DVD-style commentary - Break a Promise, Make a Vow
Because she's a masochist (and a sadist, actually) ;), lenina20 requested a commentary on Break a Promise, Make a Vow.
Once again, my commentary is in bold.
The title of this fic is a line from Over the Rhine's song "I Want You To Be My Love." The song itself doesn't particularly relate, but I love that line and it fits this fic quite well, I think. Okay, onward.
They've left her virtually alone, for what must have been hours.
This seemed to be The Others' MO. Fuck with their minds in evil ways for a while, then leave them alone to process - or not process, as the case may be - what's been done to them. Kate and Sawyer, and even Jack, always seemed to be brought back to their cages and thrown in as if they were naughty children being sent to their rooms without any supper. With slightly more evil overtones, of course.
The rain had stopped long ago, and when the sun first came out there had been steam rising from the saturated ground. Now the air is still again, and her clothes have dried stiffly on her body.
The contrast here, between the torrential rainstorm of that final scene in I Do, and the hot, dry aftermath, was quite deliberate. Not only have hours passed, but everything is different, only highlighted by the weather. I'm probably being too obvious here, but well. Remember that dark, stormy, ominous atmosphere of the entire Sawyer-at-gunpoint scene? A lot of blacks and dark browns and the green of the jungle almost looking a dark blue? Now I picture a lot of oranges and light browns, with the jungle's green bright and bold, as all greens are after a rainstorm. Yeah. Everything has changed.
She feels none of it - not the heat, not the rough fabric, not the bars of the cage pressing into her back.
Kübler-Ross missed a stage of grief, you know. In my experience, the first stage in intensely personal grief is numbness - actual physical numbness just as much as emotional. The body's way of shutting down to protect oneself, at least for a while, from the intense emotional hell that's to come. I'm sure this isn't true for everyone, but hey, they all say to write what you know, eh?
He'd told her to turn around, to close her eyes, not to watch,
To me, those moments when Sawyer is insisting Kate not watch him being killed, those moments are his "I love you" so much more than when he'd said the actual words just hours before. He's already sacrificing himself to save her life - and his last thoughts, as they were, are still of protecting her from witnessing the violence and finality of his death. Geez, I'm getting teary here. (Sorry, Lenina, but you asked for it.)
but she'd only done so after he'd fallen.
Kate never listens.
She hadn't wanted to watch them carry him away - or maybe they'd dragged him. Like he was nothing.
I'm guessing they would have dragged him. I can see Pickett doing that, grabbing him by the hair and dragging him away to wherever they were going to dispose of him. (Oh, his poor, beautiful hair.)
She doesn't know; she'd stopped listening, stopped hearing. Now she uses her feet against the ground to press herself harder into the metal bars, hoping to feel something.
She can still see the look of surprise on his face. She squeezes her eyes shut but it's imprinted on the insides of her lids. She wonders if he'd actually believed Pickett would spare him, that her desperate pleas and declaration of love would be enough to save his life.
Kate's projecting here. Sawyer himself seemed to be very resigned to his fate, believing without a doubt that he would be killed. It was Kate who kept pleading and begging, "I'll do anything you want," hoping that she could somehow stop this from happening. Sawyer's "look of surprise" that she references is probably more her own surprise and disbelief than anything else.
Maybe Sawyer had been more of a romantic than she'd thought.
Well, this is certainly true. Sawyer is definitely more of a romantic than anyone ever gives him credit for. Not that he'd ever admit it!
Or maybe people always looked surprised in the last moments before death. She wouldn't know. She hadn't exactly stuck around to photograph Wayne's reaction.
She's being callous and sarcastic here. Hooray for unhealthy defense mechanisms! I don't think she realizes that she's, once again, connecting Sawyer to Wayne. Regardless, she's definitely putting some of the blame of Sawyer's death onto herself - after all, it was obvious he gave himself up to save her.
She shuffles her body around then, seized with the need to see again the place he'd fallen. To her shock and mild horror, he's still there. They've left him, just as he'd crumpled, legs folded under him at an odd angle.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. I said before I could see Pickett dragging Sawyer away after he was killed. But maybe this is part of that mindfuckery thing they have going on - leave the dead guy to lay there so his girlfriend can watch him grow stiff and dry? I don't know. But at any rate, the rest of the fic wouldn't work if he wasn't still lying there, so...
Before she can stop it, the thought occurs to her that he must be in pain.
Ah, Ms. Kübler-Ross, here comes your denial.
But of course, he's not. Not anymore. The blood has dried on his temple, turning an ugly tint of brown in the dead heat
Tint or hue? I remember looking up the difference as I wrote this line, trying to figure out which word I should use. I vividly remember a high school art teacher being quite adamant of the difference between the two, but for the life of me I couldn't remember what it was, and a dictionary search did not help me. I ended up using 'tint' purely because it sounded better to me. I suppose I could have used 'shade,' as well. One of those silly, trivial things that doesn't matter at all in the end.
, and it almost looks like he's reached up with a muddy hand to wipe his brow. Almost.
Now she feels, and at first it's that her face is wet, which she thinks is odd, given that the rain stopped long ago. She opens her mouth to speak, and her voice creaks out, as if she hasn't used it in far too long. “Sawyer.”
When he doesn't move, she frowns and repeats it, louder, stronger this time. “Sawyer! Damn it, Sawyer! Get up!” Intellectually, she knows he's not hearing her, that he'll never respond. The knowledge doesn't stop her from trying again. “God damn you, Sawyer, stand up!”
A throwback to what she was yelling in the episode when Pickett was dragging Sawyer out of his cage. It hadn't worked then, and most of her knows it's not going to work now, but she can't help herself. Oh, that pretty little river in Egypt.
She hears footsteps then and falls silent, half expecting to see him coming around the corner. Whatcha yammerin' about, Freckles?
He would say that, wouldn't he. Kind of exasperated and a bit disturbed to find her standing in a cage, yelling at the ground.
But instead she sees Pickett approaching, and with a sick churning in her stomach, she realizes she'll never be Freckles again.
And I think she'd be tempted to haul off and slug anyone but Sawyer who would call her Freckles. Can we get a collective "awwww, poor Kate" here, please? For some reason, that particular line broke my heart the most about writing this fic. Kate has had so many different names, and most of them have been fake. Freckles might be the closest to a real name that anyone's ever given her.
After Tom, she'd vowed to never again have a reason to kill.
Not after Wayne, after Tom. A subtle reference to the episode in which Jack wants to know what she did and she refers to Tom as "the man I killed." This time, she's comparing Sawyer to Tom - she feels responsible for both their deaths, though in each she's not the one who pulled the trigger. This is the promise she breaks, referenced in the title.
Now, she stands up, ignoring the tingling in her legs that tells her she's been sitting in one position for too long. She grips the bars of the cage until her knuckles turn white and looks directly into Pickett's eyes.
“You'll pay for this. All of you. You will pay.”
And this is the new vow she makes. Part of Pickett probably wants this reaction from her - he wants to make her feel the way he felt when Colleen was killed. And I can easily see Kate in the same position Pickett was several hours earlier - holding Pickett at gunpoint, "this is for Sawyer, you son of a bitch."
Once again, my commentary is in bold.
The title of this fic is a line from Over the Rhine's song "I Want You To Be My Love." The song itself doesn't particularly relate, but I love that line and it fits this fic quite well, I think. Okay, onward.
They've left her virtually alone, for what must have been hours.
This seemed to be The Others' MO. Fuck with their minds in evil ways for a while, then leave them alone to process - or not process, as the case may be - what's been done to them. Kate and Sawyer, and even Jack, always seemed to be brought back to their cages and thrown in as if they were naughty children being sent to their rooms without any supper. With slightly more evil overtones, of course.
The rain had stopped long ago, and when the sun first came out there had been steam rising from the saturated ground. Now the air is still again, and her clothes have dried stiffly on her body.
The contrast here, between the torrential rainstorm of that final scene in I Do, and the hot, dry aftermath, was quite deliberate. Not only have hours passed, but everything is different, only highlighted by the weather. I'm probably being too obvious here, but well. Remember that dark, stormy, ominous atmosphere of the entire Sawyer-at-gunpoint scene? A lot of blacks and dark browns and the green of the jungle almost looking a dark blue? Now I picture a lot of oranges and light browns, with the jungle's green bright and bold, as all greens are after a rainstorm. Yeah. Everything has changed.
She feels none of it - not the heat, not the rough fabric, not the bars of the cage pressing into her back.
Kübler-Ross missed a stage of grief, you know. In my experience, the first stage in intensely personal grief is numbness - actual physical numbness just as much as emotional. The body's way of shutting down to protect oneself, at least for a while, from the intense emotional hell that's to come. I'm sure this isn't true for everyone, but hey, they all say to write what you know, eh?
He'd told her to turn around, to close her eyes, not to watch,
To me, those moments when Sawyer is insisting Kate not watch him being killed, those moments are his "I love you" so much more than when he'd said the actual words just hours before. He's already sacrificing himself to save her life - and his last thoughts, as they were, are still of protecting her from witnessing the violence and finality of his death. Geez, I'm getting teary here. (Sorry, Lenina, but you asked for it.)
but she'd only done so after he'd fallen.
Kate never listens.
She hadn't wanted to watch them carry him away - or maybe they'd dragged him. Like he was nothing.
I'm guessing they would have dragged him. I can see Pickett doing that, grabbing him by the hair and dragging him away to wherever they were going to dispose of him. (Oh, his poor, beautiful hair.)
She doesn't know; she'd stopped listening, stopped hearing. Now she uses her feet against the ground to press herself harder into the metal bars, hoping to feel something.
She can still see the look of surprise on his face. She squeezes her eyes shut but it's imprinted on the insides of her lids. She wonders if he'd actually believed Pickett would spare him, that her desperate pleas and declaration of love would be enough to save his life.
Kate's projecting here. Sawyer himself seemed to be very resigned to his fate, believing without a doubt that he would be killed. It was Kate who kept pleading and begging, "I'll do anything you want," hoping that she could somehow stop this from happening. Sawyer's "look of surprise" that she references is probably more her own surprise and disbelief than anything else.
Maybe Sawyer had been more of a romantic than she'd thought.
Well, this is certainly true. Sawyer is definitely more of a romantic than anyone ever gives him credit for. Not that he'd ever admit it!
Or maybe people always looked surprised in the last moments before death. She wouldn't know. She hadn't exactly stuck around to photograph Wayne's reaction.
She's being callous and sarcastic here. Hooray for unhealthy defense mechanisms! I don't think she realizes that she's, once again, connecting Sawyer to Wayne. Regardless, she's definitely putting some of the blame of Sawyer's death onto herself - after all, it was obvious he gave himself up to save her.
She shuffles her body around then, seized with the need to see again the place he'd fallen. To her shock and mild horror, he's still there. They've left him, just as he'd crumpled, legs folded under him at an odd angle.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. I said before I could see Pickett dragging Sawyer away after he was killed. But maybe this is part of that mindfuckery thing they have going on - leave the dead guy to lay there so his girlfriend can watch him grow stiff and dry? I don't know. But at any rate, the rest of the fic wouldn't work if he wasn't still lying there, so...
Before she can stop it, the thought occurs to her that he must be in pain.
Ah, Ms. Kübler-Ross, here comes your denial.
But of course, he's not. Not anymore. The blood has dried on his temple, turning an ugly tint of brown in the dead heat
Tint or hue? I remember looking up the difference as I wrote this line, trying to figure out which word I should use. I vividly remember a high school art teacher being quite adamant of the difference between the two, but for the life of me I couldn't remember what it was, and a dictionary search did not help me. I ended up using 'tint' purely because it sounded better to me. I suppose I could have used 'shade,' as well. One of those silly, trivial things that doesn't matter at all in the end.
, and it almost looks like he's reached up with a muddy hand to wipe his brow. Almost.
Now she feels, and at first it's that her face is wet, which she thinks is odd, given that the rain stopped long ago. She opens her mouth to speak, and her voice creaks out, as if she hasn't used it in far too long. “Sawyer.”
When he doesn't move, she frowns and repeats it, louder, stronger this time. “Sawyer! Damn it, Sawyer! Get up!” Intellectually, she knows he's not hearing her, that he'll never respond. The knowledge doesn't stop her from trying again. “God damn you, Sawyer, stand up!”
A throwback to what she was yelling in the episode when Pickett was dragging Sawyer out of his cage. It hadn't worked then, and most of her knows it's not going to work now, but she can't help herself. Oh, that pretty little river in Egypt.
She hears footsteps then and falls silent, half expecting to see him coming around the corner. Whatcha yammerin' about, Freckles?
He would say that, wouldn't he. Kind of exasperated and a bit disturbed to find her standing in a cage, yelling at the ground.
But instead she sees Pickett approaching, and with a sick churning in her stomach, she realizes she'll never be Freckles again.
And I think she'd be tempted to haul off and slug anyone but Sawyer who would call her Freckles. Can we get a collective "awwww, poor Kate" here, please? For some reason, that particular line broke my heart the most about writing this fic. Kate has had so many different names, and most of them have been fake. Freckles might be the closest to a real name that anyone's ever given her.
After Tom, she'd vowed to never again have a reason to kill.
Not after Wayne, after Tom. A subtle reference to the episode in which Jack wants to know what she did and she refers to Tom as "the man I killed." This time, she's comparing Sawyer to Tom - she feels responsible for both their deaths, though in each she's not the one who pulled the trigger. This is the promise she breaks, referenced in the title.
Now, she stands up, ignoring the tingling in her legs that tells her she's been sitting in one position for too long. She grips the bars of the cage until her knuckles turn white and looks directly into Pickett's eyes.
“You'll pay for this. All of you. You will pay.”
And this is the new vow she makes. Part of Pickett probably wants this reaction from her - he wants to make her feel the way he felt when Colleen was killed. And I can easily see Kate in the same position Pickett was several hours earlier - holding Pickett at gunpoint, "this is for Sawyer, you son of a bitch."