Fic: Understanding Sawyer (Sawyer/Sun)
I plan to end the barrage of new fic for a few days anyway, but I had to post this one so I won’t continue to obsess over it.
Title: Understanding Sawyer (6 of 10 or 11 in a series, see below for previous installments)
Pairing: Sawyer/Sun
Rating: R, for language and sexual themes.
Summary: Sawyer wants to build Sun a new “house”... without her knowing it. Aside from the fluff, this is a pretty thorough tour of Sawyer’s anxieties.
Note: This series is in an AU where Jin died in the raft debacle, though the rest of early season 2 canon stays relatively the same, sorta diverging from the show as Sawyer is recovering from the bullet wound. Spoilers for Sawyer’s backstory through “The Long Con” (2.13).
Many, many thanks to eponine119 for beta-ing, even though she must’ve felt like she was walking over broken glass for all my flailing about criticism. But she is wonderful, and I send her an abundance of big, sloppy kisses. :)
Understanding | Understanding Love | Understanding Failure | Understanding Gardening | Understanding Words
Understanding Sawyer
It was the only thing he could think of to do.
Can’t crowd her, can’t go around touching her all the time, definitely can’t kiss her. He had so many impulses toward Sun-some he’d not yet discovered, others he just couldn’t seem to disentangle from his usual raging lust-but he had no idea what to do, except he knew he wanted to make her happy. He could only hope that made her want to be around him.
He needed a project, something to do with his hands because he couldn’t sit around all day and read or pour over his schizophrenic poetry. And he couldn’t go back to moping. That wasn’t his style, really. Even if he was somehow a newer man, a slightly different version of himself-the kind of change that a person wakes up to one day, without knowing when or how it really happened-he was still not the type of man to stand around and think things to death.
So, after a long night of staring miserably at the ocean through the flap in his tent, he decided to build Sun a house.
*****
There was an initial quandary about what he would say to her about it. He couldn’t think of a way to hide what he was doing, and there was equally no way he could just tell her what he was up to. Women like surprises, the bigger the better. He knew that. He also knew that even if Sun wasn’t aware that he had spent the better part of his life conning women, and often with such surprises, he did. Just about any sort of subterfuge on his part felt…wrong.
Since he normally neither needed nor accepted advice, the fact that he was seeking it out made him antsy, especially since his best choice was to ask the one person most likely to give him sheer hell about it.
“You wanna do what?” Kate wrinkled up her face at him, but at least she didn’t let her jaw drop open. She was on button duty, and for some reason she enjoyed cleaning up the hatch while she was down there. She didn’t even stop sweeping when he spoke to her, only glanced at him across the room, where he was standing in the doorway.
Sighing, he repeated himself, and with the repetition it sounded more improbable than it had before: “I wanna build her a house. Or something like a house, more sturdy than a tent. You’ve seen that piece of shit she lives it. Damn thing leaks.”
“Then fix it.”
He shook his head. “You don’t understand.” She stared-confused, annoyed-and he waved at her dismissively; she disappeared into the other room, leaving him standing with his back against the doorframe. Nobody would understand what he was trying to do. He didn’t even know if he did. He was wholly unused to gratitude; it felt enormous and unwieldy, and it shouldn’t be his fault if he didn’t know how to handle it.
He slumped onto the couch and stared up at the ceiling for a while, wondering what he was doing hanging around the hatch, though he was loathe to leave. Then Kate came back into the room. “You still here moping?”
He shot her a dark, bitter look and then sighed impatiently, ruffling his hands through his hair. “I’m plannin’.”
“Why do you need to do this?”
He chose to meet her stare without flinching. “Because I do.”
“Okay.” Her face still held that look of confusion mixed with distaste, but she was carefully layering concern over it. That was typical of Kate, and he didn’t particularly want to hold it against her. She meant well. She continued, “You could always just lie to her and say it’s for you. She’d probably help you.”
“Well, ain’t that a little crappy? Make a woman build her own house?”
“If she knew you were doing it for her, she’d help, wouldn’t she?”
“Yeah.”
“At least you didn’t make bullshit excuses about her being unfit help because she’s a woman.”
“Well…”
“Give me a break. She’s tough.”
“Think I don’t know that? I just think sometimes a man oughtta do things for his-“ Kate’s mouth didn’t drop open then, but her eyes conveyed the same surprise, and he fought the urge to spring up off the couch. “Never mind.”
As she went back to her cleaning, she said lightly, “You know, if you break her heart, there’ll be a waiting list to kick your ass.” She smiled, but something about the easiness of that smile lit him up inside. He finally did get up then, impatient with himself, with her. He was almost out the door when she said, “Sawyer?”
“What?” he snarled.
By the time he turned around, he had managed to make himself relatively docile again. So she said, “Do it. It’s a nice thing to do for her. But she’ll probably cry, just so you know. Anyway, I won’t tell her.”
“Okay,” he mumbled, turning toward the door.
She called out behind him, “I know you don’t wanna hurt her.”
He clenched his jaw, unclenched it, said quietly without turning back, “Well, gold star for you.”
“Sawyer…”
“Just go on thinking what everybody else is thinking.”
“What?”
He didn’t answer her before he went back out into the daylight, where he could breathe.
*****
It took him a couple of days to put his plan into action. It seemed as though there were problem after problem. The chief among them: he didn’t know how to build anything. Sure, he’d done his fair share of manual labor in his life, and he’d rigged up his tent so it was fairly water-tight and cozy. But he was no builder and certainly no architect. He needed help, but it seemed like the only person who might prove even halfway useful was someone he wasn’t too keen on approaching.
Sayid sat on the shore, water coming within a yard of his feet. He hadn’t looked at Sawyer when he walked up, but when he sat down and used the word help, he turned his head slightly, those cool brown eyes noncommittally quizzical. So Sawyer laid out the plan, including his decision to make Sun believe the house was for him.
Sayid didn’t say anything while he talked or for a long while after. Then he said, “What makes you think I can build anything?”
“Look, if you don’t wanna help…”
“That is not what I said. I merely want to know why you came to me.”
“Who else would I go to?”
Sayid chuckled at that. “Indeed,” he said, but Sawyer wasn’t sure if he was being ironic or not, or both.
“Do you know how or not?”
“Do I know how? No. But I am relatively certain I can help you figure something out. The question is, why would I?” He hadn’t said it in a nasty way but with simple curiosity.
“Well, what else have you got to do that’s this important? You don’t give a shit about the button. And you need to work, to take your mind off…things.”
Sayid raised his eyebrows. “Why are you doing this?”
“For Sun.”
“So you said. But why?”
“Because her tent is falling apart. Because I need something to do. Because your reasons are my reasons, I think, and that’s why you’ll help me.”
Sayid pondered that for a moment before he said, “Yes. I will.” Sawyer stood up to walk away, and Sayid added, “I am naturally inclined to say you will be helping me, but I can see that it is much more important for you to be in charge here, or to seem to be, at least to Sun.”
Unwilling to break this truce before it started, Sawyer swallowed a retort. He simply said, “Thanks.”
Sawyer was a few yards down the beach when Sayid called him name and said, “I wonder at something.”
“What?”
“You might’ve used other means to get me to help you. You might’ve collected on a debt, but you didn’t.”
Sawyer could only frown in confusion, squinting into the sun and trying to study Sayid’s face for the answer. “Debt?”
“An old one, or at least relatively speaking.”
There it was, finally. He either saw it in his eyes, reminding him of the way they’d looked when he came back from being held captive by the crazy French woman, or it simply began to make sense to him. But he replied, “Well, me keeping that signal fire going wasn’t that big a deal. Was in my own best interest. Didn’t even remember it until just now.”
Sayid’s eyes narrowed, as always puzzled but somehow comprehending anyway, and he nodded. As Sawyer walked off, he marveled that really, the torture was in some ways buried so far back in his head that days could go by where he didn’t think about it, unless he was reminded of it like this. It wasn’t like it was forgotten, but it was almost as if he didn’t connect Sayid with the man who’d done it, just as he had a hard time remembering being the man who had spurred it on.
He couldn’t access the experience much at all-which was probably a good thing-except occasionally and without provocation he would still break out in a cold sweat, feeling the bamboo under his nails, often mixing it up with the sensation of the bullet sliding out of his arm and into his palm, leaving a raw hole behind.
*****
Once he had Sayid’s help, Sawyer decided to share his plan with Sun, if for no other reason than she might help him think about materials and tools and planning. He told her during their daily lunch ritual, and he was unprepared for her reaction. She simply stared at him as though the idea were so ludicrous she must’ve misheard him.
“Why do you need another place to live? Your tent is nice.”
He had anticipated this question, just a little farther down the road, so he was only partly prepared. He answered, “It’s too small.”
Again, she looked at him blankly, although now he could see that she was thinking. “You do have a lot of things.”
“Yeah. It would be nice to be able to keep my stuff separate from the stuff I give out. Since I’m being a little more…generous than I used to be.”
“Sawyer, do you know anything about building?”
He told his masculine pride to pipe down. “Not really. But I’m good at throwing things together and making them work.”
“And you need my help?”
“Only if you want to. And only the parts of it you want to do.”
“No, I’ll help. All of it. I just…”
“What?”
“I can’t believe you want my help.”
He smiled then, cocking his head to the side. Sometimes she could be so damn serious about things. He said, “Things get done faster when you’re involved. I’m sure Sayid will agree.”
“Sayid?”
“He’s gonna help.”
“Why?”
“Why, why, why?” he said, mocking her good-naturedly, shaking his head and smiling, trying to downplay everything and keep these questions from bringing it all down before it started. “It’s no big deal. It’s the kind of thing we have to do around here now. It’s not like we’ve got other pressing chores.”
She was quiet for a long time, and she paced over to the fire, discarding the fruit skins and seeds. When she turned back, she was smiling. “When do we start?”
“Well, I have to talk things over with Sayid tomorrow. But probably as soon as possible.”
“What happens to your tent?”
“I don’t know just yet. Probably, I’ll take some of it for parts,” he lied. “The rest I’ll leave for people to have.”
“May I have what’s left?”
Her face shot guilt through him, more cleanly than that bullet, but he had a feeling the wound might fester anyway. He wondered if he’d be able to keep from telling her. That had never been a problem in the past, but it was already ridiculously hard. Breathing deeply, he said, “Yeah, Sunshine, you can have any of it you want.”
“Do you promise?”
“Yes. I promise.” He almost promised to help her fix up her tent, but that was one of a million things drawing attention to the fact that he was about to look like an asshole for a few days in order to be a gentleman long after.
He was so much more accustomed to the opposite. Suddenly, he lost his appetite.
*****
Sayid approved the site, and he suggested most of the materials. It seemed improbable, but they planned on constructing this dwelling out of large tree branches and Dharma twine, with Sun’s one good tarp as the roof. Of course, she thought the tarp would be from his own tent. The new structure wouldn’t really be any bigger than her old tent, but it would be a little taller, so that she could stand inside it. And it would be more sturdy; that was the important thing.
They would have to spend that day and maybe the next rounding up materials, and already Sawyer was trying to find a way to avoid Sun so he didn’t risk telling her or let himself feel any more guilty than he already did for this necessary but asinine lie. So he sent her to scout out a site for the building, while he and Sayid searched for building materials. They carried a large, worn sheet between them, using it to hold the branches they collected.
It was still quite early morning, although Sayid was clearly wide awake. Still, he was quiet and contemplative, which suited Sawyer just fine. He realized, dimly because he only let the thought fly through his mind and back out again, that Sayid might have been a good companion for him if there weren’t so much water under the bridge. Sayid didn’t waste words, and he was strikingly fair and level-headed in his dealings with people. Sawyer often wished it had turned out that Sayid was the de facto leader of the survivors rather than Jack, because Jack was prone to letting his emotions lead him into things. Sayid was not, not that he didn’t give a shit about other people and not that his calm and control wasn’t often a reflection of the same sort of protective instinct that Jack had.
But this was not something Sawyer let himself think about except fleetingly and in vague, unformed ideas. If he thought about Sayid at all, and he did lately for some reason, it was to watch how he dealt with his loss, how he moved on. He took note of how Sayid coped, wondering if he would fare better or worse than Sun. They took such different paths, but they were, of course, in many ways, vastly different people. In other ways, they were the same: quiet, mysterious, haunted.
A lot of observations and thoughts, about Sun and about himself, churned inside Sawyer’s head that morning, tumbling around like a pair of sneakers in a clothes dryer, occasionally banging hard into him, almost startling him. He was about damn tired of all the thinking and over-thinking, but it seemed like that was what he did now. He felt like he was slowly excavating parts of himself, parts that were always there, that drove every move he made even if he avoided dwelling on them. They were no more a component of his conscious, daily reflection about his life than the foundation of a person’s house might be. In fact, it might have been that he was living on a crooked foundation but walking around as though the floor weren’t sloped and the walls didn’t fail to join properly. He’d met several people over the years-mostly women-that wanted to jolt him into seeing, as if he didn’t know, deep down. As if he hadn’t worked his whole life to block out the things he couldn’t deal with, adjusting to them so that he didn’t notice them anymore. As if it were possible-better, even-for a person to just open his eyes and understand in one quick instant that he was living in a broken house and all his efforts to ignore that fact hadn’t repaired anything.
Luckily, the sun was too bright for him to start a depressing recital of his problems. He’d come to slowly unpeel himself lately, going back by layers and mentally recording each new hurt felt or given, and now he had a rather impressive list. He still didn’t take the time to examine it, but he knew it was there. It cropped up in his poetry and his dreams. He also thought that someday he’d get to the point that he’d know it all, or as much as there was to know. He’d face it. But when he did, he couldn’t very well pretend it was something like pulling out his pockets to void the lint and bits of paper the dryer had left. When a thing makes you who you are, it is you, he thought. Sayid is an angry, cruel man. Jack is a hopeless hero. Kate is a scared convict. Sun is a giver. I am a taker.
The thought came to him that maybe that wasn’t all he was. But he was that for sure. His brain hit upon that brick wall again, where he tried to imagine a relationship with Sun and he couldn’t see over and into it. This time, he told himself that it was because he didn’t really know how it could even work. He had no model, not in his own life, and not from watching his parents.
That was as far as he got peeling away that layer. Maybe as far as he would ever get.
He found that he had stopped picking up sticks, so he began to move again, back toward Sayid, who was standing over the sheet, watching him curiously, waiting. They moved on in silence, and Sawyer soon saw that they were getting dangerously close to where Ana Lucia had been holing herself up. He thought that Sayid knew it too, but neither man made a move away from it.
In the next clearing, they found her makeshift shelter framed up against a large tree. Ana wasn’t there, but Sayid paused anyway as if she were. Then he muttered, “I do not know why she refuses to move into camp.” Sawyer gave him a look, and Sayid added, “This is folly, sleeping so far away. We would never know if anything happened to her.”
“Maybe that’s the way she wants it.”
“Undoubtedly. You don’t care much for her, do you?”
“A person grinds their dirty boot into your infected arm and you have a kind of gut reaction against them.”
Sayid said, “She mistreated you?”
Sawyer just snorted.
“Why?”
“Because she could. Because she’s crazy.”
“At times, a person might seem to be for very good reasons.”
“Oh?”
“Self-preservation.”
“I reckon,” he said darkly.
“It is very easy to hate Ana Lucia.”
Once again, Sawyer couldn’t tell by his tone if he was being straight or suggesting something else. “You don’t?”
“Some days, maybe I do. But not generally. Mostly I feel sorry for her.” As Sayid began to move on past the shelter, he said, “I will tell you something I have not told anyone before.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps I am in that sort of mood today.”
That was not at all convincing, but Sawyer was too eager to hear whatever it was, so he said, “Okay.”
“I’ve seen people I love die, before Shannon. I watched a man shoot my cousin Makid in the neck, right through the artery there. The thing that makes me the most angry is that what I remember is not Makid’s face but the face of the man who shot him, his expression.”
“Maybe it’s a good thing you don’t remember your cousin’s face, from that time.”
“Probably. But I don’t like seeing the man’s face in my mind either. It was cold, full of…well, not simple anger, but something like an anger you believe is justified. You are Allah’s worker, doing his will, and nothing you could do would be wrong. So many faces looked like that. But others I saw looked more like my own must have the first time I held a gun in my hands: scared, overwhelmed, but determined to not fail the people who put the gun there. They were who I believed in. This is what I saw in Ana Lucia’s face. I did not see Shannon.”
Sawyer paused for a long time. Then, sensing that Sayid appreciated honesty, he said, “Only one problem with that: nobody put that gun in her hands.” He thought about how he truly hadn’t given her the gun; she had taken it from him, and that gave him an irrational but very present share in the guilt over Shannon’s death. He added, “Not on purpose anyway.”
“She was trying to protect people.”
“She was trying to shoot those jungle bastards. She aimed wrong, but she knew what she was doing.”
“I agree and I disagree. Yes, she knew what she was doing, but I don’t think she had any choice in the matter. She was a police officer.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Very few do. In any case, she knows no other way to react to the world than with suspicion and action, to protect herself and others.”
“It sounds a lot like you’re letting people off the hook for having good intentions, which I think is complete crap.”
For the first time during their conversation, Sayid spoke forcefully. “I am not ‘letting her off the hook’ for Shannon’s death. I believe strongly in personal responsibility. So does Ana, which is why she is out here. I am merely saying it makes sense. And I can’t hate her.”
“Then you can’t hate the man that shot your cousin. It’s real possible he didn’t know anything else to do either, and that he felt like somebody put that gun in his hand to do something that needed doing, for everybody’s sake. As fucked up as that sounds. He was just a little farther down the same path than...”
Sayid looked toward him, but through him. Finally, he said, “Perhaps you’re right, logically, but I know what I feel. There is a line somewhere that, once crossed, a person cannot go back.”
After that comment, they fell into a heavy silence. For Sayid, it might have been a silence of thinking, but Sawyer had had enough of thinking, at least of that sort, so he set his mind back to the house, back to Sun.
*****
That first day building had somehow been a dark one in his mind, despite the blue, cloudless sky. But when he arose the next day and found the sky overcast, for some reason it made him want to work, to get moving. Today they would actually begin building, if the rain held off.
But before he even got up from his sleeping pallet, he was not thinking about building or worrying about the rain. He was thinking about Sun, dreams of milk in coffee-colored skin and red silk and a bed large enough that it seemed to swallow her like he wanted to swallow her. Devour was maybe the word. These feelings still struck him as odd, but he didn’t bother to rationalize them or ignore them anymore, at least in his private thoughts. He walked into the clearing of the worksite with the dream image in his head, and it almost vanished, as it always did, with the actual sight of the woman, calm and delicate. Too easy to absolutely destroy. He had to constantly remind himself that she wasn’t made of glass-or porcelain, because that opacity seemed to suit her better, if he were going for metaphors. But, no, she was not that breakable, and that’s what made him worry: the harder a target was, the more he was likely to push.
That day, Sun offered to go out and round up a few more branches, promising to take Hurley or Charlie with her. That left Sawyer and Sayid to frame up the building. Sayid had made a vague statement about Mister Eko coming by to take a look at their plans and possibly help them, but Sawyer had to wonder why anyone would be so willing to help him, and, even more important, how many people knew what he was actually up to. At this point, half of the camp was likely convinced he was the most selfish asshole who ever lived, while the other half was probably giggling and gossiping about what a sweet, chivalrous guy he was. That was particularly troubling to him because neither vision was precisely accurate.
Kate wandered up around lunch, bringing them fruit and wandering away again when Sayid and Sawyer, both sweaty and fighting a losing battle with the north corner post, glared at her. As she went, she said something about helping Sun with the branch collecting, but since Sawyer shot her another look of death, he was relatively certain he had run off some good help for Sun.
They worked the rest of the afternoon-Sawyer and Sayid, then Sun and Hurley. Every time Sawyer paused for a moment to take a drink and fret over the building problems, and he watched Sun working. She was just as organized as he knew she would be, and observant, even if she knew virtually nothing about building. What struck him most watching her was how she was laughing with Hurley, so much that it even seemed to lighten Sayid’s expression, making him chuckle openly at times. Sawyer had once been quite able to enjoy himself. He could get drunk and loose and fun, even during a long con, and not give anything away. Now he just couldn’t do it. Leaving himself open to laughing somehow meant leaving it all open. It just wasn’t that easy anymore.
Sun finally noticed-or in any case finally addressed-Sawyer’s quiet and melancholy mood. She marched over to him and poked him in the stomach just below his navel gently but teasingly. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothin’.”
“Then why are you so…”
“Darlin’, a bad mood from me shouldn’t be a shock to you.”
She wrinkled up her nose and cocked her head to the side. “You’re about to get a new house.”
“Yep.”
“You don’t want it?”
“No, I do. It’s just…”
“Hard?”
“Yeah.” When she said it, he suddenly felt even more like kicking something. What the fuck did it matter how hard it was, literally or otherwise, if he could have what he wanted for her?
Sawyer sighed and tried to put on a less morose face, but that was getting harder and harder to do.
*****
That second day it never rained, so they finished laying out the materials for the walls, quitting for the day long before it got dark. On the island, they’d accustomed themselves to being sweaty and dirty, but they’d gone beyond that to actually doing real work and nearly wearing themselves out, physically as much as their nerves. So after they had a community dinner of fruit and Dharma crackers, Sayid ambled away with Hurley for a swim. A dip in the ocean wasn’t good enough for Sun, so she headed for the hatch, hoping that Jack would take pity on her and let her have a shower, even though usual practice was that only the person on button duty got to take one. Although Sawyer had an almost irresistible urge to follow her down there and climb in the shower after her, that was so far from the realm of the possible that he had to stop and make himself breathe and remind himself that if this was going anywhere, it was going there slowly. He could be unhurried and deliberate: he’d had cautious marks before.
He hadn’t even conceived that Sun could be a mark until he started having those dreams, where his mind seemed to be working through scenarios to seduce her. It pissed him off to no end to find himself on autopilot, and with someone who was more a real person to him than anyone had been in a long time. He didn’t want to seduce Sun, at least not in his normal sense of the word. To be sure, he wanted her, and he wanted her to want him, but not if he had to flash his dimples and make eyes at her until she forgot to use her brain. Every woman had that threshold of reckless abandon, even the self-contained and guarded ones like Sun, but he would not want her if she wasn’t doing this with her mind clear and with both eyes wide open.
As Sawyer hiked out to a nearby pool of water to do some bathing of his own, he thought about when he was recovering in the hatch, though all he really had was hazy, confusing memories of Jack’s stern face and Sun’s soft hands. He remembered vaguely knowing she was miserable and trying to make her feel better, then failing and giving up, allowing her to cry. He had finally figured out that it was what she needed, even if just letting her fall apart went against every instinct he had.
He remembered being both glad and sorry to see her, because she treated him with such care and respect but it was something that almost hurt him. He’d gotten more used to letting her help him now, and perhaps she’d gotten more accustomed to where his boundaries were. Because there were boundaries now, some where at first there hadn’t been, and they were almost entirely physical. There in that bed, she’d had to put her hands all over him to keep him clean, and she’d once covered his body with hers to make him warm. That much he could remember fairly clearly. Now, while they could touch accidentally-a brush of the hand or thigh as they sat side by side-or in a friendly way-a pat on the back or a quick hug-their hands did not linger.
He’d let that happen once, that time on the beach, and he lay awake that night in a complete panic, because he hadn’t felt so absolutely overwhelmed with such a ridiculously small gesture since he was 14 and trying to get Katie Renfield, his foster sister’s best friend, to let him kiss her. Finally, Katie had thrown her arms around him and nuzzled her face into his neck during a hug, and he’d felt a little bit like he was happily free falling before he started to think about it too hard and his heart pounded so hard it nearly hurt as she turned her head and let him kiss her. He couldn’t even remember the kiss, only the self-consciousness he felt that he had not experienced since. He knew exactly why he never got nervous in that way with a mark. Sure, at some early points in his life as a con he had often found himself worrying if he’d be convincing enough, but all the worrying was about what she would feel and whether she would believe it. Realistically, this was part of his anxiety about Sun-whether she would ever believe he could give a damn about another person enough to be depended upon and cared for in return-but the majority of his apprehension was about his own feelings. It shocked the hell out of him, that giving a damn could somehow make him more selfish, in a way, more in need of protecting himself.
Sawyer shed all of his clothes when he got to the pool. Nobody else knew it was there but Kate, and she’d seen him just about naked enough times that he didn’t worry too much about her stumbling upon him. The water was agreeably cold, and even without soap he managed to get himself relatively clean. He should have been tired, but he found that he was physically content and mentally energized from the last two days of actually using his body, rather than lying around all day.
He got out of the pool after only a few minutes and shook some of the water out of his hair, like a dog might. He liked to drip dry, so he perched himself on a warm rock just large enough to lie back against while his feet dangled in the pool. Trees shielded the sun from his eyes, but he closed them anyway. He supposed that he should have been leery of being so far out by himself, but for the first time in a long while, he was at peace in spite of the dark thoughts that had been plaguing him. He hadn’t tied up any of those loose ends, but they didn’t seem to matter for this little while as he let the breeze blow over his skin to dry him.
He had never dreamed of Sun here or even pictured her with him, but nevertheless the images came floating into his head-seductions that would work, if he tried them. Rather than think about the execution of those scenarios, he thought about her. What he liked best about her body was how small and fragile she seemed even though she was really so strong. He had no proof of that, but somehow he knew. He could see her in his mind’s eye, climbing onto the rock with him, and when she was finally on top of him, crouched over him and looking down with a mix of amusement and determination and desire, he could feel the muscles on the inside of her thighs squeezing his hips, and her hands on his neck held him fast as she kissed him.
Of course it made him hard. Naked, in the sunlight, comfortable, happy, thinking of Sun, there was no way his body wouldn’t just give itself over to it. He let both his hands drift down to his cock, trying to take his time. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done this slowly. It was usually stolen moments in the jungle or the hatch, or else he was in his tent trying to race through it, and quietly, so that no one would hear. He’d gotten good at that, way back in his days in foster care. But today he was really alone, so he let his fingers simply glide over his skin, all the sensitive spots, and one hand moved to cradle his balls, to roll them against his palm.
He thought that if he ever did get to have sex with Sun, he might like it if the first time she was on top, so he could watch her move and let her control things. The problem with this particular fantasy was that the Sun in his mind was always so forceful. She knew ways of moving her hips that left him unable to just lie there and leisurely stroke himself. Before he knew it, he was pumping his cock with a firm grip and the muscles in his hips almost tensed themselves into knots as his pelvis shot up off the rock and toward his hand as his rhythm increased. He imagined that Sun was noisy in bed, and when he just let his mind go completely, she was saying words she might not even know and certainly wouldn’t use, not even in that context.
After Sawyer came, he relaxed into the rock with his dick in his hand, already hating himself for it. As always, he began to wonder if he could even be turned on by nice women anymore. Maybe it had to be hard and dirty and all those things he didn’t typically associate with Sun. Then he reminded himself that he had no idea what Sun might be like in bed with someone. If he liked her, he’d like her naked and touching him, however she wanted to do it. However, he was nowhere near this rational at the moment; all he could think about was how confused he always got when he let himself fantasize about her and how stupid he was for letting it happen yet again.
As he cleaned himself up again, he was still thinking his way through that stew of feelings. He used to wonder, in those few moments of self-reflection he couldn’t push out of his mind, if maybe he was simply a bad person, especially in pushing Cassidy away from him. But he knew now that whether he was a bad person or not, the simple fact was caring about someone seemed too hard, and letting them give a fuck about him was even more difficult. He didn’t know how to handle it. Fortunately, Cass had been his mark, so he just flipped a switch and went back to thinking about her that way. But Sun wasn’t his mark, and he damn well couldn’t just shove her away with all his might.
When Sawyer walked back to his tent, he purposefully avoided Sun, hoping to have a little time to himself before they went back to building the next day. He would curl up with one of those 600-page Charles Dickens novels he found in the hatch and read until he lost the light. Hopefully, by then his brain would be a little clearer or at least quieter.
*****
On the third day, Sawyer, Sun, Sayid, and Hurley put three of the walls together and worked on putting them up. It was slow going at first, but they eventually fell into a rhythm with it. At lunch, someone had run down Eko, who came to the work site later that afternoon to show them the plan for constructing a door, even though he did most of the actual work himself.
It was just Sawyer, Sun, and Sayid working later that evening when they finally decided to knock off for the day. By the next evening, hopefully they would have Sun all moved in. He had a sudden fear that maybe she wouldn’t want it, but then she sat down beside him and handed him the bottle of water she’d just been drinking from, and he had to be too focused on her nearness for a moment to think much at all. That was the hard part lately. He couldn’t simply enjoy her company, talk to her and be silent with her, without a keen awareness of how close she was to him, how near her skin was to touching his.
Her shoulder bumped his lightly. She asked, “Are you happy?”
“Sure.”
“I mean, will you be happy here?”
“Why not?”
“It’s new.”
“That’s bad?”
“I don’t know. Some people don’t like new places. They like to be somewhere they know. Somewhere that people they love have been.”
“Well, I’ve spent my whole life moving from place to place, and I don’t believe anywhere on this damn island could feel like home to me.”
“Not even your tent?” she asked.
“Not even my tent, Sunshine.” He noticed that she was quiet, her eyes locked into a far-off stare. He let his hand smooth over her knee, so quickly he barely even felt the fabric. But she came back to reality suddenly, and she nearly leaned into him as she met his eyes again.
“What?” she said.
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“Nothing.”
He didn’t press her, but, going over her words in his head, he was forced to ask himself a question he hadn’t yet, had been afraid to, really: would she want to move out of the tent she’d shared with Jin? So he asked her, “Do you like being in a new place?”
“Yes. It can be scary, but if you need to start over, it’s nice to have a place that is new so you can make it whatever you want it to be.”
“So, just what is it I’m starting over?”
“I don’t know,” she said, but he could see that she absolutely did know. He had no doubt that she knew even better than he did, even if she was wrong about whose life this new house was going to give freedom to. That was what he felt sometimes, when he stepped into new places, typically motel rooms: uncluttered, open space that seemed like freedom to him, like possibility. There was always a moment when he’d sit down on the bed and the world would be so quiet and even his brain would stop moving, but then it would all flood back in, somehow more seriously than before, and he’d never had the guts to just sit there and let it.
Sawyer passed her back the bottle and said, “The roof goes on tomorrow.”
“And you move away from the beach.”
“And your garden.”
She smiled and said, “It is your garden too.” Then she got up to inspect the day’s work. He just sat there and watched her as she opened the door and closed it again behind her. It felt right, this thing he’d done. By tomorrow, it would be perfect, because he wouldn’t have to lie about it anymore.
continued...
Title: Understanding Sawyer (6 of 10 or 11 in a series, see below for previous installments)
Pairing: Sawyer/Sun
Rating: R, for language and sexual themes.
Summary: Sawyer wants to build Sun a new “house”... without her knowing it. Aside from the fluff, this is a pretty thorough tour of Sawyer’s anxieties.
Note: This series is in an AU where Jin died in the raft debacle, though the rest of early season 2 canon stays relatively the same, sorta diverging from the show as Sawyer is recovering from the bullet wound. Spoilers for Sawyer’s backstory through “The Long Con” (2.13).
Many, many thanks to eponine119 for beta-ing, even though she must’ve felt like she was walking over broken glass for all my flailing about criticism. But she is wonderful, and I send her an abundance of big, sloppy kisses. :)
Understanding | Understanding Love | Understanding Failure | Understanding Gardening | Understanding Words
Understanding Sawyer
It was the only thing he could think of to do.
Can’t crowd her, can’t go around touching her all the time, definitely can’t kiss her. He had so many impulses toward Sun-some he’d not yet discovered, others he just couldn’t seem to disentangle from his usual raging lust-but he had no idea what to do, except he knew he wanted to make her happy. He could only hope that made her want to be around him.
He needed a project, something to do with his hands because he couldn’t sit around all day and read or pour over his schizophrenic poetry. And he couldn’t go back to moping. That wasn’t his style, really. Even if he was somehow a newer man, a slightly different version of himself-the kind of change that a person wakes up to one day, without knowing when or how it really happened-he was still not the type of man to stand around and think things to death.
So, after a long night of staring miserably at the ocean through the flap in his tent, he decided to build Sun a house.
*****
There was an initial quandary about what he would say to her about it. He couldn’t think of a way to hide what he was doing, and there was equally no way he could just tell her what he was up to. Women like surprises, the bigger the better. He knew that. He also knew that even if Sun wasn’t aware that he had spent the better part of his life conning women, and often with such surprises, he did. Just about any sort of subterfuge on his part felt…wrong.
Since he normally neither needed nor accepted advice, the fact that he was seeking it out made him antsy, especially since his best choice was to ask the one person most likely to give him sheer hell about it.
“You wanna do what?” Kate wrinkled up her face at him, but at least she didn’t let her jaw drop open. She was on button duty, and for some reason she enjoyed cleaning up the hatch while she was down there. She didn’t even stop sweeping when he spoke to her, only glanced at him across the room, where he was standing in the doorway.
Sighing, he repeated himself, and with the repetition it sounded more improbable than it had before: “I wanna build her a house. Or something like a house, more sturdy than a tent. You’ve seen that piece of shit she lives it. Damn thing leaks.”
“Then fix it.”
He shook his head. “You don’t understand.” She stared-confused, annoyed-and he waved at her dismissively; she disappeared into the other room, leaving him standing with his back against the doorframe. Nobody would understand what he was trying to do. He didn’t even know if he did. He was wholly unused to gratitude; it felt enormous and unwieldy, and it shouldn’t be his fault if he didn’t know how to handle it.
He slumped onto the couch and stared up at the ceiling for a while, wondering what he was doing hanging around the hatch, though he was loathe to leave. Then Kate came back into the room. “You still here moping?”
He shot her a dark, bitter look and then sighed impatiently, ruffling his hands through his hair. “I’m plannin’.”
“Why do you need to do this?”
He chose to meet her stare without flinching. “Because I do.”
“Okay.” Her face still held that look of confusion mixed with distaste, but she was carefully layering concern over it. That was typical of Kate, and he didn’t particularly want to hold it against her. She meant well. She continued, “You could always just lie to her and say it’s for you. She’d probably help you.”
“Well, ain’t that a little crappy? Make a woman build her own house?”
“If she knew you were doing it for her, she’d help, wouldn’t she?”
“Yeah.”
“At least you didn’t make bullshit excuses about her being unfit help because she’s a woman.”
“Well…”
“Give me a break. She’s tough.”
“Think I don’t know that? I just think sometimes a man oughtta do things for his-“ Kate’s mouth didn’t drop open then, but her eyes conveyed the same surprise, and he fought the urge to spring up off the couch. “Never mind.”
As she went back to her cleaning, she said lightly, “You know, if you break her heart, there’ll be a waiting list to kick your ass.” She smiled, but something about the easiness of that smile lit him up inside. He finally did get up then, impatient with himself, with her. He was almost out the door when she said, “Sawyer?”
“What?” he snarled.
By the time he turned around, he had managed to make himself relatively docile again. So she said, “Do it. It’s a nice thing to do for her. But she’ll probably cry, just so you know. Anyway, I won’t tell her.”
“Okay,” he mumbled, turning toward the door.
She called out behind him, “I know you don’t wanna hurt her.”
He clenched his jaw, unclenched it, said quietly without turning back, “Well, gold star for you.”
“Sawyer…”
“Just go on thinking what everybody else is thinking.”
“What?”
He didn’t answer her before he went back out into the daylight, where he could breathe.
*****
It took him a couple of days to put his plan into action. It seemed as though there were problem after problem. The chief among them: he didn’t know how to build anything. Sure, he’d done his fair share of manual labor in his life, and he’d rigged up his tent so it was fairly water-tight and cozy. But he was no builder and certainly no architect. He needed help, but it seemed like the only person who might prove even halfway useful was someone he wasn’t too keen on approaching.
Sayid sat on the shore, water coming within a yard of his feet. He hadn’t looked at Sawyer when he walked up, but when he sat down and used the word help, he turned his head slightly, those cool brown eyes noncommittally quizzical. So Sawyer laid out the plan, including his decision to make Sun believe the house was for him.
Sayid didn’t say anything while he talked or for a long while after. Then he said, “What makes you think I can build anything?”
“Look, if you don’t wanna help…”
“That is not what I said. I merely want to know why you came to me.”
“Who else would I go to?”
Sayid chuckled at that. “Indeed,” he said, but Sawyer wasn’t sure if he was being ironic or not, or both.
“Do you know how or not?”
“Do I know how? No. But I am relatively certain I can help you figure something out. The question is, why would I?” He hadn’t said it in a nasty way but with simple curiosity.
“Well, what else have you got to do that’s this important? You don’t give a shit about the button. And you need to work, to take your mind off…things.”
Sayid raised his eyebrows. “Why are you doing this?”
“For Sun.”
“So you said. But why?”
“Because her tent is falling apart. Because I need something to do. Because your reasons are my reasons, I think, and that’s why you’ll help me.”
Sayid pondered that for a moment before he said, “Yes. I will.” Sawyer stood up to walk away, and Sayid added, “I am naturally inclined to say you will be helping me, but I can see that it is much more important for you to be in charge here, or to seem to be, at least to Sun.”
Unwilling to break this truce before it started, Sawyer swallowed a retort. He simply said, “Thanks.”
Sawyer was a few yards down the beach when Sayid called him name and said, “I wonder at something.”
“What?”
“You might’ve used other means to get me to help you. You might’ve collected on a debt, but you didn’t.”
Sawyer could only frown in confusion, squinting into the sun and trying to study Sayid’s face for the answer. “Debt?”
“An old one, or at least relatively speaking.”
There it was, finally. He either saw it in his eyes, reminding him of the way they’d looked when he came back from being held captive by the crazy French woman, or it simply began to make sense to him. But he replied, “Well, me keeping that signal fire going wasn’t that big a deal. Was in my own best interest. Didn’t even remember it until just now.”
Sayid’s eyes narrowed, as always puzzled but somehow comprehending anyway, and he nodded. As Sawyer walked off, he marveled that really, the torture was in some ways buried so far back in his head that days could go by where he didn’t think about it, unless he was reminded of it like this. It wasn’t like it was forgotten, but it was almost as if he didn’t connect Sayid with the man who’d done it, just as he had a hard time remembering being the man who had spurred it on.
He couldn’t access the experience much at all-which was probably a good thing-except occasionally and without provocation he would still break out in a cold sweat, feeling the bamboo under his nails, often mixing it up with the sensation of the bullet sliding out of his arm and into his palm, leaving a raw hole behind.
*****
Once he had Sayid’s help, Sawyer decided to share his plan with Sun, if for no other reason than she might help him think about materials and tools and planning. He told her during their daily lunch ritual, and he was unprepared for her reaction. She simply stared at him as though the idea were so ludicrous she must’ve misheard him.
“Why do you need another place to live? Your tent is nice.”
He had anticipated this question, just a little farther down the road, so he was only partly prepared. He answered, “It’s too small.”
Again, she looked at him blankly, although now he could see that she was thinking. “You do have a lot of things.”
“Yeah. It would be nice to be able to keep my stuff separate from the stuff I give out. Since I’m being a little more…generous than I used to be.”
“Sawyer, do you know anything about building?”
He told his masculine pride to pipe down. “Not really. But I’m good at throwing things together and making them work.”
“And you need my help?”
“Only if you want to. And only the parts of it you want to do.”
“No, I’ll help. All of it. I just…”
“What?”
“I can’t believe you want my help.”
He smiled then, cocking his head to the side. Sometimes she could be so damn serious about things. He said, “Things get done faster when you’re involved. I’m sure Sayid will agree.”
“Sayid?”
“He’s gonna help.”
“Why?”
“Why, why, why?” he said, mocking her good-naturedly, shaking his head and smiling, trying to downplay everything and keep these questions from bringing it all down before it started. “It’s no big deal. It’s the kind of thing we have to do around here now. It’s not like we’ve got other pressing chores.”
She was quiet for a long time, and she paced over to the fire, discarding the fruit skins and seeds. When she turned back, she was smiling. “When do we start?”
“Well, I have to talk things over with Sayid tomorrow. But probably as soon as possible.”
“What happens to your tent?”
“I don’t know just yet. Probably, I’ll take some of it for parts,” he lied. “The rest I’ll leave for people to have.”
“May I have what’s left?”
Her face shot guilt through him, more cleanly than that bullet, but he had a feeling the wound might fester anyway. He wondered if he’d be able to keep from telling her. That had never been a problem in the past, but it was already ridiculously hard. Breathing deeply, he said, “Yeah, Sunshine, you can have any of it you want.”
“Do you promise?”
“Yes. I promise.” He almost promised to help her fix up her tent, but that was one of a million things drawing attention to the fact that he was about to look like an asshole for a few days in order to be a gentleman long after.
He was so much more accustomed to the opposite. Suddenly, he lost his appetite.
*****
Sayid approved the site, and he suggested most of the materials. It seemed improbable, but they planned on constructing this dwelling out of large tree branches and Dharma twine, with Sun’s one good tarp as the roof. Of course, she thought the tarp would be from his own tent. The new structure wouldn’t really be any bigger than her old tent, but it would be a little taller, so that she could stand inside it. And it would be more sturdy; that was the important thing.
They would have to spend that day and maybe the next rounding up materials, and already Sawyer was trying to find a way to avoid Sun so he didn’t risk telling her or let himself feel any more guilty than he already did for this necessary but asinine lie. So he sent her to scout out a site for the building, while he and Sayid searched for building materials. They carried a large, worn sheet between them, using it to hold the branches they collected.
It was still quite early morning, although Sayid was clearly wide awake. Still, he was quiet and contemplative, which suited Sawyer just fine. He realized, dimly because he only let the thought fly through his mind and back out again, that Sayid might have been a good companion for him if there weren’t so much water under the bridge. Sayid didn’t waste words, and he was strikingly fair and level-headed in his dealings with people. Sawyer often wished it had turned out that Sayid was the de facto leader of the survivors rather than Jack, because Jack was prone to letting his emotions lead him into things. Sayid was not, not that he didn’t give a shit about other people and not that his calm and control wasn’t often a reflection of the same sort of protective instinct that Jack had.
But this was not something Sawyer let himself think about except fleetingly and in vague, unformed ideas. If he thought about Sayid at all, and he did lately for some reason, it was to watch how he dealt with his loss, how he moved on. He took note of how Sayid coped, wondering if he would fare better or worse than Sun. They took such different paths, but they were, of course, in many ways, vastly different people. In other ways, they were the same: quiet, mysterious, haunted.
A lot of observations and thoughts, about Sun and about himself, churned inside Sawyer’s head that morning, tumbling around like a pair of sneakers in a clothes dryer, occasionally banging hard into him, almost startling him. He was about damn tired of all the thinking and over-thinking, but it seemed like that was what he did now. He felt like he was slowly excavating parts of himself, parts that were always there, that drove every move he made even if he avoided dwelling on them. They were no more a component of his conscious, daily reflection about his life than the foundation of a person’s house might be. In fact, it might have been that he was living on a crooked foundation but walking around as though the floor weren’t sloped and the walls didn’t fail to join properly. He’d met several people over the years-mostly women-that wanted to jolt him into seeing, as if he didn’t know, deep down. As if he hadn’t worked his whole life to block out the things he couldn’t deal with, adjusting to them so that he didn’t notice them anymore. As if it were possible-better, even-for a person to just open his eyes and understand in one quick instant that he was living in a broken house and all his efforts to ignore that fact hadn’t repaired anything.
Luckily, the sun was too bright for him to start a depressing recital of his problems. He’d come to slowly unpeel himself lately, going back by layers and mentally recording each new hurt felt or given, and now he had a rather impressive list. He still didn’t take the time to examine it, but he knew it was there. It cropped up in his poetry and his dreams. He also thought that someday he’d get to the point that he’d know it all, or as much as there was to know. He’d face it. But when he did, he couldn’t very well pretend it was something like pulling out his pockets to void the lint and bits of paper the dryer had left. When a thing makes you who you are, it is you, he thought. Sayid is an angry, cruel man. Jack is a hopeless hero. Kate is a scared convict. Sun is a giver. I am a taker.
The thought came to him that maybe that wasn’t all he was. But he was that for sure. His brain hit upon that brick wall again, where he tried to imagine a relationship with Sun and he couldn’t see over and into it. This time, he told himself that it was because he didn’t really know how it could even work. He had no model, not in his own life, and not from watching his parents.
That was as far as he got peeling away that layer. Maybe as far as he would ever get.
He found that he had stopped picking up sticks, so he began to move again, back toward Sayid, who was standing over the sheet, watching him curiously, waiting. They moved on in silence, and Sawyer soon saw that they were getting dangerously close to where Ana Lucia had been holing herself up. He thought that Sayid knew it too, but neither man made a move away from it.
In the next clearing, they found her makeshift shelter framed up against a large tree. Ana wasn’t there, but Sayid paused anyway as if she were. Then he muttered, “I do not know why she refuses to move into camp.” Sawyer gave him a look, and Sayid added, “This is folly, sleeping so far away. We would never know if anything happened to her.”
“Maybe that’s the way she wants it.”
“Undoubtedly. You don’t care much for her, do you?”
“A person grinds their dirty boot into your infected arm and you have a kind of gut reaction against them.”
Sayid said, “She mistreated you?”
Sawyer just snorted.
“Why?”
“Because she could. Because she’s crazy.”
“At times, a person might seem to be for very good reasons.”
“Oh?”
“Self-preservation.”
“I reckon,” he said darkly.
“It is very easy to hate Ana Lucia.”
Once again, Sawyer couldn’t tell by his tone if he was being straight or suggesting something else. “You don’t?”
“Some days, maybe I do. But not generally. Mostly I feel sorry for her.” As Sayid began to move on past the shelter, he said, “I will tell you something I have not told anyone before.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps I am in that sort of mood today.”
That was not at all convincing, but Sawyer was too eager to hear whatever it was, so he said, “Okay.”
“I’ve seen people I love die, before Shannon. I watched a man shoot my cousin Makid in the neck, right through the artery there. The thing that makes me the most angry is that what I remember is not Makid’s face but the face of the man who shot him, his expression.”
“Maybe it’s a good thing you don’t remember your cousin’s face, from that time.”
“Probably. But I don’t like seeing the man’s face in my mind either. It was cold, full of…well, not simple anger, but something like an anger you believe is justified. You are Allah’s worker, doing his will, and nothing you could do would be wrong. So many faces looked like that. But others I saw looked more like my own must have the first time I held a gun in my hands: scared, overwhelmed, but determined to not fail the people who put the gun there. They were who I believed in. This is what I saw in Ana Lucia’s face. I did not see Shannon.”
Sawyer paused for a long time. Then, sensing that Sayid appreciated honesty, he said, “Only one problem with that: nobody put that gun in her hands.” He thought about how he truly hadn’t given her the gun; she had taken it from him, and that gave him an irrational but very present share in the guilt over Shannon’s death. He added, “Not on purpose anyway.”
“She was trying to protect people.”
“She was trying to shoot those jungle bastards. She aimed wrong, but she knew what she was doing.”
“I agree and I disagree. Yes, she knew what she was doing, but I don’t think she had any choice in the matter. She was a police officer.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Very few do. In any case, she knows no other way to react to the world than with suspicion and action, to protect herself and others.”
“It sounds a lot like you’re letting people off the hook for having good intentions, which I think is complete crap.”
For the first time during their conversation, Sayid spoke forcefully. “I am not ‘letting her off the hook’ for Shannon’s death. I believe strongly in personal responsibility. So does Ana, which is why she is out here. I am merely saying it makes sense. And I can’t hate her.”
“Then you can’t hate the man that shot your cousin. It’s real possible he didn’t know anything else to do either, and that he felt like somebody put that gun in his hand to do something that needed doing, for everybody’s sake. As fucked up as that sounds. He was just a little farther down the same path than...”
Sayid looked toward him, but through him. Finally, he said, “Perhaps you’re right, logically, but I know what I feel. There is a line somewhere that, once crossed, a person cannot go back.”
After that comment, they fell into a heavy silence. For Sayid, it might have been a silence of thinking, but Sawyer had had enough of thinking, at least of that sort, so he set his mind back to the house, back to Sun.
*****
That first day building had somehow been a dark one in his mind, despite the blue, cloudless sky. But when he arose the next day and found the sky overcast, for some reason it made him want to work, to get moving. Today they would actually begin building, if the rain held off.
But before he even got up from his sleeping pallet, he was not thinking about building or worrying about the rain. He was thinking about Sun, dreams of milk in coffee-colored skin and red silk and a bed large enough that it seemed to swallow her like he wanted to swallow her. Devour was maybe the word. These feelings still struck him as odd, but he didn’t bother to rationalize them or ignore them anymore, at least in his private thoughts. He walked into the clearing of the worksite with the dream image in his head, and it almost vanished, as it always did, with the actual sight of the woman, calm and delicate. Too easy to absolutely destroy. He had to constantly remind himself that she wasn’t made of glass-or porcelain, because that opacity seemed to suit her better, if he were going for metaphors. But, no, she was not that breakable, and that’s what made him worry: the harder a target was, the more he was likely to push.
That day, Sun offered to go out and round up a few more branches, promising to take Hurley or Charlie with her. That left Sawyer and Sayid to frame up the building. Sayid had made a vague statement about Mister Eko coming by to take a look at their plans and possibly help them, but Sawyer had to wonder why anyone would be so willing to help him, and, even more important, how many people knew what he was actually up to. At this point, half of the camp was likely convinced he was the most selfish asshole who ever lived, while the other half was probably giggling and gossiping about what a sweet, chivalrous guy he was. That was particularly troubling to him because neither vision was precisely accurate.
Kate wandered up around lunch, bringing them fruit and wandering away again when Sayid and Sawyer, both sweaty and fighting a losing battle with the north corner post, glared at her. As she went, she said something about helping Sun with the branch collecting, but since Sawyer shot her another look of death, he was relatively certain he had run off some good help for Sun.
They worked the rest of the afternoon-Sawyer and Sayid, then Sun and Hurley. Every time Sawyer paused for a moment to take a drink and fret over the building problems, and he watched Sun working. She was just as organized as he knew she would be, and observant, even if she knew virtually nothing about building. What struck him most watching her was how she was laughing with Hurley, so much that it even seemed to lighten Sayid’s expression, making him chuckle openly at times. Sawyer had once been quite able to enjoy himself. He could get drunk and loose and fun, even during a long con, and not give anything away. Now he just couldn’t do it. Leaving himself open to laughing somehow meant leaving it all open. It just wasn’t that easy anymore.
Sun finally noticed-or in any case finally addressed-Sawyer’s quiet and melancholy mood. She marched over to him and poked him in the stomach just below his navel gently but teasingly. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothin’.”
“Then why are you so…”
“Darlin’, a bad mood from me shouldn’t be a shock to you.”
She wrinkled up her nose and cocked her head to the side. “You’re about to get a new house.”
“Yep.”
“You don’t want it?”
“No, I do. It’s just…”
“Hard?”
“Yeah.” When she said it, he suddenly felt even more like kicking something. What the fuck did it matter how hard it was, literally or otherwise, if he could have what he wanted for her?
Sawyer sighed and tried to put on a less morose face, but that was getting harder and harder to do.
*****
That second day it never rained, so they finished laying out the materials for the walls, quitting for the day long before it got dark. On the island, they’d accustomed themselves to being sweaty and dirty, but they’d gone beyond that to actually doing real work and nearly wearing themselves out, physically as much as their nerves. So after they had a community dinner of fruit and Dharma crackers, Sayid ambled away with Hurley for a swim. A dip in the ocean wasn’t good enough for Sun, so she headed for the hatch, hoping that Jack would take pity on her and let her have a shower, even though usual practice was that only the person on button duty got to take one. Although Sawyer had an almost irresistible urge to follow her down there and climb in the shower after her, that was so far from the realm of the possible that he had to stop and make himself breathe and remind himself that if this was going anywhere, it was going there slowly. He could be unhurried and deliberate: he’d had cautious marks before.
He hadn’t even conceived that Sun could be a mark until he started having those dreams, where his mind seemed to be working through scenarios to seduce her. It pissed him off to no end to find himself on autopilot, and with someone who was more a real person to him than anyone had been in a long time. He didn’t want to seduce Sun, at least not in his normal sense of the word. To be sure, he wanted her, and he wanted her to want him, but not if he had to flash his dimples and make eyes at her until she forgot to use her brain. Every woman had that threshold of reckless abandon, even the self-contained and guarded ones like Sun, but he would not want her if she wasn’t doing this with her mind clear and with both eyes wide open.
As Sawyer hiked out to a nearby pool of water to do some bathing of his own, he thought about when he was recovering in the hatch, though all he really had was hazy, confusing memories of Jack’s stern face and Sun’s soft hands. He remembered vaguely knowing she was miserable and trying to make her feel better, then failing and giving up, allowing her to cry. He had finally figured out that it was what she needed, even if just letting her fall apart went against every instinct he had.
He remembered being both glad and sorry to see her, because she treated him with such care and respect but it was something that almost hurt him. He’d gotten more used to letting her help him now, and perhaps she’d gotten more accustomed to where his boundaries were. Because there were boundaries now, some where at first there hadn’t been, and they were almost entirely physical. There in that bed, she’d had to put her hands all over him to keep him clean, and she’d once covered his body with hers to make him warm. That much he could remember fairly clearly. Now, while they could touch accidentally-a brush of the hand or thigh as they sat side by side-or in a friendly way-a pat on the back or a quick hug-their hands did not linger.
He’d let that happen once, that time on the beach, and he lay awake that night in a complete panic, because he hadn’t felt so absolutely overwhelmed with such a ridiculously small gesture since he was 14 and trying to get Katie Renfield, his foster sister’s best friend, to let him kiss her. Finally, Katie had thrown her arms around him and nuzzled her face into his neck during a hug, and he’d felt a little bit like he was happily free falling before he started to think about it too hard and his heart pounded so hard it nearly hurt as she turned her head and let him kiss her. He couldn’t even remember the kiss, only the self-consciousness he felt that he had not experienced since. He knew exactly why he never got nervous in that way with a mark. Sure, at some early points in his life as a con he had often found himself worrying if he’d be convincing enough, but all the worrying was about what she would feel and whether she would believe it. Realistically, this was part of his anxiety about Sun-whether she would ever believe he could give a damn about another person enough to be depended upon and cared for in return-but the majority of his apprehension was about his own feelings. It shocked the hell out of him, that giving a damn could somehow make him more selfish, in a way, more in need of protecting himself.
Sawyer shed all of his clothes when he got to the pool. Nobody else knew it was there but Kate, and she’d seen him just about naked enough times that he didn’t worry too much about her stumbling upon him. The water was agreeably cold, and even without soap he managed to get himself relatively clean. He should have been tired, but he found that he was physically content and mentally energized from the last two days of actually using his body, rather than lying around all day.
He got out of the pool after only a few minutes and shook some of the water out of his hair, like a dog might. He liked to drip dry, so he perched himself on a warm rock just large enough to lie back against while his feet dangled in the pool. Trees shielded the sun from his eyes, but he closed them anyway. He supposed that he should have been leery of being so far out by himself, but for the first time in a long while, he was at peace in spite of the dark thoughts that had been plaguing him. He hadn’t tied up any of those loose ends, but they didn’t seem to matter for this little while as he let the breeze blow over his skin to dry him.
He had never dreamed of Sun here or even pictured her with him, but nevertheless the images came floating into his head-seductions that would work, if he tried them. Rather than think about the execution of those scenarios, he thought about her. What he liked best about her body was how small and fragile she seemed even though she was really so strong. He had no proof of that, but somehow he knew. He could see her in his mind’s eye, climbing onto the rock with him, and when she was finally on top of him, crouched over him and looking down with a mix of amusement and determination and desire, he could feel the muscles on the inside of her thighs squeezing his hips, and her hands on his neck held him fast as she kissed him.
Of course it made him hard. Naked, in the sunlight, comfortable, happy, thinking of Sun, there was no way his body wouldn’t just give itself over to it. He let both his hands drift down to his cock, trying to take his time. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done this slowly. It was usually stolen moments in the jungle or the hatch, or else he was in his tent trying to race through it, and quietly, so that no one would hear. He’d gotten good at that, way back in his days in foster care. But today he was really alone, so he let his fingers simply glide over his skin, all the sensitive spots, and one hand moved to cradle his balls, to roll them against his palm.
He thought that if he ever did get to have sex with Sun, he might like it if the first time she was on top, so he could watch her move and let her control things. The problem with this particular fantasy was that the Sun in his mind was always so forceful. She knew ways of moving her hips that left him unable to just lie there and leisurely stroke himself. Before he knew it, he was pumping his cock with a firm grip and the muscles in his hips almost tensed themselves into knots as his pelvis shot up off the rock and toward his hand as his rhythm increased. He imagined that Sun was noisy in bed, and when he just let his mind go completely, she was saying words she might not even know and certainly wouldn’t use, not even in that context.
After Sawyer came, he relaxed into the rock with his dick in his hand, already hating himself for it. As always, he began to wonder if he could even be turned on by nice women anymore. Maybe it had to be hard and dirty and all those things he didn’t typically associate with Sun. Then he reminded himself that he had no idea what Sun might be like in bed with someone. If he liked her, he’d like her naked and touching him, however she wanted to do it. However, he was nowhere near this rational at the moment; all he could think about was how confused he always got when he let himself fantasize about her and how stupid he was for letting it happen yet again.
As he cleaned himself up again, he was still thinking his way through that stew of feelings. He used to wonder, in those few moments of self-reflection he couldn’t push out of his mind, if maybe he was simply a bad person, especially in pushing Cassidy away from him. But he knew now that whether he was a bad person or not, the simple fact was caring about someone seemed too hard, and letting them give a fuck about him was even more difficult. He didn’t know how to handle it. Fortunately, Cass had been his mark, so he just flipped a switch and went back to thinking about her that way. But Sun wasn’t his mark, and he damn well couldn’t just shove her away with all his might.
When Sawyer walked back to his tent, he purposefully avoided Sun, hoping to have a little time to himself before they went back to building the next day. He would curl up with one of those 600-page Charles Dickens novels he found in the hatch and read until he lost the light. Hopefully, by then his brain would be a little clearer or at least quieter.
*****
On the third day, Sawyer, Sun, Sayid, and Hurley put three of the walls together and worked on putting them up. It was slow going at first, but they eventually fell into a rhythm with it. At lunch, someone had run down Eko, who came to the work site later that afternoon to show them the plan for constructing a door, even though he did most of the actual work himself.
It was just Sawyer, Sun, and Sayid working later that evening when they finally decided to knock off for the day. By the next evening, hopefully they would have Sun all moved in. He had a sudden fear that maybe she wouldn’t want it, but then she sat down beside him and handed him the bottle of water she’d just been drinking from, and he had to be too focused on her nearness for a moment to think much at all. That was the hard part lately. He couldn’t simply enjoy her company, talk to her and be silent with her, without a keen awareness of how close she was to him, how near her skin was to touching his.
Her shoulder bumped his lightly. She asked, “Are you happy?”
“Sure.”
“I mean, will you be happy here?”
“Why not?”
“It’s new.”
“That’s bad?”
“I don’t know. Some people don’t like new places. They like to be somewhere they know. Somewhere that people they love have been.”
“Well, I’ve spent my whole life moving from place to place, and I don’t believe anywhere on this damn island could feel like home to me.”
“Not even your tent?” she asked.
“Not even my tent, Sunshine.” He noticed that she was quiet, her eyes locked into a far-off stare. He let his hand smooth over her knee, so quickly he barely even felt the fabric. But she came back to reality suddenly, and she nearly leaned into him as she met his eyes again.
“What?” she said.
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“Nothing.”
He didn’t press her, but, going over her words in his head, he was forced to ask himself a question he hadn’t yet, had been afraid to, really: would she want to move out of the tent she’d shared with Jin? So he asked her, “Do you like being in a new place?”
“Yes. It can be scary, but if you need to start over, it’s nice to have a place that is new so you can make it whatever you want it to be.”
“So, just what is it I’m starting over?”
“I don’t know,” she said, but he could see that she absolutely did know. He had no doubt that she knew even better than he did, even if she was wrong about whose life this new house was going to give freedom to. That was what he felt sometimes, when he stepped into new places, typically motel rooms: uncluttered, open space that seemed like freedom to him, like possibility. There was always a moment when he’d sit down on the bed and the world would be so quiet and even his brain would stop moving, but then it would all flood back in, somehow more seriously than before, and he’d never had the guts to just sit there and let it.
Sawyer passed her back the bottle and said, “The roof goes on tomorrow.”
“And you move away from the beach.”
“And your garden.”
She smiled and said, “It is your garden too.” Then she got up to inspect the day’s work. He just sat there and watched her as she opened the door and closed it again behind her. It felt right, this thing he’d done. By tomorrow, it would be perfect, because he wouldn’t have to lie about it anymore.
continued...