Fic: The bad stars you chart your life by (Lost; Sawyer)
Title: The bad stars you chart your life by
Characters/Pairings: Sawyer-centric, some Sawyer/Juliet
Words: 2750
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Five things that never happened to James Ford.
Author’s Note: Written in response to siobeehan’s prompt here. I didn’t mean for this to turn out quite so long, but one thing led to another and it just spiraled out of control. Title and section headings taken from Jeffrey McDaniel’s The Jerk.
1. based on the true story of my mother
When James is eight years old, his mom and dad get in a big fight, bigger than anything he's ever seen.
He hides in his room, laying in his bed with his hands pressed close against his ears. It’s a little better this way, but he can still hear the yelling, the sound of his mother crying. There’s a dull smacking noise, like someone getting hit hard. His mom screams. The front door slams. James doesn’t move. He doesn’t cry. He just lays there, hands over his ears, and waits.
He doesn’t know how long it is before his door swings open, just knows it’s long enough that the silence has started making him scared. But then he sees it’s his mom there and things don’t seem so bad. Except her face is all red and she’s got a black eye, like the kind he got last year when he got hit with a baseball in Little League.
“Come on,” she says, rushing over and pulling him out of bed. He stands there as she runs to his closet, pulls down his blue suitcase, the one he always brings when he goes to visit his grandparents. “We got get goin’, Jimmy,” she says and starts throwing clothes in the bag. “Put on your shoes.”
He doesn’t ask her why, just digs his shoes out from under the bed and puts them on quick, not even bothering to tie the laces. He knows they gotta leave soon. He hopes they make it before his daddy comes back.
When they get to the car, he’s still dressed in his pajamas, his untied sneakers sliding off his feet. His mom throws their suitcases in the trunk and he sits in the backseat watching her. She keeps looking behind her, out towards the road and he knows she's scared they ain't gonna make it out in time.
When James asks her where they’re going, she just shakes her head and tells him to put on his seatbelt.
As they drive away, he looks out the back window of their station wagon, watching as their house gets smaller and smaller through the dusty glass.
James never sees his father again.
2. i'll start telling you lies
The summer after his nineteenth birthday, James tries to pull off his first real con.
It ain’t like he sets out to do it exactly, it’s just that he’s in over his head and he needs some cash. Fast. He ain’t even sure how he got in this fix in the first place. A few games of pool, hustlin’ the wrong people, now he’s in the hole six grand and he needs to come up with a plan.
So he finds himself a bar and sits next to this blonde chick, and she’s pretty in a wholesome, corn-fed kind of way. He flags down the bartender for a beer and, as he lays his money down on the bar and takes a sip of his drink, he notices Barbie glance over at him a couple of times. When he looks back at her, she’s looking shyly at him, smiling a little.
The thing is, the girl looks a little like his mother, in the few hazy memories of her he still carries around with him. She’s sittin’ alone, just nursing a beer, idly twirling a thin gold ring with a big shiny diamond on her left hand, and when she asks him his name, he thinks about the letter he’s got folded up in his back pocket and the six grand he needs to get and he says the first thing that comes to mind. “Sawyer.”
He follows her out of the bar and he ain’t quite sure what he’s doing, but with necessity bein’ the mother of invention and all that, he supposes he’ll figure something out pretty quick.
**
Things go okay at first. The girl’s kind of annoying, but nothing he can’t deal with. Her husband runs some trucking company and is almost never home, and it’s only a matter of time before she gets bored of cheap motels and brings him to her house one night.
They have sex in her and her husband’s bed and fall asleep right around dawn. James wakes up to the sound of a door slamming and his heart starts racing once he realizes what that means.
By the time the guy’s made it back to his bedroom, James has managed to put on his jeans and one of his boots.
The last thing he remembers before he gets knocked out is the look on the girl’s face. She looks scared, the kind of look his mama used to get back when his daddy would get in to one of his moods.
**
He ends up with two broken ribs, a fractured wrist, six stitches over his right eye, and even less money in his pocket than when he first got there.
And he ain't quite decided what he's going to next, but he's pretty fucking confident that a life of crime just ain’t for him.
3. a holiday in the islands of grief
The raft holds together long enough for them to reach some kind of civilization.
Sawyer ain’t sure how it happens, they never expected to make it this far, figured they’d get picked up or die before they ever reached inhabited land, but they wash up on an island 300 miles south of Tahiti three weeks after they first set sail.
They ran out of food almost a week ago and haven’t had water for two days. Sawyer’s skin feels like it’s on fire, cracked and burned worse than anything he’s ever felt.
The kid’s been unconscious for three days and Michael’s been flipping out, getting on Sawyer’s nerves something awful. Jin seems to have gone in to some kind of trance or some shit, staring out at the endless blue of the ocean and sky, staring like someone’s gonna come save them.
By the time they finally hit land, none of them so much as get to their feet, just sit listlessly while their raft bumps against the sand. The last thing Sawyer sees before he passes out is a couple of shirtless guys running towards them from down the beach, calling out to them in a language he doesn't understand.
**
When Sawyer wakes up, he’s in some kind of hospital, hooked up to tubes and machines. He feels like shit.
There are nurses walking around, wearing white uniforms and speaking what he thinks might be French. His throat feels like it’s on fire and he’d kill for a fucking glass of water.
He turns his head a little to the side, he throat burning the whole time, sees Jin in the bed next to him. He thinks he catches a glimpse of Michael one bed over. He doesn’t see Walt, but he hopes he made it.
**
A week later, he, Michael, and Jin get released from the hospital. Turns out, the kid did make it, though Sawyer hasn’t seen him since they got here.
The cops have been peppering them with questions, and Sawyer just wants to get the hell out of here. He don’t understand a word they’re saying anyway, so it ain’t like he’s gonna be much help.
But he sticks around for a few days, he ain’t quite sure why. By the time Walt gets out, they’ve all got a decision to make.
He and Michael stay up one night after Jin and Walt go to sleep, talking about what they’re going to do next. They know Jin wants to go back, to figure out a way to rescue his wife and all the rest, but the more Sawyer thinks about it, the less he’s interested in ever figuring out where they were. Michael’s the same. Just wants to get himself and his boy home.
Sawyer thinks about staying with Jin, helping to organize some kind of search party or something. He thinks of Kate, of Jack, of Hurley and Charlie and all the rest. But in the end, he tells himself that doesn’t matter, and ends up siding with Michael. They leave Jin there, the guy trying to figure out how to tell someone how to find a mysterious island out in the middle of nowhere.
Besides, what the hell does he care anyway about those people he only knew for two weeks? They were just strangers on a plane. Ain’t like they were friends.
He tells himself that he doesn’t owe them nothing.
4. with me for a lover, you won't need catastrophes
He’s standing next to Juliet, waiting for the bomb to go off, when the Swan construction site starts to collapse.
She’s staring up at the structure, watching as it starts to fall, and she doesn’t even see the chains. Sawyer does.
Just seconds before the chains reach her, he reaches out, pulls her out of the way. From the corner of his eye he sees the chains get pulled down into the pit and the thought of Juliet being caught in those, of her just disappearing into the darkness of the Island, it’s almost enough to make him scream.
He’s still clutching her to him, whispering “I got you,” over and over again into her hair, when the scaffolding collapses less than twenty feet away from them. There’s this horrible screeching sound of metal on metal and all he can think about is how she almost ended up down there. It’s the worst thing he could possibly imagine right now.
He pulls back a little to look at her, make sure she’s okay. He can’t stop touching her, absurdly grateful that she’s still here, that he’s still here, that Jack’s plan didn’t work.
She looks at him and smiles a little and he presses a gentle kiss against her mouth as he hears the metal hit the bottom of the shaft and, all around them, the world turns white.
5. and break your heart just for the sound it makes
They get on the sub and drink their OJ like good little prisoners and when they wake up, the sub is docked in Tahiti and they’re still handcuffed to the table.
Sawyer expects a lot more trouble than they get, expects that he and Juliet are going to have to fight their way out of here. But it turns out to be much simpler than that. The captain unlocks their handcuffs and escorts them up to the surface. Once they get there, the guards just let them go, not a word or a threat or anything, really.
He and Juliet stand there for a few minutes, blinking in the bright afternoon sunlight, neither one of them sure what to do next.
**
They end up just staying in Tahiti for a while. It ain’t like there’s anywhere else they’re supposed to be and there’s this kind of unspoken agreement between them that they don’t go back to the States.
It’s strange being back in the real world. They spend almost their whole first week in Tahiti in their hotel room, avoiding the beach and watching TV.
At first, Sawyer figures they’re only going to stay here for a few days. They’ve barely got any money and they don’t speak the language and he feels kind of like a refugee, shell-shocked and out of place.
Any time he brings up leaving with Juliet, she changes the subject and it don’t take him too long to realize she just wants to stay here.
Not that he minds. Tahiti’s cheap and everyone’s pretty friendly and Juliet looks happier than he’s seen her in a while. So they end up renting a house a few blocks from the beach, falling back into their old domestic routines pretty easily.
Sawyer hardly ever even thinks about the people they left behind.
**
Two weeks after they get there, Juliet tells him she’s pregnant.
“What?” he asks. “You sure?”
“I’m sure,” she says, her face neutral.
“After just two weeks?” he says, confused. He don’t know much about pregnancy, but he figured it would take longer than that to be sure.
“It's been longer than two weeks,” Juliet tells him. "I found out before we left."
"How long before we left?" he demands.
"Two months," she says, looking right at him.
It takes a few seconds for that to sink in, for him to really process what she's telling him. That all of this has been happening and he’s had no idea.
“Jesus,” he says, this feeling in his chest like he wants to hit something. “Juliet. I…two months?”
“James.” She looks down at the ground, runs a hand through her hair. “I was just, I was waiting for the right time to tell you.”
“The right time to tell me?” he repeats, and he’s got no idea why he’s so angry right now. What if they’d stayed on the Island? What if Radzinsky had decided to shoot first and ask questions later? What if Phil had decided to punch her in the stomach instead of in the face? Jesus Christ. Two months.
“James,” she says and she sounds like she might cry. “Please.” She moves towards him, holds out her hand like she’s going to touch him, and he takes a step back.
He turns around and opens the door, heads out into the street, loud and filled with people. Juliet makes a noise behind him, something that might be sob, but he pulls the door shut, forces himself not to look at her.
**
By the time he gets home that night, he’s wasted. There’s a bar down the street from where they're staying and he's spent the past four hours getting drunk enough to try to forget that she's been lying to him for weeks.
He didn’t bring his key of course, so he ends up banging on the door until Juliet yanks it open, staring out at him, her eyes half-closed with sleep.
When she sees it’s him, she turns around without a word, leaving the door open for him. Sawyer sighs heavily and closes the door behind him. He ain’t quite sure how he ended up being the bad guy here, but he’s just drunk enough to figure it’s his job to fix it.
He follows her back to their bedroom and stands there in the open door way, watching as she pulls back the sheets on the bed and lays down, moving so that her back is to him.
He strips off his clothes and slides into bed next to Juliet, moving close so that he’s pressed up against her back.
“Hey,” he says, his voice slurred even to his own ears. She doesn’t respond, and he moves his hand so that it’s laying across her stomach. She inhales sharply and he slides his hand lower, fingers dipping below the waist of her pajama pants.
“James,” she says, her voice barely a whisper.
He moves his hand lower, sliding two fingers inside of her. She gasps and he presses a kiss against her neck, right below her ear.
She turns around so that she’s facing him, and her eyes look very blue, even in the dark of the room. When she kisses him, it feels like an apology and she tastes like everything he never thought he’d have, things he never let himself hope for.
When he twists his fingers up inside of her, she bites down on his lip and all he can think about is how grateful he is that they got put on that sub.
**
Before he falls asleep he lets himself wonder what would have happened if they’d have stayed on the Island. Wonders if Jack would have done what he said, found a way to save them all.
Juliet sighs in her sleep, pressing her body closer to his and he holds his hand against her stomach, terrified about what’s going to happen next.
Sawyer lays there silently for a few hours, his body pressed against hers, the warmth of her comforting and familiar. He keeps his hand pressed against her stomach, and as he falls asleep, the sun starts to rise, streaming in through the curtains and bathing the whole room in bright, golden light.