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"Jacqueline?"
He looks up from the game of Operation in front of him. His dad is looking down at him from a great height. "Yeah?"
His dad smiles. "You just keep that up, kiddo, and you'll be on the track to a good career." He crouches down and pats Jacqueline's braided hair. "You want to be a doctor like me, right, kiddo?"
Jacqueline smiles. "Uh-huh."
*
When he's twelve, he starts middle school, where he goes by Jackie. He doesn't wear braids anymore, and he takes all the advanced science classes they offer.
He cuts his hair short and one of his friends calls him a lesbian. He thinks about this for weeks, finally deciding that he must be. He doesn't think he likes boys.
*
When he's fifteen, he tells his mother that he doesn't think he's a girl. She understands, but his father doesn't.
It takes six months for his father to throw up his hands, sigh, and say, "All right, Jackie, if you've made up your mind. Just don't come crying to me when you get over it. If you want to do this, you'd better do it right."
Jackie never had room to fail.
He thinks about changing his name completely, but he never does. He sticks with the abortive single syllable that isn't short for anything anymore.
*
He starts hormones when he's eighteen, and the bullying finally abates a little. He was always good at dealing with it, though. He generally overcompensates by being outgoing and forceful, so things work out all right.
He watches his arms and hands in the following months as they become strong, as the veins become heavier, and he feels proud. Something in him rebels sometimes and says, that's not right, but he knows that this is just one more time he can't give in to fear.
He gets very good at sticking needles in himself.
Jack starts going to the gym obsessively, once his father insists on paying for his membership. "If you're going to be a man, you might as well be a man." Jack doesn't do it to be a man, though. He does it to be better.
He still gets top grades in all his science classes.
*
He gets top surgery halfway through college, over Christmas break. His father won't hear of him taking time off, but he wants it to be out of the way before Jack starts medical school.
Jack spends a lot of time in hospitals, and he doesn't go to his father's hospital for surgery. He keeps his life together, mostly, not reading blogs about transgender politics and not being an activist in any sense. In a lot of ways, he's very lucky. And he's driven, so driven, because he can't fuck up now.
*
"Jacqueline."
Jack's hands freeze, inches from the inside of the woman's spine. He can feel his father standing behind him, drunk, Christ, he must be drunk.
His hand slips and the woman's nerve spill out. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. He's still afraid.
*
"See you in another life, brother." There is something incredibly deliberate about the man's words, and he looks at Jack like he knows something Jack doesn't. The next day, Jack saves Sarah.
Sarah is wonderful, and best of all, she doesn't give a damn about his past. She only cares that he gave her the ability to walk again. The almost imperceptibly small margin for error in his life crashes closed.
And then Sarah cheats on him.
His father, a real man, comes home drunk smelling like perfume he can't remember if Sarah wore. His mind tells him treacherously that he recognizes the scent.
*
There is so much in Jack's life that his body fades into the background. He has surgeon's hands, and that's all that matters.
He hands his ID over at airport security, its safe little M no longer even a concern.
Then suddenly, the things that stopped mattering start to matter again.
*
The island is a fresh start. It offers a new life, one in which no one knows and no one needs to. In his new life, he's never pretended to be Jacqueline. In his new life, the scars on his chest have mostly faded, and he goes shirtless.
In his new life, he's running out of drugs.
"I need something."
"What's that?" Sawyer asks, sounding suspicious.
Jack feels his shoulders tighten. "Nothing. Medicine."
"Nothin' doing, pal."
"Sawyer," he snaps. "If you found it, just give it to me." He forces himself to breathe. "It'll say testosterone enanthate on it."
Sawyer's eyebrows shoot up. "Testosterone? Lookin' for your lost manhood, Doc?"
Jack doesn't wince, at least not externally, a learned survival skill. Sawyer's joke is off the mark. He won't be familiar enough with . . . "It's not for me," he lies.
Sawyer grins. "How's about I give it to you, then. If you tell me what it's for."
Jack hesitates. If he doesn't get the stuff, he's afraid everyone will find out soon anyway. He draws a sharp breath. "Okay," he says, "But I have a condition for you. You can't tell anyone else."
Sawyer snorts. "Seems to me like you ain't the one who's in the position to be calling the shots." He pauses. "But I'll accept. Because I'm damn curious what could make a man like you so desperate."
Jack clings to the words. A man like you. It may be the last time he hears them from Sawyer without irony behind them. Is this really worth it? He doesn't need the drugs to be a man, but he's a doctor, and he knows all about bodies and chemicals and how to keep yourself functional. And he knows himself, uncertain under the skin. "I'm transsexual," he says bluntly, but so carefully. Adjective, not noun. Transsexual, not transgender. Precision is important, to set a good example.
Sawyer's eyes narrow. "Huh? Wait, are you saying you're . . ."
Jack can see Sawyer looking him up and down, searching for clues as to what he means, what he is. What, not who. "I was female assigned at birth," he says, still precise with fear. "I need the testosterone for that."
"You're kidding me." Sawyer's voice is unreadable.
"No," Jack says, starting to get irritated. "Look, can I have it, or not?"
"Can I see?" Sawyer blurts out. He has the good grace to look chagrined immediately. "I mean, it's not that I don't believe you, I just . . . Do you have all the equipment?"
"Go to hell," Jack says evenly. "My equipment is never going to be your business."
Sawyer reaches reluctantly into one of the many bags he's collected. "Yeah, I found the stuff. Look, I ain't gonna pass up the chance to make fun of you."
"Yes," Jack says, taking the little bottle, "You are." He pauses. "Please."
Sawyer sighs. "Okay, Doc. You go play hero."
The resentment in Sawyer's voice is the old resentment, and Jack's knees nearly go weak with relief. He hates putting his secret in the hands of someone like Sawyer, but he's been lucky.
*
Hurley figures it out, of course.
"So, like . . . You were a girl?"
"No," Jack says, weary with too much death and Boone's blood still on his hands and the same old denials in his mouth. "I was never a girl."
"Right," Hurley says, quick to be kind. "But you know what I mean. That's crazy."
Right. Crazy. Jack shrugs Hurley off and keeps moving, because he can't fail now.
*
"Maybe destiny brought you here to fix you."
Jack turns away. Locke doesn't understand. Jack is broken, but it's never been his body. It's the rush in his blood when he tastes alcohol, the engine that drives him to go sleepless with bloodied hands in someone's back, the fear that makes him push himself too far.
Locke shrugs. "Miracles do happen here, Jack."
Jack doesn't believe in miracles. He's always had to be practical, because nothing is going to change his body except medicine. Still furious that Locke knows, he snaps, "No, John, they don't. I don't want a mystical new body from the island. I don't want anything from it."
And at the time, he's telling the truth.
*
When Jack is captured by the Others, Ben doesn't mention it. Not once. Jack thinks he must know, because he knows everything.
Juliet looks at his file and nods and smiles and doesn't need to say anything. Jack knows she knows, and he knows she pities him.
*
They escape the island just before he's about to run out of testosterone: too lucky to be mere coincidence, but Jack has other priorities than working through a mystery that no longer matters.
*
Kate's eyes travel down his body, trying to take in the nearly invisible scars on his chest. "You're not kidding," she says.
Jack tries not to think of Sawyer. "No," he says. "Should I put my shirt back on?" He's only half joking.
"No," Kate says, something steely in her eyes. "You should take your pants off."
Jack is never sure why Kate reacts the way she does. She's a mystery, always.
*
The motel blinds are drawn, and Ben's hand rests on Jack's exposed hip.
Ben looks at him sharply. "Have you been taking your hormones?"
Yes. Yes, that's the one fucking thing Jack has been doing right.
*
Jack clenches his hands in the sand. He has to save Kate from the man who looks like Locke. He has to get them off the island. So many things he has to do, there's not room in his head for anything about what his body used to look like. It doesn't matter.
Hurley speaks slowly, as though reading, watching a patch of air a few feet from Jack. "Jacob says . . . He chose Jacqueline Shephard when she was born. But now Jack Shephard looks like a pretty good leader."
Jack nods, taking this in. He didn't need Jacob's approval, but he guesses he's got it.
"Y'know, about this whole trans thing," Hurley says, as if this is even close to the right time for such a discussion, "I kinda see where you're coming from. I mean . . . I kinda hate my body sometimes."
Jack is about to say it's different, that it's about society and the things they want, but he realizes it's really not different. "Oh," he says. "Yeah, I guess so."
Hurley nods, apparently stratified that he hasn't upset Jack. "But the island isn't going to let either of us change."
Jack nods. "Sometimes I just don't know who I am," he says, his voice taut. On this little patch of sand with the end of everything coming, he thinks he can afford to be honest with Hurley.
Hurley shrugs. "You're the guy who's going to save us."
Jack hears guy, but it doesn't matter. All that matters is that he's got a job to do.