Title: Aftershock
Rating: PG
Summary: Charlie is heading down a hallway, fresh from a trip to the cafeteria and carrying two steaming-hot cups of coffee (one for him, one for this wife), when he hears the very familiar, very belligerent voice of the man that they’ve all been waiting for.
Disclaimer: I don't own Lost. At all. I wish, but alas...
Author's Note: Used for philosophy_20, prompt #16: God.



Charlie is heading down a hallway, fresh from a trip to the cafeteria and carrying two steaming-hot cups of coffee (one for him, one for this wife), when he hears the very familiar, very belligerent voice of the man that they’ve all been waiting for. He turns the corner and sees him, down at the nurse’s station. He looks as though he’s cornered some poor woman who can’t give him the information that he wants. He looks as though he doesn’t care all that much.

Diverting his course, Charlie decides that it’s probably best for everyone involved if he takes Sawyer off her hands and lets her get back to her job. “Sawyer,” Charlie says, loudly enough that his voice carries straight down and the hall and into his ears. The nurse looks at him gratefully before slipping away, unnoticed and already forgotten.

Instead, Sawyer turns his attention to Charlie, barreling down the hallway and staring down at him like he had been staring at the nurse – as if the whole situation was his fault. He’s frustrated, Charlie knows. He’s scared. And Sawyer doesn’t react to either emotion well, or with much rationale.

Charlie manages to meet his gaze, even though, he must admit, it isn’t easy. Charlie wouldn’t say that he’s scared of Sawyer anymore, but at the moment – in Sawyer’s mind at least – Charlie is the thing immediately standing between him and Jack. That is not a good place to be.

“Where is he?” Sawyer asks, like Charlie is holding him prisoner. Charlie sighs, figures that if the positions were reversed, if Jack was Claire, Charlie might be reacting the same way. So he gently taps Sawyer’s arm with one of the coffee cups and nods toward the hallway behind him and to his immediate left.

Sawyer’s footsteps fall heavily behind him, and he pities the ground beneath his feet. His steps are hard, loud, angry. Charlie doesn’t even want to know what’s going on in Sawyer’s mind right now. Probably guilt, he reasons. Sawyer despises feeling guilty. Charlie wonders when Sawyer started adopting Jack’s traits – feeling guilty for things that he has no control over. He supposes that’s bound to happen after being with someone for a certain amount of time. He has, after all, taken to reading his horoscope every morning in the paper. That particular interest could hardly have been thought to have developed on its own.

“Here it is,” Charlie announces, after a few corners are rounded and Sawyer’s footsteps become so quiet Charlie has to turn around a few times to make sure that he’s still there. Sawyer pauses a few feet away from the door, before he can be seen by anyone that doesn’t already know that he’s there. Charlie stops too, just a few inches short of the door and only when he realizes that Sawyer isn’t following him anymore.

“Well?” he asks, gesturing to the door. Sawyer isn’t looking at him, but at the space between him, and Charlie sighs. “He’s fine, mate. If you don’t believe me, you can walk in the door and see it with your own eyes.”

After a few moments, Charlie decides to just leave him there. Sawyer doesn’t need someone to wait with him. He’ll come in when he’s ready to. So, he turns around and walks inside the room. Claire looks up from where she stands, at Jack’s bedside, and smiles. Charlie hands her her coffee and takes up the seat just behind her.

“Was that Sawyer?” Jack asks, turning to face Charlie. He has a couple of deep cuts across his face. Even worse ones on his arms. A few of his ribs are broken, and he looks like he could easily sleep for three weeks, but other than that, he’s fine. It certainly could have been worse, as far as car accidents go. And yet, Sawyer stands on the other side of the wall like he’s being asked to walk into a morgue.

“Yeah,” Charlie answers, wanting to add ‘Your boyfriend’s just being a baby’, but he doesn’t. He has no idea what this must be like for Sawyer, after all that he’s been through. If it were Charlie, and Jack were Claire, he’d want to be by her side this second. But Jack isn’t Claire, and Sawyer isn’t Charlie, and Charlie has no idea how their relationship works. Maybe Jack had expected this.

“He’s just sitting in the hallway?” Claire asks, clearly confused, and looking out the door as if she’s trying to see him. Charlie reaches up and runs his hand along the small of her back. Claire loves Sawyer like a child loves their mother: blindly. If she see his faults, she chooses to ignore them, to focus on better things. Charlie wishes that he was like her. He doesn’t know anyone who knows his wife and hasn’t wished, at one point, that they were more like her.

“Just give him time,” Jack assures, reaching up a wobbly hand and holding onto Claire’s wrist. She smiles down at him, then reaches her hand around to squeeze his. She’s doing better, Charlie thinks to himself. Certainly better than this morning.

This morning, when the hospital had called and informed them that Jack had been admitted, she had been a mess. Charlie had long since heard the story of her mother’s slow deterioration, of the months and months Claire had spent by her bedside while she laid there, unmoving, living but no longer alive. Jack had been, by the grace of God, conscious when they had arrived, and that had calmed Claire considerably. He was going to be fine, he had assured her. Claire had asked how he could be sure, and he had told her that he was, after all, a doctor.

He was sure that Jack would reassure Sawyer similarly, that once he finally had the courage to walk into the room, to face what had happened, he would see that Jack was alive, breathing, that he would be fine after some bed rest, and with time.

“Can you hand me my water?” Jack asks, leaning back against the pillow behind his head. He tries reaching for it, but his arm doesn’t get very far. It’s as heavy as lead, and he just gets more exhausted the more he tries to move. Claire reaches for it, but doesn’t give it to him, refuses to let him do much of anything for himself. She just holds the straw up to his lips and waits for the stubborn glare to leave his face and just drink it already.

They’re quite the match, Jack and Claire. He would never have thought, in the beginning, that they could be family. Neither had Jack and Claire, really. It had come as quite the shock, to say the least. But the more each of them had looked, the more similarities they had found. They were both horribly stubborn, fiercely loyal to the people that they cared about, and, as Charlie (and, he was sure, Sawyer) had been on the receiving end of, quite quick to anger.

When Sawyer finally chooses to enter, he does so slowly, tentatively. He feels the weight of everyone’s gaze on him the instant he’s seen, but he never gets farther than the doorway. He leans against it like he’s going to fall down and looks up. He looks at Jack, and only Jack. For all intents and purposes, the two of them might as well be alone in the room.

Jack looks back, with a tired smile, as he rolls his head in the opposite direction, facing away from Charlie and Claire now, and toward Sawyer. Claire sets down the cup of water and nudges Charlie’s shoulder. He looks up at her, momentarily caught of guard, and watches as she gestures to the door. Claire’s ability to subtly read people’s cues comes in handy, more often than not, because, Charlie will admit, he’s fairly dense about such things and only comes up with the most awkward of segues and exits.

He climbs to his feet behind his wife, taking his coffee in one hand and her hand in the other, and follows her from the room. She lays a hand on Sawyer’s upper arm as they pass, but he doesn’t look up then either. She lets it fall and begins to lead Charlie down the hallway.

“Where are we going now?” Charlie asks, turning to her. She wraps both hands around his upper arm, steering him toward the elevators.

“I’m feeling a bit hungry,” she answers, pressing the down arrow. “A half an hour or so should be enough time, don’t you think?”

A loud ‘ding’ rings out through the hallway as the doors slide open. Charlie steps inside the elevator with Claire quick by his side. He smiles over at her, chuckling a bit to himself. She’s really remarkable, he thinks, as the doors close in front of them and the elevator begins its decent back toward the cafeteria that he could swear he just left.

*

“Hey,” Sawyer finally says. Like he’s a colleague of Jack’s come to check on him. Or an old friend that happened to hear that he was in the hospital and stopped to say ‘hey’ (not Marc, though, because Marc wouldn’t be in the door).

Jack just smiles, because he had expected this. Because he had always figured that, if something like this happened, Sawyer would have to keep his distance from it for as long as he could stand too. And that was okay. Jack thinks that he should be offended, that it should hurt that Sawyer hasn’t hugged him or asked how he was feeling. But it doesn’t, because he knows it he will. He just has to work his way up from the bottom first.

“Hey,” Jack replies, sleepily. Sawyer takes a step forward. One small step, because Jack notices it, and notes it as a sign of progress. He thinks that it’s because Claire and Charlie are gone, that it’s easier for Sawyer because it’s just them. He’s glad Claire seems to know Sawyer well enough to know that.

“I did somethin’ stupid before I came up here,” Sawyer confesses, and Jack momentarily panics because he has absolutely no idea what that could be. Sawyer did stupid things when he was scared. But he didn’t look drunk, and as far as Jack could tell, he was in one piece, so it couldn’t have been that bad.

“Yeah, what’s that?” Jack asks, attempting to seen nonchalant, and not at all worried. Sawyer takes a few more steps forward until he’s standing by Jack’s bedside, rolling the hem of the edge of the blanket between his fingers. Jack watches him for a few moments before looking up to his face. He seems to be getting more and more relaxed, Jack notes. After a minute, he looks up with a sigh and runs a hand through his dirty hair.

“I, uh,” he says, sitting down on the edge of the bed. His hand drops the blanket and finds Jack’s. He runs his fingers along Jack's in very much the same way he had the blanket; like he's testing the waters, getting comfortable. “I stopped in the chapel.”

Jack tries not to let his eyes betray his confusion. Jack has worked in a hospital for the better part of half his life, and he can count on one hand the number of times he’s ever been in a hospital chapel (two). In fact, the only thing that makes less sense than Jack setting foot in a chapel of any kind is Sawyer setting foot in a chapel of any kind.

“It was just kind of…” His hand is in his hair again, winding, trying to smooth it over. He shrugs as he looks at the wall, the wall he has been speaking to in the place of Jack. He wonders if Sawyer is ashamed, that he thinks admitting to walking into a church is a sign of weakness. “It was just there.”

“They didn’t tell me anything when they called,” Sawyer goes on. He still isn’t looking at Jack when he speaks, but Jack doesn’t think he could take it if he were. The emotion in Sawyer’s voice is raw enough. Jack doesn’t know if he could survive what is, no doubt, going on behind his eyes.

Sawyer keeps his gaze focused on Jack’s hands as he runs his fingers along the curves of his knuckles, between his fingers, over and over in meaningless patterns. He needs something to do with his hands, something to do at all while he talks.

“All they said was that you were here, that they couldn’t tell me much more because I wasn’t technically your next of kin. I thought I was gonna go outta my mind on the drive. Nearly did. And then, I was walkin’ down the hall and…there it was. The door was open and everything, and I just…I didn’t pray or nothin’. I ain’t that stupid, but…bein’ in there…”

Sawyer let the words die away after that. He didn’t know how to finish, but it didn’t matter to Jack if he did. He was still so stunned by the everything that Sawyer had just said to him. To drive a man like Sawyer to the kind of worry and desperation so overpowering that he would voluntarily enter a church was nothing short of a miracle, in and of itself.

Jack has no idea what to say, can’t think of anything that seems appropriate or adequate, so he just grabs hold of Sawyer’s hand, holds it still, and squeezes it for all its worth. Sawyer looks up then, smiles back, and wipes at his eyes with his free hand. The tears aren’t falling, but they’re there, pooled across the bottoms of his eyes like a lake.

“I have three broken ribs,” Jack explains, because no one has bothered to yet. “A lot of cuts, some bruises, and a migraine. But, as far as car accidents go, it could have been so much worse.” Sawyer tries to look away and Jack squeezes his hand so he’ll look back up. “I’m going to be fine.”

Sawyer nods a few times, lets it sink in, then lifts his head with a confident smile. “Well, alright, then,” he says. “I guess I owe the Big Guy one.”

Jack screws up his face, puzzled. “I thought you said you didn’t pray,” he says. Sawyer smirks and lifts Jack’s hand to his lips. He kisses one of his scraped knuckles before lowering his hand back to the bed and letting it go.

“Yeah, well,” he says, carefully fitting himself along Jack’s side, mindful of his bruises and cuts and broken ribs. He wraps an arm around Jack's shoulder and Jack holds onto his waist. “What can I say. I ain’t the type to ask for what I want. I bargain.”

Jack chuckles and shakes his head as much as his current position will allow. “I wouldn’t expect any less,” he replies, lowering his head down onto Sawyer’s chest and closing his eyes. The last thing he hears before he’s out is Sawyer returning his chuckle, and the last thing he feels is a kiss being pressed against the top of his head.

It’s the best sleep he’s had in a long time.