Part Sixteen
Sweat was sticking Sawyer's shirt to his body and rivulets of the same were running into his eyes, making his vision double and triple in unguarded moments. It ran beneath the dressings and alternately burned and itched in the wounds there, as if Sawyer was being attacked by an angry swarm of fire ants that was miraculously passing everyone else by without so much as a nibble.
Sawyer grit his teeth until lightning bolts of pain radiated out from his jaw and into his brain, focusing on putting one step in front of the other with the aid of the walking stick and letting none of the strain show on his face. Not after he had had to jump through so many hoops to finagle his way onto this little expedition into the (God, how he wished) unknown in the first place, not when he was willing to bet that everyone else on the merry journey was privately thinking that he had gone round the bend and it was easier to just humor him. Not when Jack was still sneaking him those looks that he thought that Sawyer could not see, the ones that said that he was only waiting for the inevitable moment when Sawyer fell to pieces so that Jack could put him back together again. Sawyer grit his teeth together even harder whenever he happened to notice.
'Not going to happen, Doc,' he thought, feeling his mouth settle into a hard, bitter line. 'Not for one good roll.' A cramp got started in his left side, and he took the deepest breaths that the bandages binding his ribs would allow until it went away again. It would be a cold day in hell before let the group, including that boy bad reject, see him be coddled.
"Hey, hang on a minute," Kate said. "Everybody wait." She had fallen a little ways behind the group. When Sawyer turned to look, he saw her crouching down among the ferns and staring at them with an intensity that Sawyer had never seen from her before. Sawyer really could not see what was so different between the patch of ground that she was looking at and the one about two inches to the left, but, hey, Freckles was the expert.
Kate looked back up at the group when she realized that she had all of their attentions. There was a deep line drawn down between her eyes, one that Sawyer had seen on enough women to realize that it usually meant that they wanted something. Kate had to be the first one in his experience who could find that something by digging around in the dirt, though.
She crooked her finger at Locke, then pointed back at the jungle floor. Even by craning his neck and peering hard in the fading afternoon light, Sawyer still couldn't tell what was getting her all bothered. He was slightly gratified to look around and realize that he was not the only one in the dark. "Do you see this?" Kate asked Locke. "Tell me that I'm not imagining it."
Locke knelt down beside Kate with the ease of a man at least two decades younger and leaned to look at the patch of earth that she was indicating for him. The shadows had gotten long, and Locke had to stare for a long moment before he caught whatever it was that Kate wanted him to see. When he finally lifted his head, his expression was incredulous and, Sawyer thought, even a bit proud. "I never would have noticed that alone."
Kate lifted her shoulders into a shrug, but she still looked pleased. "Young eyes."
"And for the two of us who haven't learned to paint with all the colors of the wind?" Sawyer winced when he heard the exhaustion in his voice. So maybe the stoicism plan was not going as well as he could have hoped for.
Even with the sun setting through the trees, the self-satisfied gleam in Kate's eyes was unmistakable. "Someone came this way," she said. "And it was not one of our people. We're on the right track."
Michael bounced for a moment on the balls of his feet. Sawyer had watched him damned near vibrate with the need to be doing something useful for most of the afternoon, and it was starting to hurt to look at him. "Two goals in one," he said in a low voice that made the air flinch. "Let's move on."
Jack shook his head. "No, the best thing would be to stay here for the night." Michael jerked forward as if to protest and only halted when Jack raised his hand in a soothing gesture. "The sun is going down," he said, pointing through the trees. "Kate and Locke won't be able to track in the dark."
Michael took a deep breath that shuddered on the exhale and nodded reluctantly. Sawyer thought that Michael had been running on the very last of his reserves in order to get even that far. He was probably scraping at the bottom of the barrel even as he was still itching to go charging off into the woods, reason and logic be damned.
Sawyer shot Jack a look from beneath his lashes. He also had the feeling that their stopping for the night had more to do with giving him the chance to rest than it did the bullshit reason that Jack had given about signs. Jack was not so much as glancing in his Sawyer's direction, and his whole body was written in lines of indifference. If he was faking, then his acting skills had gotten a hell of a lot better over the past several hours.
Sawyer exhaled a sigh that was shakier than he liked and put a little additional weight onto his walking stick. It was carrying a lot more of him now than it had been when they had started out.
Sawyer wasn't mistaken this time when he saw Jack throw a glance his way, 'You're an idiot' written in giant letters all over his face. It was a look that Sawyer was well accustomed to being on the receiving end of, and he was strangely soothed by it. It was the little things between he and Jack that would never change.
Sawyer wondered if this was some new and strange variant of Stockholm syndrome that was taking hold of him, or else just really good sex.
"This is as good a place to camp as any," Jack went on. "We can all gather wood for a fire if we don't go too far. Enough people have been lost already."
Sawyer put a tree at his back and, using it as a brace, slowly lowered himself to the ground. He couldn't stop the soft noise of pain that worked its way past his lips, though he did bite down on the lower one until he tasted blood a second later. Sawyer licked at the tiny drops of blood that welled up there and smiled when his vision had stopped fading in and out. He had been playing this game for too long to get knocked down by a few new twists now. "You folks have fun with that," he said. "I think I'm going to cool my heels right where I am." The perfect finishing touch would have been to lace his hands behind his head, but Sawyer liked to think that he was leaving his masochistic days behind him. He settled for a grin.
"Finally, he has an excuse to sit on his arse," Charlie muttered as he drifted by. Sawyer made sure that his smile was even sweeter, just for him.
"Universe had to swing my way sooner or later, Elton," he replied.
"You're the one with the glasses."
Sawyer made a face at Charlie's back. Kate lifted her eyebrows at him, asking without words if he was going to be all right. Sawyer lifted a negligent hand at her until she too vanished into the growing shadows. The rest followed suit until Sawyer found himself with at least a few precious moments alone.
He tilted his head back until he could feel the rough bark of the tree digging into his scalp. The sweat on his temples and running down his spine soon began to grow uncomfortable and cold. "Okay, Dream Date," he said in a voice pitched so low that that even someone crouched right beside him would have had to strain in order to hear it. "Here's your chance. You want to throw a little something else my way, maybe convince me that I haven't gone right out of my mind, don't go thinking you have to be shy on my account."
The wind lifted in the trees, drying the last of the sweat on his body and whipping his hair into a cloud around his face. As far as answers went, that one was a bit more abstract than what Sawyer had been looking for. For one moment, he smelled a powerful flash of rain, of ozone, and then it was gone. He sighed, tilted his head back even further, and realized that while he had been otherwise occupied, his hands had slipped free of his control and begun playing absently with a patch of moss at his side. A cry of horror escaped from his throat and he threw the vegetation quickly away from himself. There were a few frightening seconds in which he thought that he would choke on the bile lodged in his throat.
"Sawyer?"
Sawyer's head jerked up. Kate had already returned to their camp with a stack of branches clutched beneath her arm. Her eyes were wide and concerned. "Are you all right?"
"Fine." Sawyer swallowed down the lump in his throat with some difficulty and shook his head. "I'm fine."
Kate gave him a dubious look as she knelt to get their fire started, but said nothing more. Sawyer leaned back against the tree. Dream Date, wherever she was, didn't seem terribly interested in talking to him again, leaving Sawyer with room to wonder if she had even existed in the first place. It was not one of the most comfortable thoughts to be having while the darkness was rushing forward so quickly.
---
They were all quiet and withdrawn as they settled in around the fire, watching as the flames dipped, danced, and turned their faces into barely-recognizable caricatures of themselves. Jack was not surprised that no one was in the mood for chatting, not with everything that had happened already and everything that could happen before they saw the other end of it. It wasn't an atmosphere that lent itself easily to campfire tales.
What did surprise him, though, was to look over and realize that the member of their group who was normally the loudest was now the most withdrawn. Sawyer spoke perhaps one word to every four spoken by the others, even Michael, and seemed preoccupied with stabbing the end of his walking stick into the fire every few moments so that he could watch the sparks swirl upwards. Even with the flames' constant movement, Jack saw that there were dark circles etched into the skin beneath Sawyer's eyes. He had some idea now of what the rest of the camp must see after he had gone a run of days without sleeping.
"I'll be back," Sawyer said abruptly, pulling the end of his walking stick out of the embers and using it to push himself up to his feet. He pulled his lips back into a grimace as he reached for his pack with his free hand. Sawyer did not spare any of them so much as a glance before he turned and disappeared into the trees.
Kate threw an alarmed glance Jack's way, but he was already rising to his feet and shaking his head. "I'll get him." He ignored the glances being thrown back and forth across the fire as the people left behind visibly wondered why he was being the one to bring Sawyer back, rather than Kate.
Jack followed the sound of Sawyer's progress through the trees, very aware as he did so that he was the leader of a small force traveling through unfamiliar territory. The weight of one of the two guns, hidden down in his pack, was a comfort.
He caught up with Sawyer within a small clearing, where the moonlight was coming down and covering them both in an eerie silver light. Jack thought that it made Sawyer look beautiful, but also mechanical and cold. He much preferred the way that Sawyer looked back by the fire.
Sawyer heaved a sigh when he heard Jack's approach that sounded as if it came from somewhere deep inside of him, somewhere that sounded like it hurt. He tilted his head back until he was looking almost directly up at the trees. "You know," Sawyer said over his shoulder to Jack, "I could have just been taking a piss." He was clenching the straps of his backpack hard enough to turn his knuckles into pearls.
"I didn't think that you would be shy about making an announcement if that was all that was wrong." Jack took a few steps closer. "So what is it?" He reached to take the pack from Sawyer and help him open it.
"I'm getting really sick of people asking me that question, that's what's wrong with me." Sawyer shoved the walking stick into Jack's waiting hand instead and opened the pack himself. "You and Kate have some major issues with control, has anyone ever told you that? Might want to think about letting go."
"You're not the first, or the second, or the third." Jack rested both of his hands on the top of the walking stick and watched as Sawyer pulled out both a bottle of water and the herbs that Sun had given him some hours before. His hands were trembling slightly with a tension that he could not control. Sawyer began counting out the leaves into the required half a palm's worth before Jack said, "You're going to have to boil that in water before it will work."
"Fuck!" Sawyer turned his face back up to the sky. It was one of the most desperate obscenities that Jack had ever heard.
"We still have the aspirin in you're in pain," Jack said. He realized that he was speaking as he would to an animal in a trap, one that had not yet shown him his teeth but could at any moment. "Sawyer, what's going on?"
"You're just going to keep on asking until you get an answer, aren't you?" Sawyer threw the leaves and the water pack into the pack as if they had personally angered him. The look that he turned over Jack suggested that it would only take a few more nudges to put him on that list as well.
"I'm not crazy," Sawyer muttered. He closed his eyes when he saw Jack raise his eyebrows. "And of course that's the perfect way to convince you that I am."
The first stirrings of anger that Jack had begun to feel now had to war against a genuine worry. "Sawyer?" he asked, unsure of what kind of response he was looking for. He pulled the pack away from Sawyer and dropped it onto the ground between them.
Sawyer opened his eyes. "I swear to God, you have got to be the most damned stubborn-"
Since Sawyer had started this, this whatever that it turned out to be by kissing him in the first place without warning, Jack thought it only fair that he should return the favor.
Sawyer's mouth was open to begin with but opened further at the first touch of Jack's lips, almost as if he was begging for the entry, for the distraction. Jack tangled one hand through Sawyer's hair and wound the other around his back, pulling him close until they were touching from shin to shoulder. Jack could feel it as Sawyer sighed and released some of his tension into Jack, some of whatever the hell it was that was making him feel as if he needed to question his own sanity. Jack returned the favor and gave back a little of his own worry about Locke and his lingering fears about Kate's own place in all of this, about what he thought he was doing leading a group of forty into war when he could barely manage their group of six.
Jack tugged Sawyer's lower lip between his teeth, opening up the small wounds that Sawyer had put there himself only a few hours earlier, and Sawyer made another one of those shiver-inducing sounds into Jack's mouth. They parted for a moment to catch their breaths, resting their foreheads against one another. Jack saw that Sawyer's eyes were open. He wondered if he had kept them open the entire time. Jack left his fingers twined through Sawyer's hair so that he could not pull away.
Not that Sawyer was even trying to. He closed his eyes and sighed, leaning even further into Jack and away from the desperate, fighting man that he had been only a few moments before. Jack did not think that he had even seen Sawyer looking so soft, so defeated. He vowed that he would do whatever he had to get the smart-assed fighter back.
"I'll tell you, Jack," Sawyer said after several long minutes went by in silence. Jack, realizing that Sawyer was trusting him with something far more important to him than his stash, said nothing. "When it's all over, I'll tell you." He sighed again. The bruises beneath his eyes seemed to grow even darker in response. "But I can't tell you anything else until then."
"Okay," Jack whispered before he kissed Sawyer again, slow and deep and as if he could pull the burden away just by willing it hard enough. He pulled away when the need for oxygen gave him no other choice, breathing hard through his nose. "We should get back."
"Just gonna wind me up and then that's it?" Sawyer whispered in response. They were keeping their voices pitched low, though Jack could not say why.
Jack snorted. "Try that line of argument on a teenaged girl. I doubt that you'll get much further." He tugged gently on Sawyer's hair and leaned in to murmur, "Heal up a little more and see what I'll do to you then."
Sawyer stared at him, a faint shadow of his old grin appearing on his face. "Don't think that you're going to get out of that one by saying that I was crazy and didn't hear you right."
Jack clapped Sawyer on the shoulder, and they turned as one creature back towards the camp. The only sounds were the crackling of leaves and of twigs beneath their feet and the scurrying of small animals as they moved to get out of their way. Sawyer fell back into the inner world that had claimed him fro the past several hours, and with the shadows pressing close around them and the wind whispering secrets through the trees overhead Jack was very tempted to do the same. The forest was eerie and only half real in that light, as if someone had thrown down the seeds of a fairy tale and the island was fertile ground. It was very easy, then, to be tempted by all of Locke's pronouncements that the island was a magic place. Jack felt his lips twist.
The beacon that was their fire came back into sight within a few moments. Jack's feet sped up automatically in order to meet it. By his side, Sawyer did the same.
It was probably a mistake, that fire. If it was drawing Jack and Sawyer this efficiently, then all number of other things could also be scuttling through the dark towards it. Jack's lips settled into a hard line. No; they had made enough changes in their lives as it was. Damned if they were going to let their light be taken from them as well. Jack would fight every single one of the Others down to the ground himself before he allowed that to happen.
Locke looked up from his scrutiny of the fire when Jack and Sawyer stepped back into the camp. "Dangerous to go that far out," was all that Locke said, but there was still a note of concern in his voice.
Sawyer leaned his walking stick against one of the trees and held up his hands in a gesture of mock surrender. "Easy there. The sheriff brought me back safe and sound, so you'll still get to poke around in your precious rabbit hole." The strained and uncertain Sawyer that Jack had glimpsed only minutes before was long gone, nothing more than a trick of moonlight and shadow. Were if not for the purple circles beneath his eyes and the marks on his lower lip, Jack would have thought that they were still back at the beach. Kate would only look at either of them for a few seconds at a time before she returned to staring moodily into the fire.
"You're a real rebel without a clue, you know that?" Jack asked, not unkindly, at the same moment that Locke said, "This is every bit as much your mystery as it is mine."
For one second, Jack saw Sawyer with every one of his defenses stripped away. Sawyer's breath caught in his throat. Jack thought that he and Locke must have been the only ones who saw the look that crossed Sawyer's face then, patterned and camouflaged by the shadows of the dwindling fire.
Whatever Sawyer was not telling him, it was huge and it was terrible. Jack thought of the feeling that he had gotten on the way back, that of reality slipping away and a fairytale coming to take its place. The real kind, before Disney could come along and sanitize it for mass consumption. Jack snorted from the back of his throat and fought hard to avoid giving a self-deprecating shake of his head. If he let the atmosphere start getting to him now, after everything else that he had seen, then he would never come back from the brink.
He had gotten a promise out of Sawyer, and that was enough. Let Sawyer keep his secrets held like treasures for now. If those secrets were going to put them all in danger when Jack was still willing to kick his ass for him. Had Sawyer been able to read the contents of Jack's thoughts then, Jack thought that he might even have smiled.
Sawyer was still staring hard at Locke, but his mask was firmly back in place, buckled tight and not likely to slip anytime soon. "Never had the patience for mysteries," he said as he found a patch of ground that look comfortable enough to spend the night on and lowered himself down gingerly. "Always preferred the shoot 'em ups."
"You might get your wish," Charlie said. Michael stared moodily into the fire and said nothing.
Jack laid down with a rustling of leaves and felt Sawyer's eyes sliding over him from head to foot in response. Given the two clashing encounters that they had already had, it was probably dangerous for them to be sleeping so closely to one another when they were hardly in a private setting, but Jack decided then and there that the light was not the only thing that he was not going to allow to be taken from him.
Jack was not good at letting go. As far as character flaws went, he thought that he could live with that.
From the corner of his eye, Jack saw Sawyer glance towards the backpack that still held the mystery leaves. A moment later, he heard him mutter, "Fuck it, I ain't gonna help her." Thinking that Sawyer was talking about Sun, Jack felt his brow wrinkling, but he decided to keep his peace.
They all hunkered down in the light of the dying fire and did their best to sleep.
---
"What's wrong, babe, did your emissary get tired of waiting on you? I'll bet good help is even harder to find among the undead." Sawyer rotated his shoulder as he spoke and took a deep, chest-expanding breath. He did not feel so much as a twinge of pain from either movement. That was the one side effect of these expeditions into the Twilight Zone that he was not going to miss.
He took a few further steps towards the mysterious and maddening figure who was seated on the same tree stump where Sawyer had first seen Boone only two nights before. The unnaturally golden fire dipped and swayed between them, reaching out long fingers towards Dream Date as if it wanted to caress her. Or wring her neck. That was one impulse that Sawyer could understand without too much trouble.
"Or did he finally figure out where that light was and head towards it?" Sawyer continued. "I would have liked to see that."
Dream Date smiled. Sawyer wished that she hadn't. It was worse when she was trying to be human than when she just gave up and let herself be creepy. "He has other methods of distracting himself," she said, folding her hands together on her knees. Dream Date was wearing a loose white shift that fell over her in oversized folds and eliminated any hint of sexuality that she might have had, so that Sawyer's belief in her femininity came about not so much from observation as from instinct. Dream Date's hands were every bit as white as her dress, and when she placed them against the fabric Sawyer had to squint in order to see where one ended and the other began. She tilted her head to one side as she caught him looking, as if she wanted to ask, "Well?" but thought that such an action was beneath her.
"What?" Sawyer asked. He folded his arms over his chest and leaned back against one of the nearby trees, keeping a good distance between himself and both the fire and the scarcely human thing beyond it. He wondered if the few scant yards would even do him any good, should it come down to that. "You looking for a progress report or something?" Sawyer smirked. "You told me to move my ass. Fine. If it will get you out of my head any faster, I'll move it."
Dream Date hardly blinked. "That was the means," she said in her flat, atonal way. "That was not the end. You took one."
"And I have to give one back, yeah, I got that memo the last three or four times that you sent it." Sawyer made an exasperated noise and dragged his hand through his hair. "Listen, Dream Date, I-" He cut himself off and let out an unhealthy laugh. "Do you even have a name, or can I draw whatever I want out of a hat? Because I think that I could get creative for you, baby doll."
Dream Date opened her mouth, only to close it again without saying a word. She looked as surprised as she was capable of looking, in her inhumanly composed way. "I never learned it," she said. A softness entered her voice that made Sawyer scale back her age by at least a decade, turning her into a woman not by years nearly so much as by will. If the flat and unflinching stare that she fixed on him was any kind of indicator, then she already had plenty of that. Sawyer wondered if whoever had taken her life realized what kind of mistake that they had made.
Sawyer took a deep breath, shook his head, and went on, "Life's a bitch. You probably already know how the rest of that saying ends." Dream Date raised her eyebrows at him. "But what I did in Australia, I can't reverse it, you got that? I can't give one back." Sawyer's face hardened. "And I hate to break it to you, honey-pie, but I ain't going on this adventure for you. I am going to get that boy back."
Dream Date's face changed at the first mention of Walt, becoming even more contemptuous and cold. "So you can't give one back without also taking one," she said. Her glittering teeth were even whiter than her skin. Dream Date leaned forward to peer at him closely, pulling her dress tight across her breasts. Sawyer's mental estimate of her age when down by another five years. Dream Date folded her hands beneath her chin in a gesture that would have been coquettish on anyone else. "That puts you into quite the difficult situation, doesn't it?"
---
Sawyer lurched awake between one second and the next, noticing that the fire had died down to no more than a few red and gleaming embers. The smell of motor oil was heavy in his nose, and the growing louder by the second was the buzzing of bees.
---
Jack woke up when Sawyer's arm struck him in the chest hard enough to drive all of the air out of his lungs. He sat up, got a quick whiff of motor oil and heard the sound of buzzing all around him, and found his breath again to yell, "Everyone! Wake up NOW!" Over the sound of insects, he couldn't hear if anyone was actually obeying him.
Something slammed into the back of Jack's hand, tearing a long furrow across the skin that began to burn and fill with blood immediately. Jack swore but did not pull back his hand. Instead, he reached for Sawyer.
Sawyer jerked as soon as Jack touched him, raising his fist for a second as if he meant to take a swing at him. Even in the darkness, Jack could see that his eyes were opened wide and the whites were shining. "Not now, man," Jack said, hauling him to his feet instead. Sawyer yelped in pain and fell against him, but there was no time to worry about that now. "We have to move."
"No," Sawyer said, setting his heels into the earth and pulling back hard. "That's the wrong direction."
Jack was used to Sawyer saying the most nonsensical things that he could conceive of, was even comforted by it, but now was not the time. "What?" He gaped. Jack ducked away as something whizzed by his ear, something that he strongly suspected would have had teeth if he had allowed it to get close enough. "Sawyer, now is not the time-"
Kate screamed at the exact moment that something tugged hard on his other arm, and for one second Jack was suspended between two warring sets of instincts and with nowhere else to go. Sawyer was gone by the time that he turned back to look. He should not have been able to move that fast while injured-could not have moved that fast while injured. Jack swore again, flinched away, and the cloud around him grew that much thicker.
Doctor or leader, Jack thought bitterly. Hell of a time. Someone that he could not see tugged or Jack's arm, so he let himself be led in that direction, smelling for a moment decay and rain, towards the sound of Kate's voice and the job that he had to do.
He didn't think that job included the ground opening up beneath his him without warning, dropping him down an incredible distance before he cracked his head on a hard surface and was not in the position to do any job at all.
End Part Sixteen
