twenty-three lives kate never led (kate/various) pg13
Title: Twenty-Three Lives Kate Never Led
Fandom: LOST
Pairing/Characters: Kate (Kate/Jack, Kate/Sawyer, Kate/Juliet, Kate/Sun, Kate/Cass, Kate/Tom, Kate/Edward Mars [the Marshall], Kate/Kevin)
Rating: PG13
Word Count: 2974
Spoilers: Nothing past S3.
Summary: The title pretty much explains it. All AU, obviously. I do have to warn you that Kate dies a few times in this. Sorry, Kate. Nothing personal.
One
The plane rocks, rolls to this side and that, and shutters before taking a breath, the back blowing out in a terrifying groan. Kate struggles with the metal handcuffs that are biting into her skin before she reaches for the key in the Marshal’s front pocket. But the plane gives another jolt and the small scrap slips from her fingers, down to the aisle and into oblivion.
She focuses her eyes on the dangling yellow plastic that should have been her salvation and thinks that maybe this isn’t such a bad way to go out.
Two
The front steps land supple under her feet as she takes them two at a time, pulling on her jacket and fingering the lighter in her pocket. She knows that Wayne deserves for irony and karma to hit him all at once, for what he’s doing and what he’s done. But tonight isn’t that night and she shouldn’t be the one to do it. As Kate speeds away on her bike, she feels no satisfaction in the house’s un-obliterated retreating shape.
Three
She enlists on a Monday, five days after she graduates college with a master’s degree in engineering. Even though she hasn’t ever taken kindly to orders she knows there’s something she needs to do in life more than hating one man and day-dreaming in the sand. Training is hell, but she gets a certain rush from climbing faster than all the men beside her and the feel of her hair cropped short, despite the fact that she cries into the mattress of her bunk bed at night and she really misses her mom. She becomes a fighter pilot after two years in the service and she feels more alive there than anywhere else, zipping through the sky and leaving everything behind.
Four
The dress hugs her curves like something foreign, leaving her shoulders bare as she twirls the skirt around her legs like a bell flower. She puts her arm through her dad’s and struggles to keep in time with the music with her feet shoved tight into the white heels. Tom’s mother cries dramatically in the front pew, while all her schoolmates pepper the rows. When she sees him, at the end of the aisle, with his messy hair and nervous smile she hopes he isn’t just marrying her because of the accidental life growing beneath the layered fabric of her dress. But as Tom lays one hand briefly on her stomach before taking her hands for his vows, she knows he really does love her. And that should be enough.
Five
She’s scared and determined as she boards the train out of her hometown. Kate is sixteen and she doesn’t know anything except that she knows everything her mom doesn’t, which is why she’s running away now instead of getting tangled up with her parents’ mistakes. The teller gives her the once over but hands her the one-way ticket to California and Kate doesn’t look back.
Six
She doesn’t leave a note on the nightstand and her gaze only briefly lingers on the Marshall’s form, motionless under the sheets of the motel bed as she turns toward the door. Kate should have heard him reaching for the holster clipped to his discarded pants, but she was too busy attempting to be quiet herself. It’s her one moment of weakness in a steady trail of armor, her back turned and her eyes downcast.
The trigger clicks and she doesn’t feel a thing.
Seven
The car jams forward, the seatbelt digging angry patterns into her shoulder. Her eyes follow the dark steed as it ambles into the field beside them, the rain tapping a hollow melody in the steady calm of her ears and for a moment she can believe that she died or this is a dream or it never happened at all.
She pauses, briefly considering running, taking off, shrugging out of her bonds and making a break for it.
But the Marshall comes to, if not slightly dizzy, and Kate realizes with a sigh that she doesn’t have any fight left in her.
Eight
Cass decides that revenge isn’t something that she needs more of. She’d slashed her ex-husband’s tires once and it was enough for her, and Kate really thinks that’s healthy. They make a good team, pulling tiny scams in dirty gas stations and working odd jobs for petty cash. It’s difficult and there are moments when Kate considers just leaving a note and walking out, like when the baby is crying that shrill pitch or she robs a convenience store to feed someone else. But she’s used to the company now and that thought stirs up dust bunnies in her stomach.
It steadily gets easier, until they save up money enough to quit the constant moving and rent an apartment in Canada where no one will recognize them. Cass never visits him, but there was one time she had paused at the corner mailbox, a letter explaining everything and a photo of her baby girl inside the envelope. In the end she pocketed the note and, the next day, when Clementine accidentally calls Kate mommy and the other woman looks like sunshine might burst out of her ears, she knows she made the right choice for everyone.
Nine
She stays with Kevin because he asks her to, because there’s a necklace clinging to her throat and a gold ring on her finger that says she belongs to him, that she promised that she would. He quits the force because he can’t hear the clink of the metal bars without thinking of her, which makes her pretty sure he hates her, if just a little bit.
Kate still jumps when the flashing red and blue lights bounce into their living room from the street outside but at least now there’s someone else to interpret and mirror the tension in her shoulders. And that’s enough to keep her here for a bit longer.
Ten
When she stares up into his eyes, the touch of his lips on hers still a present memory, she knows she should be scared. But Jack is looking down at her, clearly confused and flustered and like she’s everything he’s ever been afraid to want. The muscles on her legs twitch to move her backwards, to get away. But she plants her feet firmly into the dirt and shushes her brain before taking yet another step forward, closer to him, and whispers “now what?” like this is something they can decide together because it is.
Eleven
Something inside her cringes and curls in on its self as that look creeps into Sawyer’s eyes. This doesn’t change anything, she tells him, firmly, and he nods but his eyes still reflect that pliable glint, like this may just have solved everything. Kate throws up in the bushes and it has nothing to do with morning sickness.
Twelve
She isn’t sure whether it’s the sharp sting of the rain or the bite of the metal bars digging into her chest or the promise of a gun in her lower back, but she’s pretty sure it’s at least partially the expression on Sawyer’s face. Like he’s given up and that everything is coming full circle for him. But she hates clichés so this can’t be right.
She makes a deal, a trade, the coin she knows the Others exchange with. They give her clean clothes and she sleeps in a barrack instead of a cage. Eventually they learn to trust her and after a awhile she forgets why they shouldn’t. Kate sees Jack around the compound sometimes but she mostly chats with Alex like they’re friends and reads the books for Juliet’s club and she stops regretting the fact that she and Sawyer never said their goodbyes. But she still misses him sometimes.
Thirteen
There’s bark scraping her shins and dirt under her nails and there are leaves in Sun’s hair but the moment is so vivid and real and alive that Kate doesn’t question it. Skin on skin, limbs intertwining, burying themselves in a little corner of their own world, they stop trying to figure out what’s reality and what’s just a vibrant product of hopeful imaginations. But Kate’s pretty sure that what ever this is, she doesn’t want it to stop.
Fourteen
Jack’s always worked so well under pressure, she thinks, as the seconds tick by, the gag cutting stripes into her cheeks and sweat dripping into his eyes. He’s thinking, weighing, and Kate doesn’t blame him for the second thoughts. But she isn’t sure if as much time has passed as she suspects, because it tends to stand still in moments like these. Yet the bearded man behind her has stopped counting and there’s a flash of horror over Jack’s face.
She drops to her knees, keeling over before she even registers the sound of the gun firing.
Too late.
Fifteen
She watches them, a little too closely to be casual but not so intently to qualify as creepy. Kate briefly considers finding Sawyer in his tent, because he’d gone to bed an hour ago (not that she thinks he would mind) and there’s all this tension in her chest that she needs to release somehow. She remembers he’d told her something to that effect, once.
But instead she waits for Juliet to wander off, Jack watching her leave like a perfect gentlemen (he makes her sick some days) and Kate follows the blonde to her tent. There’s a something in Kate’s look that must spell out you owe me and help me all at once because Juliet doesn’t push off her hands or her lips and Kate’s grateful. She doesn’t think she could take being rejected by the camp’s outcast and leader all in one day.
Sixteen
She’s not even sure why she does it.
Kate and Shannon had never been close, never had much in common to talk about beyond fucked up love lives and alcohol, but she feels overwhelmingly compelled to stop Sayid from following the blonde into the abyss of the jungle and trail her herself. Maybe it was a savior complex or a weak sense of sisterhood or maybe she just wanted to keep running in the opposite direction and pretend like she was actually going somewhere.
When it starts to rain, she grabs Shannon’s upper arm and forces her under the shelter of a tree; even the mud is saturated and she doesn’t want to girl to get hurt doing something stupid. But then Kate sees him. Walt. He’s whispering and standing like he’s there but he’s not, because how could he be? She rushes to follow him because none of this is making any sense and then she hears rustling and there’s a gunshot.
Kate dies with the red seeping slowly into the fabric of her shirt and rain pelting her closing eyelids. In the morning the weather has washed it all away and her blood hasn’t left a mark on the ground.
Seventeen
She wears her Sunday best to court, her patent leather shoes and collared shirt that always itches but whenever she fidgets her mom shoots her a searing look so she tries really hard not to. Her daddy sits directly in front of her, but his face reminds her of a marble statue, like cold stone, so she doesn’t hug him when she sees him even though she really wants to because it’s been months.
She knows that he did something bad, that there was a bad man that wanted to hurt her mom, but that the police people didn’t believe his story so they were here now, with the sharp whacks of a gavel and swearing on bibles. It’s really all her seven year old mind can comprehend. Kate knows her daddy is good, so the man he killed must have been evil, wanted to take her away. So she doesn’t understand why they put him in jail or that her grandma had to bring her here because her mom refused to come.
Kate curls a tiny fist around the stiff fabric of his suit and hopes he understands that she’s here and that she loves him. She’ll always love him.
Eighteen
Kate’s always loved to climb, to put fist over fist on the woody trunk of a lanky tree and keep going up, up, up until the branches stop reaching, but she never does. She thinks there’s a metaphor somewhere in there, about the inertia to keep going somewhere bright and blue and good and happy but the mean old twisty fingers of grandmother oak keep her here, just high enough to see but never to touch.
She slips the mango into her bag and thinks about how it really doesn’t belong to her, how she doesn’t deserve fruit from the sky and she’s really cheating by taking it. And just like with gravity (because she’s still an earth-ling no matter how much she pretends) everything that goes up must come down.
And she does, crashing down to her home with a sickening snap and it’s like very other time that she’s hoped too far up and been snatch back down, only now her vision is fading. The last thing she sees is sky and it’s still taunting her.
Nineteen
Kate’s eyes remain trained on the melting ice in her cup of juice, wishing it was something stronger, as the plane lolls from side to side. Her stomach muscles clench, her fingers twisting into the soft plush of her arm rest and waiting to feel the snap that means the world is ending and then…
The plane lands on time in Los Angeles and Kate doesn’t admit to herself that she almost wished it hadn’t.
Twenty
Betrayal had been a common theme in her life, the swift justice of karma or guilt or simply the symptom of never making attachments that could last. She lets Jack and Ana go with a nod of her head, knowing there’s nothing a broken man tied up into little knots and behind a steel door could do to hurt her.
She’s wrong.
His bruises remind her of fragile fruit and she almost lets herself feel sorry for him, but not enough to venture into the tiny cubicle that’s too much like a cell for her comfort, even with the ammunition tucked into the back of her pants. But Michael could check on him. His arm may be in a sling but he’s never weak.
Kate passes the gun to Michael without a second thought and when she’s found dead on the dirty hatch couch with Henry missing and Michael crying in the corner with blood on his hands, surprise is not one of the emotions frozen on her face.
Twenty-one
The build a small hut on the beach with a thatched roof and a free-space door (anyone they would want to keep out wouldn’t be deterred by doors anyway). Jack cleans fish in the afternoons and Kate washes their ragged clothes in the ocean, swishing it in the salt water and letting the dirt run clean.
They try not to think about what they’ve left behind, what they’ve given up by coming back, but she knows where his mind is when he stares into the horizon for hours on end and his hand clenches into a tight fist at his side. She knows about the tiny bottles of amber liquid he keeps hidden under the sand and she worries what will happen when it runs out, but he isn’t pale and she isn’t tired and she knows this is how it was supposed to be somehow.
They may not do taco night but at least she isn’t running anymore.
Twenty-two
Kate knows she probably shouldn’t be out like this, with her whole life in the form of forty pounds strapped to her back, hobbling along the streets of a foreign town at 3 am.
But she feels alive.
For the first time since her dad ambled away from the trailer with a cloud of farm dust in his wake and there was another man in her mother’s bed, she feels like life is there, just in front of her, like she could just reach out and grab it. She has no money, but she’s in Copenhagen and it’s beautiful and the sleep she gets that night on a park bench is the best she’s ever had.
Twenty-three
She swings her legs out from under the bar, twisting to the side because she’s seen girls in bars before and they never sit hunched over their drinks. She may not have seen the world but she knows movies and the girl in the bar always has her long legs stretched out before her like a grand piano. For the first time she wants to be that girl and not the girl next door who bakes pies and sits at home waiting for her husband to stop fighting a war just to kiss her (and not like it could be the last time either). She‘s not sure what she’s doing with the ring still on her finger and the stool wobbly under her but she’s feeling reckless tonight so maybe that’s a good thing. The man she’s talking to has a thick accent that makes her head swim and he’s good for taking her mind off things.
His hand lands on her thigh, but she’s not feeling that reckless.
“I’m sorry, Wayne is it?” He nods and smiles and Diane wonders why she never noticed that he was missing a tooth and has a bald spot before. “Did I mention that I’m married to a military man?” He jumps away quickly and she can hear Sam chuckling in the back of her mind.
She’s glad she didn’t let herself do anything stupid tonight.