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Title: Persuading Jack
Author: halfdutch
Fandom: Lost/Grey's Anatomy
Summary: Jack won't do the surgery but maybe someone can persuade him?
Notes: I kept thinking "Wouldn't it be funny if Meredith were on the
island instead of Juliet?" And then when I caught myself thinking how much I'd
prefer Addison to Juliet, this fic idea was born. Not to be taken remotely
seriously.
Spoilers: "Not in Portland" for Lost and vague Grey's Anatomy
references up through "Drowning on Dry Land."
The woman stares at him mournfully through the glass, the clipboard held
awkwardly in her hands like she’s going to drop it at any moment. Girl.
He mentally corrects himself. She looks too young and desperately thin and
fragile to be thought of as a woman.
“Look. Jack,” she says, adopting a brisk tone and a confidence that’s completely
undermined by her body language. Her shoulders hunch forward and her fingers tap
the edge of the clipboard. Just a kid, he thinks, and he has the insane
urge to feed her.
She’s been talking and he hasn’t been listening, but she just sighs and starts
over. “Jack. We really need you to do the surgery.” She furrows her brow, as if
this is how she’s practiced looking serious in a mirror.
He just shrugs, waiting to see what she’ll do now.
She steps closer to the glass and puts her hand up to it. Her eyes, if it’s even
possible, get even bigger and that much dewier. More than anything, she reminds
him of a forlorn puppy hoping to get adopted at the pound. “It’s the right thing
to do,” she says firmly.
That melancholy act might work on other men, but not on Jack. “Sorry,” he says,
but he doesn’t mean it.
Her head drops and her shoulders slump forward a little more and she nods sadly.
“I tried,” she says and heads for the door. As she leaves, her can hear her
muttering under her breath.
“I knew it. Burning the muffins was a sign, a definite sign that nothing was
going to go right today. And then no one else liked Carrie and now he
won’t do the damn surgery and ...”
The door closes softly behind her and he breathes in, happy to be alone again.
----
The next one is blonde and buxom and seems to be running on all the missing
energy that must have been sucked out of the last girl. She happily announces he
knows he has a thing for blondes and how she’s supposed to be using that to her
advantage and she winks at him. She’s speaking entirely too fast and when she
approaches the glass, he’s suddenly glad he’s safely on the other side of it.
“So. You have to do the surgery. You just have to,” she insists. She’s smiling
and she starts to speak even faster, if that’s possible. “Because, like, Ben
will die if you don’t and I know you don’t care about that, but of course you
do, because you’re a doctor, but really, I know you couldn’t just let someone
die.” She lets out a high-pitched laugh to punctuate that last thought.
There’s a mad glint in her eyes that is probably the scariest thing Jack has
seen since being dragged here against his will.
“So, anyway, I know we should have just come out and asked, but then
things got a little out of hand and, well, but you’re here now, and you’re going
to say yes, aren’t you?” She pauses for a millisecond and, when he doesn’t
answer instantly, she wrings her hands together. “Oh my God, you have to say
yes.”
Jack takes pleasure in telling her, slowly and deliberately. “No.”
Her face falls. “But ... you have to.”
“You do it.”
She laughs that odd strangled laugh again. “No, I can’t, I’m on probation. You
see, there was this guy and...” Her eyes start to well up, her entire mood
switching in an instant. “Well, anyway, it doesn’t matter now. The important
thing is that you’re here and I believe that you’re going to save the day and
everything will be fine. Because it has to be.” She finishes on a cheery note,
smiling through her tears.
Jack just turns his back to her. He hears her spluttering incoherently in
indignation and then the door slams shut.
---
“Hmm, Jack.” The redhaired woman looks up from her clipboard, pen poised in one
hand as she pushes her glasses down the bridge of her nose to regard him coolly.
“They’re telling me you don’t want to do the surgery. You mind telling me why
that is?”
Unlike the other two, she radiates quiet authority. Her white lab coat is so
much crisper than their scrubs were. And, he can’t help but notice, she’s
wearing heels. The withering gaze she’s fixing him with is precisely the kind
his mother used to turn on him.
“What’s the point?” He says, crossing his arms, knowing just how it shows off
his biceps. Sure enough, her eye goes to his tattoo and she, unconsciously, he’s
sure, bites her lower lip.
She’s only distracted for a second and then she snaps back with laserlike focus.
“The point is to save a man’s life. You’re the only one here who can do
this, Jack. I’m an OB/GYN, I can’t possibly do spinal surgery.” She stops,
frowning slightly. “We need you.”
“What about what I need?”
“What’s that?” One eyebrow raises suggestively and, again, he’s convinced that
she’s not aware of it.
“I need to get out of here. With my friends.”
The eyebrow lowers and the frown deepens. “You know that’s not going to happen.
Not until you do the surgery.”
Jack bares his teeth. “Let them go first.”
She sighs and shrugs, tossing that gorgeous red mane of hair. “Well, I’m sorry,
Jack. I knew you weren’t going to cooperate without a little more coercion.”
The hair prickles on the back of his neck. But she’s clicked her pen off and is
walking away. “Wait!” he calls after her. She shoots him one more raised-eyebrow
glance -- her eyes on his tattoo, not his face, and then, with one last flip of
her hair, walks out.
---
He’s not at all prepared for who they send in next, a man with model-perfect
wavy black hair with just a touch of gray in it and a few lines of age, just
like his own, etched around those intense blue eyes.
“Derek?! What the hell are you doing here?”
“Well, I’m here to talk you into the surgery of course.”
“But .. here, on the island?”
Derek sighs and crosses his arms. “Well, I left New York after Addison and I
split up. I took the first job I could find, one outside of Portland. I figured
the Pacific Northwest was as far away as I could possibly go. But I was wrong.
The job wasn’t in Portland. It was here. And then they recruited Addison too.
Seems they needed a fertility specialist even more than they needed a
neurosurgeon.” He offers Jack a wry smile.
“Who’s Addison?”
“You just met her. Jesus, Jack, did you really never ... wow, I guess you
didn’t.”
Jack tries to picture Derek with her and fails. He wonders if she reminds Derek
of their mother too. “Never mind. They flew you here?”
“I don’t really remember the trip. They must have drugged me. Anyway, here we
both are. Brain and spine, together again.”
“How long have you known I was here?” Jack is beyond outrage.
Derek shakes his head. “Jack, it’s not like I have any say here. I’m a prisoner,
just like you. The sooner you do this, the sooner we can all get off the
island.”
“So they’ll just let us all go?” Jack huffs in disbelief. “Derek, they’ve
killed. You can’t possibly trust them.”
“I don’t trust anyone anymore, Jack,” Derek sighs. “Did I mention that Addison
was cheating on me? With Mark? At least your wife didn’t cheat on you
with your best friend.”
“I never told you about Sarah.”
“Oh, I read your file,” Derek says, rubbing his forehead. “We all did.”
“Great, that’s just great. My own fucking brother working with these madmen.“
Derek shrugs. “Tell me you wouldn’t do the same if they threatened to kill the
woman you love.”
“Addison?”
Derek winces at the name. “No, Meredith. She came in and asked you first...”
“Oh, right.” Jack nods, as if he approves. “Well, yeah, she’s pretty.”
“It’s more than that,” Derek says, rubbing at his chin like he’s just remembered
he hadn’t shaved that morning. “There’s something about her ...”
And so Derek begins, warming to his topic as he rattles off the long list of
Meredith's charms. He has them send in a few bottles of beer and then he joins
Jack inside his cell, like he’s just come over to watch a baseball game. Jack
asks Derek what he thinks of Kate and Derek looks thoughtful and asks what this
Sawyer fellow means to her. Jack admits that Sawyer can be a problem and that
causes Derek to go off on a tangent about Mark and how could Jack possibly have
ever liked him. Jack confesses that Kate’s a fugitive and Derek nods and says
that he knows all about her.
“They’re not like other women,” Derek finally sighs and Jack clinks his third
bottle against his. The question of the surgery can wait, at least for tonight.
And Jack's going to have a helluva hangover in the morning.
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