A fic gift for Her Former Royal Highness, eponine119

[alliecat8]

For her Queen Day, eponine119 requested OT3 fic. This is as close as I can get to J/K/S, love. Hope it's enough to satisfy!

Title: Shall Not Walk Alone
Characters: Jack, Sawyer, mentions of Kate (can be read as J/S)
Rating: PG
Spoilers: None past mid-S2
Disclaimer: Only mine in my dreams
A/N: This could be a sequel to my S2 ficlet, Bearings, but it can easily be read alone.




Shall Not Walk Alone

It was a memory from so long ago and so far behind him that it hardly felt real, though Jack believed that it was. He and his mother and father were traveling cross-country on a rare summer vacation. They’d decided to take their motor home the length of Interstate 40, beginning in Barstow and ending up somewhere in North Carolina, stopping to see all the sights along the way. “It’s the kind of trip you’ll remember all your life,” Jack’s mother had told him. It was 1976, and he was ten years old.

When they stopped in Knoxville, Tennessee to visit the World’s Fair, Jack remembers being excited, happy. It had been a pleasant trip so far, with his dad unusually relaxed on his short sabbatical from the hospital and his mother happy to have the family together; happy to have Christian’s undivided attention. He remembered a sunny day with the three of them walking around the fair site, doing touristy things, when suddenly his father had turned pale and clutched his chest. The next thing Jack knew, he and his mother were being rushed to the hospital in the wake of an ambulance.

“It was probably just the heat,” an ER attending told his mother several hours later, after all the right tests had been performed. “That and alcohol consumption – which isn’t unusual on vacation – and probably too much unfamiliar ethnic food at the Fair all contributed to a small bout of angina. We’ll keep him here overnight for observation, but there’s nothing to worry about. You and your family should be able to resume your trip tomorrow.” Then he’d asked Margo if she’d like to visit Christian in the examining room. She’d nodded and reached for Jack’s hand, but a battleaxe of a nurse rose from behind the admittance desk and said, “No one younger than thirteen is allowed beyond those doors.”

“Then who will watch him?” Margo had asked, not defiantly but in her reasonable, practical mom-voice. “He’s only ten.”

The nurse nodded in a way that said she understood, but didn’t sympathize. “He can wait right there.” She nodded briskly at the first row of seats in the waiting area. “I’ll keep an eye on him. I do it for kids all the time; he’s not the only one. He’ll be fine till you get back.”

Reluctantly Margo had led him to a plastic chair and seated him next to another, younger boy who seemed to also be alone. “Don’t move from this seat,” she’d told him. “And don’t worry, everything’s fine.”

Jack tried to obey his mother, he really did. But the chair was hard and uncomfortable and the waiting room was boring, and he couldn’t stop himself from fidgeting. He wanted to go through the forbidden door where patients were getting treated. He needed to do something, to fix something. He gathered his nerve, approached the front desk and announced, “My dad is a famous surgeon back home, so I’m used to hospitals. Sick people don’t scare me.” The nurse looked at him, not unkindly, and turned her back on him to whisper something to a candy striper, who began digging under the counter for something to keep him occupied. Feeling deflated, Jack sat back down and the girl in the peppermint-colored uniform brought him a frayed magazine, a half-used spiral notebook, a pencil. “You can read,” she suggested, though the magazine was one for grown-up women. “Or you can draw me a picture. I’ll hang it on the wall behind the big desk.”

She talked to him like he was a baby and he squirmed, humiliated. He heard the other boy snort. The kid was several years younger than Jack but his attention span appeared to be much more developed. He’d been sitting still, writing darkly etched words on a white sheet of paper, with painstaking effort and concentration so savage he’d almost torn holes in the paper with the pencil lead. Yet he was still attuned to his surroundings, especially to Jack, and Jack was convinced that the younger boy was jeering at him.

Jack didn’t like being made fun of. After a while the boy’s silence started to make him uncomfortable, then angry. “What’re you here for?” he asked, not caring if the question sounded rude.

The boy looked up from his paper and gave him a long, hostile stare. Jack thought he wasn’t going to answer, but finally he said, “They took my mama back there.”

The kid had an odd look on his face. Jack thought he was trying to be tough, trying to be scary, trying not to show that he was scared. Jack looked from him to the nurse who had bullied him into staying alone in the waiting room. “They wouldn’t let you go back there, either?”

The kid stabbed his paper again with the blunt tip of his pencil. “It’s all bloody,” he said. “I guess they think I ain’t seen blood before, but I have. I’ve seen lots of it.”

“Oh.” Jack feels an unwilling tug of sympathy for the boy who was trying to act so tough. “My dad wasn’t bleeding. He thought he was having a heart attack.”

The boy’s eyes shifted away from Jack’s and he almost smirked, though his lips were shaking at the same time. “My daddy shot my mama,” he said in a tone that suggested that he thought he was one-upping Jack. “Here.” He made a fist and pounded on his chest, hard. Hard enough to hurt. Hard enough to leave a bruise, Jack thought. There was blood under his nails, between his fingers. Jack was feeling sorrier for the boy by the minute.

“Where’s your dad?” he asked.

The boy’s face went blank, and his eyes lost focus. “Dead,” he said flatly. “He shot himself, too. In the head. Lotta blood.”

Jack wondered why the boy wasn’t crying. Why he wasn’t hysterical. Shock, he thought, feeling knowledgeable. He’d been with his dad when Christian had been called to emergencies; he knew about shock. You were supposed to keep the person’s mind off the trauma. “I’m Jack,” he said. “I’m from Los Angeles.”

“James,” the boy muttered. Now he was staring at his shoes, and Jack noticed that the laces were untied, like he’d pulled them on in a hurry. Maybe he wasn’t old enough to know how to tie his shoes. He was just a little kid. But like all kids, he was curious. “Why’re you in Knoxville?”

“We were on vacation. We went to the Fair.”

“I ain’t been,” the boy said with a shrug. “The sunsphere looks cool, though.” Then he got quiet, and Jack couldn’t think of anything else to say. The boy painstakingly wrote a few more words on his paper. Then he blurted out, “My mama’s dead.”

“Huh uh,” Jack said. He was a doctor’s son; he knew dead people went to the morgue. “The doctors are fixing her like they’re fixing my dad.”

For just a second something like hope crossed James’ face, but it disappeared as quickly as it came. “They put her in an ambulance at my house. When they got here there was a sheet over her face. That means dead, don’t it?”

Jack thought it did, but he didn’t want to say so. His own dad hadn’t looked like he was dying. He hadn’t looked very sick at all. He felt a terrible sadness for James, sitting alone in a hard green plastic chair with nobody to hold onto. “Where’s your grandma?” he asked, his words mirroring his train of thought. “You could hold onto her.”

James’ chin came up. “I got somethin’ I can hold on to.” He clutched the piece of paper in one hand and the pencil in the other. Now he was all bluff and bravado. Jack had seen the same look on the faces of scared kids who were being bullied on the playground.

Just then Jack’s mother came through the double doors where she’d disappeared before. “Your father is fine,” she told Jack, her voice all calm and cool and reassuring. “They’re going to take him to a room for tonight, then we’ll have the rest of our vacation. We can go upstairs and see him now.”

Jack looked guiltily at James. “Did a grown-up come with you?” he asked, feeling nervous about leaving the boy alone.

Sawyer pointed to a woman standing by the entrance. She was wearing a badge that said Child Protective Services. “She brung me.”

Jack had heard his father’s nurses talk about kids going to “social services.” If a kid didn’t have any family, a social worker took him to a foster home, or an orphanage. Jack didn’t think that James knew this. But the kid obviously wanted Jack to think he was brave and tough – tougher than Jack. Jack thought that if he told him what he knew it might make him cry, and that would humiliate both of them. So he said the only hopeful thing he could think of. “It might be okay.”

James looked him in the eye, and Jack noticed that his eyes were blue and helplessly frightened. But he said, “Maybe it will.” He sounded like he was deciding something; making a choice…or maybe just retreating from Jack. Jack let his mother lead him away, but he never forgot about that boy, and every time he thought about him, he worried.


********

The unconscious man on the bed had blond hair and blue eyes. His name was James, and he was from Tennessee. Jack had learned that much about him since the plane crash, and he suspected more. He suspected that this island they were on wasn’t the first place that James had felt lost. If he was the same boy Jack had met in the hospital all those years ago, he might have felt lost since that day. Maybe things hadn’t turned out all right. Was it too late now for Jack to fix everything? He knew he couldn’t undo the past, not even the recent past. He couldn’t go back in time and fix Sawyer’s parents, or make him stay off the raft, or keep him from getting shot. All he could do was try to make the present turn out okay. He almost felt as helpless as he had that day in the emergency room. Still, he said to Sawyer’s unconscious form, “It’ll be okay.”

Sawyer might die. His fever was too high, and Jack didn’t know if the antibiotics were working. Jack and Kate had undressed Sawyer when he’d been brought to the hatch, and he’d seen Kate surreptitiously take an envelope out of Sawyer’s jeans pocket. Jack thought of the little boy again, and the thing he’d been writing that day in the hospital. Surely it couldn’t be the same letter that was in that crumpled envelope. But he remembered how James had clutched the piece of notebook paper, how he’d talked about it like it was the only thing he had to hold onto. It was just a letter. It couldn’t help him. What did Sawyer have to hold onto now?

Sawyer tossed and turned on the bed, restless from the pain. From time to time he mumbled things that didn’t make sense. One thing made sense to Jack, though. Once Sawyer had mumbled, “I love her.”

He wondered if Sawyer always tried to hold onto the wrong thing – something or someone who couldn’t or wouldn’t hold onto him, too. His mama, Kate, maybe other people who hadn’t stayed around for him. Sawyer didn’t know that Jack was the kind of person who always held on, who couldn’t ever let go. He’d stay with Sawyer. He’d stay right here for him, trying to keep him alive. He just had to make Sawyer understand that, so that Sawyer would stay for him.

Sawyer always reached for the wrong thing, an anchor that couldn’t hold him still or keep him safe. His mother, whose name Jack had heard was Mary. Here on the island he’d reached out for Kate. And one day, not very long ago, Sawyer had reached out for a gun that Jack held out to him. The gun that got him shot. Now Jack thought that Sawyer had been reaching out to Jack then, too, when he told Jack about meeting his father. Jack hadn’t understood, then, that that was what Sawyer was doing, and maybe he’d failed Sawyer then. Was it too late to make up for it?

Sawyer always tried to hold on to things that didn’t keep him safe. A letter. A gun. His mother, who Kate said had left his father for another man, and had gotten killed because of it. Kate, who had freaked out while Jack was away at Shannon’s funeral and had left Sawyer cold and alone on the floor while the alarm blared, unattended. “I love her,” he’d said. Jack didn’t know for sure who he loved, but whoever it was had betrayed him. Whoever it was, it was someone who wasn’t here.

Maybe he didn’t know who else to love.

Jack thought again of how Sawyer reached for the gun Jack had offered him in the jungle on the day the raft sailed. The way that, for a moment, they’d both clung to it. As if it anchored them both in place, just for a moment. Jack thought about how the boy, James, never found an anchor, he’d drifted his whole life long. Maybe he’d felt sorry for the boy because Jack’s parents were so distant, so focused on changing him that they never got to know him, and he felt adrift, too. Decades ago Jack had wanted to be James’ anchor. Maybe he could still be one. He would be, if Sawyer would only reach for him. In the still dimness of the hatch, with no one else around, Jack silently promised him that this time, he wouldn’t walk away.


End