Part Twenty-Four

Given the number of women that he had screwed over and whose lives he had ruined over the course of his life, Sawyer reasoned, and he couldn't really bitch when he found himself being plagued with them now. Call it karma, the wheel of fortune, a big, fat universal smack-down. Lord knew that he had been carrying around this bill for long enough before payment was finally demanded of him.

"Hey, there, Princess," Sawyer said, the first in their group to find his voice enough to speak to the icy-white queen glaring at them all. Well, he had a bit of a leg up on all the rest of them in getting used to her. He and Dream Date were practically buddies at this point. "If you're looking to sign me up for a crusade again, forget about it. I get home from this, I'm going to sit on my ass and collect disability checks until I'm nice and fat."

Dream Date only glared at him, like he hadn't been exposed to that often enough to develop a nice immunity by now, and turned away. She only went a few feet, walking stiff-legged, as if her insides had been filled with glass and all but the smallest movement was an agony to her. She didn't bear any injuries that Sawyer could see-he didn't even know if it was possible for a ghost to be wounded-but that didn't mean anything. You could feel like that, all cut up inside and like there was nothing left at all, without having a single mark on you.

Now was not a good time for those instincts to make another one of their show-boating appearances, the ones that other people would have called his better but which for him were still very much the rarer. His life would be so much easier if he could just learn to turn them on and off, like a light switch when he didn't want to be in the room any longer.

"Take me to where she's going," Sawyer said to Sayid, since he had long since given up any pretense of walking on his own and decided to enjoy his new life as an invalid of leisure. "I need to see." The words had exited his mouth before his brain had time to really process them, making him wonder for a moment if they had been his at all. The marks on his arm and his ankle ran hot and cold by turns; he could be anyone's puppet at this point and he might not have a clue. They all could.

Sawyer was enjoying that revelation so much, and he really wanted to thank the universe for giving it to him.

Sayid turned his head slowly so that he could give Sawyer a look suggesting that he find his brain from wherever he had lost it back in the tunnel and slot it back into his head again. With the blood and the bruises covering his face, it was fiercer than it would have appeared otherwise. Sayid's whole body was trembling with the need to lay out some of his special brand of charm all over Dream Date's ectoplasmic hide. That wasn't a philosophy that Sawyer had any kind of trouble getting behind, but he already could have told him that it wouldn't do any good. Whatever horrors had been visited on Dream Date in her life, she was long past them now.

"Have you gone mad?" Sayid whispered into Sawyer's ear.

Sawyer chuckled and then winced. "Days ago. C'mon, she don't bite. Not while you're awake."

Sayid gave him another look, this one suggesting that he was going to take Sawyer's confession of madness to heart, but it was difficult to argue when the girl herself was standing right in front of them. He helped Sawyer shuffle forward to where Dream Date was standing among a particularly verdant patch of ferns and vines, staring down at them with a look of intense hatred fixed onto her face. Sawyer was not surprised to see a hump in the earth there, once fresh but reclaimed by the jungle in record time. No wonder the growth was so green here; Sawyer imagined that it was getting plenty of fertilizer.

"This is what she did to me," Dream Date said coldly, staring at Sawyer through those chilling eyes. The anger there made them even colder than they had been on the first day that she and Sawyer met.

"No, Dream Date," Sawyer corrected her. "This is what they did to you." He jerked his head back in the direction of the tunnel that they had just emerged from and nearly overbalanced, so that Sayid had to steady him quickly before he fell. "You picked a real action hero, by the way."

"It's the same thing," Dream Date spit. "You should have stayed with me. I would have been so much nicer to you than she will."

Walt broke away from his father long enough to come stand by Sawyer's side. Sawyer was very aware of the boy's breath fanning out across his elbow as he spoke. "Then you picked yourself one hell of a knight, sweetheart. I don't look out for nobody but myself. Don't know how."

Dream Date smiled, small and chilling and even a little sad. "You're an idiot," she said. "Do you think she cares about what you want? Do you think she cares what kind of person you are? You're meat to her, you all are, and now that you're free she's just going to gobble you up like-" Dream Date's voice rose towards another one of her eardrum-assaulting shrieks as she worked her way into the rant, her eyes flashing only slightly bluer than ice. Sawyer of all people knew from drama queens, having brought it damned near into an art form himself, and he saw all the signs that she was enjoying her chance to give another grand villain speech. Pity they never got to hear the end of it.

The air above Dream Date rippled, spasmed. She looked up quickly, her lips parting in horror, as the light itself shifted and changed until it formed a mouth full of gleaming and ready teeth. Dream Date scarcely got out the beginning of a scream before the trick of the light slammed down over her, obliterating her between one second and the next and leaving not so much as a trace behind. So maybe Sawyer had been wrong when he had thought that death was the end, that there was nothing else beyond that that could hurt you. He couldn't say that he was exactly fired up to see where that path led.

Shannon was in the way of the mouth, the portal, whatever the hell had just opened up, and she would have been dragged in or worse herself, had an invisible hand not seized her by the scruff of her neck and jerked her backwards hard. She shrieked as she was pulled off her feet and deposited hard on her ass several feet away, staring at a figure above her that no one else could see. "Boone!" she managed at last.

Sayid abandoned Sawyer-thanks, buddy-and darted over to Shannon as soon as he heard her shout, so that Sawyer tumbled heavily to the jungle floor. He caught himself on his elbows to spare his ribs the worst of it, staring as the mouth lowered itself to the jungle floor and shifted until it was once again wearing the form of a very familiar woman. Karma. Right.

The green-eyed lady dragged one finger along the side of her mouth as she approached, though Sawyer for his part could see no mess there that needed to be mopped up. When this one destroyed someone, she did it neatly. "Do you have any idea what it's like to listen to someone whimper for sixteen years straight and have no power to shut them up?" the lady asked, shaking her head. "Maddening, the insolent little bitch."

Sawyer personally thought that this one had gone right around the final crazy bend in the road some time before, but now did not seem like the best time to bring a detail like that up. Not after the demonstration that he had just been given. If only he and his legs were still on speaking terms with one another.

Sawyer could hear the rest of the group moving a few yards off, not pushing close enough to attack just yet, and he wondered why in the blue hell they weren't taking the opportunity to run away as soon as it presented itself. Didn't they know a last chance when it showed its face?

The lady spun in the direction of the sea suddenly, her face twisting for a moment into an expression of sorrow. Sawyer had seen a lot of liars in his life, but he still could not tell if what he was seeing there was real or just an elaborate show. "So I have an opening, then," she mused. "And who should it be given to, if not one of the people who set me free?"

"I ain't interested," Sawyer said quickly. His arm and his ankle jesusfuck hurt all of the sudden, so that he had to grit his teeth hard. The words came out muffled and nearly unintelligible.

She smiled. "My choice. Not yours." The lady knelt down between his sprawled legs and, fuck it, if they weren't going to run, why the hell couldn't they intervene? She splayed her hand over his chest, warm and solid now rather than ephemeral as a good ghost's should be. Sawyer tried to knock her away, but it was like slapping an iron pipe. "I was going after the boy. So you might have given one back, after all. You just had the bad luck to give it to the wrong person. These things happen."

Sawyer was all kinds of flattered to hear that, he really was, but right now it was all that he could do to stay conscious. The lady dug her fingers into his chest, hard, and the pain that rolled out as the skin gave way was a hell of a lot more than he should have felt from a couple of puncture wounds. He smelled ozone and moss, growth and death. Though this could have been a result of the ferns that he reeled backwards into, Sawyer did not think so.

Someone yelled Sawyer's name, and then a shot rang out. He heard neither.

---

Jack heard Sawyer's voice long before he actually saw him and felt his steps quicken automatically, so that Kate was almost jogging in order to keep up. He was going to kiss him, and he was going to yell at him also, and then everything would be all right. That was how the story would end.

When Jack stumbled out of the trees and saw instead that Sawyer was sprawled out across the ground, seemingly unconscious and with the strange woman from the waves crouched over him like a feeding spider, he thought that his own heart was going to stop in his chest. "Sawyer!" he yelled without thinking, already drawing the gun.

The woman looked up at him, grinning, and ticked her index finger slowly back and forth in an uh-uh-uh gesture. Her hair and clothes were dry as bone even though he could feel his own shirt clinging clammily to his back. Her teeth seemed to elongate even as Jack watched, and the fingers that were submerged to the first knuckle in the skin above Sawyer's heart twisted. Jack had whipped the gun up and fired it before he even had time to think about it.

A neat hole opened up, bloodless, in the skin of the woman's forehead as the bullet passed through it. Rather than toppling over, however, she continued to give Jack her bright-eyed, almost radioactive stare. Jack's breath hitched in his chest, and he only barely stopped himself from throwing himself at her and ripping her away from Sawyer with his bare hands. Only the realization that he might hurt Sawyer more in the process halted him, and he felt the first tang of acrid panic in the back of his throat. "Get away from him," he ordered, striding forward anyway with the gun extended in front of him.

The amused twinkle in the woman's eyes grew even brighter. Jack felt a sudden urge to put a bullet through one of them and see how well she healed from that. "You took one from me," she said, "and now he's got to give it back. Everyone's settling their debts today."

Took one…Locke. Jack glanced down at Sawyer as a great suspicion took life in his mind. The prickliness, the issue with the inhalers weeks previously, the all-around Sawyerness of him…and Jack did not care. "Get back," he ordered again, still coming closer. "If he belongs to anyone, then he belongs to himself." 'And to me.' That was a thought to mull and obsess over at a later date. Jack's finger came very close to pulling the trigger again.

"And to you," the woman said, so close to reading his thoughts that Jack's did pull, sending a bullet wild and into the dirt. "Would you trade them to protect him, then?" she went on, changing tactics as abruptly as a child switching from one toy to another. "Fine. I'll trade you. Him for them. Does that make it fair now?"

Jack froze for one moment and one moment only with indecision before he said, in a voice that didn't shake for so much as a second, "That line of argument might have worked on him out there, you conniving bitch, but it doesn't work here. I'll protect them-I'll protect all of them-and I'll fight you into the ground if you try to take even so much as one. No deals, no compromises." 'I'll learn to.' "If the Others held you prisoner for that long, then we can find a way to do it, too."

It was a mistake as soon as the words were out of his mouth. A moment of fear flashed in the woman's eyes, more real than any emotion that she had shown so far and to be treasured, before it was overshadowed by a bright and blazing triumph. "Will you do what they did, Jack?" she cooed. He hated that she knew his name. The woman glanced over her shoulder, her expression for a moment becoming ambiguous, but when Jack followed her gaze all he saw were Michael, Charlie, and Walt. "Will you go that far?"

Jack grit his teeth and barely managed to hold back the long stream of obscenities that wanted to flow past his lips. 'I'll fight every single one of them.' Sacrificing one for one might be better than sacrificing one for many, but that still wasn't a choice that he was going to make. Not if he wanted to call himself a leader, maybe, finally, not if he wanted to call himself a man worth being in the company of people in the first place, not if he wanted to continue to look at his own reflection. As far as options went, that didn't leave a whole lot, save for one. Jack opened his mouth to make the own trade that he could make and that he had come very close to making for Boone, when he was cut off.

"I'll fight you." The sound of Walt's voice made them all jump. He had been so still and pale, it was hard to remember that he was not a ghost himself. Some of the color flowed into his face as he stared at the woman with old, adult anger. "I know how, and I'll fight you until you're dead if you don't let my friend go. I can do it." The woman stared at Walt for a long, long moment, defiance written across her face. Walt's brow wrinkled, and the woman's solidity dimmed for a moment until she came very close to resembling the girl in white from the corridor. Jack did not know how many ghosts were really walking this island and did not care, so long as Sawyer did not become one of them. The woman pulled her lips back as Walt went on calmly, "Give him back and go away, or I'll do it."

"I control this island," the woman gritted at Walt. "This is my place."

"Not anymore," Walt said.

The lady let out a banshee's shriek and flowed, moving away from Sawyer and upwards into the air, becoming a trick of light and shadow that resembled a glowing green mouth and made Jack's heart pause for a moment before it dissipated into a cloud of particles that smelled strongly of rot. Jack was darting forward and kneeling by Sawyer's side before they could fade away and so drew some of them down into his throat; they were cold. He checked Sawyer's pulse with one hand and found it strong, while his other hand moved to apply pressure to the five oozing puncture wounds that had been punched into the flesh. Kate settled down on one side of him, Walt on the other.

"Thank you, Walt," Jack said, reaching out and hugging Walt swiftly to him, feeling the knee-weakening surge of gratitude that Sawyer for the moment could not.

"I didn't kill her," Walt said. "But it's my choice now if I want to. That's different than…what they wanted to do."

"I know," Jack answered. "You did the right thing."

"She's bad."

"I know that, too. We'll fight her when she tries again." It wasn't a matter of 'if', Jack thought. Probably wasn't even a matter of winning or losing, but of hanging on and holding their ground until the day when the real rescue boat came over the horizon. 'How much faith do you have?'

Jack checked Sawyer's pulse again. Though Sawyer did not wake, his eyelids fluttered and he turned, very slightly, towards Jack's hand.

End Part Twenty-Four