Fic for zelda_zee: "Rome and Ithaca" 2
Title: Between Rome and Ithaca, part 2 (previous parts here)
Pairing: Jack/Sayid (Lost) Rating: R for this section
Summary: Adjusting to life after the island, day by day.
Disclaimer: Lost is all ABC’s; no money/ownership here.
Notes/Acknowledgements: For
zelda_zee , to whom I promised something some time ago, with best wishes for her birthday and her LJ hiatus. We look forward to your return.
This follows “Tales of Brave Ulysses,” which is canon-compliant through 3x16 (“One of Us”), when it was begun. As a result, one person is alive here who is dead in canon. Sorry.
They move into the house in Antelope Valley almost as soon as the ink is dry on the final documents. The previous owners have moved out; Jack and Sayid are fine with sleeping on an air mattress and living off packaged food until they can get the place reasonably outfitted. Hell, they could stay on the air mattress and boxed rations for the rest of their lives and feel like they were living in luxury.
Maybe they can’t put the island behind them - Jack isn’t even sure he wants to, not completely - but no one would want to pretend they’re still living there.
The grocery store is as much as Jack can handle at this point, filled with a bustle of people and bright lights and crammed with unnecessary things that he longed for for years. Jack takes Marc and Leah’s recommendation of a good furnisher and mail-orders everything they need and nothing they don’t in one go. He supposes the place is still bare by most standards, but it seems luxurious to them now. There’s a table, chairs with legs, a bed frame with a mattress. There’s a roof that will hold through the rainy season.
Jack’s responsible for outfitting the place with bed linens, cookware, daily necessities; Sayid’s responsible for anything mechanically related - buying or, more often, optimizing. He’s trained in advanced engineering, Jack knows, and good at it, but he takes pleasure in making what he considers small improvements: taking apart the refrigerator, the washing machine, the computer, tinkering with wires and batteries and strange little components and reconnecting them to make the things run better. They were running fine to begin with, as far as Jack could tell, but Sayid swears they’re more efficient as a result. He does the same thing at Charlie and Claire’s place once they’ve moved it. Jack finds it unnerving at first, and then if anything annoying, an unwanted reminder of a time when their survival depended on whether a makeshift radio could work for fifty seconds instead of forty-five. By the time Sayid starts in on the car, it’s endearing to him.
Jack’s sworn off unnecessary driving, especially Los Angeles driving; after surviving the island, he figures, he’s earned a few indulgences. Still, he’ll be putting in a few days a week at a charity-care clinic in a remote corner of Kern County, and probably ferrying Claire’s kids around fairly often. Soon enough, Sayid is rummaging around under the hood and the body of a Prius, intent on improving it. “Think of it as being mechanical surgery,” he tells Jack one evening. They’re nursing after-dinner coffee; Sayid brews it strong enough that Jack has to water his cup down before adding milk. There are still faint engine stains around the beds of Sayid’s nails.
The analogy makes sense to Jack, at least to some extent, and he finds himself grinning bemusedly. “And you treat it every bit as seriously.”
There’s something almost sheepish in Sayid’s face as he shrugs and says, “I am like that with my work, I suppose. Everything should run well. And efficiently.”
“So you’re trying to make a hybrid car even more efficient than it is already?” That’s where the endearment comes in, Jack supposes, the sheer dedication to the principle.
“It can be done. And it is something I like to do.” He picks up his mug and sets it down again without drinking. “And there is no need to use more oil than we can avoid.”
Jack stares at Sayid until he looks up again and makes eye contact. He opens his mouth to reply but thinks better of it before he can say anything. Instead, he nods and takes another sip of coffee. A minute later, he reaches across the table and squeezes Sayid’s hand.
They’re quick to fall into the habit of shared grocery trips: Jack and Claire will go to the market together, or else Sayid and Charlie. It makes things easier, and the arrangement tends to distribute the cooking skill about equally. Sayid’s superb but very selective, now that he can be; Jack and Claire can both hold their own well enough; Charlie’s trying to learn, but so far he doesn’t trust himself to find the ingredients for anything more complicated than tea, and it’s hard to argue with his self-assessment.
The town’s smaller grocery is tolerable if Jack has someone to accompany him, someone as overwhelmed by its excesses as he is. He doesn’t think he’d fall apart, but sometimes he’s bewildered with gratitude at having everything he needs, there and available for the exchange of nothing more than money: cleaning agents, more food than he could consume in a year, bandages and medicine at the pharmacy next door. Claire always makes a beeline for the baby aisle, then replenishes her house’s supply of tea and peanut butter; Jack, before he does anything else, finds whatever Sayid has requested, or just what he thinks Sayid might like. Dates and figs if he can find any; fresh herbs to use until the planters start flourishing, lentils and yoghurt and particular vegetables and whatever spices have spilled or run out or been overlooked.
Claire drops her groceries off at her house before helping Jack home with his the day Sayid’s scheduled to get home from his first overseas trip. Sayid’s talked with people in Iraq before, over satellite link-ups in some human rights organization's L.A. office, but this has been the first set of face-to-face visits. “Or the first since I was in Paris,” Sayid said to Jack when he told him about the arrangements. There was a certain level of irony in his words, and even in his tone, but Jack couldn’t bring himself to smile or to reply in kind. He’s been gone for almost three weeks now; Jack’s caught himself counting the days more than once. On the phone this morning, he begged to pick Sayid up at the airport, but Sayid insisted otherwise: there were delays out of Boston and reroutes in L.A.; it would be no good for Jack to wait at the airport all day, getting nervous. Jack wanted to dispute the latter part and couldn’t. In the end Sayid insisted; Jack spent the day cleaning the house unnecessarily and then buying every grocery item he though Sayid might like or even tolerate. Some of the vegetables are bound to go bad before they can use them, and some of the fruit and bread. There was so little on the island, and the food stores were a silent battleground, Jack wrestling the outcomes of hunger and food poisoning as he worked out the rations…
“Sayid’s been in Sweden?” Claire asks, disrupting Jack’s reverie.
“Yeah.” Apparently it’s the epicentre of Iraqi emigrants in Europe. Including… people Sayid needs to talk to, Jack tells himself firmly. “In a couple of months he’s going to Jordan and Syria.” There are a lot more people Sayid needs to talk to there, living in refugee camps instead of the manicured apartments and suburbs of Stockholm and Gothenburg and Malmö… He shakes himself from that line of thought. “He had a connecting flight in Boston, so he’s spent the last few days there…”
“Unwinding?”
“Something like that.” They talked on the phone when Sayid got in, and again this morning; he just wanted to spend a few days clearing his head, wandering through the Emerald Necklace or else isolating himself in the hotel’s gym and pool, letting his mind empty and then return to whatever approximation of normal is possible for him, for any of them. Sayid said he would talk to Jack about it, tell him about what was said and done and what’s still to come, but not immediately. He needs a little bit more time to process everything. Jack is fine with that. It makes sense to him, as does the possibility that some things might always remain between Sayid and the people he talks to, that there might be confidences that Sayid can’t violate, not after everything else that’s happened.
Claire says, “I can’t imagine flying again.”
“Never?”
“Definitely not.” Jack spares a sideways glance at her and she adds, “Could you?”
“I hope so. There’s some travelling I’d like to do.” Part of him would still like to see Africa and South America, visit the places he’s never been in Europe and Asia. “I think it’ll be a few years before I’m ready to give it another try, though.”
“That makes sense. Sayid’s really dedicated to manage it.”
Jack nods. “I prescribed him some sedatives, too.”
“Strong ones, I hope.”
“I think they’ll do the job.”
They pull up in the driveway just as an airport van is leaving. “He’s early,” Jack says, and then checks his watch and realizes that it’s almost seven at night. He’s tempted to leave the surfeit of groceries in the car to rot and just go in and put his arms around Sayid. He barely catches himself in time, handing the keys off to Claire and asking her to hold the door for him, then taking the heaviest bags to carry. Sayid meets him in the entryway and uses the pretext of taking one of the bags to steal an awkward hug and kiss. They’ve barely set everything down in the kitchen when there comes a little shriek and then Claire cries, “Sayid! How are you?” and throws her arms around him.
“Stiff and groggy,” Sayid replies, “but I am alive and in one piece.”
“Thank God,” says Claire, and before Jack can second her words there’s a flurry of activity as they dash to bring in the last groceries, one bag of which is there from a mix-up of Claire’s lot, full of baby powder and fancy liquid soap and a few little scented candles. “Which means Charlie’s putting away some excess cucumbers at the moment,” says Claire. “You should have seen him, Sayid, he went on a rampage.”
Sayid blinks a few times and says, “So I see.”
“I didn’t want you to come home to an empty kitchen.”
Sayid smiles. “Thank you.” A look of contentment falls across his face, tired as it is at the moment. He reaches up to put some lentils on a high shelf and stops halfway. “That stiff?” Jack asks, taking them from his hand and reaching up himself.
Sayid nods. “Three hours swimming laps this morning, and it was all undone before I landed.” He sounds bemused more than rueful.
It’s the stress at work, then, more than anything else. There’s no need for Jack to say it out loud. Instead, Claire says, “I’d say you need a hot soak now.” She rifles through the last of the groceries. “There’s bath gel in the bag that got mixed up, even.”
“Perhaps after I have unpacked,” Sayid says, his voice sounding distant again.
“I’ll unpack for you,” Jack tells him. It’s the least he can do. Sayid opens his mouth as if to protest, but Claire cuts him off: “Just finish in here and I’ll run a bath for you.”
Sayid follows Claire upstairs, carrying his suitcase. Jack folds the canvas grocery bags and puts them away, setting Claire’s by the door, and goes after them. Sayid’s putting away the last of his clothes - clean and pressed, Jack notes; it doesn’t surprise him - as Claire steps into the hall. “It should be ready any second,” she says. “I’ll show myself out.” They thank her at the same time, and Claire grins. “No trouble. But come by tomorrow; Aaron keeps asking for you, and I’d swear Lucia’s gotten bigger since three weeks ago.”
“You’d better go stop the bathtub from flooding,” Jack says. He stows the suitcases under the bed and, after a moment’s thought, discards his clothes in favour of a bathrobe. He wants to talk to Sayid, at least see how today’s trip went. Staying up late to chat tonight will be out of the question.
The bathroom door is ajar, light spilling into the hallway along with a scent like that of cheap perfume. “Come in, Jack.” Jack’s about to ask how Sayid heard him, but he forgets the question as soon as he opens the door. Sayid is stretched out in the bathtub - a claw-footed relic they seldom use; Jack isn’t sure he could fit into it lengthwise -, head resting lightly against the wall, his hands on the rim. The rest of his body is obscured beneath a mound of foam - bubbles, Jack sees, a froth of mostly-tiny bubbles reaching a few feet above the water, with a few floating and reflecting the spectrum of colours of indoor light.
“This is bath gel?” Jack asks.
“Apparently so.” Sayid’s eyes are half-closed; he sounds contented. “Nadia is playing with them.” He makes a vague motion with one hand; Jack, following it, sees the cat sitting on the counter, tracking stray bubbles with her eyes and reaching out a paw to bat at them.
“You want me to find you a rubber duck?” he asks, grinning.
Sayid smiles drowsily. “I don’t think a duck will be necessary,” he says. “How are you, Jack?”
“I’m fine.” He sets some towels on the tile floor to serve as a makeshift cushion. “A lot better now that you’re back.”
“How have you been?”
“Fine. Lonely, I guess. And a little bit nervous.” They talked about all this before Sayid left, and in conversations and e-mails, in which Jack told Sayid everything that had happened in California and Sayid told Jack what he was able to tell. He swallows and says, “How about you? In general,” he adds quickly. What Sayid can discuss with Jack, even what he’s ready to discuss, will need some more thinking over, more time before Sayid has processed it enough to communicate it to Jack. They both understand that.
“Well enough, given the circumstances,” Sayid says. “Better than most of the people I spoke to.” There’s an acknowledgement of guilt in his tone, a recognition of its ongoing, active presence, but something that speaks to an ability to negotiate it rather than dwell on it. “For right now, not much apart from what I have told you.”
“Okay.” Jack’s instinct, or his trained urge, is to stop himself from telling Sayid how glad he is to have him home, but he circumvents it. Sayid smiles again and says, “I know. Like being here.”
Jack takes off his robe and reaches for the soap, begins to run it over Sayid’s shoulders. “I showered this morning,” Sayid protests, sounding drowsy again.
Always the sense of economy, Jack thinks, always. “Okay.” He replaces the soap in its tray and gathers a handful of superfluous bath foam, using that instead. “It feels good,” he says when Sayid turns his neck and gives Jack a questioning look. “Just to have - just being here.”
Sayid relaxes again with a small nod. “Yes. It feels good.” He gives a quiet sigh and settles himself into the warm water again. “Keep talking. I don’t want to fall asleep quite yet.”
Sayid’s lost none of his muscle tone over the last three weeks, none of the bodily strength that exists in symmetry with that intangible power he somehow projects. “What should I talk about?”
“Anything you like.”
Jack thinks for a moment, running his hands over Sayid’s chest. It’s relatively smooth, not hairless but considerably closer to that state than Jack’s own. “Remember how you taught us how to keep clean on the island?”
“When the solar still was first working?”
“Yeah. I couldn’t believe you could keep clean with that little water.”
“That and sand.” They still thought Sun only spoke Korean then, but she’d brought a twig up to Jack and pulled the fruit from it, crushing it and working it into a lather in her hands, pantomiming the act of bathing. Sayid rigged the still after that - not enough fresh water for drinking, not nearly, but enough to keep clean, the same way as soldiers making their way through the desert.
“I think it was the first time I saw you naked,” Jack says.
“Probably,” Sayid agrees. He brought all the men to the still and undressed without any sign of embarassment, showed them how to measure out not more than two cups of water and get themselves clean with it. It would take a few false starts for most of them, he said, but it would work. He asked Bernard to have Rose teach the women.
“I wasn’t thinking about anything but getting clean that day,” Jack tells him. “About what would happen if it didn’t work, what diseases we’d get. The only thing I noticed about you was the scar on your thigh.”
“You learned quickly,” Sayid murmurs. “Shannon refused to learn altogether.” For a long time he never spoke of Shannon, but he’s become more able to do so recently. “At the end she asked me to show her.”
Jack doesn’t ask whether he got the chance to do that. At the end was in the tent Sayid built for her, maybe while they were talking or fooling around, maybe after they made love, and then they fought and Shannon was dead an hour later.
After a moment’s silence, Sayid says, “Bathing on the island was a quite unerotic activity.” It’s a small observation, carrying its small sense of irony and failed amusement.
“No kidding,” says Jack, forcing what he can of a laugh. Most of the time it consisted of taking your allotted soap nut and measuring out your water from the still, paying attention to nothing but the need to clean and to avoid wasting anything. Or, more rarely, groups of them would go to a small freshwater pool, not the one with drinking water or dead bodies, and indulge in what passed for a proper bath while a few people stood guard.
Sayid always washed after sex, a religious obligation for him, Jack knew, as well as a practical one; falling asleep without was inviting a heat rash they had nothing to soothe. They were settled into this house a month before Jack was conscious of the fact that they were past tightly rationed water or scouring with sand, and one lazy Sunday morning when they both woke up aroused and feeling cozy and indulgent enough to masturbate each other before getting out of bed, Jack asked if he could come into the shower with Sayid. Sayid smiled as he said, “I would like that.”
“The water’s getting cool,” Jack says. He rinses the bubbles from Sayid’s beard.
“So it is,” Sayid agrees. “I would not mind going to bed now.”
“Good idea.” It won’t be anything more than that tonight, Jack knows, or probably for the next couple of nights; Sayid is too tired. Jack’s keen just to snuggle against him under the blankets, drift off to sleep with their bodies pressed together. Sayid reaches forward and pulls up the stopper. Jack gets to his feet and helps Sayid up, dries him with a soft towel. He kisses Sayid and then whispers in his ear, “Go to bed. I’ll clean up in here.”
Sayid nods and pads his way out of the bathroom, naked and heavy-limbed from fatigue. Jack rearranges the towels and spends a minute watching Nadia jump into the tub and chase the last bubbles as they retreat down the drain. He allows his thoughts to wander, to anticipate the next shower he’ll share with Sayid. It isn’t something they do every day: their schedules don’t allow it, and neither one of them feels it’s necessary.
It was something he often did with Sarah, early in their relationship, and with girlfriends he’d had before her. He never got over the fascination of watching droplets of water gather like glimmering beads on a woman’s breasts, of staring at them and then kissing them away, starting where the flesh began to rise from the chest and circling in to the nipples. That was usually enough to get him going again when he was younger, or when he’d a little bit of time to recover beforehand. Some excuse to run the washcloth between the woman’s legs did the trick to make the feeling shared most of the time, and if she was willing Jack would be more than eager to navigate the complexities of getting it on in a shower stall.
He’s too old for that now; he and Sayid both are. A five-minute shower in lukewarm water seems unbearably luxuriant. They relax, wash each other’s bodies with no expectations of anything else, say little besides the occasional endearment. Afterwards, they fall asleep; usually they remember to put on some kind of nightwear first.
He’d be lying to himself if he said he didn’t miss the old days, Jack thinks, the energy and the sense of adventure and variety and daring that came with it, even the sensations that came with it. But he’s learned that that’s not everything, that he’s content at a point in his life when sleeping together encompasses being asleep as much as being awake. He's made an exchange, he realizes; he's relinquished something he likes a great deal for what he has now.
There are things he misses, sometimes, but there's nothing he regrets.
Sayid’s under the covers when Jack returns to their bedroom, which is illuminated only by the lamp on his nightstand. He slides into bed and turns off the light.
“I love you,” Sayid says, half-asleep, as he turns toward Jack.
“I love you too.” Jack kisses his forehead. “Go to sleep. I’ll be here in the morning.”
Image credits: homsar321 and lulinha_k at lost-forum;
fragilepicture (2x),
un_den_iable.