Lost -- The Limits of Who We Are
Jun. 9th, 2010 05:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anythingbutgreyTitle: The Limits of Who We Are
Ship (Fandom): Jack/Kate, Kate/Sawyer, Sawyer/Juliet (Lost)
Spoilers: Full series
A/N: Many thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sweet_iolanthe and likeserendipity for their feedback. Title is from Rilo Kily's "August."
Summary: It’s like re-learning to speak. That’s the only way she can describe it. Language tastes different in her mouth, stale and foreign and not hers. Speech should belong to people who have the words to go with it. Kate has lost hers.
Kate is very good at breathing. This is what she tells Claire in the first days after they get off the Island, because Claire doesn’t understand how Kate keeps still, keeps sane. Kate just tells Claire she has a lot of practice, and holds Claire’s hand after nightmares. Kate has her own vicious, clawing terrors, but she has never been one to wake up screaming. Claire can’t hear Kate’s choked gasps in the night from her room down the hall. Neither can Sawyer, who is sprawled out on the pullout couch in the living room for a few weeks. Miles spends a couple days in her home too. Her house feels like a respite for refugees. She doesn’t mind. In all honesty, she needs them there. It’s bad enough being in this house at all – after Jack left she kept seeing him out of the corner of her eye and now it’s even worse. She’ll see any object and turn it into a fragmentary image of him stepping into view, and her throat will close. But it’s never him, of course. Of course. It would be worse if she were in the house by herself.
Having Claire in the house also gives her something to distract herself with. Claire is – Kate isn’t sure how to describe it, but erratic might be best. She does not stay still. She barely sleeps. Sometimes she reaches around her like she’s expecting to still feel a gun hanging off her shoulder. She refuses to see Aaron for weeks. When Kate tells Claire that Aaron is with her mother, Claire just freezes. The nightmares are the worst that night. And though Kate hates to admit it, making sure Claire doesn’t just snap in two like stale gingerbread does keep her distracted.
It’s almost a hierarchy they have planned: Kate watches Claire, Sawyer watches Kate, Miles watches all of them. He has lost the least. Sawyer has carried around Juliet’s death for long enough to have begun to deal with it, albeit very poorly. There are many nights with alcohol and more with tears and seeing Sawyer sobbing in his sleep is one of the worst things Kate has ever seen. It burns with a sense of impossibility, like nothing should have been able to break him like that. She’s not sure who has it worse – Sawyer, who keeps dreaming of getting to Juliet a moment earlier, of saving her life, and then waking to this reality, or Kate, who can’t stop hoping Jack is somewhere on the Island, building a raft, about to come home to her any day now. Any day. She will wait.
Four days after they get back from the Island, her parole officer shows up at her door. For a horrible minute, Kate realizes she has no idea even what day it is, when her last or next meeting was meant to occur. The last four days have been nothing but off-on sleeping and nightmares that occur even while awake. If Kate has missed a meeting, she could go to jail. If her parole officer has found out she left the state, she will go to jail. But Meryl just smiles in her doorway, walks to the kitchen so Kate can fill out some forms, and frowns at the sight of Claire, Sawyer and Miles, all in various extents of disarray, in Kate’s living room. The three eye Meryl with a mix of shock and fear and disdain, even though they don’t know who she is.
“I see you have guests,” Meryl announces, defensive and shaky, like an animal behind plexiglass at the zoo.
Claire crosses her arms. Sawyer scowls. Miles simply stares.
“Family,” Kate explains.
On her way out, Meryl realizes she didn’t see Aaron. Kate says he’s on a playdate, and closes the door in Meryl’s all-too-cheery face.
“Who was that?” Miles asks as soon as Kate steps into the living room. The four of them are in sweatpants and t-shirts, freshly scrubbed, and completely wrecked. The tangles still haven’t come out of Claire’s hair. Sawyer looks like he hasn’t slept in months, with tired eyes and shaky hands. Miles looks exhausted too, but not as much as the rest of them. Kate doesn’t know what she looks like, but she imagines it isn’t a happy sight. She hasn’t been able to look in the mirror yet.
“My parole officer,” Kate responds. Claire blinks.
“One day you’ll have to tell us that story,” Sawyer says.
Kate looks at him. When she thinks of her trial, she can only think of her mother, and she can only think of Jack, the way she felt so small at the sight of him, how he was the last and also the only person she wanted to see. She thinks about the parking lot, she thinks about the day he changed his mind about seeing Aaron and just showed up on her doorstep, she thinks about taking him into her bed that night and how impossible it seemed that it was the first time when he had been so entirely a part of her for so long, she remembers the ring still tucked under clothes in her drawer, she remembers the day he left her, she remembers that last kiss on the Island, still heavy and pressing and familiar, she remembers the moment the Island disappeared from sight.
“Maybe one day,” Kate says.
Two and a half weeks later, Miles is already gone and Sawyer says he’s leaving. Not for long or to go far, he says, but he needs to see Clementine. Kate grimaces. She can’t help but think she’s done something unforgivable. She keeps such thoughts to herself. It reminds her of Kate before the Island, so very long ago, when everything wrong in the world was her fault.
“And I think it’s time I got a place of my own,” he says, though he’s clearly wary at the thought. He’s supposed to be dead. That could be difficult to work with. When Kate points this out, he says, “There’s still a conman somewhere in here,” and tries to smile. Kate shivers. Claire frowns. Miles is already gone. It’s hard being in a space with them, she knows. They’re all looking for ghosts – sometimes other people’s, sometimes of who they once were.
“Do you think you’ll be okay without me?” Sawyer asks, like he knows Kate will lie.
“We’ll be fine,” Kate says. Her lying has gotten worse. Jack was bad for her. Sawyer frowns.
“I’ll be back soon,” he promises. “You’ll get sick of me quickly.”
She can’t help but laugh a little at that. There are all of five people she can be honest with in her life. She’ll never get sick of them. She can’t.
“Tell Cassidy I say hi,” she says as he walks out the door. He gives a little nod, a barely-there affirmation, and watches Kate’s eyes until the moment the door shuts.
He’s only gone for two days. It’s hard. The day he leaves, Claire is very, very quiet, and then she announces that she wants to see Aaron. Her eyes shimmer like the rivers on the Island on stormy days, but Kate says, “Okay.”
When she picks up the phone, her hand shakes. She’s not ready to give Aaron up. She shouldn’t have pretended she ever would be. Claire’s mother cries when she calls, when Kate says Claire is alive. It doesn’t even sound like tears – it sounds like an eruption, or the wrenching-open, somehow-familiar noise the smoke monster made. It sounds like something coming loose. Something inside Kate’s chest jumps in jealousy. She hasn’t cried yet. Not even in her sleep.
Claire’s mother brings Aaron to Kate’s that evening, and there are more tears than Kate can watch. She can’t look at Claire’s mother tell her she loves her, and she can’t look at Claire with Aaron, and so she locks herself in her bedroom for the rest of the night. She’s somehow surprised to see them there the next morning. She’s accustomed to being abandoned. She would have survived it. Even expected it. But there are Claire and Aaron the next morning, him curled up and still sleeping on the couch, her standing by the refrigerator, staring inside and very clearly not knowing what to do with its contents.
“What are you doing?” Kate asks, and she’s not sure if she means what are you doing in the kitchen or what are you doing still in the house.
Claire jumps. She twitches toward the invisible gun on her back. She turns to Kate, her face relaxing.
“I wanted to make breakfast,” she stumbles. “It’s been a while.”
Kate smiles a little. She pulls out pancake mix, eggs, milk, chocolate chips. Claire watches every step. Ten minutes later, the smell of pancakes wafts through the house and Aaron stumbles into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes. He looks right at Kate and says, “Mommy, did you make pancakes?”
She can’t even think about Claire in that moment. All she can do is bend down, take Aaron in her arms, and cry. When, a few minutes later, she has reduced her sobs to small sniffles, Claire rests a hand on her shoulder and says, “I was thinking maybe Aaron and I could stay.”
Kate gapes up at her. Claire is crying too, a few dripping tears falling off her chin onto her shoulders, but she is smiling. Kate grins.
“I would love that,” she says, and something inside her dares to hope she might be okay one day.
Sawyer comes back two days later with a job, a down payment on an apartment across town, and a lot of fake papers that say he’s not dead and very good at security.
“I’m thinking maybe I’ll be a cop one day,” he says, with a hint of that old glimmer in his eye that she’s familiar with. “That seems appropriate, somehow.”
Kate smiles. Since she did it the first time it’s gotten easier. “I would love to see that. You a cop; me a mom. Things that would have seemed impossible not too long ago.”
Sawyer smirks a little, looking toward the kitchen where Claire and Aaron are coloring. His smile falls. “So, they’re both staying with you.”
Kate nods. “I mean, mothering used to be a community thing. I’ve seen stranger things, after all.”
Sawyer blinks. Kate winces.
“Anyway,” she rushes, after a pause. “She’s practically family anyway. After everything, and especially since she’s Jack’s sister and he and I –”
She stops short, stops breathing, stops moving. It’s the first time she’s said Jack’s name since they left the Island. The inside of her mouth tastes suddenly bitter, like full of ash and dirt. Sawyer’s hand is suddenly on her shoulder. She briefly wonders if she was swaying on her feet.
“Sorry,” she gasps.
He shakes his head. “Don’t,” he says, and his voice is just barely above a whisper. “I know.”
She looks at him. His hands shake, his eyes wide and shining. It’s heavier than she could ever describe, feeling the grief of another person simply because it is the same shape and weight as your own. It’s the common and yet different memories, where the settings and characters are slightly apart but the feelings are the same. It’s an exhausting moment. She has to look away.
“I don’t think this will ever stop hurting,” she whispers. She doesn’t want Sawyer to tell her it will be okay, she doesn’t want promises of healing years, she doesn’t want to think about a time she can look back on Jack and smile.
“No,” he says. “It won’t. But I’m told it starts to hurt less.”
Kate nods. She knows. She knows how grief works. She’s felt it, she’s watched it, she’s caused it. It always gets better. Still, she can’t imagine it ever being okay. She should have done everything differently. She should have told him she loved him the instant she knew, a moment she remembers with absolute clarity. It was the day the cave collapsed on him and she was so sure he could not be dead just because if he were, she would simply stop. She should have said it then. She should have said it then and never stopped. How different would their lives be if she had been brave enough to admit it? She can’t bear to think about it, but she also can’t stop. Her hands are shaking, but she only notices when she sees them stretched out and shivering in front of her. Her body doesn’t feel like hers.
“I know,” Sawyer says. “I know.”
The next day, Kate wakes up and knows with absolute certainty that Jack is dead, that he has been dead, and that she never felt when it happened. There’s something wrong about that. She had somehow always thought she would feel when he was ripped away from the world. But she knows now. She can’t get out of bed all day, and Claire brings her tea and sings lullabies and Sawyer comes over and spends hours holding her and Kate just cries.
Time starts to go faster. It feels like a sin. She has nights without nightmares and learns to smile again. It takes weeks for the first and months for the second, but it does happen, and she doesn’t remember why or how. She still reaches to the right side of the bed in the middle of the night. She does still have daydreams of burning this house and all the memories it holds to the ground. She knows how to make it look like an accident. She still sees Jack everywhere. All the pictures of him in her house have been turned face down, and though she knows she must have been the one to do so, she can’t remember when.
But there are light days now. Sawyer gets Claire fake papers so that when she’s better she can get a job. Kate can’t. An innocent verdict doesn’t get do much for her arrest history on job applications. It’s his last illegal deed, he declares, studying for his police exams. He’s at Kate’s house so often she starts to tell him he should just give up renting the apartment and move in with her. He says he’ll consider it. They smile. It’s strange, but it starts to feel less and less wrong. Clementine has playdates with Aaron and Cassidy just looks back and forth between Sawyer and Kate and Claire sitting on the couch, this odd little family that they somehow built together.
“There’s more to this story you’ll have to tell me someday,” Cassidy says one day, helping Kate make tea in the kitchen.
Kate looks at her. There’s a spark of jealousy in Cassidy’s eye.
“I don’t love him,” Kate says, though what she really means is she loves him in that way one can only love an old lover turned friend. That’s too complicated, though. She lives in the nation of too complicated.
“Really?” Cassidy asks, and now the light in her eye is different, somehow hopeful.
Kate frowns. “He’s in love with a dead woman, Cassidy,” she snaps. She didn’t mean to shout, and she knows she and Juliet weren’t the closest by any stretch of the imagination, but Juliet is one of the many ghosts in this house and Kate will protect all of them until the day she dies.
Cassidy frowns. She comes over less after that, but Sawyer still brings Clementine around.
A warm Tuesday evening, Aaron asks when Jack will be back to read to him. Kate does not breathe, and spends the night on the bathroom floor, shivering on the cool tiles and pretending Claire can’t hear her scream.
Loss is a familiar thing. It’s a cold, stretched out sheet that covers her and leaves her shivering, but it’s a sensation she’s accustomed to. She understands its ticks, its bursts and recessions. If she concentrates, she can remember when her sorrows felt like a dull hum instead of this constant banging in her skull. She also remembers that every loss feels worse than the one that came before, impossible and tearing in its moment. This time, though, she thinks it might be true. There is a long, expansive space in front of her where all she can see is not Jack not Jack not Jack. It’s like re-learning to speak. That’s the only way she can describe it. Language tastes different in her mouth, stale and foreign and not hers. Speech should belong to people who have the words to go with it. Kate has lost hers.
There’s a knock on the bathroom door. It makes her jump, the only noise that has not come from her in however long. She doesn’t know how long she’s been in there, and she doesn’t know if she’s slept. She knows she hasn’t eaten. She knows her bones ache and her throat is completely dry. She knows this is the first time she’s noticed. The sound at the door brings her out of herself. She doesn’t like it.
“Kate,” a voice calls from behind the door. Sawyer. She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t know who Kate is. When she remembers, she gasps, grabs at her chest, feeling for some sort of life beneath.
“Kate, let me in,” he says. The handle jostles. Kate stares at the shaking metal. Reverberating in the bathroom and echoing in her skull, it sounds like an earthquake.
“Kate,” Claire calls, further away and far more tentative. Kate closes her eyes and imagines them on the other side, Sawyer with his eyes closed, fist and forehead pressed against the doorframe with Claire lingering far back, not knowing what she should do. Aaron is probably in bed or planted in front of the television. They would never bring him to her wreckage. She feels a vague prick of shame at Claire encountering this. Kate’s supposed to be the strong one. She has always played the part well.
There’s a knock at the door. Kate jumps again. Sawyer calls, “Kate, just let me know you’re okay in there. Are you okay?”
She doesn’t know how to answer that exactly. “I’m here,” she says. That is true enough. She rests her hand against the chilly countertop. Not too long ago, Jack’s razor rested on the left side of the sink. “I’m here,” she says again, low enough that only she can hear it.
A raggedy sigh rustles through the door. “Kate,” Sawyer says, too calmly, “please open the door.”
The handle jostles again. Kate takes a step back.
“Claire,” she hears Sawyer say, “could you give us a minute?”
There is a pause, the rustle of feet. Kate presses her back against the wall.
“Kate,” Sawyer says. Every time he says her name she keeps expecting Jack’s voice. She shakes her head to try and get it out. The bathroom was a poor hiding spot. Everything echoes.
“What do you want, Sawyer?” she asks. She tries to sound strong but her voice cracks in different ways on every syllable. Speaking exhausts. Kate leans her head against the wall and closes her eyes.
“I want to talk to you,” he says. She scowls. “I understand what you’re going through, okay?”
She wants to scream, she wants to pull open the door and punch him, she wants to fold into herself and disappear because he doesn't understand, except, she knows, he does. Their losses are parallel.
“When Juliet –” he continues from the other side of the door, “when she died, it felt like someone had injected me with cyanide. I didn’t think I would survive another day. I understand, Kate. And I don’t know if it ever gets easier, but we’re here, and there are people who need us. No matter who we miss, we – we live for what we’ve got.”
Kate closes her eyes, a series of tears sliding down and making her face feel sticky and wet. “What if I can’t?” she asks before she can stop herself. All she wants to do is stop. She doesn’t care if it’s selfish, she doesn’t care if Claire or Aaron need her, she doesn’t even entertain the notion that Sawyer might need her, she just wants to stop.
“I don’t know, Freckles,” he murmurs. “I’m still working on that one.”
Kate inhales, exhales, counts each breath to make sure she still has one left. She walks to the door, but it feels more like watching herself move than making herself move. The lock turns with a quiet click. When she opens the door, she sees Sawyer sitting by the doorpost. He looks at her when she steps through the threshold and sits down next to him.
“I hate him,” she whispers, staring at her hands. She had meant to say something else, though she can’t remember what, and once she says it she knows it is the only thing she could say. “I hate him. He chose that place. Again.”
Her mouth burns even as she speaks, as though lined with chili powder. In the back of her mind she thinks it must be hypocritical. She is the one who deviated, she is the one who refused to acknowledge what he was to her until too late, she is the one who spent time trying to love the wrong man because she couldn’t handle loving the right one. Surely, somewhere along the path it became her fault. She is used to that paradigm.
“I’d hate him too,” Sawyer says.
When Kate looks up at him, tears in her eyes blur his face into a vaguely recognizable watercolor. “He said the Island was the only thing he hadn’t ruined. But we could have fixed it. We could have tried. And instead he just left.”
Her voice cracks on the last word. When she blinks the last batch of tears from her eyes, she sees Sawyer is shuffling toward her. He reaches an arm around her, pulling her close. She rests her head against his shoulder. Juliet’s ghost taps at her arm.
“I know,” Sawyer whispers in that way that Kate recognizes to mean he wants to say something else, something more, something to make it hurt less. She understands the tone; she’s used it with him before, by the docks, the whispering waves of the ocean rustling in her ear like the torn up tissue paper from already-opened gifts.
In a few minutes she will stand, walk to the kitchen, make tea, pretend to smile. Her knees will keep her upright and she will not see ghosts. She will stop having nightmares while still awake. Her body will feel like hers again, not some foreign entity she’s been stuffed inside of. In a few minutes she will stand. She will. Everything will be okay.
(In a few minutes, she does stand. Nothing is okay.)
It’s her birthday again. Time doesn’t mean much to her anymore, having spent so much time negotiating it. Sawyer brings a cake and Clementine around, and even Cassidy stops by for a bit. Kate feels uncomfortable to look at her. Once upon a time, Cassidy was the only person in the world she could talk to. But that feels so far away now. Impossible, even. She doesn’t even know why it’s so difficult for her to look at Cassidy now – maybe it’s just that Cassidy carries so much of Kate’s past with her. It should be comforting. It’s not.
There’s a chocolate cake, and candles, and poorly wrapped gifts from Sawyer and apologetic smiles from Claire. She didn’t know it was Kate’s birthday. Kate doesn’t mind. Even she forgot until the day before. Clementine sings along to the Disney movie playing on TV while Aaron watches, transfixed, and rolls a truck along the carpet. While Kate watches them, she can’t help but feel like she has lost them somehow. Aaron she shares with Claire; Clementine felt like family but now feels like someone else’s. She never says any of it out loud. But these feelings don’t help the already-present lack.
Clementine heads home with Cassidy that evening. After Claire puts Aaron to bed, the three of them sit on her couch and talk about the Island. They’re still talking about the Island. Kate supposes they will always be talking about the Island, trying to expel their memories through words. She should ask Sawyer if his nightmares are getting worse too. After Claire goes to bed, it’s just her and Sawyer on her couch with the flickering light of the muted television screen. She watches the ticker on the news drive by. More deaths. More wars. More plane crashes, but none in the Pacific. Sometimes, even, everyone survives, teeters in Hudson River until rescue comes ten minutes later. Kate hates them.
“One of these days,” Sawyer says, sipping a can of beer, “some plane’s going to crash on our island. I keep thinking about it. About our first day there, how scared we all were.”
Kate closes her eyes. A series of images skip in her mind – the trees and the handcuffs and Jack and stitches and fire and Jack and the monster and Jack.
“At least the monster is gone now,” she says weakly.
Sawyer nods. “At least there’s that.”
They’re quiet for a moment. Kate bows her head, a moment of silence for the grief yet to come to people she will never meet. Sometimes she has dreams of burning the Island to the ground and salting the earth.
“It seems so impossible that it’s just the three of us left,” she whispers. “When we landed there were nearly 50 of us. Three of us made it off that island in one piece.”
“If you can call us in one piece,” Sawyer mumbles. Kate doesn’t think he meant to say it out loud, because he looks at her like he’s embarrassed. “I just mean,” he starts, but she shakes her head.
“I know what you mean, James.”
They watch each other for a moment, the various colors from the television screen playing across his face, flashing to red, then green, then a cool blue.
“The world just feels a lot smaller these days, Freckles,” he says.
She nods. It really is just the two of them in the end, Claire and Miles floating on the outskirts of their large losses, their little sins. They can listen and nod and Claire might even understand somewhere in there, what with losing Charlie so long ago. But the wound isn’t fresh and, Kate can't help but guiltily think, it was never as deep. Claire kept breathing, kept moving, kept laughing, kept living. Kate’s still doing all of those things and it looks like the real thing to anyone who doesn’t know the signs. Sawyer gets it. She can wrap herself up in him and find the one person in the entire world who understands her.
So, she does. She moves across the couch to close the half-foot of space between them. He watches her as she travels, eyes wide, mouth slightly parted in surprise. He knows her well enough to know her intentions.
“Kate,” he whispers, low and throaty. Something in his voice rings of caution signs.
She shakes her head. “Don’t,” she says. She is already crying and pretending she isn’t. She watches his still open eyes as she leans him and kisses him once, softly, gently, lips closed. When she pulls a fraction of an inch away to look at him, his eyes are closed. His hushed, shallow breathing is still loud enough to hear in the silent room.
“Don’t,” she says again, pressing her lips against his once more, open mouthed. His hand presses the small of her back and pulls her in and she tries to push out every thought of Jack, every thought of palm trees and open fields. Sawyer reminds her of years ago, and his body is familiar and strange to her, and it feels like a sin, it feels like a betrayal, it feels like the only thing she has left.
The next morning there is a half-second instead upon waking where she forgets the body next to her isn’t imagined or Jack or both. In the bleary moments of first waking, she jumps a little when she sees Sawyer’s blond hair spilled across her pillows before remembering. She slips out of bed silently, showers as quickly as possible, wraps a robe around herself and steps out of the bathroom. Her plan is to sneak downstairs, drink coffee, and try to come up with something to say when he wakes up. She had been trying to think of something in the shower, but her mind was full of a low hum, like radio static. But before she can slip out the door, Sawyer mumbles, turns on his side and opens his eyes to look at her. She freezes. It’s not that she regrets what happened; it’s nothing as simple as that. It’s that this is re-doing history long dead in the company of ghosts. They’ve been here before, as two entirely different people than they are now. She remembers being in the Others’ camp back when it was Locke’s camp, years ago, before she ever dreamed of engagement rings. That Sawyer woke in the morning with a leering grin. That Kate ran away. This Sawyer doesn’t smile at all. He sits up, watches her, and doesn’t blink.
“I was just,” she begins, gesturing toward the door.
He shakes his head, getting out of bed, stepping into his jeans and walking to her. She remains in place, her feet glued to the floor. It’s been a long time since she ran from something, but it’s still instinct. It’s also an instinct she’s gotten used to fighting. Maybe it started when she got Aaron, but she thinks it began much earlier, their first day on the Island, and Jack saying, “You’re not running now.” Kate shakes her head, as though trying to push the memory out even though memories are all she has left.
Sawyer stops in front of her. She tries to look him in the eye but on contact she winces as though looking into bright light and looks away. He lifts her chin to make her look at him, though, and she does. She stares right at him and it burns, it burns, it burns.
“Don’t,” he says. He kisses her. She doesn’t close her eyes.
He stays for breakfast. She calls him James when she asks him to pass the milk, the name sticky on her tongue. Claire smiles at them over the edge of her coffee mug. When she leaves to shower and get dressed, Kate stares at the center of her own coffee for a long moment. Her reflection in the dark liquid makes her face look like it is covered in dirt.
“You regretting what happened?” Sawyer asks.
She shakes her head immediately. She doesn’t. “It’s just… strange.” It’s the truth.
He nods. After a minute of stale silence he says, “When I woke up this morning I thought you were her.”
Kate looks at him. “When I woke up this morning,” she says, and her voice is not as even as his, “I thought you were him.”
He blinks only once, and almost looks relieved. “So, that’s where we are.”
Her shoulders relax immediately, though she hadn’t noticed they were tense, bunched up too close to her ears. “Yeah,” she says, smiling a little, perhaps her first real grin in a long time. “That’s where we are.”
The crazy thing, the absolutely craziest thing about being with Sawyer – and she still can’t call him James, and he doesn’t expect her too – is that it actually fixes her. Not entirely, not by any means, but it bridges the gap between breathing and living. It takes time. She smiles a couple times here and there, and then it becomes a regular event. The first time she laughs they’re both so startled by the event that they just stare at each other in the supermarket until she bursts into tears by the mangos. It’s not a straight, linear path out. It oscillates. She takes three steps forward, one back, but she still makes progress. It can’t last, and she doesn’t think either of them expects it to. They know all too well the difference between loving someone and being so in love with someone the mere act of saying it out loud pales in comparison to all the light and warmth inside. They have the former. Kate knows they could settle for it, but they can’t settle for it with each other, not knowing what they know. The problem is, simply, that neither of them is ever quite free of their ghosts. She keeps expecting short dark hair beneath her fingers. There are still nights where she reaches for Jack and yes, she finds a body now, but it's not the right one. But he does make her better. He makes her better.
One day, one day unlike any of the other days, she looks at him while he’s reading a book and says, “Thank you.” He opens his mouth as though to ask what for, but the look in her eyes says enough and he smiles, quiet and also grateful and a little sad, and says, “Anytime, Freckles.”
It's an ending. Sawyer smiles a little, as best he can, and she does too, and he never distances himself from their makeshift family, but also never stays the night.
The months begin to pass. Then, the years, and they go so quickly. She never stops seeing Jack everywhere – in the corner of her reflection in the mirror, on street corners, as an extra in the background of films. She can’t say it’s a loss she ever gets over but it is a dull ache she grows accustomed to, like weak knees. It feels like a slow chill that creeps across the body at any time of the day or night, and it becomes as much a part of her as her own hands.
All the same, she keeps living. It’s a quiet life, the kind Kate never expected she could ever have, not with arrest warrants or Island inhabitants chasing after her. And, surprisingly, there are lovers, men who never know her secrets and men who she trusts enough just to say she loved someone so entirely she could never love them with all she had, lovers who are okay with that and more who are not, and around age fifty – an age she never thought she would reach – she decides it’s not worth the hassle. She has her family. She has Claire and she has Aaron and she has Sawyer and it’s not everything, but it’s enough. She doesn’t know how the decades pass in such a quick slight of hand given how slowly her younger years seemed to move, but they go quickly and surely and Kate is always tired but always alive enough to keep going.
That is, until one day, at age 62, when her chest flares up and she knows, quite clearly, that this is the only way she would go, her heart sighing into sleep. There is a moment, before her eyes shut, when she sees a church, and a light, and Jack as clear and alive and in love as the last moment she saw him, and she hopes, she prays, she falls asleep.
Somewhere, another Claire in another world gives birth to another Aaron, and Kate Austen wakes up.
She looks at Claire and remembers the jungle, remembers the sticky heat and the cooling breeze, remembers smoke and guns and the ocean but she doesn’t remember quite everything yet. It keeps coming back and funneling into her and her head still pounds with knowledge of a life once lived and lost when she turns to Desmond and asks what they’re supposed to do now.
He smiles a little, just a little, and says, “Now you wait for Jack.”
Jack. Jack. The name barrels into her and leaves her breathless. The visions flashing through her mind take different tone, and she has to sit down on the couch because all she can see is Jack. She remembers stitching Jack up the day they crashed. She remembers the day the cave collapsed on him and she was so terrified it seemed impossible, like her body shouldn’t have even been able to contain so much fear, and she remembers the relief so overwhelming it made her dizzy when he stumbled out alive. She remembers the day they first kissed, when she grabbed him and kissed him because he was the only thing that still made sense, because she thought he might save her back before she saved herself. She remembers after the Island, the day he came to her house with a shy shrug and asked if he could come in. She remembers the night he proposed and how she thought she would never have to be alone ever again. She remembers that last moment together on the Island, the way she breathed him in and how when he walked away it burned so deeply she couldn’t watch. And she remembers what came after, the daily aches like something inside her had been cut away with a dull knife. She takes in a sharp breath, remembering all that pain all at once.
So, she waits. Charlie, Claire and Desmond peal away to the church, and she waits. She expected it to be easy. She expected, after decades of waiting, for it to be easy to wait those last twenty minutes. It isn’t. Her hands shake, her suddenly young-again hands, free of the wrinkles of her former life. She walks back and forth across the grass in heels that she wouldn’t have been able to walk in at all during her latter years. Her body feels foreign. Every passing sound in the distance makes her jump. The cleanup workers for the concert pass by and she looks up at every sound they make, expecting Jack and still not daring herself to hope that he could just be here, right in front of her. She knows it’s happening, she knows he’ll be here, but after years and years of needing it, it just doesn’t seem possible.
But, then, there he is. Looking lost and late in a way that makes her smile even as her heart beats so hard it sounds like a demolition site in her chest. And she does smile, she smiles wide and young and more alive than she was for most of the years she was alive, because there he is, right in front of her. Her great loss, found again.
“It’s over,” she says, and even as she speaks she’s surprised how calm sounds.
“Excuse me?” he says, turning to her. Her heart stops. She keeps breathing. He sounds the same. Of course he does, of course, but he sounds the same as she remembers him sounding, like her brain caught snippets of his speech and saved it for replay in the years without him.
“The concert. It’s over.” She tilts her head. “Are you looking for someone?”
Me, she thinks. The more she stands in front of him, oddly, the calmer she feels. Her heart is already slowing down to its normal patterns. She’s not surprised. Being around him did make her finally, finally slow down..
“My son,” he says. “I was supposed to bring him here tonight, and then I couldn’t come, and…”
He turns and stares at her. “Where do I remember you from?” he asks.
She grins. She remembers, quite suddenly, the way he stared at her as she fled the airport like he knew her. She remembers the way she stared back. They didn’t even need Desmond pulling strings, she thinks. In another life, Jack once told her that if they were meant to be together, they were meant to be together. She hated him so much that day, for wanting to erase everything they were. But she was never good at saying no to Jack. Most days, she could say no to anything but Jack.
“I stole your pen,” she says, the old butterflies back again. This is a story even he doesn’t know. “Oceanic 815 from Sydney. I bumped into you coming out of the bathroom and I stole your pen.”
He frowns. “And that’s how I know you?”
The smile she had been carrying fades away. The butterflies have turned back into birds, pecking at her from the inside, trying to propel her forward where every part of her wants to touch him, to make him remember, to kiss him, to be near to him, to make sure he’s alive.
“No,” she says. “That’s not how you know me.”
Everything inside her aches, burns, and she wants to cry, she wants to throw her arms around him and weep. She can’t remember all the joys of loving him and the pains of losing him at the same time and by herself. It’s too much. He’s watching her like he doesn’t know what to say, like the words and their life is on the tip of his tongue but he can’t get it out. It’s her turn now. It’s her turn to wake him up. But she can’t. For a split, terrible second, she just can’t move. She knows she has no reason to fear. She wouldn’t be here if he didn’t love her. None of them would be. But she doesn’t know how to start, she doesn’t know how to say how every day without him was a day characterized by something missing, she doesn’t know how to say she never stopped loving him, she doesn’t know how to say anything without wanting to split open, spout tears like boiling water from a geyser, burn his skin if he gets too close.
Kate breathes in, and takes one, two, three, four, five steps forward, inviting in her pain once so accustomed to, pain that flares up at the sight of him. She invites in her fear. By the time she gets to Jack, it’s gone. Just like she knew it would be.
She reaches up, her hands resting on his face. Her fingertips tingle with the sensation of knowing this skin. Jack is sense memory. She has him in her bones.
“I’ve missed you so much,” she says.
She waits.
Ship (Fandom): Jack/Kate, Kate/Sawyer, Sawyer/Juliet (Lost)
Spoilers: Full series
A/N: Many thanks to
sweet_iolanthe and likeserendipity for their feedback. Title is from Rilo Kily's "August." Summary: It’s like re-learning to speak. That’s the only way she can describe it. Language tastes different in her mouth, stale and foreign and not hers. Speech should belong to people who have the words to go with it. Kate has lost hers.
August, I'll see you soon under yellow moons
Where I'll gather what's left of you
And August, I'm on your side
Or did I speak too soon?
Now we've crossed the great divide
Someday we'll meet beyond the stars
And it'll be away from here
Someday we'll meet beyond the limits of who we are
And it'll be away from here
- "August," Rilo Kiley
Where I'll gather what's left of you
And August, I'm on your side
Or did I speak too soon?
Now we've crossed the great divide
Someday we'll meet beyond the stars
And it'll be away from here
Someday we'll meet beyond the limits of who we are
And it'll be away from here
- "August," Rilo Kiley
Kate is very good at breathing. This is what she tells Claire in the first days after they get off the Island, because Claire doesn’t understand how Kate keeps still, keeps sane. Kate just tells Claire she has a lot of practice, and holds Claire’s hand after nightmares. Kate has her own vicious, clawing terrors, but she has never been one to wake up screaming. Claire can’t hear Kate’s choked gasps in the night from her room down the hall. Neither can Sawyer, who is sprawled out on the pullout couch in the living room for a few weeks. Miles spends a couple days in her home too. Her house feels like a respite for refugees. She doesn’t mind. In all honesty, she needs them there. It’s bad enough being in this house at all – after Jack left she kept seeing him out of the corner of her eye and now it’s even worse. She’ll see any object and turn it into a fragmentary image of him stepping into view, and her throat will close. But it’s never him, of course. Of course. It would be worse if she were in the house by herself.
Having Claire in the house also gives her something to distract herself with. Claire is – Kate isn’t sure how to describe it, but erratic might be best. She does not stay still. She barely sleeps. Sometimes she reaches around her like she’s expecting to still feel a gun hanging off her shoulder. She refuses to see Aaron for weeks. When Kate tells Claire that Aaron is with her mother, Claire just freezes. The nightmares are the worst that night. And though Kate hates to admit it, making sure Claire doesn’t just snap in two like stale gingerbread does keep her distracted.
It’s almost a hierarchy they have planned: Kate watches Claire, Sawyer watches Kate, Miles watches all of them. He has lost the least. Sawyer has carried around Juliet’s death for long enough to have begun to deal with it, albeit very poorly. There are many nights with alcohol and more with tears and seeing Sawyer sobbing in his sleep is one of the worst things Kate has ever seen. It burns with a sense of impossibility, like nothing should have been able to break him like that. She’s not sure who has it worse – Sawyer, who keeps dreaming of getting to Juliet a moment earlier, of saving her life, and then waking to this reality, or Kate, who can’t stop hoping Jack is somewhere on the Island, building a raft, about to come home to her any day now. Any day. She will wait.
Four days after they get back from the Island, her parole officer shows up at her door. For a horrible minute, Kate realizes she has no idea even what day it is, when her last or next meeting was meant to occur. The last four days have been nothing but off-on sleeping and nightmares that occur even while awake. If Kate has missed a meeting, she could go to jail. If her parole officer has found out she left the state, she will go to jail. But Meryl just smiles in her doorway, walks to the kitchen so Kate can fill out some forms, and frowns at the sight of Claire, Sawyer and Miles, all in various extents of disarray, in Kate’s living room. The three eye Meryl with a mix of shock and fear and disdain, even though they don’t know who she is.
“I see you have guests,” Meryl announces, defensive and shaky, like an animal behind plexiglass at the zoo.
Claire crosses her arms. Sawyer scowls. Miles simply stares.
“Family,” Kate explains.
On her way out, Meryl realizes she didn’t see Aaron. Kate says he’s on a playdate, and closes the door in Meryl’s all-too-cheery face.
“Who was that?” Miles asks as soon as Kate steps into the living room. The four of them are in sweatpants and t-shirts, freshly scrubbed, and completely wrecked. The tangles still haven’t come out of Claire’s hair. Sawyer looks like he hasn’t slept in months, with tired eyes and shaky hands. Miles looks exhausted too, but not as much as the rest of them. Kate doesn’t know what she looks like, but she imagines it isn’t a happy sight. She hasn’t been able to look in the mirror yet.
“My parole officer,” Kate responds. Claire blinks.
“One day you’ll have to tell us that story,” Sawyer says.
Kate looks at him. When she thinks of her trial, she can only think of her mother, and she can only think of Jack, the way she felt so small at the sight of him, how he was the last and also the only person she wanted to see. She thinks about the parking lot, she thinks about the day he changed his mind about seeing Aaron and just showed up on her doorstep, she thinks about taking him into her bed that night and how impossible it seemed that it was the first time when he had been so entirely a part of her for so long, she remembers the ring still tucked under clothes in her drawer, she remembers the day he left her, she remembers that last kiss on the Island, still heavy and pressing and familiar, she remembers the moment the Island disappeared from sight.
“Maybe one day,” Kate says.
Two and a half weeks later, Miles is already gone and Sawyer says he’s leaving. Not for long or to go far, he says, but he needs to see Clementine. Kate grimaces. She can’t help but think she’s done something unforgivable. She keeps such thoughts to herself. It reminds her of Kate before the Island, so very long ago, when everything wrong in the world was her fault.
“And I think it’s time I got a place of my own,” he says, though he’s clearly wary at the thought. He’s supposed to be dead. That could be difficult to work with. When Kate points this out, he says, “There’s still a conman somewhere in here,” and tries to smile. Kate shivers. Claire frowns. Miles is already gone. It’s hard being in a space with them, she knows. They’re all looking for ghosts – sometimes other people’s, sometimes of who they once were.
“Do you think you’ll be okay without me?” Sawyer asks, like he knows Kate will lie.
“We’ll be fine,” Kate says. Her lying has gotten worse. Jack was bad for her. Sawyer frowns.
“I’ll be back soon,” he promises. “You’ll get sick of me quickly.”
She can’t help but laugh a little at that. There are all of five people she can be honest with in her life. She’ll never get sick of them. She can’t.
“Tell Cassidy I say hi,” she says as he walks out the door. He gives a little nod, a barely-there affirmation, and watches Kate’s eyes until the moment the door shuts.
He’s only gone for two days. It’s hard. The day he leaves, Claire is very, very quiet, and then she announces that she wants to see Aaron. Her eyes shimmer like the rivers on the Island on stormy days, but Kate says, “Okay.”
When she picks up the phone, her hand shakes. She’s not ready to give Aaron up. She shouldn’t have pretended she ever would be. Claire’s mother cries when she calls, when Kate says Claire is alive. It doesn’t even sound like tears – it sounds like an eruption, or the wrenching-open, somehow-familiar noise the smoke monster made. It sounds like something coming loose. Something inside Kate’s chest jumps in jealousy. She hasn’t cried yet. Not even in her sleep.
Claire’s mother brings Aaron to Kate’s that evening, and there are more tears than Kate can watch. She can’t look at Claire’s mother tell her she loves her, and she can’t look at Claire with Aaron, and so she locks herself in her bedroom for the rest of the night. She’s somehow surprised to see them there the next morning. She’s accustomed to being abandoned. She would have survived it. Even expected it. But there are Claire and Aaron the next morning, him curled up and still sleeping on the couch, her standing by the refrigerator, staring inside and very clearly not knowing what to do with its contents.
“What are you doing?” Kate asks, and she’s not sure if she means what are you doing in the kitchen or what are you doing still in the house.
Claire jumps. She twitches toward the invisible gun on her back. She turns to Kate, her face relaxing.
“I wanted to make breakfast,” she stumbles. “It’s been a while.”
Kate smiles a little. She pulls out pancake mix, eggs, milk, chocolate chips. Claire watches every step. Ten minutes later, the smell of pancakes wafts through the house and Aaron stumbles into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes. He looks right at Kate and says, “Mommy, did you make pancakes?”
She can’t even think about Claire in that moment. All she can do is bend down, take Aaron in her arms, and cry. When, a few minutes later, she has reduced her sobs to small sniffles, Claire rests a hand on her shoulder and says, “I was thinking maybe Aaron and I could stay.”
Kate gapes up at her. Claire is crying too, a few dripping tears falling off her chin onto her shoulders, but she is smiling. Kate grins.
“I would love that,” she says, and something inside her dares to hope she might be okay one day.
Sawyer comes back two days later with a job, a down payment on an apartment across town, and a lot of fake papers that say he’s not dead and very good at security.
“I’m thinking maybe I’ll be a cop one day,” he says, with a hint of that old glimmer in his eye that she’s familiar with. “That seems appropriate, somehow.”
Kate smiles. Since she did it the first time it’s gotten easier. “I would love to see that. You a cop; me a mom. Things that would have seemed impossible not too long ago.”
Sawyer smirks a little, looking toward the kitchen where Claire and Aaron are coloring. His smile falls. “So, they’re both staying with you.”
Kate nods. “I mean, mothering used to be a community thing. I’ve seen stranger things, after all.”
Sawyer blinks. Kate winces.
“Anyway,” she rushes, after a pause. “She’s practically family anyway. After everything, and especially since she’s Jack’s sister and he and I –”
She stops short, stops breathing, stops moving. It’s the first time she’s said Jack’s name since they left the Island. The inside of her mouth tastes suddenly bitter, like full of ash and dirt. Sawyer’s hand is suddenly on her shoulder. She briefly wonders if she was swaying on her feet.
“Sorry,” she gasps.
He shakes his head. “Don’t,” he says, and his voice is just barely above a whisper. “I know.”
She looks at him. His hands shake, his eyes wide and shining. It’s heavier than she could ever describe, feeling the grief of another person simply because it is the same shape and weight as your own. It’s the common and yet different memories, where the settings and characters are slightly apart but the feelings are the same. It’s an exhausting moment. She has to look away.
“I don’t think this will ever stop hurting,” she whispers. She doesn’t want Sawyer to tell her it will be okay, she doesn’t want promises of healing years, she doesn’t want to think about a time she can look back on Jack and smile.
“No,” he says. “It won’t. But I’m told it starts to hurt less.”
Kate nods. She knows. She knows how grief works. She’s felt it, she’s watched it, she’s caused it. It always gets better. Still, she can’t imagine it ever being okay. She should have done everything differently. She should have told him she loved him the instant she knew, a moment she remembers with absolute clarity. It was the day the cave collapsed on him and she was so sure he could not be dead just because if he were, she would simply stop. She should have said it then. She should have said it then and never stopped. How different would their lives be if she had been brave enough to admit it? She can’t bear to think about it, but she also can’t stop. Her hands are shaking, but she only notices when she sees them stretched out and shivering in front of her. Her body doesn’t feel like hers.
“I know,” Sawyer says. “I know.”
The next day, Kate wakes up and knows with absolute certainty that Jack is dead, that he has been dead, and that she never felt when it happened. There’s something wrong about that. She had somehow always thought she would feel when he was ripped away from the world. But she knows now. She can’t get out of bed all day, and Claire brings her tea and sings lullabies and Sawyer comes over and spends hours holding her and Kate just cries.
Time starts to go faster. It feels like a sin. She has nights without nightmares and learns to smile again. It takes weeks for the first and months for the second, but it does happen, and she doesn’t remember why or how. She still reaches to the right side of the bed in the middle of the night. She does still have daydreams of burning this house and all the memories it holds to the ground. She knows how to make it look like an accident. She still sees Jack everywhere. All the pictures of him in her house have been turned face down, and though she knows she must have been the one to do so, she can’t remember when.
But there are light days now. Sawyer gets Claire fake papers so that when she’s better she can get a job. Kate can’t. An innocent verdict doesn’t get do much for her arrest history on job applications. It’s his last illegal deed, he declares, studying for his police exams. He’s at Kate’s house so often she starts to tell him he should just give up renting the apartment and move in with her. He says he’ll consider it. They smile. It’s strange, but it starts to feel less and less wrong. Clementine has playdates with Aaron and Cassidy just looks back and forth between Sawyer and Kate and Claire sitting on the couch, this odd little family that they somehow built together.
“There’s more to this story you’ll have to tell me someday,” Cassidy says one day, helping Kate make tea in the kitchen.
Kate looks at her. There’s a spark of jealousy in Cassidy’s eye.
“I don’t love him,” Kate says, though what she really means is she loves him in that way one can only love an old lover turned friend. That’s too complicated, though. She lives in the nation of too complicated.
“Really?” Cassidy asks, and now the light in her eye is different, somehow hopeful.
Kate frowns. “He’s in love with a dead woman, Cassidy,” she snaps. She didn’t mean to shout, and she knows she and Juliet weren’t the closest by any stretch of the imagination, but Juliet is one of the many ghosts in this house and Kate will protect all of them until the day she dies.
Cassidy frowns. She comes over less after that, but Sawyer still brings Clementine around.
A warm Tuesday evening, Aaron asks when Jack will be back to read to him. Kate does not breathe, and spends the night on the bathroom floor, shivering on the cool tiles and pretending Claire can’t hear her scream.
Loss is a familiar thing. It’s a cold, stretched out sheet that covers her and leaves her shivering, but it’s a sensation she’s accustomed to. She understands its ticks, its bursts and recessions. If she concentrates, she can remember when her sorrows felt like a dull hum instead of this constant banging in her skull. She also remembers that every loss feels worse than the one that came before, impossible and tearing in its moment. This time, though, she thinks it might be true. There is a long, expansive space in front of her where all she can see is not Jack not Jack not Jack. It’s like re-learning to speak. That’s the only way she can describe it. Language tastes different in her mouth, stale and foreign and not hers. Speech should belong to people who have the words to go with it. Kate has lost hers.
There’s a knock on the bathroom door. It makes her jump, the only noise that has not come from her in however long. She doesn’t know how long she’s been in there, and she doesn’t know if she’s slept. She knows she hasn’t eaten. She knows her bones ache and her throat is completely dry. She knows this is the first time she’s noticed. The sound at the door brings her out of herself. She doesn’t like it.
“Kate,” a voice calls from behind the door. Sawyer. She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t know who Kate is. When she remembers, she gasps, grabs at her chest, feeling for some sort of life beneath.
“Kate, let me in,” he says. The handle jostles. Kate stares at the shaking metal. Reverberating in the bathroom and echoing in her skull, it sounds like an earthquake.
“Kate,” Claire calls, further away and far more tentative. Kate closes her eyes and imagines them on the other side, Sawyer with his eyes closed, fist and forehead pressed against the doorframe with Claire lingering far back, not knowing what she should do. Aaron is probably in bed or planted in front of the television. They would never bring him to her wreckage. She feels a vague prick of shame at Claire encountering this. Kate’s supposed to be the strong one. She has always played the part well.
There’s a knock at the door. Kate jumps again. Sawyer calls, “Kate, just let me know you’re okay in there. Are you okay?”
She doesn’t know how to answer that exactly. “I’m here,” she says. That is true enough. She rests her hand against the chilly countertop. Not too long ago, Jack’s razor rested on the left side of the sink. “I’m here,” she says again, low enough that only she can hear it.
A raggedy sigh rustles through the door. “Kate,” Sawyer says, too calmly, “please open the door.”
The handle jostles again. Kate takes a step back.
“Claire,” she hears Sawyer say, “could you give us a minute?”
There is a pause, the rustle of feet. Kate presses her back against the wall.
“Kate,” Sawyer says. Every time he says her name she keeps expecting Jack’s voice. She shakes her head to try and get it out. The bathroom was a poor hiding spot. Everything echoes.
“What do you want, Sawyer?” she asks. She tries to sound strong but her voice cracks in different ways on every syllable. Speaking exhausts. Kate leans her head against the wall and closes her eyes.
“I want to talk to you,” he says. She scowls. “I understand what you’re going through, okay?”
She wants to scream, she wants to pull open the door and punch him, she wants to fold into herself and disappear because he doesn't understand, except, she knows, he does. Their losses are parallel.
“When Juliet –” he continues from the other side of the door, “when she died, it felt like someone had injected me with cyanide. I didn’t think I would survive another day. I understand, Kate. And I don’t know if it ever gets easier, but we’re here, and there are people who need us. No matter who we miss, we – we live for what we’ve got.”
Kate closes her eyes, a series of tears sliding down and making her face feel sticky and wet. “What if I can’t?” she asks before she can stop herself. All she wants to do is stop. She doesn’t care if it’s selfish, she doesn’t care if Claire or Aaron need her, she doesn’t even entertain the notion that Sawyer might need her, she just wants to stop.
“I don’t know, Freckles,” he murmurs. “I’m still working on that one.”
Kate inhales, exhales, counts each breath to make sure she still has one left. She walks to the door, but it feels more like watching herself move than making herself move. The lock turns with a quiet click. When she opens the door, she sees Sawyer sitting by the doorpost. He looks at her when she steps through the threshold and sits down next to him.
“I hate him,” she whispers, staring at her hands. She had meant to say something else, though she can’t remember what, and once she says it she knows it is the only thing she could say. “I hate him. He chose that place. Again.”
Her mouth burns even as she speaks, as though lined with chili powder. In the back of her mind she thinks it must be hypocritical. She is the one who deviated, she is the one who refused to acknowledge what he was to her until too late, she is the one who spent time trying to love the wrong man because she couldn’t handle loving the right one. Surely, somewhere along the path it became her fault. She is used to that paradigm.
“I’d hate him too,” Sawyer says.
When Kate looks up at him, tears in her eyes blur his face into a vaguely recognizable watercolor. “He said the Island was the only thing he hadn’t ruined. But we could have fixed it. We could have tried. And instead he just left.”
Her voice cracks on the last word. When she blinks the last batch of tears from her eyes, she sees Sawyer is shuffling toward her. He reaches an arm around her, pulling her close. She rests her head against his shoulder. Juliet’s ghost taps at her arm.
“I know,” Sawyer whispers in that way that Kate recognizes to mean he wants to say something else, something more, something to make it hurt less. She understands the tone; she’s used it with him before, by the docks, the whispering waves of the ocean rustling in her ear like the torn up tissue paper from already-opened gifts.
In a few minutes she will stand, walk to the kitchen, make tea, pretend to smile. Her knees will keep her upright and she will not see ghosts. She will stop having nightmares while still awake. Her body will feel like hers again, not some foreign entity she’s been stuffed inside of. In a few minutes she will stand. She will. Everything will be okay.
(In a few minutes, she does stand. Nothing is okay.)
It’s her birthday again. Time doesn’t mean much to her anymore, having spent so much time negotiating it. Sawyer brings a cake and Clementine around, and even Cassidy stops by for a bit. Kate feels uncomfortable to look at her. Once upon a time, Cassidy was the only person in the world she could talk to. But that feels so far away now. Impossible, even. She doesn’t even know why it’s so difficult for her to look at Cassidy now – maybe it’s just that Cassidy carries so much of Kate’s past with her. It should be comforting. It’s not.
There’s a chocolate cake, and candles, and poorly wrapped gifts from Sawyer and apologetic smiles from Claire. She didn’t know it was Kate’s birthday. Kate doesn’t mind. Even she forgot until the day before. Clementine sings along to the Disney movie playing on TV while Aaron watches, transfixed, and rolls a truck along the carpet. While Kate watches them, she can’t help but feel like she has lost them somehow. Aaron she shares with Claire; Clementine felt like family but now feels like someone else’s. She never says any of it out loud. But these feelings don’t help the already-present lack.
Clementine heads home with Cassidy that evening. After Claire puts Aaron to bed, the three of them sit on her couch and talk about the Island. They’re still talking about the Island. Kate supposes they will always be talking about the Island, trying to expel their memories through words. She should ask Sawyer if his nightmares are getting worse too. After Claire goes to bed, it’s just her and Sawyer on her couch with the flickering light of the muted television screen. She watches the ticker on the news drive by. More deaths. More wars. More plane crashes, but none in the Pacific. Sometimes, even, everyone survives, teeters in Hudson River until rescue comes ten minutes later. Kate hates them.
“One of these days,” Sawyer says, sipping a can of beer, “some plane’s going to crash on our island. I keep thinking about it. About our first day there, how scared we all were.”
Kate closes her eyes. A series of images skip in her mind – the trees and the handcuffs and Jack and stitches and fire and Jack and the monster and Jack.
“At least the monster is gone now,” she says weakly.
Sawyer nods. “At least there’s that.”
They’re quiet for a moment. Kate bows her head, a moment of silence for the grief yet to come to people she will never meet. Sometimes she has dreams of burning the Island to the ground and salting the earth.
“It seems so impossible that it’s just the three of us left,” she whispers. “When we landed there were nearly 50 of us. Three of us made it off that island in one piece.”
“If you can call us in one piece,” Sawyer mumbles. Kate doesn’t think he meant to say it out loud, because he looks at her like he’s embarrassed. “I just mean,” he starts, but she shakes her head.
“I know what you mean, James.”
They watch each other for a moment, the various colors from the television screen playing across his face, flashing to red, then green, then a cool blue.
“The world just feels a lot smaller these days, Freckles,” he says.
She nods. It really is just the two of them in the end, Claire and Miles floating on the outskirts of their large losses, their little sins. They can listen and nod and Claire might even understand somewhere in there, what with losing Charlie so long ago. But the wound isn’t fresh and, Kate can't help but guiltily think, it was never as deep. Claire kept breathing, kept moving, kept laughing, kept living. Kate’s still doing all of those things and it looks like the real thing to anyone who doesn’t know the signs. Sawyer gets it. She can wrap herself up in him and find the one person in the entire world who understands her.
So, she does. She moves across the couch to close the half-foot of space between them. He watches her as she travels, eyes wide, mouth slightly parted in surprise. He knows her well enough to know her intentions.
“Kate,” he whispers, low and throaty. Something in his voice rings of caution signs.
She shakes her head. “Don’t,” she says. She is already crying and pretending she isn’t. She watches his still open eyes as she leans him and kisses him once, softly, gently, lips closed. When she pulls a fraction of an inch away to look at him, his eyes are closed. His hushed, shallow breathing is still loud enough to hear in the silent room.
“Don’t,” she says again, pressing her lips against his once more, open mouthed. His hand presses the small of her back and pulls her in and she tries to push out every thought of Jack, every thought of palm trees and open fields. Sawyer reminds her of years ago, and his body is familiar and strange to her, and it feels like a sin, it feels like a betrayal, it feels like the only thing she has left.
The next morning there is a half-second instead upon waking where she forgets the body next to her isn’t imagined or Jack or both. In the bleary moments of first waking, she jumps a little when she sees Sawyer’s blond hair spilled across her pillows before remembering. She slips out of bed silently, showers as quickly as possible, wraps a robe around herself and steps out of the bathroom. Her plan is to sneak downstairs, drink coffee, and try to come up with something to say when he wakes up. She had been trying to think of something in the shower, but her mind was full of a low hum, like radio static. But before she can slip out the door, Sawyer mumbles, turns on his side and opens his eyes to look at her. She freezes. It’s not that she regrets what happened; it’s nothing as simple as that. It’s that this is re-doing history long dead in the company of ghosts. They’ve been here before, as two entirely different people than they are now. She remembers being in the Others’ camp back when it was Locke’s camp, years ago, before she ever dreamed of engagement rings. That Sawyer woke in the morning with a leering grin. That Kate ran away. This Sawyer doesn’t smile at all. He sits up, watches her, and doesn’t blink.
“I was just,” she begins, gesturing toward the door.
He shakes his head, getting out of bed, stepping into his jeans and walking to her. She remains in place, her feet glued to the floor. It’s been a long time since she ran from something, but it’s still instinct. It’s also an instinct she’s gotten used to fighting. Maybe it started when she got Aaron, but she thinks it began much earlier, their first day on the Island, and Jack saying, “You’re not running now.” Kate shakes her head, as though trying to push the memory out even though memories are all she has left.
Sawyer stops in front of her. She tries to look him in the eye but on contact she winces as though looking into bright light and looks away. He lifts her chin to make her look at him, though, and she does. She stares right at him and it burns, it burns, it burns.
“Don’t,” he says. He kisses her. She doesn’t close her eyes.
He stays for breakfast. She calls him James when she asks him to pass the milk, the name sticky on her tongue. Claire smiles at them over the edge of her coffee mug. When she leaves to shower and get dressed, Kate stares at the center of her own coffee for a long moment. Her reflection in the dark liquid makes her face look like it is covered in dirt.
“You regretting what happened?” Sawyer asks.
She shakes her head immediately. She doesn’t. “It’s just… strange.” It’s the truth.
He nods. After a minute of stale silence he says, “When I woke up this morning I thought you were her.”
Kate looks at him. “When I woke up this morning,” she says, and her voice is not as even as his, “I thought you were him.”
He blinks only once, and almost looks relieved. “So, that’s where we are.”
Her shoulders relax immediately, though she hadn’t noticed they were tense, bunched up too close to her ears. “Yeah,” she says, smiling a little, perhaps her first real grin in a long time. “That’s where we are.”
The crazy thing, the absolutely craziest thing about being with Sawyer – and she still can’t call him James, and he doesn’t expect her too – is that it actually fixes her. Not entirely, not by any means, but it bridges the gap between breathing and living. It takes time. She smiles a couple times here and there, and then it becomes a regular event. The first time she laughs they’re both so startled by the event that they just stare at each other in the supermarket until she bursts into tears by the mangos. It’s not a straight, linear path out. It oscillates. She takes three steps forward, one back, but she still makes progress. It can’t last, and she doesn’t think either of them expects it to. They know all too well the difference between loving someone and being so in love with someone the mere act of saying it out loud pales in comparison to all the light and warmth inside. They have the former. Kate knows they could settle for it, but they can’t settle for it with each other, not knowing what they know. The problem is, simply, that neither of them is ever quite free of their ghosts. She keeps expecting short dark hair beneath her fingers. There are still nights where she reaches for Jack and yes, she finds a body now, but it's not the right one. But he does make her better. He makes her better.
One day, one day unlike any of the other days, she looks at him while he’s reading a book and says, “Thank you.” He opens his mouth as though to ask what for, but the look in her eyes says enough and he smiles, quiet and also grateful and a little sad, and says, “Anytime, Freckles.”
It's an ending. Sawyer smiles a little, as best he can, and she does too, and he never distances himself from their makeshift family, but also never stays the night.
The months begin to pass. Then, the years, and they go so quickly. She never stops seeing Jack everywhere – in the corner of her reflection in the mirror, on street corners, as an extra in the background of films. She can’t say it’s a loss she ever gets over but it is a dull ache she grows accustomed to, like weak knees. It feels like a slow chill that creeps across the body at any time of the day or night, and it becomes as much a part of her as her own hands.
All the same, she keeps living. It’s a quiet life, the kind Kate never expected she could ever have, not with arrest warrants or Island inhabitants chasing after her. And, surprisingly, there are lovers, men who never know her secrets and men who she trusts enough just to say she loved someone so entirely she could never love them with all she had, lovers who are okay with that and more who are not, and around age fifty – an age she never thought she would reach – she decides it’s not worth the hassle. She has her family. She has Claire and she has Aaron and she has Sawyer and it’s not everything, but it’s enough. She doesn’t know how the decades pass in such a quick slight of hand given how slowly her younger years seemed to move, but they go quickly and surely and Kate is always tired but always alive enough to keep going.
That is, until one day, at age 62, when her chest flares up and she knows, quite clearly, that this is the only way she would go, her heart sighing into sleep. There is a moment, before her eyes shut, when she sees a church, and a light, and Jack as clear and alive and in love as the last moment she saw him, and she hopes, she prays, she falls asleep.
Somewhere, another Claire in another world gives birth to another Aaron, and Kate Austen wakes up.
She looks at Claire and remembers the jungle, remembers the sticky heat and the cooling breeze, remembers smoke and guns and the ocean but she doesn’t remember quite everything yet. It keeps coming back and funneling into her and her head still pounds with knowledge of a life once lived and lost when she turns to Desmond and asks what they’re supposed to do now.
He smiles a little, just a little, and says, “Now you wait for Jack.”
Jack. Jack. The name barrels into her and leaves her breathless. The visions flashing through her mind take different tone, and she has to sit down on the couch because all she can see is Jack. She remembers stitching Jack up the day they crashed. She remembers the day the cave collapsed on him and she was so terrified it seemed impossible, like her body shouldn’t have even been able to contain so much fear, and she remembers the relief so overwhelming it made her dizzy when he stumbled out alive. She remembers the day they first kissed, when she grabbed him and kissed him because he was the only thing that still made sense, because she thought he might save her back before she saved herself. She remembers after the Island, the day he came to her house with a shy shrug and asked if he could come in. She remembers the night he proposed and how she thought she would never have to be alone ever again. She remembers that last moment together on the Island, the way she breathed him in and how when he walked away it burned so deeply she couldn’t watch. And she remembers what came after, the daily aches like something inside her had been cut away with a dull knife. She takes in a sharp breath, remembering all that pain all at once.
So, she waits. Charlie, Claire and Desmond peal away to the church, and she waits. She expected it to be easy. She expected, after decades of waiting, for it to be easy to wait those last twenty minutes. It isn’t. Her hands shake, her suddenly young-again hands, free of the wrinkles of her former life. She walks back and forth across the grass in heels that she wouldn’t have been able to walk in at all during her latter years. Her body feels foreign. Every passing sound in the distance makes her jump. The cleanup workers for the concert pass by and she looks up at every sound they make, expecting Jack and still not daring herself to hope that he could just be here, right in front of her. She knows it’s happening, she knows he’ll be here, but after years and years of needing it, it just doesn’t seem possible.
But, then, there he is. Looking lost and late in a way that makes her smile even as her heart beats so hard it sounds like a demolition site in her chest. And she does smile, she smiles wide and young and more alive than she was for most of the years she was alive, because there he is, right in front of her. Her great loss, found again.
“It’s over,” she says, and even as she speaks she’s surprised how calm sounds.
“Excuse me?” he says, turning to her. Her heart stops. She keeps breathing. He sounds the same. Of course he does, of course, but he sounds the same as she remembers him sounding, like her brain caught snippets of his speech and saved it for replay in the years without him.
“The concert. It’s over.” She tilts her head. “Are you looking for someone?”
Me, she thinks. The more she stands in front of him, oddly, the calmer she feels. Her heart is already slowing down to its normal patterns. She’s not surprised. Being around him did make her finally, finally slow down..
“My son,” he says. “I was supposed to bring him here tonight, and then I couldn’t come, and…”
He turns and stares at her. “Where do I remember you from?” he asks.
She grins. She remembers, quite suddenly, the way he stared at her as she fled the airport like he knew her. She remembers the way she stared back. They didn’t even need Desmond pulling strings, she thinks. In another life, Jack once told her that if they were meant to be together, they were meant to be together. She hated him so much that day, for wanting to erase everything they were. But she was never good at saying no to Jack. Most days, she could say no to anything but Jack.
“I stole your pen,” she says, the old butterflies back again. This is a story even he doesn’t know. “Oceanic 815 from Sydney. I bumped into you coming out of the bathroom and I stole your pen.”
He frowns. “And that’s how I know you?”
The smile she had been carrying fades away. The butterflies have turned back into birds, pecking at her from the inside, trying to propel her forward where every part of her wants to touch him, to make him remember, to kiss him, to be near to him, to make sure he’s alive.
“No,” she says. “That’s not how you know me.”
Everything inside her aches, burns, and she wants to cry, she wants to throw her arms around him and weep. She can’t remember all the joys of loving him and the pains of losing him at the same time and by herself. It’s too much. He’s watching her like he doesn’t know what to say, like the words and their life is on the tip of his tongue but he can’t get it out. It’s her turn now. It’s her turn to wake him up. But she can’t. For a split, terrible second, she just can’t move. She knows she has no reason to fear. She wouldn’t be here if he didn’t love her. None of them would be. But she doesn’t know how to start, she doesn’t know how to say how every day without him was a day characterized by something missing, she doesn’t know how to say she never stopped loving him, she doesn’t know how to say anything without wanting to split open, spout tears like boiling water from a geyser, burn his skin if he gets too close.
Kate breathes in, and takes one, two, three, four, five steps forward, inviting in her pain once so accustomed to, pain that flares up at the sight of him. She invites in her fear. By the time she gets to Jack, it’s gone. Just like she knew it would be.
She reaches up, her hands resting on his face. Her fingertips tingle with the sensation of knowing this skin. Jack is sense memory. She has him in her bones.
“I’ve missed you so much,” she says.
She waits.
