For gregoria44: Housewarming fic, Jack/Sayid
Title: Between Rome and Ithaca (follows Tales of Brave Ulysses)
Pairing: Jack/Sayid (Lost)
Summary: Adapting to life after the island.
Rating: First two segments PG; third hard R/light NC-17. Disclaimer: Lost is all ABC’s; no money/ownership here.
Notes: Dedicated to
gregoria44 , with best housewarming wishes.
Feedback, comments, and criticism are always welcome.
As noted above, this fic follows “Tales of Brave Ulysses,” which assumes canon through 3x16 (“One of Us”), when I started work on it. As a result, on person who is now dead in show canon is alive here. Sorry!
Jack’s the only one whose seasickness lasts beyond the first few days aboard. Claire isn’t feeling much better, but the crew are quick to assign her the relative comfort of the sick bay. Jack sleeps as much as he can and spends his groggy waking hours curled up in the hull or standing unsteadily on deck, leaning over the side and indifferent to the horizon. The remedies they’ve got stocked can only do so much for him.
He’s only half-aware of anything going on around him most of the time. People are trying to figure out where they’re going to go, where they want or at least can stand to live and how that lines up with where they’ll be allowed to. Sayid is afraid, desperately afraid of having nowhere to go, that nowhere in the world will take him. All he says is, “There are legal requirements that I will need to consider,” his voice is measured and almost steady, and if Jack didn’t know Sayid so well he wouldn’t hear the well-submerged note of dread, the silent acknowledgement that he can’t bear to spend the rest of his life running and hiding like he has been for years. Jack manages to find some comforting words and tries to say them and is sick instead. Sayid turns Jack’s head and runs one hand over it while the other rests on his shoulder.
Impressions of activities and conversations form in his mind; he doesn’t participate in any of them. Jin and Desmond are pitching in however they can, he gathers. Desmond is second-guessing himself about Penelope, loathe as he is to discuss her with almost everyone. Most of the crew are from the coasts of South Asia and the Pacific Rim; there are jumbles of conversation in Korean, Spanish, Arabic that’s almost lost amidst the dialects. Kate and Rose are trying to make peace with what might come next. Danielle helps out where she can when she’s not busy protecting Alex from the strangers, Claire’s kids and the Kwons’ are handling things well enough, Shannon and Boone should be with them, and so should Steve, Libby, Eko, Ana…
He’s still dizzy with illness when the first wave of government officials and company representatives flocks aboard in Honolulu, and he finds himself signing forms and answering questions and having his blood taken almost without his awareness. Other people are making detailed arrangements, drawing up long contact lists and recommending lawyers and asking every imaginable question. He says as little as he can and relishes the first uninterrupted sleep he’s had in weeks - in years, he realizes, but the few weeks he’s behind everyone else suddenly feels like a lifetime.
He’s steadier after a few days at anchor, well enough to walk on deck and see Sayid go up to an official taking a cigarette break, a broad-set Hawai’ian INS man who seems to be under one or another higher-up’s orders to rubber-stamp birth certificates and residency permits for everyone who needs them. There’s no illusion of privacy to their conversation; the ship is smaller and more open than the island. Sayid offers some thanks and pleasantries before he says, “I was wondering if you might know about the situation in Iraq.”
The man takes a long drag on his cigarette and exhales slowly before he answers. “I thought you wanted to stay in California.” Unspoken is the fact that whatever the situation in Iraq, no one there would welcome his return. There’s no hostility in the man’s voice, just a tacit allusion to relevant facts, however unpleasant.
“Yes. But Iraq is my native country.”
The man nods and gives him an appraising look. “Do you have any guesses?”
“It was bad the last I knew. I hope it has not gotten worse.” The man fixes his gaze on the horizon, not speaking, and Sayid says, “But I would gather that it has.”
“Yeah.” The man takes a final drag on his cigarette and then tosses the butt onto the deck, rubbing it out with the sole of his shoe. He makes a few false starts at elaboration, then says, “Look, this is Hawai’i. Nobody here wanted anything to do with it. Nobody in California either.” He stamps on the cigarette butt again “Fuck it. I’ll bring you some newspapers tomorrow.”
He’s as good as his word, arriving the next day with a bundle of papers and magazines, including one or two Arabic ones he’s somehow managed to scrounge, and a few books with foreboding titles. Sayid thanks him and then rifles through the bundle. After a few moments, he looks up at the people mingled on the deck and says that he’ll be in the far corner of the hull if anyone comes looking for him.
It’s almost dusk when he re-emerges. His expression is calm, as though he’s spent the day reading an accounting textbook. Jack intercepts him before he can join the rest of the group and pulls him aside, puts a hand on his shoulder. “Hey.”
Sayid looks up at him, and for an instant there’s such despair written in his face that Jack could burst into tears. Then Sayid schools his features almost into calmness and says, “There is nothing to be said about it right now, Jack.”
He puts a hand on Sayid’s cheek, raising his face. He can’t say anything beyond what Sayid can. Instead, he nods and kisses him briefly. “They’ll be wondering why we’re not at dinner.” Sayid forces a smile, and Jack adds, “Apart from being sick of canned tuna and coconut flakes.”
Sayid can’t manage another smile, but he pretends to enjoy the rations along with everyone else.
Everyone disembarks from the ship with a copy of a hastily assembled list of contact information: lawyers, government offices, corporations, embassies, each other for the time being. The Kwons are staying with some friends of friends in Koreatown until they find a house they like. Some music-industry mogul friend has lent Charlie and Claire his place for the time being; Desmond’s already off to find Penelope again, but they’ve got permanent addresses and phone numbers to get in touch. Bernard and Rose are shopping around for a California house before they head back to New York; Danielle and Alex are being tended by a gaggle of emotive francophones who are occupying half a wing on the seventh floor of a rather nice hotel in L.A..
Kate surrendered herself in Hawai’i. She waited until Jack was asleep to do it, emerged from her corner of the hold and went up to a customs agent. She talked to Sayid about it in advance. Jack was too groggy, when he found out, to stay angry at Sayid for more than a day or two. Now he’s too overwhelmed.
He tries not to think about it too often. Sometimes he succeeds.
They’ve gone to his mother’s house, of course. Sayid has tended to make himself scarce, busying himself in the necessities of immigration procedures and legal matters and banking. Jack wonders, after too much time has passed for Sayid to be giving him time alone with his mother, why he’s doing it, and then he realizes.
He hasn’t said anything to his mother, or discussed the possibility with Sayid. He hasn’t even thought about it, really, one way or the other. It isn’t even that he’s afraid of her reaction, he thinks. It’s just that they’ve never talked about anything like this, and Jack doesn’t think she’s any more inclined to start that kind of a conversation than he is.
They’ll have to talk about some things, of course. Maybe not Sayid. Not yet.
She offers him dinner after a long day of house-hunting that Jack thinks was more productive than it would have been if she hadn’t been too tired to come. He sits down to salad and a casserole that he loved as a boy and has pretended to ever since. “Where were you looking today?” Margo asks.
“Antelope Valley.”
“That far?”
He nods. “I’ve gotten used to things being quieter. There’s a little town between the parks that Claire likes for her family.”
“You’re that attached to them?”
Not only them. A part of him is upset more than relieved at the prospect of not seeing everyone every day, being further apart from them, living among people who don’t understand. “People got attached there. I think we’ll all stay nearby.”
“Her eyes remind me of your father’s.” There’s a sharp undercurrent to Margo’s voice, a little lift at the end, making clear that she wants to know something she’d prefer go unsaid.
Jack stalls with a sip of wine. “She’s from Australia. Sydney,” he says evenly, looking his mother in the eye.
“She looks a little bit young to have two children.”
“She’s twenty-three.” The reasons for all of Christian’s trips to Australia, twenty or twenty-five years ago, must have been plain enough at the time, whether Margo ever acknowledged it or not.
Right now, she only purses her lips and nods. “You’ll have a long commute.”
Jack hasn’t been looking forward to this. He dabs at his mouth unnecessarily. “My hands are shot, Mom.” His vision seems to have suffered from the constant glare as well. “I’ve already put in the insurance claim.” Five million dollars is a drop in the bucket compared to what Dharma-Hanso and Oceanic are forking ever, but he might as well. The total liquidation of a constellation of major transnational companies and assets, a few rebellious daughters and however many hundreds of murders since the whole thing got started.
“There’s bound to be something they could do for your hands.”
“There’s not.” He could reel off a list of medical reasons, ones he’ll have to itemize on forms and demonstrate to claims adjusters, but his surgeon’s instincts have never failed him yet. He knows.
If he’d become a doctor for the right reasons, he would have been… an anaesthesiologist, maybe, or a haematologist. An oncologist. Anything but a spinal surgeon. He’d learned that much away from the hospital, away from civilization.
His mother fixes him with a firm stare, and he puts his napkin down. “Mom. I know how much you love Dad.” Except when, or maybe especially when, they were too furious to speak to each other for weeks or months, when Margo moved into a hotel or a relative’s house pending an application for divorce that was always withdrawn before it could be finalized, or when they did nothing but shout at each other loudly enough that whichever one of them didn’t start the argument begged the other to quiet down before the neighbours overhead. “I loved him too.” He could add more to that, complicate it and qualify it, but he doesn’t. “He always wanted me to be a surgeon. He was teaching me my whole life. Part of that is learning from his mistakes.”
He didn’t intend the statement to be provocative, but he expects his mother to react angrily nonetheless. For a minute it seems as if he’ll be proved right: she sets her jaw and knits her eyebrows the way she does when she’s about to lose her temper, stands up from her chair with her hands on her hips. But when she opens her mouth she only takes a little breath, then begins clearing dishes as if it were her purpose in standing. She insists she doesn’t need any help in cleaning up the kitchen. Jack takes his evening run and comes back an hour later to find her sitting in the living room sharing decaffeinated coffee and strained conversation with a just-returned Sayid.
Jack feels like he’s fourteen again, listening for his parents’ breathing to settle in the rhythms of sleep before sneaking downstairs to try Christian’s whiskey.
It’s only his mother’s breathing he hears now, and it isn’t whiskey he wants.
He half-shuffles down the hall to the guest room, feeling simultaneously compelled to move quietly and ridiculous for acting and thinking like a naughty schoolkid. The door’s unlocked; he turns the knob and pushes the door open slowly, then closes it as quietly as he can. After a moment’s thought, he locks it behind him.
The blinds are closed, and he can barely discern the outline of Sayid’s form lying under the covers of the double bed. He makes his way across the room carefully: he doubts it’s cluttered, but he can’t see where he’s going. Sayid is lying toward the free edge of the bed; Jack positions himself between him and the wall and slides awkwardly under the covers. He puts an arm around Sayid’s chest and presses up against him, then kisses his hair just above his ear. “Are you awake?”
Sayid stirs toward him. “Mostly. I heard you come in.”
“Sorry.” He didn’t mean to wake him.
“It is all right.” Sayid wiggles under the covers so that he’s facing Jack. “I have been lonely, the last few nights.”
“You didn’t come to my room,” Jack says. He didn’t realize that he’d been waiting for Sayid to start things. He can’t think of a good reason for doing that - some bad ones, maybe, but nothing legitimate.
“This is your house,” says Sayid.
“It’s my mother’s house.”
“And your room shares a wall with hers.”
“Yeah.” He doesn’t think anything more needs to be said about that, and so he puts his hands on Sayid’s arms and starts kissing him. His body is still muscle-thick, powerful; he kept to his routine aboard the ship, while Jack is still gaunt from weeks of moving little and eating less. His arms feel the same as they always have, but his mouth is different. Jack is used to both the feel of Sayid’s mouth as they’re kissing and the taste of it: sapodilla, ocean fish, jungle fruit, like Kate’s and Juliet’s, or Boone’s or Charlie’s during CPR, underneath the blood… Now it’s a toothpaste overlay of coffee and whatever makes the taste of a person’s mouth unique. There are physiological reasons for that, factors of biology and chemistry that Jack knows very well, but he doesn’t care about them right now.
After a few minutes Sayid breaks off their kissing, which has been light and unhurried. “Are you still angry about Kate?”
He pulls back from Sayid so that he can see his face. He finds that he’s unused to looking without benefit of starlight, the shuttered blinds letting in little of the glow from the street lamps and light pollution. “I understand why you… Kate’s not why I didn’t come here. I was just being an idiot.”
“We all have foolish moments,” Sayid says, pulling one of Jack’s hands between his. There’s a tense silence in which Jack is aware that he hasn’t answered Sayid’s question, which he repeats after a few moments, quieter but more determined: “Are you angry about Kate?”
Jack wonders what answer won’t make Sayid ask when he’ll stop being angry. After a few moments’ consideration, he says, sincerely, “I love you.”
His eyes haven’t adjusted much to the darkness, but he sees Sayid swallow and nod. He couldn’t say which one of them starts their burrowing together again a couple of minutes later, or whose hand is resting on the other’s cheek first, but soon they’re kissing again, in the same quiet, almost innocent fashion. Sayid’s hair is softer and drier than Jack is used to its being.
Eventually they pull back to gather their senses. There’s been too much to take in over the last few weeks, too much that’s connected with this in one way or another, to comprehend anything without a allowing a lull.
“There’s a house you should see,” Jack says. “It’s near the one Claire likes.” He’s probably looked at a dozen houses over the last few days, if not more, enough that they’re all running together in his mind. This one stood out; he’s almost certain that Sayid will like it.
“I don’t have any meetings the afternoon after tomorrow,” he says.
“We’ll go then.”
“Where are we going?”
“That’s a surprise.” Jack is sure Sayid is raising his eyebrows in some combination of amusement and near-disbelief. He doesn’t need to see him to know what expression is on his face. “I think you’ll like it.”
“You mean you are not looking for houses you think I will detest?” says Sayid, teasing.
“I’ll call the realtor about cardboard shacks near the E.R.”
“Much better.” Sayid runs a thumb over Jack's cheek.
“You wanna make out?” His voice is huskier in his own ears than he expected.
Instead of answering, Sayid kisses him. Soon enough they’re lost in the rhythm of kissing that’s intense without being desperate, hungry and undemanding at the same time. The last time they did this was during a chance moment alone in Hawai’i, and before that on the island. Jack’s been too seasick, or more recently just too dazed, to realize how much he’s missed this. He’s enjoying it too much to think about it consciously right now, registering nothing more complex than the novelty of their bodies’ being warm rather than hot, their skin no longer hard and too tight from constant exposure to the equatorial sun. He can still feel his own pulse becoming faster, and Sayid’s heart racing to answer it, and Jack doesn’t think to look at the clock to see how much time has passed when he pulls back from kissing Sayid and asks to go down on him. Making love has never been a phrase he’s been comfortable using out loud, even when he means it.
Sayid strokes Jack’s chin with his thumb and makes what eye contact he can in the dark. He doesn’t need to answer.
Jack feels compelled to help himself to another kiss as he runs his hands over Sayid’s chest and arms. So hard. In another frame of mind he might entertain the other implications of that description right away, but not tonight. There’s no hurry; he relishes the physical reality of that fact for what it is, nothing more. He takes his time feathering little kisses up and down the ridge of Sayid’s nose, flicking the tip of his tongue against it once in a while, loving the way Sayid squirms toward him. The cartilaginous parts of Sayid’s ears elicit similar reactions, he knows. His earlobes aren’t especially sensitive, but Jack likes them too much not to spend some time on them, giving little licks and nips as his fingers stroke the bony crests behind the ears, which is more to Sayid’s liking, much more, but there’s no reason Jack can’t do both.
He kisses Sayid’s neck and runs his hands further down the man’s body. He’s being touched as well as touching, he has some sensory awareness of that, but he’s a mess of emotions and he’s been too unpleasantly aware of his own body over the last couple of months to want to pay attention to anything but Sayid’s, moving under Jack’s hands and mouth. Right now he’s caressing Sayid’s arms and his chest: all muscle, anatomy drills running through some corner of his mind, bicep tricep quadricep pectoral, and he pushes the thought aside.
He works his hands beneath the undershirt Sayid is wearing; Sayid shrugs out of Jack’s grasp momentarily and pulls the thing off. He settles back against the pillows, half-sitting, and Jack barely remembers a good-bye kiss to his neck before moving on to his nipples, which are becoming firm under Jack’s fingers. Cautiously he presses his thigh to Sayid’s groin and feels an erection stirring against his leg. He drums his fingers over Sayid’s chest in little spirals that circle in on his nipples, and Sayid groans as Jack pinches them. He shifts downward to replace one hand with his mouth and finds that he’s stifled by the blankets. After a moment’s bewilderment, he pushes them aside. He’s used to sleeping on top of bedding, not under it.
The mattress itself is odd beneath them, now that Jack thinks of it. It’s stationary and consistent, entirely unlike sand, soft and grainy and squishing its way aside as people moved on top of it, giving way to harder sediment beneath, and then being pushed back afterwards. It’s softer than the jungle floor, smoother, less perilous, but there’s no room, and it smells only of laundry detergent and fabric softener. It doesn't end the space available; beyond the edge of the mattress are several feet of open space, enough for Jack to rest his feet on the floor, instead of the taut flap of a tent.
Jack alternates one hand between Sayid’s nipples and moves the other briefly over his stomach, which is too ticklish to allow lingering, and then to his thighs. Everything is muscle. He kisses Sayid’s mouth again, trying to overpower the suddenly intruding memory of the last time he had sex in this bed, when Sarah yielded to his pleas to come over and just talk somewhere that wasn’t a lawyer’s office. Some surge of lingering affection and pity came over her and they’d wound up saying their goodbyes, at least sexually, and the whole time Jack felt needy and desperate and hopeful and grateful and humiliated all at once. There was no foreplay, not really: Sarah undressed and sat back against the pillows, half-averting her eyes and offering a sad, mysterious, coquettish smile as she half-heartedly fondled one of her breasts and opened her legs. Her breath was even, her body free from sweat, hair perfectly in place. Jack stared raptly for a little while, the way he always did, and then shook himself out of his daze and went down on her until she was wet and he was hard, and she said it didn’t matter when he remembered, suddenly, that there were no condoms at hand, and later on he realized that by then she was six or eight weeks pregnant with someone else’s child. He took off his clothes and fucked her and held his tears until he heard the door shut behind her as she showed herself out of the house.
He’s not with Sarah now, he reminds himself, banishing the memory that preoccupied him for less than a second but felt like it took an eternity. He focuses on the coarse, wiry hair sprinkled over Sayid’s chest and thighs. There is nothing about Sayid’s body that’s like a woman’s, and Jack remembers how shocking that was to him at first, and his surprise at discovering how much he liked that, that there was no temptation to try to pretend the impossible.
He remembers, for an instant, the first time he had sex in this house, under the same roof if not in the same room. He was sixteen and studying for finals and Janice had driven up in her mother’s fancy red convertible, unannounced, saying she’d been in the neighbourhood and thought she might review some chemistry with him, an intention belied by the condoms that spilled from her purse as she fished for a pen. She grinned instead of blushing, and Margo was out of town and Christian was in the middle of a long surgery, and they’d wound up in his bed, fumbling toward what Jack thought at the time was ecstasy. Janice was a year older, not as new to this as Jack was, and seemed to have a reasonably good time, so much that they went through the formality of dating for a couple of months before they both moved on to other people.
Half a lifetime ago, or close to it. For a second Jack wonders if he’s even the same person right now, how much he’s substantively similar to that gawky virgin, too horny to feel self-conscious, and how much he’s different, and then the memory is gone as quickly as it appeared.
Sayid’s fully hard now, and Jack runs a hand indiscriminately over his penis, almost less to tease Sayid than to remind himself of the reality of something familiar, a tangible manifestation of what he’s been missing lately, what they’ve both been missing, to reassure himself that he’s awake, that this is real. Sayid, hard, is of completely average length, proportionately a little bit shorter than Jack but thicker as well. The vein on the shaft’s underside, Jack has discovered, is especially prominent when Sayid is aroused, symptomatic of nothing but normal variation, a variation Jack loves at least as much as Sayid does.
He almost gives in to the temptation to start in on it right away, but he resists, instead cupping Sayid’s testicles in one hand and fondling them with the other. They’re sensitive to an unusual degree - granted, Jack thinks, his few bases for comparison happened drunkenly, decades ago, but not everything requires a double-blind study - and sucking at them gently is usually enough to make Sayid start half-whispering, half-moaning what Jack suspects are curses in Arabic, if they’re coherent words of any kind at all. If he pulls back and blows little breaths over the saliva-dampened sac, then traces his fingers over it, it’s nearly enough to set Sayid over the edge. They took their time with things on the island, when they could, but never enough for Jack to find out if Sayid could come from this alone. He’s suddenly enthused about the possibility of trying to find out sometime soon, now that they’re not so pressed by constant demands and danger.
Not tonight, though. He isn’t that patient. He moves on to the head of Sayid’s cock, pressing at the slit with the tip of his tongue, and after a gratuitous swipe of his tongue from base to tip he takes as much of the length as he can into his mouth. It’s still not that much, but it’s more than it was a year or eighteen months ago. He wraps his right hand around the rest of the shaft and extends his left hand to hold Sayid’s right. A few flicks of Jack’s tongue against the back of the head at its joining to the shaft, a few moments of taking him a little bit deeper, and Sayid is coming, letting out a low, muted-sounding cry and throwing his head back.
Jack is only half-aware of Sayid’s urging him back up the mattress, encouraging him to lay his head on the pillows. His realization of his own arousal is sudden; it’s been too caught up in what he’s been doing for him to recognize it in its own right. Sayid strokes his face and kisses him briefly, but he seems to guess that Jack is desperate, that much more waiting will be intolerable for him after he’s gone a couple of months without, sickness washing away his libido as surely as the ship deprived everyone of privacy. Jack’s overstimulated now, anxious.
Sayid doesn’t bother with lingering attention to Jack’s body, to the finer points of this, although it’s clear enough that he wants to. He restricts himself to kissing his way down to Jack’s chest, and Jack thinks almost wryly that he feels like he’s twenty years old again - a few gentle bites to the nipples, some attention to the peculiar, even bizarre sensitive spot on his right hip, and he’s unable to wait any longer, lasting only a couple of minutes after Sayid takes him into his mouth.
Afterwards they lie on their backs for a few minutes, looking up at a ceiling they can barely see while they catch their breath, regain their equilibrium. Eventually they curl up together and whisper barely-sensible endearments, shower drowsy kisses on one another’s heads. Jack manages to reach out and set an early alarm, earlier than Margo’s, before he’s hit by a wave of exhaustion too strong to resist.
The stumble out of bed at half past six, exhausted but accustomed to regaining alertness on little sleep and less notice. Jack runs while Sayid makes use of Christian’s set of weights; they switch off tasks and shower before Margo wakes, asking whether they’d like scrambled eggs for breakfast. She declines Jack’s offer to make them himself; if she notices anything between him and Sayid, she gives no sign of it. Jack doesn’t see any need to talk to her about it.
He thinks of the next day’s house-visiting appointment and almost reflexively crosses his fingers under the table, wishing for luck.
**Image credits: ash and homsar321 at lost-forum;
majczos (2x),
everlyn, ash,
jadedgraphics,
isis2015