(no subject)
Title: There's Nothing In This Room But Empty Space
Fandom: Lost
Characters/Pairings: Sawyer/Claire, Jack
Word Count: 840
Rating: R
Prompt: superduperkc wanted her normal, totally crack!pairings, and this is the first one I have in reply to that.
Summary: Future fic. It's day one hundred and eight.
She hates waking up in here.
He always keeps the blinds closed, never letting so much as a ray of sunlight in. Every time she opens them she finds them closed again soon afterwards.
In her opinion it only makes things look gloomy; fits his mood as of late if nothing else.
He groans, shifts, never touching her, and she waits for that damn alarm to go off.
It’s day one hundred and eight.
---
Sawyer’s never been the best cook.
She perches herself on the counter, clear of the cabinets overheard and watches him do silly domestic things like make toast and read the newspaper (he has decent glasses now, real ones, but they don’t make her laugh; he doesn’t make her laugh anymore).
“You’re going to be late,” she practically sings, across from him at the table, and he just flips past the business section.
Right. He doesn’t care.
---
There isn’t much to do while he’s gone.
She showers, right after he leaves, drawing silly symbols in the fogged up bathroom mirrors (they always disappear before he can see them) and then she curls up with a book or idles around the apartment.
Claire doesn’t go out. People ignore her, on the streets, in buildings, everywhere, and it frightens her. Maybe they know who she is; maybe having one of them, one of the survivors of that flight that’s caused so much controversy, scares them a bit too (Sawyer never seems to have that problem).
Maybe Los Angeles just isn’t for her.
She wishes he’d move out of the city.
---
Today he comes home early.
The mail sits on the counter, her spot from earlier. Something is late or underpaid judging by the red.
“How was work?” His head’s in the fridge, he grabs a beer, never answers. “That good huh?”
He checks the answering machine; she’d ignored the ringing phone an hour ago.
“Hey, it’s Kate, I just wanted to - “
He punches delete and the voice disappears.
She frowns. “That’s a little hasty isn’t it? She’s just checking up on you?”
“Dammit,” he mutters, shaking his head, too-deep breath. Then he palms his pack of cigarettes out of the shirt pocket and she knows where this is going.
---
Sawyer must hit redial ten times. No answer. Still he keeps calling.
“This is stupid,” she tells him, choking on cigarette smoke that gets blown in her direction (he always smokes when he calls Jack). He glares at the wall. It makes her grab that clock and contemplate throwing it at him. Just to get some reaction out of him.
“Jack pick the fucking phone up,” he yells into the phone, apparently to an answering machine. He waits, hangs up, tries again, rinse, repeat.
Except this time he gets an answer.
“It’s today, right?”
She draws her legs up to her chest, curls in on herself in the chair. She doesn’t want to look at him.
“Kate called.”
She wishes she could hear what Jack was saying. She hasn’t heard his voice in so long.
“Four.” The cigarette burns down; he stubs it out, lights another. “She doesn’t get it.”
Kate’s the ‘she’ in question, not Claire. But she doesn’t know what ‘it’ is. Or what is four, what they’re marking. “What is this about?” She asks, even though she knows she won’t get an answer with the phone pressed to his ear.
“Like you don’t.” He just sounds bitter. Bitter and sad and she leaves the room to get away from it. It’s suffocating in there.
This place is suffocating.
And she waits for him to get off the phone. All she does is wait.
---
“Don’t do this Sawyer. It had nothing to with you - it could’ve happened on anybody’s watch.” Jack’s voice rings surprisingly clear across the phone. He’s not drunk yet. He’s getting better about that.
“Like you don’t,” he loses the rest of his sentence, finds it in the next puff of smoke. “Like you don’t beat yourself up over every little thing you do wrong.”
Jack’s laugh is rough. “That got me real far didn’t it?”
Sawyer nods to no one, letting out a heavy sigh and, “Four fucking years, Doc.”
“He can’t help that it’s his birthday.” Which isn’t his meaning at all. Worse yet, Jack knows that. His tone makes the shift back to serious again. “It makes me think about her too, you know.”
Their conversation won’t last much longer. They never do. Soon Sawyer will make an excuse and they’ll hang up and pretend this conversation never occurred.
He’ll go to bed and close his eyes and try to forget that he’s alone and it’s been nearly four years since he did the same damn thing, in a jungle somewhere, only to wake up and find he’d lost her.
Sometimes he tries to convince himself that he can reverse it, that he’ll wake up and she’ll have come back.
But she won’t. Alive or dead, she’s on that island, somewhere, not here.
And he’s alone.
Fandom: Lost
Characters/Pairings: Sawyer/Claire, Jack
Word Count: 840
Rating: R
Prompt: superduperkc wanted her normal, totally crack!pairings, and this is the first one I have in reply to that.
Summary: Future fic. It's day one hundred and eight.
She hates waking up in here.
He always keeps the blinds closed, never letting so much as a ray of sunlight in. Every time she opens them she finds them closed again soon afterwards.
In her opinion it only makes things look gloomy; fits his mood as of late if nothing else.
He groans, shifts, never touching her, and she waits for that damn alarm to go off.
It’s day one hundred and eight.
---
Sawyer’s never been the best cook.
She perches herself on the counter, clear of the cabinets overheard and watches him do silly domestic things like make toast and read the newspaper (he has decent glasses now, real ones, but they don’t make her laugh; he doesn’t make her laugh anymore).
“You’re going to be late,” she practically sings, across from him at the table, and he just flips past the business section.
Right. He doesn’t care.
---
There isn’t much to do while he’s gone.
She showers, right after he leaves, drawing silly symbols in the fogged up bathroom mirrors (they always disappear before he can see them) and then she curls up with a book or idles around the apartment.
Claire doesn’t go out. People ignore her, on the streets, in buildings, everywhere, and it frightens her. Maybe they know who she is; maybe having one of them, one of the survivors of that flight that’s caused so much controversy, scares them a bit too (Sawyer never seems to have that problem).
Maybe Los Angeles just isn’t for her.
She wishes he’d move out of the city.
---
Today he comes home early.
The mail sits on the counter, her spot from earlier. Something is late or underpaid judging by the red.
“How was work?” His head’s in the fridge, he grabs a beer, never answers. “That good huh?”
He checks the answering machine; she’d ignored the ringing phone an hour ago.
“Hey, it’s Kate, I just wanted to - “
He punches delete and the voice disappears.
She frowns. “That’s a little hasty isn’t it? She’s just checking up on you?”
“Dammit,” he mutters, shaking his head, too-deep breath. Then he palms his pack of cigarettes out of the shirt pocket and she knows where this is going.
---
Sawyer must hit redial ten times. No answer. Still he keeps calling.
“This is stupid,” she tells him, choking on cigarette smoke that gets blown in her direction (he always smokes when he calls Jack). He glares at the wall. It makes her grab that clock and contemplate throwing it at him. Just to get some reaction out of him.
“Jack pick the fucking phone up,” he yells into the phone, apparently to an answering machine. He waits, hangs up, tries again, rinse, repeat.
Except this time he gets an answer.
“It’s today, right?”
She draws her legs up to her chest, curls in on herself in the chair. She doesn’t want to look at him.
“Kate called.”
She wishes she could hear what Jack was saying. She hasn’t heard his voice in so long.
“Four.” The cigarette burns down; he stubs it out, lights another. “She doesn’t get it.”
Kate’s the ‘she’ in question, not Claire. But she doesn’t know what ‘it’ is. Or what is four, what they’re marking. “What is this about?” She asks, even though she knows she won’t get an answer with the phone pressed to his ear.
“Like you don’t.” He just sounds bitter. Bitter and sad and she leaves the room to get away from it. It’s suffocating in there.
This place is suffocating.
And she waits for him to get off the phone. All she does is wait.
---
“Don’t do this Sawyer. It had nothing to with you - it could’ve happened on anybody’s watch.” Jack’s voice rings surprisingly clear across the phone. He’s not drunk yet. He’s getting better about that.
“Like you don’t,” he loses the rest of his sentence, finds it in the next puff of smoke. “Like you don’t beat yourself up over every little thing you do wrong.”
Jack’s laugh is rough. “That got me real far didn’t it?”
Sawyer nods to no one, letting out a heavy sigh and, “Four fucking years, Doc.”
“He can’t help that it’s his birthday.” Which isn’t his meaning at all. Worse yet, Jack knows that. His tone makes the shift back to serious again. “It makes me think about her too, you know.”
Their conversation won’t last much longer. They never do. Soon Sawyer will make an excuse and they’ll hang up and pretend this conversation never occurred.
He’ll go to bed and close his eyes and try to forget that he’s alone and it’s been nearly four years since he did the same damn thing, in a jungle somewhere, only to wake up and find he’d lost her.
Sometimes he tries to convince himself that he can reverse it, that he’ll wake up and she’ll have come back.
But she won’t. Alive or dead, she’s on that island, somewhere, not here.
And he’s alone.