Fic: Ebb (Kate/Sayid)
Title: Ebb
Pairing: Kate/Sayid
Rating: Adults
Summary: Kate takes a run at night and stumbles upon Sayid. This is in some ways just as much a character piece as a pairing story, but don't let that scare you. Pre-"Confidence Man." 4100 words.
Note: Yeah, so I always wanted to write this pairing, but I never did, and I honestly don't know what ever stopped me (or what other pairings more likely distracted me). Of course, seeing them in last week's episode made me want to write them again. Tell me if it works. It kinda came out fast and didn't want to hang around on my hard drive anymore.
Ebb
If the moon were brighter, she wouldn't be able to see the lush darkness the way she can now, as she's running down this beach, drifting always a little too close to the ever-churning water. She's never really been on the beach much in her life, certainly never lived on one, so the sudden swish of water over the sand sometimes still takes her by surprise, keeps her anticipating and guessing-especially in the darkness. But nighttime is something she knows, and certainly running is, too.
So with the moon watching, aloof and cool and unaccountably benevolent, she flies down the beach, with the rhythm of those hard slaps of her bare feet into the wet sand. She was always so haphazard about her exercise before the island, letting days, sometimes weeks, lapse between the times when she'd pull on her sneakers and find a route that looped her through whatever new place she'd found herself in. But running's hard when you've only got a hotel to come back to, or some other place that isn't really home. That's what's so funny about her habit of running on the island.
The breeze is cool for once but the air's still so humid, even though that doesn't seem quite right, somehow. Being on this island always feels a little odd, like there are a lot of things that shouldn't add up to make a complete picture but do, somehow. It's not that Kate wants normal. She had it once, and she didn't like the way normal hid a multitude of sins. She didn’t quite ask for chaos-and that's what she often has-but she's grown accustomed to this life of change. When it's not her very freedom at stake, she likes gauging and measuring and slipping into things. She's used to adjusting. She's not used feeling like there is no adjusting because the adjustment's already been made-only the island sits permanently slightly off-center.
Not that this island, in and of itself, with all its off-kilterness, is particularly bad. It's a little bit like the night, the way it unsettles but there's a way to get used to being unsettled. And it's a little bit like Sayid's eyes. She nearly comes to a dead halt as she feels her cheeks flush beyond her physical exertion, so unexpected and hard does it hit her, but she just keeps on running, because she's never been in the habit of stopping.
It's not as though Kate isn't aware that Sayid fascinates her. She wants to say she wouldn't feel such a visceral reaction to him if it wasn't for his eyes, but that's not exactly true. It's partly what his eyes say that really slides under her skin until she wonders how she's gone so long without a pair of warm hands to trace the curves of her thighs. But if she thinks too much, she knows that his eyes don't say all that much about sex because they're saying too many other things, half of them not about her, even when he's talking to her. She likes how he seems to have his own problems he would never think to make hers; he wouldn't even burden her by sharing them. Those deep brown eyes conceal a lot of things-deep things: what she craves knowing about him, what she never will, what she never wants to-but they also give a lot away. In what they're willing to reveal, they're starkly honest, not as a weapon but as a matter of fact. He has something she never really has: confidence. She's faked it for a long time, and maybe there was a time when he did, too. But that time isn't now. He looks at her with enough self-assurance it makes her practically shiver. Then he looks at her like he's seeing himself, somehow-someone guarded and suspicious but cunning and strong. Under his gaze, she remembers that she's always been strong. She wonders what his strength has cost him.
But the thing with his eyes is usually mental, making her crave being around him, feel a little flutter in her heartbeat when she thinks about that need, while at the same time she feels like when she talks to him, he really listens without an agenda. It makes her want to discard any agenda she has. Being under his gaze feels a lot like the mental clarity she has out here, flying away from camp, even when her feet are bringing her right back to it. Because the movement is what matters, not the place she's going to. So while his eyes work that way that usually isn't precisely physical, there's no question about his voice. It's been a long time since she met someone who could make her every nerve-all the good ones, anyway-buzz with warmth and anticipation. As if she could find a way to get close to a man like that. Certainly not in the usual way. That's fitting-she doesn't want him in the usual way.
About the time the sand begins to really sting her feet, she usually turns around, and it's at a slightly different part of the beach each night. Tonight, she is just short of that strange bend in the shoreline when she feels her feet start to complain, but something makes her go on, press forward just a little farther. The water can be gorgeous around the bend-crashing against an outcropping of dark rocks, waves white and brutal even at night, under this dim moon. It somehow makes her really smell the salt of the spray again, even though she often thinks the salt permeates everything on this island until she can't tell if her unwashed body even smells like her anymore or this island.
She slows a little, jogging now around the rocks on shore that seems to force the beach farther down toward the water before it meets that outcropping, these rocks more jagged and tenacious than the slight mounds under the trees. Those two sets of rocks strike her as odd counterpoints, not even related except in the way her body seems to feel a tension there, as if they're pulling toward each other. Or as if she's feeling squeezed in by something, and she seriously doubts it's the rocks. Running like this is good, even when it hurts her feet, because she has to get away from it all sometimes.
As she gets past the bookends of rocks, she suddenly feels irritated with herself in a way that can only be hormonal it's so fast and all-encompassing. Surely it's hormonal, or she's going crazy. Her feet hurt beyond enduring and she wonders how her mind and body could've turned from contentment, that cool, moon-like feeling, to restlessness so quickly, as if the water or the wind rushed her against the rocks and fractured some part of her tranquility. The steady pull of the tide isn't calming anymore; it's maddening, relentless and jarring. The humidity clings to her even as the cool wind fails to really cool anymore, and she can't get back to the camp fast enough. But she finds that she's pursing her lips in frustration and slowing until she's now walking, petulantly, back toward camp, her feet making wet crunches over the sand.
It's only because she's walking that she notices him at all, sitting in between two trees just at the edge of the jungle. Here, the beach is narrow, the water almost reaching the trees at high tide, and he sits on that strip of unadulterated dry sand, sifting it between his fingers, and she wonders if he was there before, when she ran by, not seeing anything but the sand in front of her. She maybe doesn't want to know, but her feet take her toward him anyway.
The sand is cool and soft here, silky against her feet, and he watches her approach without a word. When he doesn't talk, it makes her more nervous than she'd care to admit. You learn to survive by collecting as much data as you can so you can interpret the world, and a person's words are the best data you can get. Sayid gives her things she needs so often that this silence from him puts her on edge. Happily, it's not the same sort of edge her emotions and her feet and the moon and ocean are putting her on.
"What are you doing?" she asks him.
"Sitting," he replies with a wry smile.
"I see that." She smiles back, because that's what's easiest to do with him sometimes. Otherwise they'd fall into one of those quicksand-like conversations where they can't open their mouths or even their eyes without every expression being we're in danger here, and we may never get away. "How long have you been here?"
"Long enough to know you would've made a good cross-country runner."
She shakes her head. "It's not often I have the patience."
"One does not need to run like that every day."
"Like what?"
He just raises his eyebrows in answer.
She says, "But I do. Run every day."
"Not like this," he says, and she begins to wonder how many times she's passed him here without knowing it. And why he insists on being here, knowing she'll run by. Did he want to be seen?
She stands there, arms crossed and looking down at him. He's wearing a white t-shirt she's never seen him in before, and jeans so worn they look incredibly soft, like the sand, like she might drop down and climb into his lap and bury herself against him. She shakes her head to herself, glancing behind her to the roll of the tide over the shore. Low. Pulling.
He says, "You're walking now."
"Yeah." She nods, smiling to herself. "I'm… I don't know. I just couldn't make my legs keep running tonight."
"You're not ill, are you?"
She laughs like a startling peal of a bell. It only sounds like a bell to her because it feels too loud and out of place, perhaps because it's so musical and feminine and open. Not at all calculated to be so, either. "No. I'm stranded on a deserted island."
"It makes me feel a bit unbalanced sometimes."
"Yeah?"
"I feel as though there ought to be a manual for this sort of thing, but there isn't one. I would not say my life has been stable and easy, but there is a difference between never quite finding a home and being here, where it doesn't even seem possible."
This surprises her. Although she's had every reason to guess that they're kindred spirits in some respects, in some ill-defined and unconcealed aspects of their pasts, he's never spoken about his life before the island, especially not so obliquely, as though he's referring to something she already knows. It prompts her to honesty herself.
She says with a snort, "Oh, no. It's possible. It's just not the home we want."
"Yes," he replies. "There's that."
"But you don't seem as disturbed by what's happening as everyone else does."
"I don't?" His eyes narrow, questioning.
"No."
"Do you see anyone else wandering away from camp in the middle of the night, simply to be able to breathe?" It isn't a question. At least his eyes don't say it is. But his voice forms a question: You feel it, don't you?.
She says evenly, "A lot of them are already looking to you to fix things for them, aren't they?"
"Or tell them we aren't doomed," he says softly, his eyes on the sand between his legs. He's started to sift it again.
"What do you really think?"
"I don't know."
"Sayid…"
He looks up again, and his hands stop. "I think this is a perilous situation," he says firmly. Then cynically, "It can only be perilous if people are trusting me about anything." His eyes cast themselves down again so she can't see his expression.
"Is this about you being Iraqi? Just because Sawyer-"
His head snaps up at that name. "No. It is not that. I'm quite accustomed to that sort of thing, from men and women thankfully few and far between. It is not that. And they trust you, too, you know?"
She shakes her head, because she knows it's true, but it's absurd. It makes her wonder what sort of life Sayid's had, if his leadership truly is as incongruous as her own. "Well, desperation will do a lot of crazy things to a person."
"It is not desperation, Kate."
She can never get over the way he says her name. Most people flatten that 't' until it disappears, making her name sound rounded off or cut off or sloping like a plane of wood, like a doorstop. But his aspirated 't' makes her name almost two syllables, both crisp and deliberate.
As her neck and shoulders prick up into goose flesh, she swings her arms and chuckles to herself, trying to dispel the night, how it-along with Sayid-is trying to wedge itself into her soul. She comes out here as a friend of the calming darkness, because it can help her not think about all this or to think about it in a way she can stand. She doesn't come out here for this intense stare and her own longing, both as cloying as the thick air and the darkness that is remarkable only because they've always lived their lives under so many bulbs.
She says, "They trust Jack more."
"And he wants it even less than we do." Suddenly, he pulls himself to his feet. "Did you know he runs, too?"
"No."
"In the mornings. Sometimes I'm awake to watch him. He does not run like you."
"No?"
"He runs something out of himself. Or maybe he runs out of himself. You run into yourself, don't you?"
That had been the problem earlier, she decides. She had been running from something, and she wasn't altogether comfortable with the person she was trying to run into. Her eyes ask him how do you know that?, because her mouth can't. Into. Out of. Sayid standing too close to her.
He adds, "When he runs past me, he sees me, and he waves. You don't."
"Sorry."
It's only when his forehead creases up that she realizes she really is sorry, because she never wants to pass him without slowing down enough to see him; but he doesn't want to be seen, especially not when he's out here like this, dealing with the island in his own way, just like she does.
He says with a wave of his hand, "There is nothing to be sorry for."
Without discussion, they begin walking back to the camp together in silence, making a matching set of footprints in the wet sand. She knows because she glances back at them every so often, the way they wind up and down the shoreline, tracing their quiet path.
They've come to the gnarled tree that she uses as a mental marker, about halfway between the rocks and the camp, when he says, "So, what has made you so tense this night?"
"I honestly don't know."
"And you would likely not tell me if you did."
"Telling things doesn't make any difference most of the time." It's true, even when she craves the scariest thing of all: opening up and letting all of it just rush out.
He nods. "Do you like to swim?"
"I guess," she says with a shrug.
"I mean, do you like the feeling of being out in the ocean, letting it bear you up and push you along?"
"Sure. It can be nice," she says, partly because it's true and partly because she can sense he's peeled back another layer for her.
"Yet you do not swim these nights when you're trying to…escape from the camp."
"I like to run. It works out my tension."
"But not tonight?"
"Not tonight. You know, it really never occurred to me to swim at night, because it's too dark. Dangerous."
She might've missed it if she didn't glance past him to the water: his chest contracts and his face lights into a smile.
"What?" she says.
He just shakes his head, the smile still on his face, and she is amazed to see how different his eyes look when he smiles; warm, knowing-in a different way.
Frowning, she says, "I'm not a very good swimmer. I'm a little out of my element here."
"Of course."
Sighing, she says, "What's so funny?"
"It's just that I did not think you were afraid of anything."
She stops, suddenly tense again, and this time she knows it's about him. This is too much. He's letting her get too close, and she doesn't know why, only that it is dangerous and the sand hurts her feet again, and she feels very small now, like a speck on the earth, insignificant under that remote, indifferent moon, beside the endless expanse of the sea. But for some reason, that sea is the only thing she wants, just to let it envelop her. She realizes she's been feeling too alone lately to bear it.
She often gets like this, in her life of running and constant inconsistency and newness. She's learned to deal with the hollowed-out feeling of abandonment that recurs with her-as though the universe has abandoned her when it's she who made the decision to willfully abandon it when she didn't understand the cost. It's just that for some reason, here on this island, she'd been thrown so out of whack she hadn't even recognized it until it was staring her in the face, looking at her through eyes so dark and round that they look exactly like alone should look. But tonight, with every nerve in her body sparking with tension, they also look like need and power. Things she always seeks but for once in her life is going to take and be.
"Maybe a swim would be good," she says, surveying the water, her hands shaking at her sides. "But only if you're coming in with me. You can swim, can't you?"
He simply nods and takes his shirt by the back of the collar and pulls it over his head. She doesn't watch as he unbuttons his jeans, but she sees in the periphery of her vision the hem of a pair of faded boxer shorts skimming his thick thighs. She's in a tank top and a pair of cut-off khaki shorts Shannon discarded, and she might very well go into the water just like that, but she unbuttons the shorts and lets them fall in a heap on the sand and follows him into the water in her tank top and bikini briefs.
The water is never anything less than warm, and that usually makes her crazy, because it should be cold and refreshing. In the hot sun, it isn't. But with the wind blowing over her, making her skin feel clammy and damp, it's nice to feel the warm water pushing against her calves, then lapping up over her knees, then overtaking her waist. When they get out to chest level-they're still quite near the shore, but it seems perfectly far enough from her life and, unaccountably, the island-Sayid grabs her bicep to halt her. They're going to stay here where they can keep their feet on the bottom.
As she bobs up and down in the water, facing him and, beyond him, that outcropping of rocks, keeping an eye on the occasional waves that come in hard from her left and try to wash clean over them, she can't stop looking at Sayid and the way he's standing there with his eyes closed, one hand stretched out toward the dark horizon, as though he can anticipate the churning of the ocean, the waves, just by feeling them. She supposes she can herself, because it's too dark to do anything but operate on blind instinct and the dim, translucent flash of moonlight on foam. He was right: this is calming, if only because it presents its own challenge right along with its comfort.
When he opens his eyes after a few moments, he looks at her quizzically. "Why do you and Jack not run together?"
The question is absolutely startling, but there's only the honest answer. "I've never run with anyone before."
"I think Jack trusts you, Kate."
"No. He wants to, but he doesn't. He trusts you, though."
"He's a fool," Sayid says sardonically, but with a half smile. "For so many reasons."
"Why are we talking about Jack?"
At that, Sayid's whole face quirks into a sheepish grin. "Just…testing the waters, as they say."
Kate lets the shivers overtake her now, because they're not for nothing. This is going to end in something, and she knows it's something she wants, even if it's far from uncomplicated, just like his gaze is now.
She says, "Okay, so I think I know what we're doing out here, but what I don't understand is why you're being so…"
"Let us say I hadn't planned on swimming with anyone tonight."
"Bullshit," she replies.
He tips his head back and laughs openly but quietly. "Yes. I had thought it would take you many more nights to notice me sitting there. May I kiss you?"
"You may," she says with a small, half-embarassed half-amused roll of her eyes, because to do anything else would be to be swept under.
His hands are small but steady as they hold fast to both sides of her head, and his mouth is so warm. His tongue explores her mouth carefully, just as carefully as he slides his body into place against hers, turning them so slightly she doesn't realize it until she feels the balance shift, how he's bracing the both of them against the onslaught of waves, even though his back is completely turned to them. So she squeezes her arms tighter around his waist and kisses him deep, and it takes him by surprise. As she draws his full bottom lip between hers, he moans so quietly she can feel it more than hear it.
He's hard now, and with his hips pulled so tight against her, she can practically feel his body throb with it, this heat and the hardness of his cock and of all his muscles as she twines around him, suddenly desperate to see if she can make him nearly stop breathing or thinking, just with fierce kisses and soft flesh slipping against his. He lets himself be kissed, but he doesn't for a moment let go of her face, at least not with the one hand that's stroking her jaw then settling in under her ear. The other traces the curve of her breast, thumb brushing her nipple, before she nips at his lip and that hand slips lower, flattening warm and solid against her stomach before it slides beneath the waistband of her panties and one of his fingers just brushes her clit on its way to probing into her, simply holding there as she rocks against him.
For a time, she can't even open her eyes, that's how good it feels, she can only kiss him feverishly and feel how he's there too, kissing her without calculation; but when she does finally look at him again, and she finds that there are still so many things he won't let her see, while this one thing shows so plainly in his face the implications of it overwhelm her, she wishes to God it wasn't too risky, on so many levels, to let him be inside her.
Instead, she pulls her hips back from where they rut against his, his hand trapped between, and she draws his cock, thick and hard, out of his boxers which are by now tickling her legs under the water. His forehead falls against her shoulder, and she can't imagine why he's looking between their bodies, because it's too dark, really, to see anything. But the feeling is more important, she decides as her body starts to pull tight with it. She can feel him drawing the slickness out of her with his nimble fingers, and she can feel his breath panted out against her collar bone. And she can feel his cock growing harder and harder in her hand. He's not so aloof anymore, and even if she honestly has no idea how she's going to survive it, she knows it's just like being here on the island: she has no choice, but it's thankfully the sort of settling that means constant adjustment. That, she thinks, is something she knows.
Pairing: Kate/Sayid
Rating: Adults
Summary: Kate takes a run at night and stumbles upon Sayid. This is in some ways just as much a character piece as a pairing story, but don't let that scare you. Pre-"Confidence Man." 4100 words.
Note: Yeah, so I always wanted to write this pairing, but I never did, and I honestly don't know what ever stopped me (or what other pairings more likely distracted me). Of course, seeing them in last week's episode made me want to write them again. Tell me if it works. It kinda came out fast and didn't want to hang around on my hard drive anymore.
Ebb
If the moon were brighter, she wouldn't be able to see the lush darkness the way she can now, as she's running down this beach, drifting always a little too close to the ever-churning water. She's never really been on the beach much in her life, certainly never lived on one, so the sudden swish of water over the sand sometimes still takes her by surprise, keeps her anticipating and guessing-especially in the darkness. But nighttime is something she knows, and certainly running is, too.
So with the moon watching, aloof and cool and unaccountably benevolent, she flies down the beach, with the rhythm of those hard slaps of her bare feet into the wet sand. She was always so haphazard about her exercise before the island, letting days, sometimes weeks, lapse between the times when she'd pull on her sneakers and find a route that looped her through whatever new place she'd found herself in. But running's hard when you've only got a hotel to come back to, or some other place that isn't really home. That's what's so funny about her habit of running on the island.
The breeze is cool for once but the air's still so humid, even though that doesn't seem quite right, somehow. Being on this island always feels a little odd, like there are a lot of things that shouldn't add up to make a complete picture but do, somehow. It's not that Kate wants normal. She had it once, and she didn't like the way normal hid a multitude of sins. She didn’t quite ask for chaos-and that's what she often has-but she's grown accustomed to this life of change. When it's not her very freedom at stake, she likes gauging and measuring and slipping into things. She's used to adjusting. She's not used feeling like there is no adjusting because the adjustment's already been made-only the island sits permanently slightly off-center.
Not that this island, in and of itself, with all its off-kilterness, is particularly bad. It's a little bit like the night, the way it unsettles but there's a way to get used to being unsettled. And it's a little bit like Sayid's eyes. She nearly comes to a dead halt as she feels her cheeks flush beyond her physical exertion, so unexpected and hard does it hit her, but she just keeps on running, because she's never been in the habit of stopping.
It's not as though Kate isn't aware that Sayid fascinates her. She wants to say she wouldn't feel such a visceral reaction to him if it wasn't for his eyes, but that's not exactly true. It's partly what his eyes say that really slides under her skin until she wonders how she's gone so long without a pair of warm hands to trace the curves of her thighs. But if she thinks too much, she knows that his eyes don't say all that much about sex because they're saying too many other things, half of them not about her, even when he's talking to her. She likes how he seems to have his own problems he would never think to make hers; he wouldn't even burden her by sharing them. Those deep brown eyes conceal a lot of things-deep things: what she craves knowing about him, what she never will, what she never wants to-but they also give a lot away. In what they're willing to reveal, they're starkly honest, not as a weapon but as a matter of fact. He has something she never really has: confidence. She's faked it for a long time, and maybe there was a time when he did, too. But that time isn't now. He looks at her with enough self-assurance it makes her practically shiver. Then he looks at her like he's seeing himself, somehow-someone guarded and suspicious but cunning and strong. Under his gaze, she remembers that she's always been strong. She wonders what his strength has cost him.
But the thing with his eyes is usually mental, making her crave being around him, feel a little flutter in her heartbeat when she thinks about that need, while at the same time she feels like when she talks to him, he really listens without an agenda. It makes her want to discard any agenda she has. Being under his gaze feels a lot like the mental clarity she has out here, flying away from camp, even when her feet are bringing her right back to it. Because the movement is what matters, not the place she's going to. So while his eyes work that way that usually isn't precisely physical, there's no question about his voice. It's been a long time since she met someone who could make her every nerve-all the good ones, anyway-buzz with warmth and anticipation. As if she could find a way to get close to a man like that. Certainly not in the usual way. That's fitting-she doesn't want him in the usual way.
About the time the sand begins to really sting her feet, she usually turns around, and it's at a slightly different part of the beach each night. Tonight, she is just short of that strange bend in the shoreline when she feels her feet start to complain, but something makes her go on, press forward just a little farther. The water can be gorgeous around the bend-crashing against an outcropping of dark rocks, waves white and brutal even at night, under this dim moon. It somehow makes her really smell the salt of the spray again, even though she often thinks the salt permeates everything on this island until she can't tell if her unwashed body even smells like her anymore or this island.
She slows a little, jogging now around the rocks on shore that seems to force the beach farther down toward the water before it meets that outcropping, these rocks more jagged and tenacious than the slight mounds under the trees. Those two sets of rocks strike her as odd counterpoints, not even related except in the way her body seems to feel a tension there, as if they're pulling toward each other. Or as if she's feeling squeezed in by something, and she seriously doubts it's the rocks. Running like this is good, even when it hurts her feet, because she has to get away from it all sometimes.
As she gets past the bookends of rocks, she suddenly feels irritated with herself in a way that can only be hormonal it's so fast and all-encompassing. Surely it's hormonal, or she's going crazy. Her feet hurt beyond enduring and she wonders how her mind and body could've turned from contentment, that cool, moon-like feeling, to restlessness so quickly, as if the water or the wind rushed her against the rocks and fractured some part of her tranquility. The steady pull of the tide isn't calming anymore; it's maddening, relentless and jarring. The humidity clings to her even as the cool wind fails to really cool anymore, and she can't get back to the camp fast enough. But she finds that she's pursing her lips in frustration and slowing until she's now walking, petulantly, back toward camp, her feet making wet crunches over the sand.
It's only because she's walking that she notices him at all, sitting in between two trees just at the edge of the jungle. Here, the beach is narrow, the water almost reaching the trees at high tide, and he sits on that strip of unadulterated dry sand, sifting it between his fingers, and she wonders if he was there before, when she ran by, not seeing anything but the sand in front of her. She maybe doesn't want to know, but her feet take her toward him anyway.
The sand is cool and soft here, silky against her feet, and he watches her approach without a word. When he doesn't talk, it makes her more nervous than she'd care to admit. You learn to survive by collecting as much data as you can so you can interpret the world, and a person's words are the best data you can get. Sayid gives her things she needs so often that this silence from him puts her on edge. Happily, it's not the same sort of edge her emotions and her feet and the moon and ocean are putting her on.
"What are you doing?" she asks him.
"Sitting," he replies with a wry smile.
"I see that." She smiles back, because that's what's easiest to do with him sometimes. Otherwise they'd fall into one of those quicksand-like conversations where they can't open their mouths or even their eyes without every expression being we're in danger here, and we may never get away. "How long have you been here?"
"Long enough to know you would've made a good cross-country runner."
She shakes her head. "It's not often I have the patience."
"One does not need to run like that every day."
"Like what?"
He just raises his eyebrows in answer.
She says, "But I do. Run every day."
"Not like this," he says, and she begins to wonder how many times she's passed him here without knowing it. And why he insists on being here, knowing she'll run by. Did he want to be seen?
She stands there, arms crossed and looking down at him. He's wearing a white t-shirt she's never seen him in before, and jeans so worn they look incredibly soft, like the sand, like she might drop down and climb into his lap and bury herself against him. She shakes her head to herself, glancing behind her to the roll of the tide over the shore. Low. Pulling.
He says, "You're walking now."
"Yeah." She nods, smiling to herself. "I'm… I don't know. I just couldn't make my legs keep running tonight."
"You're not ill, are you?"
She laughs like a startling peal of a bell. It only sounds like a bell to her because it feels too loud and out of place, perhaps because it's so musical and feminine and open. Not at all calculated to be so, either. "No. I'm stranded on a deserted island."
"It makes me feel a bit unbalanced sometimes."
"Yeah?"
"I feel as though there ought to be a manual for this sort of thing, but there isn't one. I would not say my life has been stable and easy, but there is a difference between never quite finding a home and being here, where it doesn't even seem possible."
This surprises her. Although she's had every reason to guess that they're kindred spirits in some respects, in some ill-defined and unconcealed aspects of their pasts, he's never spoken about his life before the island, especially not so obliquely, as though he's referring to something she already knows. It prompts her to honesty herself.
She says with a snort, "Oh, no. It's possible. It's just not the home we want."
"Yes," he replies. "There's that."
"But you don't seem as disturbed by what's happening as everyone else does."
"I don't?" His eyes narrow, questioning.
"No."
"Do you see anyone else wandering away from camp in the middle of the night, simply to be able to breathe?" It isn't a question. At least his eyes don't say it is. But his voice forms a question: You feel it, don't you?.
She says evenly, "A lot of them are already looking to you to fix things for them, aren't they?"
"Or tell them we aren't doomed," he says softly, his eyes on the sand between his legs. He's started to sift it again.
"What do you really think?"
"I don't know."
"Sayid…"
He looks up again, and his hands stop. "I think this is a perilous situation," he says firmly. Then cynically, "It can only be perilous if people are trusting me about anything." His eyes cast themselves down again so she can't see his expression.
"Is this about you being Iraqi? Just because Sawyer-"
His head snaps up at that name. "No. It is not that. I'm quite accustomed to that sort of thing, from men and women thankfully few and far between. It is not that. And they trust you, too, you know?"
She shakes her head, because she knows it's true, but it's absurd. It makes her wonder what sort of life Sayid's had, if his leadership truly is as incongruous as her own. "Well, desperation will do a lot of crazy things to a person."
"It is not desperation, Kate."
She can never get over the way he says her name. Most people flatten that 't' until it disappears, making her name sound rounded off or cut off or sloping like a plane of wood, like a doorstop. But his aspirated 't' makes her name almost two syllables, both crisp and deliberate.
As her neck and shoulders prick up into goose flesh, she swings her arms and chuckles to herself, trying to dispel the night, how it-along with Sayid-is trying to wedge itself into her soul. She comes out here as a friend of the calming darkness, because it can help her not think about all this or to think about it in a way she can stand. She doesn't come out here for this intense stare and her own longing, both as cloying as the thick air and the darkness that is remarkable only because they've always lived their lives under so many bulbs.
She says, "They trust Jack more."
"And he wants it even less than we do." Suddenly, he pulls himself to his feet. "Did you know he runs, too?"
"No."
"In the mornings. Sometimes I'm awake to watch him. He does not run like you."
"No?"
"He runs something out of himself. Or maybe he runs out of himself. You run into yourself, don't you?"
That had been the problem earlier, she decides. She had been running from something, and she wasn't altogether comfortable with the person she was trying to run into. Her eyes ask him how do you know that?, because her mouth can't. Into. Out of. Sayid standing too close to her.
He adds, "When he runs past me, he sees me, and he waves. You don't."
"Sorry."
It's only when his forehead creases up that she realizes she really is sorry, because she never wants to pass him without slowing down enough to see him; but he doesn't want to be seen, especially not when he's out here like this, dealing with the island in his own way, just like she does.
He says with a wave of his hand, "There is nothing to be sorry for."
Without discussion, they begin walking back to the camp together in silence, making a matching set of footprints in the wet sand. She knows because she glances back at them every so often, the way they wind up and down the shoreline, tracing their quiet path.
They've come to the gnarled tree that she uses as a mental marker, about halfway between the rocks and the camp, when he says, "So, what has made you so tense this night?"
"I honestly don't know."
"And you would likely not tell me if you did."
"Telling things doesn't make any difference most of the time." It's true, even when she craves the scariest thing of all: opening up and letting all of it just rush out.
He nods. "Do you like to swim?"
"I guess," she says with a shrug.
"I mean, do you like the feeling of being out in the ocean, letting it bear you up and push you along?"
"Sure. It can be nice," she says, partly because it's true and partly because she can sense he's peeled back another layer for her.
"Yet you do not swim these nights when you're trying to…escape from the camp."
"I like to run. It works out my tension."
"But not tonight?"
"Not tonight. You know, it really never occurred to me to swim at night, because it's too dark. Dangerous."
She might've missed it if she didn't glance past him to the water: his chest contracts and his face lights into a smile.
"What?" she says.
He just shakes his head, the smile still on his face, and she is amazed to see how different his eyes look when he smiles; warm, knowing-in a different way.
Frowning, she says, "I'm not a very good swimmer. I'm a little out of my element here."
"Of course."
Sighing, she says, "What's so funny?"
"It's just that I did not think you were afraid of anything."
She stops, suddenly tense again, and this time she knows it's about him. This is too much. He's letting her get too close, and she doesn't know why, only that it is dangerous and the sand hurts her feet again, and she feels very small now, like a speck on the earth, insignificant under that remote, indifferent moon, beside the endless expanse of the sea. But for some reason, that sea is the only thing she wants, just to let it envelop her. She realizes she's been feeling too alone lately to bear it.
She often gets like this, in her life of running and constant inconsistency and newness. She's learned to deal with the hollowed-out feeling of abandonment that recurs with her-as though the universe has abandoned her when it's she who made the decision to willfully abandon it when she didn't understand the cost. It's just that for some reason, here on this island, she'd been thrown so out of whack she hadn't even recognized it until it was staring her in the face, looking at her through eyes so dark and round that they look exactly like alone should look. But tonight, with every nerve in her body sparking with tension, they also look like need and power. Things she always seeks but for once in her life is going to take and be.
"Maybe a swim would be good," she says, surveying the water, her hands shaking at her sides. "But only if you're coming in with me. You can swim, can't you?"
He simply nods and takes his shirt by the back of the collar and pulls it over his head. She doesn't watch as he unbuttons his jeans, but she sees in the periphery of her vision the hem of a pair of faded boxer shorts skimming his thick thighs. She's in a tank top and a pair of cut-off khaki shorts Shannon discarded, and she might very well go into the water just like that, but she unbuttons the shorts and lets them fall in a heap on the sand and follows him into the water in her tank top and bikini briefs.
The water is never anything less than warm, and that usually makes her crazy, because it should be cold and refreshing. In the hot sun, it isn't. But with the wind blowing over her, making her skin feel clammy and damp, it's nice to feel the warm water pushing against her calves, then lapping up over her knees, then overtaking her waist. When they get out to chest level-they're still quite near the shore, but it seems perfectly far enough from her life and, unaccountably, the island-Sayid grabs her bicep to halt her. They're going to stay here where they can keep their feet on the bottom.
As she bobs up and down in the water, facing him and, beyond him, that outcropping of rocks, keeping an eye on the occasional waves that come in hard from her left and try to wash clean over them, she can't stop looking at Sayid and the way he's standing there with his eyes closed, one hand stretched out toward the dark horizon, as though he can anticipate the churning of the ocean, the waves, just by feeling them. She supposes she can herself, because it's too dark to do anything but operate on blind instinct and the dim, translucent flash of moonlight on foam. He was right: this is calming, if only because it presents its own challenge right along with its comfort.
When he opens his eyes after a few moments, he looks at her quizzically. "Why do you and Jack not run together?"
The question is absolutely startling, but there's only the honest answer. "I've never run with anyone before."
"I think Jack trusts you, Kate."
"No. He wants to, but he doesn't. He trusts you, though."
"He's a fool," Sayid says sardonically, but with a half smile. "For so many reasons."
"Why are we talking about Jack?"
At that, Sayid's whole face quirks into a sheepish grin. "Just…testing the waters, as they say."
Kate lets the shivers overtake her now, because they're not for nothing. This is going to end in something, and she knows it's something she wants, even if it's far from uncomplicated, just like his gaze is now.
She says, "Okay, so I think I know what we're doing out here, but what I don't understand is why you're being so…"
"Let us say I hadn't planned on swimming with anyone tonight."
"Bullshit," she replies.
He tips his head back and laughs openly but quietly. "Yes. I had thought it would take you many more nights to notice me sitting there. May I kiss you?"
"You may," she says with a small, half-embarassed half-amused roll of her eyes, because to do anything else would be to be swept under.
His hands are small but steady as they hold fast to both sides of her head, and his mouth is so warm. His tongue explores her mouth carefully, just as carefully as he slides his body into place against hers, turning them so slightly she doesn't realize it until she feels the balance shift, how he's bracing the both of them against the onslaught of waves, even though his back is completely turned to them. So she squeezes her arms tighter around his waist and kisses him deep, and it takes him by surprise. As she draws his full bottom lip between hers, he moans so quietly she can feel it more than hear it.
He's hard now, and with his hips pulled so tight against her, she can practically feel his body throb with it, this heat and the hardness of his cock and of all his muscles as she twines around him, suddenly desperate to see if she can make him nearly stop breathing or thinking, just with fierce kisses and soft flesh slipping against his. He lets himself be kissed, but he doesn't for a moment let go of her face, at least not with the one hand that's stroking her jaw then settling in under her ear. The other traces the curve of her breast, thumb brushing her nipple, before she nips at his lip and that hand slips lower, flattening warm and solid against her stomach before it slides beneath the waistband of her panties and one of his fingers just brushes her clit on its way to probing into her, simply holding there as she rocks against him.
For a time, she can't even open her eyes, that's how good it feels, she can only kiss him feverishly and feel how he's there too, kissing her without calculation; but when she does finally look at him again, and she finds that there are still so many things he won't let her see, while this one thing shows so plainly in his face the implications of it overwhelm her, she wishes to God it wasn't too risky, on so many levels, to let him be inside her.
Instead, she pulls her hips back from where they rut against his, his hand trapped between, and she draws his cock, thick and hard, out of his boxers which are by now tickling her legs under the water. His forehead falls against her shoulder, and she can't imagine why he's looking between their bodies, because it's too dark, really, to see anything. But the feeling is more important, she decides as her body starts to pull tight with it. She can feel him drawing the slickness out of her with his nimble fingers, and she can feel his breath panted out against her collar bone. And she can feel his cock growing harder and harder in her hand. He's not so aloof anymore, and even if she honestly has no idea how she's going to survive it, she knows it's just like being here on the island: she has no choice, but it's thankfully the sort of settling that means constant adjustment. That, she thinks, is something she knows.