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Los Angeles, 2007
He opens his eyes and the light hits. It's immediately to bright and so he shuts them again. The sound, however doesn’t go away. It takes him a good couple of minutes to realize that the knocking, because he identifies it as knocking now at least, isn’t coming from inside his own head.
At first, he chooses to ignore it, because who would be coming to visit him that he’d actually care to see. It’s been weeks since he actually had a visitor (discounting Ben Linus – he's still refusing to believe that happened) and also, he knows it won’t be her. Not after how they left things. Anyway, he calculates, she’s busy at this time of day dropping Aaron off at day-care and starting her other morning errands.
Still, he decides to get himself up anyway. It’s only when he pushes upwards and swings his legs sideways that he realizes he’s not on his bed but on the cold surface of the bathroom floor. He groans, using the bathroom cabinet to pull himself up and blinks wearily at this reflection in the bathroom mirror.
It’s not good. His beard is thick and patchy and his hair sticks up in all directions despite the coating of the layer of grease of several missed showers. Worse are his eyes, darkly shadowed, yet somehow looking red and puffy at the same time. He stares at himself for a minute, part revelling in the extent of his dishevelment, but the knocking continues, and it’s really not ideal for the pounding in his head.
He continues to know that it’s not Kate because it’s not her knock. It’s steady and patient, but with a firmness that makes him think that whoever is out there is male. It occasionally pauses but then starts up again with the same persistent rhythm. Kate would be yelling and hammering by now – patience was never really her strong point.
None-the-less, his curiosity eventually gets the better of him. He won’t know for sure that it’s not her until he opens the door to find out.
“Coming,” he yells, as he staggers his way out into the hallway. It comes out as more of a croak than he intended or wanted. He struggles with the bolt and then pulls the door towards himself, putting his hand immediately across his face to block the sun glare.
It is not Kate.
“Jack?” The man in front of him asks, quietly, unsurely. He’s tall and broad and looks to be in his 60s, with a thick head of pushed-back greying hair that falls long to his collar. His silver facial hair is neatly trimmed and there’s something familiar about the blue-green eyes that are currently searching his face.
Jack steps backwards, last night’s drinks rendering him unable to cope with this sudden blast of LA sunlight, combined with the niggling realization that he knows who this man is.
“Jeez,” the stranger says, only partly under his breath, and reaches out and arm to guide him into a chair in the lounge.
Jack has time to watch him as hunts around the kitchen surface for a glass and fills it from the faucet. He’s broad shouldered and fit -looking for his age (could still definitely pass as handsome), but there’s something off about him, and not just the fact that, if he’s who Jack somehow thinks he might be, he’s aged about thirty years in the last three.
“Guess, you’ll be needing this,” he drawls, handing him the glass before sitting down opposite and gazing back at him. He places one hand on his knee and Jack takes in the expensive-looking yet aged leather jacket over neatly pressed checked shirt and dark trousers with a thick dark leather pair of work boots. Jack wonders if all the alcohol from last night is making him hallucinate and the stranger’s eyes are wide too, like he can’t believe what he’s looking at either.
He clears his throat before he speaks. “Listen, you can’t go back there...”
Jack closes his eyes and takes a breath. “What?”
“I know this is all so weird right now, but it’s all I gotta say. You can’t go back, Jack.”
“But, why?” He can’t stop the instant creep of irritation in his voice. This is all to confusing for his current state of mind, and he’s also annoyed that this guy apparently know his thoughts before he’s had chance to share them with anyone else. “Look, sir,” he continues, “You’ve just barged into my house... I don’t even know who you are exactly.”
The man in front of him smirks again. “You sure about that? And I knocked actually...” But then his expression gets more serious. “That ain’t important anyway. All that matter is that I know about the island and I’m telling you you can’t go back there.”
When he gets to his feet, Jack sways immediately, and he realizes that he’s not suffering a hangover, but the that the whiskey from last night is still very much present in his system.
“Well then, I’m asking you why not? And on what authority?” He steps closer to the stranger, who holds his gaze and remains silent, so he changes his approach.
“Are you his.. Are you a relative, maybe?” he asks, quietly, his mind frantically trying to put the pieces of Sawyer’s family life together. He thinks his dad was either absent or dead, so he ends up just staring again.
“No, I ain’t,” the not-relative gruffly replies. "Knew I shoulda got her to come in," he mutters under his breath, and then he gestures back at the arm chair. “I think you oughta sit back down, Jacky Boy. You probably ain’t gonna be too fond of what I have to say.”
Jack silently does what he is told and rubs a hand through his hair as he listens. The guy in front of him smiles a little at his obedience before he begins.
“So when y’all left on the chopper you might’ve noticed that the island disappeared.”
Jack thinks a little and then nods.
“Right, so that was down to our pal Linus. Long story short, he left the island in a way he shouldnt've and caused all left behind to start skipping through time” He exhales. “Well, that was no fun, but all of us left eventually ended up in the 1970s.”
He pauses, as if expecting a response from Jack, but none is forthcoming.
“Anyway, something happened so we got stuck in 1974 and we end up living there for three years until we make it off the island in ‘77.”
He looks down at his hands for a while and clears his throat. “A lot of people died, but we made it off and you going back there won’t fix anything, Doc.”
Jack looks up at him now, eyes bloodshot and bleary. He can't avoid the truth of who is in front of him, not know he's heard the all this title in the voice that he'd, unfortunately (he thinks) know anywhere. “Sawyer?” he whispers. Saying his name for the first time catches in his throat, again like he can’t believe that he’s acknowledging that this is reality.
Sawyer smiles, but it’s a soft smile, not a smirk. “Yeah, that was my name. No-one's called me that in a long time. I go by James now.” He pauses. “Or Jim.”
Jack doesn't know how to register this and feels the agitation creeping back. The contrast of this new apparently zen Sawyer with his own recent state isn't helping him feel anything positive. “But can’t just tell me that a whole bunch of people died and there’s nothing I can do about this..”
He gets to his feet and paces over to the kitchen to look for a bottle, but Sawyer is quicker, and follows and moves the bottle out of reach. Jack almost reaches out for it, but then stops himself and leans back against the counter with his arms crossed.
"Time travel..." he starts softly, but then he shakes his head like he refuses to believe it. “Is this about Kate?” he instead scoffs at Sawyer.
He regrets the question the moment it leaves his mouth, but his recent wounds are too sore, and seeing Sawyer again (even the Grandpa version) still sets off a kind of trigger response within him.
Sawyer smiles again, in that calm way he seems to have now. “Nope, can’t say it is. I’ve been with my wife now for thirty-three years.”
“Your wife?!” Jack trials off speechless, and blinks at the idea of this happily-married Sawyer in front of him.
“Look, Doc - I know it’s hard for you, and you’ve got that saviour complex and I guess a load of guilt there for leavin’ everyone behind, but I’m here to tell you that we don’t need rescuing.”
Jack stares stonily back at him. “It wasn’t everyone I left behind,” he adds, unable to hide the sadness in his voice.
“We don’t need saving.”
“Okay,” Jack puts his head in his hands again. He has approximately a million questions in his mind about time travel, and who survived to get off the island, and who the hell Sawyer’s wife is, but he’s in no state to ask any of them coherently.
“Look,” Sawyer continues in a gentler tone. “I know Linus has probably been sniffin’ round here full of reasons for your glorious return, but when was that freak ever anything but bad news?”
“But I’ve messed it all up here...” Jack gestures around his dark, dilapidated apartment, unwilling to discuss anything further to do with Benjamin Linus. “There’s nothing here for me now in LA.”
“The hell you have.” Sawyer removes the whiskey bottle from the side and pours in neatly into the sink. Jack can't help notice that his hands, though aged, are still steady.
“We were engaged.” Jack says as he watches the last of liquor disappear down the drain, and Sawyer nods. “I had her and I lost her.”
He sighs. “You can make it right, She loves you, always has,” he admits, less gruffly then he once might have sounded. “Don't waste your chance at a life on a damn doomed mission to that stupid rock that you got off once for no good reason.”
“But...” Jack begins, but Sawyer cuts him off, firmly, with the authority of a man who has thirty years on him.
“I’m warning you, Doc. That place is death.”
His words ring ominously around the silent apartment and Jack exhales, his mind suddenly full of everything that did happen on the island last time; of all the passengers from the place crash that he was unable to save. Of Boone and Shannon, and Charlie and Libby and the others. He thinks of the line of graves with simple wooden crosses beside the beach.
“Look,” Sawyer says, and he runs another glass of water from the faucet. “You will get over this. You can make things right with Kate, and be there for Aaron. You can have a life.”
He hands Jack the glass and then pats him on the upper arm. “I gotta go, Jack.” He pats him on the back this time. “You can sort this out. Hell, if I can then so can you.” He gestures up and down his body with a small smirk before turning towards the door.
Before he reaches it, he turns back to Jack again, looking a little unsure. “Just believe me, don’t go back there. It ain’t gonna fix anything.”
He gives Jack one last small smile and a nod, before turning and this time walking through the door. Jack stays rooted to the spot as the door thuds and then a thick silence follows. He stays there for a few moments until something Sawyer said sparks in his brain and rushes to the window.
Peering through the blinds, he watches as Sawyer crosses the road and approaches a well-polished Chevvy pickup. He can make out the figure of what looks like a woman in the passenger seat.
I’ve been with my wife now for thirty-three years.
Jack quickly does the math in his head. If Sawyer travelled back to 1974 in 2004 then that means he met his wife 33 years ago on the island. He starts. The woman in the truck turns her head to greet Sawyer, and Jack makes out a sharp head of long white-blonde hair that falls straight down her back. He watches them embrace before they drive off, and for a few seconds her eyes catch Jack's in the rear-view mirror.
They are blue, sharply focused and shockingly familiar. Right then Jack gets everything that Sawyer spent the last half hour trying to convey. He gets it now, how the pieces fit together. What it is that Sawyer is desperate to preserve. He feels a creeping amount guilt as he realize that he'd almost forgotten that Juliet was there amongst the survivors left behind on the island, mixed with an envy of what they seem to have made together.
He leans his head against the glass of the window, which isn’t as cool as he would like, and wonders if he'll ever be able to let go of the island he's been holding onto in his mind, and if Sawyer's advice will be strong enough for him to resist the other voice in his head telling him that he needs to go back there to figure out what everything means.
You sound like John Locke.
He turns from the window and walks slowly to the kitchen. He needs a drink. But this time he goes to the coffee machine rather than the bottle.