Part Twenty-Two

Well, fuck.

"Honeymoon's over?" Sawyer wheezed from his doubled-over position as soon as he smelled the first hint of the moss and heard the crackling of the fire. He kept his good hand clutched to his chest, from where his heart felt as if it had been set on fire and was doing its very best to leap out of his chest in response. Unlike his previous visits, all of his injuries were flaring into brilliant agony and growing worse by the second. Tears of pain sparked in Sawyer's eyes and ran down his face.

His heart wrenched, staggering him, and it was all that Sawyer could do not to go down on one knee. He split his lips into a wide grin to keep himself from screaming. Never let them see you cry, never let them see you die. Sawyer would hang onto that maxim for as long as he was alive and even beyond. "Unless you're the secret snuggling type and just never told me. Hey, I understand. Image and all." Sawyer flicked his sweat-soaked hair back from his face and looked up at last.

He had assumed that Dream Date was silent only because she was waiting to make one of her precious goddamned entrances. Instead, it turned out to be a pure and unbridled rage. That shit made the world go around.

"Why should I?" she snapped. "If you're just going to be hers in the end, anyway, why should I bother to play nice any longer?" If the last several days had been Dream Date's idea of playing nice, Sawyer would have hated to see what she was when she was in a snit. He took several deep breaths through his nose and waited until the world stopped seesawing back and forth through the pain.

Dream Date stood just in front of the fire, almost directly on top of it. Given the look on her face, Sawyer would not have been shocked if she had taken a step backwards, into the flames, only to have them shiver and run away from her immediately. Her hands were clenched into fists by her sides, her whole body vibrating with the energy of a sun on the verge of going nova. Had her heart still beat, Sawyer was sure that her face would have been scarlet with fury.

At the moment, though, it was his own heart that he was most concerned about. Sawyer staggered again, unable to stop the groan that rose up from the depths of his throat as another sharp, spiking pain rolled out from his chest. Shit, and it looked as if he might be heading for that light that Boone was either too stubborn or too stupid to find on his own, after all. Actually staring down death was quite a different situation from idly wishing for it whenever he had been drinking too heavily.

"You were supposed to give one back," Dream Date whispered. She sounded beyond angry; she sounded as if her whole world had been ripped out from under her. Devastation made her even younger, icy blue eyes that would have been at home on a much older woman or not. In this light, Sawyer would put her age at no more than sixteen. "And instead you, you…you go with her, when she's the one who took it from me in the first place."

Sawyer hissed hard through his teeth and sank down to his knees. "Sounding like a broken record there, sweetheart," he growled. Pain had driven his voice down into a register that he had never heard before. "And from where I'm standing-" He chuckled mirthlessly and braced his hand against the ground to keep himself from falling even further. "So to speak, it sure as hell does seem like I managed that." Under his breath, Sawyer muttered, "Now let's see if I can pay the price to do it."

Sawyer had no doubt that Dream Date heard him-somehow, this bitch always managed to hear him-but she wasn't much interested in his death's door mutterings at the moment. Her shaking was growing more pronounced by the moment. Outside of being merely angry, Sawyer thought that she even looked ill. He glanced down at his hands and realized that the moss that he had been crouched on was growing rapidly, overtaking his fingers and beginning a slow trail up his wrist. Sawyer yelled and found the strength to lunge back up to his feet, flinging the moss away from himself. He half-expected to see it climbing over his boots when he looked back down.

"You were supposed to give it back to me," Dream Date said, just this side of shrieking. Tears welled up in her eyes, rolled down her face, and vanished as soon as they dropped off the edge of her chin. "This is the only place where you can give one back."

Sawyer didn't doubt that, not with everything else that he had seen over the past several days, but this was not the place to debate the whys and the wherefores. Black spots were dancing before his eyes and it wouldn't be more than a few seconds before he fell all the way, whether he liked it or not. Even if this particular choice was still in his hands, Sawyer didn't think that he would be giving one back to Dream Date, anyway. Pain had driven this girl crazy a long time ago. It was written all over her eyes.

Now that Sawyer was really pausing to think about it, lunging forward like that had maybe not been the smartest thing that he had ever done in his life. Those instincts of his were finding ways of overwhelming his common sense, instincts that were coming back faster and stronger every day. Sawyer sometimes felt as if they would drown him, one on top of the other so quickly that he couldn't keep his head up for much longer.

"Too late," Sawyer said, speaking as much to his own anxieties as he was to Dream Date. "Can't turn it back, even if I wanted to."

Dream Date stamped her foot against the ground; it shuddered. Sawyer did not think that the two events were related. The swift, fearful look that she flicked all around seemed to confirm this. She turned back to him finally, still crying angry, helpless tears. "But I didn't deserve it!" she said. "I didn't deserve what they did to me, I didn't deserve what they took from me, and you do!" Her voice rose closer to hysteria with every word. Even though he had been expecting it and for that matter did not particularly disagree, Sawyer flinched back. "You deserve to be punished, and they deserve to be punished, but now she's free and I'm dead, and there's no one around who can make it right, and if I can't get one back how can I make it right?"

"I don't know, sweetheart," Sawyer said, for once not putting any mockery into the nickname. "But I can't help you."

The air changed, a warm wind moving through the trees when Sawyer could not remember there having been so much as a breeze before. It was hot like air rolling out of an oven was hot, humid and crackling with lightning, smelling of ozone and moss and decay. Sawyer jerked back hard when he smelled the moss, that scent of things living and dying and stories that had not even begun. It was thick, cloying, like a woman who tried to wear too much perfume in order to compensate for other failings. Sawyer nearly gagged on it.

Dream Date lifted her face to the wind and tasted it for a long moment before she lowered her gaze again to look at Sawyer. Her eyes were clear, cold, and shrewd in spite of the fact that they were still filled with tears. "She does," she said. "She deserves it."

That left a long list of possibilities. Sawyer opened his mouth so that he could tell Dream Date not to worry, that making deals with the one devil in a blue dress-close enough-at a time was more than enough for him. Before he could open his mouth, though, Dream Date was gone. Not walked away, or slowly shimmering into nonexistence, but was gone. Meanwhile, the wind grew stronger.

If Sawyer made it through this, he was going to find that Straub book and burn it, one page at a time.

An unseen hand cupped his face and stroked his cheek, moving over the exact same skin that the woman with the green eyes had caressed earlier. Sawyer jerked back even further, though he wasn't really up to moving more than a few inches at a time. The surrounding foliage seemed that much brighter between one second and the next.

Freed me yes love you yes loveyouloveyouloveyou could take such good care of you yes could protect you yes like the other one yes bled for me yes tasted it loved it want only a little just a taste yes just promisepromisepromise.

Mention of the other one might have aroused more concern in Sawyer if he had not been so busy panicking over far more general things, like the fact that every time that he thought the world could not get any stranger, nope, there it was. "What?" he gasped, though the sudden brightness of the ferns all around him made him think that he already knew the color of this woman's eyes. "What the fuck?"

Protected you from them guided you here got you here made the sharks turn back from you want you you like the other one like the last one just say yes just swear it to me and I can give you one back I can take one from the boy and give it back that dangerous boy that hatehatehate boy.

Every hair on Sawyer's body was standing straight up in the air and his body was running hot and cold by turns, as if the physiological signals were so scrambled that he did not know which way to even turn now. They had left the regular world so far behind them at this point that it was no more than a blip in the radar screen.

Sawyer grunted and went back to his knees, moss be damned, as his hear again felt like someone was stabbing it with a fork and then twisting as hard as she could. "Sorry, sweetheart," he said, and none of the momentary gentleness that had colored his voice while he was speaking to Dream Date remained there now. "But I don't exactly think that I have one left to give, and I'm damned sure not in a mood to go on bended knee and be knighted even if I did. Rebel complex, you know that whole drill, I'm sure."

The invisible hand drew back as swiftly as if Sawyer had turned his hand and snapped at it. I control everything that happens on this island. I control you. Wait and see.

It echoed and reechoed, going from whisper to shout and back again before Sawyer's heart beat twice, even if he could be sure in this place that his heart even needed to beat at all. Turned out you could pass out in the middle of a paranormal dreamscape just as easily as you could lose consciousness back in the real world. Sawyer would be sure to make a note of that for his memoirs.

--

Sawyer woke again with a mouth pressed down over his, warm and pliant and of a softness that was undeniably female. He would enjoy it so much more if his ears were not ringing from the newest dragon lady to enter his acquaintance, if his head was not tilted back at an aggressive angle so that that oh-so-pretty mouth could blow air down into lungs that, from the feeling of things, had been slacking off on the job. A hand was pounding down on his chest hard enough to hurt even if his ribs had not been creatively rearranged. Sawyer gasped and sucked fresh air down into his lungs so fast that he was amazed that he did not swallow his would-be rescuer's tongue, lurching upwards and ignoring his ribs as they threatened to stage a rebellion. It was just one drop in a very large bucket at this point. Joe Schmoe and his probable appendectomy be damned, if he got out of this then Jack was going to part with those heavy sedatives.

Sawyer nearly collided noggins with Shannon as he jerked up and into life. She reared back just in time to avoid having her nose smashed into his forehead, her eyes wide and panicky, her lips parted as she gasped for breath. Sawyer wondered if she even saved any for herself, or if she had been pushing it all into him. Mess or not, she was still the prettiest woman in the world to him right at that moment, and Sawyer opened his mouth for one of the rare occasions when he wanted to offer a woman a compliment without expecting a damned thing in return.

The magnanimous impulse was dampened a tad when Shannon reared back with her good hand and slapped him.

"Ow!" Sawyer pressed his hand to his stinging cheek and glared at her. The compliment could wait, he decided. She was lucky that he didn't point out that her busted lip was going to push her past Angelina Jolie and into bad collagen injection territory before the night was over. "What the hell was that for?"

"You wouldn't wake up." Shannon sounded on the verge of tears. Sawyer hated it when women cried in front of him, especially when he had no way of making his hasty escape. "I thought that someone else was going to die."

Sawyer was so gratified to find himself placed on the short but apparently growing list of people that Shannon Rutherford gave a damn about that he decided not to point out that the odds were still in favor of a whole lot of other people dying before the sun rose again. "Where'd you learn to do CPR, anyway?" he asked, rubbing at his head. His ears were still ringing so badly that he could barely hear Shannon even though she was crouching right in front of him.

"Boone taught me," she said, suddenly looking shy.

Yeah, Sawyer would just bet that he did,. Now there was a family with issues to make his own look like nothing more serious that a predilection for temper tantrums. Sawyer continued rubbing at his head and took several deep breaths until his lungs had convinced him that they could take it on their own from here. His heart still felt as though someone had taken a baseball bat and tried to knock one right out of the park with it, but it was beating steadily, that lub-dub rhythm that Sawyer was never in his life going to take for granted again.

"I have to go," Shannon said, rising to her feet. "I only stayed to try to get you breathing again." She looked quickly around the room until she spotted the wreckage of the chair that Walt had been imprisoned in. Walking over to it, Shannon seized one of the needles, stepped on the tube connecting it to the chair, and tugged. There was a moment of resistance before it ultimately gave way, emitting a puff of sickly-sweet gas into the room.

The ringing in Sawyer's ears diminished enough so that he could hear the sound of a lot of bodies slamming against each other just beyond the doorway, and not in any kind of fun pornographic way. There were shadows moving past the opening when Sawyer focused hard, hardly any more noticeable than ink against midnight. There was a tremendous crash, a grunt of pain, and the unmistakable sound of something wet splattering against the floor. Just when he was starting to have faith in it again, his heart stuttered in his chest.

"Holy hell," he muttered.

Shannon let loose a humorous little laugh as she tested the hypodermic against the pad of her thumb. She sucked away the bead of blood that welled up before she answered. "Pretty much. I think that's what they put on the brochure." She started to turn and limp towards the door, only to pause. Looking back at Sawyer, her eyes widened. "Your arm," she said.

Sawyer glanced down, knowing without needing to ask that she was referring to the place where the newest queen on their chessboard had grabbed for him. There were a series of red marks stamped into the flesh there, almost deep enough to be called burns. As Sawyer watched, a faint green glow rose from the skin for a second before it disappeared. Even knowing that it had been meant for Walt and that he had done what could objectively be called a noble thing, Sawyer felt his mouth go dry, and he felt like putting his fist through the nearest wall. He was only slightly gratified when he remembered that everyone else had also seen the green-eyed lady before Sawyer had thrown his self-preservation right out the window, that if he really was going crazy, then he was doing it in fine company.

Shannon took a deep breath. "I wish I was on acid," she announced calmly before turning and walking out the door.

Sawyer had long since begun to wish that he was on acid, too. He took several more deep breaths, putting his hand against his chest so that he could feel his own heartbeat and reassure himself that it was still there. Shannon had barely stepped out the door when there was a thump and a feminine cry of pain. Alarmed, Sawyer began to push himself to his feet, only to fall back a second later as his muscles informed him that his license to control them had been revoked until he could show better judgment. "Fuck," he muttered. Being useless was only entertaining when he was doing it purposely.

There were still a few lights glittering in the room from the electronics on the chair that had stubbornly refused to turn off when the power had gone out. They blinked in a pattern that would drive Sawyer right out of his mind if he tried too hard to decipher it, read and green, red and green. The light was not strong enough to let Sawyer see any way in which he could help his…okay, they weren't friends, exactly, but they were being added onto his own short list of people that he would not throw under a train if he was given a chance and might even give a damn about. Not strong enough to let him see a way to help them, but also not weak enough to avoid throwing out long, multicolored shadows. All right, so maybe those shadows were not dangerous-Sawyer did not think, though he was not discounting anything at this point-but it aided in heightening Sawyer's overall anxiety over this new feeling that had been gathering over him like a wave for some time and was just now beginning to crest, this feeling of ought.

The green-eyed lady emerged from the corner of the room, grinning at Sawyer with clean white teeth that convinced him in a moment that she had never been human. Sawyer scrubbed at his cheek reflexively where the unseen hand had caressed at his face. He felt as if he was rubbing a fine layer of slime off of his skin.

"Don't think so, sweetness," he told her. "I've given one back. So far as I'm concerned, that puts my days of making deals with women that I can see through at an end." Sawyer did not know if he had given one back at all, if that was even possible while he was still on this earth, and if that was enough to tip the scales even if he had. "Go to hell."

Still grinning, the green-eyed lady cut her eyes towards the door, beyond which the shadows were not exactly telling a happy story. 'I control everything that happens on this island.' "Won't you make one more deal? For me? For them?" Sawyer inhaled sharply between his teeth.

"Don't." Sawyer jumped, immediately regretted the action, and swore at length so that the universe as a whole would know exactly how much he regretted it. He swiveled his head once he had finished and the world had stopped spinning around and saw Walt, crouching only a few feet away with his arms folded neatly over the tops of his knees. The boy's eyes were cat-wide, and the dried blood ran down and wound in circles around his arms, an ourobouros. Sawyer was just crowded with interesting company tonight. "Don't say yes to her."

Green-eyed Lady (passion's lady, Sawyer could not stop his mind from chiming in automatically) hissed at Walt without making a sound, but kept her distance. Certain things that Dream Date had said before vanishing began to coalesce in Sawyer's mind to become a great and terrible theory. He shivered before he could halt himself.

"You turned into a mind reader since you left, little man?" Sawyer asked. It was at least a logical possibility at this point, he allowed. Sawyer would decide probability once he had figured out how that theory was going to go.

Walt shook his head slowly and moved at last, coming to nestle against Sawyer's side. He never took his eyes away from the green-eyed lady. That made two of them, and the lady for her part seemed content to stare at them with her creepy little grin and let the events in the hallway turn out however they would. Doing the math in his head, Sawyer realized that she was probably going to turn out to be right. His own realization of being dead weight was bitter, bitter.

Walt was pressed up against Sawyer's side as if he would meld himself against his ribs if he could find a way. He was clearly still terrified and was shivering violently in spite of the eerie moments of calm that would occasionally come over him. Sawyer's arm twitched for a moment as he came within an inch of lifting his arm, putting it around the boy's shoulders, and giving him the hug that he so clearly desired. It was amazing, he thought, that moving one limb could turn out to be so damnably hard.

"No," Walt said at long last. Sawyer had not realized that he was going to speak; at that point Sawyer had almost forgotten that he had spoken himself. "But I know what she is."

"I'll bet you do." Sawyer couldn't stop himself from glancing towards the remains of the chair and felt Walt doing the same thing. The boy shivered even closer into his side. "Don't worry, little man. I don't know exactly what she is, but I got enough of an idea." The marks of fingers (of chains) on his arm and around his ankle began to itch, hot and cold in alternating turns.

Michael and Charlie staggered back through the door, both of them bleeding from a dozen small wounds and a few that were not so small. Michael's leg was soaked in blood from the thigh down, and it was by an obvious act of will that he was even keeping himself on his feet. It was Charlie that Sawyer could not take his eyes from, though, Charlie who had, he remembered, lunged forward to protect Walt at the same time that Sawyer had when the island's toothiest resident had shown herself. Charlie was not limping and did not seem to have received any wounds, other than the fact that the burn on his forehead had opened up again. A trickle of blood was running down the side of his face, across his neck and into the collar of his shirt. Sawyer again thought of snakes.

Charlie and Michael, Sawyer noticed, were each carrying a long, thick needle like the one that Shannon had liberated before dashing out. They weren't guns or even knives, but Sawyer still figured that they could do damage in a pinch. He very carefully didn't glance down at the obvious evidence of this etched across Walt's arms.

"There's too many of them," Charlie said, breathing hard and staring at the dark opening that marked the door. Sayid and Shannon burst through a second later, leaning heavily on each other. Tears were running down Shannon's face and she was shaking so badly that if Sayid had not been there she probably would have fallen down, but neither was she showing any signs of running for the hills. "We'd need a miracle."

Sawyer glanced towards the place where he had seen the green-eyed lady last before he could stop himself. She was long gone, off to wherever place ghosts or goddesses of whatever the fuck her random bits of ectoplasm made up went after a hard day at the office. Walt's shivering grew even more pronounced. Sawyer put his arm around him at last, if for nothing else then because he thought the little man was going to fall over otherwise.

The doorway was crowded with faces, none of them quite daring to come close even though their opponents were clearly trapped. Sawyer even wondered why for a second, until he realized that Walt had stopped shivering beneath his arm and was once again fixing the Others with that old, adult look. So Pandora's box was not quite so easy to close again once it had been well and truly opened. Sawyer was all eaten up with sympathy, really.

"All we want is the boy," the leader said from the doorway. He again sounded young, pleading and scared. Sawyer thought of how Walt had once sounded young, and how now he didn't, and wished instead that he had a weapon himself.

"Situation didn't work out so well the last time you tried that line, Yosemite," Sawyer said in a low voice. "Might want to pick a different script."

Yosemite Sam snarled for a moment before his gaze happened to fall own to Sawyer's arm, where the mark of a hand was still clearly visible. His expression cleared to become suggestive, almost leering. "By now you know that there are forces on this island, dangerous ones," he said in a reasonable voice, like an elder trying to impart wisdom onto a stubborn child. "You think that she's dangerous now. She's weak here. The jungle is her real place. That boy." Yosemite broke off to point at Walt. "He's special, like the one before him was special. He can hold her back. Otherwise, a lot of people are going to die before this is over."

Yosemite might be able to talk with the voice of a grandfather rocking in a porch swing, but that didn't mean a damned thing. Sawyer knew this game. He bared his teeth, saying, "I have a way with women," at the same time that Michael said, "I'm not seeing a single thing wrong with that plan." A buzzing sound began to fill the air.

When Sawyer had half-facetiously asked for a miracle before that was not quite what he had meant.

Yosemite grinned from the doorway. "You'll come out one way or the other," he said. Sawyer was treated to the truly bizarre sight of the first of the voracious little mechanoids swirling into the room above Yosemite's head and across his shoulders without a single one attacking. They way as well have been pet birds.

There was nowhere to run to, even if Sawyer had been sure that he could stand. He braced himself for the inevitable feeling of thousands of tiny teeth slicing strips from his flesh, when from beside him Walt said very clearly, "No."

The monsters froze in the air as swiftly as if they had become representations in a photograph rather than creatures of flesh and…well, instead of real creatures. Sawyer squinted and saw that they were trembling in the air even thought they could not move forward, the way that a person would in indignation or even fright, the way that the Others were even now. Sawyer had a strong feeling that the one before Walt had been dramatically fair-skinned from spending so much time down here and had worn a long white dress of a loose, linen-like material. He took one look at the Others' expressions and knew for a fact and without even needing to ask that she had never been able to do what Walt was doing now.

That raised the question of what, exactly, Walt was doing now. "No," he said again, more loudly. His voice was still a child in timber, but in expression it had already become much older. "None of you deserve to be here." He closed his eyes as if he could not bear to look and burrowed even further into Sawyer's side, until Sawyer had to grit his teeth hard to keep from gasping. A second later he gasped, anyway, and understood why Walt had closed his eyes.

The monster spun and attacked its master. That was their miracle, delivered through the mind of the little boy that the Others had already been trying to alter. Sawyer turned his face after the first few seconds, but he couldn't stop himself from hearing it. When the sound ceased, Sawyer opened his eyes and then spent several seconds holding an interior debate about whether that had been a good idea or the worst one that he had ever had.

"Little man…" Sawyer began when he had gotten used to the sight of so much red, only to trail off again helplessly. This wasn't the kind of work that you praised somebody for. Even if it was work that needed to be done, anyway, it still should have been done by someone else who already had blood on their hands, him or Sayid or even Michael. "Where did it go?" he asked finally, realizing that he could not hear anything buzzing, no matter how hard he listened for it.

"I threw it in the ocean," came Walt's succinct reply.

"Good boy," Sawyer said, realizing that the rest of the group was staring at him and Walt as if they were a pair of snakes that had been backed into a corner, angry and scared and with unknown poison coursing through their fangs. He glanced down at his arm. The burn was still there, still glowing green when he turned his forearm just the right way. And he had for one brief second allowed himself to get optimistic, too.

The ground shivered as Sawyer looked back up, and from a distant corridor there was the sound of a tunnel collapsing. To Sawyer's ears, the sound of it was almost celebratory. The dirt and the unvarnished wood in the hallway were drinking up the blood at an alarmingly quick rate. Well, if Yosemite had been telling the truth, then she probably had a lot to celebrate with the Others' demise. Sawyer would be raising a glass in toast, too.

"She'll be happy," Sawyer said finally, ignoring the stares except to stare pointedly back when they went on for just a second too long. "That don't mean that she'll forget about the sprog here, or what his gray matter could do to her if he takes a mind to. Call me crazy, but maybe we ought not to be under ten tons of dirt when she makes up her mind on that score."

It was like breaking a spell. Michael came forward and lifted Walt into his arms with no more strain than if his boy had still been a baby. Sayid took up the task of lifting Sawyer back up to his feet and putting his good arm across Sayid's shoulders. Much as Sawyer was not digging the sensation of being everyone's favorite rag doll, it was a little pointless to argue against it when he could not stand on his own.

"How much-" Sayid murmured in Sawyer's ear. He nodded towards a clump of raw hamburger and glittering bone. It was as good a guess as any. "How much of what their leader said to you was true?"

"About my way with women?" Sawyer chuckled and then winced. "Every word. I'll even take yours if you don't watch out." Though Sayid's lips twitched for a moment, that was clearly not what he had meant. Sawyer sighed. "I didn't cut any deals. Not with that thing. I'm not exactly privy to inside information."

Sayid nodded as if this was merely confirmation of what he had already known. "I had to ask," he said.

"I know. I ain't offended." Sawyer struggled for a moment until he was able to force his knees to take at least some of his weight. "Let's just leave, all right? This is always the part of the movie where the damned temple comes crashing down."

Nearly an hour of searching after that brought them an exit, a place where the earth began to slope gently upwards into the air of the early dawn. If you had been trapped in the darkness for long enough, Sawyer discovered, light did have a smell, delicate and sweet.

When there was a figure waiting for them at the end of the tunnel, Sawyer couldn't say that he was surprised.

End Part Twenty-Two