Chapter 3: The Doctor's Rival
Day three. The makeshift medical area had taken shape near the freshwater source Jack discovered inland—a collection of airline blankets spread under improvised lean-tos, surrounded by salvaged first aid supplies and luggage repurposed as medical equipment. The injured lay in neat rows, organized by severity with the practiced efficiency of someone who'd seen trauma before.
Jack Shephard moved between patients like a man possessed, his surgical scrubs replaced by a torn business shirt and sand-stained khakis. Dark circles shadowed his eyes, and his hands trembled slightly from exhaustion and too much airplane coffee substitute. He'd been running on pure adrenaline for three days, trying to be everywhere at once, and Mac could see the cracks beginning to show.
Mac approached the medical area with careful steps, carrying a makeshift stretcher he'd constructed from bamboo and torn fabric. His Master Builder instincts had guided every joint and weave, creating something that would have looked at home in a professional hospital despite being built from beach debris.
Jack's jaw tightened when he saw Mac coming. The tension between them had been growing since that first day when Mac's healing had saved Gary Morrison's life. Professional jealousy mixed with scientific skepticism, creating a volatile combination that made every interaction feel like walking through a minefield.
"Dr. Shephard," Mac said carefully. "Brought you a proper stretcher. Figured it might be easier to move patients."
Jack glanced at the stretcher, his expression grudgingly impressed despite himself. The construction was flawless—weight distribution perfect, joints secure enough to handle emergency transport. It looked like something from a medical supply catalog, not a piece of beach craftsmanship.
"Where did you learn to build medical equipment?" Jack's tone was neutral, but Mac caught the underlying challenge.
"Field expedient construction," Mac replied automatically. "You learn to improvise when you don't have proper supplies."
Jack's eyes narrowed slightly. Every answer Mac gave just raised more questions, building a web of suspicion that grew tighter with each impossible skill he displayed.
Before Jack could probe further, a woman's voice cut through the morning air.
"Please, someone help her! She's burning up!"
Mac turned toward the cry and felt his stomach drop. A middle-aged woman knelt beside a younger one whose leg had been badly injured in the crash. What had started as a simple laceration had become something much worse—angry red streaks climbing from the wound toward her hip, her skin flushed with fever, her breathing rapid and shallow.
Infection. Bad infection, the kind that killed people in the days before antibiotics.
Mac moved toward them before conscious thought kicked in. His Healing Hands power responded to the woman's distress, energy building under his palms like warm electricity. He could feel her pain from ten feet away—the burning agony of septicemia spreading through her bloodstream like liquid fire.
"Don't." Jack's voice was sharp, authoritative. "I'm treating her."
But Mac was already kneeling beside the infected woman, his hands hovering over the wound. The golden glow began immediately, responding to her need, but something was wrong. Instead of the warm flow of healing energy he'd felt with Gary Morrison and Boone Carlyle, this felt like grabbing a live wire.
Pain exploded through Mac's system as his power made contact with the infection. He could feel the bacteria in her bloodstream—millions of microscopic invaders turning her body against itself. His Phase One abilities reached for them, trying to purge the corruption, but they were too strong, too entrenched. It was like trying to stop a flood with a teacup.
Mac gasped and jerked back, his vision swimming. Nausea hit him like a physical blow, and he barely managed to keep from vomiting right there beside the patient. The infection burned through his nervous system like acid, his borrowed healing sense overwhelmed by the magnitude of what it couldn't fix.
"What the hell was that?" Jack's voice cut through the ringing in Mac's ears.
Mac looked up to find Jack staring at his hands, where the golden glow was fading like the last light of sunset. The doctor's expression was a mixture of fascination and alarm, his scientific mind trying to process what he'd just witnessed.
"Static electricity," Mac managed, his voice weak and shaky. "Must be some kind of weird island thing."
Jack's expression hardened. "Don't touch patients without knowing what you're doing. Whatever parlor tricks you think you're performing, this woman's life is at stake."
The dismissal hit harder than it should have. Mac did know what he was doing—his inherited healing knowledge was vast, comprehensive, covering everything from battlefield trauma to complex surgical procedures. But knowledge without the power to execute it was worse than useless. It was torture.
"I could save her if I was stronger," Mac thought desperately. "I can see exactly what's wrong, know exactly how to fix it, but my abilities aren't developed enough. I'm watching someone die because I'm not good enough yet."
Jack turned his attention back to the patient, checking her pulse and temperature with grim efficiency. "Septicemia," he said to himself. "Without proper antibiotics..."
He didn't finish the sentence, but Mac heard the unspoken conclusion. The woman was going to die, and they both knew it.
"There might be medical supplies in the fuselage," Mac offered weakly. "Antibiotics, maybe surgical instruments."
Jack shot him a look that could have melted steel. "And what would you know about surgical instruments, Mr. Combat Medic?"
The title dripped with sarcasm. Jack's suspicions were crystallizing into open hostility, professional jealousy mixing with genuine concern for his patients. In Jack's mind, Mac was an amateur pretending to be something he wasn't, playing doctor with lives hanging in the balance.
Before Mac could respond, chaos erupted from the other side of the medical area.
"Jack! Jack, get over here!"
Shannon Rutherford's voice cracked with panic. Mac followed Jack toward the commotion, his legs still shaky from the backlash of trying to heal the infected woman.
They found Boone Carlyle convulsing on the sand, his body rigid with seizure activity. Blood trickled from a head wound that should have been healing, and his breathing came in short, desperate gasps.
POV: Jack
Panic hit Jack like a physical blow. Boone had been stable when he'd checked on him an hour ago—minor head trauma, possible concussion, but nothing life-threatening. Now the kid was seizing, and Jack couldn't see why.
Internal bleeding. Had to be. Something had shifted, torn loose inside Boone's skull, and without an operating room, without proper imaging, without the tools of modern medicine, Jack was flying blind.
"Get back!" Jack barked at the crowd gathering around them. "Give him space!"
He knelt beside Boone, checking pupils and reflexes with growing desperation. The seizure was subsiding, but the boy's vital signs were all wrong. Blood pressure dropping, pulse thready and weak. Classic signs of internal bleeding, probably from a torn vessel in his brain.
Jack's hands moved with practiced efficiency, but he knew it was futile. Without emergency surgery, Boone was going to die. And there was nothing—absolutely nothing—Jack could do to save him.
"Move." Mac's voice cut through Jack's despair.
"I said don't touch—"
"Move!" The command in Mac's voice was absolute, the tone of someone accustomed to being obeyed in crisis situations.
Against his better judgment, Jack found himself stepping aside. Mac dropped to his knees beside Boone, his hands immediately pressing against the boy's abdomen. The golden glow returned, brighter this time, and Jack watched in stunned silence as something impossible happened.
POV: Mac
Mac's healing power flowed into Boone like molten gold, seeking out the source of the internal bleeding. There—a torn vessel in the boy's brain, microscopic but lethal, slowly filling his skull with blood. Mac's abilities wrapped around the injury, knitting tissue back together cell by cell, purging the accumulated blood and reducing the pressure that was killing him.
But the cost was enormous. Every second of healing drained Mac's energy like an open wound, and he could feel Boone's pain as if it were his own. The agony of intracranial pressure, the confusion of a brain starved for oxygen, the terror of a young man facing death—all of it poured through Mac's nervous system in real time.
His vision grayed at the edges. Blood trickled from his nose, and his hands shook with the effort of maintaining the healing flow. But Boone's breathing was steadying, his color improving. The boy's eyes fluttered open, focusing on Mac's face with growing clarity.
"What..." Boone's voice was weak but coherent. "What happened?"
Mac managed a shaky smile. "You're okay. Just rest."
The healing connection severed suddenly, leaving Mac gasping on the sand beside his patient. The phantom pains of Boone's injury echoed through his body—the crushing headache, the nausea, the desperate need for oxygen that wasn't quite satisfied. It felt like someone had taken a sledgehammer to his skull.
But Boone was alive. Breathing. Sitting up with Shannon's help, looking confused but fundamentally intact.
Mac staggered to his feet and stumbled away from the medical area, heading for the privacy of the jungle. His stomach rebelled violently, and he barely made it behind a palm tree before dry-heaving into the sand. The aftertaste of Boone's pain lingered in his mouth like copper and fear.
"This is the price," Mac realized with crystalline clarity. "Every healing comes with a cost. I take on their pain, their damage, their suffering. And the worse the injury, the higher the price I pay."
The knowledge was both sobering and terrifying. How much could he endure? How many times could he absorb someone else's trauma before it broke him completely?
"Mac?"
He turned to find Jack approaching cautiously, his expression a complex mixture of concern and fascination.
"Are you all right? You look like hell."
Mac wiped blood from his nose with the back of his hand. "I'm fine. Just... tired."
Jack studied him for a long moment, his doctor's instincts clearly picking up on Mac's condition. Finally, he sat heavily on a piece of driftwood nearby.
"Whatever you did back there," Jack said quietly, "I need to understand it. People are going to keep getting hurt, and if you have some way to help them..."
Mac looked at Jack's exhausted face, seeing the weight of responsibility that was crushing the doctor day by day. Jack was trying to save everyone, and the impossible nature of that task was slowly destroying him.
"I don't understand it either," Mac said, offering a half-truth that felt like the safest option. "It just... happens when I need it to. When someone's dying and conventional medicine isn't enough."
Jack was quiet for several minutes, processing what he'd witnessed. When he finally spoke, his voice carried a note of reluctant acceptance.
"The glow. That's not static electricity."
Mac's throat went dry. "Jack—"
"I don't know what it is," Jack continued. "But I've been a surgeon for fifteen years, and I've never seen anything like what you just did. Boone was dying. Internal bleeding, probable brain hemorrhage. And now he's sitting up asking for water."
"Maybe the island—"
"Don't." Jack held up a hand. "Don't insult my intelligence with island stories. I saw what I saw. You have some kind of... ability. I don't understand it, but I can't deny it anymore."
The admission hung between them like a bridge neither was sure they wanted to cross. Mac could see Jack struggling with his worldview, trying to reconcile scientific skepticism with evidence his eyes couldn't deny.
"What do you want from me?" Mac asked finally.
Jack rubbed his face with both hands, looking older than his years. "Help. That's all. People are suffering, and you can do something about it. I can't ask you to explain what I don't understand myself, but I can ask you to use whatever this is to save lives."
It wasn't friendship, but it was détente. A temporary ceasefire in the war between Mac's secrets and Jack's suspicions. Mac would take it.
"I'll help however I can," Mac said. "But Jack... there are limits to what I can do. That woman with the infection—I can't fix everything."
"But you can fix some things." Jack's voice carried a note of desperate hope. "And right now, some is better than none."
As they walked back toward the medical area together, Mac caught sight of Boone sitting up and talking to Shannon. The young man's color was good, his eyes clear and focused. In a few days, he'd be completely healed from injuries that should have killed him.
But Mac's body still ached with phantom pains, echoes of trauma that belonged to someone else. The cost of healing was higher than he'd expected, and he was beginning to understand that every life he saved would exact its own price from his borrowed existence.
That night, as Mac lay in Fort Probably-Won't-Collapse listening to the sounds of the beach camp settling into exhausted sleep, he inventoried the damage from the day's healing. Headache that felt like ice picks behind his eyes. Nausea that came in waves. Phantom pain in his abdomen where Boone's bleeding had been.
But across the camp, Boone slept peacefully under Shannon's watchful guard. The young man would wake up tomorrow with his whole life ahead of him, unaware that someone else had paid the price for his survival.
Mac could live with that ledger. Even if living with it hurt more than he'd expected.
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