(no subject)
Title: Something To Hold Onto
Fandom: Lost
Characters/Pairings: Sun, Kate
Word Count: 711
Rating: PG
Prompt: isis2015 wanted Sun fic at lostsquee. Also for #28 - Touch at slash_100
Author's Note: Second/third (?) time writing Sun POV, go easy on me.
Summary: Set during "There's No Place Like Home Pt. 1"; flashforward. This is what they have to do. That doesn't mean she agrees with it.
It’s the second knock on her door in less than half an hour.
The first one, twenty minutes ago, was louder, more forceful, agitated as time went on, finally giving up on the fifth try, when she still hadn’t answered. Sun knew who it was. She just had no interest in conversation right now.
The second one, this one, is lighter and lacking in rhythm. That of a different person, she notes, and takes a moment to guess before her head starts spinning again and her stomach lurches and this is why she’s been in the near vicinity of the toilet for at least the last forty-five minutes.
She will not ask who it is and she will do this quietly.
Apparently, she won’t even have to ask.
“Sun.” Kate’s voice is quiet, tentative, nothing like the woman herself, and there’s a long pause before, “I’m not here because of Jack, I just wanted to make sure everything is okay.”
It is not an instinctual response to tell her to come in; in fact it is quite the opposite of that. Her gut says to deal with this later. To compose herself and do all this later. They still have time, a few hours here, then the plane, then the press conference. There’s time, just not as much as she’d like. Of course she’d prefer to never have to do this but there’s no backing out now. This is what they have to do.
That does not mean she agrees with it.
But it’s Kate, who probably isn’t any more comfortable with this than she is, but for different reasons, and so she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, flushes the toilet, and calls a too weak and far too exhausted, “come in.”
Kate stops at the doorway to the bathroom. “This isn’t morning sickness is it.” Not a question but a statement and therefore Sun doesn’t grace it with an answer. This has nothing to do with the baby. This has everything to do with what they’re doing. This has everything to do with how in a few hours she has to tell the world that her husband never survived the crash, how she has to ignore everything that happened to them on the island, like they never found peace and, to a degree, found each other once more.
It cheapens things somehow, reduces everything that happened on the island to a series of lies, even dreams they tell themselves at night to help them sleep.
“Jack told me you didn’t answer.” There’s that hesitant tone again, like she knows to tread carefully. “He’s worried about you, you know.”
She knows this. But, just for right now, she needs to be selfish and disregard that because she thinks about him, she thinks about these lies that they’ve all concocted, that he pushed them to come up with, and it makes her sick. And that only leads back to the cold, porcelain toilet in front of her and she feels empty enough without that. “I thought this wasn’t about Jack.”
“It’s not. I just -- I understand why you’re doing this but...if he could’ve saved everyone he would’ve. You and I both know that.”
Sun closes her eyes against her next words, opening them again when it only makes her world tilt more. “He is asking me to give up my memories, to lie. He is asking me to leave Jin behind.”
She’s already done that once. She doesn’t know how she’s supposed to get up in front of all those people and do it again.
Her eyes sting with unshed tears, like sharp needle pricks at the corners of her eyes, as her hand unconsciously falls to rest on her stomach, searching for the last thing she has of him, the thing she can’t feel yet.
What she does feel is a hand on her back. Gentle at first, then more relaxed as Kate rubs soothing circles on her back, kneeling on the cold tile next to her. There aren’t any words, they’re don’t need to be, there’s just touch, a basic sense, and it’s something, someone, to grasp onto in all of this mess, this gray area between the truth and the lies.
It’s something real.