Part Twenty-Three
The water was shockingly cold as Jack dove beneath the surface. He opened his eyes and twisted through the water, searching for any sign of the kid. 'It's not going to be like Joanna,' Jack caught himself thinking. 'I won't let it be like Joanna.' It became a chant inside his head, almost a war cry.
There was no hint of blond hair or flailing limbs anywhere in the water, no matter how hard Jack looked. Something cold and fishlike touched against Jack's thigh; he jerked away impatiently without looking around. His lungs had long since begun to burn and a small interior voice to tell him to give it up, that it had been a lost cause since the beginning, and in any case he was risking his life for someone who probably did not deserve saving.
'It's not about who deserves it,' Jack thought, making no attempt to halt or slow his downward dive. Only a few feet deeper. He would stop when he was no longer sure that he had enough air to take him back to the surface.
Something darkly red wavered in the corner of Jack's vision, and he turned towards it even though the youth's head had not been bleeding all that badly. Extending his hand, he felt something silky slide through his fingers, though it was too dark under the water for him to definitively see what he had touched. That kid had exceptionally soft hair, considering how dirty it was.
Jack stretched out a little farther, until his questing fingers found an arm, almost as if he was being guided to it. He closed his hand around it reflexively and jerked the kid to his chest before he began swimming for the surface. By splaying his hand out across the kid's chest, Jack could still feel a heartbeat moving beneath the surface of the skin. Thank God for that. Black spots were dancing in front of Jack's eyes and there was a roaring sound in his ears. He clutched his inert burden to his chest as his head broke the surface of the water.
A few fat raindrops struck the waves as Jack emerged gasping, sullenly, as if the clouds would grant them this small mercy only before they wanted something in return. Jack was just glad for the air. He paused to pull in several deep breaths before he shifted his grip on his unconscious burden and swam them both back in the direction of the dock. Kate and Locke both had their heads turned back in the direction of the tunnel as if in scrutiny of some troubling sound. They turned back when they heard Jack calling for them.
Locke leaned over the side of the dock and extended his arms out to Jack. "Take my hands!" he yelled over the wind that was rising all around them and turning the ocean into a white foam.
Jack shook his head before he realized that with the darkness and the waves, Locke might not even be able to see the gesture. "No!" he yelled, pausing afterwards to spit out a mouthful of saltwater. "Take him first."
Locke hesitated long enough to make Jack think that he was going to pick now of all times to renew their pissing contest. Finally, Locke shook his head and grabbed the youth beneath his arms, hauling him up and onto the dark with no strain whatsoever in spite of the fact that the kid was dead weight and had to be carrying at least thirty pounds of water in his many layers of clothes. Meanwhile, Kate leaned around Locke and braced her hand against one of the dock supports so that she could extend the other one down to Jack.
The feeling of smooth wood beneath his hands was almost enough to bring Jack to tears. He only paused to enjoy it for a few moments before he raised his head and yelled at Locke, "Is he breathing?"
Locke stared down at the kid with a mild distaste as he rolled over and began to retch up all of the saltwater that he had swallowed. "I believe that's an indicator of breathing, yes."
The kid rose up to his hands and knees so that he could keep heaving. He pressed his hand to his temple, where a scarlet flow of blood was still trickling. The kid swayed back and forth as he looked up at last and realized that he had an audience, and one that could not be by any stretch of the imagination considered friendly.
The effect was immediate and electric. The kid scrabbled backwards on his hands and knees, not even bothering to stand fully upright and not seeming to realize as he did so that every step took him that much closer to falling off the edge of the dock again.
Jack's nose and throat were still burning with seawater; he did not particularly feel like mounting a second rescue on the heels of the first one just because the kid was working himself up to a mind-blowing case of panic. "Oh, no, you're not," Jack said, lunging forward. He grabbed the kid's ankle and jerked him back across the dock towards him. One of the kid's fingernails caught in the wood and made a sharp snapping noise as it pulled away. Jack and the boy both winced.
'If he would just calm down for a minute…' Snorting at how ridiculous the entire situation was becoming, Jack dodged the kid's kicking legs and sat down on his abdomen instead, grabbing the fists that immediately came flying towards his head. "Okay," Jack said, pausing for a moment to get this panting under control. "So we're going to calm down and try this again, all right?" Jack was doing his very best to keep his voice low and soothing, as he would while speaking to a wounded animal that might or might not have teeth. It would have been a lot easier if he had not been clenching his teeth hard enough to make all of the tendons in his neck stand out, if there wasn't a painful knot already rising up on his shoulder from where the wounded animal had decided to take his aggressive tendencies out for a spin. "You don't hit us and we won't hit you. Does that sound like a good plan?"
The kid squirmed and otherwise did his best to get a leg free so that he could kick Jack in the head. Jack swore and fought to regain his balance as he was nearly bucked off, raising his hand quickly to stop Kate as she came forward with an intent expression. Locke stood quietly to one side, his arms folded over his chest and a look on his face suggesting that that he was filling up mental files at a prodigious rate. Jack forced his fists to uncurl and jerked his attention away from Locke just in time to avoid being struck in the face. He grabbed the kid's arm and forced it back down to the dock.
Jack took a deep breath and unclenched his teeth before he wound up chipping one of them. "I don't think that you're doing the math here," he said to the kid, jerking his chin in the direction of Kate and Locke. "And you might want to think about the water that I just fished you out of. Or do you 'Others' not understand the concept of gratitude?"
The kid gave one final, desperate lurch and then fell back against the dock, his hair fanning out like a waterlogged halo around his head. The whiteness of his face made him appear even younger than Jack's original estimate, and the blood on his temple contrasted with the pallor as sharply as wine spilled across a linen tablecloth. He tilted his head back, exposing the long line of his throat as if he was waiting for the sacrificial knife to come down, and closed his eyes. The lids did not fall shut before Jack saw the gleam of pure panic there.
Jack should not be feeling like the guilty one. He sighed.
"We'll start simple," he told the kid. "What's your name?"
The kid remained quiet, his lips pressed tightly together, until Jack was sure that he was going to be ignored until he gave up and shoved the kid over the edge of the dock again. "Paul," he finally whispered, barely moving his lips.
"Paul," Jack repeated. "Good. See, this is better than hitting each other, isn't it?" Paul's tightly compressed lips begged to differ. "All right, Paul. How long have you been here?"
"Born here," Paul said. He had a knack for speaking while hardly moving his mouth at all, so that Jack had to lean very close in order to hear him. He tensed in anticipated of being head-butted at any moment.
"How long ago was that?" Jack felt as if he was trying to get a medical history out of a patient who was senile, had ADD, and was probably high. The wrists that Jack was keeping pinning down to the dock twitched spasmodically beneath his hands. On drugs, and with violence issues. Jack pushed down on the tendons until Paul stopped and gave him a look that definitely did not come from a wounded rabbit. It reminded Jack for a moment, painfully, of Sawyer. "I'll cut you a deal. You talk to us, you answer my questions, and we won't hurt you. We'll let you completely walk away from this."
Locke made a small movement. Jack glared him into keeping his silence. When he looked back at Paul, the boy was still wearing that Sawyer look. A fishhook twisted through Jack's gut. God only knew where Sawyer or any of the group was at that moment, or how well they were doing.
"I don't know," Paul said in response to Jack's question, tilting his head back and closing his eyes. "There aren't any seasons."
Fair enough. Jack eased his weight slowly to the side, so that he was sitting next to the kid rather than on top of him. Paul opened his eyes and watched warily. The rabbit was long gone, leaving something behind that could easily grow into a predator if it was allowed to dig its claws into the loam and run.
Jack narrowed his eyes and told himself not to forget where this kid had come from, bloody head and pathetic appearance or not. "Have you seen a kid running around that tunnel of yours? Ten years old, black, probably terrified right out of his mind?" It was probably a good thing that Jack was no longer touching Paul, as a growl had entered his voice and his hands had clenched themselves into fists without his permission. They longed for one frightening and disorienting moment to grab at Paul's tendons again and squeeze them until they popped, until he finally got some damned answers that actually made sense. Maybe if Paul asked nicely Jack would even think about stopping.
"I…" That was fear there. That was also guilt.
Kate came forward and knelt beside Jack. "Did you see him?" she growled at Paul. Jack raised his eyebrows at her.
Paul only looked at the both of them for a moment before he lowered his gaze back down to his hands. "Never seen him," he muttered. "I'm…young. Not one of the originals. I don't get told a lot of things."
"Originals?" Kate echoed. Some of her natural curiosity began to crawl back into her voice, stripping the diamond-edged hardness away.
"The first group. The ones who have been off the island." Paul was speaking more to his hands than he was to them. The words began slowly and then gradually grew faster, as if he had lanced a wound by beginning and could now not get the poison out fast enough. The guilty look had grown to be much stronger than the fearful one. "They came here to run an experiment."
"What kind of experiment?" The last question came from Locke, who had dropped his impassive impression of a Sphinx long enough to lean forward. His expression was a hungry one that Jack had never seen before, one that made him think of wolves that chased little girls in red hoods through darkened trees. It was more fitting than Jack liked, and probably more so than Locke realized.
Paul glanced up for a moment when he heard Locke speak, only to look back down at his own knuckles immediately. His hands were the most fascinating things in the world to him at that moment. "The human mind," Paul said at last. "What a certain kind of individual can do if they're…pushed far enough."
The pause that followed was ominous enough to make Jack and Kate stiffen and sit up straighter at the same moment. Only Locke did not shift, but Jack still though that he saw lines of displeasure deepening around the man's eyes. Paul hunched his shoulders further, looking more miserable than ever. Hesitating between each word as if they tasted bad and he had to gather his strength in order to even make himself say them, he went on, "Long-range black ops, other things like that. But it went bad."
"Went bad," Jack repeated in a low voice. The kid seemed to be vibrating on his own internal wavelength at this point, as if he had been carrying this story around and hating it for years and was now almost relishing the chance to get it out. Jack did not want to disrupt that rhythm.
Paul flicked a glance over him before he began to study his battered and waterlogged boots. "In case you haven't noticed," he said, speaking loudly enough to be heard by all, speaking almost defiantly, "this is not a normal place. She doesn't like it when people think that they're better than her. Doesn't show the right amount of respect."
Jack stiffened and put his hand against the dock so that he would not leap immediately to his feet. He knew without looking around at his companions' expressions that they would also be thinking of a woman-girl dressed all in white. He did look at Locke, finally, who only lifted his shoulders slightly without taking his eyes away from Paul and said, "I've been saying that for a long time, Jack."
Jack turned back to Paul and ordered himself not to shudder as he did so, no matter how many ice cubes were being slipped down the back of his shirt. "We can talk about all of that later." Paul scooted back a few inches and looked as if he was strongly thinking about leaping over the side of the dock again. "The boy. Do you know where he is?"
Paul hunched his shoulders even further, until they were nearly touching his ears, and began playing with one of his shoelaces. "Never saw him," he repeated in a mutter. "But the other one, the girl, she died a couple of months back, and it started to get bad again. A week ago the island started to play nice, like it used to."
Jack had told himself until that point that the kid was cooperating with them, that he was painfully young and only slightly less a victim than they were. He had even caught himself in unguarded moments feeling sorry for Paul, mentally going over the supplies and antibiotics that he would need when they got back in order to treat the head wound and keep a lung infection from growing as a result of the near-drowning. The rage that came over him and replaced the doctor's instincts did so quickly that Jack was almost a different person from one moment to the next. He did not think that anyone was more surprised than he when his hand closed around Paul's throat so tightly that there was hardly even enough room left for him to wheeze. Paul's head bumped against the dock, hard, as Jack slammed him backwards. Kate put her hand against his arm, not yet restraining him, but reminding him not to lose control.
"And you never thought that this was something that you should have checked out?" Jack was roaring without caring about how loud he was or who the sound was drawing to them. "You never thought that it might be a child?"
Paul's throat convulsed as he tried to speak. His face was turning dark with trapped blood. Kate's hand flexed against Jack's arm; he took a deep breath and forced his fingers to uncurl far enough so that Paul could draw a shuddering breath.
Paul panted for a few moments without speaking before he said, "We have to live." He averted his eyes away from Jack's face when he had finished saying it, as if he realized already what a weak excuse it was once it had been said out loud. That near-flinch of reluctance was the only thing that kept Jack from hitting him again.
"Then you should have fought," Jack said coldly. "And not used children as dog leashes." He moved his hand away from Paul's throat and to his arm so that he could haul the kid to his feet. Once there, Paul became engrossed in his boots again and refused to look at any of them. "You might not have seen Walt, but I'm still willing to bet that you can point us in the right direction." Jack's voice could have turned the entire island into a glacier if he maintained it long enough, the tone was so cold. "You've just been promoted to tour guide."
Paul blanched and inched backwards as if he meant to jerk away again. "I can't," he said. "Do you know what will happen-"
"Your people are holding one, possibly several of my people hostage," Jack said. "And that's just what you've done to us this week. The welfare of any of you is not my top priority at this point." Jack was sure that his smile was glittering and sharp. "If it helps, you can tell them that I had you under duress."
Paul grew even more pale and looked as if he meant to argue further, when a rumbling began from deep within the island and extended out to the dock itself. The boat made an alarming sound as it rocked back and forth against its tethers, and all four of them had to bend their knees and fight in order to keep their balance. The tunnel that they had emerged from collapsed in on itself with a resounding crash of dirt and rock. As the sound echoed away, Jack almost thought that he could hear a woman laughing.
Paul's mouth fell open as he watched, his expression a warring mixture of gratitude for his sudden reprieve and dismay. Jack could feel his face settling into hard, angry lines. 'Please let the rest of my people not have been in there.' He didn't know if he was praying to the God of upstanding WASP stock, to the unbridled force that seemed to lurk around every tree and beneath every blood-red flower here, or if was a general plea to the universe at large.
"Boat," Jack gritted, forcing himself to loosen his grip on Paul's arm before he hurt the kid. "Now. We're moving on to Plan B."
"But I don't know how to drive it," Paul protested as Jack started to drag him away down the dock.
Jack paused so that he could stare at him. "You were guarding it." His voice was colored with disbelief and a suggestion that now would be a very, very bad time for Paul to start lying to him.
Paul had to have his feet memorized by now. The more that Jack was around him, the more he became convinced that the kid was not even old enough to buy a drink back in the real world. "Wasn't guarding it," Paul muttered. "I was sleeping on it." He jerked his head towards the remains of the tunnel. Against the aged quality of the rest of the cliff, Jack was not sure what the new wound resembled more: a mouth or an eye. "I don't like being underground if I don't have to. There's not enough air."
Some of the people who had been terrorizing them for the past two months were claustrophobics. Jack felt like asking the world at large if he had been placed on a hidden camera show by mistake. "You don't have to drive, then. You just have to sit tight and not go running off to ring the alarm bell." He pushed Paul towards the ladder on the side of the boat and waited until he had disappeared over the top before he clambered up himself.
Jack tensed up as he brought his head and shoulders over the top of the boat, very aware that he had sent the most hostile member of their group up unsupervised and without knowing what kind of weapons might be on board. When the blow that he had been expecting never came, Jack eased himself over the side of the boat to see that Paul had gone to sit on the pile of blankets that he had presumably been sleeping on before he had been woken up by their voices on the dock.
"Sitting tight," Paul said in response to Jack's look. "Not running off to ring any alarm bells."
"You're a real go-getter." Jack found his balance and turned to help Kate. Locke hesitated on the dock, staring at the boat for a moment before he climbed up himself.
"There's a gun in one of the drawers there," Paul said suddenly as Kate's feet touched the dock, pointing into the cabin.
"Thanks," Jack said slowly, wondering where the sudden burst of honesty had come from and if there was something in the cabin that was going to bite him as soon as he crossed the threshold. He entered, anyway, watching through the window as Locke stepped onto the dock and very close to Kate. He dipped his head to whisper something in her ear that made her shake her own head in return. Jack frowned as he began going through the drawers, coming across the gun at last on top of a battered stack of manila folders. After first making sure that the gun's safety was on, Jack began flipping through several of the folders. His eyes widened.
"There are some pretty detailed maps of the island in here, Paul," Jack said, coming out of the cabin with both the gun and the folders in his hand. There were some fairly difficult equations, too, but he would save those so that Sayid come take a crack at them.
"Yes." Paul had not moved from his seat and was running the loose end of his shoelace through his fingers again. The dirty knots of his hair kept flopping forward into his face, rendering his expression into shadows and guesswork. "Probably I shouldn't have let you see those."
"Probably not," Jack agreed. "Do you have any aspirin on board?"
Paul looked confused. "What's that?"
"For your head, it's…never mind. I gave my bottle to Sawyer to carry, you can have some when we catch up to them." Kate stared down at the deck when Jack mentioned Sawyer's name and didn't look up again until Jack nudged at her. "Hey. Got a present for you."
Kate laughed when she saw that Jack was giving her a gun. "What's the occasion?"
"There's no reason for me to be carrying two." Jack thought of how Locke and Kate had been whispering to each other a few moments before. "And because I trust you. I just wanted you to know that."
A soft inward glow lit up Kate's face as she took the gun from him, one that many women who have worn while accepting a pearl necklace. "Then I commend you on your romantic instincts." She flushed as soon as she realized what she had said. Jack rubbed at his sore shoulder and wished that there was some way of fixing this other than time.
"Your people must be quite the experts when it comes to rationing," Locke said to Paul as he knelt to examine rows of gas cans that were stocked against the far side of the dock. Paul was shrinking back against the railing and looking as if that was still not nearly enough distance to satisfy him. Jack had known that there was a reason that he almost liked this kid. Locke picked up one of the cans and shook it, listening to the slosh of gasoline inside. "This boat has to be at least sixty years old, but there's still enough fuel here to get us halfway across the goddamned Pacific." They all jumped, even Paul who did not know that Locke did not swear, in spite of the fact that Locke's tone was nothing but pleasant.
"Let's hope so," Jack said, turning away with the folders still in his hand. Scarcely a second went by before he realized that this had been a mistake, perhaps the biggest mistake that he could have possibly made under the circumstances.
Locke swung the gasoline can in a broad arc that left it connecting hard with the base of Jack's skull, and this time there was no one to shout a yell of warning. A sunburst of white light went off behind Jack's eyelids, and he felt the curious sensation of his knees refusing to hold him for several seconds before the pain had a chance to catch up with him. Jack tried and failed to catch himself on his hands and he tumbled downwards towards the deck. His lip split as his face struck the wood, sending blood rushing down his chin. The maps and papers flew out of his hands and across the dock.
Jack could feel blood running down the back of his neck from where the edge of the can had cut into his skin, but it was a distant sensation, wavering in and out between one second and the next. The voice of his father echoed through his head: 'Don't you pass out now, Champ. Don't you dare, not with this much riding on you. Be stronger. Be better.' Jack closed his eyes, rested the side of his face against the cool wood, and for several seconds did nothing else other than breathe.
Paul made the yelping sound of a frightened puppy as Jack hit the dock. Kate shrieked, whether in fear or outrage Jack could not tell. He did not get the answer until a few seconds later, when Kate yelled, "You told me that you weren't going to hurt him!" and then he wished that he had not.
"No, Kate, no." Jack turned his face away and murmured into the dock. He put his hand against the back of his neck and rolled painfully over. The stars in the sky above him were still spinning around and running together.
Kate had her gun turned towards Paul, who for his part looked perfectly content to stay right where he was. The blood on his temple was the brightest thing on his face. 'Yippee,' Jack thought dizzily, 'now we can be twins.' Kate was fairly pale herself, and the hand holding the gun was shaking.
Locke, meanwhile, had inspected a few more cans of gasoline and then had begun turning them upside down across the deck. The sharp, burning smell made Jack's eyes water. If the look that Kate was turning Locke's way was any kind of indicator, they weren't going to need any matches to set the whole thing ablaze.
"You said that you weren't going to hurt him," Kate repeated. Her gun hand was shaking harder than ever, and now the tremble had entered her voice as well. Jack would have been more inclined towards sympathy if his head had not been throbbing so badly that he could not be sure whether the trembling in Kate's hands was real or only illusion. He had a lot of reasons to wonder which parts of Kate were real and which were imaginary.
Locke glanced first at Kate, then at Jack, before he went back to his business with the gasoline. "And I didn't," he said calmly.
Kate looked back towards Jack, her mouth falling open in a gasp. Jack thought that she would have rushed over and swept him up into a hug if not for the unfortunate business with the gun. He only held eye contact with her long enough to make her flinch before he shifted his gaze onto Locke. "What are you doing, John?" Jack called, pushing himself onto his elbows and grunting when his head protested the movement.
Locke paused long enough to spare him a withering glance for the patronizing tone that he had employed. "What are you planning on doing with this boat, Jack?" he said. "There's enough gas here to get you halfway to civilization. Halfway. You load up this boat, and you're going to get a lot of people killed." Locke paused to splash more gasoline, shaking his head. "And if you think that she's going to let us get even that far, then you're even more deluded than I thought. We still have things to learn."
She. Jack had gotten really fucking sick of her, whoever she was, and he had not even know of her presence for a full twelve hours yet. "Were you listening to a damned thing I told Paul?" Jack asked, struggling to keep his voice calm and neutral in spite of the fact that what he really wanted to do was yell. If there was a time in Jack's life that he had been angrier than this, then he could not remember it. He did not think that his inner ear would stand up to a direct attack just yet. "Unless you really want to say that Walt is better off here, being hunted."
"None of us are better here, hunted," Locke said. He jerked his head back in the direction of the collapsed tunnel. "Speaking of someone who just said that the best thing was to fight…" Locke finished and set down the empty gasoline can before he looked at Jack hard. "And even if we wiped all of that away, there's still the lack of fuel. You load a whole bunch of people up in this boat, you're going to take them into the middle of the ocean and get them killed there. That's the not the kind of decision that a leader makes, Jack, and so I'm not going to let you make it."
Jack flinched backwards and for a moment was almost, almost tempted to believe. 'How much faith do you have?'
Not enough.
"Bullshit," Jack growled. Locke twitched and looked at him. From the moment that they had met stretching forward into now, Jack could count on both hands the number of times that he had seen Locke genuinely surprised. This was by far the sweetest of them all. "You're just giving in to her, whatever the hell that she wants you to do. Don't you dare try to lecture me on what a leader does."
Another shocked look let Jack that he had hit the nail right on the head, and damn him, damn him, damn him. Kate's gun hand had begun to shake even hard, so that she was unlikely to hit anything even if she remembered to fire it.
"And don't pretend that you know what fighting is," Locke said. "Don't pretend that you even have a clue. We have had things easy, compared to what they could be."
"I'll learn," Jack grunted. His inner ear declared that it would allow him to rise back to his feet, finally.
Kate's gun wavered even further. "Locke-" she started.
"No," he said, not even bothering to turn and look at her. Had he done so, he might have seen the look that crossed Kate's face, that stubborn I-want line that Jack knew well. His heart leapt upwards to see it.
Kate's hand twitched; Jack realized that she was bringing the gun back around to bear on Locke. He didn't have more than a second or two to observe the motion before all hell broke loose and could never bring himself to ask afterwards if that was what she was really doing, but it was what he liked to believe. The sudden flaring of life back into her eyes, at least, that he could be sure of.
The jungle beyond the cliff rumbled. No, Jack realized, the jungle buzzed. Through the trees and rushing down the side of the cliff in a rippling, silvery blur, the monster came to pay them one last visit. "Oh, fuck," Jack snarled before he found himself still rushing forward to protect Kate. Paul yelped as the air was filled with the whirring of wings and the chittering of teeth; likely he had never seen the Others' nastiest invention this close before, much less been attacked by it. There was a splashing sound that Jack could barely hear over the skittering of metal and wings across his skin.
Panting harshly in his ear, Kate swore and fired the gun. Jack did not know what she was firing at, what the hell she thought she was going to hit when their enemy numbered in the hundreds, the thousands. A second later, there was a roaring sound as the bullet pinged against the railing and threw a spark down on the gasoline, a rush of heat. Jack had no idea if she had intended that or not. Didn't matter.
Jack raised his head from the cloud and realized that he could not see Locke or Paul, though the fast-growing flames were throwing everything into sharp relief. "We have to go!" Jack yelled into Kate's ear. She nodded, bringing her hand up to protect her mouth as she coughed. Jack broke away from her to gather up as many of the maps and papers as he could before the flames reached them. The smoke was driving the monster above their heads for the moment. Jack did not know how that was possible with creatures that did not, strictly speaking, need to breathe, but Jack was not going to look a good turn of fortune in the mouth.
It made a whole lot more sense the next second, when Jack realized how wrong he had been. The monster rose in the air above their heads and hesitated for only a second before they parted and plunged directly into the waves. The crackling of the fire killed any sound that they might have made.
The caverns of the Others' refuge might be poison, but they surely could not stay on this boat. "Water," Jack said into Kate's ear, hoping that the little bastards could short-circuit even if they could not drown. "We'll have to swim for shore." He barely waited for Kate's nod of agreement before he threw himself overboard, feeling Kate follow only a second behind.
Though Jack was still wet from plunging into the water earlier, the shock of the cold was still enough to make him open his mouth and take in a startled gulp of water. He twisted, searching for Kate through the blood that was still billowing out from the back of his skull. A hand came out of the darkness, warm and sure, seizing Jack's arm and tugging him upwards. They broke the surface together.
Kate was still holding the gun, but now seemed uncertain as to what she was supposed to do with it. She struggled for a few seconds to tread water and stow it away in her pack at the same time before she turned with Jack to look back at the burning boat. There were no figures moving about on the dock or in the water around it.
"Come on," Jack said at last, paddling backwards. "God only knows what else could be waiting to jump out at us."
Kate followed a more cautious pace. Her eyes locked on his, equal parts anxious and defiant. "Jack," she began.
"It can wait until we get back to shore." He forced off exhaustion that made him feel as if all his limbs had barbells attached to them and swam slowly in the direction of the beach. Twice Jack thought that he saw a strange glow from deep within the jungle, twice he told himself that he was imagining things. The clouds that had been hovering over all of their heads like sullen children broke at last, sending cold, fat raindrops onto their heads. The first pink fingers of the dawn began to crawl over the eastern horizon.
When the beach drew close at last, Jack's sense of relief was so great that he had to pause and tread water for a moment just so that he could look at it. He and Kate shared a small smile, their first since jumping over the side of the Others' boat. "I might regret saying this," Jack said. "But that's the most beautiful thing that I've seen in my life." He began to swim forward.
He had barely gone more than a few strokes before something cold and strong seized his ankle, dragging him under before he could do so much as make a sound. He kicked out hard on reflex, feeling his foot connect with something soft, something that slid when he impacted it. The first rays of the rising sun pierced the waves a second later.
'But you're dead,' Jack thought stupidly, wondering how many more times he would have to pronounce that same sentence before the varnish wore off. His eyes moved past Joanna to the numbers rising behind her, many of them dressed in the rags of bygone eras and with hardly a scrap of flesh left on their bones. And at their head was a woman.
She was not chill and sterile white like the ghost girl in the corridor, but a rich, warm caramel achieved by years spent baking out in the sun, with long brown hair that danced in the waves. Her eyes were electric, and she reminded Jack of sensuous, overripe fruit, though he could not say how. The woman grinned at him from beneath the waves, triumphant.
"This is my place," she said clearly, in spite of the fact that she had to be drawing water down into her lungs by the gallon. "And you'll do as I say."
There were so very many things wrong here, but Jack would get around to having a psychiatric break about each and every one of them when his lungs were no longer demanding that he breathe and breathe now. Jack brought his free leg up and then back down on Joanna's face. There was a reverberating crack of breaking bone, but no blood. Jack imagined that it had all congealed away by now. The grip on his leg loosened, and he surged up towards the light.
"The gun!" Jack gasped as soon as his head broke free of the waves. The sun was still battling it out against the roiling clouds, punching holes through the waves that let Jack see dark shapes moving beneath him. The rain had already begun to taper off. "Kate, shoot the gun!"
Kate was staring down through the water, her mouth fallen open in shock. At Jack's shout she jerked, nodded, and thumbed the safety off before pointing the muzzle downward. "Don't you dare jam on me," she said, both to the gun and the universe at large, before she fired several shots down into the water. The waves were immediately filled with a heavy black substance like squid's ink, too thick to be blood. Without needing to say another word between them, Jack and Kate spun around and made for the shore at a speed that would have made any competitive swimmer green with envy.
When Jack felt his feet touching the deep, silty sand again, the feeling was so good that he was almost sure that he was imagining it. He and Kate threw their arms around each other's waist as their knees began to wobble at the same moment. Jack collapsed as soon as he was out of the reach of the waves and rolled over to face the sky, letting the sun dry the sweat, sand, and blood onto his skin. He could wash later; right now he just wanted to enjoy the heat.
Kate hesitated for a moment before she sat down cross-legged on the sand, setting the gun down carefully between them. Though Jack could hear the sand shifting beneath her as she moved, he did not turn his head in her direction until she called his name. The rising sun as at her back, picking up the gold and red highlights in her hair and making them glow.
"Locke made me an offer when we went hunting together," Kate began. Jack concentrated very hard on not letting his expression change. "He said that something big was on its way, and that it was up to me to decide between building a life where I can find it or running until the day that I die." Kate stared at the gun between them as she spoke, every now and again reaching out and running her fingers across the water-slicked metal. She let out a humorless laugh. "As if I can't still do that even when I'm standing still. Deal or not, if that boat had not caught fire I would be running on it right now. Just so you know that."
"What changed your mind?" Jack kept his voice rushed, reasonable, even though he really wanted to scream and yell. He wasn't even sure who he would be yelling at at this point.
Kate paused, stopped tracing her fingers over the gun. The shadows on her face shifted; it took Jack a moment to realize that she was trying to smile. "I told you that I had your back, didn't I?" Jack reached out and squeezed her hand before he tugged them both back to their feet. He kissed her on the forehead as soon as they were both upright. Kate sighed. "I guess I'm not done running yet, huh?" she asked, looking out across the ocean.
Jack thought something else entirely. He let his hand fall down to rub a circle in the small of her back and said nothing. Jack stooped quickly to pick up the gun from where Kate had left it in the sand. They would need all of the weapons that they could get, if what's Jack instincts were telling him was true.
"Jack, look at this," Kate said as he straightened. Several yards away, barely visible against the sand and already being whipped away by the wind, was a line of footprints leading away into the jungle. Jack felt his entire body tensing up, growing fierce and angry. He did not realize that he had tightened his grip around Kate's waist until she glanced up at him.
"Which one of them do you think it was?" she continued.
Jack grinned and did not imagine for a second that it was a pleasant sight. "Guess we'll find out eventually." He tugged Kate in the direction of the waiting jungle. "Let's go find-" (Find Sawyer.) "-the rest of the group."
The trees began to quiver and shake as Jack and Kate passed beneath them, so slightly that no one standing on the beach would have noticed.
End Part Twenty-Three
