(no subject)
Title: Do Not Assume
Fandom: Lost
Characters/Pairings: Kate. Jack/Kate (briefly), Kate/Cass
Word Count: 378
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: #30 - Infidelity for lostpicksix
Author's Note: Totally out of nowhere my friend gave me the idea and so there's this. Heavy on the spec.
Summary: He still thinks that way. Where it's just the three of them, where it's exclusive to the three of them, where this is just a game.
They say don’t assume. They say it makes an ass out of you and me, like some childhood rhyme, just a little too dirty for the playground. Her mother had told her that, once upon a time, long before she would choose the man who beat her over her own daughter. She never knew what was good for her, Kate thinks, with third party perspective she’s acquired only years later. Years too late.
She doesn’t imagine Jack’s mother taught him these things. She doesn’t imagine that woman taught him much past manners. His father would’ve been the one to say these things, teach these things, if he wasn’t spending too much time molding his son into this overachieving man with a fear of failure so strong it will kill him (everyone falls, it’s just a matter of when and where).
He assumes Sawyer. It makes an ass out of him, best she can put it, after the tears have dried and it’s only anger that resides in her heart. Because she is the last person he has to turn to and what he’s said isn’t something you can take back.
He was wrong anyways. It stopped being about Sawyer a long time ago.
Kate isn’t sure what he thought she was doing. Did he think Sawyer was back? Did he think she was following in his footsteps with the cons, and the money, and the long nights in strange beds?
It isn’t Sawyer.
He still thinks that way. Where it’s just the three of them, where it’s exclusive to the three of them, where this is a game (he doesn’t think of Juliet; it’s only sad because that occurs to Kate). The cast of players has long since expanded.
No, it isn’t about Sawyer, but there is one thing he’s right about. It is about infidelity.
“It’s over,” she says, to the open door, to the person standing in the frame of it. “Me and Jack, it’s over. He left.”
In a way it’s treated like a kind of celebration when Cass kisses her, right there in the doorway, one foot inside, one out. There’s freedom this time.
Freedom because no one, not even the man who was supposed to know her best, would ever suspect it.