Following, Part Seventeen [Jack/Juliet] [R] [WIP]
Title: Following (Part Seventeen)
Characters: Juliet, Jack, Charlotte, Daniel, Hurley, Bernard, Rose, Ben...
Pairing: Juliet/Jack, hints of Charlotte/Daniel
Rating: R (more like PG-13 for this part- a few refs to sex but nothing explicit)
Spoilers: Season 4, Season 5 (sort of)
A/N: OH MY GOD - I cannot stop writing this thing. I finished a bit of work and then I couldn't help myself -- I had to come back to this. So this part is hot off the press, and I mean hot: if there are typos or syntax issues, you'll know why. Please support my bad work habits by leaving a comment if you can. :)
~~
“Juliet, what the hell are you thinking? How could you let him-” Jack began even before the sound of Ben’s footsteps had begun to die, not caring anymore whether Ben was listening or not, he was so anxious to get Juliet to take back her promise.
He was standing up in his cell, gripping the bars, wanting to shake her out of her stupor. Not only was what she was doing insane, but something about the idea of her leaving this room-leaving his sight-alarmed him beyond reason. Without knowing why, he felt certain that if she left now, he’d never see her again.
She looked back at him after he spoke, but didn’t answer, almost as if she hadn’t heard him. Slowly, she crossed the cell toward him, her expression blank.
“Juliet,” he said again, forcing himself to be gentler as she approached the bars, reaching out for her hands when they were close enough to touch. When he took them in his, he could feel them trembling. She seemed to become suddenly aware of her surroundings again; the stricken look she gave him as her eyes met his pierced him. His voice went softer automatically as he pulled her hands toward him. “Why are you doing this, Juliet?” he caressed her arms, trying to bring her back to herself. “You can’t trust him-you have to know by now that you can’t-”
When she answered him, her voice was so low that he had to lean down to hear her.
“I-I know, Jack,” she squeezed out, “And I don’t.”
“What?” he asked, confused, trying to search her face for the answer, speaking just as lowly as she was, “If you don’t trust him, then why would you-”
“I don’t trust him when he says that he’s going to let us go, or-” She swallowed before looking up at him with fear in her eyes, “Or that he’s not going to hurt you. But me leaving with him now is the only chance that either one of us is going to have to get out of this cell, find out what he’s trying to do and to stop him.”
“Juliet-” he squeezed her arms despairingly, “He’s asking you to do this: that means that he needs you to agree to it: he needs you, not the other way around. If you refuse-”
She exhaled tremulously.
“No, Jack. No matter what Ben says-to me, or to you-I don’t have a choice.” She pressed her forehead against the bar, wincing, “It’s what he does: he makes every order sound like a request, so that later, you think you made a decision-you think you agreed to it, when there was never a choice to begin with. If I don’t go with him now, I believe him when he says he’ll kill us-or have us tortured, which is worse. I have to go with him: there is no other option.”
“Juliet-you-” he trailed off helplessly, grasping her hands tightly, clenching his jaw in defeat. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, and then opened them again to look into hers. He began in a low, desperate voice, “Whatever you do, just please- Protect yourself. Don’t let him hurt you- And if you have a chance to escape at any point- Take it. Don’t-don’t even think about waiting for me. If you can get out of here-” he looked her over slowly, “I don’t care about anything else.”
Her mouth dropped open as he finished, her despair muted for a moment by her surprise.
“Jack-”
“Just-please tell me that you’ll go if you have the chance.”
“I-” There was a sound behind the door, and then suddenly it opened to reveal a large man whom Jack didn’t recognize. Juliet turned toward the door at the sound.
“Hey-” Jack protested, squeezing her hands, “Juliet-” She turned back to him as the man began unlocking the door to her cell. “Tell me.”
She pressed her lips together as though she was going to refuse, but then nodded at him silently, slowly.
He lowered his head, his sigh a mixture of despair and relief.
“You ready?” The man called to Juliet, standing in the door frame. Jack clutched her arms hard, looking up at her before he let her draw away. Her eyes were shining, sad, as she released his hands.
“Yes, Brian. I’m ready,” she said slowly, moving toward the door.
~~
Juliet didn’t come to see him the next day, or the day after that.
Cindy showed up twice to serve him lunch (Ben’s pathetic idea of a joke, no doubt), and Jack almost thought about asking her for some vodka when she wouldn’t tell him anything about Juliet.
He forced himself to eat, even though it nearly made him ill to do it; he compelled himself to stand and pace constantly in the tiny cell, wanting to be alert, ready, if the slightest opportunity presented itself. He thought of Juliet and how she would’ve laughed at his model prisoner routine if she knew, imagining just the way she’d say it, the sound of her voice, the pretty, teasing light in her eyes. And then that image of her would make him remember other things-the softness of her body against his, the sound of her heart, the tender, almost ashamed way she had looked up at him when she had told him why she’d saved his life.
It seemed so fragile, so short, what they had, stretched so thin over the weight of the stone cell around him that it was like an impossible thing, too good, a daydream. And when Cindy tapped him on the shoulder on the third day, waking him up from a doze, he had a hard time at first believing that any of it had been real.
Cindy waited as she usually did while he ate his lunch, despite the fact that it took him much longer to finish the tuna fish sandwich than he had ever taken so far. As he chewed sleepily, still waking up, she merely gazed into the open doorway and remained standing near the corner of the room, her tanned skin flickering dark and yellow in the light.
When he finished, she took the plate from him and cleared her throat.
“Brian,” she called down into the hallway, as she did every time she exited. Jack didn’t look up as he heard the door to the wider cell-Juliet’s-open. But when Cindy approached the bars to his cell instead of walking away, he sensed all at once that something was different, and his head snapped up on instinct, suddenly, like an animal’s.
“What are you-” he began as Brian moved to unlock his door.
“We’re taking you to see someone, Jack,” Cindy explained, “Ben’s orders.”
He was standing in an instant, moving so quickly that Cindy flinched and stepped backward, even though she was on the other side of the bars.
“Put your arms out,” she said after a moment when she had recovered, her voice quivering slightly on the last word, “and move slowly.” He performed the action eagerly, making sure to move forward in a slightly more subdued way as Brian opened the door and Cindy stepped inside.
It took her a moment to cuff his hands behind his back, and she did it clumsily, as though she wasn’t quite used to the procedure. When Brian handed her a burlap bag, Jack bent his head for her quickly, almost reassured by the familiar sight.
They moved him forward with excruciating slowness and it was all Jack could do not to attempt to break free, or demand where they were going, but he bit his lip, not wanting to give them the slightest reason to put him back in the cell.
“There are stairs going up,” Cindy reported from behind him, and they began to move around what he eventually realized must have a spiral staircase. The stone steps seemed to go on forever, so that he felt almost dizzy when Cindy said, “Alright-we’re reached the top.”
He was so turned around after the stairs that he wasn’t able to keep track of the long path they followed afterward, giving up quickly after he took note of a right turn and then a left. Finally, just when he thought he couldn’t take it anymore, they stopped, and Jack could feel Cindy move forward around him. A door creaked lowly, and the bag over his head began to glow with a warm, yellow light from whatever was behind it.
“We’ll come back to get you as soon as you’ve finished,” Cindy said quickly, as though the sentence was self explanatory. She pulled the material away from his face, and before he could turn around, she had shut and locked the door behind him.
He blinked slowly, looking around into what was a long, narrow room with a low fire burning in the center. The place was so cluttered with old-looking wood furniture and objects that it took him a moment to realize that there was someone else inside it, sitting in a chair behind the large table in the corner.
His heart leapt as he took in the long blond, curly hair, and the thought of Juliet was so strong in his mind that he didn’t understand until he had gotten halfway across the room that the woman sitting in the chair was not her.
“Claire?” he asked in shock, unsure, even after he said it, that the distressed, dirty-looking face could be hers.
“Jack, is that you?” Claire asked, as though he was equally unrecognizable, “It is, isn’t it? He told me you’d be coming.”
~~
Part Eighteen
Characters: Juliet, Jack, Charlotte, Daniel, Hurley, Bernard, Rose, Ben...
Pairing: Juliet/Jack, hints of Charlotte/Daniel
Rating: R (more like PG-13 for this part- a few refs to sex but nothing explicit)
Spoilers: Season 4, Season 5 (sort of)
A/N: OH MY GOD - I cannot stop writing this thing. I finished a bit of work and then I couldn't help myself -- I had to come back to this. So this part is hot off the press, and I mean hot: if there are typos or syntax issues, you'll know why. Please support my bad work habits by leaving a comment if you can. :)
~~
“Juliet, what the hell are you thinking? How could you let him-” Jack began even before the sound of Ben’s footsteps had begun to die, not caring anymore whether Ben was listening or not, he was so anxious to get Juliet to take back her promise.
He was standing up in his cell, gripping the bars, wanting to shake her out of her stupor. Not only was what she was doing insane, but something about the idea of her leaving this room-leaving his sight-alarmed him beyond reason. Without knowing why, he felt certain that if she left now, he’d never see her again.
She looked back at him after he spoke, but didn’t answer, almost as if she hadn’t heard him. Slowly, she crossed the cell toward him, her expression blank.
“Juliet,” he said again, forcing himself to be gentler as she approached the bars, reaching out for her hands when they were close enough to touch. When he took them in his, he could feel them trembling. She seemed to become suddenly aware of her surroundings again; the stricken look she gave him as her eyes met his pierced him. His voice went softer automatically as he pulled her hands toward him. “Why are you doing this, Juliet?” he caressed her arms, trying to bring her back to herself. “You can’t trust him-you have to know by now that you can’t-”
When she answered him, her voice was so low that he had to lean down to hear her.
“I-I know, Jack,” she squeezed out, “And I don’t.”
“What?” he asked, confused, trying to search her face for the answer, speaking just as lowly as she was, “If you don’t trust him, then why would you-”
“I don’t trust him when he says that he’s going to let us go, or-” She swallowed before looking up at him with fear in her eyes, “Or that he’s not going to hurt you. But me leaving with him now is the only chance that either one of us is going to have to get out of this cell, find out what he’s trying to do and to stop him.”
“Juliet-” he squeezed her arms despairingly, “He’s asking you to do this: that means that he needs you to agree to it: he needs you, not the other way around. If you refuse-”
She exhaled tremulously.
“No, Jack. No matter what Ben says-to me, or to you-I don’t have a choice.” She pressed her forehead against the bar, wincing, “It’s what he does: he makes every order sound like a request, so that later, you think you made a decision-you think you agreed to it, when there was never a choice to begin with. If I don’t go with him now, I believe him when he says he’ll kill us-or have us tortured, which is worse. I have to go with him: there is no other option.”
“Juliet-you-” he trailed off helplessly, grasping her hands tightly, clenching his jaw in defeat. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, and then opened them again to look into hers. He began in a low, desperate voice, “Whatever you do, just please- Protect yourself. Don’t let him hurt you- And if you have a chance to escape at any point- Take it. Don’t-don’t even think about waiting for me. If you can get out of here-” he looked her over slowly, “I don’t care about anything else.”
Her mouth dropped open as he finished, her despair muted for a moment by her surprise.
“Jack-”
“Just-please tell me that you’ll go if you have the chance.”
“I-” There was a sound behind the door, and then suddenly it opened to reveal a large man whom Jack didn’t recognize. Juliet turned toward the door at the sound.
“Hey-” Jack protested, squeezing her hands, “Juliet-” She turned back to him as the man began unlocking the door to her cell. “Tell me.”
She pressed her lips together as though she was going to refuse, but then nodded at him silently, slowly.
He lowered his head, his sigh a mixture of despair and relief.
“You ready?” The man called to Juliet, standing in the door frame. Jack clutched her arms hard, looking up at her before he let her draw away. Her eyes were shining, sad, as she released his hands.
“Yes, Brian. I’m ready,” she said slowly, moving toward the door.
~~
Juliet didn’t come to see him the next day, or the day after that.
Cindy showed up twice to serve him lunch (Ben’s pathetic idea of a joke, no doubt), and Jack almost thought about asking her for some vodka when she wouldn’t tell him anything about Juliet.
He forced himself to eat, even though it nearly made him ill to do it; he compelled himself to stand and pace constantly in the tiny cell, wanting to be alert, ready, if the slightest opportunity presented itself. He thought of Juliet and how she would’ve laughed at his model prisoner routine if she knew, imagining just the way she’d say it, the sound of her voice, the pretty, teasing light in her eyes. And then that image of her would make him remember other things-the softness of her body against his, the sound of her heart, the tender, almost ashamed way she had looked up at him when she had told him why she’d saved his life.
It seemed so fragile, so short, what they had, stretched so thin over the weight of the stone cell around him that it was like an impossible thing, too good, a daydream. And when Cindy tapped him on the shoulder on the third day, waking him up from a doze, he had a hard time at first believing that any of it had been real.
Cindy waited as she usually did while he ate his lunch, despite the fact that it took him much longer to finish the tuna fish sandwich than he had ever taken so far. As he chewed sleepily, still waking up, she merely gazed into the open doorway and remained standing near the corner of the room, her tanned skin flickering dark and yellow in the light.
When he finished, she took the plate from him and cleared her throat.
“Brian,” she called down into the hallway, as she did every time she exited. Jack didn’t look up as he heard the door to the wider cell-Juliet’s-open. But when Cindy approached the bars to his cell instead of walking away, he sensed all at once that something was different, and his head snapped up on instinct, suddenly, like an animal’s.
“What are you-” he began as Brian moved to unlock his door.
“We’re taking you to see someone, Jack,” Cindy explained, “Ben’s orders.”
He was standing in an instant, moving so quickly that Cindy flinched and stepped backward, even though she was on the other side of the bars.
“Put your arms out,” she said after a moment when she had recovered, her voice quivering slightly on the last word, “and move slowly.” He performed the action eagerly, making sure to move forward in a slightly more subdued way as Brian opened the door and Cindy stepped inside.
It took her a moment to cuff his hands behind his back, and she did it clumsily, as though she wasn’t quite used to the procedure. When Brian handed her a burlap bag, Jack bent his head for her quickly, almost reassured by the familiar sight.
They moved him forward with excruciating slowness and it was all Jack could do not to attempt to break free, or demand where they were going, but he bit his lip, not wanting to give them the slightest reason to put him back in the cell.
“There are stairs going up,” Cindy reported from behind him, and they began to move around what he eventually realized must have a spiral staircase. The stone steps seemed to go on forever, so that he felt almost dizzy when Cindy said, “Alright-we’re reached the top.”
He was so turned around after the stairs that he wasn’t able to keep track of the long path they followed afterward, giving up quickly after he took note of a right turn and then a left. Finally, just when he thought he couldn’t take it anymore, they stopped, and Jack could feel Cindy move forward around him. A door creaked lowly, and the bag over his head began to glow with a warm, yellow light from whatever was behind it.
“We’ll come back to get you as soon as you’ve finished,” Cindy said quickly, as though the sentence was self explanatory. She pulled the material away from his face, and before he could turn around, she had shut and locked the door behind him.
He blinked slowly, looking around into what was a long, narrow room with a low fire burning in the center. The place was so cluttered with old-looking wood furniture and objects that it took him a moment to realize that there was someone else inside it, sitting in a chair behind the large table in the corner.
His heart leapt as he took in the long blond, curly hair, and the thought of Juliet was so strong in his mind that he didn’t understand until he had gotten halfway across the room that the woman sitting in the chair was not her.
“Claire?” he asked in shock, unsure, even after he said it, that the distressed, dirty-looking face could be hers.
“Jack, is that you?” Claire asked, as though he was equally unrecognizable, “It is, isn’t it? He told me you’d be coming.”
~~
Part Eighteen