Fic: Belief (Jack/Juliet)
Title: Belief
Pairing: Jack/Juliet
Rating: light R
Summary: post-"Not in Portland" (3.07). Kinda darkish, maybe. 2000 words.
Note: I've not written this pair in a while nor read much (I'm a bad shipper, I must admit), so tell me if this works or if it's altogether cliched crap.
Juliet wishes she wasn't always conscious of why she does everything she does, but she is, and that's how she knows exactly why she's clanking that door behind her, locking it as if by accident, because she needs to be in there with him.
She wishes she wasn't conscious of how much he gets under her skin, how he hits something so deep inside her with just a long, heavy, pushing look of his eyes, how they look so coal black until he tilts his head to the light; he goes so deep she feels like he sees things she doesn't even let herself look at, and when his eyes start to look translucent, hazel almost in the fluorescent light, she thinks for a split second that she's seeing him, but it's really only a reflection of herself. She's beginning to wonder if it isn't both things at the same time.
She wishes she hadn't locked that door the instant she did. She knows they might very well leave her there, and she doesn't know what she'll do. It doesn't matter what Jack does with her in here: it will hurt. It always does, especially when she can't sort out her own need from all that fucking manipulation anymore. The two can't be separated.
She expects either disdain or sympathy. She gets a weary wave of his hand, beckoning her to sit down, as if he has no choice or doesn’t care; so she sits on the table, pulling her legs up under her indian style. He just leans into the wall, staring right through her. Captor or captive, which is she? She doesn't know, but he doesn't seem too concerned. Maybe because he's hanging in that same precarious balance, his the only hands that save, his far from the only hands that threaten. Does that make him one of them? she wonders. They save sometimes, too.
She expects him to continue staring through her now. She's never met a more stubborn man in all her life except maybe her ex-husband, and while his brand of obstinacy made her alternately angry and hopeless, Jack's is like her fuel. She's gone home so many times now with her whole body throbbing with something nearly uncontrollable, just from having a three-minute conversation with him. Not arousal, not at first. That came later, as if it were a secondary thing and not a culmination of it. He's never even tried to cause this, but he holds some fire, there in his eyes, coming up from deep in the core of him, and it travels up her arms and through her whole frame every time she hears his voice or sees his eyes. It burns her up, even in the OR, even on the beach listening to him on the walkie talkie, even now, while he ignores her so pointedly. She thinks she could feed off it.
She expects him to be the Jack she knows, who would sacrifice anything to be right and to hold his ground, but he shifts. His body pitches, slow and lazy, off the wall, and he bridges the gap between the wall and the table in two strides. Only someone who didn't know him would think it was casual. His eyes look deep and hollow except for the way they're not cold but warm, sucking some energy out of her just the same until she can't breathe but she loves that feeling. It's her turn to be absolutely still and unaffected and impervious as he takes one more step that leaves him planted in front of her, his thighs almost touching the table, almost touching her thighs, his hands still folded across his chest.
After a few too many seconds of intense staring, he says, quietly, "Is your name really Juliet?"
"What?"
"Your name," he says with just enough condescension that she can tell he's a lot more bothered than he's pretending to be. "Is it really Juliet, in the real world?"
"Yes. Juliet Burke."
"Doctor Burke?"
"Yes."
He takes that in for a second, still surveying her expression, and it's somehow different than it's ever been. Then he asks, "What made you think I wouldn't kill Ben?"
She didn't expect that question. "Because I would do it, and you aren't me."
"You know what I think?" he says, his voice taking on that scary tone it does when he's about to stop being rational. It makes her heart turn over, flip with a squeeze inside her chest, leaving that helpless and wild feeling behind she normally doesn't feel until she gets out of there, into the open air again and away from him. He suddenly reaches out and takes her hand by the wrist, smoothes his thumb over the pulse point there. "I think you just needed to believe I wouldn't."
"No."
"You needed to believe I was your conception of a good man. But I'm not a good man, Juliet." Maybe he believes it, maybe he doesn't. It's impossible to know.
"I don't care."
"You do. Because you want to be a good person, deep down. Maybe you are."
She laughs, so suddenly it startles her, but not him. For half a second, she feels like the person she left in Miami, but she's thankful when that split second is gone because she can't be that frail, scared woman. She doesn't like her. It's too late, though: she's already figured out that that's why she can't stay away from him. What she can't make sense of is whether it's some masochism that makes her stay or that tabula rasa Ben fucks over every day with his promises of a new life that turn out to be lies. "No, Jack, I'm not," she replies.
"Think I don't know that?" he says with a wry smile and a shake of his head. "I mean, it's really actually pretty ridiculous, because none of us are good on this godforsaken island. But, no, Juliet"-he snaps out her name, but then he bends his head toward her ear, that hot hand, that surgeon's hand, still rubbing at her wrist-"you aren't a good person." He's spitting out every word now with determination, like when he asked her about the x-rays. "But I need to believe you are. I need you to be here with me because you're stuck here, not because Ben turned you into one of his brainless monsters. Are you here with me?" His gaze is so hard it looks closed, but there's the slightest flicker of openness, if she stares long enough; there's a chance he's telling the truth. She believes he is, because she needs to.
"Yes." She makes her voice as calm as the one she used when she talked over the video, and she realizes instantly that this time, there are more than two meanings to everything, more meanings than she knows. "I'm here."
"And you're stuck?"
Calmly, because it's something she's faced so many times, at least until he got here: "I'm never going to get off this island. And neither will you."
At those words, Jack drops her hand and it falls against her thigh as he backs away, molding himself to that corner, finally sitting down in that same spot he always does when she brings him food. He's shutting her out again, but he's not doing anything to keep it all out of his eyes. Probably, at this point, he can't.
She wants to yell at him, make him fight back. Her hands clench in her lap, and she tries not to look at him. She hates it when he gives up like this, because it makes all the fight go out of her, too. She can't forget the tight way he held her when he tried to use her for leverage. He thought he could change things then. He might be able to change things now, but he doesn't know it. She wants to scream at him, the only tactic that she hasn't tried yet because it's even more dangerous than this. So she takes a long breath and counts to five.
She wants to tell him this is the only place on the island she's ever made herself willfully stuck, because she needs to be with him long enough to make him need her. But she can't say that.
She wants to nestle into his chest and pretend her whole life hasn't been a road to nothing or destruction, or both. What she does, finally, is drop herself down off the table, with Jack's large, wide eyes monitoring every movement. When she sits down beside him, he doesn't move, but he's suddenly completely in control again-spine straight and jaw clenched and hands rigid and flat against his thighs.
She decides to be direct, because that's really the only way Jack can't twist things into whatever shape he needs them to fit. What she doesn't know is what it will mean, but she says it anyway:
"I didn't need to want you, but I do."
"So?"
"So," she says with a shrug of her shoulders. "You're stuck with me."
"I'm stuck with you?" he says with a pinched-up face, annoyed.
She puts her hand on top of his on his leg, and he just stares at it a few seconds before he jerks away. She sighs and puts her hands on the ground to push herself up, to retreat to the table where he can still burn clean through her just with a look, when he turns her jaw and crushes a kiss against her lips like a warning or a promise. She doesn’t kiss him back at first; it's been so long since she's done this she's forgotten how it feels, and this is Jack and her skin is too warm and her hands shake, but she finally just opens up and lets him have what he wants. She doesn't fight him; she yields while at the same time takes his rough, stubble-covered jaw in her hands to angle his mouth into hers.
When her fingers curl around the back of his neck and rest there in the hollow at the nape of his neck, he shivers and pulls away and she knows this is the end of it, all she'll ever get. He'll yell and scream and maybe shove her into something, give her that hard anger that fuels her but probably destroys her, too. Maybe she wants it to. But he doesn't do that. Instead, he pulls her hard by the hand until she climbs into his lap, her thighs straddling his.
Their stomachs are touching now, and it's not until she sinks down into him that she feels that he's already hard, and he isn't bashful about holding her by the hips so that she's tight against him, all of him, her breasts heaving against his chest. He studies her face for a long time, and she finally closes her eyes against it, but she can still feel how tense he is, this close to uncontrollable. His pulse is pounding, and his breath is too fast. He's trying to slow it, she knows, but this is too real now, so real she can smell him and still taste him and feel every muscle in his whole body poised against her yielding flesh, as if he expected her to have some walls up, and now he's stopped, waiting, because he found none.
Sometime while her eyes are closed, he makes up his mind, because when she opens them, he says, "This is stupid."
"No."
"Yeah. Yeah it really, really is, Juliet."
"Then stop."
"I don't want to. Especially if you're telling me the truth. Why not both of us be miserable and right tomorrow."
She knows better than to question an enigmatic statement that he probably doesn't even understand, and if he thought he did, who says he actually would? She just waits for his mouth to take hers again, and it does, with passion more than ferocity this time. It practically hurts. It's definitely too much.
She needs this to be about more than self-loathing, and she think that maybe, deep down, it is, but she can never be sure.
She needs this to last forever, but it won't. She won't let herself think about that.
She needs him to kiss her like she's the one he'd choose to be kissing, right now. When she realizes she is, that this is the most fucked-up thing they could possibly feel and do, she wraps herself around him so tight nobody manning the observation booth will see anything but his hands and her.
Pairing: Jack/Juliet
Rating: light R
Summary: post-"Not in Portland" (3.07). Kinda darkish, maybe. 2000 words.
Note: I've not written this pair in a while nor read much (I'm a bad shipper, I must admit), so tell me if this works or if it's altogether cliched crap.
Juliet wishes she wasn't always conscious of why she does everything she does, but she is, and that's how she knows exactly why she's clanking that door behind her, locking it as if by accident, because she needs to be in there with him.
She wishes she wasn't conscious of how much he gets under her skin, how he hits something so deep inside her with just a long, heavy, pushing look of his eyes, how they look so coal black until he tilts his head to the light; he goes so deep she feels like he sees things she doesn't even let herself look at, and when his eyes start to look translucent, hazel almost in the fluorescent light, she thinks for a split second that she's seeing him, but it's really only a reflection of herself. She's beginning to wonder if it isn't both things at the same time.
She wishes she hadn't locked that door the instant she did. She knows they might very well leave her there, and she doesn't know what she'll do. It doesn't matter what Jack does with her in here: it will hurt. It always does, especially when she can't sort out her own need from all that fucking manipulation anymore. The two can't be separated.
She expects either disdain or sympathy. She gets a weary wave of his hand, beckoning her to sit down, as if he has no choice or doesn’t care; so she sits on the table, pulling her legs up under her indian style. He just leans into the wall, staring right through her. Captor or captive, which is she? She doesn't know, but he doesn't seem too concerned. Maybe because he's hanging in that same precarious balance, his the only hands that save, his far from the only hands that threaten. Does that make him one of them? she wonders. They save sometimes, too.
She expects him to continue staring through her now. She's never met a more stubborn man in all her life except maybe her ex-husband, and while his brand of obstinacy made her alternately angry and hopeless, Jack's is like her fuel. She's gone home so many times now with her whole body throbbing with something nearly uncontrollable, just from having a three-minute conversation with him. Not arousal, not at first. That came later, as if it were a secondary thing and not a culmination of it. He's never even tried to cause this, but he holds some fire, there in his eyes, coming up from deep in the core of him, and it travels up her arms and through her whole frame every time she hears his voice or sees his eyes. It burns her up, even in the OR, even on the beach listening to him on the walkie talkie, even now, while he ignores her so pointedly. She thinks she could feed off it.
She expects him to be the Jack she knows, who would sacrifice anything to be right and to hold his ground, but he shifts. His body pitches, slow and lazy, off the wall, and he bridges the gap between the wall and the table in two strides. Only someone who didn't know him would think it was casual. His eyes look deep and hollow except for the way they're not cold but warm, sucking some energy out of her just the same until she can't breathe but she loves that feeling. It's her turn to be absolutely still and unaffected and impervious as he takes one more step that leaves him planted in front of her, his thighs almost touching the table, almost touching her thighs, his hands still folded across his chest.
After a few too many seconds of intense staring, he says, quietly, "Is your name really Juliet?"
"What?"
"Your name," he says with just enough condescension that she can tell he's a lot more bothered than he's pretending to be. "Is it really Juliet, in the real world?"
"Yes. Juliet Burke."
"Doctor Burke?"
"Yes."
He takes that in for a second, still surveying her expression, and it's somehow different than it's ever been. Then he asks, "What made you think I wouldn't kill Ben?"
She didn't expect that question. "Because I would do it, and you aren't me."
"You know what I think?" he says, his voice taking on that scary tone it does when he's about to stop being rational. It makes her heart turn over, flip with a squeeze inside her chest, leaving that helpless and wild feeling behind she normally doesn't feel until she gets out of there, into the open air again and away from him. He suddenly reaches out and takes her hand by the wrist, smoothes his thumb over the pulse point there. "I think you just needed to believe I wouldn't."
"No."
"You needed to believe I was your conception of a good man. But I'm not a good man, Juliet." Maybe he believes it, maybe he doesn't. It's impossible to know.
"I don't care."
"You do. Because you want to be a good person, deep down. Maybe you are."
She laughs, so suddenly it startles her, but not him. For half a second, she feels like the person she left in Miami, but she's thankful when that split second is gone because she can't be that frail, scared woman. She doesn't like her. It's too late, though: she's already figured out that that's why she can't stay away from him. What she can't make sense of is whether it's some masochism that makes her stay or that tabula rasa Ben fucks over every day with his promises of a new life that turn out to be lies. "No, Jack, I'm not," she replies.
"Think I don't know that?" he says with a wry smile and a shake of his head. "I mean, it's really actually pretty ridiculous, because none of us are good on this godforsaken island. But, no, Juliet"-he snaps out her name, but then he bends his head toward her ear, that hot hand, that surgeon's hand, still rubbing at her wrist-"you aren't a good person." He's spitting out every word now with determination, like when he asked her about the x-rays. "But I need to believe you are. I need you to be here with me because you're stuck here, not because Ben turned you into one of his brainless monsters. Are you here with me?" His gaze is so hard it looks closed, but there's the slightest flicker of openness, if she stares long enough; there's a chance he's telling the truth. She believes he is, because she needs to.
"Yes." She makes her voice as calm as the one she used when she talked over the video, and she realizes instantly that this time, there are more than two meanings to everything, more meanings than she knows. "I'm here."
"And you're stuck?"
Calmly, because it's something she's faced so many times, at least until he got here: "I'm never going to get off this island. And neither will you."
At those words, Jack drops her hand and it falls against her thigh as he backs away, molding himself to that corner, finally sitting down in that same spot he always does when she brings him food. He's shutting her out again, but he's not doing anything to keep it all out of his eyes. Probably, at this point, he can't.
She wants to yell at him, make him fight back. Her hands clench in her lap, and she tries not to look at him. She hates it when he gives up like this, because it makes all the fight go out of her, too. She can't forget the tight way he held her when he tried to use her for leverage. He thought he could change things then. He might be able to change things now, but he doesn't know it. She wants to scream at him, the only tactic that she hasn't tried yet because it's even more dangerous than this. So she takes a long breath and counts to five.
She wants to tell him this is the only place on the island she's ever made herself willfully stuck, because she needs to be with him long enough to make him need her. But she can't say that.
She wants to nestle into his chest and pretend her whole life hasn't been a road to nothing or destruction, or both. What she does, finally, is drop herself down off the table, with Jack's large, wide eyes monitoring every movement. When she sits down beside him, he doesn't move, but he's suddenly completely in control again-spine straight and jaw clenched and hands rigid and flat against his thighs.
She decides to be direct, because that's really the only way Jack can't twist things into whatever shape he needs them to fit. What she doesn't know is what it will mean, but she says it anyway:
"I didn't need to want you, but I do."
"So?"
"So," she says with a shrug of her shoulders. "You're stuck with me."
"I'm stuck with you?" he says with a pinched-up face, annoyed.
She puts her hand on top of his on his leg, and he just stares at it a few seconds before he jerks away. She sighs and puts her hands on the ground to push herself up, to retreat to the table where he can still burn clean through her just with a look, when he turns her jaw and crushes a kiss against her lips like a warning or a promise. She doesn’t kiss him back at first; it's been so long since she's done this she's forgotten how it feels, and this is Jack and her skin is too warm and her hands shake, but she finally just opens up and lets him have what he wants. She doesn't fight him; she yields while at the same time takes his rough, stubble-covered jaw in her hands to angle his mouth into hers.
When her fingers curl around the back of his neck and rest there in the hollow at the nape of his neck, he shivers and pulls away and she knows this is the end of it, all she'll ever get. He'll yell and scream and maybe shove her into something, give her that hard anger that fuels her but probably destroys her, too. Maybe she wants it to. But he doesn't do that. Instead, he pulls her hard by the hand until she climbs into his lap, her thighs straddling his.
Their stomachs are touching now, and it's not until she sinks down into him that she feels that he's already hard, and he isn't bashful about holding her by the hips so that she's tight against him, all of him, her breasts heaving against his chest. He studies her face for a long time, and she finally closes her eyes against it, but she can still feel how tense he is, this close to uncontrollable. His pulse is pounding, and his breath is too fast. He's trying to slow it, she knows, but this is too real now, so real she can smell him and still taste him and feel every muscle in his whole body poised against her yielding flesh, as if he expected her to have some walls up, and now he's stopped, waiting, because he found none.
Sometime while her eyes are closed, he makes up his mind, because when she opens them, he says, "This is stupid."
"No."
"Yeah. Yeah it really, really is, Juliet."
"Then stop."
"I don't want to. Especially if you're telling me the truth. Why not both of us be miserable and right tomorrow."
She knows better than to question an enigmatic statement that he probably doesn't even understand, and if he thought he did, who says he actually would? She just waits for his mouth to take hers again, and it does, with passion more than ferocity this time. It practically hurts. It's definitely too much.
She needs this to be about more than self-loathing, and she think that maybe, deep down, it is, but she can never be sure.
She needs this to last forever, but it won't. She won't let herself think about that.
She needs him to kiss her like she's the one he'd choose to be kissing, right now. When she realizes she is, that this is the most fucked-up thing they could possibly feel and do, she wraps herself around him so tight nobody manning the observation booth will see anything but his hands and her.