sorrydontsuitme | (no subject)

(no subject)

Ain't no such thing as butterflies in his stomach or his heart skippin' beats. None of that Wuthering Heights fated-to-be-in-love crap; he ain't no stalker like that damn Heathcliff son of a bitch and Freckles ain't no mournful mooning Cathy.

He never liked that book.

Over the years he's been with a lot of women. From the time he was sixteen, he's romanced 'em. Wined 'em, dined 'em, fooled around with 'em, conned 'em. He hasn't conned every woman he's slept with and he hasn't slept with every woman he's conned. But he hasn't had very many bedtime partners where he didn't have some kind of ulterior motive and he ain't ashamed to admit it: it's what he does. Reminds him of a long-ago conversation he had with Freckles when she wanted something from him. I've got a lot more of everything, but you ain't got carte blanche yet.

Whether or not she knows it, she's got it now.

So he can't help but wonder: what is it she wants right now? Right here, today, when all the stuff they want is just a phone call away and they got a whole damn asteroid at their disposal? If he was the introspective type he might wonder why him: out of all the guys here, why'd she choose him? Damn good thing he ain't never given introspection a second glance; he don't have time for that shit. So he's only a little bit surprised when he finds himself outside the door to her room, like he was drawn there by somethin' inevitable. Fate? He's a damn opportunist. He goes where his libido takes him.

If only that was always true, he wouldn't ever get into so much trouble like he does. If only he could shut it all up, all those damn little voices inside telling him what's right and what's wrong. Mostly he ignores 'em, always has. And then he woke up this morning going... hey there, Freckles. Only she wasn't there. It's a damn good thing he knows how to remedy that.

He ain't got no cards, no flowers, no pretty poems, no backpack full of mangoes. This time all he's got is himself. One of these days, that'll be enough.

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She's rated a sweetheart a couple of times now. That kind of amuses her.

She flashes him a little grin over her burger and reaches for her Coke.

"You mind if I ask you something?" she asks after taking a drink. Considering their circumstances have changed a little bit -- and she's planning on going to a movie with him (eventually) -- she doesn't think a little question is too much to ask.

She won't ask many or he'll start to expect answers from her in return, and there're plenty of answers he could want that she's not exactly willing to give.

"Ask away." He ain't got... a whole lot to hide, anyhow. It's time for fries and they know these are good. And they lead to good things; he dips one in the ketchup and eats it up. If Freckles didn't have a big ole pile of 'em on her own plate, he'd offer her some of his.

But she's got her own, and the cold Coke makes for a fine chaser, and the company's real nice in so many ways. He ain't made no promises in the here and now about bein' on best behavior, but it comes easy for him today. Maybe he's just a little more relaxed than usual, despite havin' been shot a couple days ago.

Will wonders never cease?

"What's on your mind, Freckles?" The straw makes a slurping sound as he reaches the bottom of that Coca-Cola.

This time she reaches for a fry, and she dips it in her ketchup and takes a bit before she says anything else.

"Why Australia?"

He's from Tennessee, she knows. Or at least he lived around there when he was about eight. She saw the envelope he keeps that letter of his in. It says America's Bicentennial, Knoxville, TN right on it.

So what's there for him in Australia?

That ain't the question he might've been expecting, although it's a fair enough one. What's he gonna tell her about it: that he was conned into going there and killing a guy? That he was so hell-bent on revenge he believed what Hibbs told him, that Duckett was actually Sawyer? That he found out too late, got drunk, got in a bar-room brawl with some government someone-or-other, spent the night in jail, and then got deported 'cause he broke a damn coffee mug?

Hell no. In fact, his normal M.O. would be to turn it right around on her: look her in the face, arms folded across his chest, and go how come you were in Australia?

Yeah, that'd be his usual way of doin' things. But things with Freckles are anything but usual, so he makes an exception. Sure. He can answer.

"Had some business to attend to." And then he goes ahead and adds one more thing. "A favor for a friend."

Sawyer's definition of business isn't necessarily the same as hers, and she's pretty sure she's not imagining that his demeanor changes just a little.

She picks up another fry and dips it in ketchup just like the last.

"Favor for a friend." She gives him a small smile. "That's nice of you."

In the two months they spent living on the island, he didn't do many favors. Then again, she'd guess he didn't consider many of the people there his friends, either.

"You get to stay there long? It's not so bad there."

Well. Ain't she just full of questions... and ain't that his old self talkin'.

(Tiger don't change its stripes.)

"Not too long, Freckles. And so far as not so bad goes, ain't nothin' to do there except drink anyhow." And a man can only take so much of that before he starts head-butting public officials.

Like he knew what he was doin': conning people ain't got a damn thing in common with killing 'em, except for the fact they're both illegal. So what if the concept of drinkin' to forget sounded real damn good to him, and goin' to jail for a barroom brawl was so damn preferable to bein' out there on the streets?

Everything's upside down and backwards in Australia anyhow. It's one place he wouldn't mind never seein' again.

"What'd you do while you were there?" Fair's fair.

She pretty much expected the question sooner or later. In the past it hasn't even taken him this long to turn a question back on her like this.

"You remember the night we got here?"

About six whole months ago. Maybe he doesn't.

"I said I was kind of in Australia on vacation? It wasn't nearly as much of a lie as you probably thought it was." She looks down at the fries left on her plate and picks up the best-looking one, popping it in her mouth without bothering to dip it. "Kind of a working vacation. I helped out on a farm for a few months."

Glancing back up at him again, she smiles slightly. "Wanted to get out to Bali from there."

Hell yes he remembers the night they got here. Not exactly the kind of night someone would forget: bein' in a damn jungle of mystery one minute and a futuristic robot-run hotel the next ain't exactly the kind of thing a man forgets just like that. And he's got to think the story about Freckles helpin' out on a farm in Australia -- hell of a workin' vacation -- is any less of a lie than her saying she was there on vacation.

It almost don't matter to him. But almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, or so they say, and curiosity is a hell of a thing. It's what kept him after her and that Halliburton. It's what led him to trade information for a kiss from her early on: he was curious about what it would be like. A man can tell a lot from a kiss, and that's a lesson he learned all over again out there in the hallway earlier. Curiosity might have killed the cat, but it ain't killed him.

Not yet.

To his credit, he saves the question he wants to ask for later. Sometime, when she least expects it, he'll ask what the hell she was doin' working on an Australian farm, and who she worked with or for and how come she did it. But not today. Today he's got somethin' else to focus on.

"Bali, huh? Me, I thought I'd get a chance to get over to Japan. Ain't never been, and Sydney's a hell of a lot closer than Knoxville or Tallahassee or any of those places." But he didn't. If she asks, he'll just tell her he ran out of money.

But maybe she won't ask.

And maybe he'll open his eyes one day and see a big black horse standin' there lookin' at him like the whole thing ain't none of his damn business. Pushing back in his chair, he lights himself a cigarette.

It's not the first time he's mentioned Tallahassee.

"That's right. You said you spent a lot of time in Florida, didn't you?"

That conversation, as she remembers, didn't get very far, but that time it had nothing to do with either of them evading questions and everything to do with spotting Dragons for the first time.

Drinking the last of her Coke, she leans her arms on the table. "What's in Japan that got you so interested?"

Define "a lot.," he almost asks. He would go wherever the money took him and that's the truth of it, but he never did stay in any one city too long once he started movin' along. It's like that old Hank Williams song: I can settle down and be doin' just fine till I hear an oldl train rollin' down the line, then I hurry straight home and pack 'cause if I didn't go I think I'd blow my stack. Yeah, he ain't never been much for stayin' in one place. Always seemed like a fantasy better suited to other people, not him.

That's a little more'n she asked for, though. "I ain't so sure about the midwest, but I do know the south. Whole damn region's a person's playground. Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Missouri, Louisiana: you live in one of 'em, you live in all of 'em."

He hates Florida.

A line of smoke floats straight up from his cigarette, he waves it aside. "The whole Japan thing was pure curiosity. Never figured I'd be over on that side of the world no-how, so I thought while I was there I might as well just travel around a little." I love you baby, but you gotta understand, when the Lord made me, he made a ramblin' man.

Hank Williams was from Alabama. He probably hated Florida too.

A long time ago he learned it ain' lyin' if you just don't tell part of the story. And then there's degrees of lyin'. Big lies, little white lies, lies you tell out of tryin' to not hurt someone, lies you tell specifically to hurt someone.

Lies you tell to protect yourself: I only said that so he'd stop hitting you. The problem, as he sees it, is this: every damn lie's got some element of truth to it.

"But you know how the story goes, Freckles. Travel's expensive over there, so I wound up on my way home instead." He grinds out that cigarette in favor of another french fry. Kind of stupid to have picked up the habit again just 'cause he could. Hell, he'd been tryin' to quit smoking for ten damn years.

She trusts Sawyer at her back with a gun. She trusts him to look out for himself all the time and her when both of them are up against a bunch of Others or a big group of Dragons. She trusts him to call people by nicknames instead of their real names 95% of the time.

She trusts that half the time she drops in on him he'll be reading something, that he's been curious enough at some point to already have taken a peek at the selection of sexy pay-per-view channels available here, that he wouldn't mind it if she half-rose from her seat and leaned right over the table to kiss his smoky mouth.

She also trusts him to tell the truth -- the whole truth, and nothing but it -- about as much as she does, mostly for different reasons but for a few of the same.

His story? Probably mostly true. But he's being pretty vague about it all, and she knows it.

And it's really none of her business, is it? Especially if she's planning on being just as as open as he is.

It doesn't matter, Kate, who we were, what we did before this, before the crash.

In a lot of ways it doesn't make a difference at all, especially here. But it still matters.

It keeps mattering.

"That's all right. I've got you covered on almost the whole midsection of the country and even dipped down into the south a few times, too." Thought while he was there he might as well just travel around a little? Doesn't she know what that's like. "Never for very long, though."

Except for the year or so in Florida.

"You ever want to go to Japan, Freckles?" He's got a thought forming in his brain, and it's a better one than most of his usual ones. The more he thinks about it the more he likes it, and it wouldn't even take a con, or at least not too much of one. Yeah, there's an idea brewin' up there.

"Or you ever think about it when you were workin' on that farm?" Workin' on a farm his ass: she might've been, but it ain't why she went to Australia in the first place. He'd put good money on that. But he ain't much in the business of askin' her for no explanations. It's kind of an unspoken agreement they got, and they got it way back when she asked him for a favor that went somethin' like won't someone put that poor US Marshal out of his misery? Of course, he screwed that up just like he screwed up the deal with Duckett but ain't nothin' he could do about that now.

Live and learn. It ain't a bad motto. Man can't learn if he's dead, so it's a lucky thing he ain't.

"Thought about going a lot of places while I was working on that farm" -- places she knew she'd probably never get to, but out of the country for the first time, she was filled with a sense of freedom and something like adventure that meant she couldn't help thinking about it -- "but I never really thought I'd make it out to somewhere like Japan." Her grins tilts slightly, quirks higher on one side. "I'd have gone if I could've," she goes on, echoing him purposefully, "but you know how the story goes: travel can be expensive."

Especially internationally.

"They say they got a Tokyo on Mars that's just like the original, except newer." Reading those tabloids comes in handy after all. "They even got just as many crows as the original Earth city. You want to go sometime? Check it out?"

Hell, it's only 7 hours away. All they'd need is passports and money, and how hard can it be to find a fake passport or two? And as far as money goes... well, he ain't never worried about findin' it or makin' it show up when he's needed it. He's always got a contingency plan.

"They do have a Tokyo on Mars." She's heard about it on the news -- and in his magazines -- more than once over the past six months. "You asking me to tag along with you on a seven-hour trip?"

It's a lot less than it'd have taken them to get from Sydney to Los Angeles, but the idea makes her grin anyway. She's not exactly in the habit of going with anybody on trips that long.

Being escorted by Edward doesn't count.

"There's that little passport issue, you know."

She bets she could ask Spike -- and Spike could ask Dan Sato -- about getting another passport or two at this point.

"How hard can it be to get a passport?" Since he was fifteen he's moved in shady circles. Hell, more than half the stuff he's done in his life's been illegal. Might as well add one more thing to the mix, right?

Now he gives a pointed glance across the table. If it wasn't rooted to the floor below he'd push it aside, stand, lean over, and go back for seconds on that earlier kiss. Damn the technology and modern substances.

"Sure, Freckles. I'm askin' you to tag along with me on a seven-hour trip. It'd be fun, don't you think?" They could go to the hub of Martian movie-making. Take stupid little tourist pictures of themselves standing in front of Martian landmarks. Hell, they even got a Disneyland there. Take the pictures back to the island as proof there's life on Mars, and have a good old laugh over it.

For the first time since he got to this place, he wonders what a shuttle costs.

"You be up for that some day?"

They got a movie date to attend to first.

She doesn't say anything in response to his first question. It's just a hypothetical, anyway.

The second isn't.

"Bet I'd be up for it." Some day, he says. Her smile straightens and stretches, and she nods. She wants to go, but it's still a little bit of a relief that they can't go right this minute. "Never been to Mars, and by the time we get there, it'll be about time."

It's already about time.

She'll just have to try to help him out without letting him find out she's had her own passport for a while. He's bound to give her a hard time for it even if she mentions that she kind of championed his cause.

"After my leg heals. Gotta be able to chase all the brooding emo docs away from your side, don't I?" That makes him grin and almost laugh. Like he could keep Freckles from doin' whatever the hell she wants anytime anyhow. No, that's a lesson he learned a long time ago. But it's also one of the things he likes about her, if a man's got to pick and choose. She's real independent, don't take crap from no one, least of all him.

Except when he gives it to her real nice. Kiss me, Kate.

"Don't know, though, Freckles." He motions over the robot for a refill on their sodas. "Think we could stand each other for seven hours?" The answer is of course they can. They stood each other for longer than that workin' on the chain gang there on the island, and a shuttle trip ought to be a hell of a lot more fun than breakin' rocks in the hot sun, I fought the law and... yeah. At least now he's got a purpose: figure out about passports and raise the money they'll need for 'em. And that's somethin' he can do while his leg heals up.

He might just start by askin' Julie. She's got one.

She smiles crookedly, but the doctor joke pricks more than it would normally.

They're here, after all. Eating out and sleeping in nice hotel rooms and talking about trips to Mars.

(And having sex.)

And she can't regret it because she knows Danny would kill Sawyer if they went back. He hates him -- he has from the first day they were put in cages and twice as much now -- and she wasn't able to convince Jack.

She can't regret it.

But she can feel bad about the way it all went and how things were for Jack when they left. Even if he's frozen in time while they're here.

She picks up her Coke glass again, tips it back to suck a half-melted piece of ice into her mouth. "Think I can stand a shuttle trip sitting next to you if I could stand being stuck in the cage next to yours for a couple of days."

It's not a good comparison: she couldn't stand the cages. But that's not so much because of him as it was because of everything else. He'll get the idea; she's been through much worse.

If he gets too smug and makes her roll her eyes too much, she'll get up and stretch her legs for a while or put on some earphones and take a nap.

He ignores the whole cage thing, mostly 'cause he doesn't want to talk about it. Some things don't belong in the conversation no more and that, as far as he's concerned, is one of 'em. "Hell, Amelia Earhart, the flight from Sydney to L.A. would've been what, twice that long, right? I think we got history on our side says we can do a plane or shuttle ride for seven hours." A smug little smile creeps onto his face. Just like her talkin' about the cages, him talkin' about the plane ain't a fair comparison. "Shuttle's gonna be even better than that plane ride anyhow."

Ain't no one wearin' handcuffs at the very least. That's gonna be a relief, and so is gettin' on board without bein' deported. Kind of amazes him he didn't know Freckles then, or any of the other people either. That he didn't so much as notice Hugo or give a passing nod to Locke or nothin'. But mostly, he can't believe he didn't pay too much attention to Freckles 'cause in some ways, it feels like he's always known her.

"You hold our flight up for comparison, and almost anything's got to be better."

Two, six, eight months: it'd take longer than that to erase her memories of the flight. She remembers walking onto the plane, her wrists in handcuffs and Edward breathing down her back. She remembers having to duck down to drink her juice because her cuffed wrists didn't allow her much arm movement. She remembers struggling desperately to reach another oxygen mask for herself after she put one over Edward's face.

"Don't let it go to your head that I think you'll be better company than Edward was."

She reaches toward the computer screen again, fingers hovering above it.

"How about that pie?"

"How 'bout that pie." This is like a repeat of yesterday without the hanky-panky -- yet -- but that's okay. They can take it nice and easy if she needs to. He might not know what it's really like to be in love -- yet -- but there's some similarity to the whole thing with runnin' a long con, and that's this: you let people take their time. They got to decide about things when they decide about 'em and you can't rush 'em.

So pie sure sounds like a decent alternative.

"Apple with vanilla ice cream?" It's hopeful, it ain't innuendo, not much, and it sounds real good. Briefly, he wonders what would happen if he walked through that little slidin' door with a big-ass platter of food. He could tell Pickett and his buddies bet your polar bears never got this from those damn food chutes.

It'd be good for a laugh anyhow. Even so, he'd rather not go back. He prefers the shine on Freckles' face and the sparkle in her eye to that dull, dead, angry look she had back there.

(He guesses he probably loved that too.)

"Can't call it a replacement for yesterday's if there's no vanilla ice cream, can we?"

She goes ahead and orders a slice of pie topped with ice cream for each of them, and then she settles back in her chair again, looking across the table at him with a small smile on her face. One hand reaches back and pats her hair, still mostly secured in the band looped around it.

"Next time you can pick dessert. If you think that sounds fair."

Personally, she's happy with the apple pie and ice cream -- it's not chocolate, but it's good -- but she knows enough to think Sawyer's taste in desserts should be pretty good. The guy likes those girl scout Thin Mint cookies: how can he not know a good dessert when he sees it?

Aw, hell, Freckles. I'd pick you. The words almost leave his lips but they get stuck right back there behind his teeth and won't come out. Damn, baby, he ain't been tongue-tied with a woman since he was maybe sixteen. Funny how that happens.

"Cupcake, you got carte blanche, remember. You can pick dessert any old time you want."

I never cared about having carte blanche because I just wanted to spend some time with the only other person on this island that just don't belong. In some ways, he could make the same claim about this asteroid: him and Freckles, they're still two peas in a pod, two of a kind. Maybe what happened between 'em yesterday was always gonna be inevitable. Hell, ain't most everyone here an outlaw in one way or another? Maybe they are, maybe they ain't. But in either case, he stands by his thought: him and Freckles are more alike than any two other people here, there, anywhere.

Carte blanche. On the island, it referred to his stash. Here, he thinks she's got carte blanche to his heart. Funny how that just sort of fell into place, and he won't be givin' it up about it in so many words. But if she just so happens to figure it out, he might not even deny it.

Her hesitation is just short enough not to be awkward.

Probably.

"That carte blanche arrangement only counts on the island, I think."

There's a completely different stash hidden away in his hotel room, but she doesn't need anything from it. He doesn't owe her anything here.

"But if it makes you feel any better," she adds after a second, still smiling, "I'll make sure that won't stop me from picking dessert whenever I want."