FINALLY FINISHED.
Title: Calling It Quits
Fandom: Lost
Pairing: Jack/Sawyer
Challenge/Prompt: 7snogs, #2 Jealousy
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Slash
Copyright: Title and opening quotation taken from Aimee Mann’s song “Calling It Quits”.
Summary: All the ways they don't really relate.
Author’s Notes: This is my last one for this challenge (it really should not have taken me over a year to write 7 fics *sigh*), but it doesn’t herald the end of Jack/Sawyer because they are fun. Set in bits of season one, because that’s the one I’ve got on DVD. Not sure what I’ve actually done with the DVDs, but it’s ok because I also happen to have the book. Shush.
Eyes the colour of candy, lies to cover the handicap;
Though your slippers are ruby, you’ll be led to the booby trap.
There’s no prize, just a smaller size,
So I’m wearing the shoe till it fits -
Then I’m calling it quits.
Aimee Mann
On flight 815, Sawyer is sitting, looking out of the window with a smirk on his face, as Jack makes his way down the aisle to his seat. He doesn’t know who Sawyer is yet (and in times to come, he will regret knowing, but he doesn’t know that yet either). Sawyer is simply a man sitting in a seat with a smirk twisting his lips like he owns them all. (Jack doesn’t know yet that Sawyer actually does. His brain is too full of my father is dead and Ana Lucia and alcohol.)
*
Jack doesn’t see Sawyer as he dashes over the beach trying to save everyone, burning hot from the humidity and the fire from the dead plane. But Sawyer sees him. He lights a cigarette from a piece of burning wreckage and leans back to watch the man in the tattered black suit attempt to hold the world together (it’s impossible, but Sawyer gets a good view of Jack’s ass as he tries, so all is not lost).
*
It takes Jack maybe two days to work out that he doesn’t like Sawyer. It probably should happen sooner, but he’s preoccupied with the dying marshal and the other wounded and with Kate and the fact that everyone suddenly wants him to lead them. Except Sawyer. Sawyer doesn’t want to be owned by anyone and Jack is only too happy to leave him to his own devices.
*
Kate, of course, is the complicated one. Jack likes her immediately, right from the moment he hands her a needle and thread and trusts her to stitch him back together. But it seems that Sawyer also has his eye on the beautiful dark-haired fugitive too, and Jack - Jack doesn’t need any more excuses to dislike him, although he uses this one anyway.
*
The first time Jack hits Sawyer, he likes it. Dislike has rapidly turned to hatred, and although Jack is angry about Shannon’s asthma medication, really, he’s wanted to give Sawyer a punch for a while. And yes, he is quick enough, even in the darkness, to register Sawyer’s look of surprise before it transmutes into brittle nonchalance.
*
It would be quicker, safer, and saner to just tell Jack that he doesn’t have the medication everyone’s driving themselves mad over, it really would, but no one likes Sawyer and he doesn’t like anyone. Why should he make their lives easier? Why should he be forced to admit to something that’s almost a crack in his armour? He should have that medication, he’d have it if he truly were as awful as they like to think he is, so he doesn’t tell the truth because he wants to be as evil as Jack believes.
*
Sawyer doesn’t want to be liked, doesn’t want to get on with people, is quite happy to snap and snarl and hoard and give people stuff - oh, but sweetheart; what will you give me in return? Jack does not and will not feel guilty when he changes Sawyer’s bandages, and notes the split fingernails. He did what he had to, and Sawyer understands that, and neither of them are sorry (they won’t let themselves be).
*
The island is dangerous. There’s a big fucking crunchy thing in the jungle and these whispers in the trees and polar-fucking-bears, and apparently a crazy French chick with little-to-no sense of humour. And even when those things aren’t out to get everyone there are homicidal fellow passengers who don’t like Sawyer and seem perfectly happy to hurt him and he knows, now, that Jack would never lift a finger to stop them.
*
Jack resolutely does not flinch when he looks at Sawyer’s face; split lip, grazed forehead, determinedly cocky expression under all that hair. Sawyer made that choice for all of them. Sawyer’s got splintery words to fight back against the bamboo slid under his fingernails - God some nights Jack can actually hear him screaming, the sound echoing in his ears and impossible to lose - but even though he’s sure guilt should be tearing him up, he refuses to let it. He won’t feel guilty. Not about Sawyer, of all people.
*
It turns out that Jack doesn’t - won’t - trust Sawyer with the antibiotics (maybe he thinks that Sawyer will trade them to other people in exchange for things. As if Sawyer would be that stupid. He knows that he needs these pills and if he actually wanted to commit suicide, he’d have done that years ago). So Sawyer finds himself every day walking to the caves, in order to receive a couple of pills with all the bad grace Jack can manage.
*
Jack watches Sawyer re-read Watership Down for what has to be about the fourth time and wonders what it is about the book that attracts him so much; it’s got nothing but rabbits in it and it doesn’t strike Jack as the sort of thing that Sawyer would enjoy. But then, he has to remind himself, he knows nothing about Sawyer and therefore he doesn’t get to pass judgement.
*
“What is it about Sawyer?” Jack asks Kate, because he knows that she’s got this affinity with the guy, and he wants - he has to know.
“If you don’t know, I can’t tell you,” she shrugs, blushing, but Jack feels worse because some small part of him knows exactly what she’s talking about.
*
Being the outsider eventually becomes sort of enjoyable, because as much as Sawyer would like to be liked, he also knows that it doesn’t work like that for him. He gets hated, but at least he gets attention. It’s all he really has, some days. Attention and the scalding heat that comes from knowing just how much other people despise him. And, of course, there are certain people who despise him more than others.
*
Sawyer sees the world in black and white, which Jack thinks is mildly ironic, given that Sawyer himself is such a shade of grey. Admittedly, the grey is so dark it’s practically charcoal and Sawyer seems to take great delight in pushing all the boundaries until they collapse in on him, but still. He’s got a simple view of that world that some small part of Jack really, really wants to share.
*
Jack is borderline worshipped by everyone on this damn island. Sawyer doesn’t exactly want everyone trailing after him, whining and asking exactly what it is that they should be doing right now (because hell if he knows. Hell if Jack knows, come to think of it, but he can at least put up a decent impression of Knowing What He’s Doing), but it might be nice, he reflects, to be looked at with something other than disgust. Just for once.
*
It doesn’t hurt, watching Kate’s fingers brush Sawyer’s arm a few too many times, because Jack has enough things on his mind without adding in what Kate and Sawyer are or aren’t doing under tarpaulin. There’s something - their darker sides combining, or something like that, Jack was never a psychologist - going on there, and it may become something, and it may become nothing, and either way it doesn’t involve him and he refuses to care either way.
*
The longer they stay on the island, the more it frustrates Sawyer, because no matter how much he tries to annoy Jack, it never gets anywhere. He can push and push and push and Jack refuses to snap, so determined that it’s ridiculous, almost humiliating. But it’s always been Sawyer’s experience that every man (or woman, as the case may be) has a price, has a tipping point, and he won’t admit it but he is vaguely curious as to what Jack’s is.
*
Jack doesn’t want to talk, he doesn’t want to touch anyone, he doesn’t want to be himself right now. He just wants to exist, quiet, and not have to live in this mould they’ve fashioned for him. He doesn’t want to have to hate Sawyer and worry about everyone’s well-being and moon after Kate.
“Don’t say anything,” he says, when he comes and sits in a corner of Sawyer’s tarpaulin masquerading as a tent because he has to hide somewhere. Sawyer just laughs. “Wasn’t even gonna try, Doc.”
*
Sawyer has to concede that a lot of the women on the island really are pretty, underneath the dirt and still-healing wounds. He also knows that, if he exerted even the smallest amount of effort, he could have any and all of them - even Shannon, who thinks she’s too much of a princess to deign to look his way, even Sun, unhappily married to a half-crazed husband. What really annoys him about the whole thing, though, is that not one of them can hold his attention the way that Jack does.
*
Everyone and everything is frantic and Boone is dead which is mad and never supposed to happen, and Jack sits and watches the waves and waits for Kate to come and care about him.
“I’ve got his blood on my hands,” he says quietly, when someone sits down beside him. “Yes you have,” Sawyer responds, tone neutral. Maybe he really doesn’t give a damn.
*
Sawyer doesn’t want to tell Jack that he knows his daddy loved him after all, because no one has ever come up to him and told him that his daddy loved him really, really he did. He’s jealous of Jack’s relationship with his dead father as opposed to his own relationship with his very own dead father, and that’s just sick.
The truth slips out anyway.
*
Jack is walking away with tears in his eyes and then he can’t stop himself and turns back and pulls Sawyer into a desperate kiss, thanking him and hating him at the same time for this revelation. Sawyer laughs against his mouth - “you’re such a girl, doc” - but is content to let Jack push his shirt back over his shoulders and pull him closer.
*
Time passes and it becomes clear Jack is going to have to leave and get his dynamite, and Sawyer has to finish the mast, so they disentangle themselves. Sawyer watches Jack leave and thinks about trying something new and crying his heart out; but he’s not about to start changing the habits of a lifetime for anyone.
*
Kate says, sort of blankly, “he’s gone”, and yes, he is, and Jack watches the sea where the raft used to be before it sailed out of sight, and wonders how he really feels about the whole thing.
*
Fandom: Lost
Pairing: Jack/Sawyer
Challenge/Prompt: 7snogs, #2 Jealousy
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Slash
Copyright: Title and opening quotation taken from Aimee Mann’s song “Calling It Quits”.
Summary: All the ways they don't really relate.
Author’s Notes: This is my last one for this challenge (it really should not have taken me over a year to write 7 fics *sigh*), but it doesn’t herald the end of Jack/Sawyer because they are fun. Set in bits of season one, because that’s the one I’ve got on DVD. Not sure what I’ve actually done with the DVDs, but it’s ok because I also happen to have the book. Shush.
Eyes the colour of candy, lies to cover the handicap;
Though your slippers are ruby, you’ll be led to the booby trap.
There’s no prize, just a smaller size,
So I’m wearing the shoe till it fits -
Then I’m calling it quits.
Aimee Mann
On flight 815, Sawyer is sitting, looking out of the window with a smirk on his face, as Jack makes his way down the aisle to his seat. He doesn’t know who Sawyer is yet (and in times to come, he will regret knowing, but he doesn’t know that yet either). Sawyer is simply a man sitting in a seat with a smirk twisting his lips like he owns them all. (Jack doesn’t know yet that Sawyer actually does. His brain is too full of my father is dead and Ana Lucia and alcohol.)
*
Jack doesn’t see Sawyer as he dashes over the beach trying to save everyone, burning hot from the humidity and the fire from the dead plane. But Sawyer sees him. He lights a cigarette from a piece of burning wreckage and leans back to watch the man in the tattered black suit attempt to hold the world together (it’s impossible, but Sawyer gets a good view of Jack’s ass as he tries, so all is not lost).
*
It takes Jack maybe two days to work out that he doesn’t like Sawyer. It probably should happen sooner, but he’s preoccupied with the dying marshal and the other wounded and with Kate and the fact that everyone suddenly wants him to lead them. Except Sawyer. Sawyer doesn’t want to be owned by anyone and Jack is only too happy to leave him to his own devices.
*
Kate, of course, is the complicated one. Jack likes her immediately, right from the moment he hands her a needle and thread and trusts her to stitch him back together. But it seems that Sawyer also has his eye on the beautiful dark-haired fugitive too, and Jack - Jack doesn’t need any more excuses to dislike him, although he uses this one anyway.
*
The first time Jack hits Sawyer, he likes it. Dislike has rapidly turned to hatred, and although Jack is angry about Shannon’s asthma medication, really, he’s wanted to give Sawyer a punch for a while. And yes, he is quick enough, even in the darkness, to register Sawyer’s look of surprise before it transmutes into brittle nonchalance.
*
It would be quicker, safer, and saner to just tell Jack that he doesn’t have the medication everyone’s driving themselves mad over, it really would, but no one likes Sawyer and he doesn’t like anyone. Why should he make their lives easier? Why should he be forced to admit to something that’s almost a crack in his armour? He should have that medication, he’d have it if he truly were as awful as they like to think he is, so he doesn’t tell the truth because he wants to be as evil as Jack believes.
*
Sawyer doesn’t want to be liked, doesn’t want to get on with people, is quite happy to snap and snarl and hoard and give people stuff - oh, but sweetheart; what will you give me in return? Jack does not and will not feel guilty when he changes Sawyer’s bandages, and notes the split fingernails. He did what he had to, and Sawyer understands that, and neither of them are sorry (they won’t let themselves be).
*
The island is dangerous. There’s a big fucking crunchy thing in the jungle and these whispers in the trees and polar-fucking-bears, and apparently a crazy French chick with little-to-no sense of humour. And even when those things aren’t out to get everyone there are homicidal fellow passengers who don’t like Sawyer and seem perfectly happy to hurt him and he knows, now, that Jack would never lift a finger to stop them.
*
Jack resolutely does not flinch when he looks at Sawyer’s face; split lip, grazed forehead, determinedly cocky expression under all that hair. Sawyer made that choice for all of them. Sawyer’s got splintery words to fight back against the bamboo slid under his fingernails - God some nights Jack can actually hear him screaming, the sound echoing in his ears and impossible to lose - but even though he’s sure guilt should be tearing him up, he refuses to let it. He won’t feel guilty. Not about Sawyer, of all people.
*
It turns out that Jack doesn’t - won’t - trust Sawyer with the antibiotics (maybe he thinks that Sawyer will trade them to other people in exchange for things. As if Sawyer would be that stupid. He knows that he needs these pills and if he actually wanted to commit suicide, he’d have done that years ago). So Sawyer finds himself every day walking to the caves, in order to receive a couple of pills with all the bad grace Jack can manage.
*
Jack watches Sawyer re-read Watership Down for what has to be about the fourth time and wonders what it is about the book that attracts him so much; it’s got nothing but rabbits in it and it doesn’t strike Jack as the sort of thing that Sawyer would enjoy. But then, he has to remind himself, he knows nothing about Sawyer and therefore he doesn’t get to pass judgement.
*
“What is it about Sawyer?” Jack asks Kate, because he knows that she’s got this affinity with the guy, and he wants - he has to know.
“If you don’t know, I can’t tell you,” she shrugs, blushing, but Jack feels worse because some small part of him knows exactly what she’s talking about.
*
Being the outsider eventually becomes sort of enjoyable, because as much as Sawyer would like to be liked, he also knows that it doesn’t work like that for him. He gets hated, but at least he gets attention. It’s all he really has, some days. Attention and the scalding heat that comes from knowing just how much other people despise him. And, of course, there are certain people who despise him more than others.
*
Sawyer sees the world in black and white, which Jack thinks is mildly ironic, given that Sawyer himself is such a shade of grey. Admittedly, the grey is so dark it’s practically charcoal and Sawyer seems to take great delight in pushing all the boundaries until they collapse in on him, but still. He’s got a simple view of that world that some small part of Jack really, really wants to share.
*
Jack is borderline worshipped by everyone on this damn island. Sawyer doesn’t exactly want everyone trailing after him, whining and asking exactly what it is that they should be doing right now (because hell if he knows. Hell if Jack knows, come to think of it, but he can at least put up a decent impression of Knowing What He’s Doing), but it might be nice, he reflects, to be looked at with something other than disgust. Just for once.
*
It doesn’t hurt, watching Kate’s fingers brush Sawyer’s arm a few too many times, because Jack has enough things on his mind without adding in what Kate and Sawyer are or aren’t doing under tarpaulin. There’s something - their darker sides combining, or something like that, Jack was never a psychologist - going on there, and it may become something, and it may become nothing, and either way it doesn’t involve him and he refuses to care either way.
*
The longer they stay on the island, the more it frustrates Sawyer, because no matter how much he tries to annoy Jack, it never gets anywhere. He can push and push and push and Jack refuses to snap, so determined that it’s ridiculous, almost humiliating. But it’s always been Sawyer’s experience that every man (or woman, as the case may be) has a price, has a tipping point, and he won’t admit it but he is vaguely curious as to what Jack’s is.
*
Jack doesn’t want to talk, he doesn’t want to touch anyone, he doesn’t want to be himself right now. He just wants to exist, quiet, and not have to live in this mould they’ve fashioned for him. He doesn’t want to have to hate Sawyer and worry about everyone’s well-being and moon after Kate.
“Don’t say anything,” he says, when he comes and sits in a corner of Sawyer’s tarpaulin masquerading as a tent because he has to hide somewhere. Sawyer just laughs. “Wasn’t even gonna try, Doc.”
*
Sawyer has to concede that a lot of the women on the island really are pretty, underneath the dirt and still-healing wounds. He also knows that, if he exerted even the smallest amount of effort, he could have any and all of them - even Shannon, who thinks she’s too much of a princess to deign to look his way, even Sun, unhappily married to a half-crazed husband. What really annoys him about the whole thing, though, is that not one of them can hold his attention the way that Jack does.
*
Everyone and everything is frantic and Boone is dead which is mad and never supposed to happen, and Jack sits and watches the waves and waits for Kate to come and care about him.
“I’ve got his blood on my hands,” he says quietly, when someone sits down beside him. “Yes you have,” Sawyer responds, tone neutral. Maybe he really doesn’t give a damn.
*
Sawyer doesn’t want to tell Jack that he knows his daddy loved him after all, because no one has ever come up to him and told him that his daddy loved him really, really he did. He’s jealous of Jack’s relationship with his dead father as opposed to his own relationship with his very own dead father, and that’s just sick.
The truth slips out anyway.
*
Jack is walking away with tears in his eyes and then he can’t stop himself and turns back and pulls Sawyer into a desperate kiss, thanking him and hating him at the same time for this revelation. Sawyer laughs against his mouth - “you’re such a girl, doc” - but is content to let Jack push his shirt back over his shoulders and pull him closer.
*
Time passes and it becomes clear Jack is going to have to leave and get his dynamite, and Sawyer has to finish the mast, so they disentangle themselves. Sawyer watches Jack leave and thinks about trying something new and crying his heart out; but he’s not about to start changing the habits of a lifetime for anyone.
*
Kate says, sort of blankly, “he’s gone”, and yes, he is, and Jack watches the sea where the raft used to be before it sailed out of sight, and wonders how he really feels about the whole thing.
*