Lost fic: Sympathetic Magic [J/K/S, R]
Disclaimer: Not mine
Spoilers: best read after season 3
Notes: Written for psych_30 #12, Collective Unconscious. Using for fanfic100 #55, Spirit. Thanks to Allie for reading multiple versions.
Summary: The island binds them together.
Sympathetic Magic
by eponine119
July 20-23, 2007
It knows them. It knows them all.
…
The three of them are out in the jungle when it happens. This time there's no mechanical click-click-click sound, no warning. One minute they're hiking, hot, bickering, and the next they are surrounded in thick black smoke that isn't really. It's oily emptiness, closing in and clinging to their skin. It runs down the back of Sawyer's throat, but he can't cough.
A hand seizes his in the blind darkness. Small and slender. Kate. He reaches out and comes up with Jack's hard hand, big as his own but different somehow. They cling.
Lightning flashes within the nothingness, illuminating it. Sawyer can feel the electricity buzz in his brain and ignite the sweat between their palms. It burns, down deep in his bones. Then there's a snap and it's gone.
They stand in a circle, a linked ring. Kate to him and him to Jack and Jack to Kate.
He's panting with fear, the sound painful in his ears. Kate looks confused, wondrous. Jack frowns with his forehead wrinkled. They don't let go.
"That thing--" "--the monster--" "--what Locke saw--" They talk over each other. It doesn't matter. They know what it was, or think they do. They know they're lucky to be alive.
"Let's go back." It doesn't matter who says it, because they do. Kate drops Sawyer's hand almost forcefully. Jack's hand just disappears, there one second and gone the next. He's still panting.
…
He lies alone in his shelter that night, trying to put it out of his head. He counts his breaths and tries to empty his mind, tries to relax. But when he closes his eyes, the darkness is like when it surrounded him, closing out everything else except that thread-thin connection to Kate and to Jack. But now he's alone. He presses his hand against the bare skin of his belly. Feels its shallow rise and warmth. Tells himself to go to sleep now.
In the drifting sound of the waves, as his limbs grow too heavy to move, he can hear something. A conversation playing. It's not traveling the length of the beach. It's in his mind. This has happened to him before, always on the edge of sleep. If he tries to hard to listen, it evaporates. He has to let it come.
"I made my bed, Katherine." "Well, your bed's gone, Ma."
"What is this?" "An insurance policy for the house." "What did you do?"
It keeps repeating. Replaying. "What did you do?" He thinks he can feel a humid night, mosquitos hovering, and a blast of heat against his face, but he's asleep.
…
In the morning, they sit shoulder to shoulder. Him and Kate. Not talking. Just sitting. Eating breakfast, except as he moves the sweet fruit between his teeth with his tongue, she keeps forgetting, letting it loll in her hand as she looks at the sea. It's reflecting in her eyes. She's lost in it.
Until she senses Jack on the edge of her vision. Her breathing changes and she remembers to eat. Her eyes track him as he cuts across the sand. Sawyer's eyes follow, lingering on Jack's back, the nape of his neck and his hard ass under his jeans. He can feel Jack's hands on him -- her -- pressing her, forcing her close. He smells, he tastes Jack, stubble scratching the tiny hands against his face, tongue sweeping --
Sawyer chokes. Fruit burns hard down his throat, stealing his breath. But he's in his own head again. He looks at Kate crazily but she can't tell, she thinks it's because he's choking. She puts a hand against his back to steady him. He thinks to jerk away, but he doesn't. Instead, he touches her. Swallows hard and draws a breath. Watches her eyes darken. "You feel it," he says.
Her lips are parted. "Yeah," she says, and he knows she's talking about something else. She's talking about what happens in his tent when they're feeling desperate, sad, overwhelmed, lonely. Funny how it's never happiness or love. Well, he's scared he's crazy and she's longing for Jack, so it's only a moment before the tent flaps fall closed behind them and their bodies twist together. She's small underneath him but strong and his bed is still warm from him sleeping in it.
Her breath catches as he slides into her. Hips move, back of her neck arching. He's holding her head between his hands, staring down at her closed eyelids. He wants to kiss them, except he's gone again, into the hot darkness of her mind. It's red behind her eyes, and he can feel himself surge as she clenches tight around him. She's remembering a kiss with hatred and pity and manipulation. She's trying not to think about Jack. He's trying not to think about Jack. As he sends her soaring, they're fighting, trying not to think about Jack.
She makes a pained noise and he moves, fast, off of her like he's hurt her. His hands slip down through the cascade of her hair as she rolls onto her side, knees drawing up, away from him. "Hey," he says, and touches her spine.
She swears, but it's giving in, because suddenly she's on him, wild almost like an attack. She straddles him, forcing him inside. She puts her hands over his wrists as his hips buck against her. This time he's the one who has to close his eyes.
…
He and Jack end up at the same place at the same time. It's not a coincidence, though they each pretend it is.
"There's something going on, Doc." Sawyer keeps his voice low, even though they're at the deserted edge of the jungle and there's no one to hear them.
"You want an aspirin, Sawyer?"
"Think it'd help?" He can give it back just as good as he gets it. Better.
"There's nothing going on. Your imagination. That's all." Jack's always been good at denial.
"I've been thinking about the French chick," Sawyer says. "How they all flipped 'n killed each other. That door that said 'Quarantine.' That's what this is."
"There is no infection on this island." Jack seems so sure. Until Sawyer grabs his hand, pressing their palms together. Like they were when that cloud hung over them.
What he feels is an instant shock of terror. Not his own. Loss of control. Jack's afraid. The words don't fit together. Jack's…afraid? Jack?
He feels the heat of his own skin, and then his thoughts are sucked down a dark tunnel of desire. He sees himself through Jack's eyes, unreal. Not the lying shit he sees in the mirror. He sees his hair golden in the sunshine, eyes the color of the jungle, lips…
Sawyer can't. He pulls himself back into his own head. Think of something, think of anything, anything else, anything -- he sees the boots and he's trembling. Hears his mother's voice and his body's cold. It jerks with the first shot, and stills with the second.
Jack's looking at him with pity in his eyes. Soft, dark, velvet pity. Sawyer would rather die than be looked at that way. He doesn't know what to do. "You want to fuck me," he says, spitting the accusation at Jack.
It doesn't work. Jack says, "So?"
He can feel himself shaking. Like when he gave Jack the gun, before the raft. It's intense. He has to do something, he can't -- can't stand feeling so open. It's like he's bleeding. Dying.
Jack's still in his head, must be, because he takes him in his arms. Holds him, tight. An embrace. Comfort. What he needed as a boy, as that boy, the one scared and hiding under the bed. For a moment he gives in to it.
Then he does what he has to, as a man. One who feels the need for control just as strongly as Jack does, though he goes about it differently. He kisses Jack, mouth open before their lips meet, the way Jack knows now he kissed Kate, in the jungle, a long time ago. His hand slips into Jack's pants as he kisses him. Jack's hard, and Sawyer drops to his knees. Takes him in the that mouth that Jack's fantasized about. Makes him come.
He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and shakes Jack's fingers from where they're twined in his hair. He sees the shame blossoming in his eyes. Hears Christian Shepherd's voice, faint but growing louder, calling Jack names. It almost breaks his will to do this.
"They killed each other because they couldn't live with it, Jack."
"That won't happen to us." Jack sounds sure. But Sawyer knows he isn't sure, not at all.
…
Kate doesn't come round him like before. He used to be able to fool himself into thinking they were friends. They talked, right? Chased each other through the jungle. It wasn't all about getting into each others' pants, even if they both pretended that it was.
Before, he would have chalked it up to the simple fact that having is never as good as wanting. They both lived by that creed. Or he might even have thought she was playing harder to get and burned twice as hot for her.
Now he sees her cuddled up to Jack even more than she used to. She touches him all the time, a silken hand laid gently against his forearm, green eyes looking up at him. Jack hasn't given in yet, but he will. And Kate…she must like what she sees in him now that their souls have been laid bare to each other.
Sawyer turns away. He doesn't blame Jack. It's nice to feel wanted, loved. He had a glimpse of it himself in Jack's head, and he's craving more. It should be enough that it's his tent she'll be sleeping in tonight. It's not.
…
Her hair brushes against his chest intoxicatingly. She washed it this afternoon and he can still smell the salt and the sunshine. Catching her breath, she puts a hand against his hipbone. It makes him groan just a little.
Kate's head comes up. He can taste the metal fury in her mouth and feel her frantic heartbeat echo through his mind. "You're thinking about Jack?" Shrill with betrayal.
He smiles lazily, scooches his hips an inch closer, and puts his hand against the side of her face. "So are you," he says, as he pushes her head down again and closes his eyes.
…
They aren't the only ones. The beach is quieter now, tense and heated. He can read the secrets in their darkened eyes, even though their minds are silent to him. He sits back and looks over the brim of his book, trying to match them up, figure out who is linked with who and what's going to happen.
No one goes on hikes anymore.
He thinks about the French chick and the shifting lies of her stories. In one version, they killed each other. In another, she killed them all. He thinks back to their first day on this island, standing up on high with doomed Shannon translating. That time, "it" killed them. It killed them all.
He doesn't get it, and he doesn't like that.
…
The boats come. Sawyer pretends like he always knew they would. He lingers on the fringe of the group, with Jack, who is counting and checking off names in his head.
"Locke." Sawyer answers the question before Jack thinks to ask it. Jack turns, like he's going to go into the jungle and drag him back here. Force him to be rescued. He stops abruptly and looks at Sawyer, who shakes his head to make his point.
"That first week here," Jack says. "He saw it. And it…bonded him…to this island." He drops his head. "I should have known."
"How?" Sawyer challenges, and he feels Jack ease, though he doesn't raise his head. "Let's go," he says, and deliberately puts his hand on Jack's arm. The connection between them intensifies. Sawyer can feel it like a hot gush of blood, draining dizzily down from his head and splashing his belly with fire. It makes his lips buzz with desire. This is what it feels like to be Jack. Powerful.
On the ship, Jack sleeps with him. Sawyer wakes early in the morning with Jack's dreams playing in his peripheral vision. Jack's bare chest is snug against Sawyer's back. It is excruciating and divine. So of course Sawyer has to edge away, staring at Jack as though to memorize his face as he pulls his shirt on over his head and zips up his jeans. When he closes his eyes and can still see it, he eases out the door.
He stands barefoot on the deck. The salt spray of the water tastes different than their ocean. It's cold and bitter, where theirs was warm and tropical, like blood. He licks it from his lips and finds Kate worrying over her fate. He feels the teeth-ragged edge of her cuticle before he sees it. "They won't touch you," he says.
"It'll still be goodbye," she replies coldly and pushes past him.
He thinks she's wrong.
She's not.
…
They scatter like grains of sand in the surf. Back to their homes, the pieces of their broken lives. Sawyer knows he should be happy about that. He was never part of the group, and he's not the type to keep in touch. But he didn't think they would disappear so completely.
It's the silence in his head that threatens to drive him mad now. His head aches and throbs with it, but the worst is the emptiness in his hollow chest. He misses them.
In the middle of the night, he ascends to the highest hill in the darkness, alone with the jagged stars. He slows his breathing and closes his eyes. He listens hard.
But Jack and Kate, they're not there.
End.
Spoilers: best read after season 3
Notes: Written for psych_30 #12, Collective Unconscious. Using for fanfic100 #55, Spirit. Thanks to Allie for reading multiple versions.
Summary: The island binds them together.
Sympathetic Magic
by eponine119
July 20-23, 2007
It knows them. It knows them all.
…
The three of them are out in the jungle when it happens. This time there's no mechanical click-click-click sound, no warning. One minute they're hiking, hot, bickering, and the next they are surrounded in thick black smoke that isn't really. It's oily emptiness, closing in and clinging to their skin. It runs down the back of Sawyer's throat, but he can't cough.
A hand seizes his in the blind darkness. Small and slender. Kate. He reaches out and comes up with Jack's hard hand, big as his own but different somehow. They cling.
Lightning flashes within the nothingness, illuminating it. Sawyer can feel the electricity buzz in his brain and ignite the sweat between their palms. It burns, down deep in his bones. Then there's a snap and it's gone.
They stand in a circle, a linked ring. Kate to him and him to Jack and Jack to Kate.
He's panting with fear, the sound painful in his ears. Kate looks confused, wondrous. Jack frowns with his forehead wrinkled. They don't let go.
"That thing--" "--the monster--" "--what Locke saw--" They talk over each other. It doesn't matter. They know what it was, or think they do. They know they're lucky to be alive.
"Let's go back." It doesn't matter who says it, because they do. Kate drops Sawyer's hand almost forcefully. Jack's hand just disappears, there one second and gone the next. He's still panting.
…
He lies alone in his shelter that night, trying to put it out of his head. He counts his breaths and tries to empty his mind, tries to relax. But when he closes his eyes, the darkness is like when it surrounded him, closing out everything else except that thread-thin connection to Kate and to Jack. But now he's alone. He presses his hand against the bare skin of his belly. Feels its shallow rise and warmth. Tells himself to go to sleep now.
In the drifting sound of the waves, as his limbs grow too heavy to move, he can hear something. A conversation playing. It's not traveling the length of the beach. It's in his mind. This has happened to him before, always on the edge of sleep. If he tries to hard to listen, it evaporates. He has to let it come.
"I made my bed, Katherine." "Well, your bed's gone, Ma."
"What is this?" "An insurance policy for the house." "What did you do?"
It keeps repeating. Replaying. "What did you do?" He thinks he can feel a humid night, mosquitos hovering, and a blast of heat against his face, but he's asleep.
…
In the morning, they sit shoulder to shoulder. Him and Kate. Not talking. Just sitting. Eating breakfast, except as he moves the sweet fruit between his teeth with his tongue, she keeps forgetting, letting it loll in her hand as she looks at the sea. It's reflecting in her eyes. She's lost in it.
Until she senses Jack on the edge of her vision. Her breathing changes and she remembers to eat. Her eyes track him as he cuts across the sand. Sawyer's eyes follow, lingering on Jack's back, the nape of his neck and his hard ass under his jeans. He can feel Jack's hands on him -- her -- pressing her, forcing her close. He smells, he tastes Jack, stubble scratching the tiny hands against his face, tongue sweeping --
Sawyer chokes. Fruit burns hard down his throat, stealing his breath. But he's in his own head again. He looks at Kate crazily but she can't tell, she thinks it's because he's choking. She puts a hand against his back to steady him. He thinks to jerk away, but he doesn't. Instead, he touches her. Swallows hard and draws a breath. Watches her eyes darken. "You feel it," he says.
Her lips are parted. "Yeah," she says, and he knows she's talking about something else. She's talking about what happens in his tent when they're feeling desperate, sad, overwhelmed, lonely. Funny how it's never happiness or love. Well, he's scared he's crazy and she's longing for Jack, so it's only a moment before the tent flaps fall closed behind them and their bodies twist together. She's small underneath him but strong and his bed is still warm from him sleeping in it.
Her breath catches as he slides into her. Hips move, back of her neck arching. He's holding her head between his hands, staring down at her closed eyelids. He wants to kiss them, except he's gone again, into the hot darkness of her mind. It's red behind her eyes, and he can feel himself surge as she clenches tight around him. She's remembering a kiss with hatred and pity and manipulation. She's trying not to think about Jack. He's trying not to think about Jack. As he sends her soaring, they're fighting, trying not to think about Jack.
She makes a pained noise and he moves, fast, off of her like he's hurt her. His hands slip down through the cascade of her hair as she rolls onto her side, knees drawing up, away from him. "Hey," he says, and touches her spine.
She swears, but it's giving in, because suddenly she's on him, wild almost like an attack. She straddles him, forcing him inside. She puts her hands over his wrists as his hips buck against her. This time he's the one who has to close his eyes.
…
He and Jack end up at the same place at the same time. It's not a coincidence, though they each pretend it is.
"There's something going on, Doc." Sawyer keeps his voice low, even though they're at the deserted edge of the jungle and there's no one to hear them.
"You want an aspirin, Sawyer?"
"Think it'd help?" He can give it back just as good as he gets it. Better.
"There's nothing going on. Your imagination. That's all." Jack's always been good at denial.
"I've been thinking about the French chick," Sawyer says. "How they all flipped 'n killed each other. That door that said 'Quarantine.' That's what this is."
"There is no infection on this island." Jack seems so sure. Until Sawyer grabs his hand, pressing their palms together. Like they were when that cloud hung over them.
What he feels is an instant shock of terror. Not his own. Loss of control. Jack's afraid. The words don't fit together. Jack's…afraid? Jack?
He feels the heat of his own skin, and then his thoughts are sucked down a dark tunnel of desire. He sees himself through Jack's eyes, unreal. Not the lying shit he sees in the mirror. He sees his hair golden in the sunshine, eyes the color of the jungle, lips…
Sawyer can't. He pulls himself back into his own head. Think of something, think of anything, anything else, anything -- he sees the boots and he's trembling. Hears his mother's voice and his body's cold. It jerks with the first shot, and stills with the second.
Jack's looking at him with pity in his eyes. Soft, dark, velvet pity. Sawyer would rather die than be looked at that way. He doesn't know what to do. "You want to fuck me," he says, spitting the accusation at Jack.
It doesn't work. Jack says, "So?"
He can feel himself shaking. Like when he gave Jack the gun, before the raft. It's intense. He has to do something, he can't -- can't stand feeling so open. It's like he's bleeding. Dying.
Jack's still in his head, must be, because he takes him in his arms. Holds him, tight. An embrace. Comfort. What he needed as a boy, as that boy, the one scared and hiding under the bed. For a moment he gives in to it.
Then he does what he has to, as a man. One who feels the need for control just as strongly as Jack does, though he goes about it differently. He kisses Jack, mouth open before their lips meet, the way Jack knows now he kissed Kate, in the jungle, a long time ago. His hand slips into Jack's pants as he kisses him. Jack's hard, and Sawyer drops to his knees. Takes him in the that mouth that Jack's fantasized about. Makes him come.
He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and shakes Jack's fingers from where they're twined in his hair. He sees the shame blossoming in his eyes. Hears Christian Shepherd's voice, faint but growing louder, calling Jack names. It almost breaks his will to do this.
"They killed each other because they couldn't live with it, Jack."
"That won't happen to us." Jack sounds sure. But Sawyer knows he isn't sure, not at all.
…
Kate doesn't come round him like before. He used to be able to fool himself into thinking they were friends. They talked, right? Chased each other through the jungle. It wasn't all about getting into each others' pants, even if they both pretended that it was.
Before, he would have chalked it up to the simple fact that having is never as good as wanting. They both lived by that creed. Or he might even have thought she was playing harder to get and burned twice as hot for her.
Now he sees her cuddled up to Jack even more than she used to. She touches him all the time, a silken hand laid gently against his forearm, green eyes looking up at him. Jack hasn't given in yet, but he will. And Kate…she must like what she sees in him now that their souls have been laid bare to each other.
Sawyer turns away. He doesn't blame Jack. It's nice to feel wanted, loved. He had a glimpse of it himself in Jack's head, and he's craving more. It should be enough that it's his tent she'll be sleeping in tonight. It's not.
…
Her hair brushes against his chest intoxicatingly. She washed it this afternoon and he can still smell the salt and the sunshine. Catching her breath, she puts a hand against his hipbone. It makes him groan just a little.
Kate's head comes up. He can taste the metal fury in her mouth and feel her frantic heartbeat echo through his mind. "You're thinking about Jack?" Shrill with betrayal.
He smiles lazily, scooches his hips an inch closer, and puts his hand against the side of her face. "So are you," he says, as he pushes her head down again and closes his eyes.
…
They aren't the only ones. The beach is quieter now, tense and heated. He can read the secrets in their darkened eyes, even though their minds are silent to him. He sits back and looks over the brim of his book, trying to match them up, figure out who is linked with who and what's going to happen.
No one goes on hikes anymore.
He thinks about the French chick and the shifting lies of her stories. In one version, they killed each other. In another, she killed them all. He thinks back to their first day on this island, standing up on high with doomed Shannon translating. That time, "it" killed them. It killed them all.
He doesn't get it, and he doesn't like that.
…
The boats come. Sawyer pretends like he always knew they would. He lingers on the fringe of the group, with Jack, who is counting and checking off names in his head.
"Locke." Sawyer answers the question before Jack thinks to ask it. Jack turns, like he's going to go into the jungle and drag him back here. Force him to be rescued. He stops abruptly and looks at Sawyer, who shakes his head to make his point.
"That first week here," Jack says. "He saw it. And it…bonded him…to this island." He drops his head. "I should have known."
"How?" Sawyer challenges, and he feels Jack ease, though he doesn't raise his head. "Let's go," he says, and deliberately puts his hand on Jack's arm. The connection between them intensifies. Sawyer can feel it like a hot gush of blood, draining dizzily down from his head and splashing his belly with fire. It makes his lips buzz with desire. This is what it feels like to be Jack. Powerful.
On the ship, Jack sleeps with him. Sawyer wakes early in the morning with Jack's dreams playing in his peripheral vision. Jack's bare chest is snug against Sawyer's back. It is excruciating and divine. So of course Sawyer has to edge away, staring at Jack as though to memorize his face as he pulls his shirt on over his head and zips up his jeans. When he closes his eyes and can still see it, he eases out the door.
He stands barefoot on the deck. The salt spray of the water tastes different than their ocean. It's cold and bitter, where theirs was warm and tropical, like blood. He licks it from his lips and finds Kate worrying over her fate. He feels the teeth-ragged edge of her cuticle before he sees it. "They won't touch you," he says.
"It'll still be goodbye," she replies coldly and pushes past him.
He thinks she's wrong.
She's not.
…
They scatter like grains of sand in the surf. Back to their homes, the pieces of their broken lives. Sawyer knows he should be happy about that. He was never part of the group, and he's not the type to keep in touch. But he didn't think they would disappear so completely.
It's the silence in his head that threatens to drive him mad now. His head aches and throbs with it, but the worst is the emptiness in his hollow chest. He misses them.
In the middle of the night, he ascends to the highest hill in the darkness, alone with the jagged stars. He slows his breathing and closes his eyes. He listens hard.
But Jack and Kate, they're not there.
End.