Lost ficlet: Tonic (Jack/Sawyer)
Here: have something emo.
Title: Tonic
Pairing: Jack/Sawyer
Rating: R, for language
Summary: Jack slips into Otherville to play Sawyer's piano. Angst. 2800 words.
Note: AUish, in and around "The Economist" and "Eggtown."
Tonic
He doesn't ask Sawyer how he knew to pick the house with the piano, nor does he ask him if he can play. It doesn't matter.
He knows he's sitting outside, listening to the sound of the music coming through the window. What's weird is that he doesn't even grouse that it's dangerous. Maybe it's because he can play-has, in fact, already played this very piano-just as well, well enough to fool anyone coming to look for the origins of the melancholy sound. It fills Jack with some strange emotion to think of Sawyer's fingers on the same keys his are skimming now.
He wishes he could see his face, but, really, he doesn't need to. He's seen Sawyer relaxed before, and he's seen him contemplative, even when he's trying to appear like his mind's clear. Sawyer doesn't know how much he watches him; his busy hands make him seem like he's focused on something else entirely, something important. But he's come to wonder if there's anything more important than the people around you, living in peace and understanding with them. Living.
Maybe Sawyer didn't choose the house on purpose. Maybe he's not even listening. Jack puts his fingers to the keys anyway, spins the sound up around him like a cocoon. He tries to ignore how dangerous this is, how the last time he sat at this piano bad things happened, how now he keeps hitting bad notes or else trips over the right ones. At first. The danger floods in after a while and becomes part of what he's doing, like it always does with anything anymore.
Eventually, he's aware of someone standing in the doorway. It's not Hurley, who has gone off to sit with Claire, to do just what it is Jack's doing, without the music. Appropriate. What he can't deal with is how they don't even blame him. Everyone's too soul-sick or too preoccupied to start laying blame. Except the man standing in the doorway.
He used to think he was Sawyer's conscience. Maybe he is. But, now, it's more like Sawyer's his conscience. No, that's not right. It's more like he's his metronome. Keeps extraordinarily erratic time until he's forced to compensate, even and smooth.
When Jack finishes the piece and takes his foot off the pedal and the sound dies away, Sawyer simply says, "You know, things would be different if you'd just come with us. You could have, you know. We could've kept all this shit together."
We? he thinks.
This is not the way they talked for half an hour when he got here, saying everything but to the purpose while they shared food out of a can (but heated in a saucepan, over a stove) and drank boxed wine. Too much of it, he thinks, or else it's that he's more used to gin and tonics. He's lightheaded and too warm, and he's no more calm than he was when he came into the house. He was never entirely comfortable here. He doesn't know why he expected he would be.
"I'm here now," he says, and he finds his voice scratchy. Disuse? Too much use?
"Why?"
"I don't know."
"Bullshit." His voice is low, rhythmic. "Walking into the heart of the devil's home, and for what? You hoping John'll slice you open like he did Naomi?"
"He won't kill me, Sawyer."
Less musical now: "Even after you aimed a gun at him and pulled the trigger?"
"Even after."
"You're wrong."
"I said he wouldn't kill me, that's all."
"Oh, that's how it is now? Bad shit's coming, and you'll just stand up and take it? I don't know who you're kidding. You'll run out of it someday. Maybe today. You're playing that piano now like you hope nobody notices it's you sending this misery out over the camp."
Misery? he thinks. The piece had only descended into the minor key for a time. But there are other ways of sounding sad, he supposes. Ways of looking it, too, like Sawyer's dark expression, eyes hollow and mouth in a hard line.
"It's not a camp."
Sawyer's eyes clearly ask him, Is that all you've got to say? But he simply nods and replies, "No, I don't guess it is."
"They can't hear me anyway. Just you."
"You come all the way out here to play for me?"
He holds Sawyer's gaze for a moment, then he bows his head and it's like he can feel every muscle in his back and neck just give. He's too tightly wound. That was what was wrong with his playing. Mindless routine, not art. Might as well have been playing scales.
He starts, then, not with scales but at middle C, just playing the notes as they stretch out to the right, stopping at another C. He leaves it pressed down under his finger.
Sawyer's voice sounds harsh against the sudden absence of sound, like a silence still, but a darker one, coming in to fill the space. "Why do you suppose Charlie did what he did?"
"Somebody had to."
"But why him?"
"Tired."
"Of?"
Jack chokes on a bitter laugh. "All this. It's exhausting. We can't keep going on like this. Maybe he just wanted it over."
"It is over, for him."
"Exactly."
Sawyer's eyes narrow. His voice drags. "You don't think it was bravery?"
"I think it was one of the bravest things I've ever known."
Sawyer breathes out heavy as he lets the words wisp away in the acoustics of the room. Then he says darkly, "It wasn't brave, you coming here. Just stupid."
That, he knows.
The piano bench isn't the right height. He feels it in his elbows. "What time is it?"
"Time? I don't know. It's after dark."
"Dark thirty," he says with a sardonic chuckle at himself. Not in days has he asked the question and meant it like that. Something about stepping into a house again brought the illusion of normalcy, sent his brain right back to wanting to know hours, minutes, seconds.
"What the hell is wrong with you?" Sawyer asks.
"I'm tired."
Sawyer gets it, he can see. Maybe he's always understood tired better than anybody. Maybe that's why he spent so long sitting on his ass, resisting that first advance into giving a damn.
"And you'd like to just camp out on that piano bench and play depressing music and wallow and-"
"I'd like to fucking breathe," he spits out, the breath leaving him in a wicked rush. It makes him shaky, this rise in his voice. Good, he thinks. "That's what I'd like. I want to know who made it my job to never get to breathe."
"You did."
He chuckles again. Of course. He suddenly sees fit to say what he's been meaning to say, maybe since he got here: "You asked me why I didn't come. Why didn't you stay?"
"What?"
He thinks, Because you're right: we might've shared it between us, the way Sayid takes part of the load. Juliet. Desmond. Sun and Jin.
But he replies, instead, "You know he's crazy, right? Crazy. I know what Hurley said, but Charlie didn't make some fucking…proclamation or something about this before he died. Follow the crazy person. As if that's the only way to prove you gave a shit about his life or his death."
"That's not why I'm here."
"No? Then why?"
"I don't know, but that's not it."
"Bullshit."
"Jack, if you can't tell me why you left your twenty-odd sheep down at the beach so you can trek out across the jungle, all by yourself, no agenda in the world except to say hello, like you're just in the neighborhood or something-or else just to play this fucking piano-I don't have to tell you anything about what I'm doing here."
Jack realizes his finger is still hanging on that C, so he removes it and just stares at Sawyer. Somewhere along the line, they learned to look each other dead in the eyes and see true things. They also learned to spit those things back like they wanted to rend flesh from bone. Maybe that's what he wanted tonight, he thinks. Needed.
Sawyer leans up against the wall, head hitting it with a dull thud even if his shoulders stay round, not quite making contact. So fucking beautiful, he thinks, not bothering to push the thought back. It's all any of them have now: real things staring them in the face and no time or energy to deny them. They're necessary. Wanting Sawyer like this, coming here to breathe his air again, is necessary.
Distracting, though. He knows that-now, anyway. Maybe a part of him was relieved that Sawyer shouldered his gun, burned an accusation and a promise into his eyes, then swept a hollow glance over his feet before he turned to follow John.
"What were you playing?" Sawyer says. Diplomatic.
Jack just shakes his head.
Sawyer closes his eyes, and he watches the lines settle into his face. He's softer like this-in the dark, in the quiet, in a house. When they're alone. Like the hatch, he thinks. Closest thing to a friend. I slept with her. I love her. Those lines speak out the roughness in him, the places where his life settles into the cracks in him. Deep places Jack wants to touch with his hands like he plucks at these keys, always testing even when he seems so sure.
His fingers land on each black key in turn, down from that mental divide of middle C, petering out somewhere before the notes turn to ludicrous rumbles.
Sawyer snorts softly to himself, and it startles Jack into looking at him.
"You know," he starts, that voice slow and sweet. Always the voice that got him, that he's been missing. He wonders how Sawyer would sound singing, but he wouldn't have anything to sing that fit this night.
Charlie, he thinks, would have just sung something that wasn't perfect but somehow did what it was meant to do anyway.
"You know this ain't about Charlie," Sawyer is saying. "I ain't here because I think I owe it to him. But you don't owe it to Boone either, to stay away."
It physically startles him, with cold and with weight. "It's not-"
"I know." Sawyer's eyes shine in the dim light, entirely more green than normal. "I realize that man's got some serious shit going on in his head. But so do I. I'd explain it if I could, but I can't. You just have to believe that I've got reasons to be here." He turns those shining eyes away. "Besides, if you got your sheep, I got mine."
"Sheep?"
"Somebody," he says emphatically, and Jack catches a tone of desperation in his voice just before he flattens it back down again. "Somebody's got to keep a fucking eye on him."
"Sheep?"
"I know you get better than anybody that people die around John Locke."
"Do you wanna be one of them?"
"No," he says, but he doesn't mean it. He can't, not with the way it sounded like an echo instead of an idea. But he means it when he catches Jack's gaze and says, "But I'm not keen on leaving this island either. Ever. Make no mistake about that." And his eyes close again. And he doesn't leave.
Jack's fingers find the keys without his looking at them. They also choose the music, something soft and repeating, his left hand moving in a pattern, low high middle high, his right in a fluid stroke of melody and ornament, cramming improvised notes in where notes don't need to be, but they fit; they always fit. He makes sure of that. Not that Sawyer would know if they did or didn't. Without the music, he's not sure he really does either.
Sawyer hasn't moved, and Jack wills him to, with his hands. Toward, away. Even when he hears the footsteps, his hands still pick at the keys, bouncing over them, calling up sound to fill the empty spaces in the room and in his head. Then Sawyer's large, heavy hands fall onto his shoulders, and he doesn't falter. It's easy enough when the melody repeats and repeats, like everything here repeats into infinity, repeats the same old melancholy song.
Except it's not a song. It would be easier if it were. There's nothing beautiful and noble about pressing through until you can't go on anymore. As one of Sawyer's thumbs rubs at the nape of his neck, he thinks about how stupid it was that he came out here knowing he wouldn't be able to get back without staying, maybe permanently. He can't ask Sawyer how they both chose the house he would end up marooned in. He doesn't ask himself if he needs the piano to be here at all to feel his heart pulling him down, heavy and ready to rest.
"Why did you choose to go with John?" he asks.
"I chose not to go with you." He can feel Sawyer's breath on the back of his neck. His hands slip off the keys and rest on his lap.
Sawyer adds low but firmly, "I can't watch you do it anymore."
"What?"
"Just what you did when you were here before. Act like almighty God laid it all on you."
He doesn't even mean to jerk his shoulders, but he does, and Sawyer jerks away.
Jack snarls, "So you come here to be with a man who thinks he's responsible for the whole fucking island?"
Sawyer's still hovering, though. Close and hot, like his voice, intimate and searing. "I don't care what John Locke does. He can burn in hell for all I care. Maybe I'll burn in hell with him. But you have got to stop this."
"I have to? Why?"
"You shouldn't have come."
"I get that."
"You fuck us all up. Whether you leave or whether you never leave. I can't-"
Suddenly, Sawyer's hands are gone, his very presence is gone, and door at the end of the hall is slamming. He can't follow him out into the night, and Sawyer knows it. Suddenly, he feels more trapped in the compound than he has all night, even in those moments when he crossed back into the fringe of lamp light that marks the boundary of this place that is not his and that he told himself he wouldn't return to.
When he turns back to the piano, his fingers don't call up any music, so like he did as a child, he looks over the keys, studying them, and places his hands over them where they need to be. Scales, he thinks. His hands move.
He wonders where Sawyer's gone and if he's crazy for being here now. He surely is. But something inside him pings with the same thing that touched off his heart with a brutal singe and pop when Hurley turned to go.
I could bring them here, he thinks. They would come. But he won't ask them to just because he needs it, not for the piano and not for Sawyer. Not just for Sawyer, anyway.
He thinks, with a loss of breath like a sudden and surprising gut punch, how little they really know about each other, any of them. They have instincts for each other now, most of them, but they don't often know each other's lives. Does Sawyer actually play the piano? Did Charlie? Surely. He thinks of Charlie as he runs scales, what Desmond told him about a silly song on a keypad unlocking everything. Unlocking fate, maybe. Maybe just ruin.
Somewhere in the middle of A minor, he is suddenly sure, with hard-won instinct, that Sawyer's out there on the porch, terrified to wander off but equally terrified to come inside. Protective, perhaps, and it floods his heart with something that ought to soothe but simply burns, for the responsibility.
Taking a deep breath, he shifts his mind to C major, even hears the scale start anew, from the middle of the old, but it doesn't matter. Maybe it would to them, but it doesn't to him. Maybe not even to Sawyer.
So he calls out, as loudly as he dares, "Come back inside. Please."
He waits in silence, his heart beating up into the seconds that time out an answer.
~
Title: Tonic
Pairing: Jack/Sawyer
Rating: R, for language
Summary: Jack slips into Otherville to play Sawyer's piano. Angst. 2800 words.
Note: AUish, in and around "The Economist" and "Eggtown."
Tonic
He doesn't ask Sawyer how he knew to pick the house with the piano, nor does he ask him if he can play. It doesn't matter.
He knows he's sitting outside, listening to the sound of the music coming through the window. What's weird is that he doesn't even grouse that it's dangerous. Maybe it's because he can play-has, in fact, already played this very piano-just as well, well enough to fool anyone coming to look for the origins of the melancholy sound. It fills Jack with some strange emotion to think of Sawyer's fingers on the same keys his are skimming now.
He wishes he could see his face, but, really, he doesn't need to. He's seen Sawyer relaxed before, and he's seen him contemplative, even when he's trying to appear like his mind's clear. Sawyer doesn't know how much he watches him; his busy hands make him seem like he's focused on something else entirely, something important. But he's come to wonder if there's anything more important than the people around you, living in peace and understanding with them. Living.
Maybe Sawyer didn't choose the house on purpose. Maybe he's not even listening. Jack puts his fingers to the keys anyway, spins the sound up around him like a cocoon. He tries to ignore how dangerous this is, how the last time he sat at this piano bad things happened, how now he keeps hitting bad notes or else trips over the right ones. At first. The danger floods in after a while and becomes part of what he's doing, like it always does with anything anymore.
Eventually, he's aware of someone standing in the doorway. It's not Hurley, who has gone off to sit with Claire, to do just what it is Jack's doing, without the music. Appropriate. What he can't deal with is how they don't even blame him. Everyone's too soul-sick or too preoccupied to start laying blame. Except the man standing in the doorway.
He used to think he was Sawyer's conscience. Maybe he is. But, now, it's more like Sawyer's his conscience. No, that's not right. It's more like he's his metronome. Keeps extraordinarily erratic time until he's forced to compensate, even and smooth.
When Jack finishes the piece and takes his foot off the pedal and the sound dies away, Sawyer simply says, "You know, things would be different if you'd just come with us. You could have, you know. We could've kept all this shit together."
We? he thinks.
This is not the way they talked for half an hour when he got here, saying everything but to the purpose while they shared food out of a can (but heated in a saucepan, over a stove) and drank boxed wine. Too much of it, he thinks, or else it's that he's more used to gin and tonics. He's lightheaded and too warm, and he's no more calm than he was when he came into the house. He was never entirely comfortable here. He doesn't know why he expected he would be.
"I'm here now," he says, and he finds his voice scratchy. Disuse? Too much use?
"Why?"
"I don't know."
"Bullshit." His voice is low, rhythmic. "Walking into the heart of the devil's home, and for what? You hoping John'll slice you open like he did Naomi?"
"He won't kill me, Sawyer."
Less musical now: "Even after you aimed a gun at him and pulled the trigger?"
"Even after."
"You're wrong."
"I said he wouldn't kill me, that's all."
"Oh, that's how it is now? Bad shit's coming, and you'll just stand up and take it? I don't know who you're kidding. You'll run out of it someday. Maybe today. You're playing that piano now like you hope nobody notices it's you sending this misery out over the camp."
Misery? he thinks. The piece had only descended into the minor key for a time. But there are other ways of sounding sad, he supposes. Ways of looking it, too, like Sawyer's dark expression, eyes hollow and mouth in a hard line.
"It's not a camp."
Sawyer's eyes clearly ask him, Is that all you've got to say? But he simply nods and replies, "No, I don't guess it is."
"They can't hear me anyway. Just you."
"You come all the way out here to play for me?"
He holds Sawyer's gaze for a moment, then he bows his head and it's like he can feel every muscle in his back and neck just give. He's too tightly wound. That was what was wrong with his playing. Mindless routine, not art. Might as well have been playing scales.
He starts, then, not with scales but at middle C, just playing the notes as they stretch out to the right, stopping at another C. He leaves it pressed down under his finger.
Sawyer's voice sounds harsh against the sudden absence of sound, like a silence still, but a darker one, coming in to fill the space. "Why do you suppose Charlie did what he did?"
"Somebody had to."
"But why him?"
"Tired."
"Of?"
Jack chokes on a bitter laugh. "All this. It's exhausting. We can't keep going on like this. Maybe he just wanted it over."
"It is over, for him."
"Exactly."
Sawyer's eyes narrow. His voice drags. "You don't think it was bravery?"
"I think it was one of the bravest things I've ever known."
Sawyer breathes out heavy as he lets the words wisp away in the acoustics of the room. Then he says darkly, "It wasn't brave, you coming here. Just stupid."
That, he knows.
The piano bench isn't the right height. He feels it in his elbows. "What time is it?"
"Time? I don't know. It's after dark."
"Dark thirty," he says with a sardonic chuckle at himself. Not in days has he asked the question and meant it like that. Something about stepping into a house again brought the illusion of normalcy, sent his brain right back to wanting to know hours, minutes, seconds.
"What the hell is wrong with you?" Sawyer asks.
"I'm tired."
Sawyer gets it, he can see. Maybe he's always understood tired better than anybody. Maybe that's why he spent so long sitting on his ass, resisting that first advance into giving a damn.
"And you'd like to just camp out on that piano bench and play depressing music and wallow and-"
"I'd like to fucking breathe," he spits out, the breath leaving him in a wicked rush. It makes him shaky, this rise in his voice. Good, he thinks. "That's what I'd like. I want to know who made it my job to never get to breathe."
"You did."
He chuckles again. Of course. He suddenly sees fit to say what he's been meaning to say, maybe since he got here: "You asked me why I didn't come. Why didn't you stay?"
"What?"
He thinks, Because you're right: we might've shared it between us, the way Sayid takes part of the load. Juliet. Desmond. Sun and Jin.
But he replies, instead, "You know he's crazy, right? Crazy. I know what Hurley said, but Charlie didn't make some fucking…proclamation or something about this before he died. Follow the crazy person. As if that's the only way to prove you gave a shit about his life or his death."
"That's not why I'm here."
"No? Then why?"
"I don't know, but that's not it."
"Bullshit."
"Jack, if you can't tell me why you left your twenty-odd sheep down at the beach so you can trek out across the jungle, all by yourself, no agenda in the world except to say hello, like you're just in the neighborhood or something-or else just to play this fucking piano-I don't have to tell you anything about what I'm doing here."
Jack realizes his finger is still hanging on that C, so he removes it and just stares at Sawyer. Somewhere along the line, they learned to look each other dead in the eyes and see true things. They also learned to spit those things back like they wanted to rend flesh from bone. Maybe that's what he wanted tonight, he thinks. Needed.
Sawyer leans up against the wall, head hitting it with a dull thud even if his shoulders stay round, not quite making contact. So fucking beautiful, he thinks, not bothering to push the thought back. It's all any of them have now: real things staring them in the face and no time or energy to deny them. They're necessary. Wanting Sawyer like this, coming here to breathe his air again, is necessary.
Distracting, though. He knows that-now, anyway. Maybe a part of him was relieved that Sawyer shouldered his gun, burned an accusation and a promise into his eyes, then swept a hollow glance over his feet before he turned to follow John.
"What were you playing?" Sawyer says. Diplomatic.
Jack just shakes his head.
Sawyer closes his eyes, and he watches the lines settle into his face. He's softer like this-in the dark, in the quiet, in a house. When they're alone. Like the hatch, he thinks. Closest thing to a friend. I slept with her. I love her. Those lines speak out the roughness in him, the places where his life settles into the cracks in him. Deep places Jack wants to touch with his hands like he plucks at these keys, always testing even when he seems so sure.
His fingers land on each black key in turn, down from that mental divide of middle C, petering out somewhere before the notes turn to ludicrous rumbles.
Sawyer snorts softly to himself, and it startles Jack into looking at him.
"You know," he starts, that voice slow and sweet. Always the voice that got him, that he's been missing. He wonders how Sawyer would sound singing, but he wouldn't have anything to sing that fit this night.
Charlie, he thinks, would have just sung something that wasn't perfect but somehow did what it was meant to do anyway.
"You know this ain't about Charlie," Sawyer is saying. "I ain't here because I think I owe it to him. But you don't owe it to Boone either, to stay away."
It physically startles him, with cold and with weight. "It's not-"
"I know." Sawyer's eyes shine in the dim light, entirely more green than normal. "I realize that man's got some serious shit going on in his head. But so do I. I'd explain it if I could, but I can't. You just have to believe that I've got reasons to be here." He turns those shining eyes away. "Besides, if you got your sheep, I got mine."
"Sheep?"
"Somebody," he says emphatically, and Jack catches a tone of desperation in his voice just before he flattens it back down again. "Somebody's got to keep a fucking eye on him."
"Sheep?"
"I know you get better than anybody that people die around John Locke."
"Do you wanna be one of them?"
"No," he says, but he doesn't mean it. He can't, not with the way it sounded like an echo instead of an idea. But he means it when he catches Jack's gaze and says, "But I'm not keen on leaving this island either. Ever. Make no mistake about that." And his eyes close again. And he doesn't leave.
Jack's fingers find the keys without his looking at them. They also choose the music, something soft and repeating, his left hand moving in a pattern, low high middle high, his right in a fluid stroke of melody and ornament, cramming improvised notes in where notes don't need to be, but they fit; they always fit. He makes sure of that. Not that Sawyer would know if they did or didn't. Without the music, he's not sure he really does either.
Sawyer hasn't moved, and Jack wills him to, with his hands. Toward, away. Even when he hears the footsteps, his hands still pick at the keys, bouncing over them, calling up sound to fill the empty spaces in the room and in his head. Then Sawyer's large, heavy hands fall onto his shoulders, and he doesn't falter. It's easy enough when the melody repeats and repeats, like everything here repeats into infinity, repeats the same old melancholy song.
Except it's not a song. It would be easier if it were. There's nothing beautiful and noble about pressing through until you can't go on anymore. As one of Sawyer's thumbs rubs at the nape of his neck, he thinks about how stupid it was that he came out here knowing he wouldn't be able to get back without staying, maybe permanently. He can't ask Sawyer how they both chose the house he would end up marooned in. He doesn't ask himself if he needs the piano to be here at all to feel his heart pulling him down, heavy and ready to rest.
"Why did you choose to go with John?" he asks.
"I chose not to go with you." He can feel Sawyer's breath on the back of his neck. His hands slip off the keys and rest on his lap.
Sawyer adds low but firmly, "I can't watch you do it anymore."
"What?"
"Just what you did when you were here before. Act like almighty God laid it all on you."
He doesn't even mean to jerk his shoulders, but he does, and Sawyer jerks away.
Jack snarls, "So you come here to be with a man who thinks he's responsible for the whole fucking island?"
Sawyer's still hovering, though. Close and hot, like his voice, intimate and searing. "I don't care what John Locke does. He can burn in hell for all I care. Maybe I'll burn in hell with him. But you have got to stop this."
"I have to? Why?"
"You shouldn't have come."
"I get that."
"You fuck us all up. Whether you leave or whether you never leave. I can't-"
Suddenly, Sawyer's hands are gone, his very presence is gone, and door at the end of the hall is slamming. He can't follow him out into the night, and Sawyer knows it. Suddenly, he feels more trapped in the compound than he has all night, even in those moments when he crossed back into the fringe of lamp light that marks the boundary of this place that is not his and that he told himself he wouldn't return to.
When he turns back to the piano, his fingers don't call up any music, so like he did as a child, he looks over the keys, studying them, and places his hands over them where they need to be. Scales, he thinks. His hands move.
He wonders where Sawyer's gone and if he's crazy for being here now. He surely is. But something inside him pings with the same thing that touched off his heart with a brutal singe and pop when Hurley turned to go.
I could bring them here, he thinks. They would come. But he won't ask them to just because he needs it, not for the piano and not for Sawyer. Not just for Sawyer, anyway.
He thinks, with a loss of breath like a sudden and surprising gut punch, how little they really know about each other, any of them. They have instincts for each other now, most of them, but they don't often know each other's lives. Does Sawyer actually play the piano? Did Charlie? Surely. He thinks of Charlie as he runs scales, what Desmond told him about a silly song on a keypad unlocking everything. Unlocking fate, maybe. Maybe just ruin.
Somewhere in the middle of A minor, he is suddenly sure, with hard-won instinct, that Sawyer's out there on the porch, terrified to wander off but equally terrified to come inside. Protective, perhaps, and it floods his heart with something that ought to soothe but simply burns, for the responsibility.
Taking a deep breath, he shifts his mind to C major, even hears the scale start anew, from the middle of the old, but it doesn't matter. Maybe it would to them, but it doesn't to him. Maybe not even to Sawyer.
So he calls out, as loudly as he dares, "Come back inside. Please."
He waits in silence, his heart beating up into the seconds that time out an answer.
~