(no subject)
Caprice
Lost fandom
Kate/Sawyer
R
Summary: An alternative rendering of events from “Whatever the Case May Be.”
Disclaimer: The usual onslaught of lies.
Feedback: Love it! Will feed it with a cookie.
Beta ♥ : soultoad
For autumn_faerie. Happy birthday. :)
Caprice
Sawyer thinks "mermaid" when the girl emerges from the water. All spray and slivers of liquid shaking off and coalescing back into the cool pond, the disturbance of the water is insubstantial compared to the skin and hair and laughter that comprises Sawyer's foreground.
Leaning against a rock near the waterfall, he folds his arms and takes in the view. Kate squints at him, bemused, scooping her arms in wide circles along the surface of the water.
"So," he erupts, as if reeling a conversation back to its main topic. "You climb trees like a monkey. And now, you swim so well, I'm half-tempted to turn you over and look for gills and maybe even a fancy fin joining those pretty little legs of yours."
Kate snorts. "Half-tempted?" She arches her back and bright, clear droplets shimmer on the sinews of her neck for a second before careening down onto her collar bones. With slow, lazy strokes, she begins to drift backward, away from him. "That's unlike you, Sawyer." She closes her eyes against the sharpness of the sun and kicks her legs. Sawyer catches a glimpse of her feet: heels together, toes pointed out in a v-shape.
The mermaid mocks him.
Sawyer's mama told him it wasn't polite to compare girls to animals. Unfair, reductive or somesuch that he didn’t understand as a kid. But Sawyer's mama isn't here. And Sawyer isn't sure where "here" is, for that matter. Certainly manners and mores could be bent in such an nonspecific environment. Fact is, he isn't always sure he is here. Times like this, though, he's glad he is.
Here. It's as amorphous as the water. Limbo Island. Only, Sawyer doesn't think this could be Purgatory. Truth be told, most of his life leading up to this had played out like a classic Greek rendering of Purgatory updated for the 21st century. He'd spent too much time paying for something that wasn't his fault, and the rest of the time paying for what he'd done as a result. If washing up on this island was meant to be punishment for becoming the man he hated, for committing crimes within and without the scope of the law, then God or the Devil or Bob or someone had a really fucking twisted notion of retribution.
Maybe the angels had let him into heaven after all. Or maybe this branch of Purgatory had a nicer waiting room.
Definitely kinder on the eyes.
Kate swims like a seraph in seafoam as she laps the pond once, parallel to the perimeter as though she's mapping it. Somehow he feels safer with her here, like her imaginary ring is a boundary keeping all the danger out and, well... keeping them in. Sawyer was never the type of man to own up to being frightened. But his safety nets have long been sarcasm and sex, and even he knows how easily such crutches give him away. Not that he was ever adverse to using them fully. Like now.
He smoothes his hands behind him, finding leverage on the slippery rock, and hoists himself partially out of the water. Kate swims closer. Trickles of water speed down his chest and he revels in every trail that tickles its way down his skin, chill and goosefleshed despite the warm air. Kate’s figure enlarges as she closes the distance between them in her languorous arc. His stomach muscles ripple as a shiver passes over him. Straining his head sideways, he rests his cheek against the damp rock nearest the waterfall. The spray collects on his brow, dotting his eyelashes, wetting his hair just where it had begun to dry.
The suffusing roar of the waterfall seems keener, and Sawyer realizes that the soft splash of Kate’s movements is gone. He opens one eye.
Kate bobs below him, one arm extended as she claws at a small crag for purchase. She is smiling at him.
“Something tickle your fancy?”
“You’re posing,” she accuses.
“I’m sunbathing, Freckles. Merpeople like you may adapt to that cold water just fine, but I find myself in need of a little warm up.” He stretches, turns his head the other way and folds his hands behind his head.
“Like a reptile?” Kate sounds nearer, but he refuses to open his eyes and look to see just how close she has moved.
“Excuse me?”
“Marine reptiles,” Kate states matter-of-factly, though her voice has lowered and taken on a positively syrupy quality, thick and sticky. Sawyer’s stomach rumbles as she continues. “They’re cold-blooded, so their bodies can’t regulate temperature like ours and they can’t stay in water as long as they want to. Is that you, Sawyer? Are you finally proving you’re cold-blooded?”
He sinks slightly into the water as he lolls his head back toward her. Opening his eyes, he finds her leaning against the rock alongside him, mere inches away. Her finger tangles and twirls around a thread dangling from his bandage. While she absently fidgets, the back of her hand brushes against his jutting elbow.
“Sweetness?” He smirks then drops the muscles of his face, drops the volume of his voice to accommodate the space between them--or lack thereof. “Are you flirting with me?”
Kate laughs, but it’s more like an exhale. “I do not flirt.” She looks him in the eye and doesn’t smile.
“Good.” Sawyer does smile, without baring his teeth. “Neither do I.”
Now Kate smiles. “You don’t? Your nicknames and constant jabs are one step removed from pulling my pigtails on the school yard.”
Sawyer grunts. “Cute. ‘Cept, there’s no school yards on Paradise Lost. And, y’know, I don’t find myself needing to look at your patent leather shoes to get a sight of your panties.” His eyes glance over her torso and he stares directly at her crotch.
The muscles of her thighs undulate under her wet skin as she keeps herself afloat in the pond. He feels a current of water against his feet as she kicks harder to propel herself. But instead of sinking into the water as he expects, she has moved upward, and her feet settle against his as she squeezes against him onto his small ledge of rock. They are both immersed up to their shins in water now, and Sawyer still stares at the dark cloth between Kate’s legs, clinging tightly like a second skin and revealing slope and crevice alike.
He is waiting for her to speak, waiting for her next taunt, her next accusation, waiting for her to recommence the banter they always fall into: words instead of action. But she’s still staring at him, watching his eyes when he looks at hers again. Her mouth is open. Sawyer doesn’t need to think twice.
Releasing one arm and leaning into the other--still crooked behind his head, he circles her waist and lines his mouth against hers in one singular movement. She hasn’t closed her mouth, but he licks around her lips anyway, tasting the dewy remnants of her swim. Her tongue follows his, traps him against the corner of her mouth. When she lets go, he follows suit, capturing her tongue as it retreats, pinning its tip against the roof of her mouth, then sliding down its underside. Their kiss is all breath and battle, less touch than false warning and misfire. Their teeth collide for the third time and Kate pulls back.
“Stop.”
“No.”
“Stop fucking fighting. Kissing shouldn’t be this hard.”
“If I recall, honey, I had to get my ass whupped just to get a kiss out of you earlier, so don’t tell me--”
Lips. And fingers in his hair. Nails scratching at his stubble. Kate’s hands are firm against his skull as she kisses him hard, but with the softest sucking against his lips. She twirls her tongue around his and he doesn’t push back, just tastes her, lets her taste him.
Kate tastes Sawyer likes she’s starving.
It’s as if he’s nectar, fucking ambrosia, and he chuckles lowly into her mouth. She groans, vibrating back into him--a ripple that runs straight down his chest, whirlpools in his gut.
He pivots his wrist on her side and his fingers slip and fan under the string of her bikini briefs. The tight cotton burns against his skin as he drags his hand closer to that patch between her legs. She fists a a clump of hair at the back of his head when his thumb brushes the mound, dips under the cloth and slides straight down the curved lips of her cunt.
Now their kiss is monosyllabic: a gasp for air punctuates each unison lap of their tongues. Sawyer’s touch on Kate is uninterrupted, circumlocutory, as he swirls loose figure eights up around her clit, down around her vagina, never stopping, never entering. His knuckles push against the underside of her panties, testing the give of those thin strings that cut into her thighs as his hand pulls and purls.
Sawyer moans when Kate draws back again, their lips smacking apart.
“What?” he snaps as she grabs his wrist with both hands and tugs his hand out of her panties, her eyes fluttering closed momentarily when his thumb grazes over the head of her clit. But she’s grinning, eyeing him rapaciously as her chin lowers. She edges one leg lithely over his and slides along the width of his torso to straddle him. He’s grinning now too, watching her mouth twitch involuntarily.
They stand, clinging as closely as water on skin, sticking where their wet flesh meets.
Her lips hover near his. He can feel the impression she has left on them, anticipates the feeling as if she’s kissing him again already. But she doesn’t. Her toes shift backward and she’s slipping down his chest, nipples hard and dragging tracks down his quivering stomach, fingers curling briefly under his waistband then out over his hips, lips hot and open against the bulge in his jeans, then gone. She’s out of his reach, sunk into the water, before he even knows to hold on.
Kate laughs. Her laughter bubbles so lightly it is nearly indistinguishable from the sound of the waterfall, drowned out completely as she moves farther and farther away.
Sawyer thinks, “mermaid” again and vows to catch her and check her legs once and for all. He plans to search her neck for any hidden gills too, reconsiders, and thinks, “Maybe they’re under her arms, near her breasts. I’m just one snug Old Navy tank top away from finding out.”
He plunges in, pursues her to the center. Kate’s back arches slick and smooth as she dives deeper underwater, feet kicking above the surface. Pale fins, concentric circles and nothing. He follows, mirroring her fins and circles. He’s still smiling when he opens his eyes to the sting of subsurface sight.
And there’s death in the water.
Just like everywhere else.
Sawyer’s mama once said, “You’re born alone and you’ll die alone.” She didn’t mean for him to hear that, but he did. And he never forgot it.
Everything returns. The maddening hum of the jungle outshines the roar of the falls. He sits with Kate on the edge of the jungle, on the edge of a pond. The mermaid is just a girl. And she’s looking at the metal briefcase in her lap with a lust he can only envy. She doesn’t want him now. Did she ever? He glances back over the expanse of the pond, at the rocks near the waterfall. The bubble has burst. Just water and rock and more victims of a plane that fell out of the sky. Each one alone, hunting in packs, living together because there’s safety in numbers--but alone, always alone, when it comes to survival.
Everyone comes back down. “This isn’t Purgatory,” he thinks as Kate walks away. “This is just the same old Earth we’ve been living on all along. And people are animals.”
Sawyer thinks “bait” when he grips the briefcase handle, lets it swing solidly into his thigh with each and every stride as he walks back to the beach.
Lost fandom
Kate/Sawyer
R
Summary: An alternative rendering of events from “Whatever the Case May Be.”
Disclaimer: The usual onslaught of lies.
Feedback: Love it! Will feed it with a cookie.
Beta ♥ : soultoad
For autumn_faerie. Happy birthday. :)
Caprice
Sawyer thinks "mermaid" when the girl emerges from the water. All spray and slivers of liquid shaking off and coalescing back into the cool pond, the disturbance of the water is insubstantial compared to the skin and hair and laughter that comprises Sawyer's foreground.
Leaning against a rock near the waterfall, he folds his arms and takes in the view. Kate squints at him, bemused, scooping her arms in wide circles along the surface of the water.
"So," he erupts, as if reeling a conversation back to its main topic. "You climb trees like a monkey. And now, you swim so well, I'm half-tempted to turn you over and look for gills and maybe even a fancy fin joining those pretty little legs of yours."
Kate snorts. "Half-tempted?" She arches her back and bright, clear droplets shimmer on the sinews of her neck for a second before careening down onto her collar bones. With slow, lazy strokes, she begins to drift backward, away from him. "That's unlike you, Sawyer." She closes her eyes against the sharpness of the sun and kicks her legs. Sawyer catches a glimpse of her feet: heels together, toes pointed out in a v-shape.
The mermaid mocks him.
Sawyer's mama told him it wasn't polite to compare girls to animals. Unfair, reductive or somesuch that he didn’t understand as a kid. But Sawyer's mama isn't here. And Sawyer isn't sure where "here" is, for that matter. Certainly manners and mores could be bent in such an nonspecific environment. Fact is, he isn't always sure he is here. Times like this, though, he's glad he is.
Here. It's as amorphous as the water. Limbo Island. Only, Sawyer doesn't think this could be Purgatory. Truth be told, most of his life leading up to this had played out like a classic Greek rendering of Purgatory updated for the 21st century. He'd spent too much time paying for something that wasn't his fault, and the rest of the time paying for what he'd done as a result. If washing up on this island was meant to be punishment for becoming the man he hated, for committing crimes within and without the scope of the law, then God or the Devil or Bob or someone had a really fucking twisted notion of retribution.
Maybe the angels had let him into heaven after all. Or maybe this branch of Purgatory had a nicer waiting room.
Definitely kinder on the eyes.
Kate swims like a seraph in seafoam as she laps the pond once, parallel to the perimeter as though she's mapping it. Somehow he feels safer with her here, like her imaginary ring is a boundary keeping all the danger out and, well... keeping them in. Sawyer was never the type of man to own up to being frightened. But his safety nets have long been sarcasm and sex, and even he knows how easily such crutches give him away. Not that he was ever adverse to using them fully. Like now.
He smoothes his hands behind him, finding leverage on the slippery rock, and hoists himself partially out of the water. Kate swims closer. Trickles of water speed down his chest and he revels in every trail that tickles its way down his skin, chill and goosefleshed despite the warm air. Kate’s figure enlarges as she closes the distance between them in her languorous arc. His stomach muscles ripple as a shiver passes over him. Straining his head sideways, he rests his cheek against the damp rock nearest the waterfall. The spray collects on his brow, dotting his eyelashes, wetting his hair just where it had begun to dry.
The suffusing roar of the waterfall seems keener, and Sawyer realizes that the soft splash of Kate’s movements is gone. He opens one eye.
Kate bobs below him, one arm extended as she claws at a small crag for purchase. She is smiling at him.
“Something tickle your fancy?”
“You’re posing,” she accuses.
“I’m sunbathing, Freckles. Merpeople like you may adapt to that cold water just fine, but I find myself in need of a little warm up.” He stretches, turns his head the other way and folds his hands behind his head.
“Like a reptile?” Kate sounds nearer, but he refuses to open his eyes and look to see just how close she has moved.
“Excuse me?”
“Marine reptiles,” Kate states matter-of-factly, though her voice has lowered and taken on a positively syrupy quality, thick and sticky. Sawyer’s stomach rumbles as she continues. “They’re cold-blooded, so their bodies can’t regulate temperature like ours and they can’t stay in water as long as they want to. Is that you, Sawyer? Are you finally proving you’re cold-blooded?”
He sinks slightly into the water as he lolls his head back toward her. Opening his eyes, he finds her leaning against the rock alongside him, mere inches away. Her finger tangles and twirls around a thread dangling from his bandage. While she absently fidgets, the back of her hand brushes against his jutting elbow.
“Sweetness?” He smirks then drops the muscles of his face, drops the volume of his voice to accommodate the space between them--or lack thereof. “Are you flirting with me?”
Kate laughs, but it’s more like an exhale. “I do not flirt.” She looks him in the eye and doesn’t smile.
“Good.” Sawyer does smile, without baring his teeth. “Neither do I.”
Now Kate smiles. “You don’t? Your nicknames and constant jabs are one step removed from pulling my pigtails on the school yard.”
Sawyer grunts. “Cute. ‘Cept, there’s no school yards on Paradise Lost. And, y’know, I don’t find myself needing to look at your patent leather shoes to get a sight of your panties.” His eyes glance over her torso and he stares directly at her crotch.
The muscles of her thighs undulate under her wet skin as she keeps herself afloat in the pond. He feels a current of water against his feet as she kicks harder to propel herself. But instead of sinking into the water as he expects, she has moved upward, and her feet settle against his as she squeezes against him onto his small ledge of rock. They are both immersed up to their shins in water now, and Sawyer still stares at the dark cloth between Kate’s legs, clinging tightly like a second skin and revealing slope and crevice alike.
He is waiting for her to speak, waiting for her next taunt, her next accusation, waiting for her to recommence the banter they always fall into: words instead of action. But she’s still staring at him, watching his eyes when he looks at hers again. Her mouth is open. Sawyer doesn’t need to think twice.
Releasing one arm and leaning into the other--still crooked behind his head, he circles her waist and lines his mouth against hers in one singular movement. She hasn’t closed her mouth, but he licks around her lips anyway, tasting the dewy remnants of her swim. Her tongue follows his, traps him against the corner of her mouth. When she lets go, he follows suit, capturing her tongue as it retreats, pinning its tip against the roof of her mouth, then sliding down its underside. Their kiss is all breath and battle, less touch than false warning and misfire. Their teeth collide for the third time and Kate pulls back.
“Stop.”
“No.”
“Stop fucking fighting. Kissing shouldn’t be this hard.”
“If I recall, honey, I had to get my ass whupped just to get a kiss out of you earlier, so don’t tell me--”
Lips. And fingers in his hair. Nails scratching at his stubble. Kate’s hands are firm against his skull as she kisses him hard, but with the softest sucking against his lips. She twirls her tongue around his and he doesn’t push back, just tastes her, lets her taste him.
Kate tastes Sawyer likes she’s starving.
It’s as if he’s nectar, fucking ambrosia, and he chuckles lowly into her mouth. She groans, vibrating back into him--a ripple that runs straight down his chest, whirlpools in his gut.
He pivots his wrist on her side and his fingers slip and fan under the string of her bikini briefs. The tight cotton burns against his skin as he drags his hand closer to that patch between her legs. She fists a a clump of hair at the back of his head when his thumb brushes the mound, dips under the cloth and slides straight down the curved lips of her cunt.
Now their kiss is monosyllabic: a gasp for air punctuates each unison lap of their tongues. Sawyer’s touch on Kate is uninterrupted, circumlocutory, as he swirls loose figure eights up around her clit, down around her vagina, never stopping, never entering. His knuckles push against the underside of her panties, testing the give of those thin strings that cut into her thighs as his hand pulls and purls.
Sawyer moans when Kate draws back again, their lips smacking apart.
“What?” he snaps as she grabs his wrist with both hands and tugs his hand out of her panties, her eyes fluttering closed momentarily when his thumb grazes over the head of her clit. But she’s grinning, eyeing him rapaciously as her chin lowers. She edges one leg lithely over his and slides along the width of his torso to straddle him. He’s grinning now too, watching her mouth twitch involuntarily.
They stand, clinging as closely as water on skin, sticking where their wet flesh meets.
Her lips hover near his. He can feel the impression she has left on them, anticipates the feeling as if she’s kissing him again already. But she doesn’t. Her toes shift backward and she’s slipping down his chest, nipples hard and dragging tracks down his quivering stomach, fingers curling briefly under his waistband then out over his hips, lips hot and open against the bulge in his jeans, then gone. She’s out of his reach, sunk into the water, before he even knows to hold on.
Kate laughs. Her laughter bubbles so lightly it is nearly indistinguishable from the sound of the waterfall, drowned out completely as she moves farther and farther away.
Sawyer thinks, “mermaid” again and vows to catch her and check her legs once and for all. He plans to search her neck for any hidden gills too, reconsiders, and thinks, “Maybe they’re under her arms, near her breasts. I’m just one snug Old Navy tank top away from finding out.”
He plunges in, pursues her to the center. Kate’s back arches slick and smooth as she dives deeper underwater, feet kicking above the surface. Pale fins, concentric circles and nothing. He follows, mirroring her fins and circles. He’s still smiling when he opens his eyes to the sting of subsurface sight.
And there’s death in the water.
Just like everywhere else.
Sawyer’s mama once said, “You’re born alone and you’ll die alone.” She didn’t mean for him to hear that, but he did. And he never forgot it.
Everything returns. The maddening hum of the jungle outshines the roar of the falls. He sits with Kate on the edge of the jungle, on the edge of a pond. The mermaid is just a girl. And she’s looking at the metal briefcase in her lap with a lust he can only envy. She doesn’t want him now. Did she ever? He glances back over the expanse of the pond, at the rocks near the waterfall. The bubble has burst. Just water and rock and more victims of a plane that fell out of the sky. Each one alone, hunting in packs, living together because there’s safety in numbers--but alone, always alone, when it comes to survival.
Everyone comes back down. “This isn’t Purgatory,” he thinks as Kate walks away. “This is just the same old Earth we’ve been living on all along. And people are animals.”
Sawyer thinks “bait” when he grips the briefcase handle, lets it swing solidly into his thigh with each and every stride as he walks back to the beach.