Fic for the lost_caves crew: "Thicket," Desmond/Sawyer
Title: Thicket (subsequent bit here)
Pairing: Desmond/Sawyer
Summary: Desmond and Sawyer enjoy the silence as much as they can, after the Looking Glass.
Rating: Hard R/light NC-17 Disclaimer: Lost is all ABC’s; no money/ownership here.
Notes: For
hendercats and
jenthegypsy, who provided lettuce and happy frolicking grounds for this plot bunny. Go check out their community at
lost_caves - it's excellent!
Comments, feedback, and criticism are always welcome.
Note Two: I realized, in replying to feedback on this after I posted it, that there's a brief exchange between Sawyer and Desmond about one bit of their shared history in
halfdutch's wonderful fic " Warm Beer," which everyone should go read now. I should have realized it sooner and noted it off the bat, so apologies all around. Same bit of canon, but it should be noted that she picked up on it first, and best.
***
There wouldn’t seem to be a great deal that Desmond can say he’s got in common with Sawyer. Beyond the very obvious and the insubstantial, there’s little apart from the fact that they’ve both wound up on this fucking island at the same time; in fact, there’s next to nothing. It’s the island that clinches it, really.
Desmond’s always been a quiet man, and there’s been a lot in life to encourage that tendency. The monastery, the things he didn’t want to say, three years in the company of Kelvin Inman or his own conscience, not so much as recorded music to distract him. Sawyer’s incapable of shutting the fuck up, except when anyone might want him to talk. Then he’s silent as the grave.
Think of graves, think of Charlie. There’s nothing to be said there, never will be from him, although Claire will want to talk of it eventually. Penny’s lost to him, he’s sure of nothing but that now, and he’d be just has happy six feet under, come to that. Lady Luck has never smiled that kindly on him; no reason to expect she’ll start now.
Claire smiles at him, when she can. How he’d love to look at her, if he has to at all, through the nauseously sweet syrup of palm wine, tempting him because unlike Charlie he’s displeased to be without his own addiction, a weaker addiction whose loss costs more to a weaker man. He’s desperate for the toddy that Danielle and Sun can brew, but Jack won’t let him at it. Pity Desmond can’t turn water into wine; there’s enough of it to keep him happy until all their livers failed them. He’s far from confident that anyone’s ever managed that trick, although he’s beheld many things stranger with his own eyes. Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink. Charlie’d breathed it, in the end.
He takes to spending his time in the woods. There’s less to remember there, and fewer people pressing in on him, chancing his company.
He was glad of the company, of course, when he’d first got it again, much as it terrified him. The fear in it seems distant now, for the most part, acutely as he remembers it. He still feels the same way: overwhelmed and overjoyed, no matter how much grief is bearing down on him, no matter how much better off they’d all be if he’d turned the failsafe key on the twenty-first of September and been done with everything once and for all. He’s out of great things to do in his life, probably out of decent ones. He’s still here, though, and the chaotic froth of joy at being among people, no matter how keen he is to avoid them at the same time, buoys him enough to keep him here, whatever the consequences. He’d be going to hell for that if he thought there was one, apart from here.
The first month he was back among people, before Locke went mad the first time and he turned the key and the world went madder than ever, madder than Locke could ever be, was a surging mass of emotions and impressions, suspicion and friendship and fear and curiosity. Desmond couldn’t make sense of it if anyone asked; it’s all too tangled, too close, too strong. He was glad - no, he was euphoric, however much he tried to conceal it, however much it frightened him - to make friends with people, with Hurley and Claire and Charlie… he can’t bear to think of that, not yet. But confused as well, desperately so, not knowing what fit where or who he’d cursed or which of his memories meant what, which were real in any sense.
He understood the feel of sun and sea air on his skin, the smell of the jungle and the fire and the taste of fish and fruit, the sound of waves and crackling flames and human voices. There was the embarrassment he knew he ought to feel, if he could only remember quite how, about his need for the drink and the madness he seemed to have developed and the way his desires were raging like a schoolboy’s, twenty years and a sea of whiskey too late for any excuse. That was the easiest thing to make sense of, the most immediate in some senses, and so he tried to comprehend it first, to control one thing in his life beyond those buttons.
There were buttons Charlie died to press.
There’s a knot of trees within shouting distance of the camp, dense to work though but clear in the centre, that he hasn’t shown the others, trusting them to find their own places to mourn and hide. He got familiar with it quite quickly, found it too useful to pass up as a place of quiet and, in the first weeks, masturbation, when the sudden exposure to dozens of people, beautiful women in particular but also simply living people aware of his presence, had him regressing into that second adolescence after years of drink and boredom had dulled all that to the point of vanishing, a half-wanted renaissance that had ended with a rap to his head and his waking up in the jungle undressed and dirty and with memories of what didn’t exist. He started coming here to be alone, in the quiet, then, when the company of the doomed became intolerable, like that of the merely inquisitive. It’s still enough to drive him there at times, that or the thought of Charlie.
He thinks Sawyer’s unwell the first time he finds him there, sitting on the bare earth with his face pressed into his hands, and then he draws close enough to hear him and realizes that the man is weeping. He retreats as quietly as he can manage and finds the largest tree he can as a shield, trusting the night to complete his protection from the curious and the well-intentioned. He can’t speak at moments like these. He can’t so much as think.
He returns to the thicket despite Sawyer’s having discovered it, finding no good substitute in his diurnal explorations. Sometimes he’s got the place to himself. Others he hears footsteps approach before they pause and depart again, or else it’s his footsteps that Sawyer hears. That’s fine with him until Sawyer’s too quiet one night and Desmond nearly trips over him getting into the little clearing, sees the tears on his face amidst anger at the disruption. “Are you well, brother?”
“What the hell are you doin’ here?”
“It’s a good place to be alone, find some quiet.” Sawyer doesn’t offer the retort Desmond might have expected. “But you’ve not answered my question.”
“Yeah. Just peachy.” Sawyer’s risen to his feet and wipes a hand over his face.
“I’ve left you alone here half a dozen nights now, and I can tell you, brother, you seem less than peachy.”
“What the hell business is that of yours?”
“Don’t like to see anyone suffering, is all.”
“And just what brings you out here, then?”
“I need to be alone sometimes.”
“You’re alone all the damn time anyway. Sometimes I got to remind myself you can even talk.”
“People will go on talking when they’ve nothing to say.”
“Well, I got nothin’ to say to you, Braveheart.”
Desmond shrugs. “Two can use this hollow, yeah? Without having anything to say about it?”
“Ain’t there somewhere else you can go?”
“I’ve looked, brother. There’s little else safe.”
“Well, ain’t that grand.” Sawyer spits on the ground. “You wanna draw up a schedule, or just you leave me alone and I do the same for you?”
“The second sounds better than splitting up the time after night chores, doesn't it?”
“Guess so.” Sawyer sounds inclined to argue about it, but as though he hasn’t got the energy to do so.
There’s an unspoken agreement in their exchange that they’ll try to avoid each other, but they can’t stagger the times at which human society becomes unbearable. They find each other in the thicket almost as many nights as not, despite their best efforts against it. Sawyer’s quick enough to abandon his efforts at suppressing his tears, on which Desmond never comments. The pain of what’s happened around Desmond rarely takes any form that prompts tears of his own. Without any conscious thought on Desmond’s part or, he suspects, on Sawyer’s, they sit or stand with their backs to one another, as far apart as they can manage.
Desmond knows full well what his own troubles are, even if he can’t give voice to them, or can’t bear to. Sawyer’s are a mystery; he’s wept less for the loss of people he knew better than Charlie, and he’s not the sort of man to bewail the vagaries of Kate’s affections like this, whatever his fears for her well-being. Desmond suppresses what urge he has to ask, although he once suggests to Sawyer, from duty and against his instincts, that his troubles might be eased in the sharing. “Ain’t you one to talk,” is all Sawyer says to him, and Desmond is grateful for both their sakes. He always found contemplation a sounder cure than confession, which might have been why it wasn’t Father affixed to his name. All the same, he takes to putting a hand on Sawyer’s shoulder or an arm around it when he seems at his worst, that by instinct more than inclination, and though Sawyer gives a hostile shrug at times he’s quick enough to accept it.
Desmond doubts he could identify any particular factor that prompts the arm around the shoulder to evolve into an embrace one day when noiseless sobs are running waves through Sawyer’s body. Sawyer goes stiff for an instant and then leans into him. Desmond runs a hand over Sawyer’s hair, saying nothing, and then, without being able to say when it began or what he was thinking, he’s kissing Sawyer. He hardly realizes what he’s doing until it dawns on his consciousness that Sawyer is kissing him in return. Not with the sort of hunger and brutality he might have expected of the man - had he expected this, then? - but with a sort of measured interest. He’s surprised, somehow, that Sawyer doesn’t taste of tobacco, although they’re without cigarettes here, or manage to have a tongue as sandpaper-rough as his words.
Sawyer’s body is broader than his, although the man’s lost weight since Desmond met him; they’re all sinew now, the both of them. When he was alone in the hatch Desmond took to standing in front of the mirror for hours, interrupted hours, clean or dirty or clothed or towel-wrapped or naked, as if to remind himself that he existed, that humanity existed, that he was anything a figment of some incorporeal imagination diseased with ennui. He’s surprised now to feel something warm and alive under his hands, Sawyer’s muscles bulkier than his own and more defined by the simple virtue of their size, that Sawyer is less sweaty than Desmond might have expected, although he’s made no objection to the unplanned roving of Desmond’s hands under his shirt.
Sawyer disentangles his lips from Desmond’s and presses them close to his ear. “Real eager tonight, ain’t you?”
There are things he won’t speak of: how at the end of a year he was begging Kelvin for it, a slovenly and unlovable man to whom Desmond looked up like a dog to its master, and he thinks Kelvin got more pleasure out of denying him than he ever could have got from the act itself. Kelvin went out more and more as time went on, and when Desmond ran out of books to read until they wore apart, whatever time wasn’t spent at the buttons he divided between aerobics machines and fitful naps and round after round of harmless self-abuse. It was all the worse when Kelvin died and sleep began to escape Desmond. After that there was nothing to his life but the nuts and bolts and wiring of the machines that kept his body and everyone else’s alive, all in the haze of drink and boredom that had finally put an end not only to the need but to the possibility of rote masturbation, and the dust and the arthritic shadows were closing on his mind.
Desmond swallows. “It’s been a long time for me, brother.”
“I can see that. Thought you had a girl back home.”
“Aye. She’s gone.” Kate’s just as gone from Sawyer, maybe; the women here are all afraid, just like the men for them, unwilling to do what they might for fear of its leading elsewhere. It’s been wearing on Sawyer, or it will be. Desmond tries not to think of the first weeks above ground, at pains to avoid women for fear of giving offence, hard as soon as he saw a one of them and beyond letting the condition resolve itself, risking embarrassment often enough at the proximity of anyone at all. The part of him that isn’t crushed with the grief of losing of Penny and Charlie is as desperate as it was then, only stifled, as it has been since the failsafe, under the weight of disbelief and fear.
“You’ve been in prison, brother?” he asks, mostly out of confusion at the silence.
Sawyer stops unbuttoning his shirt and gives Desmond a sharp look. “How’d you know?”
He realizes he can’t answer that. “Word gets around. Common recognition, maybe.”
Sawyer gives a disbelieving snort as he finishes with his shirt and begins to undo the lower buttons of Desmond’s. “How’d you wind up in jail? Drive drunk or somethin’?”
He shakes his head. “Disobeyed a commanding officer. I wasn’t much suited to the military, truth to tell you.”
“You ain’t gonna ask what I did?”
“Doesn’t much matter, does it?”
“Guess not.” Sawyer pinches Desmond’s nipple, hard, and sucks near the hollow of his throat. His free hand roves over the muscles Desmond kept his sanity, in part, by working to maintain. Even with the aerobic machines strewn through the jungle now, the daily labour quiets his mind, allows him to focus somehow. The distinction between mind and body has long been blurred for him, he realizes; it didn’t matter if he understood why he was pushing the buttons, only that he was capable of doing it - a capability only as good as his ability to remember the routine, to understand the hatch’s operations. He couldn’t say what his own hands are doing at the moment - one’s at the back of Sawyer’s head, he sees; the other’s wandering over his chest.
Sawyer gives Desmond no chance to object before he unbuckles his belt, perhaps knowing he wouldn’t. “No sense wastin’ time,” he says, and Desmond wants to reply, wants to say so many things about time almost as badly as he wants to forget them, and all he can do is bite Sawyer’s shoulder in response, taste his sun-burnished skin and wonder if he’s real. He fumbles for Sawyer’s belt buckle, wondering whether the man should be as hard as Desmond is himself, undoes Sawyer’s fly. “Probably won't get it up just now,” Sawyer says, although they’re pushing down one another’s trousers and underwear. Sawyer’s running his hands over Desmond’s hips and thighs and stomach. “Jerked off before you showed up.” Briefly Desmond wonders if that’s true or if it’s do with whatever pain brings Sawyer here in the first place, what he doesn’t want to acknowledge, but there’s less cause for asking than not.
“How you want it?” Sawyer says.
“Hm?” Desmond’s mind is everywhere and nowhere. Sawyer’s words don’t make sense to him, Sawyer himself makes no sense, nothing here is within his comprehension.
“How do you want it?” Sawyer repeats it more slowly, closer to Desmond’s ear. “I could jerk you off. ’Course, you ain’t cut. Can’t say as I’ve dealt much with ones like that. So if there’s anything special you need me to do ’bout that extra part you’re gonna have to tell me.” A smirk crosses his face as he adds, “If you can.”
“I don’t care. Anything.” He’s about to come without a single touch, pressing himself against Sawyer’s body, rubbing himself against the man’s thigh.
“Might like it better if I suck your dick, though,” Sawyer says. In some distant corner of Desmond’s brain, he’s aware that he’s begun whimpering, that Sawyer might be enjoying it. “Straight as a nail myself when I can manage it, but guys sure give better head. Chicks just don’t know what they’re doin’ half the time.” Desmond tries not to remember how well Penny managed it, how much she liked to do it. “You could just keep rubbin’ up on my leg like some horny-ass cat, if you want to,” Sawyer continues. “Can’t say as I’d want that if it was the other way around, but suit yourself.”
“No - I think - ”
“Or I could let you fuck me,” Sawyer says, licking Desmond’s earlobe. “Shove your dick up my ass balls-deep if you want to. Probably not my favourite option at the moment, but I think I could handle it, provided I get a turn when I need one.” Sawyer licks the palm of his hand. “Spit’ll have to do well enough. I ain’t got anything that’s catchin’. Guessin’ you don’t either, or you’d have wound up mighty sick in that hatch.” Sawyer’s fondling Desmond’s balls now, and he realizes that he’s mimicking the action, and that Sawyer’s leaning into his touch even if there isn’t much of a reaction, and that Desmond had forgotten how thin that skin feels, close to fragile, when it’s attached to someone else. “Wouldn’t mind the trade-off, now I think of it. I bet you got a nice tight ass.” One of Sawyer’s hands sneaks around Desmond’s waist and squeezes his backside as if to prove it.
He’ll go mad if Sawyer keeps at this much longer. He opens his mouth and gasps wordlessly, unable to speak. He manages to press one of his hands to Sawyer’s mouth and the other to his own crotch. “Please, brother - ”
“All righty, then.” Sawyer grabs Desmond’s upper arms and pulls him to his feet, then sinks to his knees. For all his talking he’s been attentive enough to see that Desmond is past waiting, that he’s beyond the point where any teasing is tolerable. Sawyer darts his tongue out and traces little circles around the head of Desmond’s cock, then cups his balls, drawn up as tightly as they are, in one hand and wraps the other around his shaft. He touches his lips to the very tip of Desmond’s cock and then draws it into his mouth, sucking lightly a couple of times and then hard. He makes a little snaking motion with the tip of his tongue and gives another rather firm bit of suction, and then before Sawyer’s even begun properly Desmond feels a great pulsing sensation overtake his body, his eyes shut tightly against some bright light that will surely blind him if they’re open.
He couldn’t say how long it is before he opens them again, but his heart is only beating quickly, not threatening to pound its way out of his chest. He’s drawing breath normally enough, even if it’s difficult to find words. He turns his head and sees Sawyer sitting at his head, beside him; somehow he’s fallen to the jungle’s floor, although there’s no ache in his body, and he thinks Saywer must have eased him down somehow. The man deserves at least a word of thanks for that, surely, although Desmond isn’t sure of how to phrase it.
“You weren’t kiddin’ when you said it’s been a long time,” Sawyer says.
Those are real words, not imagined ones; specific enough that Desmond can find an answer. “Three and a half years, brother. And not the best ones of my life, I don’t mind telling you.”
“Wouldn’t think so. You all right?”
He feels his mouth stretch into a smile, broader and warmer than might be polite, and wishes he could control it better. “Aye. You?”
“Yep. Gonna look forward to gettin’ something from you, when I’m in the mood for it.”
“I’ll be happy to give it, then.” He reaches for his trousers, but Sawyer extends an arm to stop him. “Keep ’em off. I wanna look at you naked.” Desmond must have a questioning look on his face, because Sawyer adds, “Gives me somethin’ nice to think about for next time.”
Desmond relaxes his body again, happy enough to ignore the trousers, although there are other considerations. He remembers that there’s a beach here, that people are there and might be wondering after them. “We ought to be going back soon, before anyone comes looking.”
“Why, you wanna hide somethin’ from them?”
“No. But I’d rather not have them gossiping. Or worried, at that.”
“You got a point there. I don’t want to hear their goddamn nosy questions. We can go back five minutes apart, sound all right?”
“Aye.” Something occurs to Desmond, and he adds, “I imagine you’ll still be wanting to come here alone at times.” He certainly will be, at any rate; he can’t imagine that Sawyer would feel any differently.
“Yeah. But we can run into each other sometimes.”
“I reckon we can, brother. And you know where to find me.”
“On the goddamn beach, just like everyone else.”
“It’s a wonderful beach,” Desmond tells him. “You’ve no idea how wonderful it is.”
“I sure don’t, Braveheart.”
“It’s a bonnie wee strand, then,” says Desmond. “And I’m going to go back to it now, before I fall asleep here.”
“Wore you out good, did I?” says Sawyer. “Guess I’ll just wish you sweet dreams, then.”
His dreams will be memories of Charlie, visions of being accused of him, of Penny being pulled under the tide and Kelvin sitting in judgment, a bloodied sailboat wrecked on the shoals.
There’s no need to say any of that to Saywer. Instead, he says, “Likewise, brother,” and manages a grin.
**Image credit: night_sky_dream at lost-forum.
Pairing: Desmond/Sawyer
Summary: Desmond and Sawyer enjoy the silence as much as they can, after the Looking Glass.
Rating: Hard R/light NC-17 Disclaimer: Lost is all ABC’s; no money/ownership here.
Notes: For
hendercats and
jenthegypsy, who provided lettuce and happy frolicking grounds for this plot bunny. Go check out their community at
lost_caves - it's excellent!
Comments, feedback, and criticism are always welcome.
Note Two: I realized, in replying to feedback on this after I posted it, that there's a brief exchange between Sawyer and Desmond about one bit of their shared history in
halfdutch's wonderful fic " Warm Beer," which everyone should go read now. I should have realized it sooner and noted it off the bat, so apologies all around. Same bit of canon, but it should be noted that she picked up on it first, and best.
***
There wouldn’t seem to be a great deal that Desmond can say he’s got in common with Sawyer. Beyond the very obvious and the insubstantial, there’s little apart from the fact that they’ve both wound up on this fucking island at the same time; in fact, there’s next to nothing. It’s the island that clinches it, really.
Desmond’s always been a quiet man, and there’s been a lot in life to encourage that tendency. The monastery, the things he didn’t want to say, three years in the company of Kelvin Inman or his own conscience, not so much as recorded music to distract him. Sawyer’s incapable of shutting the fuck up, except when anyone might want him to talk. Then he’s silent as the grave.
Think of graves, think of Charlie. There’s nothing to be said there, never will be from him, although Claire will want to talk of it eventually. Penny’s lost to him, he’s sure of nothing but that now, and he’d be just has happy six feet under, come to that. Lady Luck has never smiled that kindly on him; no reason to expect she’ll start now.
Claire smiles at him, when she can. How he’d love to look at her, if he has to at all, through the nauseously sweet syrup of palm wine, tempting him because unlike Charlie he’s displeased to be without his own addiction, a weaker addiction whose loss costs more to a weaker man. He’s desperate for the toddy that Danielle and Sun can brew, but Jack won’t let him at it. Pity Desmond can’t turn water into wine; there’s enough of it to keep him happy until all their livers failed them. He’s far from confident that anyone’s ever managed that trick, although he’s beheld many things stranger with his own eyes. Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink. Charlie’d breathed it, in the end.
He takes to spending his time in the woods. There’s less to remember there, and fewer people pressing in on him, chancing his company.
He was glad of the company, of course, when he’d first got it again, much as it terrified him. The fear in it seems distant now, for the most part, acutely as he remembers it. He still feels the same way: overwhelmed and overjoyed, no matter how much grief is bearing down on him, no matter how much better off they’d all be if he’d turned the failsafe key on the twenty-first of September and been done with everything once and for all. He’s out of great things to do in his life, probably out of decent ones. He’s still here, though, and the chaotic froth of joy at being among people, no matter how keen he is to avoid them at the same time, buoys him enough to keep him here, whatever the consequences. He’d be going to hell for that if he thought there was one, apart from here.
The first month he was back among people, before Locke went mad the first time and he turned the key and the world went madder than ever, madder than Locke could ever be, was a surging mass of emotions and impressions, suspicion and friendship and fear and curiosity. Desmond couldn’t make sense of it if anyone asked; it’s all too tangled, too close, too strong. He was glad - no, he was euphoric, however much he tried to conceal it, however much it frightened him - to make friends with people, with Hurley and Claire and Charlie… he can’t bear to think of that, not yet. But confused as well, desperately so, not knowing what fit where or who he’d cursed or which of his memories meant what, which were real in any sense.
He understood the feel of sun and sea air on his skin, the smell of the jungle and the fire and the taste of fish and fruit, the sound of waves and crackling flames and human voices. There was the embarrassment he knew he ought to feel, if he could only remember quite how, about his need for the drink and the madness he seemed to have developed and the way his desires were raging like a schoolboy’s, twenty years and a sea of whiskey too late for any excuse. That was the easiest thing to make sense of, the most immediate in some senses, and so he tried to comprehend it first, to control one thing in his life beyond those buttons.
There were buttons Charlie died to press.
There’s a knot of trees within shouting distance of the camp, dense to work though but clear in the centre, that he hasn’t shown the others, trusting them to find their own places to mourn and hide. He got familiar with it quite quickly, found it too useful to pass up as a place of quiet and, in the first weeks, masturbation, when the sudden exposure to dozens of people, beautiful women in particular but also simply living people aware of his presence, had him regressing into that second adolescence after years of drink and boredom had dulled all that to the point of vanishing, a half-wanted renaissance that had ended with a rap to his head and his waking up in the jungle undressed and dirty and with memories of what didn’t exist. He started coming here to be alone, in the quiet, then, when the company of the doomed became intolerable, like that of the merely inquisitive. It’s still enough to drive him there at times, that or the thought of Charlie.
He thinks Sawyer’s unwell the first time he finds him there, sitting on the bare earth with his face pressed into his hands, and then he draws close enough to hear him and realizes that the man is weeping. He retreats as quietly as he can manage and finds the largest tree he can as a shield, trusting the night to complete his protection from the curious and the well-intentioned. He can’t speak at moments like these. He can’t so much as think.
He returns to the thicket despite Sawyer’s having discovered it, finding no good substitute in his diurnal explorations. Sometimes he’s got the place to himself. Others he hears footsteps approach before they pause and depart again, or else it’s his footsteps that Sawyer hears. That’s fine with him until Sawyer’s too quiet one night and Desmond nearly trips over him getting into the little clearing, sees the tears on his face amidst anger at the disruption. “Are you well, brother?”
“What the hell are you doin’ here?”
“It’s a good place to be alone, find some quiet.” Sawyer doesn’t offer the retort Desmond might have expected. “But you’ve not answered my question.”
“Yeah. Just peachy.” Sawyer’s risen to his feet and wipes a hand over his face.
“I’ve left you alone here half a dozen nights now, and I can tell you, brother, you seem less than peachy.”
“What the hell business is that of yours?”
“Don’t like to see anyone suffering, is all.”
“And just what brings you out here, then?”
“I need to be alone sometimes.”
“You’re alone all the damn time anyway. Sometimes I got to remind myself you can even talk.”
“People will go on talking when they’ve nothing to say.”
“Well, I got nothin’ to say to you, Braveheart.”
Desmond shrugs. “Two can use this hollow, yeah? Without having anything to say about it?”
“Ain’t there somewhere else you can go?”
“I’ve looked, brother. There’s little else safe.”
“Well, ain’t that grand.” Sawyer spits on the ground. “You wanna draw up a schedule, or just you leave me alone and I do the same for you?”
“The second sounds better than splitting up the time after night chores, doesn't it?”
“Guess so.” Sawyer sounds inclined to argue about it, but as though he hasn’t got the energy to do so.
There’s an unspoken agreement in their exchange that they’ll try to avoid each other, but they can’t stagger the times at which human society becomes unbearable. They find each other in the thicket almost as many nights as not, despite their best efforts against it. Sawyer’s quick enough to abandon his efforts at suppressing his tears, on which Desmond never comments. The pain of what’s happened around Desmond rarely takes any form that prompts tears of his own. Without any conscious thought on Desmond’s part or, he suspects, on Sawyer’s, they sit or stand with their backs to one another, as far apart as they can manage.
Desmond knows full well what his own troubles are, even if he can’t give voice to them, or can’t bear to. Sawyer’s are a mystery; he’s wept less for the loss of people he knew better than Charlie, and he’s not the sort of man to bewail the vagaries of Kate’s affections like this, whatever his fears for her well-being. Desmond suppresses what urge he has to ask, although he once suggests to Sawyer, from duty and against his instincts, that his troubles might be eased in the sharing. “Ain’t you one to talk,” is all Sawyer says to him, and Desmond is grateful for both their sakes. He always found contemplation a sounder cure than confession, which might have been why it wasn’t Father affixed to his name. All the same, he takes to putting a hand on Sawyer’s shoulder or an arm around it when he seems at his worst, that by instinct more than inclination, and though Sawyer gives a hostile shrug at times he’s quick enough to accept it.
Desmond doubts he could identify any particular factor that prompts the arm around the shoulder to evolve into an embrace one day when noiseless sobs are running waves through Sawyer’s body. Sawyer goes stiff for an instant and then leans into him. Desmond runs a hand over Sawyer’s hair, saying nothing, and then, without being able to say when it began or what he was thinking, he’s kissing Sawyer. He hardly realizes what he’s doing until it dawns on his consciousness that Sawyer is kissing him in return. Not with the sort of hunger and brutality he might have expected of the man - had he expected this, then? - but with a sort of measured interest. He’s surprised, somehow, that Sawyer doesn’t taste of tobacco, although they’re without cigarettes here, or manage to have a tongue as sandpaper-rough as his words.
Sawyer’s body is broader than his, although the man’s lost weight since Desmond met him; they’re all sinew now, the both of them. When he was alone in the hatch Desmond took to standing in front of the mirror for hours, interrupted hours, clean or dirty or clothed or towel-wrapped or naked, as if to remind himself that he existed, that humanity existed, that he was anything a figment of some incorporeal imagination diseased with ennui. He’s surprised now to feel something warm and alive under his hands, Sawyer’s muscles bulkier than his own and more defined by the simple virtue of their size, that Sawyer is less sweaty than Desmond might have expected, although he’s made no objection to the unplanned roving of Desmond’s hands under his shirt.
Sawyer disentangles his lips from Desmond’s and presses them close to his ear. “Real eager tonight, ain’t you?”
There are things he won’t speak of: how at the end of a year he was begging Kelvin for it, a slovenly and unlovable man to whom Desmond looked up like a dog to its master, and he thinks Kelvin got more pleasure out of denying him than he ever could have got from the act itself. Kelvin went out more and more as time went on, and when Desmond ran out of books to read until they wore apart, whatever time wasn’t spent at the buttons he divided between aerobics machines and fitful naps and round after round of harmless self-abuse. It was all the worse when Kelvin died and sleep began to escape Desmond. After that there was nothing to his life but the nuts and bolts and wiring of the machines that kept his body and everyone else’s alive, all in the haze of drink and boredom that had finally put an end not only to the need but to the possibility of rote masturbation, and the dust and the arthritic shadows were closing on his mind.
Desmond swallows. “It’s been a long time for me, brother.”
“I can see that. Thought you had a girl back home.”
“Aye. She’s gone.” Kate’s just as gone from Sawyer, maybe; the women here are all afraid, just like the men for them, unwilling to do what they might for fear of its leading elsewhere. It’s been wearing on Sawyer, or it will be. Desmond tries not to think of the first weeks above ground, at pains to avoid women for fear of giving offence, hard as soon as he saw a one of them and beyond letting the condition resolve itself, risking embarrassment often enough at the proximity of anyone at all. The part of him that isn’t crushed with the grief of losing of Penny and Charlie is as desperate as it was then, only stifled, as it has been since the failsafe, under the weight of disbelief and fear.
“You’ve been in prison, brother?” he asks, mostly out of confusion at the silence.
Sawyer stops unbuttoning his shirt and gives Desmond a sharp look. “How’d you know?”
He realizes he can’t answer that. “Word gets around. Common recognition, maybe.”
Sawyer gives a disbelieving snort as he finishes with his shirt and begins to undo the lower buttons of Desmond’s. “How’d you wind up in jail? Drive drunk or somethin’?”
He shakes his head. “Disobeyed a commanding officer. I wasn’t much suited to the military, truth to tell you.”
“You ain’t gonna ask what I did?”
“Doesn’t much matter, does it?”
“Guess not.” Sawyer pinches Desmond’s nipple, hard, and sucks near the hollow of his throat. His free hand roves over the muscles Desmond kept his sanity, in part, by working to maintain. Even with the aerobic machines strewn through the jungle now, the daily labour quiets his mind, allows him to focus somehow. The distinction between mind and body has long been blurred for him, he realizes; it didn’t matter if he understood why he was pushing the buttons, only that he was capable of doing it - a capability only as good as his ability to remember the routine, to understand the hatch’s operations. He couldn’t say what his own hands are doing at the moment - one’s at the back of Sawyer’s head, he sees; the other’s wandering over his chest.
Sawyer gives Desmond no chance to object before he unbuckles his belt, perhaps knowing he wouldn’t. “No sense wastin’ time,” he says, and Desmond wants to reply, wants to say so many things about time almost as badly as he wants to forget them, and all he can do is bite Sawyer’s shoulder in response, taste his sun-burnished skin and wonder if he’s real. He fumbles for Sawyer’s belt buckle, wondering whether the man should be as hard as Desmond is himself, undoes Sawyer’s fly. “Probably won't get it up just now,” Sawyer says, although they’re pushing down one another’s trousers and underwear. Sawyer’s running his hands over Desmond’s hips and thighs and stomach. “Jerked off before you showed up.” Briefly Desmond wonders if that’s true or if it’s do with whatever pain brings Sawyer here in the first place, what he doesn’t want to acknowledge, but there’s less cause for asking than not.
“How you want it?” Sawyer says.
“Hm?” Desmond’s mind is everywhere and nowhere. Sawyer’s words don’t make sense to him, Sawyer himself makes no sense, nothing here is within his comprehension.
“How do you want it?” Sawyer repeats it more slowly, closer to Desmond’s ear. “I could jerk you off. ’Course, you ain’t cut. Can’t say as I’ve dealt much with ones like that. So if there’s anything special you need me to do ’bout that extra part you’re gonna have to tell me.” A smirk crosses his face as he adds, “If you can.”
“I don’t care. Anything.” He’s about to come without a single touch, pressing himself against Sawyer’s body, rubbing himself against the man’s thigh.
“Might like it better if I suck your dick, though,” Sawyer says. In some distant corner of Desmond’s brain, he’s aware that he’s begun whimpering, that Sawyer might be enjoying it. “Straight as a nail myself when I can manage it, but guys sure give better head. Chicks just don’t know what they’re doin’ half the time.” Desmond tries not to remember how well Penny managed it, how much she liked to do it. “You could just keep rubbin’ up on my leg like some horny-ass cat, if you want to,” Sawyer continues. “Can’t say as I’d want that if it was the other way around, but suit yourself.”
“No - I think - ”
“Or I could let you fuck me,” Sawyer says, licking Desmond’s earlobe. “Shove your dick up my ass balls-deep if you want to. Probably not my favourite option at the moment, but I think I could handle it, provided I get a turn when I need one.” Sawyer licks the palm of his hand. “Spit’ll have to do well enough. I ain’t got anything that’s catchin’. Guessin’ you don’t either, or you’d have wound up mighty sick in that hatch.” Sawyer’s fondling Desmond’s balls now, and he realizes that he’s mimicking the action, and that Sawyer’s leaning into his touch even if there isn’t much of a reaction, and that Desmond had forgotten how thin that skin feels, close to fragile, when it’s attached to someone else. “Wouldn’t mind the trade-off, now I think of it. I bet you got a nice tight ass.” One of Sawyer’s hands sneaks around Desmond’s waist and squeezes his backside as if to prove it.
He’ll go mad if Sawyer keeps at this much longer. He opens his mouth and gasps wordlessly, unable to speak. He manages to press one of his hands to Sawyer’s mouth and the other to his own crotch. “Please, brother - ”
“All righty, then.” Sawyer grabs Desmond’s upper arms and pulls him to his feet, then sinks to his knees. For all his talking he’s been attentive enough to see that Desmond is past waiting, that he’s beyond the point where any teasing is tolerable. Sawyer darts his tongue out and traces little circles around the head of Desmond’s cock, then cups his balls, drawn up as tightly as they are, in one hand and wraps the other around his shaft. He touches his lips to the very tip of Desmond’s cock and then draws it into his mouth, sucking lightly a couple of times and then hard. He makes a little snaking motion with the tip of his tongue and gives another rather firm bit of suction, and then before Sawyer’s even begun properly Desmond feels a great pulsing sensation overtake his body, his eyes shut tightly against some bright light that will surely blind him if they’re open.
He couldn’t say how long it is before he opens them again, but his heart is only beating quickly, not threatening to pound its way out of his chest. He’s drawing breath normally enough, even if it’s difficult to find words. He turns his head and sees Sawyer sitting at his head, beside him; somehow he’s fallen to the jungle’s floor, although there’s no ache in his body, and he thinks Saywer must have eased him down somehow. The man deserves at least a word of thanks for that, surely, although Desmond isn’t sure of how to phrase it.
“You weren’t kiddin’ when you said it’s been a long time,” Sawyer says.
Those are real words, not imagined ones; specific enough that Desmond can find an answer. “Three and a half years, brother. And not the best ones of my life, I don’t mind telling you.”
“Wouldn’t think so. You all right?”
He feels his mouth stretch into a smile, broader and warmer than might be polite, and wishes he could control it better. “Aye. You?”
“Yep. Gonna look forward to gettin’ something from you, when I’m in the mood for it.”
“I’ll be happy to give it, then.” He reaches for his trousers, but Sawyer extends an arm to stop him. “Keep ’em off. I wanna look at you naked.” Desmond must have a questioning look on his face, because Sawyer adds, “Gives me somethin’ nice to think about for next time.”
Desmond relaxes his body again, happy enough to ignore the trousers, although there are other considerations. He remembers that there’s a beach here, that people are there and might be wondering after them. “We ought to be going back soon, before anyone comes looking.”
“Why, you wanna hide somethin’ from them?”
“No. But I’d rather not have them gossiping. Or worried, at that.”
“You got a point there. I don’t want to hear their goddamn nosy questions. We can go back five minutes apart, sound all right?”
“Aye.” Something occurs to Desmond, and he adds, “I imagine you’ll still be wanting to come here alone at times.” He certainly will be, at any rate; he can’t imagine that Sawyer would feel any differently.
“Yeah. But we can run into each other sometimes.”
“I reckon we can, brother. And you know where to find me.”
“On the goddamn beach, just like everyone else.”
“It’s a wonderful beach,” Desmond tells him. “You’ve no idea how wonderful it is.”
“I sure don’t, Braveheart.”
“It’s a bonnie wee strand, then,” says Desmond. “And I’m going to go back to it now, before I fall asleep here.”
“Wore you out good, did I?” says Sawyer. “Guess I’ll just wish you sweet dreams, then.”
His dreams will be memories of Charlie, visions of being accused of him, of Penny being pulled under the tide and Kelvin sitting in judgment, a bloodied sailboat wrecked on the shoals.
There’s no need to say any of that to Saywer. Instead, he says, “Likewise, brother,” and manages a grin.
**Image credit: night_sky_dream at lost-forum.