Tales of Brave Ulysses (Jack/Sayid), 1/7
Disclaimer: No ownership of anything remotely related to Lost; no infringement intended; no money made.
Author's note: While the on-island sections of this fic are in chronological order, the post-island ones are not (necessarily), and most need not be read to have happened in any particular sequence.
Assumes canon through 3x16, "One of Us," but more speculation than specific spoilers.
Jack steps onto the gangplank with the weight of an obscure, anxious uncertainty building in the pit of his stomach. He wonders whether he’s brave - clever? - Odysseus, returning against all the odds to everything - almost everything - that used to be home, or upright Aeneas, setting first sight on a strange shore that will become his own, whether he wants it or not.
He’s only read the Cliff’s Notes, and even that’s been a long time. It’s Desmond who’s going back to Penelope, or whatever it is that he’s doing. He figures that counts for something, under the circumstances.
Not that he’d shared his thoughts with the legion of customs agents and lawyers and public health officials who’d thronged aboard when they refuelled in Hawai’i.
There’s a little cluster of people standing in a cordoned-off area outside one of the warehouses. His mother is among them, a study in restraint: widow’s suit, hair back, face impassive. But when he closes the distance between them she squeezes her eyes shut, just for a second, and gasps, then hugs him so long and so tightly than he can barely breathe. When he manages to extricate himself, she can’t take her eyes off him.
Someone else is clapping his shoulder, saying his name, upbeat, offering to take his bags - Marc Silverman; he must have accompanied Jack’s mother; Silverman, his best man, Silverman who arranged his bachelor party and his funeral. Jack hugs him, tries to make a joke about Silverman not getting his hands on Jack’s golf clubs anytime soon, bursts into tears halfway through. “Damn, it’s good to see you.” Silverman nods; he’s choking up too.
He breathes in and runs a hand over his face. He needs to hold himself together, for a little while at least. There’s a familiar shuffle of feet behind him - funny how he can recognize it when he’s never heard it on a surface anything like this - and a hand on his forearm. He turns, brushes his fingers to a lapel, feels a smile tug at his mouth. He sees it returned and faces the others again. “Mom, Marc - Sayid Jarrah.” Everyone smiles, and there’s a flurry of heads nodded and hands proffered, and he adds, “He’ll be staying with me.”
If they were expecting him to add for a while or until…, they don’t mention it.
There are subjects everyone tries to avoid: much of the past, any of the future. Still, things come up.
“How come you never got married?”
Jack didn’t plan to ask that; it just slips out of his mouth as they’re tending the fire. They’re finally coming to trust each other again, after the whole debacle with the Others. Or Sayid is coming to trust Jack again, after everything he’s done.
Sayid doesn’t seem especially surprised by the question. “When I was living in Iraq, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“I wanted to wait a few years after I finished university. Establish my career, get a better salary, settle myself in life so that I could take care of a family.”
“Did you want a family?”
“In time. But before any of that could happen the first Gulf War came, and I got my new assignment. I couldn’t ask a woman to live with me when I could barely live with myself. Or have children when people who were weaker than I was were not always safe from me.” He shifts his eyes from the fire to Jack. “Did you want children?”
“So badly. I always imagined being a father, even when I was a little kid. I wanted to be everything my dad wasn’t. I don’t know how well I would have done at that, but I would have done better than him.”
“But you and your wife never had any.”
“Sarah. No. We both wanted kids. She was - she’s a teacher. She loves them so much; she couldn’t wait to have her own. But we decided to take a year or two and adjust to married life before we started trying. And by the time that happened we realized we’d gotten married for the wrong reasons.” Or she realized it. It took him a little longer.
“That is a pity. But I suppose there is no use getting caught up in wishes.”
“None at all.”
Especially not those wishes. Not here.
One way or the other, almost everyone winds up near Los Angeles.
Claire has nothing but bad memories back in Australia, and Charlie has too many of them in England; they’d rather start over among people they know best. Sun and Jin take the same view of Seoul, of Sun’s father, and settle just outside the city. Rose’s cancer has disappeared, along with fear of flying, somehow; she and Bernard split their time between New York and the Malibu area. Rousseau and Alex are on Santa Catalina Island, with about as much human society as they can handle. Jack doubts that either one of them will ever be okay, exactly, especially not Danielle, but they’re doing a lot better than he expected. Kate manages to wrangle relatively light charges and seven years in a federal facility up near Oakland. Good behaviour and she’ll be out in three.
Their house is in Antelope Valley, still in L.A. County but far from the manicured suburbs of Jack’s previous life, distant from the unwelcome beach. Mission-revival adobe, 1924 with some adjustments since. It’s on a low hill by a little town, on the very edge of one of the state parks; there won’t be any new shopping malls or subdivisions springing up. He’d driven the realtor insane with specifications: within the county, accessible by train, he’s earned the luxury of never driving in Los Angeles again; good schools and resources, since he wants to live near Claire and Charlie; not too big a town; left-leaning, not that California’s brand of conservatism is particularly odious, but discretion beats valour, especially for Sayid’s sake.
It didn’t come any cheaper than Claire’s place, a ten-minute walk away; for once he’s grateful to Dharma/Hanso for providing the settlement. Not that what he endured on the island is worth being able to buy half the Mojave desert if he wanted to, but at least they were good for something. When there’s a good bloom in the wildflower park, the pre- and post-island city crowd, especially the ones with kids, drop by and visit.
Everyone from the island has acquired unrelated nieces and nephews: Eko and Hugo Kwon, Aaron Littleton, Lucia Desdemona Pace. He and Sayid are listed as Claire and Charlie’s next of kin, the kids’ next of kin in case anything happens. He hates thinking about it.
It’s halfway between an accident and a dream.
Aaron’s colicky and Claire’s panicky; having Jack on call at beach camp seems to reassure her, although there’s not a damned thing he can do. The night always feels cold this time of year - summer? winter? Nothing makes sense here - although it probably isn’t, just cooler than the daytime, when the air is body-temperature.
He dreams, sometimes, of boars or the Others or things far less strange than his waking life. Or sometimes better dreams, muzzy and half-lucid.
He is warm in this one; something undefined and amorphous fits itself to him. He presses into it. It’s safe and familiar, like Sarah felt, before they fell apart.
He’s in some state between the boredom and panic that have split his existence lately. He’s greedy for the warmth. It’s entangled in his legs, between his fingers. His belly and thighs are on fire. His body is becoming flame in the night air, which is cool as the tangled roots that hold the jungle together, and he is as hard, thick. He’s lost in the warmth; he couldn’t say whether the body in his arms and the cock in his hand are his or -
Sayid’s.
Warm, indeed, and waking up. Jack is hard against his ass. Ready to come, like a schoolboy.
Sayid’s hands are tight around Jack’s wrist. It’s a plea or a command in a low whisper. Precise.
"Go on, Jack."
**Image credits: sylvia and hydolas at lost-forum
;
hellybongo,
jatesoul,
tina_eat,
isis2015,
losty_ville,
theseventhsign,
marylou_gr,
audiopineapple,
navras_rheya, and
lasamy.
Author's note: While the on-island sections of this fic are in chronological order, the post-island ones are not (necessarily), and most need not be read to have happened in any particular sequence.
Assumes canon through 3x16, "One of Us," but more speculation than specific spoilers.
Jack steps onto the gangplank with the weight of an obscure, anxious uncertainty building in the pit of his stomach. He wonders whether he’s brave - clever? - Odysseus, returning against all the odds to everything - almost everything - that used to be home, or upright Aeneas, setting first sight on a strange shore that will become his own, whether he wants it or not.
He’s only read the Cliff’s Notes, and even that’s been a long time. It’s Desmond who’s going back to Penelope, or whatever it is that he’s doing. He figures that counts for something, under the circumstances.
Not that he’d shared his thoughts with the legion of customs agents and lawyers and public health officials who’d thronged aboard when they refuelled in Hawai’i.
There’s a little cluster of people standing in a cordoned-off area outside one of the warehouses. His mother is among them, a study in restraint: widow’s suit, hair back, face impassive. But when he closes the distance between them she squeezes her eyes shut, just for a second, and gasps, then hugs him so long and so tightly than he can barely breathe. When he manages to extricate himself, she can’t take her eyes off him.
Someone else is clapping his shoulder, saying his name, upbeat, offering to take his bags - Marc Silverman; he must have accompanied Jack’s mother; Silverman, his best man, Silverman who arranged his bachelor party and his funeral. Jack hugs him, tries to make a joke about Silverman not getting his hands on Jack’s golf clubs anytime soon, bursts into tears halfway through. “Damn, it’s good to see you.” Silverman nods; he’s choking up too.
He breathes in and runs a hand over his face. He needs to hold himself together, for a little while at least. There’s a familiar shuffle of feet behind him - funny how he can recognize it when he’s never heard it on a surface anything like this - and a hand on his forearm. He turns, brushes his fingers to a lapel, feels a smile tug at his mouth. He sees it returned and faces the others again. “Mom, Marc - Sayid Jarrah.” Everyone smiles, and there’s a flurry of heads nodded and hands proffered, and he adds, “He’ll be staying with me.”
If they were expecting him to add for a while or until…, they don’t mention it.
There are subjects everyone tries to avoid: much of the past, any of the future. Still, things come up.
“How come you never got married?”
Jack didn’t plan to ask that; it just slips out of his mouth as they’re tending the fire. They’re finally coming to trust each other again, after the whole debacle with the Others. Or Sayid is coming to trust Jack again, after everything he’s done.
Sayid doesn’t seem especially surprised by the question. “When I was living in Iraq, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“I wanted to wait a few years after I finished university. Establish my career, get a better salary, settle myself in life so that I could take care of a family.”
“Did you want a family?”
“In time. But before any of that could happen the first Gulf War came, and I got my new assignment. I couldn’t ask a woman to live with me when I could barely live with myself. Or have children when people who were weaker than I was were not always safe from me.” He shifts his eyes from the fire to Jack. “Did you want children?”
“So badly. I always imagined being a father, even when I was a little kid. I wanted to be everything my dad wasn’t. I don’t know how well I would have done at that, but I would have done better than him.”
“But you and your wife never had any.”
“Sarah. No. We both wanted kids. She was - she’s a teacher. She loves them so much; she couldn’t wait to have her own. But we decided to take a year or two and adjust to married life before we started trying. And by the time that happened we realized we’d gotten married for the wrong reasons.” Or she realized it. It took him a little longer.
“That is a pity. But I suppose there is no use getting caught up in wishes.”
“None at all.”
Especially not those wishes. Not here.
One way or the other, almost everyone winds up near Los Angeles.
Claire has nothing but bad memories back in Australia, and Charlie has too many of them in England; they’d rather start over among people they know best. Sun and Jin take the same view of Seoul, of Sun’s father, and settle just outside the city. Rose’s cancer has disappeared, along with fear of flying, somehow; she and Bernard split their time between New York and the Malibu area. Rousseau and Alex are on Santa Catalina Island, with about as much human society as they can handle. Jack doubts that either one of them will ever be okay, exactly, especially not Danielle, but they’re doing a lot better than he expected. Kate manages to wrangle relatively light charges and seven years in a federal facility up near Oakland. Good behaviour and she’ll be out in three.
Their house is in Antelope Valley, still in L.A. County but far from the manicured suburbs of Jack’s previous life, distant from the unwelcome beach. Mission-revival adobe, 1924 with some adjustments since. It’s on a low hill by a little town, on the very edge of one of the state parks; there won’t be any new shopping malls or subdivisions springing up. He’d driven the realtor insane with specifications: within the county, accessible by train, he’s earned the luxury of never driving in Los Angeles again; good schools and resources, since he wants to live near Claire and Charlie; not too big a town; left-leaning, not that California’s brand of conservatism is particularly odious, but discretion beats valour, especially for Sayid’s sake.
It didn’t come any cheaper than Claire’s place, a ten-minute walk away; for once he’s grateful to Dharma/Hanso for providing the settlement. Not that what he endured on the island is worth being able to buy half the Mojave desert if he wanted to, but at least they were good for something. When there’s a good bloom in the wildflower park, the pre- and post-island city crowd, especially the ones with kids, drop by and visit.
Everyone from the island has acquired unrelated nieces and nephews: Eko and Hugo Kwon, Aaron Littleton, Lucia Desdemona Pace. He and Sayid are listed as Claire and Charlie’s next of kin, the kids’ next of kin in case anything happens. He hates thinking about it.
It’s halfway between an accident and a dream.
Aaron’s colicky and Claire’s panicky; having Jack on call at beach camp seems to reassure her, although there’s not a damned thing he can do. The night always feels cold this time of year - summer? winter? Nothing makes sense here - although it probably isn’t, just cooler than the daytime, when the air is body-temperature.
He dreams, sometimes, of boars or the Others or things far less strange than his waking life. Or sometimes better dreams, muzzy and half-lucid.
He is warm in this one; something undefined and amorphous fits itself to him. He presses into it. It’s safe and familiar, like Sarah felt, before they fell apart.
He’s in some state between the boredom and panic that have split his existence lately. He’s greedy for the warmth. It’s entangled in his legs, between his fingers. His belly and thighs are on fire. His body is becoming flame in the night air, which is cool as the tangled roots that hold the jungle together, and he is as hard, thick. He’s lost in the warmth; he couldn’t say whether the body in his arms and the cock in his hand are his or -
Sayid’s.
Warm, indeed, and waking up. Jack is hard against his ass. Ready to come, like a schoolboy.
Sayid’s hands are tight around Jack’s wrist. It’s a plea or a command in a low whisper. Precise.
"Go on, Jack."
**Image credits: sylvia and hydolas at lost-forum
;
hellybongo,
jatesoul,
tina_eat,
isis2015,
losty_ville,
theseventhsign,
marylou_gr,
audiopineapple,
navras_rheya, and
lasamy.