Time-line: Unknown, sometime before SOS. Spoilers up until 'What Kate Did.'
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters. I am not affiliated in any way, shape or form with anyone who does.
Feeling helpless was the worse feeling in the world. It was suffocating. It was devastating and it was Sawyer's existence.
If he thought hard enough he could manage to barely remember a time where he hadn't felt helpless. Back to a time where he hadn't thought of adult concepts such as sex and death. Before his mother had stuffed him under the bed. Before the shouting and the screaming and the gunshot. Before he saw his father's body go limp.
He still woke up some nights, trying not to scream when the images flashed through his head. And every time that happened he would need to force himself to remember that he had only been eight years old, that it wasn't his fault, he couldn't have stopped it.
But the only way to keep the guilt away was to let the helplessness in. And once it was in, it never left.
It had lingered throughout the years, attacking him. He had felt helpless being manipulated into killing an innocent man, helpless when the plane crashed, helpless when he was stabbed, helpless when he was shot, helpless when he was captured, helpless when he was carried through the jungle, helpless when Jack and Kate had been treating him like an injured child.
But if there was ever a time that he truly needed to feel helpless he still had his letter, the letter he had written to himself, to what he was going to become.
He knew that he had chosen to become Sawyer. That he could have stopped conning after getting the money that he needed… But he couldn't feel like that, he had to make himself believe that it had been inevitable, that it hadn't been through choice.
Sometimes Sawyer needed to feel helpless, it was the only way that he could convince himself that he deserved to be alive.