(no subject)
pairing: Jack/Kate
Rating: PG-13 for some mild swearing, angst, and sexual situations.
Disclaimer: I own nothing and no one, and make no money from this.
Summary: Kate's been running for a long time, and she's afraid to stop now. But Jack's the sort of person who could be the stumbling block she needs.
"Are you doing your broody thing again?"
Jack glanced up at Kate, narrowing his eyes at her for a moment from where he’d been sitting on the beach with his knees pulled up against his chest. Then his body relaxed a little, and he offered her a self-deprecating shrug. "I guess so. Need help with anything?"
It stung that the first thing he’d asked was what she wanted from him, but Kate didn’t mention it as she sat down in the sand next to him. Night was falling rapidly around them, the ocean air cooling slightly and the stars just now starting to glint against the inky sky. It would have been romantic, if they weren’t currently stranded on a desert island of doom and mystery. But still, she had to admit that it was nice - she’d never really known a man who could make her feel so safe, save for one, and he was dead. Killed.
"No. I just thought. Well."
"Care to spend the rest of the night having a deep and meaningful conversation about our childhoods?"
She paused, and then looked over at him. His profile was sharply handsome in the twilight, his hawkish nose standing out aggressively and his dark, narrow eyes watching the sea. He still had two faint scars from the cuts that had been on his right cheekbone since day one, and somehow it made him look even better to her. He was like a rock in the middle of a rushing stream, steady and safe amidst all the chaos. It scared her, really - she didn’t deserve such a man, wasn’t worthy of his devotion. Kate was well aware of the fact that out in the real world, Jack would only have fallen for the good girls, the girls who would rub his back at night and wash the blood from his lab coats and heat up his cold dinners in the oven for when he got home from the hospital.
She would have killed to have been that woman for Jack, but deep down she doubted her ability to do so. She was a runner, in every sense of the word. And all her life, she’d run from people. She wasn’t sure she was ready for someone like Jack in her life, someone to run to.
"You’re making fun of me," she said finally, smiling a little, and he laughed.
"Sort of. When I was ten years old, I jumped into a fight between one boy and three others. He was helpless, the one boy - all of the other kids were bigger than him and were beating him up for no reason at all other than that he was smaller and weaker than them and they obviously suffered from inferiority complexes. So on my way home from school that day, I saw them at it, and I jumped in to defend him. Of course, that only resulted in both of us getting our asses kicked, but I was glad I’d done it."
"What did your parents say?" she asked softly, knowing where this story was going. Jack knew she knew, and smiled sadly at her.
"My father was furious. He’d never once hit me, and he didn’t have to. When I walked in the door that night covered in bruises and cuts to meet that crushingly disapproving stare of his, it was all it took to reduce me to being convinced that I’d been wrong to play the hero. He spent the rest of the night lecturing me about how stupid I’d been, and by the time he was done I’d stopped trying to defend my motives. It was the same as always - Dad was right and I was a fool."
"And your mother?"
"She did the same thing she always did - she sided silently with my father and didn’t speak to me for the rest of the night."
"Emotional bullies," Kate said, knowing what he was getting at. And once again, he knew she knew.
"I suppose."
"And yet you still ache to make them proud of you, even though you’re a grown man and they’re gone."
"My mother is still alive," he said sharply, turning to her with a frown, and she mentally smacked her own forehead.
"Oh. I’m sorry. Wait, no I’m not. I meant I was sorry about assuming...oh, never mind."
Jack sighed a little, watching the water. "About a year ago, my father was called in to perform a surgery on a patient. I was working under him at St. Sebastian’s hospital in Boston at the time, and it was pressure like nothing I’d ever known before - I loved it. But the point is, a woman had gotten into a severe car accident and her spinal cord was all but severed. They called my father in to operate on her, and when he finally showed up, he was drunk. He’d had one too many at lunch that day."
"Oh, my God," she whispered, staring at Jack with wide eyes and afraid to hear the rest.
Jack’s voice was flat, monotone. He wasn’t angry or sad in this moment, he was just a man telling a story. Numb. "About halfway into it, one of the nurses - her name was Stacy, she was always my favorite - she couldn’t ignore the fact that my father was obviously under the influence and she called me in. Sweet girl, she really was. She was only nineteen, and she’d had a crush on me since she’d gotten to St. Sebastian’s. So she called me in, but by the time I got there Dad had already done most of the damage. I pushed him aside and did the best I could, but she died about fifteen minutes after I went in. My father begged me not to tell the hospital’s board of directors what had happened - he alternated between emotional blackmail to insisting that he hadn’t done anything wrong at all."
"But you did tell them," Kate knew enough of Jack by now to know that he was no halfway-honest man, no man of ‘sometimes’ morals. It was part of why she cared for him so much.
Jack nodded, not looking at her anymore. "Yes. I almost didn’t, but in the end…she was pregnant, Kate. She was pregnant, and he didn’t tell me, and then she was dead. I had to tell them. I couldn’t..."
She heard the catch in his voice, the thickening of his words, and ached to put her arms around him and cradle him against her chest the way his mother should have years ago. Jack swallowed hard enough for her to hear it, and she reached out and put a hand against his cheek. He flinched, and she cringed, and then she dropped her arm.
"I was married. Her name was Sarah," his voice was throaty and harsh with repressed tears now, but he spoke quickly, as if he was running downhill and couldn’t stop.
"She was a patient of mine, another car crash victim. She’d been paralyzed from the waist down by her injuries, and she’d asked me to make sure that she’d be able to dance in time for her wedding. I did the best I could - and then it happened. But all her fiancé could ask me about was whether or not she’d be able to have sex after her surgery, and how much it was going to cost him. We spent all of her time in the hospital getting to know each other, and I fell in love with that injured woman the day she moved her right foot for me. We got married a year later."
"What happened?" Kate was transfixed now, watching him intently.
"A surgeon’s schedule happened. There just wasn’t enough time...my first love is my work, those lives in my hands. She didn’t understand," Jack stopped speaking now, his voice catching in his throat and tears dripping down his cheeks. Kate reached for him with trembling hands and an ache in her chest, but he stood up.
"Jesus, look at me. I’m sorry. I’m going to go now," was what he said, and then he was gone, walking back up the beach and leaving her feeling as if she could love that stupidly heroic, quietly hurting man with dark, narrow eyes.
________________
"Jack."
Jack was sitting on a rock the next morning, organizing the pills in his medical kit, and he glanced up at Kate. There was a long, tense moment between them, and then he smiled weakly at her.
"Hi, Kate. If you say something like, ‘listen, about last night…’ right now, I’m going to throw this box of pills at you."
His voice was matter-of-fact and neutral, and she had no doubt that he wasn’t kidding. Grinning, she approached him. “Well, there goes my original plan. But, um. I was thinking, and you really deserve to know some things about me.”
"Yes. Yes, I do," he didn’t look up at her.
"You know that I can’t tell you, though. Right?"
"No. I know that you won’t tell me, Kate. I’m very aware that you’ve done some bad things in your life. But this isn’t about me being scared off, this is about you knowing that sometimes I doubt myself as a leader, sometimes being asked what to do all the time makes me want to scream, and that I still have nightmares about my father’s disapproving glare - and me still not knowing a damn thing about you."
His voice was still flat and emotionless, and it worried her. He should have been angry, hurt. But now, it was like he didn’t even care anymore.
"Jack," he finally looked up at her, holding up a hand to stop her.
"Don’t. Whatever it is you’re going to say, it’s not the right thing. I can tell you that much right now."
"Who the hell are you to tell me that?!" she demanded, her voice rising a pitch, and Jack laughed.
"You want to get into it, then? Let me tell you who the hell I am, Kate. I’m the man who’s opened up to you, who’s told you all about his childhood and how things hurt me and how things make me happy. I’m the man who’s defended you time and time again to everyone who claimed that you were untrustworthy, shady as hell - and yet still, the man you refuse to expose anything of yourself to. I think it’s completely within my rights to tell you that whatever it is you’re about to say, I don’t want to fucking hear it."
She stared at him, wide-eyed and stunned. She’d known that Jack was the type to fly off the handle if pushed too far, and that her refusal to tell him anything about herself had been hurting him - she just hadn’t realized how deeply.
That’s good though, right? His being hurt means that he still cares.
"You’re right," she said finally, lowering her eyes to the ground. "But Jack, you don’t get it. You have no idea how much I want to..."
"Really, now? Do you have any idea how hard it was for me to tell you everything I did? Probably about as hard as it would be for you to tell me everything you’ve done."
She blinked, and then took a step forward. "Please. Just let..."
Jack shook his head. "I’ve spent way too much of my life ‘just letting’ things, Kate. I’m sorry, I just can’t do that anymore," he wasn’t crying this time, but his eyes were suspiciously bright. She took another step closer to him, and then another, and then she was wrapping her arms around his neck and he was leaning over to pull her against him with both of his big, warm hands on her waist, and they were kissing frantically. She pressed her lips against his, and he made a choked sort of moan in the back of his throat, and she slid her hands into his short brown hair and they kissed and kissed out there by the medical tent.
He was so solid and warm pressed against her, she arched a little so that she could feel it more. His strong hands were rising, one pressing into the small of her back and the other wrapping itself into her thick brown hair, and he was everything she’d been trying to find, all her life. His mouth was hot and hungry, and she touched her tongue to his and it was like electricity, as corny as that sounded. She felt her skin flush hot and let him back them up until his back was against a tree and he was lifting her right off her feet to wrap her legs around his waist.
She pressed against his firm chest and ran her tongue over his teeth and they kissed until they had to breathe. When they finally pulled apart, Jack was panting and looked dazed, as she was sure she did too.
"Nnngh."
She laughed, clutching at his shoulders as she lowered herself back into a standing position. "My thoughts exactly," running her tongue over her swollen lips, she smiled a little up at him, and he sat down hard on the ground with his back still against the tree. She sank down as well, curling up against him the way she’d wanted to since the day she’d seen him rushing around the beach saving everyone’s lives with no thought for his own gaping wound.
"We’re going to have sex soon, aren’t we, Kate?"
Leaning against him and feeling his heartbeat slow against her cheek, she nodded. "Hopefully. God, you’re a good kisser."
The air was heavy-hot around them, and she was still afraid. But not quite as much as she’d been before. If she could say the same for him, she was keeping her fingers crossed. Maybe this was where she’d been running to all along.
Rating: PG-13 for some mild swearing, angst, and sexual situations.
Disclaimer: I own nothing and no one, and make no money from this.
Summary: Kate's been running for a long time, and she's afraid to stop now. But Jack's the sort of person who could be the stumbling block she needs.
"Are you doing your broody thing again?"
Jack glanced up at Kate, narrowing his eyes at her for a moment from where he’d been sitting on the beach with his knees pulled up against his chest. Then his body relaxed a little, and he offered her a self-deprecating shrug. "I guess so. Need help with anything?"
It stung that the first thing he’d asked was what she wanted from him, but Kate didn’t mention it as she sat down in the sand next to him. Night was falling rapidly around them, the ocean air cooling slightly and the stars just now starting to glint against the inky sky. It would have been romantic, if they weren’t currently stranded on a desert island of doom and mystery. But still, she had to admit that it was nice - she’d never really known a man who could make her feel so safe, save for one, and he was dead. Killed.
"No. I just thought. Well."
"Care to spend the rest of the night having a deep and meaningful conversation about our childhoods?"
She paused, and then looked over at him. His profile was sharply handsome in the twilight, his hawkish nose standing out aggressively and his dark, narrow eyes watching the sea. He still had two faint scars from the cuts that had been on his right cheekbone since day one, and somehow it made him look even better to her. He was like a rock in the middle of a rushing stream, steady and safe amidst all the chaos. It scared her, really - she didn’t deserve such a man, wasn’t worthy of his devotion. Kate was well aware of the fact that out in the real world, Jack would only have fallen for the good girls, the girls who would rub his back at night and wash the blood from his lab coats and heat up his cold dinners in the oven for when he got home from the hospital.
She would have killed to have been that woman for Jack, but deep down she doubted her ability to do so. She was a runner, in every sense of the word. And all her life, she’d run from people. She wasn’t sure she was ready for someone like Jack in her life, someone to run to.
"You’re making fun of me," she said finally, smiling a little, and he laughed.
"Sort of. When I was ten years old, I jumped into a fight between one boy and three others. He was helpless, the one boy - all of the other kids were bigger than him and were beating him up for no reason at all other than that he was smaller and weaker than them and they obviously suffered from inferiority complexes. So on my way home from school that day, I saw them at it, and I jumped in to defend him. Of course, that only resulted in both of us getting our asses kicked, but I was glad I’d done it."
"What did your parents say?" she asked softly, knowing where this story was going. Jack knew she knew, and smiled sadly at her.
"My father was furious. He’d never once hit me, and he didn’t have to. When I walked in the door that night covered in bruises and cuts to meet that crushingly disapproving stare of his, it was all it took to reduce me to being convinced that I’d been wrong to play the hero. He spent the rest of the night lecturing me about how stupid I’d been, and by the time he was done I’d stopped trying to defend my motives. It was the same as always - Dad was right and I was a fool."
"And your mother?"
"She did the same thing she always did - she sided silently with my father and didn’t speak to me for the rest of the night."
"Emotional bullies," Kate said, knowing what he was getting at. And once again, he knew she knew.
"I suppose."
"And yet you still ache to make them proud of you, even though you’re a grown man and they’re gone."
"My mother is still alive," he said sharply, turning to her with a frown, and she mentally smacked her own forehead.
"Oh. I’m sorry. Wait, no I’m not. I meant I was sorry about assuming...oh, never mind."
Jack sighed a little, watching the water. "About a year ago, my father was called in to perform a surgery on a patient. I was working under him at St. Sebastian’s hospital in Boston at the time, and it was pressure like nothing I’d ever known before - I loved it. But the point is, a woman had gotten into a severe car accident and her spinal cord was all but severed. They called my father in to operate on her, and when he finally showed up, he was drunk. He’d had one too many at lunch that day."
"Oh, my God," she whispered, staring at Jack with wide eyes and afraid to hear the rest.
Jack’s voice was flat, monotone. He wasn’t angry or sad in this moment, he was just a man telling a story. Numb. "About halfway into it, one of the nurses - her name was Stacy, she was always my favorite - she couldn’t ignore the fact that my father was obviously under the influence and she called me in. Sweet girl, she really was. She was only nineteen, and she’d had a crush on me since she’d gotten to St. Sebastian’s. So she called me in, but by the time I got there Dad had already done most of the damage. I pushed him aside and did the best I could, but she died about fifteen minutes after I went in. My father begged me not to tell the hospital’s board of directors what had happened - he alternated between emotional blackmail to insisting that he hadn’t done anything wrong at all."
"But you did tell them," Kate knew enough of Jack by now to know that he was no halfway-honest man, no man of ‘sometimes’ morals. It was part of why she cared for him so much.
Jack nodded, not looking at her anymore. "Yes. I almost didn’t, but in the end…she was pregnant, Kate. She was pregnant, and he didn’t tell me, and then she was dead. I had to tell them. I couldn’t..."
She heard the catch in his voice, the thickening of his words, and ached to put her arms around him and cradle him against her chest the way his mother should have years ago. Jack swallowed hard enough for her to hear it, and she reached out and put a hand against his cheek. He flinched, and she cringed, and then she dropped her arm.
"I was married. Her name was Sarah," his voice was throaty and harsh with repressed tears now, but he spoke quickly, as if he was running downhill and couldn’t stop.
"She was a patient of mine, another car crash victim. She’d been paralyzed from the waist down by her injuries, and she’d asked me to make sure that she’d be able to dance in time for her wedding. I did the best I could - and then it happened. But all her fiancé could ask me about was whether or not she’d be able to have sex after her surgery, and how much it was going to cost him. We spent all of her time in the hospital getting to know each other, and I fell in love with that injured woman the day she moved her right foot for me. We got married a year later."
"What happened?" Kate was transfixed now, watching him intently.
"A surgeon’s schedule happened. There just wasn’t enough time...my first love is my work, those lives in my hands. She didn’t understand," Jack stopped speaking now, his voice catching in his throat and tears dripping down his cheeks. Kate reached for him with trembling hands and an ache in her chest, but he stood up.
"Jesus, look at me. I’m sorry. I’m going to go now," was what he said, and then he was gone, walking back up the beach and leaving her feeling as if she could love that stupidly heroic, quietly hurting man with dark, narrow eyes.
________________
"Jack."
Jack was sitting on a rock the next morning, organizing the pills in his medical kit, and he glanced up at Kate. There was a long, tense moment between them, and then he smiled weakly at her.
"Hi, Kate. If you say something like, ‘listen, about last night…’ right now, I’m going to throw this box of pills at you."
His voice was matter-of-fact and neutral, and she had no doubt that he wasn’t kidding. Grinning, she approached him. “Well, there goes my original plan. But, um. I was thinking, and you really deserve to know some things about me.”
"Yes. Yes, I do," he didn’t look up at her.
"You know that I can’t tell you, though. Right?"
"No. I know that you won’t tell me, Kate. I’m very aware that you’ve done some bad things in your life. But this isn’t about me being scared off, this is about you knowing that sometimes I doubt myself as a leader, sometimes being asked what to do all the time makes me want to scream, and that I still have nightmares about my father’s disapproving glare - and me still not knowing a damn thing about you."
His voice was still flat and emotionless, and it worried her. He should have been angry, hurt. But now, it was like he didn’t even care anymore.
"Jack," he finally looked up at her, holding up a hand to stop her.
"Don’t. Whatever it is you’re going to say, it’s not the right thing. I can tell you that much right now."
"Who the hell are you to tell me that?!" she demanded, her voice rising a pitch, and Jack laughed.
"You want to get into it, then? Let me tell you who the hell I am, Kate. I’m the man who’s opened up to you, who’s told you all about his childhood and how things hurt me and how things make me happy. I’m the man who’s defended you time and time again to everyone who claimed that you were untrustworthy, shady as hell - and yet still, the man you refuse to expose anything of yourself to. I think it’s completely within my rights to tell you that whatever it is you’re about to say, I don’t want to fucking hear it."
She stared at him, wide-eyed and stunned. She’d known that Jack was the type to fly off the handle if pushed too far, and that her refusal to tell him anything about herself had been hurting him - she just hadn’t realized how deeply.
That’s good though, right? His being hurt means that he still cares.
"You’re right," she said finally, lowering her eyes to the ground. "But Jack, you don’t get it. You have no idea how much I want to..."
"Really, now? Do you have any idea how hard it was for me to tell you everything I did? Probably about as hard as it would be for you to tell me everything you’ve done."
She blinked, and then took a step forward. "Please. Just let..."
Jack shook his head. "I’ve spent way too much of my life ‘just letting’ things, Kate. I’m sorry, I just can’t do that anymore," he wasn’t crying this time, but his eyes were suspiciously bright. She took another step closer to him, and then another, and then she was wrapping her arms around his neck and he was leaning over to pull her against him with both of his big, warm hands on her waist, and they were kissing frantically. She pressed her lips against his, and he made a choked sort of moan in the back of his throat, and she slid her hands into his short brown hair and they kissed and kissed out there by the medical tent.
He was so solid and warm pressed against her, she arched a little so that she could feel it more. His strong hands were rising, one pressing into the small of her back and the other wrapping itself into her thick brown hair, and he was everything she’d been trying to find, all her life. His mouth was hot and hungry, and she touched her tongue to his and it was like electricity, as corny as that sounded. She felt her skin flush hot and let him back them up until his back was against a tree and he was lifting her right off her feet to wrap her legs around his waist.
She pressed against his firm chest and ran her tongue over his teeth and they kissed until they had to breathe. When they finally pulled apart, Jack was panting and looked dazed, as she was sure she did too.
"Nnngh."
She laughed, clutching at his shoulders as she lowered herself back into a standing position. "My thoughts exactly," running her tongue over her swollen lips, she smiled a little up at him, and he sat down hard on the ground with his back still against the tree. She sank down as well, curling up against him the way she’d wanted to since the day she’d seen him rushing around the beach saving everyone’s lives with no thought for his own gaping wound.
"We’re going to have sex soon, aren’t we, Kate?"
Leaning against him and feeling his heartbeat slow against her cheek, she nodded. "Hopefully. God, you’re a good kisser."
The air was heavy-hot around them, and she was still afraid. But not quite as much as she’d been before. If she could say the same for him, she was keeping her fingers crossed. Maybe this was where she’d been running to all along.