Title: In Admiration - Part 7

Fandom: Lost

Characters: Jack Shephard, Boone Carlyle

Prompt: #35 Mask

Author's Notes: Written for the LiveJournal community slash100 (underscore between "slash" and "100" – for some reason FFN deletes it)

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Jack's first conscious thought when he woke was that he always figured death would feel less physically limiting. All that talk about floating out of your body and the spirit going to somewhere better just didn't seem to apply. He tried to prop himself up on his shoulder, only to cry out in pain as his body kept moving down against his arm, shoulder making a scraping sound. Okay, then, Jack thought, I can't be dead if my shoulder is dislocated. He then became aware of a sensation that felt like someone was sitting on his chest. Great... Dislocated shoulder and I'm stuck under a rock.

The preceding incidents that led to his being stuck under a rock in a dark cave suddenly returned to Jack. "Charlie," he tried to wheeze out, coughing, and glad to hear that nothing sounded juicy in his lungs. Meant the rock he was pinned under hadn't broken a rib to get blood into his lungs. His voice didn't sound too good, though. How long have I been in here?

"Charlie!" he tried again, but there was no response, and Jack couldn't even begin to try and look for him in the absolute darkness. He hoped Charlie had managed to stay outside of the cave-in; the other possible options filled Jack with a sense of dread. Then he began to wonder if people were trying to find a way to get him out of the cave. Jack new all too well what happened to the human body when it was deprived of water for too long. The others had to be trying to help, though, he reasoned with himself. Sun and Jin and Hurley had all been nearby when it happened. And Charlie was out there, too, hopefully.

Jack tried to move his good shoulder to push the rock off his chest, but he couldn't get the right leverage off the ground. He couldn't help but chuckle. Kate hadn't liked the caves because she thought they weren't safe and reduced their chances of being rescued. Jack could easily imagine the I-told-you-so look she'd have on her face if (when, Jack told himself) he got out of this mess. The thought of Kate at all made him sigh, which was rather painful given the rock he was half stuck under.

Jack's trouble with Kate lay in the fact that all the harmless flirting was just that: harmless. Flirting was fun whether it was innocent or yearned for something more. The trouble with flirting with Kate, though, was that to Jack it was all innocent, but Kate seemed to think otherwise. The trouble with Kate was that she was completely and totally not Jack's type. It had taken Jack a failed marriage to Sarah to figure this out.

So who was his type? Well, on this island anyway, he most definitely would have gone for Sawyer if the man hadn't been such an impossible bastard. Although Sawyer was attractive, his abrasive personality turned off Jack and seemingly every survivor that had met the Southerner. The fellow survivor that had Jack completely captivated was Boone.

He couldn't say it was an attraction-at-first-sight scenario. His first encounter with Boone had Jack in his completely professional doctor-mode, trying to get things squared away in those first rushed hours after the crash. Jack had actually tried to get rid of Boone since the young man seemed to do more harm than good, but even Jack realized he had been hard on Boone and talked to him about it.

Jack hadn't even realized he might have been gay until he was married to Sarah and felt incomplete. The first time he had fooled around with a guy was in high school. Jack had been up in his room, passing back and forth with a friend from the football team a bottle of expensive vodka he had stolen from his father, and they'd ended up making out, giggly and drunk. Jack never found out how his father had known, but after school the next day he got cornered by his father, getting a lecture as to how if Jack expected to have a future, he couldn't do anything to risk it because no medical school was going to accept a faggot student. It wasn't respectable. His father then proceeded to tell Jack how teenage hormones made wrong things seem like a good idea. That he hadn't raised a queer for a son.

He had been set up on a date with the daughter of a friend of his father's, and while Jack didn't think she had much of a brain, she had a nice body and the more he thought about it, when had he ever seen men together? What had happened was an accident since drunk and horny was never a good combination.

While married to Sarah, though, he still felt like pieces were missing. He would go out at night to bars, attracted to the smell of alcohol, cigarettes, and musk. He'd go back to strange apartments and hotel rooms with men he didn't even know, returning to his home with Sarah in the morning, her thinking he had been working all night. He'd think back to that time in high school, wondering what this all meant, and after a while he realized he was being unfair to everyone - Sarah, his family, himself.

Sarah had surprisingly understood; they ended on good terms. Jack thought his father was more upset by the divorce than anyone else. After everything had been finalized, Jack let Sarah keep the house, and while she was working one day Jack and his dad moved out the stuff that was his. The whole time Jack saw a familiar look in his father's eyes, the one that seemed to call him a failure.

"Jack!" came a voice, and he lifted his head slightly, trying to find the source of the sound. It was hard to find a direction with the voice echoing off the cave walls. He hoped he wasn't hallucinating. "Jack, can you hear me? Jack?" It was Hurley. A wave of relief swept over him. He wasn't going to die alone in here.