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anythingbutgreynote: many thanks to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
miss_mishi for sitting and figuring this out with me and deadduck008 for helping me figure out where to go. ♥ title from vienna teng's 'stray italian greyhound.'
what do i do with a love that won't sit still
Physics was one of her favorite classes in school, the way things push against each other. She used to get straight A’s before she stopped feeling. lost. (kate, jack/kate, hints of sawyer/juliet). spoilers through '316.' pg-13.
On the plane, she compiles a list of things to say. She could start small – I got off for murder – or big – I claimed Aaron as my own – or bigger still – Jack and I were engaged once, but then he broke the insides of me and I haven’t been able to look at him since.
She doesn’t think she’ll start there. It’ll be hard enough to look at Sawyer and know she was never going to come back for him. She won’t talk about Aaron, either.
Small steps, then – a not guilty verdict. That she can taste without the hollow sound of a gag reflex in the background.
-
Three hours, twenty-seven minutes since the shuddering of plane wheels lifting off the ground, she goes to the bathroom and vomits in the toilet.
Head resting against the cool mirror, which shakes along with the vibrations of the plane engines, she tries not to swallow, breathes through her mouth, calculates the force, mass and acceleration of an airplane crash. If six broken people and 48 strangers crash into a solid mass at 500 miles per hour, how many bodies will there be in the morning?
Physics was one of her favorite classes in school, the way things push against each other. She used to get straight A’s before she stopped feeling.
The truth is, the island brought her back to life in some ways. She’ll never admit that to anyone, least of all herself, but before the island her eyes would glisten under fluorescent lighting, but teardrops would rarely spill over. She forgot how to do that. Not too many days on the island, though, Jack challenged her with a tiny airplane toy and memories she could not shake, and she cried. She cried so hard that only afterward did she remember she hadn’t wept in years, not like that, not so that it felt like her insides were crawling up her throat like slugs. Crying came much easier after that, and had to. The island was so hard.
Jack does that to her. Challenges her, breaks her, hurts her, makes her cry, but he always reminds her what it’s like to feel something. That’s why she started loving him. And, much like the crying, once she started she forgot how to stop.
She leans off the mirror, and a sticky, greasy imprint of her skin stays behind. Trying to rub it just makes it worse, so that she can’t make out her face in the reflection anymore. When she goes back to her seat, she is careful to stare at the ground, because she can feel Jack watching her, the faint shading of a stain on her shirt.
-
Five hours, thirteen minutes into the flight, Jack tries to talk to her. He smells like her home smelled when he was living in it, and reminds her of hardwood floors, pancake breakfasts, and blond-haired boys who treated brussels sprouts like baseballs. She tries to breathe through her mouth, but then she can almost taste it. Instead, she stares out the window and tries to keep from breathing at all, tries to keep from feeling him next to her, watching her, waiting for her to move.
“Are you nervous?” he asks, and the words fumble in his mouth. They both know that is a stupid question, a paltry, how about that weather today sort of inquiry. She doesn’t answer, keeps her eyes locked on the blinking red lights on the wingtips.
“I’m so glad you came with us,” he says, trying again, his voice in a whisper and shaking, she thinks.
That’s when she turns to him. “I told you, Jack,” she says, her throat so tight it hurts to speak. She can feel her eyes narrowing and does not wince when he flinches at the inflection of her words, low and angry and sharp. “I didn’t come with you. I didn’t come for you, any of you.”
His chin tilts up. He’s remembering the way they used to play this, when he was the strong one and she had nightmares of jail cells as soon as they got back to shore. “If you didn’t come for us, why did you come?”
He thinks he knows the answer. Sawyer reads across his face and makes him look ashamed, embarrassed, like he should have seen this coming. For half an instant, an instant so fast she doesn’t show it on her face, she wants to reach out, to touch his cheek, the soft skin of him, and remind him how she made her choice long ago, before she ever meant to. Sawyer saw it before she did, she thinks, remembering all the ways he looked at her whenever she looked at Jack, the way Sawyer knew she would come to him when Jack hurt her. She never understood why these men fell in love with her, these brilliant, damaged people who grasped at her limbs and heart like starving children begging for bowls of stale porridge.
Jack watches her. Her fingers pat Morse code SOS on her arm, and she says nothing, turns back to the window. She counts the heartbeats until he walks away.
It’s a lie, though. She did come with him, for him, at least partly. She knows determination when it writes itself across Jack’s face, knows he would have gotten back to that island no matter what, and she didn’t want him going back to that too-warm, too-quiet land alone.
And she knew, she knew, if Ben wanted Aaron on that island, he wouldn’t stop until he had him, and that meant Aaron had to go. Kate has never forgotten the night Claire jumped into her dreams and screamed. So, Kate called Sun, put Aaron on a plane to Sun’s mother, and stopped breathing. She doesn’t remember getting Jack’s apartment key, a long forgotten gift, out of the jewelry box in her closet next to her gun resting in its holster. The engagement ring was still there too, waiting, waiting, waiting. She doesn’t remember taking the taxi to his apartment, or unlocking the door, but she does remember that bed, breathing in the scent of him, remembering how to forget to cry. She learned that skill once; she can do it again.
Maybe she didn’t come for Jack. Maybe that was a lie, she wonders, a finger curling through her hair with a dead stare out the window. Maybe she came so she wouldn’t have to be completely alone in that giant empty house that used to be home.
-
Six hours, two minutes in the air, the plane makes its first groaning tremble. Her eyes shut tight in preparation of impact and all she can see is the first time around, the memories she cannot shake, the way her stomach threatened to clamor out of the very skin of her, the way she thought this is punishment for my sins. Everything was about her then – her sins, her life, her skin burned from the inside out.
For a moment, she almost calls out to Jack, makes him sit next to her, hold her sweaty hands, tell her it will be all right. Then, the plane steadies, pushes on, and her hands are wrapped around her kneecaps so tightly she thinks she might bruise. She forces her fingers to relax, sighs with a scratchy throat, looks back out the window at the bleary, blinking light.
Sometimes it stuns her how much the island changed her. She doesn’t run to the other side of the world anymore; not everything is about her anymore. Her sins are different. Those are all still hers. Those still choke her in the night. Under covers she whispers, Bless me Father, for I have sinned. She’s not a religious person, but she knows about hell, knows she’s going there. She was halfway there once before, in a circle disguised as forestry. Once, she thought Jack would save her.
Now, she thinks she’s too far gone for that. Every minute that goes by she forgets more and more what crying means. The first step is to disassemble the term, to forget its meaning, to turn it foreign, the sort of thing you would have to look up in the dictionary, but you can’t be bothered to do so. The key is to dehumanize it, to make it a thing, a nasty, drunken adopted relative that cackles lusty whims in the night.
Then light it on fire, and all that’s left is ash.
If she closes her eyes the combustion can feel like a fireplace at Christmastime, warm and safe. She doesn’t close her eyes, though. If she does, she sees the crash, she sees Wayne, she sees Aaron, she feels Jack’s eyes on her back again.
-
Seven hours, fifty-eight minutes, and the plane begins to shake again. Her knees bump up and down and this time she knows what is coming, eyes the fasten seatbelt sign like a stoplight. In her head she is counting in sets of fives and making grocery lists and wishing she had never gotten on this plane and wondering if she will die this time and not thinking about Jack.
The bright light that sweeps over them reminds her of hospital rooms, and that is the last thought she carries until the light washes out, and suddenly she is dreaming of when running water did not sound like waterfalls.
She never told Jack how she has been dreaming in black and white since they left the island. That’s the last thing she can remember dreaming until even the dream blinks out.
-
She hears Jack before she sees him. His voice stirs her like a far-away echo at first, but then gets stronger, his hand on her shoulder and a warm breeze in her hair.
When she opens her eyes to look at him she has to immediately look away. The green backdrop of the island is so bright is burns, and he’s looking at her like he thought he lost her again. He’s looking at her like she could break. Her head pounds and the water in her hair feels like blood and coming back to this island feels like dying. His hand wraps around her wrist and her pulse pounds against his fingertips.
She wants to say she wishes this place didn’t feel familiar; she wants to say her unused womb feels pinched from the inside; she wants to say nothing, to cling to him with her arms around his neck like a child, demand he keep her safe and hold her while she cries, as he did just the night before, the two of them tangled and shaking and unable to sleep.
Instead she takes her hand out of his and asks where Ben is. Jack starts planning; this place feels too much like a comfortable old sweater; she is already remembering how to track footsteps in soft dirt, and that is when they hear the car. Her slacks stick to her skin as she stands and she thinks Jin is a mirage until Jack says his name. Though, this place, he could still be a ghost.
She doesn’t touch Jin, even as Jack and Hurley wrap him in quick hugs. If she touches him, it’s real.
-
Jin’s English is nearly perfect by now. She can’t help but stare. Questions roll off his tongue in droves, starting with Sun. He is quiet for a long time when he learns she was on the plane, and loud again when he learns they don’t know where she is. He presses the gas pedal down and the engine whirs. The window is open and warms her face and she closes her eyes and remembers the time she took Aaron on the teacups in Disneyland and he laughed as she tripped over herself when the spinning stopped, the time she took Aaron to the beach and cried, the time she took Aaron to the amusement park with Jack and it was eerily windy, so windy Jack had to carry Aaron to keep him from falling over and it was the coldest day California had seen in a long time, but she never even thought to complain while Jack kept ¬her son close and safe.
As they drive up to the too-familiar yellow houses of the Other’s camp, Jin suddenly stops his shouts about Sun’s return, and turns to look straight at Kate. That panic in her eyes makes her stop breathing.
“Our child?”
His body sings of paternal protection. Kate can’t speak.
“She’s safe,” Jack says, his hand around hers again. “Sun kept her safe.”
Jin swallows with wide eyes. His mouth turns ever so slowly into a smile. “She.”
Jack’s laugh is low. “Yeah,” he says with a grin. “She.”
Around Jack’s hand, her fingers grip until his skin turns red. He does not wince.
-
The Others’ houses look the same as that afternoon where she spied Jack playing football with the enemy. The grass is freshly shorn; sprinklers whiz in the background; the swing set is empty. Her hands are shaking and Jack is watching her and she can feel he wants to touch her. She won’t let him. Grasping his hand in the car was a mistake she will be sure not to repeat. Instead, she takes to looking for sandy blond hair through windows. Sawyer is safe; Sawyer she can touch; Sawyer reminds her of nothing left behind. Jack watches her look around, knowing exactly who she is looking for. After a moment he looks away. She can feel his eyes fall to the ground.
Jin leads them forward across the lawn, and this is when the sound of laughter rings to their right. Her head snaps to the side so quickly her neck stings. Sawyer and Juliet stand laughing and walking out of the forestry. Kate’s eyes narrow. They stand so close their hands brush.
A swift moment later, their eyes lift and both, at the same moment, stop short. Her eyes burn, stepping forward. Juliet stops watching Jack and starts watching Sawyer, the way his mouth forms into an oh that looks like loss of air.
She takes the first step and does not have to look at Jack to feel what he feels. Sawyer does not budge until she is halfway across the field, remains completely still, as though threatened, until he steps forward in a small, jerking motion. At first she thinks he has injured his leg, the way he moves, but then she realizes there’s nothing wrong with him except the paralysis of seeing her. His lips start mouthing her name and that’s when she starts running, collides into his warm and sunburned skin with enough force to make him stumble. His hands shake at his side until he gingerly wraps his arms around her, like he’s not sure she’s real, like he thinks if he touches too heavily she’ll turn to dust.
“Kate,” he whispers.
Her smile is almost real, tucked in the gap between his neck and his shoulder.
“Long time no see,” she says. He does not laugh.
-
Sawyer and Juliet make tea in the next room and she sits on her hands on a lumpy couch. Jack leans against a doorframe with his eyes closed and arms crossed. She can hear the muffles of Sawyer and Juliet’s conversation. She closes her eyes to concentrate on what’s being said but the only thing she can pick out is her name.
When she opens her eyes again she can see Jack is trying to eavesdrop too. He’s not a spy, more of the swing in and save the maiden type, lacks subtlety. His eyes are fixed on the door to the kitchen and his neck cranes forward just slightly and – she can’t help it – a small laugh escapes her.
His eyes slide to hers with something like shock filtering through the pupils, and he asks what’s funny. His smile is soft, kind, surprised, painful. She swallows. The way he looks at her makes her eyes burn again. It reminds her of California, of the way light fell on his skin, the times she laughed until she cried or the other way around, the nights she slept with her body curled into his, the time she stood in front of the mirror and repeated I love you until she was sure she wouldn’t run this time, the way his hands shook when she said it, waking up screaming from nightmares and having him tell her it was over, funerals without bodies where they clasped hands in back corners and made up reasons how they knew Charlie Pace, Shannon Carlisle, birthdays and love notes and roses bought for no reason at all, the engagement ring in the box she left in her armoire because she didn’t want to remember the things she has lost.
“You’re a terrible spy,” she says with a faltering smile.
He laughs, a quiet, surprised sound. “Out of practice.”
The words they say feel soft and delicate, because really it is they who are out of practice with each other. When he put her hand over hers outside Carole Littleton’s motel room, she thought her skin was on fire.
The teapot screeches but they don’t hear it, and instead just stare at each other. It seems impossible that they are now trapped here again, though this time with choice, this time when he is the compass that points north, this time where she does not have to imagine the way he would taste. She can still remember the pads of his fingertips in the night, the days she would miss him so much she thought she could smell him on the wind and would stop and turn around and almost expect to see him standing there. She would dream of him saying her name in that way that spoke of I love yous. It has been two hours since the plane crash, ten hours since the tires lifted into the air, and just twenty-two hours since her nails dug into him to imprint proof of her existence on his skin.
They are still staring at each other when Sawyer walks into the room, and catches them in the act. His eyes reflect with something almost like relief, but mostly like pain. He hands her a cup of tea without looking at her and her cup and saucer sing with the echo of her quivering fingers. The reflection of herself she sees in the tinted water sings of exhaustion, and when she looks up Sawyer is vanishing back into the kitchen where Juliet waits with palms flat on her jeans. Jack is still looking at Kate the way he always has, like he’s still surprised to see her, even more amazed that he could touch her.
In the kitchen, the whispers are soft; in the living room, the clanking of cups against saucers is sharp; in her head, it’s like snow days in childhood, the way the entire world seemed to stop and beckon. Her knees are shaking, but her feet don’t move, and that means she’s staying.
Kate's mother used to say you can run, but you can’t hide and meant for it to be about sins, but it somehow became about love.
miss_mishi for sitting and figuring this out with me and deadduck008 for helping me figure out where to go. ♥ title from vienna teng's 'stray italian greyhound.'what do i do with a love that won't sit still
Physics was one of her favorite classes in school, the way things push against each other. She used to get straight A’s before she stopped feeling. lost. (kate, jack/kate, hints of sawyer/juliet). spoilers through '316.' pg-13.
On the plane, she compiles a list of things to say. She could start small – I got off for murder – or big – I claimed Aaron as my own – or bigger still – Jack and I were engaged once, but then he broke the insides of me and I haven’t been able to look at him since.
She doesn’t think she’ll start there. It’ll be hard enough to look at Sawyer and know she was never going to come back for him. She won’t talk about Aaron, either.
Small steps, then – a not guilty verdict. That she can taste without the hollow sound of a gag reflex in the background.
-
Three hours, twenty-seven minutes since the shuddering of plane wheels lifting off the ground, she goes to the bathroom and vomits in the toilet.
Head resting against the cool mirror, which shakes along with the vibrations of the plane engines, she tries not to swallow, breathes through her mouth, calculates the force, mass and acceleration of an airplane crash. If six broken people and 48 strangers crash into a solid mass at 500 miles per hour, how many bodies will there be in the morning?
Physics was one of her favorite classes in school, the way things push against each other. She used to get straight A’s before she stopped feeling.
The truth is, the island brought her back to life in some ways. She’ll never admit that to anyone, least of all herself, but before the island her eyes would glisten under fluorescent lighting, but teardrops would rarely spill over. She forgot how to do that. Not too many days on the island, though, Jack challenged her with a tiny airplane toy and memories she could not shake, and she cried. She cried so hard that only afterward did she remember she hadn’t wept in years, not like that, not so that it felt like her insides were crawling up her throat like slugs. Crying came much easier after that, and had to. The island was so hard.
Jack does that to her. Challenges her, breaks her, hurts her, makes her cry, but he always reminds her what it’s like to feel something. That’s why she started loving him. And, much like the crying, once she started she forgot how to stop.
She leans off the mirror, and a sticky, greasy imprint of her skin stays behind. Trying to rub it just makes it worse, so that she can’t make out her face in the reflection anymore. When she goes back to her seat, she is careful to stare at the ground, because she can feel Jack watching her, the faint shading of a stain on her shirt.
-
Five hours, thirteen minutes into the flight, Jack tries to talk to her. He smells like her home smelled when he was living in it, and reminds her of hardwood floors, pancake breakfasts, and blond-haired boys who treated brussels sprouts like baseballs. She tries to breathe through her mouth, but then she can almost taste it. Instead, she stares out the window and tries to keep from breathing at all, tries to keep from feeling him next to her, watching her, waiting for her to move.
“Are you nervous?” he asks, and the words fumble in his mouth. They both know that is a stupid question, a paltry, how about that weather today sort of inquiry. She doesn’t answer, keeps her eyes locked on the blinking red lights on the wingtips.
“I’m so glad you came with us,” he says, trying again, his voice in a whisper and shaking, she thinks.
That’s when she turns to him. “I told you, Jack,” she says, her throat so tight it hurts to speak. She can feel her eyes narrowing and does not wince when he flinches at the inflection of her words, low and angry and sharp. “I didn’t come with you. I didn’t come for you, any of you.”
His chin tilts up. He’s remembering the way they used to play this, when he was the strong one and she had nightmares of jail cells as soon as they got back to shore. “If you didn’t come for us, why did you come?”
He thinks he knows the answer. Sawyer reads across his face and makes him look ashamed, embarrassed, like he should have seen this coming. For half an instant, an instant so fast she doesn’t show it on her face, she wants to reach out, to touch his cheek, the soft skin of him, and remind him how she made her choice long ago, before she ever meant to. Sawyer saw it before she did, she thinks, remembering all the ways he looked at her whenever she looked at Jack, the way Sawyer knew she would come to him when Jack hurt her. She never understood why these men fell in love with her, these brilliant, damaged people who grasped at her limbs and heart like starving children begging for bowls of stale porridge.
Jack watches her. Her fingers pat Morse code SOS on her arm, and she says nothing, turns back to the window. She counts the heartbeats until he walks away.
It’s a lie, though. She did come with him, for him, at least partly. She knows determination when it writes itself across Jack’s face, knows he would have gotten back to that island no matter what, and she didn’t want him going back to that too-warm, too-quiet land alone.
And she knew, she knew, if Ben wanted Aaron on that island, he wouldn’t stop until he had him, and that meant Aaron had to go. Kate has never forgotten the night Claire jumped into her dreams and screamed. So, Kate called Sun, put Aaron on a plane to Sun’s mother, and stopped breathing. She doesn’t remember getting Jack’s apartment key, a long forgotten gift, out of the jewelry box in her closet next to her gun resting in its holster. The engagement ring was still there too, waiting, waiting, waiting. She doesn’t remember taking the taxi to his apartment, or unlocking the door, but she does remember that bed, breathing in the scent of him, remembering how to forget to cry. She learned that skill once; she can do it again.
Maybe she didn’t come for Jack. Maybe that was a lie, she wonders, a finger curling through her hair with a dead stare out the window. Maybe she came so she wouldn’t have to be completely alone in that giant empty house that used to be home.
-
Six hours, two minutes in the air, the plane makes its first groaning tremble. Her eyes shut tight in preparation of impact and all she can see is the first time around, the memories she cannot shake, the way her stomach threatened to clamor out of the very skin of her, the way she thought this is punishment for my sins. Everything was about her then – her sins, her life, her skin burned from the inside out.
For a moment, she almost calls out to Jack, makes him sit next to her, hold her sweaty hands, tell her it will be all right. Then, the plane steadies, pushes on, and her hands are wrapped around her kneecaps so tightly she thinks she might bruise. She forces her fingers to relax, sighs with a scratchy throat, looks back out the window at the bleary, blinking light.
Sometimes it stuns her how much the island changed her. She doesn’t run to the other side of the world anymore; not everything is about her anymore. Her sins are different. Those are all still hers. Those still choke her in the night. Under covers she whispers, Bless me Father, for I have sinned. She’s not a religious person, but she knows about hell, knows she’s going there. She was halfway there once before, in a circle disguised as forestry. Once, she thought Jack would save her.
Now, she thinks she’s too far gone for that. Every minute that goes by she forgets more and more what crying means. The first step is to disassemble the term, to forget its meaning, to turn it foreign, the sort of thing you would have to look up in the dictionary, but you can’t be bothered to do so. The key is to dehumanize it, to make it a thing, a nasty, drunken adopted relative that cackles lusty whims in the night.
Then light it on fire, and all that’s left is ash.
If she closes her eyes the combustion can feel like a fireplace at Christmastime, warm and safe. She doesn’t close her eyes, though. If she does, she sees the crash, she sees Wayne, she sees Aaron, she feels Jack’s eyes on her back again.
-
Seven hours, fifty-eight minutes, and the plane begins to shake again. Her knees bump up and down and this time she knows what is coming, eyes the fasten seatbelt sign like a stoplight. In her head she is counting in sets of fives and making grocery lists and wishing she had never gotten on this plane and wondering if she will die this time and not thinking about Jack.
The bright light that sweeps over them reminds her of hospital rooms, and that is the last thought she carries until the light washes out, and suddenly she is dreaming of when running water did not sound like waterfalls.
She never told Jack how she has been dreaming in black and white since they left the island. That’s the last thing she can remember dreaming until even the dream blinks out.
-
She hears Jack before she sees him. His voice stirs her like a far-away echo at first, but then gets stronger, his hand on her shoulder and a warm breeze in her hair.
When she opens her eyes to look at him she has to immediately look away. The green backdrop of the island is so bright is burns, and he’s looking at her like he thought he lost her again. He’s looking at her like she could break. Her head pounds and the water in her hair feels like blood and coming back to this island feels like dying. His hand wraps around her wrist and her pulse pounds against his fingertips.
She wants to say she wishes this place didn’t feel familiar; she wants to say her unused womb feels pinched from the inside; she wants to say nothing, to cling to him with her arms around his neck like a child, demand he keep her safe and hold her while she cries, as he did just the night before, the two of them tangled and shaking and unable to sleep.
Instead she takes her hand out of his and asks where Ben is. Jack starts planning; this place feels too much like a comfortable old sweater; she is already remembering how to track footsteps in soft dirt, and that is when they hear the car. Her slacks stick to her skin as she stands and she thinks Jin is a mirage until Jack says his name. Though, this place, he could still be a ghost.
She doesn’t touch Jin, even as Jack and Hurley wrap him in quick hugs. If she touches him, it’s real.
-
Jin’s English is nearly perfect by now. She can’t help but stare. Questions roll off his tongue in droves, starting with Sun. He is quiet for a long time when he learns she was on the plane, and loud again when he learns they don’t know where she is. He presses the gas pedal down and the engine whirs. The window is open and warms her face and she closes her eyes and remembers the time she took Aaron on the teacups in Disneyland and he laughed as she tripped over herself when the spinning stopped, the time she took Aaron to the beach and cried, the time she took Aaron to the amusement park with Jack and it was eerily windy, so windy Jack had to carry Aaron to keep him from falling over and it was the coldest day California had seen in a long time, but she never even thought to complain while Jack kept ¬her son close and safe.
As they drive up to the too-familiar yellow houses of the Other’s camp, Jin suddenly stops his shouts about Sun’s return, and turns to look straight at Kate. That panic in her eyes makes her stop breathing.
“Our child?”
His body sings of paternal protection. Kate can’t speak.
“She’s safe,” Jack says, his hand around hers again. “Sun kept her safe.”
Jin swallows with wide eyes. His mouth turns ever so slowly into a smile. “She.”
Jack’s laugh is low. “Yeah,” he says with a grin. “She.”
Around Jack’s hand, her fingers grip until his skin turns red. He does not wince.
-
The Others’ houses look the same as that afternoon where she spied Jack playing football with the enemy. The grass is freshly shorn; sprinklers whiz in the background; the swing set is empty. Her hands are shaking and Jack is watching her and she can feel he wants to touch her. She won’t let him. Grasping his hand in the car was a mistake she will be sure not to repeat. Instead, she takes to looking for sandy blond hair through windows. Sawyer is safe; Sawyer she can touch; Sawyer reminds her of nothing left behind. Jack watches her look around, knowing exactly who she is looking for. After a moment he looks away. She can feel his eyes fall to the ground.
Jin leads them forward across the lawn, and this is when the sound of laughter rings to their right. Her head snaps to the side so quickly her neck stings. Sawyer and Juliet stand laughing and walking out of the forestry. Kate’s eyes narrow. They stand so close their hands brush.
A swift moment later, their eyes lift and both, at the same moment, stop short. Her eyes burn, stepping forward. Juliet stops watching Jack and starts watching Sawyer, the way his mouth forms into an oh that looks like loss of air.
She takes the first step and does not have to look at Jack to feel what he feels. Sawyer does not budge until she is halfway across the field, remains completely still, as though threatened, until he steps forward in a small, jerking motion. At first she thinks he has injured his leg, the way he moves, but then she realizes there’s nothing wrong with him except the paralysis of seeing her. His lips start mouthing her name and that’s when she starts running, collides into his warm and sunburned skin with enough force to make him stumble. His hands shake at his side until he gingerly wraps his arms around her, like he’s not sure she’s real, like he thinks if he touches too heavily she’ll turn to dust.
“Kate,” he whispers.
Her smile is almost real, tucked in the gap between his neck and his shoulder.
“Long time no see,” she says. He does not laugh.
-
Sawyer and Juliet make tea in the next room and she sits on her hands on a lumpy couch. Jack leans against a doorframe with his eyes closed and arms crossed. She can hear the muffles of Sawyer and Juliet’s conversation. She closes her eyes to concentrate on what’s being said but the only thing she can pick out is her name.
When she opens her eyes again she can see Jack is trying to eavesdrop too. He’s not a spy, more of the swing in and save the maiden type, lacks subtlety. His eyes are fixed on the door to the kitchen and his neck cranes forward just slightly and – she can’t help it – a small laugh escapes her.
His eyes slide to hers with something like shock filtering through the pupils, and he asks what’s funny. His smile is soft, kind, surprised, painful. She swallows. The way he looks at her makes her eyes burn again. It reminds her of California, of the way light fell on his skin, the times she laughed until she cried or the other way around, the nights she slept with her body curled into his, the time she stood in front of the mirror and repeated I love you until she was sure she wouldn’t run this time, the way his hands shook when she said it, waking up screaming from nightmares and having him tell her it was over, funerals without bodies where they clasped hands in back corners and made up reasons how they knew Charlie Pace, Shannon Carlisle, birthdays and love notes and roses bought for no reason at all, the engagement ring in the box she left in her armoire because she didn’t want to remember the things she has lost.
“You’re a terrible spy,” she says with a faltering smile.
He laughs, a quiet, surprised sound. “Out of practice.”
The words they say feel soft and delicate, because really it is they who are out of practice with each other. When he put her hand over hers outside Carole Littleton’s motel room, she thought her skin was on fire.
The teapot screeches but they don’t hear it, and instead just stare at each other. It seems impossible that they are now trapped here again, though this time with choice, this time when he is the compass that points north, this time where she does not have to imagine the way he would taste. She can still remember the pads of his fingertips in the night, the days she would miss him so much she thought she could smell him on the wind and would stop and turn around and almost expect to see him standing there. She would dream of him saying her name in that way that spoke of I love yous. It has been two hours since the plane crash, ten hours since the tires lifted into the air, and just twenty-two hours since her nails dug into him to imprint proof of her existence on his skin.
They are still staring at each other when Sawyer walks into the room, and catches them in the act. His eyes reflect with something almost like relief, but mostly like pain. He hands her a cup of tea without looking at her and her cup and saucer sing with the echo of her quivering fingers. The reflection of herself she sees in the tinted water sings of exhaustion, and when she looks up Sawyer is vanishing back into the kitchen where Juliet waits with palms flat on her jeans. Jack is still looking at Kate the way he always has, like he’s still surprised to see her, even more amazed that he could touch her.
In the kitchen, the whispers are soft; in the living room, the clanking of cups against saucers is sharp; in her head, it’s like snow days in childhood, the way the entire world seemed to stop and beckon. Her knees are shaking, but her feet don’t move, and that means she’s staying.
Kate's mother used to say you can run, but you can’t hide and meant for it to be about sins, but it somehow became about love.
