Title: Full of Broken Thoughts
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Sawyer has to admit, he’s shocked as hell. He’s rarely shocked, surprised, by anyone or anything anymore. Sun never stops surprising him.
Disclaimer: I do not own Lost. At all. I wish but alas...
Author's Note: Used for au100, prompt #71: broken. Set directly after 'Expose'.



It’s like any other night. That’s what shocks Sawyer the most. He’s lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling of his shelter, into the darkness. It’s the middle of the night, but he hasn’t slept yet. He’s knows he’s not going to. He has far too much on his mind, too many disconnected thoughts drifting around, all fighting for the forefront of his mind.

The tent-flap is pulled aside and Sawyer sits up immediately, backing up a few paces on instinct alone. And there she is, like every night before this night, since a few days after she had returned from the other side of the island with Sayid and Jin. Sawyer has to admit, he’s shocked as hell. He’s rarely shocked, surprised, by anyone or anything anymore. Sun never stops surprising him.

He doesn’t even know what to say, what snappy remark to throw at her, or if he even should. Not after this afternoon…not after he’d had the things he’d done shoved back in his face, along with a fairly hard slap to boot. He resolves to keep his mouth shut. He owes her at least that. At least.

The flap falls closed, slips from her nearly lifeless hand. She looks likes she’s just gliding along, running on instinct rather than desire. She lowers herself down to her knees in the sand, crouching in front of him, facing him head-on. He can just make her out in the dim light being emitted by the flashlight he stopped reading by about twenty minutes ago but had left on nonetheless.

She’s pissed. Still. He hadn’t expected her not to be, but he still looks away. Stung. Even though he doesn’t have the right to be. He should face her like a man, but he looks away from her like a boy. Shame is all he feels.

“Didn’t expect I’d see you here again,” he says, mutters really, and the remark is directed more toward the sand at Sun’s knees than her. She doesn’t move, not one fraction of an inch, and neither does he. He can’t lift his head, not even to gauge if she’s just going to hit him and leave again.

“Would you do something for me?” she asks, in a voice so flat and devoid of any emotion – even anger – that he looks up. His head snaps upward, his eyes meet hers, and he seems shocked at the sound of her voice. He feels shocked. But he shrugs and shakes his head a bit.

“Sure, shoot,” he says, realizing a second after the words fall from his mouth that that might not have been the best thing to say to her right now. If she notices the irony, however, she lets it pass.

Before she says anything else, she rises up on her knees a bit. He’s still laying back on his elbows and he has to look up at her to see her face. He’s sure that she’s done that on purpose. Her knee rises up, then lands to the side of his hip. The other repeats the same motion on the opposite side, and when she lowers herself down, sits on his stomach, he lets himself fall to his back.

She leans down, planting her hands on either side of his shoulders and letting her hair hang down to the sides of her face. It almost touches his chest, tickles faintly. Sawyer tries not to squirm. He looks up into her eyes, thinking that will help. It doesn’t. He only wants to squirm more.

“Don’t talk,” is her request, and at any other time, he would have laughed, taken it as a joke. He doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t move. He only looks up into her eyes as she pierces him with her stare. It tells him to take her seriously, to do what he asks without being a smart ass about it. On any other day that might have been a difficult task. But not today.

He nods, slowly, keeping eye-contact, showing her he’s being earnest. He wouldn’t blame her if she couldn’t believe him, but all he can really do at this point is hope and try.

For a few excruciating minutes, she doesn’t move. He doesn’t move either. He keeps his body still and his eyes on her. He wants to move his hands, to bring them up to her waist and hold on, to get things started the way he’s been doing night after night after night before this one. But he can’t. It doesn’t feel right anymore. So he has to wait for her, to wait until she’s ready, and since he can’t speak, he doesn’t know how long he’s going to be waiting.

Sawyer thinks, after about a minute of silence, that she’s going to leave. That she’s just come to compound his guilt, to temp him with her body and then pull it away from him. He knows that frustration is driving those thoughts. He knows that Sun isn’t the kind of girl who would do something like that. But he also knows what she’s capable of when he’s angry, how frightening she can become.

That is why, when she finally moves, it’s a blessed relief. She sits up a little bit straighter and takes a deep breath. She reaches out her hands and Sawyer, instinctively, reaches up and holds onto them. He doesn’t have the time to consider that wasn’t what she wanted, because she pulls him until he’s sitting up and the question is answered for him.

When her kiss comes, he expects it to be angry, to be accompanied by teeth. But it isn’t. It’s as tender as always, almost but not quite as tentative. It’s then that he realizes that she has come here tonight for the same reasons that she always comes to him. She doesn’t want to hurt him, to punish him, but to get what she always gets from him; what she needs from him. It’s then that he feels comfortable enough to reciprocate, reaching around her and holding onto her back tightly.

She doesn’t pull away, or even tense. She just squeezes his shoulders in her small hands, the inside of her jean-covered thighs over the outside of his, as the kiss grows deeper, as she presses her body as close to his as it is possible for her to be.

She loves Jin, she’s told him this, many times, and that’s okay. Sawyer isn’t in love with her, and it doesn’t hurt when she goes away, back to her husband, back to the person that they both know she belongs with.

This isn’t about love, it’s about comfort. A comfort Jin can’t give her because he loves her. She doesn’t want this from someone that loves her. She can’t get this from someone that loves her. All she will tell Sawyer, all he really knows, is that something happened on the other side of the island, something that has made it so that Sun can’t recognize herself. Something that consumes her with guilt. Something that has set them, in Sun’s mind, on the same level. Sawyer doubts that’s true, doubts that it ever could be true, but he isn’t about to argue with her. Not now, not ever. He gives the comfort to her that she thinks she needs whenever she thinks she needs it, and takes her comfort in return. Of having someone who wants to be with him. Of not caring if she comes or when she goes.

As she kisses him, holding one hand behind his neck while the other works at getting her shirt off, Sawyer wonders to himself if she still thinks she’s as bad as he is now. If she’ll still be able to get the same things she did from him on the nights before this night. He supposes that it doesn’t really matter. She’s here. That must mean something.

*

Sawyer lays on his back once more, his gaze turned upward as Sun dresses beside him, as she tugs her shirt back over her head and pulls up the zipper on her jeans. She used to ask him to turn his back while she dressed (why, he had no idea, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t just seen her naked not a moment ago), but not tonight. Tonight, she doesn’t seem to care what he sees, or if he watches. He doesn’t, though.

“What?” she asks. He turns to face her, startled, and screws up his face. “You want to say something,” she goes on, and Sawyer knows that she’s right, that his mind has been turning something over and over, a question he’d like answered but didn’t have the courage to ask unless prompted. “So, what is it?”

He sighs and sits up, looks her in the eyes and asks, “What does this mean?” He hopes she understands. He doesn’t mean them, because there is no “them”. He doesn’t mean the sex, because if he had wanted to know what that meant, he would have asked after the first time.

He wants to know what her coming here, what her being with him after what had happened early in the day means. He’s not naïve enough to try find to hope in it, but he needs something. He needs to understand.

She frowns and seems to be deep in thought within a few seconds. She considers her answer long and hard, while tying her shoes. Reaching for the tent flap with her right hand, she pulls it open, sending a gust of crisp, night air, fragrant with the scents of the ocean, past them both. She turns back and leaves him with, “Nothing.”