how to love a lie
how to love a lie
kate/sawyer - takes place directly after "what kate does"
Her fingers run up and down the strap of the pack on her back, her tongue gliding across her drying lips anxiously as she stares at the shut door. She’s meant to go back, back to Jack and the others and show her loyalty to their cause (they’ve always had a cause she’s sure, but the lines have blurred and it’s as if she’s no longer meant to remember what she stands for). Instead, her feet remain firmly cemented in Dharmaville.
It’s ironic in a lot of ways, her inability to leave this place, to leave him. There’s a strange pull to this out of place town, because for her, it’s the most sense of normalcy in an odd, surreal world that she’s ever experienced. Even with Aaron, in LA, she’d been a stage actor, playing house and pretending to be a mother. The love was real, of course, (unfortunately) but the charade had to end at some point, and it’s only here in Dharmaville where the lines between fiction and fact seem to become visibly clear to her.
She remembers a day years ago, when she’d lain in bed with Sawyer, lazy and happy in spite of their predicament. He’d wanted her to stay, but she’d never been the docile type, and instead she panicked and fled. (Run, run, run, move, move, move.) Grounding herself in one place for too long never turned out well. She didn’t want to play-act with him. She didn’t want there to be any pretense between them.
Then there’s the haunting ghost of Juliet and there’s an engagement ring under water, much like the one she lost in the second crash, and there are all these echoes of things past that will never come to be, and it seems, as always, she’s faced with a choice.
Standing by Jack, in the end, has always been her constant. Deep down, it’s always the path she knew she would ultimately choose. But now, with Sawyer in emotional hell and Jack willing to remain in the hands of people she neither likes nor trusts, she’s beginning to wonder whether she wouldn’t be better off on her own. (She could stay here, she knows. She could force Sawyer to let her in, but he’d only grow to hate her over time. She knows she has to leave him alone. She has to let him be.)
Still, there’s this tiny fraction of her that keeps picturing him jumping from that damn helicopter, watching hopelessly as he gives up on them, forever ensuring that she’d never be able to stop loving him, Aaron cradled in her arms, as her mind mentally did what it’s always done, adjusted. Cassidy had been right. She’d clung to Aaron, not only because she needed him, but because he was incapable of leaving her. He could never desert or abandon her.
Yet, her mind keeps reeling back to Juliet, to the strong, serene calm of that woman that finally broke Sawyer and made him stay, to the girl who finally won him over in the end, and she can’t help but be bitter over the dead woman’s power over him. It’s catty and unimportant right now, but it’s there, inside of her, and she can’t quite let go off all of these feelings of inadequacy. It’s the memory of this woman that now haunts her, replacing the memory of Claire (and oh god, the name, Juliet- it must kill him, the literary context come to life), and while she hates this woman for so much more than just taming Sawyer, she can’t help but wish she were still alive, if only because Sawyer can’t seem to handle life without her.
I wasn’t any more fit to be your boyfriend than I am to be that little girl’s father. His words scream through her mind and she’s at least grateful for the honesty. Cut to a little three year old Aaron padding out into the living room, crying and confused, as she has to explain why Jack is gone and never coming back. His struggle to make sense of her strange words slices through her heart and no matter how much she’ll always love Jack, there are certain acts she’ll never be able to forgive.
At least Sawyer, the absent father, had been up front about his flaws. He’d never faked a thing. It’s not an excuse or a reason to forgive him, but at least he’d never lied or pretended. There had been no disbelief or false sense hope. With Jack, her life had become a series of let downs and false illusions. (She knows it’s not as simple as placing blame, but she doesn’t care about being fair right now, and besides, she needs to sort this all out.)
The prospect of finding Claire, of making some sort of sense out of all of this chaos, still burns deeply within her chest. There’s hardly any hope of making this split second dream a reality, she knows, but she has to try something. She’s crawling out of her skin. There’s no reason for her to attempt to go home and no reason for her to stay. She’s stuck between hell and more hell, and at least while she’s fighting for something she still cares about, she finds a sense of purpose.
Kate’s always been good at making herself useful.