Fixed, everything. It was fishy in ways that he couldn't quite put his finger on, but he knew it for certain, a deep feeling in the center of his gut. It was the way that things were calibrated, with the slickness of a really neat con, that seemed wrong. Nothing was wrong, and that meant everything was wrong. First the bastards came across them in the jungle, caught them traipsing through it like Snow White and her Three Extra-Tall Dwarves, and now there was some guy in the hatch and Locke minding him like old Johnny-boy had stumbled off the sets of Kojak and The Babysitters' Club. And, to add injury to insult, Jack and Kate had decided to go adventuring in the jungle.
He hoped they'd trip and fall, break a few bones. He didn't want them to run into the Others, because he didn't relish the idea of carrying that guilt with him until they made it off this damn labyrinth of an island, but he wouldn't have minded them getting knocked around a little. Maybe he should have let them take a gun. The least he could have hoped for would've been that Saint Jack would've shot his own foot off.
The only one that paid any attention to him anymore was the dog, and he wasn't even sure the dog liked him for anything other than his food. Christ, and here he'd thought that being the sheriff would have been a hell of a job. The whispers had told him it would be, anyway. They had spoken to him again, and he could hear Duckett's voice, urging him to just take the guns and get them away from other people, at any price possible, even if he had to wound an innocent party to do it. This was his second chance, they had said in half-breaths coasting through the island air, and he had believed them.
It hadn't worked that way, though. Things had gone badly. He could see it in their faces at the campfire. Betrayal, turning to hatred. He had seen that look so many times before that he could notice the exact moment that their faces changed, that they wrote him off. He had done just what they expected of him, just what the whispered voices had expected of him, just what Duckett had expected of him, just what the Others had expected of him.
He had been screwed over just as badly as he'd screwed others over, and he'd had the chance to get out of it all along. It was more than he had given to others, but he had gotten nothing from it. Story of his life, really. He watched Vincent, listened to the dog's tail thump, and scoffed at it. Vincent looked up, black beady eyes lit with firelight into blazing oilslicks. "Scram, you mangy mutt!" Sawyer's hand hit the ground, sending sand flying towards the dog. In a moment, it left, too.