Fic: Gulf (Jack/Ana Lucia)
I've gotta stop posting so much fic, but the luau keeps me busy. I wanted to write for Laura, because I didn't figure anyone else would tackle this pairing. Unfortunately, it didn't exactly turn out cheery.
If you're slightly annoyed that I've put Ana Lucia's face on your flist, forgive me. Forgive her.
Title: Gulf
Pairing: Jack/Ana Lucia
Rating: Adults
Summary: Angst. Sorry. This is basically my treatise on what Ana might have meant for Jack, and what she still signifies.
Note: Spoilers for season 2, assuming a physical relationship that never materialized on the show. This is for elise_509. I promise, dear: something silly forthcoming.
I welcome any discussion of how wrong you all might think I am. But be prepared for a good-natured brawl.
Gulf
It was a little bit cruel the way they could open their eyes and let everything flood there, up into their gaze, dark and unending, shining even against the near-black sky. Cruel because necessary; cruel because no one else would understand it; cruel because they were the last people that really deserved to have those faces mirrored back at them-loss, error, frustration, envy. But Jack would reach out his hand and glide it along the skin of her collarbone, her neck, her face, and they would stop looking at each other, for a moment. Usually, that was enough.
Jack's body became a weight, but the only kind that she could really endure without anger. Pressed down, flattened, spread open-him inside, a searing heat, his cock slipping out and a long gasp before he felt it all come together again like relief-he knew Ana needed this. She could only need it from a man who was reluctant to give it, always trying to pull her on top. But once she got him between her legs, hot and open, wet and clutching his neck and rolling her hips, he gave way to it, because he always could somehow read her mind, even if he didn't like what he saw, heard. That didn't matter so much in the face of having his skin sliding with the skin of a person who knew him. It was like stability.
Before this, though, it was ragged and shifting and chaotic. Ana had come stumbling into the camp, and to him she was visibly wearing how much she'd lost and how little control she managed to keep, like a burden of wings, tucked against her back. She had fought too hard, but it was what he would have done. Everyone around them looked at her as though she'd become a monster, but they hadn't met her casually in a bar and seen that she was so human it hurt to look at her when she slept curled up into herself, angry and hard. He still saw her smiling and heard the way her voice slid and jumped with her accent as she flirted and tried to calm him, all at the same time, as if she couldn't decide which impulse was the more important. She never could. She would nudge him with her leg and grin conspiratorially at times; at others, she sat stoically and tried not to make him feel like an absolute failure for absolutely failing.
With her breasts falling onto his chest with the heave of her breath, once they were both satisfied, at least for a while-Ana on top and crushing him, soft and warm, sighing-he wondered what it would have been like if there had not been that phone call, if they had had an hour to get to know each other and had found some way to sit beside each other on the long flight to LA. What if they'd fallen, hard and confused but together on one beach or the other? What if they'd always been here, where they were now, tangled up like two old and leafless trees, fighting the wind together with a weary clacking before they settled back against each other, as though they'd never yielded?
Jack had heard some people say that the island brought them someone they'd never have met otherwise. For him, the irony was that the island had probably broken something irreparably. Jack watched her skulk through the camp, sharpened into a dark flint and cast aside, and he was confident that this woman was not Ana any more than he was this person who cocked a gun with a flood of power and nausea and blackmailed people for heroin like it was something righteous, and believed it. He couldn’t make any sense of how they'd even fit together anymore when they weren't the people from the airport bar. Really, he had never been exactly sure how those people fit together anyway-so different but lining up in places that might matter.
But they were them, somehow, at least like this, at least stomach to stomach, sweat mingled until sometimes he found he smelled like her. The curve of her hips still looked confident to him, and her lips hit some soft place deep under his skin no matter where they touched him. The heavy air stirred over them, cautious, unwilling to even brave the sort of exhalations a man might have waiting for sleep after a day of slowly killing himself for reasons he didn't even understand. She did; she had learned the hard way to simply stop trying so hard, even if she could only watch him and wait for the island to beat him into submission too.
She was not a monster. At the end of the day, in the dark, long after she pulled him to her as tightly as she could, she let him see her with her eyes wide open. She didn't scowl and let her lids half close; both relaxed and focused, he didn't squint. Like two neglected wells, reflecting only some moonlight, they paused and looked deep, and with the tension and fire burned out, they were hollow and it hurt to look. But at least they were willing to look, and Jack could breathe afterward and remember that he had good intentions in this world no matter what the world did to bend and break them. He was no monster either, even if he acted that way from time to time.
They saw a difference, though. The whole lot of them, they saw this gulf between consequences and intentions, in him standing over her open grave, and judged and didn't know anything about the world enough to give her a label she could die with or that Jack could live with too. It had to be shared. Whatever she was, he had to take a piece of it for himself, because he might have been her. The anger burned, and he couldn't go near her grave after that first time. What was he if not crazy and desperate and capable of destroying things in the crush of his zealous hands? They should call him dangerous. He was. And what was she if not crazy and desperate and capable of holding things together through a force of will that hurt? They should call her leader. She might have been him.
When he saw her in the jungle, scared and not yet capable of erecting those walls again, it made him remember being that man who had been shouting at the ticket clerk. Things were out of joint on this island, with Ana already scattered into pieces by the time he found her again and Jack's own inevitable fragility showing in the light between his cracks even as he tried to cast himself in a single mask of steel. It was hard being on this side of it; he couldn't imagine what she'd seen when she looked at him in that airport bar. But he knew what he'd seen, and he'd been immediately sorry that he wasn't going to be anywhere near her on the plane.
They had scanned the tickets casually as though it didn't mean the future: she was in the tail section, and he wasn't.
If you're slightly annoyed that I've put Ana Lucia's face on your flist, forgive me. Forgive her.
Title: Gulf
Pairing: Jack/Ana Lucia
Rating: Adults
Summary: Angst. Sorry. This is basically my treatise on what Ana might have meant for Jack, and what she still signifies.
Note: Spoilers for season 2, assuming a physical relationship that never materialized on the show. This is for elise_509. I promise, dear: something silly forthcoming.
I welcome any discussion of how wrong you all might think I am. But be prepared for a good-natured brawl.
Gulf
It was a little bit cruel the way they could open their eyes and let everything flood there, up into their gaze, dark and unending, shining even against the near-black sky. Cruel because necessary; cruel because no one else would understand it; cruel because they were the last people that really deserved to have those faces mirrored back at them-loss, error, frustration, envy. But Jack would reach out his hand and glide it along the skin of her collarbone, her neck, her face, and they would stop looking at each other, for a moment. Usually, that was enough.
Jack's body became a weight, but the only kind that she could really endure without anger. Pressed down, flattened, spread open-him inside, a searing heat, his cock slipping out and a long gasp before he felt it all come together again like relief-he knew Ana needed this. She could only need it from a man who was reluctant to give it, always trying to pull her on top. But once she got him between her legs, hot and open, wet and clutching his neck and rolling her hips, he gave way to it, because he always could somehow read her mind, even if he didn't like what he saw, heard. That didn't matter so much in the face of having his skin sliding with the skin of a person who knew him. It was like stability.
Before this, though, it was ragged and shifting and chaotic. Ana had come stumbling into the camp, and to him she was visibly wearing how much she'd lost and how little control she managed to keep, like a burden of wings, tucked against her back. She had fought too hard, but it was what he would have done. Everyone around them looked at her as though she'd become a monster, but they hadn't met her casually in a bar and seen that she was so human it hurt to look at her when she slept curled up into herself, angry and hard. He still saw her smiling and heard the way her voice slid and jumped with her accent as she flirted and tried to calm him, all at the same time, as if she couldn't decide which impulse was the more important. She never could. She would nudge him with her leg and grin conspiratorially at times; at others, she sat stoically and tried not to make him feel like an absolute failure for absolutely failing.
With her breasts falling onto his chest with the heave of her breath, once they were both satisfied, at least for a while-Ana on top and crushing him, soft and warm, sighing-he wondered what it would have been like if there had not been that phone call, if they had had an hour to get to know each other and had found some way to sit beside each other on the long flight to LA. What if they'd fallen, hard and confused but together on one beach or the other? What if they'd always been here, where they were now, tangled up like two old and leafless trees, fighting the wind together with a weary clacking before they settled back against each other, as though they'd never yielded?
Jack had heard some people say that the island brought them someone they'd never have met otherwise. For him, the irony was that the island had probably broken something irreparably. Jack watched her skulk through the camp, sharpened into a dark flint and cast aside, and he was confident that this woman was not Ana any more than he was this person who cocked a gun with a flood of power and nausea and blackmailed people for heroin like it was something righteous, and believed it. He couldn’t make any sense of how they'd even fit together anymore when they weren't the people from the airport bar. Really, he had never been exactly sure how those people fit together anyway-so different but lining up in places that might matter.
But they were them, somehow, at least like this, at least stomach to stomach, sweat mingled until sometimes he found he smelled like her. The curve of her hips still looked confident to him, and her lips hit some soft place deep under his skin no matter where they touched him. The heavy air stirred over them, cautious, unwilling to even brave the sort of exhalations a man might have waiting for sleep after a day of slowly killing himself for reasons he didn't even understand. She did; she had learned the hard way to simply stop trying so hard, even if she could only watch him and wait for the island to beat him into submission too.
She was not a monster. At the end of the day, in the dark, long after she pulled him to her as tightly as she could, she let him see her with her eyes wide open. She didn't scowl and let her lids half close; both relaxed and focused, he didn't squint. Like two neglected wells, reflecting only some moonlight, they paused and looked deep, and with the tension and fire burned out, they were hollow and it hurt to look. But at least they were willing to look, and Jack could breathe afterward and remember that he had good intentions in this world no matter what the world did to bend and break them. He was no monster either, even if he acted that way from time to time.
They saw a difference, though. The whole lot of them, they saw this gulf between consequences and intentions, in him standing over her open grave, and judged and didn't know anything about the world enough to give her a label she could die with or that Jack could live with too. It had to be shared. Whatever she was, he had to take a piece of it for himself, because he might have been her. The anger burned, and he couldn't go near her grave after that first time. What was he if not crazy and desperate and capable of destroying things in the crush of his zealous hands? They should call him dangerous. He was. And what was she if not crazy and desperate and capable of holding things together through a force of will that hurt? They should call her leader. She might have been him.
When he saw her in the jungle, scared and not yet capable of erecting those walls again, it made him remember being that man who had been shouting at the ticket clerk. Things were out of joint on this island, with Ana already scattered into pieces by the time he found her again and Jack's own inevitable fragility showing in the light between his cracks even as he tried to cast himself in a single mask of steel. It was hard being on this side of it; he couldn't imagine what she'd seen when she looked at him in that airport bar. But he knew what he'd seen, and he'd been immediately sorry that he wasn't going to be anywhere near her on the plane.
They had scanned the tickets casually as though it didn't mean the future: she was in the tail section, and he wasn't.