alliecat8 | My offering for lostsquee Queen <user site="livejournal.com" us

Title: With the Eyes of Eagles
Pairing: Jack/Sawyer
Spoilers: Through the Looking Glass, set post-rescue
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Only mine in my dreams

With the Eyes of Eagles

Even bruises can be beautiful.

“Motorcycle vs. median, no helmet.” That’s the first Jack hears about Sawyer after they've rescued him from the highway accident. And here he is again, being handed unceremoniously into Jack’s care, bleeding again, thankfully unconscious so that Jack doesn’t have to listen to whatever words of welcome or leave-me-the-fuck-alone Sawyer might have in store for him. After all this time, he still doesn’t know which way the wind will blow with this one.

“How’d it happen?” he asks, and the paramedic shrugs. “Lost control, I guess. No signs of drugs or alcohol in his system.” Jack looks at the prone form skeptically. Sawyer only loses control in times of extreme stress. Unlike Jack, who hasn’t felt a modicum of control since they’ve returned. Jack with his maps, his books, his never-ending supply of hired experts. Jack, never the man of faith, blindly flying into the unknown in the hope-against-hope that fate will repeat itself. His prayers to a god he doesn’t believe in.

On impulse he searches the torn pockets of Sawyer’s jeans, and there it is. Nothing but a crumpled piece of paper, but one that tells him everything he needs to know. Sawyer has been following the deaths, too, as one Oceanic survivor after another takes himself out of this world, looking for either another one or oblivion. How easy it would be, he thinks, to just give up, but for Jack giving up doesn’t seem to be his destiny. Now he looks at Sawyer’s paper and wonders if he’s found another one who feels the same way.

Pushing away a nurse who’s only trying to do her job, he cuts away Sawyer’s asphalt-crusted clothes. The scars are still there. In the golden sheen of a tropical sun they’d been all but invisible but here, under the unforgiving fluorescents, they stand out in stark relief. The tiny scar on Sawyer’s lower lip that Jack had put there himself in a fit of temper. The gash on his arm that Sayid put there the first time Sawyer should’ve died on the island. The bullet wound in his shoulder, the gash on his cheek inflicted a short time later by what was likely the same gun. The innumerable small scars on his body that happened while he was in captivity, including the mysterious two near his heart that he will never speak of. And others, unnoticeable on the island but glaring here, in their new old world.

But none from the motorcycle accident. Jack inspects him carefully, as any healer would, but all he can find are livid bruises, in deep burgeoning shades of blue, red and green. They’re enough like his own tattoos to unnerve him. They’re enough like his own tattoos to convince him. Jack reaches for the pills that are never out of his grasp, and swallows four. He sees that Sawyer’s eyes are open, watching him. The room around him is suddenly colorless but for the sea-green of the tiled walls, the matching hue of Sawyer’s eyes, and the vivid stains of bruises, of ink. “It doesn’t mean what you think it means,” Sawyer says, and his voice seems to come from a long way off. From the island itself. “'He walks among us, but he isn’t one of us.' That’s just what they wanted to believe.”

“I know,” he says. “We have to go back.” His fingers trace the vivid map of scars on Sawyer’s body. “We’re supposed to go back.”

Standing alone in the autumn cold:
The Hsiang flowing northward,
Orange Island, the cape.
I see thousands of hills in crimsoned view,
The woods piling up in deep-dye;
The mighty stream, in its gleam of jade,
One hundred barques racing by.
Eagles high up, cleaving the space,
Fish gliding above shallow ground;
Ten thousand creatures, under frosty a sky,
all fighting for freedom.

In the waste's dreariness brooding,
I ask the blue space without bonds:
Who masters fate's rise and descent?

Once I came here with a hundred companions,
Vivid the months and years yet, filled with pride.
Schoolmates we were, and young altogether,
Upright and honest, in the bloom of our lives;
Impetuous students, full of enthusiasm,
We cast all restraints boldly aside.
Pointing to China, its mountains and rivers,
Setting the people afire with our words,
And counted for muck all those ranking high.
Do you still can remember:
How, venturing midstream, the oars lashed the waters
And the waves yet staying the flight of our boats?

--Ch'ang-sha 1925

Even bruises can be beautiful. To glean something beautiful from pain, not in the coolness of rescue, but in soaring through the air and being blazed home to earth.

End