Recap in the pipeline for last night's epi. In the meantime, inspired by the remarkable literary offering provided by the Jaters, I now present to you Fishbiscuit's first foray into the world of fan fic--honoring the cosmic coupling of Jack and Tom. I hope that their story inspires your reading as much as it did my writing.

Two Hearts Bleeding As One

Tom inched down the hallway, his heart doing jumping jacks and various acrobatic maneuvers insde the bony portion of his chest cavity. It was now or never. Nothing could keep him away from what destiny had decreed he should amalgamate his soul with. He peeked around the edge of the cold, clammy wooden door apparatus, and his lukewarm breath caught in his throat. There he was, leaning over the pool table's verdant field of green felt like a swimmer poised to dive into a gypsy pool. His fingers flexed erotically over the smooth pool cue. Where had Jack learned to play pool like that? It seemed a magical gift emanating from his past painful history that he could carry such talent within his tortured heroic frame. The words that left Tom were rushed, breathless, almost gynecological in proportion. "I brought your sandwich."

Jack turned, his muscles flexing and tears stood in his deep socketed brown ocular lenses. Could it really be? But... he'd told him he didn't want a sandwich. Tom's words played a prelude and fugue on the strings of his inner violin which lurked deep in his emotional core. Why hadn't he gone back to the other Others, the ones he really loved? Did this mean... Could it mean... Did Tom love him?

Jack's heart crumpled in his pneumothorax like a porkchop that had been cooked too long. Tom's eyes glazed over with etymological longings, a pure concertina of masculine emotion and he wanted to say so much, words his soul gushed forth like a fire hydrant by a sidewalk, but Jack couldn't understand. They were both too scared to admit this yearning besottedness.

Jack's agile fingers flexed like he was yearning for a scalpel to draw across Tom's translucent skin in tangential patterns much resembling a bizarre crop circle formation. It was always this way. Torn between pounding passion and disgust bordering on acid reflux after too much guacamole. "Why?!" Was all he could manage in a strangled whisper as his Adam's apple became lodged in his throat, in need of an emotional tracheotomy.

Tom's posture was stooped, defeated, like a man drowning in his own sweat after mowing the lawns. "Because I can't leave without you Jack. Stay here and die. Come with me...and live." His voice was fragile and discombobulated, as though any moment the fear would break it into a quadrillion shards of liquid nitrogen.

Jack reached out his hand, slowly, tentatively...like a sloth with bad crotch itch and finally took the grilled cheese sandwich. "Bring me some toothpicks and I'll think about it."

Tom's large hands which looked like sausages, only they weren't, extended across the verdent green of the pool table toward Jack who was standing, his emotions encased in a velutinous down jacket of calidity he had never experienced before. "I've, I've never experienced this before," Tom stuttered slowly, his words tripping over each other like a disarticulated slinky trying to ambulate down stairs. "Not even when I was with Ben."

Jack felt his heart clutch in his chest like a sticky brake. "You, you were with Ben?" He couldn't believe what he was processing aurally. Surely the rushing of the freight train of blood in his ears was hindering his auditory sensations. "But I, I thought that I was going to be your first..."

Tom oscillated his head with melancholy dolor. "It will be like the first time with you."

Jack looked deeply into Tom’s sincere orbs, his hope wavering like a newborn colt still shaky on its inexperienced legs. Finally, he understood that Tom was telling the truth and it hit him right in the solar plexus, taking his breath away just like that time he’d gotten hit by the handlebars of Sarah’s bike. Sarah, oh god! Finally HE wouldn’t have to be the one that was strong and brave, the tall one. His heart jumped like a frog that had sat on a scalding hot rock as he thought of how it would feel to have strong arms to hold him, a broad and cushioned chest on which he could rest his tired head. He was so exhausted from always having to be everybody’s role model. He never asked for that burden but he had carried it with his head erect and had kept his pain buried deep in the folds of his brave but slender frame.

It was so hard. Nobody deserved this quaking surge of mellow bliss like them, but how could it be counted on? Time wheeled them away from each other like a hospital gurney on wheels with clean sheets, and they held on to each other in this cosmic emptiness of unembellished purple sky while they both knew that whether in this life or the one that comes after this life, the next life, they'd face eternity in each others coiled arms, strong like snakes and flexing forever, snakelike. "I told you not to come back for me!" Tom said, knowing that his guilt would forever hover over his body as a human posterior hovers over a toilet.

"I didn't think you meant it ," Jack crooned, his soliloquy of vigorous verbiage eclipsing his pain.

"Jack..." Tom warbled softly as a lark heralding the rosy dawn; almost overcome by the burgeoning need to articulate his growing, and surging desire to utter his paramour's nomenclature, with a reverance that held every hope and dream for a forbidden future together. "Jack!" He repeated more imperiously, with the conviction of a dying man signing his own death warrant. It was both a command and a surrender, perhaps even a peace treaty between two nations caught up in a bloody, twisted and holocaustic senseless war. Would the angina in his chest cavity ever find its surcease. "Jack." Tom whispered thricely, like a clergyman intoning the most solemn liturgical prayer. At the sound of Tom's melodious pleas, Jack looked at him with a look that shipped lakes, seas, oceans; a look that would cause the stars to fall if it were night, but it wasn't night, so the stars couldn't fall. Well, they could but because it was day no one would see them fall.

Jack longingly gazed at Tom, wishing he could dive into those yearningly sad and overcast eyes to elevate the anguish egressing from his otherwise electromagnetic presence. He longed to draw closer, to revel in his increasing dyspnoea of unbridled and unrequited passion. With his own sensitive heart palpitating almost out of his now too cumbersome ribcage, he tiptoed in hesitant steps towards him. Within reach, he clasped Tom's uniquely swine-like and powerful addendums. He found himself feigning confusion, now cognizant this was a sign of unchartered bliss and propensities to be explored. He drew a breath in, acidifying his already raw throat with emotion, his resistance growing futile, while the lyrics he had memorized fibrillated his heart, throwing him off balance.

Jack's hand haltingly fluttered toward Tom's lumberjacklike face with the rapaciousness of a young Crusader hurling himself into an onslaught of malevolent Moors, anticipating death and glory. Neither Ben, nor Kate nor anyone listed on anyone's list would stand between them now. They were ensconced in an ecumenical universe all their own, like two acorns tenuously enswathed in the branches of a mighty oak. This microcosm of the space time continuum existed only for them and no extraneous force of god nor man could encroach upon them here.

Then the door croaked like a ninety year old emphysema patient, gasping for attention. In walked Juliet with scissor-like movements, all harsh acute angles and lines. Interrupting the communion between Jack and his newest supplicant with the maniacal glee of a woman spurned and repudiated beyond all reasoning and cognitive thought. Jack's heart sank deeper than the Marianas trench, knowing that Juliet had purposefully timed her entry to achieve maximum dissatisfaction and despondency from the two XY chromosomed creatures before her. "Tom...Ben wants to speak with you." She intoned, like a headmistress eager to get out the disciplinary ruler of admonishment.

Feeling as though his promethean heart was being ripped out of his barrel chest, Tom reluctantly disengaged his appendages and walked to the door. At the door frame he hesitated for 3.4 seconds and turned back to Jack. "I'll be back with the toothpicks." He promised, a sodium chloride tear glistening in his eye for a brief second, before it vanished like a drunken virgin's virtue at a frat party. Then he was gone, striding out into the day like a fireman, full of resolve and quivering need that while not satiated, would grow with each passing nanosecond that they were apart.