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Sawyer can’t decide what bothers him more: the hole in his shoulder or the fact that Kate’s acting weird.
Ever since he came out of his fever-induced near-coma bullshit, she has been avoiding him like the plague. He woke up to Kate telling him she liked him and that it disgusted her, and before he even had the chance to unpack what the Hell that was supposed to mean, she took off and he hasn’t seen her since.
It probably shouldn’t bug him as much as it does. In theory, he should have plenty of other stuff to worry about; his shoulder is no longer beyond fucked but it’s still solidly regular fucked, not to mention all of the shit going on with the Others and Michael’s kid and Shannon and this freaky bunker that’s apparently threatening to blow up every two hours.
And yet. Here he is, lying in a bed in a freaky bunker, trying to breathe through the pain his fucked shoulder is sending down his arm…
…and worrying about why Kate is avoiding him.
He scoffs at himself, raising his good hand to wipe his hair off his clammy forehead in exasperation. Embarrassing, this. His self control has slipped all the way out of his reach; he decided decades ago that he wouldn’t let himself care, especially not about women. At least he gets to blame this nonsense on the fever.
He drops his arm to the mattress again with a huff. If he could stand on his feet, he’d go look for her to ask what all the fuss is about, but he’s honestly hardly able to move at all. He supposes all he can do is wait for her to come by again.
Recently, a bunch of people have developed the irritating habit of sitting next to his bed and talking. Not talking with him, because he ignores it as much as he can, but talking at him. When he complained about it once, Sun blamed it on the fact that he spent a good long time knocked out and that the people on button duty in the bunker spent a good long time bored, so talking at his knocked-out body was at least something they could do to pass the time. The habit apparently stuck around afterwards and it annoys the Hell out of him.
Today it’s Hurley who insists on yapping at his face. Something about a crap horror movie he vaguely remembers watching once, in which a girl performs an exorcism on her lover to blast some evil ghost out of his body, and then she spends the rest of the movie avoiding the guy because she’s scared it didn’t work, except it turns out it did work and everything is fine in the end. Happy ending.
It takes Hurley forty-five minutes to explain this in non-chronological order and he uses the word “dude” exactly fifty-six times. Counting is more entertaining than listening to him.
Sawyer has already thoroughly zoned out by the time Hurley suddenly pauses and looks at him expectantly.
Sawyer turns his head to look back at him, frowning. “What?”
“Asked you a question, dude.” Fifty-seven. “I said, what’s up with Kate?”
Sawyer frowns at him. “How am I supposed to know? I haven’t seen her since yesterday.”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” Hurley replies. “She’s avoiding you. Aren’t you two supposed to be buds? Joined-at-the-hip, Bonnie-and-Clyde sort of deal?”
Buds. Sawyer scoffs. “Well, sorry to burst your bubble, big guy,” he replies. He’d intended to say more, but he decides he doesn’t feel like it.
Hurley ends the long silence with an awkward nod. “Yeah. All right.” He slaps his knee and gets up from the chair. “I just remembered I have something I should be doing. Uh. See you later.”
“Something like that,” Sawyer replies noncommittally. In the blissful silence that follows, he leans his head back and closes his eyes with a sigh.
However, because nothing nice ever lasts, it doesn’t take long before loud-ass footsteps ring through the hallway.
Sawyer groans as the footsteps grow nearer, and he opens his eyes to see who came to ruin his peace and quiet. “Has no one ever taught you not to run indoors--” he starts to say, but the words die on his tongue.
Kate is standing in the room, leaning her hands on her knees, out of breath. She’s staring at him. “You’re fine,” she pants, wiping her hair out of her face. She’s coated in sweat; she must’ve been running a while.
“I… guess?” Sawyer huffs a laugh, trying to mask his bewilderment at seeing her again all of a sudden. “Freckles, what’s--”
“Hurley said to come see you,” she says, still panting. “Urgently.” She’s starting to sound annoyed now, more like herself. “I’m not really seeing what’s so urgent about you taking a nap.”
“Hurley said that, huh?” Sawyer has yet to decide whether to thank him or kick his ass for that. “Apparently he knows something I don’t. Far as I know, there ain’t nothing wrong with me.” He gestures vaguely at the bandages around his left shoulder. “Other than the obvious, ‘course.”
“Yeah. Good. That’s… good.” She straightens up, putting her hands on her hips. “I was… in the middle of something, actually, so I guess I’ll get back to the beach now. I’ll see you later.”
She’s already turning away, expertly not giving Sawyer a chance to properly talk to her. “Hey, wait a sec,” he calls out, quickly reaching out with his good hand to grab her wrist.
The moment his hand closes around her wrist, her head snaps towards him, her teeth bared and her eyes wide. She looks full-on, deer-in-the-headlights terrified.
He freezes in response, stunned, just for a second. She yanks her arm from his grasp, jolting his upper body and making the wound in his shoulder protest. He grimaces and grabs at it with his other hand.
Kate is standing on the other side of the room now, out of his reach, still staring. “Sorry,” she whispers.
“No, it’s--” He shakes his head. “It’s fine, just--”
When he looks up again, she’s already gone.
“--stay,” he finishes his sentence in the empty room, and he presses the back of his head into the pillow in frustration.
The next morning, the hole in his shoulder is bothering him more than before.
Jack says he probably tore it open somehow, with some sort of sudden movement. Sawyer knows exactly which sudden movement, but Jack can do without that knowledge. So he keeps his mouth shut and lets Jack theorize that it might’ve happened when he fell out of bed the other day and that he just didn’t notice it hurt till now. An event he still has zero recollection of happening, by the way.
Jack changes the bandages on his shoulder while Sawyer bullies the worry on his face back into annoyance, and then Sawyer bullies him some more when he brings him some aspirin – Sawyer’s aspirin, which got added to the commie pile when he left on the raft. He supposes he shouldn’t complain because he’s using up all of the aspirin himself anyway, but he’s feeling antsy and so he does complain.
Jack gets fed up with him pretty quickly after that and leaves him in the silence of the bunker by himself.
Sawyer heaves a sigh, resting his hand on his throbbing shoulder. He’s still pissed off at himself for freaking Kate out yesterday. He’d spent years upon years upon years perfecting the art of making himself seem trustworthy – but those skills seemed to have left him the moment the plane hit the ground. This is the first time he’s actually missing those skills.
With those thoughts refusing to leave his skull, he has a very restless and annoying morning. There isn’t really anything for him to do, apart from staring at the bunk bed above him and trying in vain to fall asleep. Michael briefly pokes his head into the room to say hi when his shift in the bunker ends, and John walks in to peel and share a mango during his shift a bit later, but that’s only fifteen minutes out of the whole morning. For the rest of it, he’s just bored. The novelty of getting to lie in a bed has worn off fast.
He’s just starting to consider the pros and cons of getting up and walking to the beach by himself – pro, change of scenery; con, might not get far enough to get a change of scenery – when someone knocks on the open doorframe. He cranes his neck to look.
Kate is standing in the doorway. She gives him an awkward little wave. “Hi, Sawyer,” she greets him quietly.
“You’re back,” he replies, his eyebrows drawing together in confusion.
“Yeah, I… heard you weren’t feeling well. From a more reliable source, this time.”
Sawyer hums. “Jack?” That would be a weird move from Jack, but then again, Jack’s been acting almost just as weird as Kate but in a different way.
“Sun,” Kate replies, “who heard it from Jack.” She steps into the room, her arms crossed across her chest. She doesn’t meet his gaze and stands as far away from him as she can. “Hope you’re not mad at me for messing up your shoulder.”
He almost chokes on his own spit at that. “Me mad at you?” he asks. “What about the other way around? I’d sooner think you’re mad at me.”
She presses her lips together at his tone, as though to suppress a flinch; he sighs, once again annoyed with himself.
“Didn’t mean to shout,” he adds, lowering his voice. “But I’ve been racking my brains for days trying to figure out what I did to piss you off so bad, and I’m drawing a blank here. Just tell me.”
She shifts in place, uncrossing and then re-crossing her arms. “I’m not mad at you. Not at… you, Sawyer.”
He narrows his eyes at her. “Then who?”
“I… don’t think you’d believe me even if I told you.”
He works his jaw, thinking. Well, at least she’s not mad at him. That’s something, at least. “So you’re not mad at me,” he says. “But you are avoiding me. Why?”
Her hand tightens around her upper arm, almost unnoticeable. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she says. After a moment, she adds, eyes locked on the floor, “I really don’t.”
“Aw,” Sawyer protests, “humor me, Freckles. Don’t you have some pity for this poor wounded soul?”
“I’d be surprised if you had a soul,” Kate shoots back. At least she seems to shed some of that tension she’s carrying around. “All I can say,” she continues with a sigh, “is that you freaked me out really bad when your fever was high and you didn’t know what you were saying. It wasn’t your fault and I just need to get used to seeing your face again. That’s all.”
“When you said I made you sick to your stomach,” he asks, quietly, “did you mean it?”
“Not in the way you think.” She rakes a hand through her hair. “Look, I’ve said all I wanted to say. I want… to spend time with you. With you, not the person I see in you who freaks me out.”
Well. All of that is confusing as Hell, but he’s never known Kate to be an easy-to-understand person anyway. He thinks he’s satisfied with the new knowledge he has, apart from one little thing.
“When you said you liked me,” he says, with all the savagery of a second-grader, mouth twisting into a smirk, “did you mean that?”
Kate purses her lips at him and – thank all that’s good and holy – finally grins. “What do I need to do to make you stop asking questions?” she asks, shaking her head. “I’d do anything. I’m serious.”
Sawyer huffs a laugh at her exasperation. “Well, I do have something in mind,” he replies. He has been awfully bored, after all.
Kate rolls her eyes at him when he pauses for effect. “All right. Spit it out.”
“Well, the first step is to walk on back to the beach real quick.”
“You are a child,” Kate announces to him when she returns, the sand from the beach still in her shoes. “Three years old. Maybe four.”
It takes a second before he reacts; she halts in the doorway to the room, her heart skipping a beat. She’s acutely aware that she let her guard down, and maybe too soon. What if Sawyer opens his mouth and Wayne’s words come out again?
But then, he rolls his head towards her and lazily opens one eye, and he replies with a grin, “What does that make you, then, Freckles? A newborn?” He yawns loudly. “Did you get the book?”
“Yeah.” She holds it up; “Watership Down”, like he asked. “Had to pry it from Charlie’s hands. He was trying to read it to the baby.”
“That book ain’t meant for babies anyway.”
“And yet I’m about to read this to you,” Kate replies, lips curving into a smirk, “like you’re a baby.”
She’s teasing him just for the sake of teasing him; just because she can, just because he’s finally well enough to tease her in return and because that helps banish the image of Wayne from her mind. Wayne was many things but he was never playful, not like Sawyer is. If she’d given Wayne her offer to do “anything” to get him to stop asking questions, she knows what he would have asked for and the idea makes her nauseous.
Wayne would very certainly not have requested to be read to from a children’s book. He would also not have stuck his tongue out at her in defense of said request. Sawyer does.
“I am following doctor’s orders, thank you very much,” he protests. He’s scowling up at her, but she sees the beginning of a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. “I lost my damn glasses in the Great Raft Incident of ’04 and Jack said I shouldn’t read without them.”
“Well, if Jack says so,” she replies with an audibly-faked sigh, and she sits down on the chair by his bedside and flips open the book. “Would one chapter be enough to hold up my end of the deal?”
“At least a few chapters,” Sawyer exclaims, his voice rising like it does when he feels he’s been wronged. “You’re buying my silence here, and I can assure you that it ain’t cheap.”
She possesses the skills to bargain – it sure wouldn’t be the first time she has bartered herself out of a deal – but, in all honesty, she’d gladly sit here all day and read him the whole book. Now that her all-consuming terror has ebbed away some, she’s realizing that she’d missed him.
She’ll never live it down if she tells Sawyer that, though. So instead of giving herself the chance to talk more, she takes a breath and reads,
“The primroses were over. Toward the edge of the wood, where the ground became open and sloped down to an old fence and a brambly ditch beyond, only a few fading patches of pale yellow still showed among the dog’s mercury and the oak-tree roots…”
And Sawyer shuts his smart mouth and rests his fever-warm gaze on her and listens.