Following, Part Twenty-One [Jack/Juliet] [R] [WIP]
The air lost its voice, gathered around him in thick clumps of black silence. After a kind of duration that was difficult to measure, the smoke rolled back, leaving him in the open. He nearly choked in surprise at the sight of the black socks of the person standing in front of him.
“Hey, kiddo.”
“You’re not-” Jack began instantly, even before he looked up, but he found it impossible to continue as his eyes moved up the man’s body. The picture before him stifled him, crushed all doubt-every subtle crease in the suit, the polished gold wedding ring on his finger, the shape of the veins stretching over the knuckles-told Jack that he was looking at his father.
“How is it, Jack, that you think you can tell a person what he’s not, if you never really knew what he was?”
When Jack finally had the courage look up into his father’s face, he felt as though he was being suffocated. Christian smiled condescendingly, as he always did, without hurry, as if his son’s errors amused him, but not quite enough to make him laugh.
"I don’t know who you are, but I know you’re not him,” Jack looked away quickly, toward the ground, because it seemed the only way he would be able to make the words come out. “What are you doing here? What do you want with Claire? Why are you trying so hard to convince us that you’re our father?”
“Jack, I’m not trying to convince anybody. You can’t convince people of these things: you either believe or you don’t. Claire believes me,” he sighed, as though he wanted to demonstrate his frustration, “and I’m here because I want to ask you to help her. Even if you don’t understand how important what we’re doing is, even if you don’t believe me, you care about her, Jack-I can see that much. What she’s going to have to do-is very difficult and very dangerous. She’s going to need somebody to look out for her. If you don’t help her-she’ll be on her own.”
Jack paused, the question that was on the tip of his tongue making his heart pound.
“Why didn’t you-why didn’t you ever tell me about her?” he squeezed his eyes shut, knowing even as he spoke that the whole question-the words and the tone of it, hurt and angry-was all wrong. The question wasn’t meant for whoever this was: it was meant for his father. But Jack’s curiosity-his need to know how the thing in front of him would respond, temporarily overcame his doubt as he waited for an answer.
“What would I have said?” Christian asked rhetorically, shaking his head, “She was nine before I even knew about her. You weren’t much more than a teenager, and your mother never would have understood. She wasn’t capable of understanding-”
Jack opened his eyes furiously.
“Understanding what? That you cheated on her? Or that the only reason you had kids was to get them to do something for you, because you couldn’t-” he felt his pulse speed up, the idea dawning on him only as he spoke, “Because you couldn’t do it yourself-because you failed, and you needed your kids to make up for it-”
“You say that like it was personal, like I had a choice,” the figure answered, sounding more and more like Christian as he went on, “I didn’t. We don’t have a choice, Jack: not when it comes to this island. It does what it wants with us. It doesn’t let us choose.”
“Was that what you told yourself, to make it easier? That you didn’t have a choice when you left your family to cheat on Mom in Australia? That you weren’t putting hundreds of people’s lives at risk when you went into surgery drunk? That you didn’t decide to drink yourself to death in Sydney?” Jack’s eyes burned and his lungs felt hot as he finished, as if he had breathed in something that was impossible to exhale.
“You always did like to blame people,” Christian observed with a humorless smile, “Do you know why you like to do that? Because you need to believe so badly that everything is a choice. You need to believe that you can control the things around you. It’s why you could never see this island for the gift it truly is. It takes away our choices: it makes us free. We never have to feel guilty here, Jack; we never have to feel like we’ve failed, because we haven’t. You of all people should understand-”
“If we don’t have a choice-” Jack began, half disgusted and half curious, “then why are you trying so hard to convince me to help Claire? If the island’s already decided-”
“The island hasn’t decided about that.”
~~
He coughed hard, choking on the soup-like texture of the air around him, feeling like he had already swallowed liters of it.
Then someone slapped him full in the face.
“Christ, I don’t know which one of you is worse.”
He opened his eyes, blinking slowly, unable to make sense of the picture before him. He was lying on the ground in the middle of the jungle and Charlotte was sitting over him, looking down with an expression that was hard to interpret because her face was so bruised. Black smoke was pouring around their bodies.
Jack started at the sight of it, bolting upright so quickly that he almost knocked Charlotte down.
“Jesus! What the hell is the matter with you?” Charlotte demanded, scrambling backward painfully, trying to regain her balance.
“The smoke,” he explained, panicked, coughing as if to demonstrate what he meant, “You’re not-”
“Dead?” she finished mirthlessly, with a smile that looked grisly, given her injuries, “No, but it’s not for lack of trying on Linus’ part.”
He only stared at her dumbly.
“If I were the smoke monster,” she mused, “I bet it would have been a lot easier to drag you across the jungle floor. I think you’re half a stone heavier than when we took you to the operating room.” She paused, looking him over as if she was waiting for the understanding to filter into his expression. When he didn’t move, she rolled her eyes, “There’s smoke because there’s a fire, Jack. Please don’t make me slap you again: we don’t have time for it.”
As Charlotte was speaking, a sharp gust of wind cut through the smoke, and he suddenly wondered why he hadn’t noticed it before: for as far as he could see in two separate directions, the trees around them were on fire. There was no sign of the temple anywhere.
“What happened? How did we get here?” he asked her lifting one hand to his forehead and rubbing his eyes.
“There was a flash. You must’ve seen the light, right?”
“Yeah,” he agreed, but his voice sounded as uncertain as if he hadn’t, “Where’s the temple?”
“We’re in the middle of it right now. It’s just not here anymore. The best I can figure is that whatever time it is now -is before the temple was ever built-which I’m guessing is a pretty long time ago.”
He looked down at the handcuff around his left wrist. The other side of it was now lying on the ground, closed around air instead of the bar to which Cindy had attached him.
“Juliet-” he said almost as soon as he thought it, looking around him as though he might be able to find her. “Charlotte, did you see her? They took her upstairs-about an hour before the flash. She thought they were going to-execute her-” His stomach sunk as he looked up at Charlotte, but her eyes brightened almost immediately.
“Come on,” she said, rising to her feet with painful deliberation, “you’re not hurt, are you? You can walk?”
His heart leapt into his throat as he stood, shaking his head, trying to stop himself from grabbing Charlotte-she looked like the slightest touch might knock her over.
“She’s alive? You know where she is?” he asked frantically, in lieu of shaking her.
Charlotte simply nodded at him and beckoned for him to follow her.
~~
Part Twenty-Two