Title: Last Words
Characters: Miles, Jack
Pairing: None
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Season 5 AU
A/N:. Jack asks Miles for help. My first attempt at a Miles POV. This is another short vignette from the "Jack jumps" fic, although it can also be read as a standalone.
~~
“If I give you this-you can tell me-the last thing he was thinking?”
“If his body’s here on the island, yeah,” Miles reaches out for the photo impatiently, but when his hand closes around it, he looks up at Jack suspiciously, “Where’d you bury him?”
Jack clears his throat.
“It’s a simple question, Shephard: where’d you bury him?”
“I didn’t,” he begins nervously after a moment, “I never found his body. But I-” he swallows, “I know that he’s here.”
Miles starts to feel a strange sensation overtake him, like there’s someone behind them, and he turns on Jack suddenly.
“How do you know that he’s here?”
“Because I-I saw him,” Jack says, after a long moment of hesitation, and Miles can tell just from the way Jack’s looking at him that he’s not talking about seeing a body in a coffin. He shakes his head, half with fear, and half with disgust.
“And you didn’t think it was important to tell me that this thing was walking around before I made contact with it?” he huffs. Jack opens his mouth as if he’s not sure what to say.
“I didn’t-”
“Forget it,” Miles raises his hand in dismissal, and then takes the photo out of Jack’s hand. “Just know that if this kills me for some reason-” he begins, “you’re going to have two ghosts following you around the island.”
Miles closes his eyes without waiting for Jack to react, his thumb resting just over Christian Shephard’s ear in the photo. He feels the familiar sensation of losing control, as if he’s a plane caught up in turbulence and they’re all trying to steer at once, and then suddenly his head splits open and all he sees is black. It’s like a tornado in his skull, like agony, and he loses all sense of who he is, what he was supposed to do, and his hands shake, and the glass in his hand breaks and cuts into his skin, and it’s like taking up the scalpel and the wrong end, and he can’t be that out of it, can he? But he crawls out of the bar on his hands and knees, thinking,
“You’ve got to find Claire, Jack: You’ve got to find her. Keep her safe.”
“What?”
Miles opens his eyes, and it’s only then that he realizes he’s on the ground.
“Find Claire, Jack: Keep her safe.”
~~
END