Forgiveness
Jan. 9th, 2010 12:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tellshannon815Title: Forgiveness
Author: tellshannon815
Recipient: stolen_kisses87
Pairings or Characters: Jack/Shannon, Rose.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None.
Prompt: Jack/Shannon.
Summary: Jack vows to do whatever it takes to protect Shannon after he finds out about their pre-crash connection during their button duty shift.
Author notes: I tried to write something for something beyond where Shannon died, but fic would have got way of hand – still the second part could be any time in S2!
“Why did you let Sayid stop me?” Shannon asked. “You were the one who said he was a liar. You were the one who went for him back there –“ (she couldn’t say the words at Boone’s funeral , it was still too hard for her to accept that he was really gone) “ – Sawyer and Charlie had to pull you off him! I thought you understood, Jack. I thought you knew why I did what I did.”
Jack didn’t answer her for a while, and Shannon wondered if he were ever going to, which would have annoyed her on any other day. She wasn’t used to being ignored by men. She was used to being checked out, used to the rush of knowing men couldn’t keep their eyes off her. (And that had included Jack before, even as they’d all watched his pathetic attempts to flirt with Kate.) Then Shannon flinched as she remembered the look she’d always observed on Boone’s face whenever he’d caught anyone checking her out, and the rush of power it had given her every time she’d seen it. Now that she knew she was never going to see it again, Shannon wished she hadn’t taken quite so much pleasure in goading him.
“Believe me, Shannon, if I thought it would have fixed anything, I’d have gone after him a long time before you did,” Jack said at last, turning around to face her briefly.
“Then why did you let Sayid stop me?” Shannon asked again. “Kate said you went after him earlier...” Shannon broke off. Kate had stopped herself mid-sentence, as though she’d realised she’d already said too much, so Shannon had suspected there had been more to what Jack had said than Kate was letting on. And if she was honest with herself, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to know.
“Because I didn’t think that what you were going to do would have made you feel any better in the long run,” Jack replied. “You remember the way Charlie was after he killed Ethan, don’t you?”
Actually, Shannon barely remembered that at all. She’d spent most of that time topping up her tan, just generally keeping out of all the drama and doing her own thing, but now that she thought about it, she did think she remembered Sayid having talked to Charlie for a while about it.
“Sayid told Charlie that what he’d done was going to be with him for the rest of his life,” Jack went on. “And he was right. If you’d killed Locke, it would always have been with you. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still not happy with Locke’s explanation. I still think he was responsible. But by stopping you shooting Locke, we were saving you, not him.”
“So why didn’t Sayid explain this to me?” Shannon asked.
“Did you really give him a chance?” Jack asked, smiling down at her. For a moment Shannon reflected that this was the first time he’d really looked at her, unless you count that time with the asthma attack, which Shannon didn’t. She’d just been a patient to him then, just the same as that guy who’d been moaning and groaning in his tent right after the crash, or that guy who’d kept on annoying the hell out of everyone with his imaginary ailments right up until he’d seen the golf course and decided he wanted to play. Jack had never seemed to see her as a woman, or even as Shannon. Just a patient like anyone else.
Stop it, Shannon told herself angrily. She knew she shouldn’t be thinking like this. Not after what had happened, not when she’d been behaving like this with Sayid and hadn’t known Boone was in pain and calling for her. In fact, if Shannon was honest with herself, a part of her didn’t want to be with Sayid now. She’d been with Sayid when Boone had needed her, and if Sayid hadn’t suggested the picnic on that other beach, then Charlie would have been able to find her straight away and Shannon could have been with Boone at the end too. Sun had tried to talk to her about how brave Boone had been, but she couldn’t really hide the fact that he had died in pain, and Shannon couldn’t help wondering now whether it would have been easier for him if she had been there with him and Jack at the end. Of course, Shannon knew it wasn’t really Sayid’s fault – after all, he couldn’t possibly have known what was going to happen. But there was still a part of her that found it difficult to be around Sayid while she felt that way.
She couldn’t even remember the last thing she’d said to Boone now. Was it some comment about the time he was spending with Locke? Or had it been yet another argument about her and Sayid? Shannon hated the fact that she wasn’t even sure what it had been, and felt even worse that it was most likely to have been the argument.
“He doesn’t understand,” Shannon eventually replied, “I don’t think he ever can. Not like you. Sun told me what happened, about how you gave him your own blood...” She swallowed, looked away from Jack for a moment. “And she told me how you wouldn’t give up on him, even up to the end.”
Jack nodded. “And if he hadn’t asked me to stop, I would have –“ He broke off, and Shannon had to admit she was relieved. She knew from Sun what Jack had intended to do to try and save Boone, and she found that she didn’t really want to hear him say the words.
“Thank you,” Shannon whispered, knowing how inadequate it was for just what she was feeling at the time, but at the same time feeling that Jack would understand.
“I still wish I could have done more,” Jack admitted, “but he wouldn’t let me.”
“Sun told me that as well,” Shannon explained. “She said he wouldn’t let you use up all the medication on him.” That was just like him, she thought. “What happened wasn’t your fault.” And deep down, Shannon wasn’t sure it was Locke’s, either. She’d thought earlier that maybe Sayid knew it, too. I know how strong the need can be to find someone to blame. That was what he had said, and Shannon had wondered if he had understood what she had been really thinking ever since Boone had died.
But the way Jack was looking at her now, it was totally different to the way she thought Sayid was seeing her. Jack looked at her as though he saw some good in her, as well as understanding how she was feeling right now.
“I miss him, Jack,” she choked out at last, turning away from him so that he wouldn’t see that she was crying. But Jack had pulled her close, whispered “I know you do” in her ear before wiping the tears from her face, pulling her close again. She wasn’t quite sure how it happened when they began to kiss, wondered why even as he parted her lips with his tongue, as his hands reached around her neck to stroke her back.
Shannon wasn’t sure which of the two of them broke away first, gasping, flustered and embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” she muttered eventually, after a pause of what felt like hours. She hated herself for what had just happened. It was still too soon after Boone, and only the night before, she’d been with Sayid. “That shouldn’t have happened – it was too...” she began, before choking on the end of her sentence, turning around and running, not knowing where but not caring either, just as long as she was somewhere far away from Jack, from Sayid and the rest of them.
“Shannon, wait!” Jack began, but Shannon ran, barely noticing as she bumped into a startled Rose. She hoped he wouldn’t follow her. It was just typical of her. Once more, Shannon had stuffed everything up. It had never mattered that much before. She’d taken what she could get from different guys, not stopping to think about whether they might have cared for her. It was easier to take, not to give, knowing all along it meant nothing and trying to convince herself she didn’t care. And it should have been just the same with Jack, probably would have been under other circumstances. She couldn’t be fixed; she’d known that for a long time, much as Boone always liked to think he’d be able to fix her somehow. But now, with Jack, Shannon had started to hope that maybe things could have been different, that maybe he would have been the one to succeed where so many others had failed.
Ugh, who am I kidding? Shannon thought with disgust. Jack couldn’t fix her. No one could. He’d just end up leaving her like all the other guys, Philippe, Bryan, that idiot she’d married...her father and Boone. It was best all round if she just left now, before she gave him the chance, just as she had done with Sayid. Mr. I-Can-Fix-Everything might believe he could be the one to fix Shannon. Maybe, at first, he might even mean it. But Shannon knew something was always going to happen. Perhaps Kate would decide she was fed up of juggling two boyfriends and make a choice, choosing Jack. Or (more likely) Jack would realise on his own that he was trying to do the impossible, save someone who couldn’t be saved.
Well, she wasn’t sitting around waiting for that to happen. She was just going to walk away, before she found out all over again that he was just the same as all the others.
“Hey, Rose.” Jack called. “What’s going on over there? What’s up with Shannon?” He gestured to where Shannon appeared to be running away from the camp, in the direction of the hatch.
“Locke was getting on her case about taking her shift with the button.” Rose explained. “See, I can’t really blame her, because I don’t like the hatch myself. And I don’t think it helped matters when Nikki and Paulo wandered past and made some stupid comment about people pulling their weight. They should really have thought before they spoke, I mean, do they not understand how it feels to lose someone?”
“Thanks, Rose,” Jack hastily replied, dashing off after Shannon. He thought he understood why Shannon had felt the way she did about that. And Rose was right about Nikki and Paulo not having helped – Jack knew Rose would never have said it herself, but the idea that Nikki and Paulo, of all people, should have criticised someone else for not pulling their weight must have just added insult to injury.
He wasn’t surprised to see her slumped in front of the computer when he arrived in the hatch, staring listlessly at the timer which was displaying 05:00.
“You come to give me a hard time about not taking my turn with this thing as well?” Shannon greeted him, turning back to face the computer. There was something about the determined set of her shoulders that reminded Jack of Sarah for a moment, of the way she always used to look when she was upset about something (usually with Jack).
“No, Shannon, I’m not. I heard what happened –“ Jack began, but Shannon wasn’t listening. “Because I can take my turn just the same as everyone else. I can enter the numbers into this stupid thing –“ she began, but was interrupted by the sound of the alarm. Jack watched as she began to enter the numbers: 4, 8, 15, 16, 22.
“Damn it!” Shannon winced as she realised her mistake and hastily went back to correct it.
“It’s okay, Shannon, it doesn’t matter,” Jack began, but Shannon muttered “Maybe I shouldn’t bother with this. I can’t even enter the stupid code right. They’re all right, I’m completely useless.”
“You’re not useless, Shannon,” Jack started to say, “and really, this, this pushing the button, it really isn’t that important.” But it wasn’t the time to get into that. “You don’t like the hatch, and that’s fine, I understand.” He sat down beside her, not saying anything for a while, waiting until Shannon was ready to speak. He wasn’t going to push her. It was important that he let her explain in her own time.
“You gonna say something, or are you just gonna sit there staring at me?” Shannon asked at last.
“If you want to talk about why you don’t like the hatch, then I’m here to listen, Shannon. But if you don’t feel like talking, that’s okay too.” Jack watched as Shannon appeared to be struggling with herself, debating whether or not to tell him what he thought he already knew.
“You were right,” she burst out at last. “I do hate the hatch. It doesn’t make sense, you know? When I first saw the inside of it, I thought This was what Boone had been so desperate to get into? This was what was so important that he kept going off with Locke all those times? This stupid computer, those videos, a goddamn pingpong table...all of this stuff in here was not worth Boone’s life, Jack. So that’s why I hate the hatch, because if Boone hadn’t been so fixated with it, he’d probably still be here today.”
Jack pulled her close, let her sob into his shoulder for a while.
“And I wish he’d told me about it,” Shannon continued, “because then I might have been able to talk him out of it, you know? And maybe he’d still be here.”
“From what I understood, Locke didn’t give him much of a choice in the matter,” Jack began, but Shannon didn’t seem to have heard him.
“It pissed me off at first, you know? I couldn’t understand why he wanted to spend all his time with Locke and that stupid hatch, when he could have been spending time with me. I wasn’t used to being rejected, sounds stupid now that I think about it.” Shannon sobbed. “But it’s not all about the hatch. There was something Sayid said as well...” Shannon broke off, and Jack realised there was a part of him that wasn’t sure that he wanted her to continue. He found that he didn’t really like thinking about Shannon with Sayid. Jack knew she’d been keeping her distance from him ever since the day he’d stopped her from shooting Locke, and there was a part of him that had been secretly relieved.
“What did he say, Shannon?” he asked.
“It was something about needing someone to blame. I can’t remember exactly what. But it made me wonder whether he knew what I’ve been wondering all along. I wondered whether he knew that I was the one to blame for Boone’s death. Not Locke, not Hurley who said something crazy about numbers, not even the hatch. Me.”
“That’s crazy, Shannon,” Jack began. “How could you have been to blame? You weren’t even there when it happened.”
“Because it’s my fault that Boone was on the flight at all.” Shannon burst out. “It’s what happens every time I love someone. My father was killed three years ago in a collision with another SUV because he was out running an errand for me. If I hadn’t asked him to pick up those stupid ballet shoes for me, he wouldn’t have been in the car and the accident would never have happened.”
Rutherford. Of course. Jack had thought he’d heard the name before when Hurley had taken the census and checked it against the manifest, but he hadn’t thought much of it at the time. But now, hearing Shannon tell her story, he remembered exactly where he knew the name from. He’d been thinking about that day only a few days earlier, when they’d opened the hatch, damn it. Adam Rutherford, 57, chest trauma, no breath sounds. The guy who’d been in the accident with Sarah was Shannon’s father?
He’d felt guilty about that at the time, although he’d thought at the time that it was very unlikely Adam Rutherford could have been saved. The guys who’d brought him in had said that he’d stopped breathing at the scene; there was very little Jack could have done to help. He’d chosen to operate on Sarah at the time because he’d thought that she could be saved, even if not wholly fixed. They’d gone over this all at the time, when Adam Rutherford’s wife had gone in screaming lawyer, threatening to sue. There had been very little anyone could have done.
But it would not have been impossible; Jack knew that now. After all, he’d thought that it would have been impossible for Sarah to have walked again, but he’d somehow managed to repair her spine. If the miracle had happened for Sarah, could it have happened for Adam instead? And maybe it wouldn’t have been that much of a miracle, either; there had been an investigation after Shannon’s stepmother had threatened to sue, and while it had found that it would indeed have been unlikely, there had been a chance that Adam Rutherford could have survived if Jack had operated on him. If he had allowed his intern to work on Sarah, and worked on Adam himself, could things have been different?
He realised Shannon was still telling her story. “...so we’d let Boone think that these guys were abusing me, and he’d pay them to leave me, but I’d take half of the money. That’s why I was in Australia, and that’s why Boone came out to get me. So it wasn’t Locke’s fault that Boone died. Because he wouldn’t have been on Flight 815 if it wasn’t for me.”
“You can’t blame yourself, Shannon,” Jack said, stroking her hair, knowing that what he had said was hopelessly inadequate, but not knowing what else he could say.
“Sometimes I still feel angry with my father for having died,” Shannon continued, “even though I know it was the idiot in the SUV who caused it.” Jack waited for the familiar punch-to-the-gut feeling that he remembered from the days immediately after his split from Sarah, when Marc Silverman and his other friends had said negative things about her, and noted with some surprise that he didn’t feel anything at all.
“But the one person I’d always thought would be there for me was Boone.” Shannon sobbed. Now Jack thought he understood why Shannon had turned away from Sayid; she was afraid he would abandon her like all the other men in her life had done, so she was walking away from him before he could hurt her again.
But he didn’t know what he could say, if anything, to make her feel better. In fact, he was pretty sure there was nothing at all. Because the fact was, a lot of the things Shannon was blaming herself for weren’t her fault at all. They were Jack’s.
Sun had said that Jack couldn’t have saved Boone; and maybe that had been true, not with where they were and what he’d had to work with, not with Locke’s lie. But Jack still thought that if Boone had let him go through with the amputation, or if he’d got the whole truth from Locke in the first place, there might have been a chance.
But either way, it was his fault that Boone had been there at all, not Shannon’s. Because if Jack had succeeded in saving Adam Rutherford, then maybe things in Shannon’s life would have turned out differently. Shannon could have gone on that internship she’d mentioned, and she wouldn’t have needed to carry out the cons. It was true that Boone need not have been on the flight if it hadn’t been for Shannon’s cons, but it wasn’t Shannon’s fault that they were in that situation.
He was pretty sure he wasn’t going to tell her; it wouldn’t fix anything if he did. Shannon had been through a lot in these last few days, and Jack telling her that would just upset her more, which she didn’t need right now. There wasn’t a reason that she needed to know.
Jack hadn’t been able to save Shannon’s father, and he hadn’t been able to save her brother. But he determined in that moment that he would do whatever he had to do to protect Shannon.
“Sorry,” Shannon muttered, and Jack realised she had started crying. “I’m such an idiot.”
“No, you’re not,” Jack whispered, pulling her close, feeling her tears soaking into his right shoulder. He could feel her trembling as he kissed her softly, felt her nails digging into his back as he began to unfasten her shirt. He realised his own hands were shaking as he stroked her back, allowed his hands to roam down her body, fumbling with the zipper on her jeans.
For a moment, he wondered if this was the right thing, given that it was still so soon after Boone. But it felt right to them both, and Jack imagined that if Boone was there, he’d understand too. It was time they started forgiving themselves.
Author: tellshannon815
Recipient: stolen_kisses87
Pairings or Characters: Jack/Shannon, Rose.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None.
Prompt: Jack/Shannon.
Summary: Jack vows to do whatever it takes to protect Shannon after he finds out about their pre-crash connection during their button duty shift.
Author notes: I tried to write something for something beyond where Shannon died, but fic would have got way of hand – still the second part could be any time in S2!
“Why did you let Sayid stop me?” Shannon asked. “You were the one who said he was a liar. You were the one who went for him back there –“ (she couldn’t say the words at Boone’s funeral , it was still too hard for her to accept that he was really gone) “ – Sawyer and Charlie had to pull you off him! I thought you understood, Jack. I thought you knew why I did what I did.”
Jack didn’t answer her for a while, and Shannon wondered if he were ever going to, which would have annoyed her on any other day. She wasn’t used to being ignored by men. She was used to being checked out, used to the rush of knowing men couldn’t keep their eyes off her. (And that had included Jack before, even as they’d all watched his pathetic attempts to flirt with Kate.) Then Shannon flinched as she remembered the look she’d always observed on Boone’s face whenever he’d caught anyone checking her out, and the rush of power it had given her every time she’d seen it. Now that she knew she was never going to see it again, Shannon wished she hadn’t taken quite so much pleasure in goading him.
“Believe me, Shannon, if I thought it would have fixed anything, I’d have gone after him a long time before you did,” Jack said at last, turning around to face her briefly.
“Then why did you let Sayid stop me?” Shannon asked again. “Kate said you went after him earlier...” Shannon broke off. Kate had stopped herself mid-sentence, as though she’d realised she’d already said too much, so Shannon had suspected there had been more to what Jack had said than Kate was letting on. And if she was honest with herself, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to know.
“Because I didn’t think that what you were going to do would have made you feel any better in the long run,” Jack replied. “You remember the way Charlie was after he killed Ethan, don’t you?”
Actually, Shannon barely remembered that at all. She’d spent most of that time topping up her tan, just generally keeping out of all the drama and doing her own thing, but now that she thought about it, she did think she remembered Sayid having talked to Charlie for a while about it.
“Sayid told Charlie that what he’d done was going to be with him for the rest of his life,” Jack went on. “And he was right. If you’d killed Locke, it would always have been with you. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still not happy with Locke’s explanation. I still think he was responsible. But by stopping you shooting Locke, we were saving you, not him.”
“So why didn’t Sayid explain this to me?” Shannon asked.
“Did you really give him a chance?” Jack asked, smiling down at her. For a moment Shannon reflected that this was the first time he’d really looked at her, unless you count that time with the asthma attack, which Shannon didn’t. She’d just been a patient to him then, just the same as that guy who’d been moaning and groaning in his tent right after the crash, or that guy who’d kept on annoying the hell out of everyone with his imaginary ailments right up until he’d seen the golf course and decided he wanted to play. Jack had never seemed to see her as a woman, or even as Shannon. Just a patient like anyone else.
Stop it, Shannon told herself angrily. She knew she shouldn’t be thinking like this. Not after what had happened, not when she’d been behaving like this with Sayid and hadn’t known Boone was in pain and calling for her. In fact, if Shannon was honest with herself, a part of her didn’t want to be with Sayid now. She’d been with Sayid when Boone had needed her, and if Sayid hadn’t suggested the picnic on that other beach, then Charlie would have been able to find her straight away and Shannon could have been with Boone at the end too. Sun had tried to talk to her about how brave Boone had been, but she couldn’t really hide the fact that he had died in pain, and Shannon couldn’t help wondering now whether it would have been easier for him if she had been there with him and Jack at the end. Of course, Shannon knew it wasn’t really Sayid’s fault – after all, he couldn’t possibly have known what was going to happen. But there was still a part of her that found it difficult to be around Sayid while she felt that way.
She couldn’t even remember the last thing she’d said to Boone now. Was it some comment about the time he was spending with Locke? Or had it been yet another argument about her and Sayid? Shannon hated the fact that she wasn’t even sure what it had been, and felt even worse that it was most likely to have been the argument.
“He doesn’t understand,” Shannon eventually replied, “I don’t think he ever can. Not like you. Sun told me what happened, about how you gave him your own blood...” She swallowed, looked away from Jack for a moment. “And she told me how you wouldn’t give up on him, even up to the end.”
Jack nodded. “And if he hadn’t asked me to stop, I would have –“ He broke off, and Shannon had to admit she was relieved. She knew from Sun what Jack had intended to do to try and save Boone, and she found that she didn’t really want to hear him say the words.
“Thank you,” Shannon whispered, knowing how inadequate it was for just what she was feeling at the time, but at the same time feeling that Jack would understand.
“I still wish I could have done more,” Jack admitted, “but he wouldn’t let me.”
“Sun told me that as well,” Shannon explained. “She said he wouldn’t let you use up all the medication on him.” That was just like him, she thought. “What happened wasn’t your fault.” And deep down, Shannon wasn’t sure it was Locke’s, either. She’d thought earlier that maybe Sayid knew it, too. I know how strong the need can be to find someone to blame. That was what he had said, and Shannon had wondered if he had understood what she had been really thinking ever since Boone had died.
But the way Jack was looking at her now, it was totally different to the way she thought Sayid was seeing her. Jack looked at her as though he saw some good in her, as well as understanding how she was feeling right now.
“I miss him, Jack,” she choked out at last, turning away from him so that he wouldn’t see that she was crying. But Jack had pulled her close, whispered “I know you do” in her ear before wiping the tears from her face, pulling her close again. She wasn’t quite sure how it happened when they began to kiss, wondered why even as he parted her lips with his tongue, as his hands reached around her neck to stroke her back.
Shannon wasn’t sure which of the two of them broke away first, gasping, flustered and embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” she muttered eventually, after a pause of what felt like hours. She hated herself for what had just happened. It was still too soon after Boone, and only the night before, she’d been with Sayid. “That shouldn’t have happened – it was too...” she began, before choking on the end of her sentence, turning around and running, not knowing where but not caring either, just as long as she was somewhere far away from Jack, from Sayid and the rest of them.
“Shannon, wait!” Jack began, but Shannon ran, barely noticing as she bumped into a startled Rose. She hoped he wouldn’t follow her. It was just typical of her. Once more, Shannon had stuffed everything up. It had never mattered that much before. She’d taken what she could get from different guys, not stopping to think about whether they might have cared for her. It was easier to take, not to give, knowing all along it meant nothing and trying to convince herself she didn’t care. And it should have been just the same with Jack, probably would have been under other circumstances. She couldn’t be fixed; she’d known that for a long time, much as Boone always liked to think he’d be able to fix her somehow. But now, with Jack, Shannon had started to hope that maybe things could have been different, that maybe he would have been the one to succeed where so many others had failed.
Ugh, who am I kidding? Shannon thought with disgust. Jack couldn’t fix her. No one could. He’d just end up leaving her like all the other guys, Philippe, Bryan, that idiot she’d married...her father and Boone. It was best all round if she just left now, before she gave him the chance, just as she had done with Sayid. Mr. I-Can-Fix-Everything might believe he could be the one to fix Shannon. Maybe, at first, he might even mean it. But Shannon knew something was always going to happen. Perhaps Kate would decide she was fed up of juggling two boyfriends and make a choice, choosing Jack. Or (more likely) Jack would realise on his own that he was trying to do the impossible, save someone who couldn’t be saved.
Well, she wasn’t sitting around waiting for that to happen. She was just going to walk away, before she found out all over again that he was just the same as all the others.
“Hey, Rose.” Jack called. “What’s going on over there? What’s up with Shannon?” He gestured to where Shannon appeared to be running away from the camp, in the direction of the hatch.
“Locke was getting on her case about taking her shift with the button.” Rose explained. “See, I can’t really blame her, because I don’t like the hatch myself. And I don’t think it helped matters when Nikki and Paulo wandered past and made some stupid comment about people pulling their weight. They should really have thought before they spoke, I mean, do they not understand how it feels to lose someone?”
“Thanks, Rose,” Jack hastily replied, dashing off after Shannon. He thought he understood why Shannon had felt the way she did about that. And Rose was right about Nikki and Paulo not having helped – Jack knew Rose would never have said it herself, but the idea that Nikki and Paulo, of all people, should have criticised someone else for not pulling their weight must have just added insult to injury.
He wasn’t surprised to see her slumped in front of the computer when he arrived in the hatch, staring listlessly at the timer which was displaying 05:00.
“You come to give me a hard time about not taking my turn with this thing as well?” Shannon greeted him, turning back to face the computer. There was something about the determined set of her shoulders that reminded Jack of Sarah for a moment, of the way she always used to look when she was upset about something (usually with Jack).
“No, Shannon, I’m not. I heard what happened –“ Jack began, but Shannon wasn’t listening. “Because I can take my turn just the same as everyone else. I can enter the numbers into this stupid thing –“ she began, but was interrupted by the sound of the alarm. Jack watched as she began to enter the numbers: 4, 8, 15, 16, 22.
“Damn it!” Shannon winced as she realised her mistake and hastily went back to correct it.
“It’s okay, Shannon, it doesn’t matter,” Jack began, but Shannon muttered “Maybe I shouldn’t bother with this. I can’t even enter the stupid code right. They’re all right, I’m completely useless.”
“You’re not useless, Shannon,” Jack started to say, “and really, this, this pushing the button, it really isn’t that important.” But it wasn’t the time to get into that. “You don’t like the hatch, and that’s fine, I understand.” He sat down beside her, not saying anything for a while, waiting until Shannon was ready to speak. He wasn’t going to push her. It was important that he let her explain in her own time.
“You gonna say something, or are you just gonna sit there staring at me?” Shannon asked at last.
“If you want to talk about why you don’t like the hatch, then I’m here to listen, Shannon. But if you don’t feel like talking, that’s okay too.” Jack watched as Shannon appeared to be struggling with herself, debating whether or not to tell him what he thought he already knew.
“You were right,” she burst out at last. “I do hate the hatch. It doesn’t make sense, you know? When I first saw the inside of it, I thought This was what Boone had been so desperate to get into? This was what was so important that he kept going off with Locke all those times? This stupid computer, those videos, a goddamn pingpong table...all of this stuff in here was not worth Boone’s life, Jack. So that’s why I hate the hatch, because if Boone hadn’t been so fixated with it, he’d probably still be here today.”
Jack pulled her close, let her sob into his shoulder for a while.
“And I wish he’d told me about it,” Shannon continued, “because then I might have been able to talk him out of it, you know? And maybe he’d still be here.”
“From what I understood, Locke didn’t give him much of a choice in the matter,” Jack began, but Shannon didn’t seem to have heard him.
“It pissed me off at first, you know? I couldn’t understand why he wanted to spend all his time with Locke and that stupid hatch, when he could have been spending time with me. I wasn’t used to being rejected, sounds stupid now that I think about it.” Shannon sobbed. “But it’s not all about the hatch. There was something Sayid said as well...” Shannon broke off, and Jack realised there was a part of him that wasn’t sure that he wanted her to continue. He found that he didn’t really like thinking about Shannon with Sayid. Jack knew she’d been keeping her distance from him ever since the day he’d stopped her from shooting Locke, and there was a part of him that had been secretly relieved.
“What did he say, Shannon?” he asked.
“It was something about needing someone to blame. I can’t remember exactly what. But it made me wonder whether he knew what I’ve been wondering all along. I wondered whether he knew that I was the one to blame for Boone’s death. Not Locke, not Hurley who said something crazy about numbers, not even the hatch. Me.”
“That’s crazy, Shannon,” Jack began. “How could you have been to blame? You weren’t even there when it happened.”
“Because it’s my fault that Boone was on the flight at all.” Shannon burst out. “It’s what happens every time I love someone. My father was killed three years ago in a collision with another SUV because he was out running an errand for me. If I hadn’t asked him to pick up those stupid ballet shoes for me, he wouldn’t have been in the car and the accident would never have happened.”
Rutherford. Of course. Jack had thought he’d heard the name before when Hurley had taken the census and checked it against the manifest, but he hadn’t thought much of it at the time. But now, hearing Shannon tell her story, he remembered exactly where he knew the name from. He’d been thinking about that day only a few days earlier, when they’d opened the hatch, damn it. Adam Rutherford, 57, chest trauma, no breath sounds. The guy who’d been in the accident with Sarah was Shannon’s father?
He’d felt guilty about that at the time, although he’d thought at the time that it was very unlikely Adam Rutherford could have been saved. The guys who’d brought him in had said that he’d stopped breathing at the scene; there was very little Jack could have done to help. He’d chosen to operate on Sarah at the time because he’d thought that she could be saved, even if not wholly fixed. They’d gone over this all at the time, when Adam Rutherford’s wife had gone in screaming lawyer, threatening to sue. There had been very little anyone could have done.
But it would not have been impossible; Jack knew that now. After all, he’d thought that it would have been impossible for Sarah to have walked again, but he’d somehow managed to repair her spine. If the miracle had happened for Sarah, could it have happened for Adam instead? And maybe it wouldn’t have been that much of a miracle, either; there had been an investigation after Shannon’s stepmother had threatened to sue, and while it had found that it would indeed have been unlikely, there had been a chance that Adam Rutherford could have survived if Jack had operated on him. If he had allowed his intern to work on Sarah, and worked on Adam himself, could things have been different?
He realised Shannon was still telling her story. “...so we’d let Boone think that these guys were abusing me, and he’d pay them to leave me, but I’d take half of the money. That’s why I was in Australia, and that’s why Boone came out to get me. So it wasn’t Locke’s fault that Boone died. Because he wouldn’t have been on Flight 815 if it wasn’t for me.”
“You can’t blame yourself, Shannon,” Jack said, stroking her hair, knowing that what he had said was hopelessly inadequate, but not knowing what else he could say.
“Sometimes I still feel angry with my father for having died,” Shannon continued, “even though I know it was the idiot in the SUV who caused it.” Jack waited for the familiar punch-to-the-gut feeling that he remembered from the days immediately after his split from Sarah, when Marc Silverman and his other friends had said negative things about her, and noted with some surprise that he didn’t feel anything at all.
“But the one person I’d always thought would be there for me was Boone.” Shannon sobbed. Now Jack thought he understood why Shannon had turned away from Sayid; she was afraid he would abandon her like all the other men in her life had done, so she was walking away from him before he could hurt her again.
But he didn’t know what he could say, if anything, to make her feel better. In fact, he was pretty sure there was nothing at all. Because the fact was, a lot of the things Shannon was blaming herself for weren’t her fault at all. They were Jack’s.
Sun had said that Jack couldn’t have saved Boone; and maybe that had been true, not with where they were and what he’d had to work with, not with Locke’s lie. But Jack still thought that if Boone had let him go through with the amputation, or if he’d got the whole truth from Locke in the first place, there might have been a chance.
But either way, it was his fault that Boone had been there at all, not Shannon’s. Because if Jack had succeeded in saving Adam Rutherford, then maybe things in Shannon’s life would have turned out differently. Shannon could have gone on that internship she’d mentioned, and she wouldn’t have needed to carry out the cons. It was true that Boone need not have been on the flight if it hadn’t been for Shannon’s cons, but it wasn’t Shannon’s fault that they were in that situation.
He was pretty sure he wasn’t going to tell her; it wouldn’t fix anything if he did. Shannon had been through a lot in these last few days, and Jack telling her that would just upset her more, which she didn’t need right now. There wasn’t a reason that she needed to know.
Jack hadn’t been able to save Shannon’s father, and he hadn’t been able to save her brother. But he determined in that moment that he would do whatever he had to do to protect Shannon.
“Sorry,” Shannon muttered, and Jack realised she had started crying. “I’m such an idiot.”
“No, you’re not,” Jack whispered, pulling her close, feeling her tears soaking into his right shoulder. He could feel her trembling as he kissed her softly, felt her nails digging into his back as he began to unfasten her shirt. He realised his own hands were shaking as he stroked her back, allowed his hands to roam down her body, fumbling with the zipper on her jeans.
For a moment, he wondered if this was the right thing, given that it was still so soon after Boone. But it felt right to them both, and Jack imagined that if Boone was there, he’d understand too. It was time they started forgiving themselves.