(no subject)
Title: Scars Are Souvenirs You Never Lose
Fandom: Lost
Characters/Pairings: Jack/Shannon
Word Count: 1,275
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: eponine119 wanted Jack/Shannon
Summary: AU from "The Greater Good". There's a look there, a look like he doesn't expect that she was the type who ran around and got in fights or did anything that would result in concussions or broken bones. Right, she's been this sarcastic, pretty, primadona her whole life. She forgot.
It starts over something stupid.
A cut, not even the thickness of her fingernail, but it bleeds and she does a shitty job of covering that up and next thing she knows Boone’s bugging her to go see Jack. Infection he reasons and as far as she’s concerned as long as it doesn’t turn yellow and nothing comes out of it, it’s fine.
So he brings Jack to her.
“He sounded pretty worried.” Jack’s got her hand in his and the fact that he has to squint to even see the damn thing is a message in and of itself. Still he smoothes the pad of his index finger over the small slit, the tiny imperfection, and she makes the mistake of wincing. “But it hurts?”
“It stings.” Shannon settles for, nonchalant, before she adds, “I’ve had worse. Everyone’s had worse.”
There’s a look there, a look like he doesn’t expect that she was the type who ran around and got in fights or did anything that would result in concussions or broken bones. Right, she’s been this sarcastic, pretty, primadona her whole life. She forgot.
It makes her bitter, instantly, and it’s there that she lets a bit of someone else, someone Jack or any of the others doesn’t know, slip out. “I broke my arm on the jungle gym when I was seven. Got shin splints in track, before they figured out I was asthmatic and the coach made me quit. And again when I was dancing.”
Jack frowns, “You were a dancer.”
“Ballet. I...” she looks down, trying not to make this sound pathetic, but struggling with it anyways. This is one of those things she’ll always regrets, she figures, might as well get over it now. “I used to teach it to these little kids and I was going for this internship with a dance company in New York.” She pushes the words past her lips. “It didn’t work out.”
She thinks the only reason he bothers with the antiseptic this time is because he pities her.
That’s just the opposite of what she wants.
---
The next time his hand is on her shoulder.
The cut has long since healed.
“Shannon, I...” he stumbles over his words. She wonders if he was like this with patients. With their families. See, she knows as soon as he walks down that beach, looking ragged and like he spent too much time out of the sun, what this is about. Something happened. Something happened to Boone. Now it’s just a matter of how bad. “I’m so sorry but - “
The rest of it she doesn’t hear, she sees. She watches his lips move and tries to tell the waves to stop crashing so loud and the birds to stop making all that racket but her own lips are motionless and the words, the commands, only exist in her head. But she processes what he’s saying, on some level, some shallow level that allows her to keep it together, to only tear up.
She does not break. They all expect her to break. She never thought she’d prove herself stronger than they thought like this.
The breakdown, that will come later, later over the body of yet another man she’s loved and lost. Everyone leaves her eventually.
And just like that another cut opens. But this one is much deeper. This one will take much, much longer to heal.
---
The third time he doesn’t touch her. Not all.
In fact, she thinks she might make him nervous. Four hours ago she held a gun in her hand and pulled the trigger. She would’ve hit her target too if Sayid hadn’t messed it up.
When he looks at her, she can see that image is all but burned into his brain, and honestly she can’t bring herself to care. She did, tried to do, what she had to do. What was right.
John Locke didn’t deserve to be saved. Let him be another damn sacrifice for his precious island. At least no one would miss him, not the way she misses Boone.
“You want to do something about the - “ he starts but doesn’t finish, nodding to the spot on her arm instead that’s red with dried blood and she hadn’t even noticed until now. It doesn’t hurt. A stick, she thinks, something she’d hit on her way down to the ground, when Sayid tackled her. Battle scars.
“No,” she murmurs, in a tone that tells him she’d really rather she was just left alone.
He picks up on that and she’s watching his retreating back mere seconds later.
Her thank you, the one she hadn’t wanted him to hear but felt the need to say, is swallowed up by the breeze.
---
This time it’s her hand on his shoulder. Role reversal; she comes to him.
“I don’t...blame you. It’s not even your fault. So stop beating yourself up about it.” She tries not to make the words sound so empty.
He denies it. Guilt is written all over his face even so.
“Look, you’re the doctor, you save people, you have some God-complex, whatever. But you didn’t kill him and you weren’t the one who stopped me from getting my revenge. So none of this falls on you.” Her laugh is a bitter one. “This doesn’t even have anything to do with you at all.”
Later, she’ll wonder if she shouldn’t have been so harsh.
---
He stops coming by. She scared him away.
So she’s waiting for him when he comes back for the jungle. “I’m sorry. About last time.”
Jack looks like he doesn’t know what to do with those words in relation to her but he gives her this smile, this nod, that feel forgiving but she can’t tell.
She kisses him then. Because it feels like the thing to do.
It probably isn’t but she doesn’t care about that either.
---
It’s his lips on her neck, her fingers holding tight to his arms, winding around his biceps, tracing those tattoos, and she didn’t see this coming when it was just a stupid cut.
He pushes into her, and she can feel the ground of the caves, the various twigs imbedded in the earth, through the blanket she’s currently laying on.
She’ll count the scars later.
---
“It did work out.”
His hand brushes against her arm as he walks by her, looking through the medicine for something, another patient.
“What?” He’s forgotten by now. Of course. It makes her feel stupid.
“The internship.” Jack looks at her long enough that she can see the flash of recognition. “I was going to go but my dad died and my step-mother didn’t want to pay for it.”
“I’m sorry.” Is all he offers. It’s all he can offer.
She can feel the tears behind her eyes but she blinks them away. Strong, right, she’s trying to be strong. She’s playing yet another role. “I wasn’t always like this. But no one knows that now...now that he’s,” her voice breaks there, but she pulls through, “now that he’s gone. And I just thought someone should know.”
Because someone needs to know that she’s more than just some superficial rich bitch. Someone needs to know that she isn’t this horrible person that everyone thinks she is. Someone needs to know so she can remind herself of that, so that someone can bring her back down to earth again.
He doesn’t say anything to that but she thinks, if she’s reading him right, that it might mean something. That it did mean something to him.
And that wound finally starts to heal.