anythingbutgrey | Lost -- The Hurricane I'll Never Outrun

Title: The Hurricane I'll Never Outrun
Ship (Fandom): Jack/Kate (Lost)
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Through 'Eggtown'; Speculation? for future episodes
A/N: Title from The Hush Sounds 'Hurricane'; Thanks to

britfacexx for the beta! ♥; The dialogue at the end is from 'Eggtown' and is, thus, not mine. For

lostfichallenge #68: One True Pairing
Summary: The island changed them, yes. But they’ve always been cyclical people, fall into patterns. So, he still goes to the hospital. And Kate still pushes everyone away.

When they land, he can’t see.

The cameras accost them like hornets in August, bright lights stark against the night sky. Screaming questions surround him, all the words blurring together and overlapping, senseless as a foreign language. Airport security hustles them inside and then there’s –

“Sarah,” he says.

She’s not crying. He can see – sense Kate stand up straight, remembering another blond who made things complicated.

“Jack,” Sarah says.

There’s a wail when Hurley’s mother sees him, and she latches her arms around him as best she can with a laugh. It distracts Jack for a second, but then he snaps back to Sarah, to eyes that are just beginning to shimmer with her mouth forming words, “I thought you were dead.”

Me too, he wants to say. Me too.

“Jack,” Kate says and he comes back to Earth, reality that holds him and he turns to her, her face ashen. Jack has seen Kate terrified, and he has seen Kate cry. When she does both it’s almost too much.

“Jack,” she says again and he steps toward her, voice low with a steady hand on her elbow at her swaying knees.

“Jack?” Sarah asks behind him but so far away. He ignores her.

“Jack,” Kate says. “Will you take Aaron for me?”

He pauses, but he does, even though the sight still makes him wince at the thought of Claire, coming back to camp and finding Aaron gone, all of them gone.

Handcuffs click around Kate’s wrists before he realizes it, and his mouth drops open, “No, you are not doing this, you can’t do this.”

But Kate just shakes her head. That’s when he realizes she’s been resigned to this for weeks.

“Kate Austen,” someone says, “You are under arrest for –”

He hears nothing else.

Behind him, Sarah says, “Jack.”

-

He likes to tell himself they didn’t have a choice, that it was a decision that could not be thought over, guns were pointed at them and it was either get on the helicopter or get shot, really. Kate had Aaron and they knew, they knew the island was no place for a baby.

Rose had refused to leave without her husband, and they sighed with cocked guns and permitted her leave. Rose wasn’t important, he supposes with a twinge in his knee. Jack knows Rose told Claire, but that doesn’t make anything even the slightest bit easier.

Sun had been difficult. But they knew she was going to die, and a head wound was of little importance. Kate knocked her out. Sometimes leaders have to make hard decisions. And they thought they would be able to get back eventually. Maybe.

The thing about it, the thing that gets him every time like a bad joke, is how they all just fall back into circles. He goes back to the hospital; Hurley goes back to the asylum. Kate goes back to being guilty and fighting to stay free.

The island changed them, yes. But they’ve always been cyclical people, fall into patterns. So, he still goes to the hospital. And Kate still pushes everyone away.

-

The point isn’t that she leaves Sawyer behind. The point is that she would never go back for him. They don’t know how to get back, but even if they did, she wouldn’t step an inch toward an airport. Besides, she doesn’t fly anymore. She chooses to blame Aaron for that, because it’s easier than saying the nightmares won’t stop.

-

Even convicts get to place lawsuits, and the last time they’re all together they’re quiet and maybe crying and awarded a few million dollars each. She won’t look at anything but her hands, but at the end she walks by him with a whisper of, “This lie is killing me.”

He tries to stop her with a hand on her wrist, but she breaks free with a light tug, picks Aaron up, and walks away.

-

His car radio sings of Oceanic’s economic troubles. He sighs.

The doorbell chimes a welcome and Kate opens the door. Her face collapses.

“Go away,” she says.

“Kate –” he tries.

“Go away,” she says.

“Talk to me,” he says, and it sounds like begging.

The handle shakes when she shoves the door shut.

Part of him always expected all of them to fall apart like cookie crumble pieces, separated with unification impossible. It’s hard for Jack to look at Aaron without remembering who they left behind, and it’s hard for Kate to look at Jack without remembering absolutely everything else.

Sometimes you can face things. And sometimes you run. Kate can’t run, so she simply retreats.

-

Of course he hears about the trial. It keeps him up at night with the television reporting history he already knows because he helped fabricate it, Kate Austen is one of the so called 'Oceanic Six', survivors of Oceanic Flight 815, which crashed on an island...

The new guy at works asks if he's heard about the trial and Jack wants to stab his eye out with a scalpel.

When her lawyer calls, he smiles. In truth, all he’s ever wanted to do was protect her.

(And she always wanted to protect him. And this is how they are. Were.)

“What do you need me to do?” he asks.

-

When she checked to see if she was pregnant with Kevin’s child, she was looking for a reason to stay. Aaron wasn’t quite what she had in mind, but it makes her stay put. It’s strange, really, that feeling of no longer falling. Her body was accustomed to terminal velocity. And then he came along.

(She’ll tell you he was Aaron. That’s not quite true.)

-

The door to the courtroom opens with a click, and whispers chase his entrance. He buttons his jacket to distract his hands, and tries to remember to breathe like this doesn’t mean everything. But a glance at her quiets it all, no change from the usual, and his footfalls come with confidence he has to pretend he has, for her sake. He shoots a smile in her direction, something quietly understated, and she winces. He sighs low and under his breath.

He raises his hand to lie under oath. She winces.

The story falls out of his mouth like it did the first thousand times. Eight initial survivors, six who made it off, things were so hard, but Kate, “She saved us she – ”

She’s Kate.

And Kate rises from her seat with shaking elbows he knows only he can see and whispers, “Enough.”

Her lawyer nods. Jack wants to shake her and demand, for once, that she let him protect her.

The prosecutor rises with “Do you love the defendant?” like love is a crime in itself, like a damnation, like a transgression, a new circle in hell reserved not for secret lovers but just for those who love. But one more lie never hurt anyone and he flinches, “No. Not anymore.”

He almost cracks, then. There have been years of lies, but that is when he almost cracks.

-

After the trial, he gets a beer. It’s the only thing he can think to do.

His phone buzzes in his pocket and he jumps, hoping to see her name on his caller ID. It’s her lawyer instead, and he picks it up with a leaping heart.

“You still around, doctor?” her lawyer asks.

Jack nods. It takes him a minute to remember her lawyer can’t see him over the phone.

“Yes,” he says, with the single syllable trapped somewhere behind the tonsils.

-

He pulls into the parking lot and waits with the radio running. On the island, he missed the radio, the unpredictability, the way crackling voices could give him everything he wanted or nothing at all. The single escape of sound meant he wasn’t working, he wasn’t sitting; he was in motion, changing, shifting, the radio his guide.

Every clack of heels on pavement makes him jump, but he doesn’t have to wait for her for long. Her hand floats back behind her to tug her hair out of a knot and he sighs, because that’s the Kate he knows, messy and uncontrollable. But he knew – he knows that was only on the outside, and inside she was left with a strange contradiction between loose and choking on her past.

“Hey,” he calls and she stops with a soft smile.

A laugh begs to escape from the back of her throat but she pushes it back behind her tongue. “How’d you know I’d be here?” she asks, but thinks she can almost hear a hint of a childhood giggle behind it.

He shrugs. “Your lawyer. He owed me one.”

She can’t help the soft chuckle there, directed at the floor. She looks back up at him. “Thank you. For saying what you did.”

“You’re welcome,” he laughs.

She shakes her head, remembering. She lived her formative years in lies, her entire life, really, if she thinks about it. She thought she would be used to saying them, or hearing them, doing the cha-cha of fibbing about names and places, dates and times of death.

“You know, Jack,” she says, “I’ve heard you say that story so many times.” She studies his face. “I’m starting to think you believe it.”

That was the wrong thing, once again with the wrong words spilling out of her, she never gets anything right, and she knows because his face falls and he looks around the parking lot for any dash of color but her eyes.

She swallows. He swallows.

She looks away.

He sighs, “I just wanted to tell you that – what I said in there. I didn’t mean it.”

He had rehearsed it in the car, but whispering it to his hands was a lot easier than having to look at her. The last time he told her he loved her, and of course that’s the implication, he didn’t expect a response beyond the way her eyes grew wider. He just wants to see that again. He wants to see anything of her again.

Cars rustle their tires behind them, and she feels so frozen. He feels shakier than he allows her to see. It’s ironic that he feels the need to be strong around her, even now. She has always been the only person he allowed to see him crash. But he keeps his fingers and mouth steady and waits.

A tracing tingle races down her index finger and it twitches. She tries to shake it out. She hears nothing but a racing thump in her stomach where she knows her heart shouldn’t be. Her head pounds too, and she finds herself wondering if maybe her heart isn’t sitting in the right place because he has always been something new, as different from the Kevins of her history as she is from the Kate she was on September 21, 2004.

It’s easy to blame him for that and she grins, “Do you want to follow me? Come by for a visit?”

Echoes of scraping wheels grow louder while the sound of breathing dims. She should know that he can’t do that though. He thought she had learned by now how a small boy makes him shiver like the island never could. Every night, he dreams of them, left behind, struggling and screaming in the dark. He was their leader. He didn’t want to be, but he was, and he abandoned them.

Aaron reminds him of that.

Jack swallows with a sigh to the side. “Oh,” he breathes, “I – I actually have to get over the hospital.” But he can’t watch her walk away again, so he suggests, “But… maybe you and I could grab some coffee together or something.”

He can’t keep the grin in place though, and it falters at the sight of her disappointed frown.

“I know why you don’t want to see the baby, Jack,” she says, because she does know, and she just can’t hate him for it. “But until you do – Until you want to?” She sighs. She doesn’t want to make this firm and final stance. “There’s no you and me going for coffee.”

His face falters, a soft exhalation at the way he lets her down.

“But, um,” she continues with a twinge of hope in her voice he thinks he must be imaging, “if at any time you change your mind, come and see us.”

They both know it’s not going to happen anytime soon. He wants to scream.

“Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”

The pit in her stomach seems permanently lodged there, and she turns to her taxi because escape is always easier. He reaches around her to open the door for her and she smiles a little. It’s strange seeing him in the real world, without the backdrop of a thousand trees.

She tilts her head a little as an apology she can’t control. “Bye,” she says.

He nods, “Bye,” and shuts the door behind her.

The taxi pulls out and he wants her to turn around. He wants her to glance out the rear window with a shy wave, because watching her go has never stopped hurting and he just wants to know if it’s anywhere near as difficult for her.

*
feedback?