Lost fic: Ink [Sawyer, post-finale]
Disclaimer: Lost is not mine.
Spoilers: Through "Live Together, Die Alone."
Using for psych_30 #6, Inferiority Complex, and fanfic100 #77, What?
Summary: What they want from Sawyer are words.
Ink
by eponine119
June 9-10, 2006
He was in another hatch. A small room, with smooth windowless walls and cool air that smelled faintly of earth because it was underground. He sat on the bed because lying on it made him feel vulnerable. Stretched out he might relax. Sitting up, with shoulders tense and feet gripping the tile floor, he could spring into action.
It wasn't a bunk bed, like in the other hatch. A small table sat beside it, with a chair made of metal and heavier than it looked. A quick tug at the door and he knew it was locked.
They had him right where they wanted him. So he sat, waiting, and eventually they came.
When he heard the soft voices through the door, he thought it might be Jack and Kate coming to his rescue. He scowled, even as he longed for it, because he could take care of himself but taking care of himself had gotten him here. Alone, and captured, and separated from his group. He closed his eyes as the key scraped against the lock. Jack and Kate -- his group? Come on. He'd traded one enemy for another, that's all. He knew how to survive.
He raised his eyes but not his head when the door opened. He knew that the bruised man standing there had been held prisoner by Jack in their hatch, much as Sawyer was being held now. There was no one beside him; the woman whose voice he'd heard had gone.
"They won't trade anyone for me," Sawyer said. His voice sounded hoarse to his own ears, rough and unused. He realized he was thirsty.
"I don't want a trade," the man said. His calm voice and eyes mesmerized Sawyer momentarily. The lack of anger was so unfamiliar. "I got what I wanted."
Sawyer pressed his lips together and waited to hear more. Not giving him the satisfaction of asking, because Sawyer knew he wanted him to ask. Sawyer also knew he wasn't what this man had wanted.
The man walked to the desk. Sawyer kept his head down, hair shielding his eyes so the man wouldn't know his every move was being watched intently. The drawer rasped as he pulled it out. From inside he withdrew a notebook and a ballpoint pen, items so mundane Sawyer almost wanted to laugh. Almost because he'd seen a mountain of those notebooks back on another part of this creepy fucking island. Even as his stomach turned, he felt his fingers curl with the desire to open that notebook -- any of the notebooks from that pile -- and read. Bury himself in someone else's words. Escape even this locked room, for as long as it lasted.
But when the man flipped open the notebook to the first page, Sawyer saw that it was blank and unused. His spirits fell a little. There would be no easy escape. The man turned to him, with a tiny little smile. Sawyer slid his jaw, ground his teeth a little harder. Whatever this man wanted, he wasn't going to get.
"I want you to write down everything that's happened since you came to this island," the man said. "Sparing no detail."
Sawyer didn't have to say no; his look said it for him.
The man took the cap from the tip of the ballpoint pen and replaced it on the other end. "Sparing no detail," he repeated carefully.
"Or what?"
"Or your friends will die." He set the pen down on the blank sheet of notebook paper.
Sawyer sighed. "I never had a friend in my life." Even as he said it, the words rang back in his ears and heated the skin of his face. He told Jack he was a friend. He also told Jack being a friend got you killed, only not in so many words.
"You'd have them die?" the man asked him. "Rather than share a few paltry recollections with me?" Sawyer said nothing. "Perhaps you'll change your mind."
He walked out of the room, and the door locked tight behind him. Sawyer dug his hands through his hair, staring at the notebook and the pen. Then he turned away, determined to ignore them. He wasn't going to give that man anything he wanted, not one single thing.
But he had to get up. Stagger to his feet and run his fingers desperately through the pages, just to be sure that they were all blank. He needed an out, he needed an escape, as much as he'd needed a cigarette after that fuck, as much as he'd needed anything in his entire life.
They were blank. He'd picked up the pen to rifle the pages and it felt natural in his hand, holding it in a loose writing grip out of habit. It was such a small thing, yet with so much power inside it. All he had to do was tighten his fingers, press its tip to the page, give in.
But he'd die before he was complicit, so he threw the pen across the room as hard as he could. It bounced off the wall with a pathetically small clatter and lay on the tile floor. He should have followed it with the notebook, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. Couldn't fling the pure white innocence of those pages, couldn't crumple or mangle or destroy them.
So he lay back down on the bed, forgetting his earlier thoughts of readiness now that he knew what they wanted from him. His feet splayed out and the tightness in his lower back relaxed, and he took deep breaths with his fingertips resting lightly against his belly, slipped up under the hem of his shirt. In his mind he tried to formulate a plan, but the only things he thought of were things from the books he'd read: tesseracts and rabbits and murder.
Sometime later, a breathless scream roused him. He sat up, awake and ready, wrenched from his dreams so fast it made him sick. He held his breath, waiting for another scream as the echoes of the first died away. But another scream didn't come. It didn't need to. He knew it was Kate, and he knew it was meant for him. To make him give them what they wanted.
He scowled down at the pen lying on the tile floor. It would be such a small thing, to give in. He hated them for not threatening him directly. If it was him they hurt or planned to kill, Sawyer could have lived with it easily. It would have been no trouble to keep his lips silent and his hands still. He would willingly die for something so trivial as not giving them what they wanted.
But they had Kate and Jack, and would use them. Sawyer wondered what the Others were asking of Kate and Jack. He knew they wouldn't give in. Not even when the Others tortured him so they would hear his screams. They hated him, just like everyone on this island hated him, because that had been his goal, his one true desire. They wouldn't hate him for not saving them now. They'd expect it. Expect him to be selfish.
But they would also expect him to be weak and disloyal, which was what collaborating with the enemy was. He figured Jack could hang him for treason later, when they got out of this mess, and he didn't much care. He'd deserve it and Jack would enjoy it. For a moment he closed his eyes and let himself imagine Jack, earnest brown eyes enraged, body heated and tense and right up against Sawyer's as he screamed at him, because that's what Jack would do. A delicious shudder flowed through him, a trembling that seized his shoulders and disappeared when he opened his eyes. Let Jack be angry with him later, so long as they all survived this now.
Sawyer picked up the pen.
He brushed his thumb against the page. He could almost feel the thin blue lines. They reminded him of the letter he'd carried with him for so many years. A testament to the pain and suffering in his life. Those few words on the page had given him strength and determination. They had made him the man he was today. Words were powerful; they had created Sawyer out of a little boy named James.
Time to write another testament.
Everything that's happened since you came to this island. That was what they wanted from him. He gripped the pen and watched the ink flow out, into the awkward patterns of his rusty handwriting. How long had it been? Sixty days, seventy? And before that, what had he ever written besides a name that wasn't even his? Signing checks that would bounce and fraudulent credit slips and hotel registers.
He flashed on the police station, the morning of the crash. Signing for his things. Signing a statement he was barred from ever returning to their precious continent. And signing for the plane ticket that doomed him. He hadn't done it in Sawyer's name. No, his fingerprints had betrayed him and all those dubious riches were granted to him under the name he'd been born with, a name as worthless as the man who'd answered to it before him. His daddy's name.
"The plane crashed," he wrote, on the first line of the first page of the empty notebook. He wrote it and looked at it and wondered what else to say. The plane crashed. There was nothing else to say.
He closed the notebook. The silence rung in his ears. There would be more screams. It was a question of when. But he could do no more, even though he wanted to. Sawyer wanted to save them. He wanted to save everybody. But whenever he tried to be a hero, he not only failed, he made things worse.
He lay back down on the bed, this time curling into a tense ball with his knees drawn in to his chest protectively. They would be back soon, and he would be the one made to scream because Jack and Kate wouldn't do what they wanted them to do. He knew they never would, and wondered what their assignments were. If this whole thing was just some fucking game to someone with more power than he had.
The words to write in the notebook wouldn't come to him, but he remembered the crash. He knew some of them didn't, though he didn't know how he knew since the subject never came up. It was something they had all survived together. There was no need for discussion.
In a way, it was denial. It didn't change their reality, stranded helpless on this island, but without words it hadn't happened. The way no mention of his parents' lives or deaths had crossed his lips for decades. When he was a kid, the people around him knew the story. They'd ask and be met with stony silence. Hibbs was the first person he told, going on twenty years later, and then only because he'd wanted something he couldn't get on his own.
Sawyer flung himself up from the bed and paced, but still his mind wouldn't quit. So he got down on the floor and started doing push-ups, the way you heard prisoners did so they'd be ready for escape. He would be ready. The motion and the exertion calmed his thoughts, until all he was aware of was his harsh breath and sweat burning his eyes and pain.
The man came back. The small man with the deceptively timid expression and bruised face. Sawyer wondered why they didn't send the man who'd shot him on the raft. Sawyer wanted to get his hands on him, and his absence let Sawyer think perhaps he was afraid. Afraid of what Sawyer would do. If they knew it made Sawyer feel powerful, they would have sent him instead of this man.
"You didn't write much," he said, looking down his nose at the notebook.
Sawyer just looked at him, mouth set and refusing to speak.
"But you did write something," the man said. "That shows you have a willingness to cooperate." He sighed. "I was hoping not to have to hurt her again."
"What did you ask them to do?" Sawyer's voice came out rough and soft.
"She knows, you know," he continued, as though Sawyer hadn't spoken. That made Sawyer angry. He'd broken his determination not to speak, only to be ignored. "She knows that when we hurt her, it's because of you."
"Good," said Sawyer, and he meant it. Jack and Kate wouldn't cooperate. She'd be proud of him. She'd hate him, too. He tried to think of her in pain and it made him falter. She'd try to be brave, and he'd seen her try to be brave, but he knew she was small and soft and in need of protection. He'd felt her wracked with sobs in his arms and he'd pressed his lips against her hair when she was terrified. He wondered what they'd do to her, and imagined her face pale and tear-streaked.
"Maybe we can get her to scream your name," the man said. His eyebrow rose. "But you'd like that, wouldn't you?"
He twitched with the urge to react, to pummel this little man into the tile floor. He could do it before anyone knew, before help could come. But now was not the time. He needed a plan before he acted, and he didn't have one yet. He'd wasted so much time.
"Jack's giving us what we want," the man added.
"I don't believe you." Jack was stronger than Sawyer. He would never surrender.
"I guess he loves her more than you do," the man said, taunting him. "And she knows it, too." He put his hand on Sawyer's shoulder and Sawyer recoiled. "Think about it." He moved toward the door.
"What about her?" Sawyer asked.
The man smiled, and it was creepy. "She's only here because of you. And him. We've asked nothing of her. If you give us what we want, she's of no use to us. She can go free." He tapped softly on the door. It opened and he slipped outside, leaving Sawyer alone and once again locked up tight.
He knew it was lies.
That didn't stop him from considering it. Kate free. Sunlight, and fresh air. Running through the jungle, back to the beach. Coming back to save them. Free, instead of tied up, locked up, and being tortured because of him.
Whenever he tried to help, he only made things worse. "Damn," Sawyer said softly to himself, and with one finger turned the notebook at an angle. The plane crashed. Then what happened?
He picked up the pen and listened to his breath in the silence. Then what happened? A man running around that he now knew to be Jack, and explosions, and screaming. Sawyer himself was dazed and unhurt. He put his hands into his pockets and realized what he wanted had been left in the wreckage somewhere. Looking down, staggering between bodies and pieces of debris, he saw a familiar red and white box. He picked it up without thinking and only later, after he'd smoked cigarette after cigarette in a long desperate chain, realized he'd taken the pack from the pocket of a dead passenger. Someone who might have been sitting right beside him. Someone who had minutes before been breathing and alive. Someone who deserved to live more than he did.
If he wrote, they wouldn't hurt her. They'd set her free. He set the end of the pen against his closed lips, thinking about betrayal. Then he put it to the paper and gave them what they wanted.
It must have been hours later that he paused. Blue ink smeared the heel of his cramped hand and his eyes burned from the strain. The pages in the notebook crinkled, brittle with the grooves of words he'd carved into them. He closed his eyes, drained with the effort it had taken, not only to remember but to get it out. With the strain of doing the wrong thing.
When she screamed, he was staring at the words pressed into the side of his hand, backwards and blurred but words nonetheless. One of them was her name. The other was the name she screamed. Not his name. Jack.
"That bastard," he muttered, but there was little surprised behind it. Of course he'd lied. Of course he had. Sawyer knew it and he'd complied anyway. Jack was the hero but he hadn't protected her, and she would love him more for it. Sawyer ripped the pages from the notebook but realized the futility of it and let them flutter to the floor around him.
They were still there when the man returned. Sawyer had lost his sense of time, but he thought it was the next morning. That would make it three days that'd they'd been here. Only three. Sawyer sat on the bed, in the same posture he'd assumed on the first day, the first time the man had entered this prison, and he didn't raise his head. He watched through the ends of his hair as the man gathered the pages. He would put them in order. He would read them. Read Sawyer's words. Know his thoughts. Own them.
He turned over the last page, only half-filled, and looked at Sawyer. "Did you finish?"
"No, but I'm done," Sawyer said.
The man sat down on the bed next to him. "You're upset because I lied to you. I thought you might be."
"No," Sawyer said. He knew he'd been lied to, from the outset. It was everything else. His own betrayal, as usual, was born from his desire to do the right thing.
"You've done a good thing here. A valuable thing," the man told him, as though Sawyer cared. As though he wanted to be congratulated. The man stood up. "You can go."
"What?" He raised his head.
"You may go," the man repeated. The door stood open behind him, and he made no move to block it. His expression was sincere, the way it had been when he gave Michael and Walt the boat and promised them safe passage. "You'd be a fool to refuse," he added. But Sawyer knew he was a fool. "You've given us what we needed. You're free to leave."
"What about her?"
"She stays," the man replied.
"Dontcha want to use me to torture her?" Sawyer offered.
"I told you before. She has nothing we want. She's only useful to us as a tool. A voice. When he gives in, she'll be free to go."
"He'll never give in," Sawyer said. He knew Jack.
The man smiled. Sawyer had forgotten the way it looked, the way it made the air seem cold. "We'll see," he said confidently.
Sawyer gave a nod and got to his feet. He wanted to fight his way out. Being allowed to leave was shameful. It made him feel pathetic. The man stood aside, and Sawyer ducked his head as he walked out of the cell.
Instantly he was ambushed. From behind, his hands were seized and a cloth bag was wrestled over his head. He struggled and they forced him to his knees, which hit the cement floor painfully. But he knew he hadn't been lied to again; he would be set free. Dumped off in the middle of the jungle somewhere with no way of finding his way back here to rescue them.
The needle scratched his skin as he fought against them, strong hands everywhere, holding him down against the floor. There was only one thing he could do, and that was scream. "Do it, Jack," he shouted. "Do it and they'll let her go. They're not lying --" A hand closed over his throat just as the drug from the needle took hold and pulled him quickly into the void of unconsciousness.
He came to with his head and entire body throbbing. He lay facedown in the same clearing where he'd fallen when they'd been attacked. Sawyer moaned as he rolled over. The sun overhead burned his eyes as he looked into it. He hoped for a moment it wasn't real. Or that they'd heeded his advice and that when he managed to get to his feet, Jack and Kate would be there too. Safe instead of in need of a rescue he couldn't provide.
He said their names and there was no reply. He wondered if it would be better to lie there in the soft grass than to return to the beach alone. He didn't want to go back without them. He wanted to be the hero. He wanted to save them. But here he was, still a coward, bearing the smears of blue ink on his hand to prove it.
This was all some sick game. They probably hadn't even wanted him in the first place, just toyed with him because he was there and because they could. It had been Jack and Kate they wanted all along and he was just excess baggage. That wasn't hard for Sawyer to believe, and not just because it might ease his guilty conscience.
He got to his feet and looked behind him to see if he was still alone. He was. He started back for the beach. Someone there would know what to do. Someone there would save them. Jack would have the chance to look at him again with disgust in his eyes, hand curled into an unused fist because Sawyer wasn't even worth hitting. Kate would turn away from him again, remembering it was Jack's name that she screamed, and how that made Jack a hero. All this time on the island had done nothing to change him, so with his head hung low, he began the long walk home.
End.
Spoilers: Through "Live Together, Die Alone."
Using for psych_30 #6, Inferiority Complex, and fanfic100 #77, What?
Summary: What they want from Sawyer are words.
Ink
by eponine119
June 9-10, 2006
He was in another hatch. A small room, with smooth windowless walls and cool air that smelled faintly of earth because it was underground. He sat on the bed because lying on it made him feel vulnerable. Stretched out he might relax. Sitting up, with shoulders tense and feet gripping the tile floor, he could spring into action.
It wasn't a bunk bed, like in the other hatch. A small table sat beside it, with a chair made of metal and heavier than it looked. A quick tug at the door and he knew it was locked.
They had him right where they wanted him. So he sat, waiting, and eventually they came.
When he heard the soft voices through the door, he thought it might be Jack and Kate coming to his rescue. He scowled, even as he longed for it, because he could take care of himself but taking care of himself had gotten him here. Alone, and captured, and separated from his group. He closed his eyes as the key scraped against the lock. Jack and Kate -- his group? Come on. He'd traded one enemy for another, that's all. He knew how to survive.
He raised his eyes but not his head when the door opened. He knew that the bruised man standing there had been held prisoner by Jack in their hatch, much as Sawyer was being held now. There was no one beside him; the woman whose voice he'd heard had gone.
"They won't trade anyone for me," Sawyer said. His voice sounded hoarse to his own ears, rough and unused. He realized he was thirsty.
"I don't want a trade," the man said. His calm voice and eyes mesmerized Sawyer momentarily. The lack of anger was so unfamiliar. "I got what I wanted."
Sawyer pressed his lips together and waited to hear more. Not giving him the satisfaction of asking, because Sawyer knew he wanted him to ask. Sawyer also knew he wasn't what this man had wanted.
The man walked to the desk. Sawyer kept his head down, hair shielding his eyes so the man wouldn't know his every move was being watched intently. The drawer rasped as he pulled it out. From inside he withdrew a notebook and a ballpoint pen, items so mundane Sawyer almost wanted to laugh. Almost because he'd seen a mountain of those notebooks back on another part of this creepy fucking island. Even as his stomach turned, he felt his fingers curl with the desire to open that notebook -- any of the notebooks from that pile -- and read. Bury himself in someone else's words. Escape even this locked room, for as long as it lasted.
But when the man flipped open the notebook to the first page, Sawyer saw that it was blank and unused. His spirits fell a little. There would be no easy escape. The man turned to him, with a tiny little smile. Sawyer slid his jaw, ground his teeth a little harder. Whatever this man wanted, he wasn't going to get.
"I want you to write down everything that's happened since you came to this island," the man said. "Sparing no detail."
Sawyer didn't have to say no; his look said it for him.
The man took the cap from the tip of the ballpoint pen and replaced it on the other end. "Sparing no detail," he repeated carefully.
"Or what?"
"Or your friends will die." He set the pen down on the blank sheet of notebook paper.
Sawyer sighed. "I never had a friend in my life." Even as he said it, the words rang back in his ears and heated the skin of his face. He told Jack he was a friend. He also told Jack being a friend got you killed, only not in so many words.
"You'd have them die?" the man asked him. "Rather than share a few paltry recollections with me?" Sawyer said nothing. "Perhaps you'll change your mind."
He walked out of the room, and the door locked tight behind him. Sawyer dug his hands through his hair, staring at the notebook and the pen. Then he turned away, determined to ignore them. He wasn't going to give that man anything he wanted, not one single thing.
But he had to get up. Stagger to his feet and run his fingers desperately through the pages, just to be sure that they were all blank. He needed an out, he needed an escape, as much as he'd needed a cigarette after that fuck, as much as he'd needed anything in his entire life.
They were blank. He'd picked up the pen to rifle the pages and it felt natural in his hand, holding it in a loose writing grip out of habit. It was such a small thing, yet with so much power inside it. All he had to do was tighten his fingers, press its tip to the page, give in.
But he'd die before he was complicit, so he threw the pen across the room as hard as he could. It bounced off the wall with a pathetically small clatter and lay on the tile floor. He should have followed it with the notebook, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. Couldn't fling the pure white innocence of those pages, couldn't crumple or mangle or destroy them.
So he lay back down on the bed, forgetting his earlier thoughts of readiness now that he knew what they wanted from him. His feet splayed out and the tightness in his lower back relaxed, and he took deep breaths with his fingertips resting lightly against his belly, slipped up under the hem of his shirt. In his mind he tried to formulate a plan, but the only things he thought of were things from the books he'd read: tesseracts and rabbits and murder.
Sometime later, a breathless scream roused him. He sat up, awake and ready, wrenched from his dreams so fast it made him sick. He held his breath, waiting for another scream as the echoes of the first died away. But another scream didn't come. It didn't need to. He knew it was Kate, and he knew it was meant for him. To make him give them what they wanted.
He scowled down at the pen lying on the tile floor. It would be such a small thing, to give in. He hated them for not threatening him directly. If it was him they hurt or planned to kill, Sawyer could have lived with it easily. It would have been no trouble to keep his lips silent and his hands still. He would willingly die for something so trivial as not giving them what they wanted.
But they had Kate and Jack, and would use them. Sawyer wondered what the Others were asking of Kate and Jack. He knew they wouldn't give in. Not even when the Others tortured him so they would hear his screams. They hated him, just like everyone on this island hated him, because that had been his goal, his one true desire. They wouldn't hate him for not saving them now. They'd expect it. Expect him to be selfish.
But they would also expect him to be weak and disloyal, which was what collaborating with the enemy was. He figured Jack could hang him for treason later, when they got out of this mess, and he didn't much care. He'd deserve it and Jack would enjoy it. For a moment he closed his eyes and let himself imagine Jack, earnest brown eyes enraged, body heated and tense and right up against Sawyer's as he screamed at him, because that's what Jack would do. A delicious shudder flowed through him, a trembling that seized his shoulders and disappeared when he opened his eyes. Let Jack be angry with him later, so long as they all survived this now.
Sawyer picked up the pen.
He brushed his thumb against the page. He could almost feel the thin blue lines. They reminded him of the letter he'd carried with him for so many years. A testament to the pain and suffering in his life. Those few words on the page had given him strength and determination. They had made him the man he was today. Words were powerful; they had created Sawyer out of a little boy named James.
Time to write another testament.
Everything that's happened since you came to this island. That was what they wanted from him. He gripped the pen and watched the ink flow out, into the awkward patterns of his rusty handwriting. How long had it been? Sixty days, seventy? And before that, what had he ever written besides a name that wasn't even his? Signing checks that would bounce and fraudulent credit slips and hotel registers.
He flashed on the police station, the morning of the crash. Signing for his things. Signing a statement he was barred from ever returning to their precious continent. And signing for the plane ticket that doomed him. He hadn't done it in Sawyer's name. No, his fingerprints had betrayed him and all those dubious riches were granted to him under the name he'd been born with, a name as worthless as the man who'd answered to it before him. His daddy's name.
"The plane crashed," he wrote, on the first line of the first page of the empty notebook. He wrote it and looked at it and wondered what else to say. The plane crashed. There was nothing else to say.
He closed the notebook. The silence rung in his ears. There would be more screams. It was a question of when. But he could do no more, even though he wanted to. Sawyer wanted to save them. He wanted to save everybody. But whenever he tried to be a hero, he not only failed, he made things worse.
He lay back down on the bed, this time curling into a tense ball with his knees drawn in to his chest protectively. They would be back soon, and he would be the one made to scream because Jack and Kate wouldn't do what they wanted them to do. He knew they never would, and wondered what their assignments were. If this whole thing was just some fucking game to someone with more power than he had.
The words to write in the notebook wouldn't come to him, but he remembered the crash. He knew some of them didn't, though he didn't know how he knew since the subject never came up. It was something they had all survived together. There was no need for discussion.
In a way, it was denial. It didn't change their reality, stranded helpless on this island, but without words it hadn't happened. The way no mention of his parents' lives or deaths had crossed his lips for decades. When he was a kid, the people around him knew the story. They'd ask and be met with stony silence. Hibbs was the first person he told, going on twenty years later, and then only because he'd wanted something he couldn't get on his own.
Sawyer flung himself up from the bed and paced, but still his mind wouldn't quit. So he got down on the floor and started doing push-ups, the way you heard prisoners did so they'd be ready for escape. He would be ready. The motion and the exertion calmed his thoughts, until all he was aware of was his harsh breath and sweat burning his eyes and pain.
The man came back. The small man with the deceptively timid expression and bruised face. Sawyer wondered why they didn't send the man who'd shot him on the raft. Sawyer wanted to get his hands on him, and his absence let Sawyer think perhaps he was afraid. Afraid of what Sawyer would do. If they knew it made Sawyer feel powerful, they would have sent him instead of this man.
"You didn't write much," he said, looking down his nose at the notebook.
Sawyer just looked at him, mouth set and refusing to speak.
"But you did write something," the man said. "That shows you have a willingness to cooperate." He sighed. "I was hoping not to have to hurt her again."
"What did you ask them to do?" Sawyer's voice came out rough and soft.
"She knows, you know," he continued, as though Sawyer hadn't spoken. That made Sawyer angry. He'd broken his determination not to speak, only to be ignored. "She knows that when we hurt her, it's because of you."
"Good," said Sawyer, and he meant it. Jack and Kate wouldn't cooperate. She'd be proud of him. She'd hate him, too. He tried to think of her in pain and it made him falter. She'd try to be brave, and he'd seen her try to be brave, but he knew she was small and soft and in need of protection. He'd felt her wracked with sobs in his arms and he'd pressed his lips against her hair when she was terrified. He wondered what they'd do to her, and imagined her face pale and tear-streaked.
"Maybe we can get her to scream your name," the man said. His eyebrow rose. "But you'd like that, wouldn't you?"
He twitched with the urge to react, to pummel this little man into the tile floor. He could do it before anyone knew, before help could come. But now was not the time. He needed a plan before he acted, and he didn't have one yet. He'd wasted so much time.
"Jack's giving us what we want," the man added.
"I don't believe you." Jack was stronger than Sawyer. He would never surrender.
"I guess he loves her more than you do," the man said, taunting him. "And she knows it, too." He put his hand on Sawyer's shoulder and Sawyer recoiled. "Think about it." He moved toward the door.
"What about her?" Sawyer asked.
The man smiled, and it was creepy. "She's only here because of you. And him. We've asked nothing of her. If you give us what we want, she's of no use to us. She can go free." He tapped softly on the door. It opened and he slipped outside, leaving Sawyer alone and once again locked up tight.
He knew it was lies.
That didn't stop him from considering it. Kate free. Sunlight, and fresh air. Running through the jungle, back to the beach. Coming back to save them. Free, instead of tied up, locked up, and being tortured because of him.
Whenever he tried to help, he only made things worse. "Damn," Sawyer said softly to himself, and with one finger turned the notebook at an angle. The plane crashed. Then what happened?
He picked up the pen and listened to his breath in the silence. Then what happened? A man running around that he now knew to be Jack, and explosions, and screaming. Sawyer himself was dazed and unhurt. He put his hands into his pockets and realized what he wanted had been left in the wreckage somewhere. Looking down, staggering between bodies and pieces of debris, he saw a familiar red and white box. He picked it up without thinking and only later, after he'd smoked cigarette after cigarette in a long desperate chain, realized he'd taken the pack from the pocket of a dead passenger. Someone who might have been sitting right beside him. Someone who had minutes before been breathing and alive. Someone who deserved to live more than he did.
If he wrote, they wouldn't hurt her. They'd set her free. He set the end of the pen against his closed lips, thinking about betrayal. Then he put it to the paper and gave them what they wanted.
It must have been hours later that he paused. Blue ink smeared the heel of his cramped hand and his eyes burned from the strain. The pages in the notebook crinkled, brittle with the grooves of words he'd carved into them. He closed his eyes, drained with the effort it had taken, not only to remember but to get it out. With the strain of doing the wrong thing.
When she screamed, he was staring at the words pressed into the side of his hand, backwards and blurred but words nonetheless. One of them was her name. The other was the name she screamed. Not his name. Jack.
"That bastard," he muttered, but there was little surprised behind it. Of course he'd lied. Of course he had. Sawyer knew it and he'd complied anyway. Jack was the hero but he hadn't protected her, and she would love him more for it. Sawyer ripped the pages from the notebook but realized the futility of it and let them flutter to the floor around him.
They were still there when the man returned. Sawyer had lost his sense of time, but he thought it was the next morning. That would make it three days that'd they'd been here. Only three. Sawyer sat on the bed, in the same posture he'd assumed on the first day, the first time the man had entered this prison, and he didn't raise his head. He watched through the ends of his hair as the man gathered the pages. He would put them in order. He would read them. Read Sawyer's words. Know his thoughts. Own them.
He turned over the last page, only half-filled, and looked at Sawyer. "Did you finish?"
"No, but I'm done," Sawyer said.
The man sat down on the bed next to him. "You're upset because I lied to you. I thought you might be."
"No," Sawyer said. He knew he'd been lied to, from the outset. It was everything else. His own betrayal, as usual, was born from his desire to do the right thing.
"You've done a good thing here. A valuable thing," the man told him, as though Sawyer cared. As though he wanted to be congratulated. The man stood up. "You can go."
"What?" He raised his head.
"You may go," the man repeated. The door stood open behind him, and he made no move to block it. His expression was sincere, the way it had been when he gave Michael and Walt the boat and promised them safe passage. "You'd be a fool to refuse," he added. But Sawyer knew he was a fool. "You've given us what we needed. You're free to leave."
"What about her?"
"She stays," the man replied.
"Dontcha want to use me to torture her?" Sawyer offered.
"I told you before. She has nothing we want. She's only useful to us as a tool. A voice. When he gives in, she'll be free to go."
"He'll never give in," Sawyer said. He knew Jack.
The man smiled. Sawyer had forgotten the way it looked, the way it made the air seem cold. "We'll see," he said confidently.
Sawyer gave a nod and got to his feet. He wanted to fight his way out. Being allowed to leave was shameful. It made him feel pathetic. The man stood aside, and Sawyer ducked his head as he walked out of the cell.
Instantly he was ambushed. From behind, his hands were seized and a cloth bag was wrestled over his head. He struggled and they forced him to his knees, which hit the cement floor painfully. But he knew he hadn't been lied to again; he would be set free. Dumped off in the middle of the jungle somewhere with no way of finding his way back here to rescue them.
The needle scratched his skin as he fought against them, strong hands everywhere, holding him down against the floor. There was only one thing he could do, and that was scream. "Do it, Jack," he shouted. "Do it and they'll let her go. They're not lying --" A hand closed over his throat just as the drug from the needle took hold and pulled him quickly into the void of unconsciousness.
He came to with his head and entire body throbbing. He lay facedown in the same clearing where he'd fallen when they'd been attacked. Sawyer moaned as he rolled over. The sun overhead burned his eyes as he looked into it. He hoped for a moment it wasn't real. Or that they'd heeded his advice and that when he managed to get to his feet, Jack and Kate would be there too. Safe instead of in need of a rescue he couldn't provide.
He said their names and there was no reply. He wondered if it would be better to lie there in the soft grass than to return to the beach alone. He didn't want to go back without them. He wanted to be the hero. He wanted to save them. But here he was, still a coward, bearing the smears of blue ink on his hand to prove it.
This was all some sick game. They probably hadn't even wanted him in the first place, just toyed with him because he was there and because they could. It had been Jack and Kate they wanted all along and he was just excess baggage. That wasn't hard for Sawyer to believe, and not just because it might ease his guilty conscience.
He got to his feet and looked behind him to see if he was still alone. He was. He started back for the beach. Someone there would know what to do. Someone there would save them. Jack would have the chance to look at him again with disgust in his eyes, hand curled into an unused fist because Sawyer wasn't even worth hitting. Kate would turn away from him again, remembering it was Jack's name that she screamed, and how that made Jack a hero. All this time on the island had done nothing to change him, so with his head hung low, he began the long walk home.
End.