By Sinking815
August 12th, 2006
A/N: Just fixing a slight boo-boo that someone was kind enough to point out! To those of you who reviewed and commented on liking the three POV chapters, this one's for you guys! Once again I apologize for the inconvenient wait, but I can promise there will be another chapter up tonight, or two tomorrow. ;) Hope that lets me back into your good graces at least a little bit. As always, please read and review!
Chapter 14: Disorientation
When he opened his eyes then, he'd been staring into the terrified face of Marc Silverman. When he opened his eyes then, he'd seen the rumpled sheets not left from Sarah's sleeping form, but pulled askew from his own tossing and turning. When he opened his eyes then, he'd been looking up, dazed and bewildered, at a jungle canopy where only moments before he'd been fixated on the glowing orange of the "Please fasten seatbelt" light.
If he opened his eyes now, he'd be reacquainted with those disoriented feelings and the pain they inevitably caused. Right now he didn't want to feel.
So he squeezed them shut. Opening them to the cruel outside world would be to admit that he'd have lived through those horrific moments of his life, would be to relive them in all their terror. He'd learned his lesson. He'd keep them closed.
And then he sighed, letting out the breath he'd been holding, hoping that by freezing he could remain in that suspension of not feeling. That by ignoring and resisting that somehow, the stabs of pain as he inhaled and exhaled, the dull ache he felt across his face, the rhythmic throbbing just above his cheek would fade away into that nothingness.
But even he knew that pretending to flick the off switch in his brain was not going to stop it from returning to reality. He wished they'd hit him again, shut the lights off. It was easier to handle life when the mind and body were two separate entities. He groaned, partly from his own dismay, partly from his own futile resistance, realizing he was powerless to quit, to surrender. He just couldn't face this again, even though, he knew he had no choice.
Blinking slowly, he thought he'd managed to get a handle on the situation and braced for the next blow. He counted the seconds, looking, waiting, praying for something, anything to happen. But it never came; instead, the disorientation he'd tried so hard to stay off was there waiting to prey on his vulnerability.
The clarity came next, along with the intensity of what had been mere throbbing and the questions. He was staring with half his sight up at the thatched roof of captivity, and memories of what Marc Silverman had looked like with one eye swollen shut flooded him. No, no! That was a long time ago. It was irrelevant. Focus, damn it!
The hut he'd been pulled from was back, darker, seemingly farther away. The floor was solid under his back and with a weak flex of his fingers, he grabbed a handful of the dirt and sand, hoping to ground himself against the vertigo he knew would hit him when he sat up. Steeling himself, he crunched forward, grunting with the effort and against the stabbing and aching.
That was the moment his hearing returned.
What the hell did he think he was doing? He said that much to him, to which the bruised man mumbled something past the point of comprehension.
"All right, Doc," Sawyer grumbled. "Take it easy, would ya?"
His hand found Jack's shoulder, pushing him back to the ground. He may not have had the college degree or the privilege of adding M.D. after his name, but Sawyer knew the golden rule of first aid. Don't move.
Jack's left eye was swollen shut, the skin blackened and puffy; Sawyer's stomach turned at the thought of the amount of blood accumulating beneath the skin. A dark trail leaked from a cut on his forehead and merged with the blood seeping from his nose and where his lower lip split. His shirt, dark though it was, looked like someone had dragged it through the mud behind their car. Mud and dirt caked his bare arms and Sawyer could see angry red marks trying to rival the bruise covering Jack's eye.
In Sawyer's opinion, the doctor looked a little beyond band-aids and Neosporin. He didn't have to look around to know that Hell's Camp wasn't about to serve him up a nice little white tin box with the famous red cross marking the lid either. In fact, Sawyer thought, Doc looked like he could use an ambulance and a one-way trip to the ER. But maybe it looked worse than it was. He hoped it looked worse than it was.
Sawyer jumped when he felt a hand close around his arm, interrupting his thoughts. Jack was staring at him, with a confused look on his face. Or about as confused as one can make their face look after being beaten.
"Jesus, Doc," Sawyer muttered. "You could have at least waited 'til the odds were in your favor."
He was staring at him, and Jack realized he was waiting for an order, for a command. So he gave him a question.
"Did they…" Jack started, setting his jaw against the stabbing in his sides. "Did they let you out?"
Sawyer chuckled, throwing his hands up slightly and cocking his head to the side with an amused smirk.
"Unbelievable," he drawled. "Hero gets thrown through the blender by two wannabes from Raiders of the Lost Ark and he wants to know if I got to take my piss in peace."
Jack's mouth turned up a little at the other man's flippancy, an attempt at smiling that didn't last long when the burn in his face reminded him viciously that this really wasn't a laughing matter.
The anxiety in Sawyer's chest eased at the sight of Jack smiling, despite his multitude of cuts and bruises. If he couldn't break out the hydrogen peroxide and gauze pads, he could try to distract him from the pain he was sure going through. Hell, Jacko had done the same thing for him, how many months ago?
Sawyer shook the hair out of his face, and answered, "Yeah, I got out." Then he paused, considering how to not make his next statement sound as caring as it would.
"Can I do anything for ya, Doc? I may not have Nurse Freckles's pretty face, but I sure as hell…"
Jack interrupted him before he got too carried away with the thought.
"No, Sawyer." He sighed, winced, inhaled and winced again. "Now we just wait."
She slept fitfully throughout the night. Her body was spent and exhausted after the long day, but her mind just wouldn't slow down. It was on overload, running laps even when sleep did find a chance to claim her for a few minutes at a time. The sleep she did get was shallow at best, almost as if she were dozing away the hours until sunrise brought another trying day.
Whenever her rampaging brain choose to let her rest and drop out of reality for those few precious moments, it never really surrendered its hold. She would dream of times she wished hadn't been, of places she hoped she wouldn't remember, of people she'd never see again or couldn't see again. She'd revisit her childhood, shake hands with her mistakes. Her mind abandoned her in memories that she knew exactly how they ended, but no matter what she did to fix the plot for a different outcome, she'd always be reliving the same ending.
First it was her dad. Not her biological father; she'd learned to forget him a long time ago. She dreamed of the man that would always be her "true" father in her heart, the man she shared a last name with even though she could never be of blood relation. They'd be hiking together in the woods around his base in Washington state. Every once in a while, he'd pause to show her hoofprints in the mud, or antler rubbings against the trunk of a sugar maple, or just to let her short little legs catch up with his long ground-covering stride. Then the rows of trees collapsed together to form solid walls, and Sam Austen's hunting fatigues morphed from the faded greens and browns to the official evergreen of his sergeant's uniform, and his happy smiles dissolved into the quivering lower lip with disappointment as she backed away, now a criminal in his eyes, feeling the betrayal and the lonliness settling their way back into her stomach as she turned and ran.
She awoke to shame.
Then it was Tom. He was always next. No matter how far she managed to get from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, there was no place on the planet far enough to dull his memory. It was like she carried a piece of him inside her, like he had taken a Sharpie marker and signed his name in bold black letters across her heart. She dreamed he used the same marker to write the date on an index card that he folded and placed inside their time capsule. She watched herself hand him the cassette tape that had somehow captured more than just a moment in their lives, had captured promises to be broken and cried over. Then the cornfield had condensed itself to a smashed car and he no longer looked at her with open eyes, and the moistness on her palms was not from the summer humidity typical in the Midwest and was now blood, his blood, Tom's blood, staining her pale skin with a crimson mark, and she bolted.
She awoke to grief.
Then it was Jack. Somehow she'd knew he'd be next. When she first met him back in that hollow on the beach, she'd known he was number three on her list. The longer she watched him grow from fellow survivor to local leader, the more she recognized the easiness with which she could take him and suddenly he fit into Tom's spot or Sam's spot in her childhood. He was a good person, and Kate Austen did one of two things to good people. She either hurt them, or she killed them. It was inevitable and she knew he was next.
But unlike the other dreams, this one didn't have an end that she couldn't stop from coming. It was like this part of her life had stalled, had finally reached a dead end where she couldn't run, or hide, or fight. She seemed stuck facing him, like that day they'd had a stand-off in the jungle, his hand firmly holding her in place, grounding her in her moment of insanity. For once in her life, someone had grabbed a hold of her messed-up self and had held her together when she was sure she was falling apart. That terrified her, because a person like that around someone like her meant one thing—she would destroy him.
She awoke to fear.
Kate stared wide-eyed around her, trying to calm her racing heart. It was a dream, she told herself. They had all been dreams. It wasn't real anymore. That was in the past. Don't think about it anymore, that was…
The door creaked open on its rope-bound hinges and Alex stepped into her hut, a bowl and cup in her hands. And Kate felt the fear strangle her once again.
She knew how this one ended too.