Fic: Unload (Sawyer/Ana Lucia)
Title: Unload
Pairing: Sawyer/Ana Lucia
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 4500
Summary: Post-rescue, domestic stuff. What Jack sees when he comes for a visit.
This isn't exactly crack-fic, but it is rather light in tone, just something playful that doesn't attempt to totally fluff these two up. They're still combative and snarky, just like we know and love them (those of us who do love Ana). I was determined that it was possible to let them be happy, but if that seems like an impossibility to you, you should probably move on along.
Note: for hiatus_stories, prompt #25.
Unload
They kept a gun hanging on the wall of their house in east Tennessee.
Sawyer's friends found that appropriate redneck behavior. Ana's friends thought it was only slightly ghetto, choosing to chalk it up to her chosen profession. Only a select few visitors to the Cortez household knew why the gun was there and that it wasn't loaded, for more reasons than just propriety and safety. Those select few-their fellow crash survivors- didn't know whether to get misty-eyed over that symbolic gun or simply smile just like their hosts were smiling…or maybe not exactly like their hosts were smiling, because when Sawyer and Ana decided to be happy, it looked very interesting on them indeed.
*****
Sawyer sat in the old, beat-up rocker on the front porch, taking swigs off a cold beer, but he looked so content Jack found it slightly unnerving, even though he'd already been there an hour. There was something surreal about the whole scene-the perfectly cool afternoon air, the mountains on the horizon, the pristine blue sky…Sawyer sitting in front of a house he owned and had lived in for longer than Jack assumed he'd ever been in one place in his adult life.
Sawyer's long legs stretched out in front of him, and the hand that wasn't holding the beer lazily tapped the rocker's armrest. He said, "After…what is it? almost two years we been back?…you still don't believe it, do you?"
"No, I believe it," Jack said, grinning slowly. "I do. It's just that it's still a little nuts."
"All of it, or just the name?"
"The name, mostly."
"Aw, hell. Too much shit weighing down Ford. And around here it seems a damn sight more respectable for us to have the same last name."
"You're not fooling anybody. She's the Hispanic one, not you."
"Don't care."
"So you haven't gone off and gotten married?"
Sawyer choked on his beer a bit with that. "Technically, no. The women down at the Mexican market call me her esposo, but Ana don't like it."
"Do you?"
"Not really. It's just funny."
Just then, Ana let the screen door slam behind her as she came out, wearing a scowl that wasn't the least bit funny. "There any way to get your lazy ass to remember to do the laundry on Fridays?" she said with a snarl. To Jack, this looked serious, but Sawyer just grinned at her.
"Plenty of incentives, darlin'. What you got in mind?"
She flipped him off as she went back into the house, but the door didn't slam this time.
"I come at a bad time?" Jack said.
"No, it's good to see you. Don't pay any attention to her. Sometimes she just gets that way."
"Sometimes?"
"Less and less often. I don't mind telling you it wasn't real easy at first, but she's kinda…mellowed a bit. We both have, as far as we're capable."
"We all always did think you two clung to each other to make each other miserable."
"Yeah? Well, maybe we did," he said, taking a drink, looking almost wistful for a moment, but still somehow Sawyer. "Needed it, I think. It just works different now."
"Not too different," Jack said with a smirk.
"That?" He nodded toward the door. "Hell, that's just the way she is. She'll get over it."
"Yeah?"
"Mostly peaceably. She's just pushing."
"Pushing?"
"It's what she does. Pokes, prods, bitches…narrows those big brown eyes of hers until I get good and fired up and she can get exactly what she wants out of me. Don’t look at me like that. It works just fine. Used to, we had real fights. She'd accuse me of sticking my dick where it don’t belong. Or I'd get sick and damn tired of having her mama nosing into our business. But we don't do that anymore. Much. Just make enough drama to keep life interesante."
He stood up then, stretching his legs. "Come on inside. I'll show you."
*****
There was no doubt about it: Ana was supposed to die that day in the hatch. She almost did. Michael was strong, but he wasn't nearly as stubborn as Ana Lucia. She was at her lowest point-stranded, outcast, still nursing every personal wound she'd ever received, the least of which the baby she hadn't wanted until she lost it-but even at her lowest, she wasn't ready to die. Sawyer once joked to her that it had everything to do with that quickie they had in the woods earlier that day. Focused her, or else just made her remember all the little pleasures of life.
Really, her survival had everything to do with that tryst with Sawyer, but it had nothing to do with what they both had to admit was fast, sloppy sex on the hard ground that left them both sore. It was in the gleam in her eye when she made off with his gun. She had already made the move when she realized she just might have to have another go at him, because he'd been just one step ahead of her: the gun wasn't loaded.
She hated to think Sawyer was cleverer than she was, but she learned to live with that slight, because it meant she was cleverer than Michael. In that split-second it took him to realize the cartridge was empty and stare wide-eyed at a woman who should've been dead, she knocked him a blow hard enough to put him on the floor. Another carefully-placed kick or two had him out cold and locked in the holding cell the man they knew as Henry Gale had just vacated.
Sawyer had the good grace not to say a word about how that unloaded gun had saved her life. It's not like she could forget, and to bring it up would've been tacky, considering he'd just done it to be a bastard.
*****
Jack stood at the sliding glass door and watched in amusement as Sawyer slid up behind Ana where she stood at the sink washing dishes. She let him cross his hands over her stomach, but she kept her back straight.
She said, "Jack, you staying for dinner?"
"If you'll have me."
Sawyer said, "Sure enough. Ana here is probably the best damn cook in the county."
"Small county," she said, rolling her eyes in Jack's direction.
Jack said, "What do you two do when you don't have an audience?"
Sawyer clutched Ana a little tighter. "More of the same. Less clothes."
At that, Ana bucked her hips back into his and attempted to move toward the refrigerator, but Sawyer grabbed her and spun her just enough to press her back into the edge of the counter and lean over to kiss her long and hard. For a moment, it seemed as though they were totally aware of being watched and at the same time completely wrapped up in each other. Jack remembered how that sight had used to make him almost jealous. He didn't understand why Ana began to moon over Sawyer, in her own passive-aggressive way, but he understood it perfectly when Sawyer began to trip over himself, in his typically self-protective, half-belligerent way, just to be near her. But that came a long time after, when Jack's own view of the world had spun 180 degrees.
Sawyer finally released Ana, and she bent her flushed face over the sink again. "I'm making chicken," she said. "You hungry, Jack?"
"Yeah."
To Sawyer: "You wanna help me, baby? It'll go faster that way."
Jack laughed. "I'm a little skeptical of that."
Sawyer just raised one eyebrow. "We're a pretty efficient team, when there aren't any naked detours."
Ana said, "Sometimes we're eficiente then too, no?"
Sawyer scowled at her, hearing a subtle dig in her words that Jack hadn't. Ana grinned and stood up on her tiptoes to kiss the side of his neck, saying, "You do get the job done, though." Sawyer shook his head as she went back to the sink, and Jack tried really hard to hide his amusement. Good thing he'd learned not to blush so easily anymore.
*****
They were supposed to take a doomed trip to scout out the others-Jack, Sawyer, Kate, Hurley, and Michael-and that's exactly what they did. Sayid didn't like it, Locke didn't like it, and Ana really, really didn't like it. It was a trap, wasn't it? Plain and simple. Looking back, it would've made so much more sense for Sayid and Ana to go along or to go instead, but Jack was adamant that they stay behind-which was lucky, because that meant they got to lead the rescue party.
Before Sawyer had gone, he turned over the secret of his gun stash to Ana. Nobody knew why, least of all Sawyer. He had just as little reason to trust a woman who ground a dirty boot into his infected shoulder as he did a man who shoved bamboo under his nails and sliced his arm open. By then, though, those things seemed to be forgiven or were chalked up to karma, like all the other million hurts Sawyer had suffered that he believed he deserved. Both Ana and Sayid saw the world the same way, invited punishment, but in the end it was Ana whose hands seemed steadier and whose anger burned hotter. He trusted that, so he trusted her, and he told her exactly where to find that ammo he'd withheld that had saved her life, as well as everything else.
When they made it into the Others' camp, by the time Sayid split off to head down into that strange hatch to find Jack, Eko and Ana lingered on the outside, finding the cages quickly enough. Ana put two of the crazy dharma people down with bullets to the leg, and Eko simply bodily plowed through them, using the butt of his gun to take them down. They argued a good bit about that before they ever set out, but in the end, Eko said no more killing. There had already been too much killing.
There was one son of a bitch that seemed to be on a suicide mission to do Sawyer as much damage as possible. He had the cage door open, and he was kicking Sawyer, so hard Sawyer was on the ground. The man pulled a gun and Ana raised her own. Sawyer screamed something at her about how stupid she was, and it really was stupid, but she just aimed at the man's knee and fired. And missed.
The man called her a bitch and other names she'd heard before, and closed in on her so fast she couldn't get the gun aimed again. Then he took aim at her heart and pulled the trigger. She thought she was going into shock. She fell down, not feeling anything but the adrenaline now surging through her veins, and watched as Sawyer kicked the guy's legs out from under him and he went down beside her. Ana's hands groped blindly at her chest, but there was no blood. There was just Sawyer standing now, kicking the guy hard enough to knock him out. With a half-crazy laugh, he picked up the gun and fired it into the air.
There was no pop. The gun was empty.
*****
Jack watched from the kitchen table as Ana simply pointed and Sawyer went to the fridge or the cupboard and retrieved whatever it was she wanted. He measured out the rice and peeled the potatoes, but when she made him slice the onion-only to complain about how he went about the slicing-he gave her a hard look, slapped her ass, and sat down beside Jack.
"You still in San Francisco?" Ana asked him, and Sawyer watched her with interest as she finished the onions and added them to the peppers frying on the stove.
"Yeah. It's nice there."
Sawyer asked, "Ain't found a little woman of your own yet, keep the bed warm for ya?"
Jack laughed, but before he could reply, Ana had pitched the heel of the onion and it smacked Sawyer square in the forehead. He snorted and said under his breath, "She once aimed a frying pan at me."
"Didn't throw it, though, did I, you crazy gringo?" she said with a mischievous smile, as though she might easily do that one day.
Sawyer said, "Wouldn't matter, with your aim. And it ain't my fault you're a midget, woman." He rubbed his forehead. "Damn."
"Ain't my fault you're a male chauvinist," she said, mocking his drawl.
Jack said, "Ana, you still working for the sheriff's department?"
Sawyer said, "Didn't I tell you she's a deputy now?"
Ana said with mock-sweetness, "Honey, I think we forgot to put it in the holiday newsletter."
"Can't a man be proud of his woman?"
She scowled, but when Jack said, "Congratulations," she smiled.
Sawyer mumbled, "How come he gets a smile and I get the death look?"
"That wasn't the death look. That was cállate."
"Fat chance of that. You done abusing me?"
"Yeah. Go on and get out of my kitchen. Set the table out on the deck."
"Yes, ma'am," he said with a lazy salute. He handed Jack a stack of plates and they went through the sliding glass door. Ana was turning up the radio and humming to herself, her hips wiggling to the music as she slid back across the kitchen.
*****
Ana was like a pit bull when Sawyer came back to the camp. She wouldn't let anybody but Jack near him at first, not that anyone was clamoring to be around the cranky man whose body was covered in bruises. She also wouldn't admit to anybody why she was behaving the way she was. As if everyone hadn't already figured it out.
Except Sawyer. He didn't see it. He was halfway convinced Ana was up to no good, despite every evidence to the contrary. Then he entertained notions that Ana was just trying to curry favor with Jack. Kate told him Ana didn't want Jack. Jack told him, too, and Libby. Even when Ana told him, he didn't believe it. Then he barked at her one day, worse than he ever had before, and she didn't bark back like she usually did; she just glared and asked him why in the hell she'd gone to so much fucking trouble to bring him back, just so he could treat her the way he always had.
It wasn't very long before Sawyer realized four things: she'd moved the guns, she wouldn't tell him to where, she was really, really attached to him, and she'd be damned if she even came close to admitting it again. Or to even speaking to him.
*****
"She looks happy," Jack said once they set the white plastic table with a vinyl tablecloth and place settings for three.
Sawyer lit the citronella candle and sat it on the railing. Only then did Jack realize how quickly it had gotten dark. He was inside so much nowadays he had forgotten to stop and let the night overtake him. Sawyer, however, didn't seem to have forgotten.
"I think she is. Damn sure wouldn't say so, not that that's particularly surprising, but at least she don't put off those vibes anymore."
"Vibes?"
"Remember how she was when she first came to our side of the beach? Always so angry, and we couldn't for the life of us figure out at who? Nobody wanted to be around her, and it wasn't because she shot Shannon. It was the way tension just rolled off her. She might not say a word, but you could feel shit coming on, 'specially if you looked into her eyes."
"I used to think the same about you sometimes. Except I'm pretty sure you knew exactly how nervous you made people."
"Didn't mean I really wanted to, though. I think falling out of the sky onto that island was the best thing that ever happened to me. I'd been at a low point so long I'd almost taken for granted that that's what my life was supposed to be. Sitting there in that fucking tent, listening to the waves beat at the shore all fucking day long, I owned up to a lot of things, took stock. I think part of me was so fucking lonely I couldn't think straight. Took me a long time to figure out how to let myself not want to be lonely anymore."
"I think I went through the same thing. Took me a little longer."
"Well, you didn't have Rambina come barreling into your life, determined to save you."
"I don't think she meant to rescue you from yourself."
"Naw. Nothing that dramatic. And, really, after a while, she just sort of gave up on me. Which was what I needed, I guess, strange as that sounds." He shook his head as if to clear it. "No. I just meant I couldn't ignore somebody even more stubborn than I am."
A voice from the sliding glass door said, "I heard that."
Sawyer just smiled and turned his back on the dark backyard. "Damn good thing," he said to Jack. "You gotta find you one, Doc."
Ana said, "Get your ass in here and help me bring out the food, Jaime."
Sawyer grinned again. "Worth every bit of trouble, I promise."
*****
Sawyer didn't realize how much he needed to keep up a constant antagonistic banter with Ana until it stopped altogether. Then he began to see that though it had always seemed so angry, at some point that anger had all floated to the surface, so that underneath the attitude and eye rolling and words spat out was something less than hateful. For both of them.
He didn't like it one bit when Ana decided to quit baiting him. He told himself it was about the guns, how she walked around camp pretending like she wasn't lording it over him. What really bothered him was that she felt like she didn't even need to lord it over him. No matter what he said to her, he couldn't engage with her. She just gave a bored frown and wandered away.
He grew obsessed with finding the guns again, and it was an endless amusement to everyone around them to see how poorly he hid that fixation. He was the only person in the camp who didn't realize his attempts to subtly wheedle information out of everyone weren't so subtle. He was also the only person in the camp that didn't know it wasn't really about the guns. It hadn't been for her, so why should it be for him.
He accepted it, finally. Easiest way to piss her off in the long run. At first, he didn't think it worked. She still seemed oblivious, so he acted oblivious too. Sometimes he even struck up perfectly innocent conversations with her, which bewildered her at first but slowly became normal…to them. The rest of the island was preparing for something big-either they would kill each other or finally cement their alliance and put a plan for world domination into action. About the time Sawyer realized he wasn't pretending to accept things, that he no longer cared that much about getting his gun stash back, she came stomping into his hut and threw one at him so hard it bruised his ribs.
*****
Sawyer stood at the deck railing, his head bowed back with laughter. "I really did think you were trying to kill me, baby."
"I wanted to," Ana said.
Jack said, "We always wondered how it--…well, it didn't make sense to anybody."
"You think it made sense to us?" she said. "I didn't even know why he made me so mad."
"We knew that at least," Jack said with a laugh.
Sawyer frowned dramatically at him. "Might've been nice for y'all to share that bit of insight with the man with his head up his ass."
Ana said, "As if knowing would've made a difference."
Jack said, "All I remember was Sawyer went on a five-day hike by himself, and you sat and stared out at the water the whole time. Were you waiting for him?"
"No," she said with a wicked laugh. "No, I was praying the smoke monster would get his ass."
"Did you know then, baby?" Sawyer said.
"Of course I didn't know. Are you crazy? I think I had myself convinced I never wanted you in the first place."
"But then," he said with a smug smile, sliding over behind her, "you realized you missed me."
"Didn't you miss it?" Ana said.
Jack chimed in: "I think by then we all missed the two of you bickering. You were too…quiet when you were ignoring each other. Gloomy. Annoying."
When Sawyer sat back down again, Ana slid over into his lap. "Sawyer, you never did tell me what you did while you were on that hike."
He shook his head, rolled his eyes and sighed at himself, and made some motion with his eyes that had her giggling and burying her face in his neck. When he looked at Jack again, he said, "I'm human, anyway."
Jack tried to hide a smile. "It took you that long to figure everything out?"
"No. It clicked in place in my head pretty quick. I already kinda knew she gave a shit. I just didn't know exactly what kind of shit she gave until then. I had to sort it out."
"What did she say to you before you ran off?" Jack asked.
Sawyer shook his head. "Didn't have a damn thing to do with what she said."
Ana added, "I did tell you where the guns were."
"Just like that," Sawyer said to Jack. Then to Ana: "I meant about that gun you chucked at me."
Ana smirked and said to Jack. "It wasn't loaded."
"That and the way you looked at me. Jesus Christ. Anyway, it took me all five of those days to work up the gumption to get my stash back from where she had it in her own fucking tent."
Jack laughed. "That's not exactly…"
"Subtle?" Ana said. "No. But I wasn't thinking clearly. Who the hell can when he decides to flash his dimples. That's what he did, Jack, you know. Walked right into my tent when he got back and thought he could just be cute and I'd crumble."
"If you weren't so suspicious, you would've seen I was mostly serious," he said with a snort.
"Because sincerity is your strong suit, yeah?"
Jack watched them exchange looks, and it was strange to see their old facades of defensiveness redesigned to be mostly transparent.
Pushing Ana up off his lap, Sawyer stood up, stretching his legs, and said, "Enough of this trip down memory lane. I always come out a bastard and a moron when you tell the story."
"Well, when you tell it, I'm lovesick and whiny."
"Now, I can't rightly help that, can I, darlin'?"
She swatted him on the ass as he slid through the patio door, stack of dirty dishes in tow.
*****
After another hour of conversation, Jack said, "I've gotta be going. I need to make it to Knoxville before it gets too late."
Ana said, "You know how to get there from here? I could show you-"
Sawyer waved her off. "She'd have you in Tampa. I promise you don't want her giving you directions even out of the driveway."
As Sawyer drifted into the kitchen to grab an atlas, so they could likely argue for half an hour about a route Jack had already planned, Ana stood with him in the living room.
She said, "Jack, it's been really good to see you."
"You too. You and Sawyer…well, you seem like you're pretty settled here."
"Yeah. We used some of the Oceanic money for the house, but the rest of it we put back. We decided we're really happier without so much shit in our lives, you know?"
"Yeah. I ride a bicycle to work most days now."
"No wonder you look so in shape and tan," she said, just a hint of flirtation in her eyes.
Jack almost for a moment remembered having something like feelings for her, but now he couldn't picture her with anyone but Sawyer. He said, "I didn't get it. You two. Even on the island, I didn't get it."
"Neither did we," she said with a smile and shake of her head.
Sawyer came back into the living room then with a beat-up atlas. Jack remembered that the two of them had apparently fought and fucked their way across half of the western hemisphere when they got back to civilization, before they drifted to Tennessee, and that must've been the atlas they carried. As Sawyer laid it open on the coffee table, she rolled her eyes and sat down on the arm of the couch. She said, "Did he tell you he actually had a job now?"
"Yeah. I didn't know he knew so much about cars."
"And what he doesn’t know, he just bullshits."
Sawyer looked up from his deliberations at the map and scowled at her. "Did I bullshit getting that diesel bastard up and going again in Ecuador?"
She made some snarky reply, but Jack found that he'd tuned them out, focused instead on the house itself, how it looked lived-in and comfortable. It wasn't precisely domestic, though. The living room was acetic, free of artwork and knickknacks and photos and other personal touches. Only the gun that hung on the wall, over the mantle. Its barrel pointed toward the window beside the front door. Jack's eyes followed the line of the window up, and he was surprised to see that something had made a notch on the wall, near the ceiling.
Jack pointed. "Where did that…?"
"Not from that gun," Sawyer said. "Ain't never been loaded."
Ana cocked her head to the side. "The coffee mug?" she asked Sawyer.
"Too small. Probably the serving fork."
She chuckled and inclined her head toward Jack. "Thanksgiving."
Jack said, "I thought you two didn't fight like that anymore."
"That wasn't a real fight," Sawyer said.
Jack looked at both of them quizzically.
Ana added, "No scars."
*****
They took the gun off the wall after Jack left. It had been so long since they paid any attention to it they couldn't remember exactly what model it was. Actually, they both remembered, but they remembered something different. But rather than have a standoff, they simply made a bet and pulled it down.
They were both wrong, so Sawyer did the dishes while Ana went upstairs to unearth her one and only lacy negligee from the depths of the closet. Both of them, however, were a little too stubborn to hang the gun back on the wall again that night.
Pairing: Sawyer/Ana Lucia
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 4500
Summary: Post-rescue, domestic stuff. What Jack sees when he comes for a visit.
This isn't exactly crack-fic, but it is rather light in tone, just something playful that doesn't attempt to totally fluff these two up. They're still combative and snarky, just like we know and love them (those of us who do love Ana). I was determined that it was possible to let them be happy, but if that seems like an impossibility to you, you should probably move on along.
Note: for hiatus_stories, prompt #25.
Unload
They kept a gun hanging on the wall of their house in east Tennessee.
Sawyer's friends found that appropriate redneck behavior. Ana's friends thought it was only slightly ghetto, choosing to chalk it up to her chosen profession. Only a select few visitors to the Cortez household knew why the gun was there and that it wasn't loaded, for more reasons than just propriety and safety. Those select few-their fellow crash survivors- didn't know whether to get misty-eyed over that symbolic gun or simply smile just like their hosts were smiling…or maybe not exactly like their hosts were smiling, because when Sawyer and Ana decided to be happy, it looked very interesting on them indeed.
*****
Sawyer sat in the old, beat-up rocker on the front porch, taking swigs off a cold beer, but he looked so content Jack found it slightly unnerving, even though he'd already been there an hour. There was something surreal about the whole scene-the perfectly cool afternoon air, the mountains on the horizon, the pristine blue sky…Sawyer sitting in front of a house he owned and had lived in for longer than Jack assumed he'd ever been in one place in his adult life.
Sawyer's long legs stretched out in front of him, and the hand that wasn't holding the beer lazily tapped the rocker's armrest. He said, "After…what is it? almost two years we been back?…you still don't believe it, do you?"
"No, I believe it," Jack said, grinning slowly. "I do. It's just that it's still a little nuts."
"All of it, or just the name?"
"The name, mostly."
"Aw, hell. Too much shit weighing down Ford. And around here it seems a damn sight more respectable for us to have the same last name."
"You're not fooling anybody. She's the Hispanic one, not you."
"Don't care."
"So you haven't gone off and gotten married?"
Sawyer choked on his beer a bit with that. "Technically, no. The women down at the Mexican market call me her esposo, but Ana don't like it."
"Do you?"
"Not really. It's just funny."
Just then, Ana let the screen door slam behind her as she came out, wearing a scowl that wasn't the least bit funny. "There any way to get your lazy ass to remember to do the laundry on Fridays?" she said with a snarl. To Jack, this looked serious, but Sawyer just grinned at her.
"Plenty of incentives, darlin'. What you got in mind?"
She flipped him off as she went back into the house, but the door didn't slam this time.
"I come at a bad time?" Jack said.
"No, it's good to see you. Don't pay any attention to her. Sometimes she just gets that way."
"Sometimes?"
"Less and less often. I don't mind telling you it wasn't real easy at first, but she's kinda…mellowed a bit. We both have, as far as we're capable."
"We all always did think you two clung to each other to make each other miserable."
"Yeah? Well, maybe we did," he said, taking a drink, looking almost wistful for a moment, but still somehow Sawyer. "Needed it, I think. It just works different now."
"Not too different," Jack said with a smirk.
"That?" He nodded toward the door. "Hell, that's just the way she is. She'll get over it."
"Yeah?"
"Mostly peaceably. She's just pushing."
"Pushing?"
"It's what she does. Pokes, prods, bitches…narrows those big brown eyes of hers until I get good and fired up and she can get exactly what she wants out of me. Don’t look at me like that. It works just fine. Used to, we had real fights. She'd accuse me of sticking my dick where it don’t belong. Or I'd get sick and damn tired of having her mama nosing into our business. But we don't do that anymore. Much. Just make enough drama to keep life interesante."
He stood up then, stretching his legs. "Come on inside. I'll show you."
*****
There was no doubt about it: Ana was supposed to die that day in the hatch. She almost did. Michael was strong, but he wasn't nearly as stubborn as Ana Lucia. She was at her lowest point-stranded, outcast, still nursing every personal wound she'd ever received, the least of which the baby she hadn't wanted until she lost it-but even at her lowest, she wasn't ready to die. Sawyer once joked to her that it had everything to do with that quickie they had in the woods earlier that day. Focused her, or else just made her remember all the little pleasures of life.
Really, her survival had everything to do with that tryst with Sawyer, but it had nothing to do with what they both had to admit was fast, sloppy sex on the hard ground that left them both sore. It was in the gleam in her eye when she made off with his gun. She had already made the move when she realized she just might have to have another go at him, because he'd been just one step ahead of her: the gun wasn't loaded.
She hated to think Sawyer was cleverer than she was, but she learned to live with that slight, because it meant she was cleverer than Michael. In that split-second it took him to realize the cartridge was empty and stare wide-eyed at a woman who should've been dead, she knocked him a blow hard enough to put him on the floor. Another carefully-placed kick or two had him out cold and locked in the holding cell the man they knew as Henry Gale had just vacated.
Sawyer had the good grace not to say a word about how that unloaded gun had saved her life. It's not like she could forget, and to bring it up would've been tacky, considering he'd just done it to be a bastard.
*****
Jack stood at the sliding glass door and watched in amusement as Sawyer slid up behind Ana where she stood at the sink washing dishes. She let him cross his hands over her stomach, but she kept her back straight.
She said, "Jack, you staying for dinner?"
"If you'll have me."
Sawyer said, "Sure enough. Ana here is probably the best damn cook in the county."
"Small county," she said, rolling her eyes in Jack's direction.
Jack said, "What do you two do when you don't have an audience?"
Sawyer clutched Ana a little tighter. "More of the same. Less clothes."
At that, Ana bucked her hips back into his and attempted to move toward the refrigerator, but Sawyer grabbed her and spun her just enough to press her back into the edge of the counter and lean over to kiss her long and hard. For a moment, it seemed as though they were totally aware of being watched and at the same time completely wrapped up in each other. Jack remembered how that sight had used to make him almost jealous. He didn't understand why Ana began to moon over Sawyer, in her own passive-aggressive way, but he understood it perfectly when Sawyer began to trip over himself, in his typically self-protective, half-belligerent way, just to be near her. But that came a long time after, when Jack's own view of the world had spun 180 degrees.
Sawyer finally released Ana, and she bent her flushed face over the sink again. "I'm making chicken," she said. "You hungry, Jack?"
"Yeah."
To Sawyer: "You wanna help me, baby? It'll go faster that way."
Jack laughed. "I'm a little skeptical of that."
Sawyer just raised one eyebrow. "We're a pretty efficient team, when there aren't any naked detours."
Ana said, "Sometimes we're eficiente then too, no?"
Sawyer scowled at her, hearing a subtle dig in her words that Jack hadn't. Ana grinned and stood up on her tiptoes to kiss the side of his neck, saying, "You do get the job done, though." Sawyer shook his head as she went back to the sink, and Jack tried really hard to hide his amusement. Good thing he'd learned not to blush so easily anymore.
*****
They were supposed to take a doomed trip to scout out the others-Jack, Sawyer, Kate, Hurley, and Michael-and that's exactly what they did. Sayid didn't like it, Locke didn't like it, and Ana really, really didn't like it. It was a trap, wasn't it? Plain and simple. Looking back, it would've made so much more sense for Sayid and Ana to go along or to go instead, but Jack was adamant that they stay behind-which was lucky, because that meant they got to lead the rescue party.
Before Sawyer had gone, he turned over the secret of his gun stash to Ana. Nobody knew why, least of all Sawyer. He had just as little reason to trust a woman who ground a dirty boot into his infected shoulder as he did a man who shoved bamboo under his nails and sliced his arm open. By then, though, those things seemed to be forgiven or were chalked up to karma, like all the other million hurts Sawyer had suffered that he believed he deserved. Both Ana and Sayid saw the world the same way, invited punishment, but in the end it was Ana whose hands seemed steadier and whose anger burned hotter. He trusted that, so he trusted her, and he told her exactly where to find that ammo he'd withheld that had saved her life, as well as everything else.
When they made it into the Others' camp, by the time Sayid split off to head down into that strange hatch to find Jack, Eko and Ana lingered on the outside, finding the cages quickly enough. Ana put two of the crazy dharma people down with bullets to the leg, and Eko simply bodily plowed through them, using the butt of his gun to take them down. They argued a good bit about that before they ever set out, but in the end, Eko said no more killing. There had already been too much killing.
There was one son of a bitch that seemed to be on a suicide mission to do Sawyer as much damage as possible. He had the cage door open, and he was kicking Sawyer, so hard Sawyer was on the ground. The man pulled a gun and Ana raised her own. Sawyer screamed something at her about how stupid she was, and it really was stupid, but she just aimed at the man's knee and fired. And missed.
The man called her a bitch and other names she'd heard before, and closed in on her so fast she couldn't get the gun aimed again. Then he took aim at her heart and pulled the trigger. She thought she was going into shock. She fell down, not feeling anything but the adrenaline now surging through her veins, and watched as Sawyer kicked the guy's legs out from under him and he went down beside her. Ana's hands groped blindly at her chest, but there was no blood. There was just Sawyer standing now, kicking the guy hard enough to knock him out. With a half-crazy laugh, he picked up the gun and fired it into the air.
There was no pop. The gun was empty.
*****
Jack watched from the kitchen table as Ana simply pointed and Sawyer went to the fridge or the cupboard and retrieved whatever it was she wanted. He measured out the rice and peeled the potatoes, but when she made him slice the onion-only to complain about how he went about the slicing-he gave her a hard look, slapped her ass, and sat down beside Jack.
"You still in San Francisco?" Ana asked him, and Sawyer watched her with interest as she finished the onions and added them to the peppers frying on the stove.
"Yeah. It's nice there."
Sawyer asked, "Ain't found a little woman of your own yet, keep the bed warm for ya?"
Jack laughed, but before he could reply, Ana had pitched the heel of the onion and it smacked Sawyer square in the forehead. He snorted and said under his breath, "She once aimed a frying pan at me."
"Didn't throw it, though, did I, you crazy gringo?" she said with a mischievous smile, as though she might easily do that one day.
Sawyer said, "Wouldn't matter, with your aim. And it ain't my fault you're a midget, woman." He rubbed his forehead. "Damn."
"Ain't my fault you're a male chauvinist," she said, mocking his drawl.
Jack said, "Ana, you still working for the sheriff's department?"
Sawyer said, "Didn't I tell you she's a deputy now?"
Ana said with mock-sweetness, "Honey, I think we forgot to put it in the holiday newsletter."
"Can't a man be proud of his woman?"
She scowled, but when Jack said, "Congratulations," she smiled.
Sawyer mumbled, "How come he gets a smile and I get the death look?"
"That wasn't the death look. That was cállate."
"Fat chance of that. You done abusing me?"
"Yeah. Go on and get out of my kitchen. Set the table out on the deck."
"Yes, ma'am," he said with a lazy salute. He handed Jack a stack of plates and they went through the sliding glass door. Ana was turning up the radio and humming to herself, her hips wiggling to the music as she slid back across the kitchen.
*****
Ana was like a pit bull when Sawyer came back to the camp. She wouldn't let anybody but Jack near him at first, not that anyone was clamoring to be around the cranky man whose body was covered in bruises. She also wouldn't admit to anybody why she was behaving the way she was. As if everyone hadn't already figured it out.
Except Sawyer. He didn't see it. He was halfway convinced Ana was up to no good, despite every evidence to the contrary. Then he entertained notions that Ana was just trying to curry favor with Jack. Kate told him Ana didn't want Jack. Jack told him, too, and Libby. Even when Ana told him, he didn't believe it. Then he barked at her one day, worse than he ever had before, and she didn't bark back like she usually did; she just glared and asked him why in the hell she'd gone to so much fucking trouble to bring him back, just so he could treat her the way he always had.
It wasn't very long before Sawyer realized four things: she'd moved the guns, she wouldn't tell him to where, she was really, really attached to him, and she'd be damned if she even came close to admitting it again. Or to even speaking to him.
*****
"She looks happy," Jack said once they set the white plastic table with a vinyl tablecloth and place settings for three.
Sawyer lit the citronella candle and sat it on the railing. Only then did Jack realize how quickly it had gotten dark. He was inside so much nowadays he had forgotten to stop and let the night overtake him. Sawyer, however, didn't seem to have forgotten.
"I think she is. Damn sure wouldn't say so, not that that's particularly surprising, but at least she don't put off those vibes anymore."
"Vibes?"
"Remember how she was when she first came to our side of the beach? Always so angry, and we couldn't for the life of us figure out at who? Nobody wanted to be around her, and it wasn't because she shot Shannon. It was the way tension just rolled off her. She might not say a word, but you could feel shit coming on, 'specially if you looked into her eyes."
"I used to think the same about you sometimes. Except I'm pretty sure you knew exactly how nervous you made people."
"Didn't mean I really wanted to, though. I think falling out of the sky onto that island was the best thing that ever happened to me. I'd been at a low point so long I'd almost taken for granted that that's what my life was supposed to be. Sitting there in that fucking tent, listening to the waves beat at the shore all fucking day long, I owned up to a lot of things, took stock. I think part of me was so fucking lonely I couldn't think straight. Took me a long time to figure out how to let myself not want to be lonely anymore."
"I think I went through the same thing. Took me a little longer."
"Well, you didn't have Rambina come barreling into your life, determined to save you."
"I don't think she meant to rescue you from yourself."
"Naw. Nothing that dramatic. And, really, after a while, she just sort of gave up on me. Which was what I needed, I guess, strange as that sounds." He shook his head as if to clear it. "No. I just meant I couldn't ignore somebody even more stubborn than I am."
A voice from the sliding glass door said, "I heard that."
Sawyer just smiled and turned his back on the dark backyard. "Damn good thing," he said to Jack. "You gotta find you one, Doc."
Ana said, "Get your ass in here and help me bring out the food, Jaime."
Sawyer grinned again. "Worth every bit of trouble, I promise."
*****
Sawyer didn't realize how much he needed to keep up a constant antagonistic banter with Ana until it stopped altogether. Then he began to see that though it had always seemed so angry, at some point that anger had all floated to the surface, so that underneath the attitude and eye rolling and words spat out was something less than hateful. For both of them.
He didn't like it one bit when Ana decided to quit baiting him. He told himself it was about the guns, how she walked around camp pretending like she wasn't lording it over him. What really bothered him was that she felt like she didn't even need to lord it over him. No matter what he said to her, he couldn't engage with her. She just gave a bored frown and wandered away.
He grew obsessed with finding the guns again, and it was an endless amusement to everyone around them to see how poorly he hid that fixation. He was the only person in the camp who didn't realize his attempts to subtly wheedle information out of everyone weren't so subtle. He was also the only person in the camp that didn't know it wasn't really about the guns. It hadn't been for her, so why should it be for him.
He accepted it, finally. Easiest way to piss her off in the long run. At first, he didn't think it worked. She still seemed oblivious, so he acted oblivious too. Sometimes he even struck up perfectly innocent conversations with her, which bewildered her at first but slowly became normal…to them. The rest of the island was preparing for something big-either they would kill each other or finally cement their alliance and put a plan for world domination into action. About the time Sawyer realized he wasn't pretending to accept things, that he no longer cared that much about getting his gun stash back, she came stomping into his hut and threw one at him so hard it bruised his ribs.
*****
Sawyer stood at the deck railing, his head bowed back with laughter. "I really did think you were trying to kill me, baby."
"I wanted to," Ana said.
Jack said, "We always wondered how it--…well, it didn't make sense to anybody."
"You think it made sense to us?" she said. "I didn't even know why he made me so mad."
"We knew that at least," Jack said with a laugh.
Sawyer frowned dramatically at him. "Might've been nice for y'all to share that bit of insight with the man with his head up his ass."
Ana said, "As if knowing would've made a difference."
Jack said, "All I remember was Sawyer went on a five-day hike by himself, and you sat and stared out at the water the whole time. Were you waiting for him?"
"No," she said with a wicked laugh. "No, I was praying the smoke monster would get his ass."
"Did you know then, baby?" Sawyer said.
"Of course I didn't know. Are you crazy? I think I had myself convinced I never wanted you in the first place."
"But then," he said with a smug smile, sliding over behind her, "you realized you missed me."
"Didn't you miss it?" Ana said.
Jack chimed in: "I think by then we all missed the two of you bickering. You were too…quiet when you were ignoring each other. Gloomy. Annoying."
When Sawyer sat back down again, Ana slid over into his lap. "Sawyer, you never did tell me what you did while you were on that hike."
He shook his head, rolled his eyes and sighed at himself, and made some motion with his eyes that had her giggling and burying her face in his neck. When he looked at Jack again, he said, "I'm human, anyway."
Jack tried to hide a smile. "It took you that long to figure everything out?"
"No. It clicked in place in my head pretty quick. I already kinda knew she gave a shit. I just didn't know exactly what kind of shit she gave until then. I had to sort it out."
"What did she say to you before you ran off?" Jack asked.
Sawyer shook his head. "Didn't have a damn thing to do with what she said."
Ana added, "I did tell you where the guns were."
"Just like that," Sawyer said to Jack. Then to Ana: "I meant about that gun you chucked at me."
Ana smirked and said to Jack. "It wasn't loaded."
"That and the way you looked at me. Jesus Christ. Anyway, it took me all five of those days to work up the gumption to get my stash back from where she had it in her own fucking tent."
Jack laughed. "That's not exactly…"
"Subtle?" Ana said. "No. But I wasn't thinking clearly. Who the hell can when he decides to flash his dimples. That's what he did, Jack, you know. Walked right into my tent when he got back and thought he could just be cute and I'd crumble."
"If you weren't so suspicious, you would've seen I was mostly serious," he said with a snort.
"Because sincerity is your strong suit, yeah?"
Jack watched them exchange looks, and it was strange to see their old facades of defensiveness redesigned to be mostly transparent.
Pushing Ana up off his lap, Sawyer stood up, stretching his legs, and said, "Enough of this trip down memory lane. I always come out a bastard and a moron when you tell the story."
"Well, when you tell it, I'm lovesick and whiny."
"Now, I can't rightly help that, can I, darlin'?"
She swatted him on the ass as he slid through the patio door, stack of dirty dishes in tow.
*****
After another hour of conversation, Jack said, "I've gotta be going. I need to make it to Knoxville before it gets too late."
Ana said, "You know how to get there from here? I could show you-"
Sawyer waved her off. "She'd have you in Tampa. I promise you don't want her giving you directions even out of the driveway."
As Sawyer drifted into the kitchen to grab an atlas, so they could likely argue for half an hour about a route Jack had already planned, Ana stood with him in the living room.
She said, "Jack, it's been really good to see you."
"You too. You and Sawyer…well, you seem like you're pretty settled here."
"Yeah. We used some of the Oceanic money for the house, but the rest of it we put back. We decided we're really happier without so much shit in our lives, you know?"
"Yeah. I ride a bicycle to work most days now."
"No wonder you look so in shape and tan," she said, just a hint of flirtation in her eyes.
Jack almost for a moment remembered having something like feelings for her, but now he couldn't picture her with anyone but Sawyer. He said, "I didn't get it. You two. Even on the island, I didn't get it."
"Neither did we," she said with a smile and shake of her head.
Sawyer came back into the living room then with a beat-up atlas. Jack remembered that the two of them had apparently fought and fucked their way across half of the western hemisphere when they got back to civilization, before they drifted to Tennessee, and that must've been the atlas they carried. As Sawyer laid it open on the coffee table, she rolled her eyes and sat down on the arm of the couch. She said, "Did he tell you he actually had a job now?"
"Yeah. I didn't know he knew so much about cars."
"And what he doesn’t know, he just bullshits."
Sawyer looked up from his deliberations at the map and scowled at her. "Did I bullshit getting that diesel bastard up and going again in Ecuador?"
She made some snarky reply, but Jack found that he'd tuned them out, focused instead on the house itself, how it looked lived-in and comfortable. It wasn't precisely domestic, though. The living room was acetic, free of artwork and knickknacks and photos and other personal touches. Only the gun that hung on the wall, over the mantle. Its barrel pointed toward the window beside the front door. Jack's eyes followed the line of the window up, and he was surprised to see that something had made a notch on the wall, near the ceiling.
Jack pointed. "Where did that…?"
"Not from that gun," Sawyer said. "Ain't never been loaded."
Ana cocked her head to the side. "The coffee mug?" she asked Sawyer.
"Too small. Probably the serving fork."
She chuckled and inclined her head toward Jack. "Thanksgiving."
Jack said, "I thought you two didn't fight like that anymore."
"That wasn't a real fight," Sawyer said.
Jack looked at both of them quizzically.
Ana added, "No scars."
*****
They took the gun off the wall after Jack left. It had been so long since they paid any attention to it they couldn't remember exactly what model it was. Actually, they both remembered, but they remembered something different. But rather than have a standoff, they simply made a bet and pulled it down.
They were both wrong, so Sawyer did the dishes while Ana went upstairs to unearth her one and only lacy negligee from the depths of the closet. Both of them, however, were a little too stubborn to hang the gun back on the wall again that night.