Fic: Impact, 1/2 (Jack/Sawyer)
I'm being atypical and nervously posting part of a story without having written the rest (rest assured, I DO know where it’s going…mostly.) Anyway, maybe I'm having fic withdrawal. *shrugs* Also, if this is rambly and associative, I’m sorry. That’s the muse’s current issue-of-the-month, I think. Self-deprecation is the issue-of-the-life for me.
Title: Impact, 1/2(?)
Pairing: Jack/Sawyer
Rating: R, possibly working toward NC-17
Summary: Post-rescue; Sawyer confronts Jack about his feelings. Spoilers for season three. This part: 2500 words.
Note: For zelda_zee, who recently complained of having Jack problems. When he's being petulant and obtuse, just smack him over the head with it, I say. No…really. :)
Impact, part one
It shouldn't have felt like a prison to Jack, but it did. Lying on that hotel bed, bewildered and lonely, he felt absolutely trapped, just like he had when he was in that hatch, surrounded by nothing but metal and glass, behind a door that he couldn't open. He could open this door, physically, but he didn't really want to. Too much lay beyond it, too many people he had to confront, from both the past and the present which was about to become the past, too. He wondered what would survive this transition, if anything. Would he?
Part of the problem was being inside again. He had been used to the wide open, even when that transport ship finally reached them. He could always look out over the horizon and see the end of the world curving down as if under the ocean, the sky stretching up forever. He had underestimated how strange it would be to be indoors again after nearly a year without much of an indoors to speak of. It didn't help that in this case he was shuttled between myriad indoor locations, all of which made him feel like an animal in a cage. Medical tests, governmental de-briefings, military inquisitions, Oceanic meetings with insurance people, lawyers, mid-level managers, and assorted people in company polo shirts, brought in with the express purpose of placating people that didn't want to be placated. He wanted to tell them he wasn't even angry anymore. Time was past for being angry about what had happened to them. Anger wouldn't change anything. That much he knew.
The comforter on the bed scratched at his back, and he lay there with the air conditioner off, sweating in his new clean clothes because he was used to sweat. It wasn't as though he was averse to the shower; it just didn't occur to him to take one. That first day, yes-when he made his one and only statement to the media, groping for what the appropriate public response to something so strange should be-but then he found that he'd gone two days without another one because he simply forgot that's what he should do. He had forgotten a lot of other things, too, or learned a new way to see them: how ridiculous television is, how processed food is nothing but salt and fat and it tastes like too much, how people manage to be so damn polite all the time, even if it meant lying.
Then there were the things he missed. He was still constantly aware of the weather, but rather than be attuned to it naturally, simply from being out in the open air, he found himself standing at the window, gauging how quickly a storm was about to come up. If a room didn't have a window, it made him nervous. That was why the only demand he made was to be put in a room with a balcony, one he might open the doors to, so he could feel the air. But it wasn't as humid in Sydney, and he couldn’t hear the ocean. That was perhaps what he missed most.
He lay on the bed, unwilling to get up because getting up meant he had to do something, and he really had no idea what to do. If he lay still enough, it was like things hadn't changed too much. He had tried to do that when Ben and Juliet held him captive, but there were constant noises from the old hatch and he feared he would die before he saw his people again. Here, he knew his people were down the hall, across the courtyard, downstairs in the restaurant, above him on the observation deck. He told himself it was different, that they were all safe now and he could see them whenever he wanted, but the truth was he knew he would never see some of them again.
Jin and Sun would get on a plane and go back to Korea. Claire would probably stay there in Australia, with Charlie and the baby in tow. Who knew where Sayid was headed, or Desmond. Even the ones who would also be going back to the States might be lost to him. He might never cross their paths again. Logically, he knew that was okay. Many of them he was close with only because of circumstance; once off the island, he had no reason to keep them in his life. But they were like family now, people you didn't choose but were bound up with anyway. Family was like your own personal mythology, necessary pieces of your life that must be in place for you to function. Even miles away, he had to know that they were okay-healthy, happy. It had been that way once he resigned himself to being stuck with Juliet's group for those few months they held him. He always wondered if Hurley had made it back okay, if Locke was being a good leader, if Sayid had managed to keep himself in check, if Aaron had learned to walk, if Sun was still pregnant. Most of all, he worried about Kate and Sawyer.
He took only slight comfort in them being together. He figured that two colossally stubborn people together were better than either apart. It wasn't what would happen as they fled that bothered him. He made himself believe they would make it back. They had to. What he worried about was how they would survive once back in camp. Would they pull away from everyone? Would they think too much about him? Would they think about him at all? Once Kate, Sawyer, and Sayid had come for him on that rescue mission, and he got back to camp himself, he understood how it was. Life goes on. If it doesn't, you risk getting lost. If it doesn't, people coddle you and worry over you, and it's unbearable. So Kate and Sawyer had taken a few days to rest, then they jumped back in as though nothing had happened. Jack tried, but it took him longer, and he wasn't sure why. It was taking him longer now.
The news people had asked him so many questions, given that he was the doctor. Just like the survivors themselves, they'd labeled him as the leader, the spokesman, that man most likely to hold everything together. Nobody bothered to correct them, to say that Jack had only been that man a few times, as if by accident. Locke, Sayid, even Sawyer at times had really been the leaders in the long run. After he was gone so long, they'd stepped in to fill his shoes, and he was relieved that they still held sway in the camp once he got back. He was then simply the doctor, not captain and pastor and counselor and president all rolled into one. It was easier, then.
Even Sawyer was easier, and Kate. They thanked him in their own ways for saving them, just as he thanked them for returning the favor. They bickered, but it was only for show, because something had cemented them together in that experience. Even when it was clear that Kate and Sawyer weren't in love, just sleeping together out of a need for companionship, Jack didn't try to intervene and have Kate for himself. He didn't know if it was propriety or loyalty or what, but he found that he couldn't cross Sawyer that way.
He supposed they were who he missed the most as he lay there on his bed in an undershirt and a pair of black slacks, no belt and no socks. Kate was already being escorted to a holding cell, pending extradition. Someone had told him she was due for at least ten years in the federal pen. She'd be in her mid-thirties when she got out, so he tried to imagine what she would look like then, a little more weathered, more mature. That was easer than thinking about how her attitude might've changed. Or would she find her way on the inside just as she had on the island, make a community around her but still remain mostly impervious to anything besides the solitude of her own mind.
It had taken Jack a long time to see it, but that's what he'd done, probably his whole life. After Sara, he had decided not to let anyone or anything in. He just went about his business and tried not to think about that kind of intimacy. It was safer that way, just as it was infinitely necessary to live that way with Juliet and her people. Self-protection was the only thing he had, but once he got back, he couldn't stop. It was its own kind of prison. Why else could he be laying on the bed, sticky and warm and knowing, somehow, that if anybody reached out a hand to hold tightly to him, it would only be out of obligation. It wouldn't be because they needed him. But he needed all of them, just like he'd needed them the whole time they were on the island. The only ones he'd even tried to reach out to were Kate and Sawyer. Now, Kate was going where he couldn't touch her, might never again. And who in the hell knew where Sawyer might end up. Was he feeling just as lonely?
Jack hadn't seen him since the night before, and he'd been all smiles, selling his freedom and thankfulness to the cameras. The media had done their homework, and when confronted with his past, Sawyer would simply say it was his past, that he wasn't that man anymore. Jack firmly believed it. He'd been steadily changing since they landed on the island, but after nearly dying several times at the hands of Ben's goons, he became someone so different he could sit down and talk to Jack for hours. They didn't seem to talk about anything substantial, just whatever would pass the time. Sawyer told the longest, most improbable stories, but they let him escape from his own mind for a while, and for that he was grateful. Jack found himself curious to know what Sawyer would ramble about now, if it would even be possible.
Sometime after it got dark, Jack fell asleep, or very close to it, like a waking sleep. He lay diagonally across the bed, thoughts swirling through his head, his mind drifting over all the people he was used to seeing. Sometimes they were on the beach and sometimes they were in this hotel, in that sterile conference room looking bleary-eyed and confused, despite their joy. Yes, all of them were joyful. A person would have to be crazy not to want to be back to civilization, where the future was safer and more certain. They'd been hanging in suspended animation so long Jack knew it would take a long time before they realized they weren't anymore.
The room was dark, and when he heard a knock at the door it startled his heart into thumping inside his chest, and he fumbled for but never found a light switch. He simply pulled the door open, and the hallway light blinded him as a figure stepped into his room without closing the door.
Sawyer wore jeans and a navy button-down shirt, untucked and left open at the collar. He nearly walked over Jack's feet with his worn boots, those he'd worn almost every day on the island. He was clean-shaven, and it looked so strange Jack almost laughed, but he was still in a daze.
What finally woke him up was Sawyer. Sawyer didn't say a word, simply pushed a hand into his chest and knocked him back into the wall. Jack saw with those movements that he was both drunk off his ass and pissed off.
"What?" Jack said.
"How do you do it? How do you just sit up here and make me wonder what the fuck you're thinking and why you're not down there with the rest of us? Huh?"
"Sawyer…"
"I just don't get it, Doc," he said with a snarl. "I never have. But I guess I always thought-I was always so damn sure-you'd figure it out, if-- God, if we ever did finally get off that rock. Now we're here and you're still an idiot."
Sawyer let him go, but he stayed right there in his face. Jack said, "Sawyer, what's wrong? What are you talking about?"
"We're just supposed to worry, is that right? We just sit here and take it, because God knows you ain't gonna worry about us, for all your weight-of-the-world bullshit. Do you know that's the last thing she said to me? They're hauling her away in handcuffs, and she's telling me to watch out for you, don't let you--you, you motherfucker--get like this. As if I need to be told that. As if there's any fucking way to stop it.
"I just thought I could, you know," he added, his voice calming. "You always could. You could stop me. Every time. Bet you didn't know that. 'Course you didn't."
Jack couldn't say anything, as disoriented as he was, in more ways than one. He simply watched as Sawyer stepped back into the doorway, leaning against the frame with a bitter laugh. "I think I'm probably twice as stupid as you, Jack. Why am I still here? I'm supposed to be gone. I don't have any reason to still be here, but I am. And I hate you for it."
"Me? Sawyer, what in the hell are you talking about?" It was a fair question, as Sawyer was being both vehement and vague.
He didn't even have time to react to Sawyer's nostrils flaring before the man lunged for him and threw him into the wall again, holding him by the shoulders, pinning him tightly enough that his shoulder blade ground painfully into the wall. "This. This is what I'm talking about. I fuckin' hate you, Jack. I do."
"Okay."
"That's all you got? 'Okay'? It hurts like a motherfucker and there ain't a goddamn thing I can do about it. You could, but you won't." His eyes darkened more than Jack had ever seen, but he cast his face down when he said, "It ain't because you can't, it's because you don't want to. It's too hard. Fuck you and fuck things being too hard for you to even see them much less deal with them."
He let him go then, stumbling out into the hallway. Then he spun around before Jack could respond and said, "Hell, just fuck you." Then he swung his fist and the world went black with pain, then simply black.
on to the rest-->
Title: Impact, 1/2(?)
Pairing: Jack/Sawyer
Rating: R, possibly working toward NC-17
Summary: Post-rescue; Sawyer confronts Jack about his feelings. Spoilers for season three. This part: 2500 words.
Note: For zelda_zee, who recently complained of having Jack problems. When he's being petulant and obtuse, just smack him over the head with it, I say. No…really. :)
Impact, part one
It shouldn't have felt like a prison to Jack, but it did. Lying on that hotel bed, bewildered and lonely, he felt absolutely trapped, just like he had when he was in that hatch, surrounded by nothing but metal and glass, behind a door that he couldn't open. He could open this door, physically, but he didn't really want to. Too much lay beyond it, too many people he had to confront, from both the past and the present which was about to become the past, too. He wondered what would survive this transition, if anything. Would he?
Part of the problem was being inside again. He had been used to the wide open, even when that transport ship finally reached them. He could always look out over the horizon and see the end of the world curving down as if under the ocean, the sky stretching up forever. He had underestimated how strange it would be to be indoors again after nearly a year without much of an indoors to speak of. It didn't help that in this case he was shuttled between myriad indoor locations, all of which made him feel like an animal in a cage. Medical tests, governmental de-briefings, military inquisitions, Oceanic meetings with insurance people, lawyers, mid-level managers, and assorted people in company polo shirts, brought in with the express purpose of placating people that didn't want to be placated. He wanted to tell them he wasn't even angry anymore. Time was past for being angry about what had happened to them. Anger wouldn't change anything. That much he knew.
The comforter on the bed scratched at his back, and he lay there with the air conditioner off, sweating in his new clean clothes because he was used to sweat. It wasn't as though he was averse to the shower; it just didn't occur to him to take one. That first day, yes-when he made his one and only statement to the media, groping for what the appropriate public response to something so strange should be-but then he found that he'd gone two days without another one because he simply forgot that's what he should do. He had forgotten a lot of other things, too, or learned a new way to see them: how ridiculous television is, how processed food is nothing but salt and fat and it tastes like too much, how people manage to be so damn polite all the time, even if it meant lying.
Then there were the things he missed. He was still constantly aware of the weather, but rather than be attuned to it naturally, simply from being out in the open air, he found himself standing at the window, gauging how quickly a storm was about to come up. If a room didn't have a window, it made him nervous. That was why the only demand he made was to be put in a room with a balcony, one he might open the doors to, so he could feel the air. But it wasn't as humid in Sydney, and he couldn’t hear the ocean. That was perhaps what he missed most.
He lay on the bed, unwilling to get up because getting up meant he had to do something, and he really had no idea what to do. If he lay still enough, it was like things hadn't changed too much. He had tried to do that when Ben and Juliet held him captive, but there were constant noises from the old hatch and he feared he would die before he saw his people again. Here, he knew his people were down the hall, across the courtyard, downstairs in the restaurant, above him on the observation deck. He told himself it was different, that they were all safe now and he could see them whenever he wanted, but the truth was he knew he would never see some of them again.
Jin and Sun would get on a plane and go back to Korea. Claire would probably stay there in Australia, with Charlie and the baby in tow. Who knew where Sayid was headed, or Desmond. Even the ones who would also be going back to the States might be lost to him. He might never cross their paths again. Logically, he knew that was okay. Many of them he was close with only because of circumstance; once off the island, he had no reason to keep them in his life. But they were like family now, people you didn't choose but were bound up with anyway. Family was like your own personal mythology, necessary pieces of your life that must be in place for you to function. Even miles away, he had to know that they were okay-healthy, happy. It had been that way once he resigned himself to being stuck with Juliet's group for those few months they held him. He always wondered if Hurley had made it back okay, if Locke was being a good leader, if Sayid had managed to keep himself in check, if Aaron had learned to walk, if Sun was still pregnant. Most of all, he worried about Kate and Sawyer.
He took only slight comfort in them being together. He figured that two colossally stubborn people together were better than either apart. It wasn't what would happen as they fled that bothered him. He made himself believe they would make it back. They had to. What he worried about was how they would survive once back in camp. Would they pull away from everyone? Would they think too much about him? Would they think about him at all? Once Kate, Sawyer, and Sayid had come for him on that rescue mission, and he got back to camp himself, he understood how it was. Life goes on. If it doesn't, you risk getting lost. If it doesn't, people coddle you and worry over you, and it's unbearable. So Kate and Sawyer had taken a few days to rest, then they jumped back in as though nothing had happened. Jack tried, but it took him longer, and he wasn't sure why. It was taking him longer now.
The news people had asked him so many questions, given that he was the doctor. Just like the survivors themselves, they'd labeled him as the leader, the spokesman, that man most likely to hold everything together. Nobody bothered to correct them, to say that Jack had only been that man a few times, as if by accident. Locke, Sayid, even Sawyer at times had really been the leaders in the long run. After he was gone so long, they'd stepped in to fill his shoes, and he was relieved that they still held sway in the camp once he got back. He was then simply the doctor, not captain and pastor and counselor and president all rolled into one. It was easier, then.
Even Sawyer was easier, and Kate. They thanked him in their own ways for saving them, just as he thanked them for returning the favor. They bickered, but it was only for show, because something had cemented them together in that experience. Even when it was clear that Kate and Sawyer weren't in love, just sleeping together out of a need for companionship, Jack didn't try to intervene and have Kate for himself. He didn't know if it was propriety or loyalty or what, but he found that he couldn't cross Sawyer that way.
He supposed they were who he missed the most as he lay there on his bed in an undershirt and a pair of black slacks, no belt and no socks. Kate was already being escorted to a holding cell, pending extradition. Someone had told him she was due for at least ten years in the federal pen. She'd be in her mid-thirties when she got out, so he tried to imagine what she would look like then, a little more weathered, more mature. That was easer than thinking about how her attitude might've changed. Or would she find her way on the inside just as she had on the island, make a community around her but still remain mostly impervious to anything besides the solitude of her own mind.
It had taken Jack a long time to see it, but that's what he'd done, probably his whole life. After Sara, he had decided not to let anyone or anything in. He just went about his business and tried not to think about that kind of intimacy. It was safer that way, just as it was infinitely necessary to live that way with Juliet and her people. Self-protection was the only thing he had, but once he got back, he couldn't stop. It was its own kind of prison. Why else could he be laying on the bed, sticky and warm and knowing, somehow, that if anybody reached out a hand to hold tightly to him, it would only be out of obligation. It wouldn't be because they needed him. But he needed all of them, just like he'd needed them the whole time they were on the island. The only ones he'd even tried to reach out to were Kate and Sawyer. Now, Kate was going where he couldn't touch her, might never again. And who in the hell knew where Sawyer might end up. Was he feeling just as lonely?
Jack hadn't seen him since the night before, and he'd been all smiles, selling his freedom and thankfulness to the cameras. The media had done their homework, and when confronted with his past, Sawyer would simply say it was his past, that he wasn't that man anymore. Jack firmly believed it. He'd been steadily changing since they landed on the island, but after nearly dying several times at the hands of Ben's goons, he became someone so different he could sit down and talk to Jack for hours. They didn't seem to talk about anything substantial, just whatever would pass the time. Sawyer told the longest, most improbable stories, but they let him escape from his own mind for a while, and for that he was grateful. Jack found himself curious to know what Sawyer would ramble about now, if it would even be possible.
Sometime after it got dark, Jack fell asleep, or very close to it, like a waking sleep. He lay diagonally across the bed, thoughts swirling through his head, his mind drifting over all the people he was used to seeing. Sometimes they were on the beach and sometimes they were in this hotel, in that sterile conference room looking bleary-eyed and confused, despite their joy. Yes, all of them were joyful. A person would have to be crazy not to want to be back to civilization, where the future was safer and more certain. They'd been hanging in suspended animation so long Jack knew it would take a long time before they realized they weren't anymore.
The room was dark, and when he heard a knock at the door it startled his heart into thumping inside his chest, and he fumbled for but never found a light switch. He simply pulled the door open, and the hallway light blinded him as a figure stepped into his room without closing the door.
Sawyer wore jeans and a navy button-down shirt, untucked and left open at the collar. He nearly walked over Jack's feet with his worn boots, those he'd worn almost every day on the island. He was clean-shaven, and it looked so strange Jack almost laughed, but he was still in a daze.
What finally woke him up was Sawyer. Sawyer didn't say a word, simply pushed a hand into his chest and knocked him back into the wall. Jack saw with those movements that he was both drunk off his ass and pissed off.
"What?" Jack said.
"How do you do it? How do you just sit up here and make me wonder what the fuck you're thinking and why you're not down there with the rest of us? Huh?"
"Sawyer…"
"I just don't get it, Doc," he said with a snarl. "I never have. But I guess I always thought-I was always so damn sure-you'd figure it out, if-- God, if we ever did finally get off that rock. Now we're here and you're still an idiot."
Sawyer let him go, but he stayed right there in his face. Jack said, "Sawyer, what's wrong? What are you talking about?"
"We're just supposed to worry, is that right? We just sit here and take it, because God knows you ain't gonna worry about us, for all your weight-of-the-world bullshit. Do you know that's the last thing she said to me? They're hauling her away in handcuffs, and she's telling me to watch out for you, don't let you--you, you motherfucker--get like this. As if I need to be told that. As if there's any fucking way to stop it.
"I just thought I could, you know," he added, his voice calming. "You always could. You could stop me. Every time. Bet you didn't know that. 'Course you didn't."
Jack couldn't say anything, as disoriented as he was, in more ways than one. He simply watched as Sawyer stepped back into the doorway, leaning against the frame with a bitter laugh. "I think I'm probably twice as stupid as you, Jack. Why am I still here? I'm supposed to be gone. I don't have any reason to still be here, but I am. And I hate you for it."
"Me? Sawyer, what in the hell are you talking about?" It was a fair question, as Sawyer was being both vehement and vague.
He didn't even have time to react to Sawyer's nostrils flaring before the man lunged for him and threw him into the wall again, holding him by the shoulders, pinning him tightly enough that his shoulder blade ground painfully into the wall. "This. This is what I'm talking about. I fuckin' hate you, Jack. I do."
"Okay."
"That's all you got? 'Okay'? It hurts like a motherfucker and there ain't a goddamn thing I can do about it. You could, but you won't." His eyes darkened more than Jack had ever seen, but he cast his face down when he said, "It ain't because you can't, it's because you don't want to. It's too hard. Fuck you and fuck things being too hard for you to even see them much less deal with them."
He let him go then, stumbling out into the hallway. Then he spun around before Jack could respond and said, "Hell, just fuck you." Then he swung his fist and the world went black with pain, then simply black.
on to the rest-->