neck there himself. "There's not a lot that I can do about it, unless you want me to tie him up and stick him in a dark cave somewhere." Jack cleared his throat and realized that his voice had cracked a bit on that last part. He was picking a terrific time to flashback to the age of eighteen. First chance that Jack got, he was going to find a way to send his libido a thank-you note.
Kate stared at him for a long moment before she realized that the first water bottle had begun to run over some seconds before and hurriedly pulled it from the water. "Do not," she said, capping the bottle and thrusting the second one into the water. Jack now thought that it was his neck that she was seeing clenched between her fingers. "Do not tell me what you were thinking just then."
"Agreed," Jack said quickly. He looked up again to see that Kate was crinkling her eyes at him, working her lower lip between her teeth in an attempt not to smile. Jack had always loved those hints of a perverse sense of humor that she could let slip through whenever she wiggled out from beneath the weight of those secrets that she had not yet shared with him, and for a moment it was almost, almost like it had been before. "Haven't you tried to talk him out of it?" Kate fixed him with a look until Jack lifted his shoulders. "Well, if you can't get through to him, what makes you think that I'll be able to?"
Kate finished filling the second bottle and took an inordinate amount of time to twist the cap back on, lowering her head so that she would not have to look Jack in the face. "The two of seemed to have a bond," she said in a low voice.
"Kate," Jack said, and then paused as all of the things that ran through his head seemed empty and cheap. "It's really not like that. It was just a one night stand."
"We're on an island, Jack," Kate said. She gathered the bottles to her chest and stood up. "We don't get one night stands. Nowhere to run." She balanced her burden in the crook of her elbow so that she wouldn't drop it and pushed back a few strands of hair that had come free from her ponytail. "And I'm good at reading people."
"I'm sorry that it turned out this way," Jack said. "That I hurt you," he added, feeling that the first part needed to be clarified.
"Me, too." Kate tried to smile, and it looked mostly real. She bent back down so that she could kiss Jack's cheek. As Kate's lips brushed against the stubble, the female scent of her was for one moment staggering. "But I have a way of wrecking good men, so maybe it's for the best." One of the bottles slipped from her grasp, so that Jack had to reach out quickly to catch it before it could dash against the rocks and possibly break. He turned the action of handing it back to her into an opportunity to squeeze at her hand.
"Thanks," Kate said as she tucked the bottle back against her chest.
"No," Jack replied. "Thank you." Kate graced him with one final smile as she turned to walk away. Jack lifted his eyes and noticed that Sawyer was watching them both; how long he had been doing it Jack could not say. He raised his chin and pinned Sawyer with a challenging look. Sawyer twitched and returned one of his one before Kate reached him. She flicked a few strands of hair back form his face as she spoke to him, managing to make it look almost like an accident when she thunked him in the forehead, and he grabbed at her hand before she could pull it out of his reach. The dimples were working hard enough to earn their way into a union.
The plastic beneath his fingers made a cracking sound in warning. Jack took a deep breath and forced his knuckles to relax before he did injury to them. Would he be this irritated if it was a normal patient insisting on doing something so ill-advised and stupid? Jack took another sideways glance at Sawyer from beneath his lashes. Sawyer was on his feet by then, though he was listing visibly from side to side. Kate had braced her hand against his shoulder to keep him steady as she raised herself onto her toes so that she would be able to speak into his ear. Jack hoped that she was questioning his sanity in the same way that Jack had earlier, preferably with more swearing this time, as that seemed to be a language that Sawyer understood. Sawyer shook his head in response to whatever Kate had said, causing a disgusted look to appear on her face.
Yep, Jack decided in response to his own question. He would be just as annoyed if he and Sawyer had not slept together and shoved themselves into some strange limbo place where the ground kept sliding beneath their feet, if Sawyer had pulled a stunt like this on the first day that they had known each other, and even if had not been Sawyer at all. If it had been Joe Random doing something like this back in the real world, though, Jack would not have had to waste the energy in arguing with him at all, but doped him up to the point where there was no way that he was going to consider going anywhere before Jack himself leaped forward to deal with the next big crisis, the next miracle demanding his attention.
He forgot the order that he had issued to himself about going easy on the bottles and threw the last one into the pack, where it made a clacking sound against all of the others. Jack zipped the pack up and threw it over one shoulder, his movements short and abrupt with anger that he was only barely keeping under control. He thought that he could feel Sawyer's eyes against the back of his neck as he stalked off towards the infirmary cave, but he knew that in the time it took for him to turn around Sawyer would be occupied with something else again.
A little of the afternoon sunlight was able to drift into the infirmary cave from its side entrance, cutting the gloom enough so that Jack could see what he was doing. He crouched beside his medical bag, muttering a string of obscenities and threats beneath his breath as he sorted through what he planned on taking with him. Most of the words centered around Sawyer, while Locke claimed his fair share and one or two were even directed towards the universe at large. In spite of himself, Jack felt the corner of his mouth quirking up as he caught the last one. Pretty funny to be swearing at fate, for all that he claimed not to believe in it.
Jack sighed as he pitched Sawyer's antibiotics in after the sewing kit and looked around at everything else that he was going to have to leave behind. Even stripped down to the very basics, that still excluded a lot. Jack's imagination was already constructing nightmare scenarios in which someone-most notably a very specific someone-died because he lacked the tools to save his life.
"Focus on what you can control," Jack whispered to himself. It was as good a mantra as any. He zipped the pack up again and, looking back in the direction of the main cavern, decided that there was still one more thing that they needed before they could set out. Jack dipped his head and stepped quickly out of the cave and into the jungle.
It was immediately several degrees cooler once he was beyond the insulating walls of stone and the heat of bodies, causing Jack to lift up his face so that he could taste the breeze. There was sea salt there, overlaid with the earthy and alive smell of approaching rain. Arzt had been right.
Jack's father had taught him how to scent an oncoming storm close to thirty years before. Jack could not remember the exact details of that night, except that they had stood on the front porch and it had to have been during the slim window of time when Christian had had enough to drink in order to take this meanness away but not enough to bring it back again. It was not until much later that Jack had realized that most boys had moments like this with their fathers all the time, that there was perhaps something wrong in prizing the memory for its rarity.
Jack felt a scowl traveling to take over his face. And now he was letting it distract him from his job. He paused a moment longer to enjoy the wind and the dual promise of wildness and life that he could smell riding on the storm along with it before he went on.
The breeze was much stronger in the canopy than the pleasant movement of air than Jack was receiving on the ground floor, and he had gone only a short distance before he found exactly what he was looking for. A tree branch lay across the jungle floor at Jack's feet, broken so recently that golden sap still gleamed at the jagged end. Jack lifted it up, finding that it stood at roughly the same height as his shoulder, and tested his weight on it. Even with his full strength resting on it, the branch did not so much as creak. That would do just fine. Jack pulled the battered pocketknife that he kept for everyday tasks from his pack and quickly cut away the extra leaves and twigs. When he had the branch cleaned to his satisfaction, Jack put the knife away and carried his prize back to camp.
Everyone was ready and waiting only for him by the time that Jack returned. "Sorry," he said to them all, but most especially to Michael, who was looking more ragged about the edges by the second. "Unavoidable detour." He walked over to Sawyer and thrust the walking stick into his hand. "Here. So maybe you won't be dragging all the rest of us back so much."
Sawyer stared at the staff that Jack handed to him for a very long time, as if he wasn't quite sure what it as. He tested his weight on it, a faint smile tugging up the corners of his mouth when he discovered that it would hold him. Sawyer looked back up at Jack with a curious expression in his eyes. "And here I thought you said that my insurance had gone and run out." The smile took on a suggestion of a leer. "What am I going to have to do to pay off this debt?"
"Hippocratic oath." Jack's knuckles brushed against Sawyer's as he took his own sweet time in letting go of the staff. "If I didn't let you fall for being a reckless ass before, I'm not going to start now." Something wary, almost scared, moved across Sawyer's face and only intensified when Jack leaned in close. Had either of them wanted, they could have stolen a kiss.
"Why are you doing this, Sawyer?" Jack asked in a voice so low that he scarcely even heard himself. Sawyer opened his mouth, but Jack cut him off before he could speak. "No, and don't give me any bullshit about being the only one who can lead us to the other entrance. We could make something work with Jin." Jack paused for a moment before he said, "You really don't strike me as the martyr type."
Sawyer leaned back, a brief blaze entering his eyes that made Jack sure that he had said the wrong thing. "Well, I sure as hell ain't a hero, either, so what does that leave me?" He flashed Jack a grin that was gleaming and jagged around the edges. "I think reckless idiot fits me just fine, how about you?" Sawyer wasn't one to fire warning shots, but Jack still knew that this was exactly what he was being offered now.
If Sawyer wasn't one to fire them, then Jack also wasn't one to heed them. He leaned in closer and gestured towards Sawyer's arm, where a pink line of scar tissue was hidden beneath the sleeve of his shirt. "And you're sure that it's not about that?" Having ignored his one warning, he braced himself for Sawyer to fire a bullet right between his eyes.
Something flat moved into Sawyer's eyes that Jack had seen on only a few previous occasions, and on few still that had ended well. "No, Jack," he said. Where Sawyer was planning on putting the poison that was hovering so violently and obviously beneath the surface, Jack could not say, but the very sight of it made his stomach twist. "It's not about that.
A few seconds of silence went by in which they were once again drawing close to each other, as if pulled by magnets that they could neither see nor remove. "Easy there, hoss," Sawyer whispered. His breath was a warm fan over Jack's cheek. "You sidle up much closer to me and you're going to have to make good on some private promises in a very public place."
"I'm not the only one who moved, am I?" Jack untangled his fingers from Sawyer's and stepped back. He could feel Sawyer's eyes on him, and by now the eyes of everyone else as well. Private promises? It had sounded to Jack as if they had made some more then without even intending to.
---
Kate watched Jack and Sawyer whispering to each other and worked her lower lip between her teeth, aware by this point that she must look like a jealous teenager but at the same time unable to quite stop herself. She had grown so used to their triangle and its confines that she had not noticed as it became more and more equilateral, so that it was a shock when she found herself forced out entirely.
She took a deep breath and crossed her arms over her chest. Did she feel left out now? Yeah, she wouldn't lie about that, and once in the very recent past she would have declared her own private war in doing something about it. Maybe that was why she was so determined to stay her hand now. The temptation to slide back into the person that she had allowed her circumstances to turn her into was always present, always tugging at her.
Jack handed Sawyer the walking stick. Kate turned away before they could lean close again.
'You're a bigger person than this,' Kate told herself fiercely. 'And if not now, then by God you're going to be.'
A warm hand came down on her shoulder. Kate twitched, feeling her usual second of limbo between fight and flight, before she turned to meet Locke's kindly gaze. "Maybe this isn't going to be such an easy journey," Locke said in a gentle voice.
His tone and eyes were nearly fatherly, causing a prickle to run up Kate's spine. Smiling to show that there was no harm done, Kate picked Locke's hand off of her shoulder and stepped away. "I wasn't expecting it to be," she said. "I'm tough. I'll be all right."
"Do you still have the knife that I gave you?" Locke asked.
"Keeping it close like my own baby," Kate replied. She patted at a side pocket on her backpack, where the hilt could just be seen poking out.
"Good girl. You may very well need it." Locke stepped away to speak with Charlie. Kate back and saw that Jack was staring at her, his expression worried. Of course he was worried for her; that was the kind of man that Jack was. Kate felt another one of those swift pangs. Fine. So she wasn't that person yet.
Sawyer was still looking at his walking stick as if it was the best present that he had received in a good long time, not paying attention to any of the goodbyes going on around him. Kate shifted the straps of her pack on her shoulders and turned away towards the cave's entrance.
---
Tracy had taken Aaron away on the pretense of being homesick for her own children and needing something small to cuddle for a moment or two, but Claire suspected that it was really because Tracy wanted to give her a chance to say goodbye to Charlie. She could see Tracy glancing up every few seconds from the position that she had taken on an outcropping of stone several feet away. When she wasn't watching Claire from the corner of her eye, Tracy was keeping herself occupied with the solemn duty of blowing raspberries onto Aaron's belly. Aaron shrieked with mirth and waved his hands in the air.
"I want you to be careful," Claire said to Charlie. Their hands had become clasped in each other's over the course of their conversation, and every time that Claire would unhook her fingers from his they seemed to crawl back within seconds. "Promise me, Charlie."
He grinned at her. Claire thought that Charlie looked a touch too chipper for someone who was about to march off and face the dragon. She wondered if he realized this. "No worries, love," he said. "We'll be back so fast that you'll hardly even realize we were gone."
Claire made a face. "Charlie. Promise."
Again that grin, until Claire had no choice but to smile herself. "I promise that I'll come back," Charlie said in the voice of a schoolboy reciting a lesson that he had memorized a long time ago and was amused by having to bring it up again. "That's got to be one better than just promising to be careful, yeah?"
Claire tried to pull another face and ruined it by smiling. "But I'll hold you to that one, too."
Charlie kissed her before he answered, swift and playful, grinned when he saw her face, and kissed her again. "I never break a promise," he said, a touch of the levity going out of his voice. Claire wasn't sure what it was that came to replace it, except that she had never heard it before. Claire found her gaze being drawn up to the half-healed mark on Charlie's forehead as he squeezed her hand one final time and walked over to greet Locke, who had begun to walk towards them. Locke raised his hand and touched Charlie's forehead for a moment, which did little to soothe away Claire's uneasiness.
Michael was standing by himself as he waited for the others to finish their goodbyes and join him. Seeing him alone pulled at something in Claire's chest, so she signaled to Tracy that she was going to be just a few moments longer. "Hey, Michael," she said, pushing a few strands that had fallen loose from her ponytail back behind her ears. "We've never really gotten a chance to talk, have we?"
"Not really," Michael said, looking down at her. "Are you here to tell me that you know what I'm going through?" His face was tight and drawn, but there was no anger in his voice.
"More or less." Claire felt suddenly very young and very awkward. She put her hair behind her ears again. "I mean, I know that Aaron was only gone for a few hours, but still…" Claire trailed off as everything that she had planned on saying shriveled in her mouth. "I'm sorry," she finished.
The corner of Michael's mouth twitched up. Claire thought that it would have been a smile if the rest of Michael's face had not looked so worn-down and terrible. "I know that you are." He shifted his shoulders and seemed to be drawing up his interior reserves through an exercise of pure will. "Won't have to be sorry for much longer, though. I'm not coming back without my boy." He turned his head as Sun and Jin came up to say their farewells, leaving Claire with a graceful way to make her exit. She watched from a distance as Sun first hugged Michael and then stepped to the side so that Jin could clasp his hand. That also turned into a hug within seconds, first with one arm and then with both, until Claire began to feel as if she was intruding into a private moment among the three of them. She reclaimed her baby from Tracy and settled next to her against the wall to watch the rest of events unfold.
But she could not stop her eyes from returning to Charlie's forehead again and again and again.
---
Locke was in the rare position of not knowing what was going to happen next or he was going to be fully in control of the situation when it did, and he did not like it in the slightest. It smacked far too much of the way that things had been before.
The lady passed close behind him, continuously moving as she always was, having eyes only for Sawyer. She trembled, and Locke did not know why. "He's not mine," she said. Locke could not answer her, but after she spoke he knew that her trembling was a combination of wariness and fear. "She shouldn't be able to do that."
Strictly speaking, the lady herself should not be able to do that, though Locke did not think that this was something that she would appreciate hearing. Not for the first time, he wondered if she really was the source, or if she was just one more person borrowing the dragon.
"I'm going on this to bring that boy back, not to hurt him," Locke murmured, raising his voice to a level audible to his ears alone. The lady, who wasn't dealing with human limitations, heard him all the same. That was enough.
She lifted her eyes, brilliant and green, away from Sawyer long enough to stare at him. Locke thought that he could catch a whiff of her scent, like moss, like living and growing things. "I don't expect you to," she said, before she turned and drifted away. Locke knew that she would be gone before he even turned his head.
Boone had also disappeared, or else Locke might have found a way to ask him if he knew anything else about what was going on, if he knew what this strange new presence that he could feel tingling at the back of his neck in unguarded moments was, if he knew what Sawyer was up to and why Locke had the terrible feeling that he had also been chosen, and not by the island.
But Boone was long gone, of course, and he had little patience for talking to Locke these days. Locke supposed that he could understand why.
He tapped at the burn on Charlie's forehead as the young man drew close, keeping his touch light so that he would not cause him pain. There was going to be a scar. "Given yourself quite a mark there, Charlie," he said.
"Yeah." Charlie blushed and raised his own hand to touch at the scabbed-over burn. "I hear that women like scars, though. It could work out."
"You got lucky," Locke said. "It could have been a lot worse. You could even say that something chose you, in a way."
Charlie dropped his hand to his side, flicking Locke a look that was both incredulous and amused. "Sure, man. Whatever you say." His mouth twisted into a half-smile as he caught himself reaching up to finger the wound again only a few seconds later.
Locke allowed his gaze to drift across the cave to where Jack and Hurley were conducting an intense, hushed conversation. Even when they made pacts to get everything out in the open, they found ways to draw secrets close around themselves again. Jack looked up suddenly, meeting Locke's gaze as if he could read his thoughts. There was no love lost in that stare.
He didn't understand, Locke though as he turned away. Jack thought that he wanted power, because Jack himself had had it thrust upon him so many times that he could not help but read the desire for it into everyone around him. He could not be more wrong. Locke wanted only what he had wanted since the first moment that he had landed on the island, to understand. Understand why he had been chosen, and why he was no longer the only one.
---
Hurley looked a little green as he stared down at the object that Jack was offering to him, and he made no move to take it. "I don't know, man," he said. "I've never even used one of those before."
"Until a few weeks ago, I had never used one, either. Look, it's not hard." Jack showed Hurley where the safety on the handgun was and how to remove and reload the clip. His hands were sure and quick, so much so that even Jack could hardly believe that this was only the third or fourth time that he had done it. He discharged the clip one final time and placed both items in Hurley's hand, wrapping his fingers around them when Hurley showed no inclination to grasp them on his own.
"We're taking two guns with us," Jack said. "That only leaves one to protect the caves."
Hurley was still very pale. Beads of sweat had begun to break out on his forehead. "I don't think you want to leave this gun with me, Jack," he said. "Just trust me on this, bad things have a way of happening around me without the aid of firearms."
Jack blinked at the strange statement, but for the sake of time decided that he would let it pass. He lifted his eyes, matched stares for a moment or two with Locke on the other side of the cave, and found that he was grinding his teeth when he looked back towards Hurley. "You're the only one that I trust not to use it unless it's necessary."
"Oh." If the look on Hurley's face was any indication, Jack might as well have pulled out a sword and knighted him. His fingers tightened beneath Jack's own, finally claiming the gun. He looked nauseous as he stared down at it. "I still don't think that this is going to end well, Jack."
"You'll be fine." Jack clapped Hurley once on the shoulder. Like iron filings to a magnet, as soon as Hurley had left Jack found that his eyes were seeking out Sawyer again. He found him in a darkened corner of the cave, talking to Sun as he leaned heavily on his new walking stick.
"Only enough to fill your palm, no more," Sun was saying. She paused and looked at Sawyer's hands. "In your case, perhaps only enough to fill half of your palm. Add it to a cup of boiling water and let it stand. You should feel the effects within fifteen minutes. Make sure that you have a safe place to lie down before you drink it." Sun handed him one of the camp's plastic bags, almost as precious as gold for how rare they were becoming. Jack could see that she had filled it with the leaves that she had been clenching in her fists when he had been treating Sawyer and Jin on the beach.
"Yeah, thanks," Sawyer muttered, looking none too pleased as he accepted the bag. Wincing, he began leaning over to pick up his pack.
Jack got there first. "Thought that stuff gave you nightmares," he said, picking up the pack for Sawyer.
Sawyer made a face as he threw the bag inside. "It does." Off of Jack's look, he sighed. "Don't ask, okay? I don't quite know myself."
"Secret masochist. Got it." Jack zipped the backpack back up. He couldn't help but notice as he did so that Sawyer had stolen the bottle of aspirin back from him. Pretty interesting move for a man who seemed to be favoring a more homeopathic method of pain management. "That doesn't come as much of a surprise, really."
"You're hysterical, Doc. If there were enough people on this island for a comedy circuit I would put you on it." Sawyer gestured for Jack to give the pack back to him.
Jack held onto it. "Is this related in any way to you going with us?" Sawyer stiffened, giving Jack all the answer that he needed. "Sawyer, if there's something going on…"
Sawyer gave him one of those acid-bright and knife-vicious smiles that he was capable of, the ones that let Jack know that he had crossed some kind of invisible line and would be getting exactly nowhere for his trouble. "You going to give me that back or not?" Sawyer asked.
Jack hefted Sawyer's pack with one hand to test the weight. "No," he said, slinging it over his shoulder in spite of the fact that he was already carrying his own. "You're going to have enough trouble keeping up as it is."
Sawyer's eyes went dark. "I don't need your pity, Jack." There was a warning note in his voice, and a pleading one also. Jack felt himself leaning back, looking for that final piece that would make this man make sense and realizing that it was probably buried so deeply that even Sawyer himself did not know the location any longer.
"No, you need to not push yourself so hard that you wind up undoing all of the work I did in putting you back together again." Jack let a beat go by before he said, in a gentler voice. "You don't have to carry the weight by yourself all of the time."
Sawyer jerked back as if Jack had slapped him. Jack braced himself for the storm brewing at the back of Sawyer's eyes to come spilling forth out of his mouth. Sawyer surprised him by jerking his chin up in the very faintest of nods. "I can't go spilling any secrets that I don't rightly know, Jack," he said. "Take what you can get."
"For now," Jack allowed. He shifted Sawyer's pack into a more comfortable position on his shoulder as he and Sawyer made their way over to the rest of the group. The six of them disappeared from the caves and into the bright sunlight beyond.
End Part Fifteen
