Fic: Apparitions (Jack/Sawyer)
Title: Apparitions
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Jack feels like he’s been kicked in the gut, and in the head. The air has all but left his lungs, and his brain has lost the ability to form words.
Disclaimer: I do not own Lost. At all. I wish but alas...
Author's Note: It has been five months to the day (yay, crazy huh?) since my last Jack/Sawyer fic. It's good to be back, I've got to admit. This fic was inspired by something that demonqueen666 said. It's set during 'Something Nice Back Home', but has spoilers for 'There's No Place Like Home Parts Two and Three'.
Jack feels him before he sees him. Something shoots straight up his spine and his eyes close immediately. He doesn’t want to open them - doesn’t want to see him. He wants that smoke alarm to start beeping again and drown out everything that he might say. He knows it’s him, feels it’s him. He doesn’t need to turn around, doesn’t want to, but he does.
“Ain’t you even gonna say ‘hi’, doc?” he asks, cigarette between his fingers and a smug smile on his face. Sawyer hasn’t heard that nickname in his voice in years, and in that moment, he feels every day they’ve been apart. He can’t say hello. He can’t say anything. He can’t even believe what he’s seeing, hearing, feeling. It’s like he’s walking around in a dream. A disturbing, unwelcome, frightening dream.
“What are you doing here?” is what Jack eventually says. He’s trying very hard not to fall to pieces, or throw up, because he feel like he’s about to do both. He feels like he’s going crazy. He thinks of Hurley, in the asylum, talking about Charlie and how he sees him every day. Jack wonders, at that moment, if he doesn’t belong in the room right next to him.
“What, I can’t drop in and say hey?” Sawyer asks. He sounds exactly the way Jack remembers him, and Jack takes that as a sign that maybe he is losing his mind. That maybe his mind is somehow showing him what he wants to see, what he remembers exactly how he remembers it. For all he knows, he’s talking to nothingness.
“You aren’t here,” Jack replies. At least logic is ruling his mouth, if not his brain. Sawyer just chuckles and grabs the ashtray off of the coffee table in front of him. He puts out his cigarette and climbs from the couch. He’s wearing jeans and the shirt that he had been wearing when Jack had last seen him, plummeting into the ocean. The one that Jack had found, inexplicably, when the chopper had gone down. The one he was wearing when they were finally rescued. The one that was in his drawer at Kate’s house, folded inside another shirt, hidden from everyone but him.
“Really?” Sawyer replies, as if everything about Jack, and what’s he’s saying, is the most amusing thing he’s ever seen or heard. “ ‘Cause it really seems like I am, what with you talkin’ to me and all.”
“You’re not here,” Jack repeats. He wants to step back as Sawyer approaches, but he can’t make his legs move. “I’m just…seeing what I want to see.”
“Aw, you wanna see me? How sweet,” Sawyer replies. Jack’s frown deepens and that makes Sawyer smile even wider. Jack doesn’t think anything could ever change that. Jack’s exasperation will always bring Sawyer and endless amount of joy. “I’m here, Jack.”
There’s an earnestness to Sawyer’s voice that sets Jack back a bit. He could reach out and touch Sawyer to confirm that fact, but he doesn’t. He stands, perfectly still, keeps his hands at his sides, even though they’re balled into a fist. As much as he wants confirmation that it’s really Sawyer in front of him, he doesn’t want confirmation that it’s not. He can’t trust anything right now.
“You’re on the island,” Jack tells him. Wherever that is…
Sawyer shrugs. “That too,” he answers. It’s all so infuriating that Jack would shove him if he were really here. His fingernails are digging into his palms almost hard enough to draw blood.
“What do you want from me, Sawyer?” Jack asks, feeling infuriated, defeated, tired, confused, and about a thousand different emotions all at once. Jack has thought so many times, what it would be like to see Sawyer again, what he would say if that day ever came. He can’t believe that this is it, that this is the real Sawyer and not his mind playing tricks on him. The things he has to say, he will say to the flesh-and-blood Sawyer. He won’t accept any substitutes. Period.
“I want you to come back,” Sawyer answers.
Jack laughs, bitterly. “Back where?” he answers, which he means literally. Even if he wanted to, where would he go? He wouldn’t even know where to begin looking. “I…the only way we can protect you…protect the people we left behind is to keep our mouths shut about what happened and go about our lives. It’s better this way.”
“Is it?” Sawyer asks. Jack’s train of thought stops dead. Is it? The question echoes in his mind. Is it better this way? Better with Kate than with Sawyer? Better raising his half-sister’s child than being alone? Better marrying a woman he loves but doesn’t completely trust? Is it really a better life that they have now, or does he just want it to be?
“Kate and I are getting married,” he blurts out, stupidly. He thinks, vainly, that maybe it’ll make this apparition of Sawyer go away, that maybe he dreamed him up because he’s scared of getting married and he’s using Sawyer as a way to talk himself out of it, dredging up past memories and unfulfilled desires to make him think twice. “We’re…happy. So, yes. It’s better.”
It’s a lie. He doesn’t think that life is worse (it couldn’t possibly be) but better? No. It isn’t that either. Sawyer smiles wryly. He knows Jack is lying. He used to be able to bluff better than this.
“Well, good for you, doc,” he replies. “But you’re a damn liar. And having the wife and the kid and the picket fence and the mini-van ain’t gonna change anything. It ain’t gonna change the fact that you’re pretending every minute of the day, that you’re livin’ a lie, and that you think about all the people you left behind on that island every minute of the day, and it eats you up that you’re tryin’ to forget ‘em.”
“You mean forget you,” Jack says. There’s a bite to it, but the meaning Jack was going for doesn’t register on Sawyer’s face. He wasn’t sure if it would if Sawyer were real either.
“Yeah, me,” Sawyer answers. “You loved me.”
“You loved me,” Jack counters, like that makes Sawyer’s point any less valid, like that proves some twisted point he’s trying to make, like he’s saying ‘you loved me first’, like that means he wins somehow. When did everything, even love, get to be a competition between him and Sawyer in his mind.
“Still do,” Sawyer answers, evenly. Jack’s eyes go wide; he can’t stop them. “That’s why I’m here, talkin’ to your stubborn ass.”
“What?” Jack asks, suddenly gone stupid. Sawyer’s words hit him upside the head, the way they’ve been doing all evening, but they’re stronger now, more powerful. It takes all the energy Jack has not to fall over on the floor.
“I could tell you you weren’t supposed to leave the island, and that’s true,” Sawyer says. “I could tell you you all need to come back, and you do. But that ain’t why I’m here. I’m here to tell you you need to come back for me.”
Jack feels like he’s been kicked in the gut, and in the head. The air has all but left his lungs, and his brain has lost the ability to form words. His head is swimming and all he can do is shake his head with his mouth hung open. This isn’t Sawyer, hell tells himself. This isn’t real. But he wants it to be, God how he wants it to be. He wants Sawyer to be saying these things to him. He wants to be able to touch him without feeling like he will disappear like the mirage he is.
But Jack can’t smell his scent, or the cigarette he had been smoking, even though it seemed to have set off the alarm. He can’t feel anything beyond his presence. Sawyer isn’t real and he in’t here. But he’s saying all of the things that Jack had laid awake at night thinking about. And he’s standing in front of him, looking exactly like he had the last time Jack had seen him. It’s so tempting to believe.
“I don’t even know where you are,” Jack says, weakly. Because he is weak. His logic crumbles to dust around him, and he wants to fall into Sawyer. But he can’t.
“So start lookin’, Columbus,” Sawyer replies. “You’re bound to stumble across the New World eventually.” He winks. Jack laughs. He can’t help it. The absurdity of the situation has caught up with him, and he dimly remembers that talking to ones self is supposedly the surest sign of madness. Jack thinks that talking to yourself and believing in the things that you’re mind has created is an even surer sign.
“I have a life,” Jack says, thinking of Kate and of Aaron, and of the little home they’ve built around them. It’s everything that he’s supposed to want. And instead he’s talking to a man he hasn’t seen in three years and seriously considering following him back to the one place he never wants to see again as long as he lives.
“You could have a better one with me,” Sawyer answers. Jack’s eyes close. He’s had that thought before, when he’s been awake in the middle of the night, laying next to Kate. He thinks about what it would have been like if Sawyer hadn’t jumped off the helicopter, if they would have stayed together or fallen apart, if they would have a life as good as, or possibly better than, the one he has now. The ‘what ifs’ are what haunt him. He doesn’t need to add ‘what if we were wrong to leave’ to the pile.
“I wish you were here,” Jack confesses.
“I am here, you jackass,” Sawyer replies, like he’s amazed by the fact that Jack doesn’t get it yet. “God, you are the dumbest smart guy I have ever known.”
“Okay, say I believe this,” Jack says, in a tone of voice that makes it very clear he’s humoring Sawyer. “You’re telling me that you’re here and on the island, when it is a scientific impossibility to be in two places at once.”
“It’s also a scientific impossibility for an entire island to vanish into the damned sea and pop up somewhere else,” Sawyer comes back. “But hell if that didn’t happen too.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Yeah, you do,” Sawyer replies, knowingly. “You don’t want to, but you do. Just like you don’t wanna admit that I’m here, or that you miss me, or that you love me, or that you really want nothing more than to be wherever it is I am.”
Jack sighs. He is so. damned. tired.
“I’m marrying Kate,” he says, as if that proves his point. He says it firmly, like he believes it’s the right thing to do. Hurley says he’s not supposed to raise Aaron, that they weren’t supposed to leave the island, that wants them to come back. Well fuck the island and what it wants, and whatever the hell that means.
“Sure you are,” Sawyer answers. Jack goes from wanting to pull him close to wanting to punch him in the nose within a second flat.
“God, you are so infuriating!”
“It’s part of my charm.”
“Do you think you’re funny?”
“I’m hilarious, doc,” Sawyer says, smugly and Jack shakes his head and turns away. His head is splitting in two.
“You expect me to just randomly sail the ocean looking for an island I swore to god I would never walk on again as long as I lived just because we ‘weren’t supposed to leave’ and ‘we’re all supposed to come back’?”
“God, you don’t listen!” Sawyer yells. “That shit is true, yeah. But that isn’t why I’m here. I could care fucking less if they all come with you, even though they have to. I ain’t Locke. I don’t care what the island wants. I just want you to come back for me. What the hell do I have to do to make you believe it’s really me?”
“Sawyer…” Jack sounds as defeated as he feels. “If you aren’t here, I’m crazy, and I’m making you up, and I’m seeing the things I want to see, and hearing you say the things I want to hear. If you are here…I can’t even make my brain understand what that might mean.”
“I’m here,” Sawyer replies, stubbornly. “So start understandin’.” Jack shakes his head. “Listen, I ain’t got much more time, and I certainly don’t have all night to stand here and try to convince you that you ain’t crazy and that it’s really me, and that every word that comes out of my mouth, I mean. You can ask me when you see me again, and I’ll repeat the damn conversation word for fucking word. So just shut your mouth for a minute and listen. Can you do that, doc?”
What can Jack do but nod? Nothing, really. So he does, and Sawyer takes a deep breath, like he has a speech prepared.
“You can’t bullshit me, Jack. Maybe you used to be able to, sit you down at a poker table, and you can wipe your face blank, but not now. Not after all we’ve done and all we’ve been through. You may not like that, but you know it’s true. And you know marryin’ Kate and trying to live your story-book-happily-ever-after life ain’t gonna make you forget about me, or any of us. I know you, doc. You love me. And I love you. And I want you to come back for me. I ain’t stupid enough to think you’re gonna leave here and rent a boat and scour the earth or anything, but you’ll get there. I know that.”
“Sawyer-”
“Shut up,” Sawyer says, gently. “I don’t care if you believe I’m here, or if you go home thinkin’ you had one hell of a conversation with yourself tonight. I just want you to remember this: you go to bed at night thinkin’ about me, wondering where I am, how I am, what I’m doin’. And I do the same for you. You may lay next to Kate and I may lay in the damn sand, but we’re thinkin’ about the exact same things. You aren’t ready to find me yet, but you want to. And you will. Someday.”
“I’ve wanted to see you again for so long,” Jack tells him. There’s no point in not anymore. There’s no point in holding back, in biting back on everything he wants to say. Logic has abandoned him, and he’s running on pure emotion now. It’s taken over his brain, his mouth.
“Feeling’s mutual, doc,” he answers. “Hope I’ll be seein’ you again sometime soon, but I won’t hold my breath.”
“I…when I walk out those doors tonight, I don’t know what I’m going to believe.”
“I know,” Sawyer replies. “I can wait, though. It’s not like I’ve got anything but time. You’re a stubborn old jackass, but you’ve come around for me before. I can’t help but think this is one of those times you’ll do it again.”
Jack snorts a laugh and shakes his head. This is so surreal.
“You are…” he starts. But he doesn’t know how to finish. There are so many things that Sawyer is. Good things, bad things. Terrifying things. Amazing things. What Sawyer means to him now, at this place in his life, is something Jack tries not to think about (and fails more often than not). But with him, or the apparition of him, standing right in front of him, talking and breathing and smirking and laughing at him like he always does, it’s all he can think about, and all he can’t find the words to say.
Sawyer just shrugged, like he could read Jack’s mind and knew exactly what Jack was thinking. “Yeah,” he answers. “It’s time for me to get along, now, Jack. Even if you think I’m something you dreamed up tomorrow, remember what I said. Just…remember me.”
“Sawyer.”
“Yeah?” he asks.
“You were right,” he says. Even if this isn’t real, Sawyer isn’t real, Jack can say this. He needs to say this. Because it’s true.
“Hell yeah I was,” Sawyer answers, confidently. “But, just out of curiosity, what is it that you suddenly think I’m right about?”
It’s Jack’s turn to smile a bit. Because there’s absolutely nothing sudden about it.
“I love you,” he answers. “I miss you. I think about you all the time.”
Sawyer smiles at that, and there’s something in his eyes. Something…deeper. Something more. Something that goes a lot longer than anything Sawyer has said tonight to convincing Jack that Sawyer might just be real. Because the something in his eyes is something Jack has seen before, something vague that Jack couldn’t conjure up without seeing it first. Something he’d never remember until he saw it again. That something looks real, feels real, is real.
“I know,” Sawyer answers. “I love you too. Remember that.”
Jack opens his mouth to say something, but he blinks, and then Sawyer is gone. A millisecond was how long his eyes had been closed, if that long, but suddenly he’s standing in the lobby all by himself, in the middle of the night, his mind racing a mile a minute.
His feet seem to move of their own accord over to the couches. All he knows is that he needs to sit down before he passes out. He rests his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. He takes several deep breaths. He doesn’t know what to think, so he tries not to think. He just needs to concentrate on breathing, second to second, minute to minute. He takes one last deep breath and lets it go.
When he opens his eyes, he’s looking down at the coffee table. There’s an ashtray right in front of his face, and there is a freshly extinguished cigarette inside of it.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Jack feels like he’s been kicked in the gut, and in the head. The air has all but left his lungs, and his brain has lost the ability to form words.
Disclaimer: I do not own Lost. At all. I wish but alas...
Author's Note: It has been five months to the day (yay, crazy huh?) since my last Jack/Sawyer fic. It's good to be back, I've got to admit. This fic was inspired by something that demonqueen666 said. It's set during 'Something Nice Back Home', but has spoilers for 'There's No Place Like Home Parts Two and Three'.
Jack feels him before he sees him. Something shoots straight up his spine and his eyes close immediately. He doesn’t want to open them - doesn’t want to see him. He wants that smoke alarm to start beeping again and drown out everything that he might say. He knows it’s him, feels it’s him. He doesn’t need to turn around, doesn’t want to, but he does.
“Ain’t you even gonna say ‘hi’, doc?” he asks, cigarette between his fingers and a smug smile on his face. Sawyer hasn’t heard that nickname in his voice in years, and in that moment, he feels every day they’ve been apart. He can’t say hello. He can’t say anything. He can’t even believe what he’s seeing, hearing, feeling. It’s like he’s walking around in a dream. A disturbing, unwelcome, frightening dream.
“What are you doing here?” is what Jack eventually says. He’s trying very hard not to fall to pieces, or throw up, because he feel like he’s about to do both. He feels like he’s going crazy. He thinks of Hurley, in the asylum, talking about Charlie and how he sees him every day. Jack wonders, at that moment, if he doesn’t belong in the room right next to him.
“What, I can’t drop in and say hey?” Sawyer asks. He sounds exactly the way Jack remembers him, and Jack takes that as a sign that maybe he is losing his mind. That maybe his mind is somehow showing him what he wants to see, what he remembers exactly how he remembers it. For all he knows, he’s talking to nothingness.
“You aren’t here,” Jack replies. At least logic is ruling his mouth, if not his brain. Sawyer just chuckles and grabs the ashtray off of the coffee table in front of him. He puts out his cigarette and climbs from the couch. He’s wearing jeans and the shirt that he had been wearing when Jack had last seen him, plummeting into the ocean. The one that Jack had found, inexplicably, when the chopper had gone down. The one he was wearing when they were finally rescued. The one that was in his drawer at Kate’s house, folded inside another shirt, hidden from everyone but him.
“Really?” Sawyer replies, as if everything about Jack, and what’s he’s saying, is the most amusing thing he’s ever seen or heard. “ ‘Cause it really seems like I am, what with you talkin’ to me and all.”
“You’re not here,” Jack repeats. He wants to step back as Sawyer approaches, but he can’t make his legs move. “I’m just…seeing what I want to see.”
“Aw, you wanna see me? How sweet,” Sawyer replies. Jack’s frown deepens and that makes Sawyer smile even wider. Jack doesn’t think anything could ever change that. Jack’s exasperation will always bring Sawyer and endless amount of joy. “I’m here, Jack.”
There’s an earnestness to Sawyer’s voice that sets Jack back a bit. He could reach out and touch Sawyer to confirm that fact, but he doesn’t. He stands, perfectly still, keeps his hands at his sides, even though they’re balled into a fist. As much as he wants confirmation that it’s really Sawyer in front of him, he doesn’t want confirmation that it’s not. He can’t trust anything right now.
“You’re on the island,” Jack tells him. Wherever that is…
Sawyer shrugs. “That too,” he answers. It’s all so infuriating that Jack would shove him if he were really here. His fingernails are digging into his palms almost hard enough to draw blood.
“What do you want from me, Sawyer?” Jack asks, feeling infuriated, defeated, tired, confused, and about a thousand different emotions all at once. Jack has thought so many times, what it would be like to see Sawyer again, what he would say if that day ever came. He can’t believe that this is it, that this is the real Sawyer and not his mind playing tricks on him. The things he has to say, he will say to the flesh-and-blood Sawyer. He won’t accept any substitutes. Period.
“I want you to come back,” Sawyer answers.
Jack laughs, bitterly. “Back where?” he answers, which he means literally. Even if he wanted to, where would he go? He wouldn’t even know where to begin looking. “I…the only way we can protect you…protect the people we left behind is to keep our mouths shut about what happened and go about our lives. It’s better this way.”
“Is it?” Sawyer asks. Jack’s train of thought stops dead. Is it? The question echoes in his mind. Is it better this way? Better with Kate than with Sawyer? Better raising his half-sister’s child than being alone? Better marrying a woman he loves but doesn’t completely trust? Is it really a better life that they have now, or does he just want it to be?
“Kate and I are getting married,” he blurts out, stupidly. He thinks, vainly, that maybe it’ll make this apparition of Sawyer go away, that maybe he dreamed him up because he’s scared of getting married and he’s using Sawyer as a way to talk himself out of it, dredging up past memories and unfulfilled desires to make him think twice. “We’re…happy. So, yes. It’s better.”
It’s a lie. He doesn’t think that life is worse (it couldn’t possibly be) but better? No. It isn’t that either. Sawyer smiles wryly. He knows Jack is lying. He used to be able to bluff better than this.
“Well, good for you, doc,” he replies. “But you’re a damn liar. And having the wife and the kid and the picket fence and the mini-van ain’t gonna change anything. It ain’t gonna change the fact that you’re pretending every minute of the day, that you’re livin’ a lie, and that you think about all the people you left behind on that island every minute of the day, and it eats you up that you’re tryin’ to forget ‘em.”
“You mean forget you,” Jack says. There’s a bite to it, but the meaning Jack was going for doesn’t register on Sawyer’s face. He wasn’t sure if it would if Sawyer were real either.
“Yeah, me,” Sawyer answers. “You loved me.”
“You loved me,” Jack counters, like that makes Sawyer’s point any less valid, like that proves some twisted point he’s trying to make, like he’s saying ‘you loved me first’, like that means he wins somehow. When did everything, even love, get to be a competition between him and Sawyer in his mind.
“Still do,” Sawyer answers, evenly. Jack’s eyes go wide; he can’t stop them. “That’s why I’m here, talkin’ to your stubborn ass.”
“What?” Jack asks, suddenly gone stupid. Sawyer’s words hit him upside the head, the way they’ve been doing all evening, but they’re stronger now, more powerful. It takes all the energy Jack has not to fall over on the floor.
“I could tell you you weren’t supposed to leave the island, and that’s true,” Sawyer says. “I could tell you you all need to come back, and you do. But that ain’t why I’m here. I’m here to tell you you need to come back for me.”
Jack feels like he’s been kicked in the gut, and in the head. The air has all but left his lungs, and his brain has lost the ability to form words. His head is swimming and all he can do is shake his head with his mouth hung open. This isn’t Sawyer, hell tells himself. This isn’t real. But he wants it to be, God how he wants it to be. He wants Sawyer to be saying these things to him. He wants to be able to touch him without feeling like he will disappear like the mirage he is.
But Jack can’t smell his scent, or the cigarette he had been smoking, even though it seemed to have set off the alarm. He can’t feel anything beyond his presence. Sawyer isn’t real and he in’t here. But he’s saying all of the things that Jack had laid awake at night thinking about. And he’s standing in front of him, looking exactly like he had the last time Jack had seen him. It’s so tempting to believe.
“I don’t even know where you are,” Jack says, weakly. Because he is weak. His logic crumbles to dust around him, and he wants to fall into Sawyer. But he can’t.
“So start lookin’, Columbus,” Sawyer replies. “You’re bound to stumble across the New World eventually.” He winks. Jack laughs. He can’t help it. The absurdity of the situation has caught up with him, and he dimly remembers that talking to ones self is supposedly the surest sign of madness. Jack thinks that talking to yourself and believing in the things that you’re mind has created is an even surer sign.
“I have a life,” Jack says, thinking of Kate and of Aaron, and of the little home they’ve built around them. It’s everything that he’s supposed to want. And instead he’s talking to a man he hasn’t seen in three years and seriously considering following him back to the one place he never wants to see again as long as he lives.
“You could have a better one with me,” Sawyer answers. Jack’s eyes close. He’s had that thought before, when he’s been awake in the middle of the night, laying next to Kate. He thinks about what it would have been like if Sawyer hadn’t jumped off the helicopter, if they would have stayed together or fallen apart, if they would have a life as good as, or possibly better than, the one he has now. The ‘what ifs’ are what haunt him. He doesn’t need to add ‘what if we were wrong to leave’ to the pile.
“I wish you were here,” Jack confesses.
“I am here, you jackass,” Sawyer replies, like he’s amazed by the fact that Jack doesn’t get it yet. “God, you are the dumbest smart guy I have ever known.”
“Okay, say I believe this,” Jack says, in a tone of voice that makes it very clear he’s humoring Sawyer. “You’re telling me that you’re here and on the island, when it is a scientific impossibility to be in two places at once.”
“It’s also a scientific impossibility for an entire island to vanish into the damned sea and pop up somewhere else,” Sawyer comes back. “But hell if that didn’t happen too.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Yeah, you do,” Sawyer replies, knowingly. “You don’t want to, but you do. Just like you don’t wanna admit that I’m here, or that you miss me, or that you love me, or that you really want nothing more than to be wherever it is I am.”
Jack sighs. He is so. damned. tired.
“I’m marrying Kate,” he says, as if that proves his point. He says it firmly, like he believes it’s the right thing to do. Hurley says he’s not supposed to raise Aaron, that they weren’t supposed to leave the island, that wants them to come back. Well fuck the island and what it wants, and whatever the hell that means.
“Sure you are,” Sawyer answers. Jack goes from wanting to pull him close to wanting to punch him in the nose within a second flat.
“God, you are so infuriating!”
“It’s part of my charm.”
“Do you think you’re funny?”
“I’m hilarious, doc,” Sawyer says, smugly and Jack shakes his head and turns away. His head is splitting in two.
“You expect me to just randomly sail the ocean looking for an island I swore to god I would never walk on again as long as I lived just because we ‘weren’t supposed to leave’ and ‘we’re all supposed to come back’?”
“God, you don’t listen!” Sawyer yells. “That shit is true, yeah. But that isn’t why I’m here. I could care fucking less if they all come with you, even though they have to. I ain’t Locke. I don’t care what the island wants. I just want you to come back for me. What the hell do I have to do to make you believe it’s really me?”
“Sawyer…” Jack sounds as defeated as he feels. “If you aren’t here, I’m crazy, and I’m making you up, and I’m seeing the things I want to see, and hearing you say the things I want to hear. If you are here…I can’t even make my brain understand what that might mean.”
“I’m here,” Sawyer replies, stubbornly. “So start understandin’.” Jack shakes his head. “Listen, I ain’t got much more time, and I certainly don’t have all night to stand here and try to convince you that you ain’t crazy and that it’s really me, and that every word that comes out of my mouth, I mean. You can ask me when you see me again, and I’ll repeat the damn conversation word for fucking word. So just shut your mouth for a minute and listen. Can you do that, doc?”
What can Jack do but nod? Nothing, really. So he does, and Sawyer takes a deep breath, like he has a speech prepared.
“You can’t bullshit me, Jack. Maybe you used to be able to, sit you down at a poker table, and you can wipe your face blank, but not now. Not after all we’ve done and all we’ve been through. You may not like that, but you know it’s true. And you know marryin’ Kate and trying to live your story-book-happily-ever-after life ain’t gonna make you forget about me, or any of us. I know you, doc. You love me. And I love you. And I want you to come back for me. I ain’t stupid enough to think you’re gonna leave here and rent a boat and scour the earth or anything, but you’ll get there. I know that.”
“Sawyer-”
“Shut up,” Sawyer says, gently. “I don’t care if you believe I’m here, or if you go home thinkin’ you had one hell of a conversation with yourself tonight. I just want you to remember this: you go to bed at night thinkin’ about me, wondering where I am, how I am, what I’m doin’. And I do the same for you. You may lay next to Kate and I may lay in the damn sand, but we’re thinkin’ about the exact same things. You aren’t ready to find me yet, but you want to. And you will. Someday.”
“I’ve wanted to see you again for so long,” Jack tells him. There’s no point in not anymore. There’s no point in holding back, in biting back on everything he wants to say. Logic has abandoned him, and he’s running on pure emotion now. It’s taken over his brain, his mouth.
“Feeling’s mutual, doc,” he answers. “Hope I’ll be seein’ you again sometime soon, but I won’t hold my breath.”
“I…when I walk out those doors tonight, I don’t know what I’m going to believe.”
“I know,” Sawyer replies. “I can wait, though. It’s not like I’ve got anything but time. You’re a stubborn old jackass, but you’ve come around for me before. I can’t help but think this is one of those times you’ll do it again.”
Jack snorts a laugh and shakes his head. This is so surreal.
“You are…” he starts. But he doesn’t know how to finish. There are so many things that Sawyer is. Good things, bad things. Terrifying things. Amazing things. What Sawyer means to him now, at this place in his life, is something Jack tries not to think about (and fails more often than not). But with him, or the apparition of him, standing right in front of him, talking and breathing and smirking and laughing at him like he always does, it’s all he can think about, and all he can’t find the words to say.
Sawyer just shrugged, like he could read Jack’s mind and knew exactly what Jack was thinking. “Yeah,” he answers. “It’s time for me to get along, now, Jack. Even if you think I’m something you dreamed up tomorrow, remember what I said. Just…remember me.”
“Sawyer.”
“Yeah?” he asks.
“You were right,” he says. Even if this isn’t real, Sawyer isn’t real, Jack can say this. He needs to say this. Because it’s true.
“Hell yeah I was,” Sawyer answers, confidently. “But, just out of curiosity, what is it that you suddenly think I’m right about?”
It’s Jack’s turn to smile a bit. Because there’s absolutely nothing sudden about it.
“I love you,” he answers. “I miss you. I think about you all the time.”
Sawyer smiles at that, and there’s something in his eyes. Something…deeper. Something more. Something that goes a lot longer than anything Sawyer has said tonight to convincing Jack that Sawyer might just be real. Because the something in his eyes is something Jack has seen before, something vague that Jack couldn’t conjure up without seeing it first. Something he’d never remember until he saw it again. That something looks real, feels real, is real.
“I know,” Sawyer answers. “I love you too. Remember that.”
Jack opens his mouth to say something, but he blinks, and then Sawyer is gone. A millisecond was how long his eyes had been closed, if that long, but suddenly he’s standing in the lobby all by himself, in the middle of the night, his mind racing a mile a minute.
His feet seem to move of their own accord over to the couches. All he knows is that he needs to sit down before he passes out. He rests his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. He takes several deep breaths. He doesn’t know what to think, so he tries not to think. He just needs to concentrate on breathing, second to second, minute to minute. He takes one last deep breath and lets it go.
When he opens his eyes, he’s looking down at the coffee table. There’s an ashtray right in front of his face, and there is a freshly extinguished cigarette inside of it.