TITLE: Offstage Lines

AUTHOR: Mari

RATING: Hard R

SPOILERS: Through S1

PAIRING: Jack/Sawyer, Sayid/Shannon, Jin/Sun

DISCLAIMERS: Ain't my sandbox.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: All right, I began to write this literally the day after 'Exodus, Pt. 2' aired. I wrote like a crazy person all summer, finished the first draft before S2 aired, and then threw it in a drawer and forgot about it for a while as I edited another Monster Fic of Doom. I started editing this one again in December. Therefore, any similarities that you see between this fic and S2 are based upon foreshadowing and coincidence, and the discrepancies you see are because I'm crack-addled and loving it.

Part One

John Locke was not a spiritual man.

When he told himself this, he did so with a fervor that allowed him to believe it, with the zeal of the choirboy who told himself that a reference to four corners and a view of the planet from a satellite did not have to be contradictory if he did not want them to be. Fate did not have to be a mystery. It could be a solid, absolute thing if only Locke could try hard enough, if he could find all of the separate puzzle pieces that would fit together to make it work. Make it make sense. Locke knew that he and Jack were alike in that regard even if they were alike in no other: they needed to understand, and they became very upset when their respective religions would not allow them to do so.

He was looking at one of the puzzle pieces at long last, Locke thought, leaning over the edge of the blown hatch and peering into the rectangle of darkness that stretched without end beyond that. This was his reward for his faith. His answers rested at some point down in the darkness where their flashlights and their torches could not go. He had been given a path towards understanding, and that was enough. To ask for it all to be delivered without trial, without struggle, and, yes, perhaps even without further sacrifice was unconscionably selfish.

Locke curved his lips into a small smile. It was gone too quickly for the others to see by the haloes of light thrown out from their lights. After all, the best games were the ones that required assembly first.

Jack and Hurley clustered together at the other side of the hatch, staring down with identical expressions of wariness and curiosity. Meanwhile, Kate stood at a distance balanced between Jack and Locke, her hands braced against her hips as she kept a restless stare moving across the jungle. After seeing that the ladder was broken after the fifth rung, she had lost interest in the hatch altogether and instead had become fixated on the recent visit that the island's most dangerous resident had paid them only a short distance from there. More than once she had asked if they really needed that many torches.

"Thought predators were afraid of light," Hurley had said, holding a flashlight in one hand and a homemade torch in the other, like a warrior carrying a sword and shield for battle.

"Predators with reasons to be scared of people are afraid of light," had come Kate's terse reply. Hurley had turned off his flashlight and shoved it into his back pocket without further ado. He had kept the torch, but from that point forward Locke saw him sneaking it frequent uneasy glances.

The boy leaned over Locke's shoulder from the opposite side, staring down into the same darkness that the rest of them had been gazing down for the past half-hour. The boy's stare was hard. After so much struggle, he was angered to see the sacrifice bringing so little in the way of answers. With the rest of the group there and watching, Locke could not tell him what he had realized about games.

"So what do you want to do now, John?" Jack spoke up from the other side of the hatch, the first sound that he had made for several minutes. The lady crossed behind him, her eyes flashing a brilliant and beautiful green in the low light. Looking at Locke from over Jack's shoulder, they seemed to be asking the same question. She trailed her fingers lightly along the collar of Jack's shirt as she went, and he shivered as if touched by a cold wind. Jack's eyes became unfocused for a moment before his expression once again became patronizing. Locke supposed that was understandable given the strain that they were all under. Even so, he saw Hurley lift his eyebrows and Kate turn back from scanning the jungle long enough to give Jack a disapproving look.

"I want what I've wanted from the beginning, Jack," Locke said. "I want to see what's inside."

Something in Jack's face tightened. Even if that was the answer that he had expected, Locke did not think that it was the one that Jack had wanted. Locke wondered if Jack was waiting for him to start speaking in tongues. He crouched down by the hatch's opening again and began drumming his fingers against the metal rim as he fell into thought. The sound traveled down into the opening and bounced away on an endless series of echoes. Bored, the boy wandered away to do whatever it was that he used to occupy the rest of his time. After one long, honey-eyed stare, the lady took herself elsewhere, too.

Jack stared at Locke, his eyes dark and hard, and as soon as he realized the game Locke lifted his chin in order to return the favor. The flash of pleasure that he felt when Jack was the first one to look away might have been childish, as was telling himself that Jack had started it, but Locke decided that he was hardly the only man who would have been unable to resist.

"We don't know what's down there, John." Another thing that few men would have been able to resist was the flash of irritation that Locke felt at the way Jack constantly used his name, as if by classifying Locke he could find some way of controlling him.

Jack was back to playing the staring game. Having already won it once, Locke soon grew bored and went back to staring down into the darkness of the hatch. He pulled a pebble from his pocket and threw it down into the shadows, where, like all of the others they had tried before it, it fell too far for them to hear a sound over the calls of the night insects and the noise of their crackling torches.

"I'm well aware of that, Jack," Locke said at long last, putting a deliberate stress upon Jack's name. There was a tension rising in the air that was only seconds away from making it ripple and pulsate. Hurley began to fidget, while Kate merely looked uneasy. "I want to see what I can see." Locke pulled his lips back into a smile that he knew was long past the point when it would have been a reassurance to Jack, and was only likely to anger him instead. He used it anyway. "Isn't that the point of science, to satisfy the roamings of the inquiring mind?"

Jack pressed his lips into a hard line. "I'm only interested in using to protect people." He left off the 'my' before 'people', but only barely. Locke had actually seen his lips convulse around the word before he managed to force it back again.

Well. Locke fought back an urge to tilt his head to one side. They had already cast away 'the' in favor of 'yours', 'mine', 'theirs.' 'Other.' Locke didn't think when it was all said and done that there would be much room left for 'our' at all. Watch how quickly they rebuilt society around themselves.

"You can keep your scientific inquiries." There was a hostility to Jack's tone as he finished that was strong enough to make Kate throw him another disapproving glance over her shoulder, while Hurley looked as if he wished badly that he had somewhere else to be. Locke watched it all and took copious mental notes.

He straightened from his crouch at the edge of the hatch, brushed the dirt from his hands, and looked Jack straight in the eye. Jack stared back rigidly, but Locke was no longer in the mood to be amused by games. "But wasn't that your purpose in finding a way to open the hatch, Jack? To find a place to hide your people?" If Jack was already thinking in terms of 'us' and 'them', then Locke saw no reason to do him the courtesy of avoiding it in speech. He stared at the opening that rose up out of the jungle and glared at them all, a dark, unblinking eye of Odin with all of the secrets of the original. "This is not going anywhere. If the Others have already arrived, then the rest of the camp will need to go somewhere very quickly."

Locke wondered if Jack had ever been on a Little League team when he was a boy, if he had ever lost so that he could learn to accept it. A tightness moved across Jack's face, followed by a sudden peace that made Locke momentarily uneasy, because he could not tell from whence it came. Jack threw a final glance towards the hatch. Locke thought that he might be fighting back an urge to spit down it. "There's no ladder," Jack said. "If we're going to go down, then we're going to need supplies. Rope."

"Yeah, I think I'm going to pass on that adventure," Hurley said quickly. They all looked at him. "Dude, I watched horror movies all through high school, okay? I know what the lifespan of the comic relief is." Hurley got a look that made Locke almost as uneasy as Jack's expression of serenity, because he could not understand it, and all that he wanted to do was understand.

Jack was already nodding. "That's fine." He looked towards Locke, his eyebrows raised, waiting for the cue that would let their dance of battling wills start up again.

The jungle growled, from a distance that was far away but still growing closer. Locke said, "We should move quickly."

---

Locke knew before they were within one hundred yards of the caves' entrances that something big had changed since they had left. In spite of the late hour and the darkness that most of the people on the island were only now beginning to recognize as every bit as dangerous as the day, figures were milling about out front, backlit by torches set out to imitate porch lamps. Locke felt his pace slow, and the other three rushed ahead of him. There was a bounce to Jack's step that did not know whether to worried or hopeful.

Steve and Tracy were sitting outside of the main entrance, arms around each other. They wore grins that had not right being there given the danger that they were in. "Jack!" Steve called out as soon as he caught sight of the doctor. "Hey, man, it's good to see you, if there's anyone who has earned himself a party-"

"What are you doing out here?" Jack demanded before Steve could finish, and the smile slid right out of Steve's face. Locke thought that if Jack could have actually reached down and shaken Steve without striking Tracy in the process, he would have. "What are any of these people doing outside? If the Others were to come right now, everyone out here would be picked off like babies in a park!"

Tracy stared up at Jack from her position wedged between Steve's legs, her eyes wide. "You mean no one's found you and told you?" she asked. "We posted sentries just in case something wound up happening, after all." Three people came running out of the jungle, waving their arms and shouting. Tracy's nervous look transformed into one of mild embarrassment. "Um. Okay, so, except for Sayid? We don't exactly have a lot of soldiers here."

Jack put his hands onto his hips. "Tell me what?"

Steve and Tracy stared up at him and, like small children at a party, soon became unable to hide their grins. "There are no Others," Steve said. "We're safe." He paused for a moment. "Relatively speaking."

"What?" Kate peeked around Jack, her eyes wide and uncomprehending.

"The Others! They're not real!" Tracy was so happy that she began to bounce against Steve's lap as she spoke. If the look on Steve's face was anything to go by, Locke thought that it would be a long time before he complained. "The French woman took Claire's baby and ran away with him-" Jack sucked in his breath sharply enough to make a whistling noise, but Tracy fluttered her hands at him. "No, no, it's okay! Sayid and Charlie brought him back, and it turns out that the French woman set the black smoke fire herself." Tracy continued to flutter her hands about until Steve caught them and lowered them back into her lap. "Her little girl probably died of natural causes years ago and she had to make the whole thing up in order to cope with it. I mean, after more than a decade she's clearly not about to try out for the cheerleading squad."

"Tracy," Jack chided.

Tracy had the good grace to flush and look down, tucking a few strands of walnut-colored hair behind her ears. "Yeah, sorry. I just…I have kids, okay? Back home. If someone tried to take them, I…" Her smile was shining and false from start to finish. "I don't think that I would be in nearly so good a mood."

Jack leaned down, looked for a moment as if he were going to squeeze at Tracy's shoulder in sympathy, and changed direction in mid-flight to pat at it instead. "No, you're fine. You guys enjoy the celebration."

"Make sure to pull up some fun for yourself, Jack," Steve said. When Jack turned back to look at him, Steve almost seemed to be embarrassed. "It's not a secret that you don't get a lot of it."

"Thanks." Jack turned to leave again, his step betraying for the first time how tired he actually was.

Kate hurried to catch up with him. From his place a few paces back, Locke heard her say, "What about Ethan?"

"Yeah, man." Hurley seemed glad to pass his torch off into someone else's hands as they reached the circle of light and crush of people that made up the caves. "French Chick didn't crazy a whole person into existence."

"I haven't forgotten about that." Jack paused before he had gotten more than a few feet away from the entrance and turned so that he could give Locke a wide smile. Locke smiled back and wondered if one or both of them was going to begin marking territory before the night was over. "The Others aren't coming, John. I guess we don't need to go into the hatch, after all."

Locke rubbed his hand over his head. "Not tonight."

Jack stared at him for a moment longer before he headed towards the place where Claire was sitting, guarded protectively on one side by Charlie. Charlie was sporting an ugly burn above his eyebrow that had not been there when Locke had left camp earlier that day. Claire's son was warding off sleep by kicking his feet and sticking a fistful of Claire's hair into his mouth. Claire and Charlie looked as if they were only a few steps away from following suit. Sun, who had been sitting alone nearby, rose to her feet as soon as she saw Jack approaching.

"Hey," Jack said, kneeling down in front of Claire. "Sounds like you had an eventful day just by staying home." He held out his arms for the child. "May I?"

Charlie made a snorting sound. "'Eventful' is a polite euphemism, mate." He touched at the wound on his head and winced. "Try 'gut-wrenchingly awful adrenal overdose' and you might be getting closer."

Claire passed her child over with a visible reluctance. "I've looked him over about fifty times since Sun gave him back," she said. "I don't…I don't think Danielle meant to hurt him, really."

Charlie snorted again, far louder and with much less humor behind it. "No, she only wanted to hand him over to the crazy people in her head." He put his arm around Claire's shoulders and squeezed her close. "You are far too kind a soul."

Claire took her son eagerly back into her arms once Jack had finished inspecting him.

"I examined the child," Sun said, standing behind Jack. She nodded towards Charlie's head. "And I cleaned his wound. Neither of them have serious injuries."

Jack straightened and smiled at her. "You did a great job."

Sun frowned and, finding a bit of fleshy something on Jack's neck beneath his ear, reached out to pluck it off. Kate went pale and said, "Um, maybe you shouldn't have done that."

Off of the curious, concerned look that Sun was passing around at all four of them, Hurley said, "Think about who left, and then think about who came back." Sun let out a cry of disgust and dropped what she was holding immediately, jumping back so quickly that she almost left her shoes behind. "Yeah, we kind of had that reaction, too."

"I'm going to wash up," Jack said, rubbing his hand over his face.

Sun nodded, staring at her fingers. "I will do the same." With a final glance towards Locke, Jack left. Each member of the group drifted off as well to let friends and acquaintances know that they had made it back safe.

Locke crouched down in front of Claire, pretending not to notice the look of slight wariness that Claire gave him. He extended his forefinger, and the baby abandoned Claire's hair within a second to grab at it. "I'm glad that he's safe," Locke said, and meant it.

Some of the uneasiness left Claire's face. "Thank you. I am, too."

Locke straightened and, patting at Charlie's shoulder for a moment, turned to look about the crowded caves. He found the person that he was seeking a moment later, sitting against one of the far walls and nibbling at a makeshift plate of fruit and small game. Sun came over to join her a moment later, and Kate pushed the plate over so that the two of them could share. Locke kept his distance until Sun realized that her water bottle was empty and rose to refill it.

"Hello, Kate," Locke said, walking over to her. "It's been a long time since you and I had a chance to talk, hasn't it?"

Kate looked up at him.

End Part One