TITLE: In the Light and in the Dark
AUTHOR: Mari
EMAIL: Ficangel@yahoo.com
RATING: NC-17
PAIRING: Jack/Kate/Sawyer
SPOILERS: Through 'Do No Harm', but before 'The Greater Good'.
DISCLAIMER: Abrams and Co. owns all, I'm just writing this for my own and philomel's amusement.
SUMMARY: Creature comforts can take many forms, and be found in the strangest places. Written for the J/K/S ficathon.



When Locke wasn't back by the third day after Boone's funeral, Sawyer figured that this was the point when it would start to get bad. It was a faint ringing the air, so soft that it was felt rather than heard, the sound of choosing sides. Sawyer, who had prided himself for close to six weeks now on this ability to remain on the sidelines of every important event, cataloguing and watching and trying to decide how this could be played to help him, sat, pretended to read his fat Stephen King, and wondered what this meant.

When Locke didn't come back, Sawyer figured it was going to get bad. When the doc got sick of waiting like a good boy and made to pursue him himself, Sawyer knew it. He split his attention away from watching Sayid hover about Shannon like she was porcelain with cracks running through her from the base up, and instead focused his attention on the commotion occurring on the edge of the jungle, just where the shadows met the sun. The thrumming occurring all around him was almost thick enough to touch, and Sawyer thought, absurdly, of all the Westerns he had watched when he was a kid and tried to climb into his television set to avoid reality. Where the good guy would ride in with his white hat and clean up the dusty little town, and all would be cheering and getting liquored up afterwards.

Sawyer never watched a Western where the good guys bolted off. He didn't think this was the point at which he wanted to start, either.

Jack was shoving water bottles and a few paltry supplies into that big boy backpack that he liked to haul all across the island with him when Sawyer strolled up, and never mind that he was still running so low on blood and sleep that he was actually weaving from side to side where he stood. Kate watched from a few paces off, alternating between bracing her hands on her hips and folding them beneath her breasts. She chewed at her lower lip so hard as she watched Jack prepare that Sawyer was faintly amazed that she had not yet split the flesh. After a particular wobble nearly sent Jack to his knees, she stepped forward and grabbed his elbow swiftly. Her mouth moved, and though Sawyer was still too far away to hear what was being said, he didn't need to be within distance for speech to hear whatever it was that Jack snapped back at her. Kate flinched away so hard that she nearly stumbled over her own feet, putting her arms back beneath her breasts and assuming a stony expression. Her eyes met with Sawyer's over Jack's shoulder, her expression softening and becoming one that Sawyer thought might even be pleading. More than a month of watching this woman and he had yet to decipher what was going on behind those pretty eyes whenever she cast him that stare, but damned if the reaction she could stir up in him wasn't always the same. Sawyer deliberately slowed his pace into a saunter, let that old devil's smirk slide over his face, and gave Kate a leisurely once over as he drew near.

The roll of Kate's eyes told him that she had his number good and proper, while he was still trying to figure out where to even begin the formula for hers. She ticked her chin towards Shannon and Sayid, where Sayid was smoothing a bottle of sun block that he hadn't had that morning over Shannon's shoulders. "Guess the market's open." Sawyer thought that he saw that sly, knowing smile that she could get sometimes playing at the corners of her mouth for a second all the same, before she was once again subsumed by the traumas of the islands resident hero. "Well, you're not going alone, okay?"

Sawyer shrugged as if it didn't matter. "Business is business, sweetcheeks. Can't shut down just because the boy scout couldn't watch his step."

Jack glared at him, but chose instead to address Kate. "Not something that there really needs to be a committee for." Jack straightened from fiddling with the straps on his backpack, flashed Kate a smile that was in all likelihood meant to be reassuring, but instead only made him look as if he were only good blow away from shattering and sending the shrapnel wherever it would fall. Off Kate's look of swift concern, he made a visible effort to backpedal into something more comforting, but Sawyer had seen the shape those pieces would take every bit as much as Kate had. Seemed like he wasn't the only one finding the clothes of the upright and true to be just a touch ill-fitting, and Sawyer was surprised by how much of a comfort that revelation could come to be. Not to mention how well it sat on Jack. "We're only going to talk."

"Going camping?" Sawyer asked loudly from a place only a few paces off from the pair. Though they were still standing on open beach and Sawyer had made no particular effort to hide, even earned himself that oh-so-irritated look that was as good as currency where Jack was concerned, Jack jumped at the sound of his voice. He rolled his eyes quickly towards the sky, as if he were asking heaven if Sawyer was some kind of trial sent solely to test him, and if so what he could do at this point to unburden himself of it. Were it not for the deadly serious, razor's edge expression that he had seen Jack wearing a bare second before, Sawyer might even think it was funny. Hell, if it had been happening two days previously, he knew he would. "'Cause I'm thinking you might want to pop in for a physical before you traipse off into the heart of darkness there, doc. You're looking only two steps removed from the kid."

Jack's face tightened into something fierce at even the oblique mention of Boone. His hands curled into fists tight enough to turn his knuckles into pearls around the straps of his pack. Well, good. Let the doctor get himself all riled up and pissed, if at least this way he wasn't aiming himself at the would-be shaman turned genuine lunatic of the island, who even at this moment was probably bringing his blood-sacrificing and skull-boiling skills into perfection. Sawyer had spoken every word the truth-Jack was beginning to look like a prime candidate for one of those films with the word 'Dead' in the title-and he didn't think that his slow-growing and hard-won commitment to playing by the rules didn't mean that he couldn't tweak them a little.

To Sawyer's surprise, the fight that he had almost been looking forward to and imagined that Jack had, too, never came. Jack tightened his lips into a line so hard that nearly disappeared before he bit out, "The doctor hereby gives himself a clean bill of health, but he appreciates the concern." Jack looked towards Kate. "If you picked up Locke's trail out there, would you tell me?"

Kate looked pained, though Sawyer could not tell if this was because her trustworthiness had been called into question or because Jack still seemed to be an eager passenger on the suicide train. "Jack-"

"Would you?"

Kate paused to fix Jack with a long, penetrating stare, and any number of emotions could have been read onto her face at that moment. Finally, she nodded. "Yes. I would."

"Good." Jack's smile was a long stone's throw away from healthy or pleasant. Sawyer wished that he would stop it. "Then you're right, I shouldn't be going alone." He turned to head into the jungle, leaving Kate and Sawyer to stay or follow as they pleased. If he was trying to play the gung-ho hero the island seemed to expect of him, Sawyer wanted to say to Jack's retreating back, then he might want to invest in some acting lessons and circle around for another try. Sawyer had seen crack-ups before. He knew the signs, and Jack's were all but flashing neon and beckoning with promises of topless dancers.

Kate took one small step as if to follow Jack, paused, and turned that almost-pleading stare back onto Sawyer. Except that in this go around she had removed the 'almost' and was giving him a full entreaty, those lovely hazel eyes so large and desperate that she was coming close to qualifying for her own Precious Moments figurine. 'I ain't one of the good guys,' Sawyer wanted to tell her, feeling something that managed to be kissing cousins to annoyance and desperation at the same time. Were the island an actual Western, he would have been one of the minor cowboys in the black hats who were moved down by the sheriff in the second act, one more stepping stone on the way to hunting down the real evil, and until Kate had started fixing him with that look he had been just fine with that.

But nevertheless, Sawyer still knew an oncoming breakdown when he saw one, knew that Kate should not be alone with Jack when that happened. Knew that Jack probably shouldn't be alone when it happened, either, and that was a revelation that Sawyer figured was best served by tucking it away again and waiting until the shock wore off before he tackled it again. 'Never' was looking like a pretty good option.

"And what's my role in this grand adventure gonna be?" Jack hesitated and turned to face Sawyer again, eyebrows raised into incredulity. It was a good change away from that killing look, and Sawyer paused long enough to give Kate a few mental points for being too damned perceptive for her own good, at the same time that he was tempted to take those points away on account of how she was too damned perceptive for her own good. "You don't think that I'm going to let you take the lady here into the big, dark woods alone, do you? That's getting to be just a wee bit scandalous there." All right, so that last bit might have been solely for Kate's benefit and his own amusement. She pulled an exasperated face at him, and he returned the favor with the sweetest and most innocent smile that he was capable of.

Jack was staring at them both as if they had gone insane and neglected to tell him, which Sawyer thought was funnier than it should have been under the circumstances, before he finally rolled his eyes at Sawyer. "You can be bait." He turned and disappeared into the greenery. This time Kate did not hesitate to follow, though she did pause long enough to cup her hand around Sawyer's elbow and whisper a faint "Thank you" into his ear as she passed.

"Anything for a pretty lady." Sawyer touched lightly at his arm as he fell in behind her, where he could feel the place where her fingers had been, and wondered if official membership in the good guys club meant that he could expect every pair of doe eyes to be his undoing from here on out, or if this was a power purely Kate's.

Hours passed in mostly silent travel, and while Sawyer hadn't been expecting scintillating conversation even he had to admit that the absence of all human sound except for their breathing and the faint tramping of their feet across the jungle floor was beginning to make the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. Jack had pulled into a world entirely his own except to ask Kate the occasional question; to Sawyer he did not speak at all, unless it was to raise his eyebrows now and again when Sawyer would let a prime opportunity for a smart-assed comment slide by him untaken. Sawyer figured that, sleep and blood-deprived as the good doctor was, now was probably not the best time to be telling him that he looked like a cancer patient on his last legs, and Sawyer was just opting not to get him riled. Best case scenario, it would end in a fight. Worse, the doctor would keel over dead.

"Could he have gone this way?" Jack interrupted Sawyer's thoughts by crouching down and pointing at a scuffed place on the jungle floor. It was the sixth time that he had done so in the past hour alone, so Sawyer figured that Kate could be forgiven for not exactly breaking speed records in rushing over to take a look-see.

She was already shaking her head before she had even knelt down. "No, this is way too small to be from a human, this is…" Kate trailed off, and the corners of her mouth turned downwards. There was a tension to her shoulders that Sawyer hadn't noticed seconds before.

"Share with the class, Freckles?"

She looked up at him. Even the faint hints that were all he could ordinarily read from her eyes were gone. "This is a boar track." She glanced towards Jack as she said it. A second later, Sawyer caught himself doing the same thing.

If Kate had arrived on the island as an expert in inscrutability, then Jack had since taken a crash course in bringing it to perfection. Sawyer had seen marble statues that had given him more to work with. "The boar that have moved out of hunting range?"

"Yeah." Kate looked back down, touched at the earth with the tips of her fingers. "It's fresh, too. A couple of days, definitely no older."

"What do you know." Jack turned to stare off again. There was no missing the way that he wobbled for a moment as he did so.

"Jack!" It was Kate who exclaimed his name, but Sawyer who lunged forward and grabbed at his arm, jerked him back so hard that Jack stumbled and nearly fell into Sawyer's chest. When Jack spun towards him, it was with an ugly expression. Fine by Sawyer; if Jack was so eager to fight someone, then let it be the someone who hadn't killed anyone within the last 72 hours. Given the state that Jack was currently in, Sawyer figured that he could wrestle him down and sit on him without doing too much damage, let Kate talk him off the ledge on stupid upon which he had perched himself from there. It would even be fun.

Instead, Sawyer heard himself saying, "Don't you think you've already filled your idiot quota for the day?"

"What?" Jack jerked his arm out of Sawyer's grasp and stared at him as if he could not quite process what Sawyer had just said. Whether that was because it was too harsh or not harsh enough Sawyer could not say, because he could not tell himself. The good guys could officially take their white hats and shove them.

Sawyer threw his arm back in the direction he figured the camp was in. Kate shook her head very slightly, and he made adjustments until she stopped. "In case you've forgotten, Jack, there are about forty people on that beach back there who are expecting you to get off your ass and lead-"

"You might want to pick a different line of argument," Jack interrupted in a low, quiet voice that Sawyer had never heard before.

He figured the best thing to do was to go on as if Jack had not spoken at all. "And one crazy man out there all by his lonesome who we all know isn't going to be found until he wants to be. I was just wondering what kind of comic book you think you're living in, is all, and who you think is better served by your getting yourself killed for." Even as the words were emerging from his mouth Sawyer could not quite wrap his brain around the fact that they were his own, or that he was about two steps away from actually meaning them, any more than he could the quiet way that Kate had stepped close to him in order to lend her unspoken support.

Jack's expression was almost angry as he tracked the movement. "Over-inflated expectations. Hell of a motive for an intervention." The anger turned to desperation turned to an near-magnetic sense of determination through some sort of alchemy that Sawyer couldn’t explain and wasn't sure that Jack would be able to if pressed, either.

Words weren't going to cut it, then. It occurred to Sawyer that the minor good guys didn’t tend to fair much better than the bad ones, and that both sets always, always revolved as satellites around the larger players. This could be taken as an altogether shitty state of affairs, Sawyer figured, but he was already moving before he quite knew how to stop himself.

"Jack, if you'll just let us make camp so that you can rest for a while-" Sawyer heard Kate begin in an imminently reasonable voice that he could already tell her wasn't going to do the slightest bit of good. Not now, not while Jack was running on rage and not much else, and it was going to take a pretty good shock to the system to put him in the state to do anything else.

He had always been so good at rationalizations.

Sawyer figured that was as good an explanation as any for what his mouth was doing to Jack's, what Jack was too shocked to prevent Sawyer's mouth from continuing to do to his own. Hell, of all the people that Sawyer had ever been adept at lying to, he figured he was doing himself a disservice if he was not placed squarely within the top tier. Jack tasted like plantains and-damn it if the son of a bitch hadn't been hoarding mouthwash, Sawyer wasn't so far gone that he wasn't going to tuck that bit of info away for future use-and he was keeping his mouth open just far enough for Sawyer to explore and analyze these findings to his full satisfaction. "Oh," Sawyer heard Kate say in a soft, shocked voice, and then, "Um," which he was pretty sure meant something else entirely. When he finally pulled away, it was only because of the small, rational part of his brain which suggested that breathing was always nice.

Jack stared at him with an expression so perfectly wiped blank that it looked as if he had just taken a board to the back of his head. Sawyer flicked his tongue across his lips, decided that rationalization was clearly a good look on him, and wondered what Jack was going to do now that the ball had been placed so firmly back into his court. The most likely option and the most favorable one, respectively either a sock to the jaw or a returning of the favor, didn't seem to be happening, not while Jack was still wearing that dazed expression as if he had been born into it.

There was a faint rustling sound from Kate's direction, and Sawyer glanced over at her, expecting an expression every bit as stunned as Jack's. She was breathing hard in a manner that made Sawyer's eyebrows go up, but beyond that did not appear to have moved. A beat later, and Sawyer realized that the noise was not coming from Kate herself at all. At any rate, he had never known Freckles to make a snorting sound like that before.

Kate twitched and made a visible effort to pull her eyes away from the tableau of Jack and Sawyer so that she could look over her shoulder. When she turned back, her eyes were wide. "Trees!" she yelled. "Get into the trees now!"

"Why?" Sawyer yelled back. The owners of the rustling noises burst from the undergrowth before Kate could offer an answer, and after that point Sawyer no longer needed one. At least half a dozen fully grown boars, less than twenty yards away and bearing down fast. While Sawyer was sure that Jack would not have been foolish enough to come on this little venture of his unarmed, any weapons that the doctor might have brought with him were stored away in his pack and far beyond their reaches in time to prevent being gored.

Kate sprinted past them both, grabbing Jack's arm and jerking him forward along with her. When the panic had worn down, Sawyer would be embarrassed but perhaps no longer to remember that he had done the same thing to Jack's other arm, so that Jack had had no real choice but to follow them wherever they wanted to lead. The best of those options seemed to be, as Kate had shouted, up the nearest tree and out of range of tusks as sharp as any of the knives that they had back at camp.

Sawyer shoved Jack as the weakest member of their group towards a tree with low-slung branches and waited to see that he was actually going to climb it rather than indulging in some very impressive but ultimately stupid heroics, before he scrambled onto one of the lower branches himself. Sawyer waited only long enough for the feel of solid bark beneath his legs before he swung back around, contorting his upper body out to a length he hadn't known himself capable of in order to reach for Kate's outstretched hands. He grabbed her beneath her arms, whirled her around with a strength which felt as if it had to be coming from some place outside of himself, and had her settled on the branch next to him within a span of what had surely been no more than seconds but felt like much longer. Kate squealed in distress both as a boar's tusk passed so close to the sole of her shoe that she might have even felt it scraping against the rubber and at the bone-jarring thump as Sawyer settled her body down on the other side of his. Kate's hand was wrapped around his forearm and she did not seem inclined to let go anytime soon. Even at that unlikely pulse point, Sawyer could feel how hard her heart was pounding, and he was hard-pressed to ignore the part of him which wanted to crush Kate's body against his until he was absolutely sure that she was entirely there and safe.

Kate released her grip on Sawyer's arm long enough to run her hands slowly across herself, as if she was sharing his thought. When she looked back up again, her eyes had taken on a faint gleam. "What do I have to give to you to make you do that again?" she whispered.

At first Sawyer thought she was referring to the part where he had swung her through the air like a human boomerang, and it was on the tip of his tongue to tell her that as soon as boars sprinting in squealing, agitated circles got bored and wandered off he would spin her in any kind of exciting new angles that she wanted, when he realized that that was no it at all. "Why, Freckles, I'll be damned." Her lips parted a little, far enough to show a glitter of teeth that showed how the gleam of her eyes had only gotten stronger. "You're not exactly right sometimes, girl."

Kate shrugged and seemed on the verge of replying when an exhausted laugh came from the branch above them. An end-of-the-line laugh, and as Sawyer craned his head to look upwards he figured that he didn't know Jack better than this-and when the hell had that happened and why the hell wasn't Sawyer more distressed by it, both questions that he did not have an answer for-he figured he'd see the doctor about ready to say fuck it all and jump. "That's just great." Jack stared down at the boars for a moment longer before he shook his head, rubbed at his eyes, and let out a sigh more tired that any other Sawyer could ever remember hearing. "If I didn't know better, I'd say that the entire fucking island was siding with John Locke against us."

The 'us' made Sawyer's eyebrows crawl up towards his hairline even more than did the obscenity, until he noticed that Kate had tilted her head back and was staring at Jack's perch above them with an expression of deep concern fixed upon her face. When she saw that Sawyer was watching her she flushed, looked briefly embarrassed at having been caught out, and snaked her hand out until her fingers were tangled with Sawyer's own. Jealousy had actually been one of the furthest things from Sawyer's mind-he was slowly coming to understand this thing which had crawled into his face and damned if he knew what he was going to do about it-but the realization that Kate suddenly cared enough to spare him was an interesting one. Sawyer moved his thumb so that it was brushing gently across the tops of Kate's fingers, making her breath catch for a moment as she called out, "Jack, come down further. You're going to fall."

Sawyer craned his head back further to read Jack's expression and found that this was one of the rare instances when the doctor did not have his every vulnerable button stand out and begging to be pushed. He had fixed his stare unblinkingly onto the place where Kate and Sawyer had linked hands. Good for him; Sawyer didn’t feel like letting go just yet. "Yeah, get your ass down here. You go Humpty Dumpty out of this tree and we're fresh out of spackle to put you back together again."

Jack blinked, and the moment was broken. An annoyed Jack was one he knew how to predict, one that he might even be willing to admit that he kind of liked, and one which stood head and shoulders over that over person that had been appearing at odd intervals over the past few days. Kate squeezed his hand faintly as he spoke. Sawyer already knew that there wasn't a lot he wouldn't be willing to do to get those little gestures, or the sweet smile which could accompany them.

"Your concern touches me," Jack said in a dry voice. "I promise, somewhere deep inside I'm moved." He began making his way cautious way back down to the branch where Kate and Sawyer were perched, while Sawyer leered and only just stopped himself from making a comment that would have gotten him shoved out of the tree. A hoary old male at the base of the tree gave an outraged squeal at the sight of the intruders daring to move rather than cowering as was appropriate to them and scrabbled furiously at the bark with his tusks. Jack flipped it off as he hesitated a beat, then settled down on the other side of Kate. Looked like the good doctor was feeling better already.

Kate reached for Jack with her free hand as soon as he had gotten himself settled, so that she was holding one of Jack and Sawyer's hands in each of her own. She stared at the boar with pursed lips. "Now this is romance." Sawyer glared at her and she stared back at him with the expression of dewy innocence that he got the feeling she had spent years perfecting. Sawyer lifted his eyes over shoulder to meet Jack's and saw an expression there of…well, Sawyer would swear from that smooth, appraising look that he was being diagnosed. If Jack was planning to either push him out of the tree or lean over Kate's body and return that kiss in a manner that Sawyer was not likely to forget, then this was his moment. At beat, then two, and the air all but crackled as Jack lowered his gaze to look at the boar again. Bastard.

"Don't suppose you brought any weapons with you," Kate murmured. She was breathing fast again and doing her damnedest to hide it.

"Some knives." Jack looked back up again, gave her a faint smile before he went back to glaring at his adversary. "Don't suppose either of you know how to throw one."

One by one, Jack and Sawyer raised their heads in order to look at Kate. She rolled her eyes and made an exasperated sound. "What? I'm not Wonderwoman."

"Couldn't hurt to ask." Jack went back to staring at the food source keeping them treed and said, "It occurs to me that I didn't know what irony was until this moment."

"Water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink," Sawyer mused, and felt Jack's eyes on him, a heavy-lidded stare that Sawyer had never seen before but decided he liked all the same.

"It's going to be hours before they leave," Kate said. She shifted against Jack and Sawyer as she spoke, and the air seemed on the verge of throwing off sparks. Sawyer wondered what, exactly, they were going to have to do about that.

Kate was proven right, as by the time the boar decided that the human playthings weren't going to come down so that they might be gored properly and left, the sun was no more than a faint pink suggestion on the western horizon. Kate suggested that they move as far out of the boar's territory as they could before they risked a repeat performance of the previous scramble, and Sawyer replied that this was the best idea that he had heard yet. By the time that Kate had deemed them far enough away for safety's sake it was full dark and they were keeping track of each other by virtue of voice and linked hands: Kate to Jack to Sawyer bringing up the rear.

"Hope you aren't getting us lost here, Freckles."

Kate paused and leaned around Jack to look at him at the exact same moment that the clouds parted away from the moon to allow him a glimpse of her face. Her eyebrows quirked upwards as she said, "You're always welcome to blaze your own trail. At least you'll have a food supply." She jerked her head in the direction that they had come, and presumably to where the boar were still waiting.

"Don't think they like my company, thanks."

"Wouldn't be the first." Oh, so Jack was back on his game. Near-death was a good look on him, if the even stare he was giving Sawyer now was any indication. Well, now. So that's what they were going to have to do about it. Even with wine-dark circles still beneath his eyes and the rest of him resembling nothing so much as a refugee from a Romero film, it was still the best that Sawyer had seen Jack looking in several days. So maybe his shiny new white hat wasn't going to be pulled away from him just yet, and if this was one of the perks of keeping it? Sawyer could think of a great many less pleasant scenarios.

Kate made a faint sound, and when Sawyer cut his eyes towards her he realized that she was breathing hard again. A flush began creeping up her neck when she realized that she was caught out, but Sawyer didn’t see that she was in any kind of big rush to look away, either. He grinned at her. "You are one twisted lady, Kate."

She blinked for a moment at the use of her actual name. A quiet smile began to play around the edges of her mouth. "Uh-huh." It was too dark to tell, but if he had been close enough to get himself a good look Sawyer would have said that her pupils were dilated about as far as they could go.

When they finally paused to make camp, Jack insisted on doing his fair share of the work in spite of Kate's and even Sawyer's resistance and then sprawled out in front of the fire, staring into the flames with an intensity that made Sawyer half-expect them to shrivel up and meekly offer submission at once. The looks he moved across Sawyer and Kate held much of the same quality, and Sawyer could have laughed. If the doctor thought that he was going to roll over and show his belly, then he had definitely lost too much blood to make tramping out here all by his lonesome a good idea. Never one to be shy, Sawyer flopped right down to one side of Jack, while Kate took one a few feet one and watched them both.

"You're not going to deal with Locke alone," Kate began in that reasonable tone her voice could take at times, and most often during those moments when there was not a chance in hell of it working. Sawyer privately thought that it was incredibly endearing that she never failed to try. "We'll all-"

"Kate," Jack interrupted very softly, in a voice which continued to be gentle even as the stare he directed into the fire was anything but. "I don't think I want to talk about this."

"The lady's right," Sawyer drawled as he stretched out muscles just beginning to turn sore from his adrenaline-powered rescue of Kate hours earlier. Jack's eyes followed every move, and Sawyer was of a mind to ask Jack if he always made his interest this obvious, or if Sawyer was managing to excite him just that much.

"And I don't think you should be talking at all." Jack moved his eyes back up to Sawyer's face.

Since it was going to be like that…Sawyer licked at his lips, long and slow. "So this is the part where I tell you to shut me up, huh?"

Kate sighed and sat up straighter, folding her hands in her lap like a little girl attending a show. When both men turned to look at her, she flicked her fingers out in a quick hurry-up gesture. "Well, get on with it if you're going to." The grin she flashed them both was at the same time Sawyer's Kate and not, a throwback to some pre-island version of herself that could now and again creep from her bag of tricks. "The suspense is killing me."

Sawyer figured that he would have to be the one to make the first move, so when one of Jack's hands came down on his shoulder, pushing him flat against the earth, at the same time that Jack's mouth was pushing down on his and not waiting for permission, Sawyer was at first boggled by what he was supposed to do about this. Lying back and enjoying the ride seemed to be the best idea, especially when Jack's free hand pushed just so at the crotch of Sawyer's jeans, slow, circular waves of pressure that-sweet Jesus. Sawyer's hips jumped up from the ground beyond his control and he issued forth a moan into Jack's mouth, which Jack swallowed up quickly before asking for more. His hand undid the front of Sawyer's jeans, slid inside.

From her perch a few feet away, Kate made a strangled sound. "That'll work."

Sawyer pulled away long enough to pant, "You should have tried it sooner." Off Jack's look, he added, "Yeah, yeah, not talking. And you say that you don't get off on being the leader."

"Small doses might agree with me." In the firelight, Jack's eyes were all pupil as Sawyer nudged his hand away from his cock-and not without reluctance-and began heading south. "What are you-" Jack cut himself off with a sigh and a faint groan as Sawyer pulled down the zipper on Jack's own jeans, releasing a cock hard and ready into his hand.

"You really are vanilla." Sawyer didn't wait for Jack's response before he bent his head down, blew a cool stream of air across the head of Jack's penis. Jack jumped and muttered, "Jesus," before both his hands came up to tangle in Sawyer's hair, draw him close. Or maybe not so vanilla, Sawyer thought as he took Jack into his mouth and began to move. He was certainly adjusting to the mechanics of this new little situation quickly.

"God, you're beautiful," Sawyer heard Jack mutter, and wasn't sure that he knew or even wanted to know which one of them was being referred to. Jack's fingers threaded through his hair and down against Sawyer's scalp, kneading slow little circles against the skin as he began muttering Sawyer's name over and over again, as if it were being pulled from him.

Sawyer didn't hear Kate move, and he nearly jumped out of his skin when the hair at the base of his head was brushed aside, a trail of quick, soft kisses placed from there down to the collar of his shirt and back up to a place right beneath his ear. Kate began whispering in his ear, a string of syllables that might have been utter nonsense or might have been the next great American novel for all Sawyer knew, because at that moment a slim hand took hold of Sawyer's cock and he was really beyond caring whether or not Kate was spitting out pretty poetry. Sawyer jumped again, and moaned, and of the fingers which abruptly tightened to a point approaching cruelty through his hair were any indication, then vibrations were definitely his friend. Sawyer would swear that he heard Kate giggle, too, but at that second Jack was coming, murmuring Sawyer's name among a string of endearments that Sawyer had definitely never heard attached to it before.

Sawyer let Jack slips from his mouth, leaned back against Kate as she continued to stroke him and Jack watched them both. He came a few moments later with a burst of muffled oaths and a kaleidoscope of colors going off behind his eyes, and when he wandered back to himself he was still leaning on Kate while she propped her chin onto his shoulder. It occurred to Sawyer then that he had had sex with Kate before he had ever really kissed her, and this was a state of affairs which ought to be remedied as soon as possible.

Her lips were cool and smooth, and she made an 'Mmf' noise when Sawyer did something that she liked, which Sawyer was pleased to note by the time it was over was often. Her mouth was red, swollen, when Sawyer pulled away, those lovely come-hither eyes rendered almost entirely into pupil, with only slim rings of hazel left behind. As Sawyer caught his breath, he noticed that Jack had put himself away but was still staring at them both, and Kate in particular. He moved forward, nudging Sawyer aside with a whispered, "Who needs to rest now?" Sawyer scowled and was about to reply when Jack caught the back of his head and pulled him forward into a kiss that wasn't hesitant, nor was demanding, wasn't…there wasn't anything in Sawyer's experience for what it was, and the brief pool of prospects that was left behind was enough to make a not-small portion of Sawyer's brain whisper that extricating himself as gracefully as possible and then getting himself the hell out of Dodge might be the wisest of all his possible options. Jack's hand on the back of his head was a weight, though, was nearly a reassurance, and it wasn't until Kate made a soft noise of protest that Sawyer remembered that his original plan had been to pull away.

"Spectator sport?" Kate asked. Though a smile softened her words, Sawyer saw the gleam in her eyes and the more the faint hint of pre-island Kate standing behind it. The new woman's smile turned soft and sly as Jack made the rest of the journey towards her, as she shucked her jeans on down her legs. Sawyer watched as Jack knelt down between Kate's spread knees, as he dipped his head low, and from Kate's quickly taken inhalation knew exactly what he was doing. The eerie feeling of being simultaneously spectator and participant became overwhelming, leading Sawyer to bridge the gap by leaning down and taking up Kate's mouth with his own. She shivered and whined as Jack continued his ministrations on her, and when she came her voice disappeared into Sawyer's mouth too quickly to be sure whose name she shrieked. In the end, Sawyer decided that it wouldn't matter.

Jack talked, a little, much later and mostly to Kate. Sawyer lay sprawled out on his stomach between them, dozing in and out knowing that the other two realized he was faking most of it. Every now and again one of Jack's or Kate's hands would brush his back as they gestured, and Sawyer figured that if he had to abandon the fringes at long last then he had not picked a terrible place to be.

End