in our bodies there are cells shaped like stars {jack/claire}
Title: In Our Bodies There Are Cells Shaped Like Stars
Fandom: Lost
Characters/Pairings: Jack/Claire. Various other characters are mentioned.
Rating: R
Word Count: 4,804
Author's Note: Written for gigglemonster . The ending of this is, well, very open, so I may write a sequel. Also, this is way plottier than I intended.
Summary: Post Season 5 finale. There is something about her, this girl that he's never seen before in his life, something that fools him into thinking he knows her.
*this story takes place as if the bomb did in fact reset everything*
---
Jack finds her on a street, with fifteen minutes left on his lunch break.
She looks like a child, eyes wide and innocent like a china doll, and from a hundred feet away he knows two things: she isn’t from around here and he knows her from somewhere.
Seconds later, he’s lost her in the crowd, and Tom Gablehauser, the colleague he’s out with in an attempt to be more social, has found him.
---
Twice afterwards, that same week, he sees her.
The first, on his drive home, outside of a motel. The doors are a garish robin’s egg blue, gold numbered markings, and she’s pulling a bag off her shoulder and tossing it in her car in a hurry, slamming the door before climbing in the driver’s side. She’s gone, in the opposite direction, before the light turns green.
The second, outside of a coffee shop. A woman in her forties holds an umbrella in defense of the suddenly gray skies and shakes her head, her voice audible but her words masked by the din of the people on the streets. The pretty girl’s face is colored in rejection, pleading eyes and a small mouth that forms around words before biting them back as the woman leaves. Jack watches her back hit the brick of the building, in time with the vibrations of the pager clipped to his belt, and when he looks back up she isn’t there.
It’s a game of ‘catch me if you can’, and he’s starting to think the fates or whatever god he stopped believing in long ago is taking on the role of the third party in a two-party game.
---
A plane falls from the sky in November.
What he means to say is that a plane disappears from radar and they never hear from it again.
Wreckage is never found, and two days later a bald man with a smile that freezes the blood in his veins to ice shows up and asks if Jack knows who he is.
Jack doesn’t; he closes the door in his face without ever asking for a name and forgets all about it.
---
The girl evades him through the holidays, well into February.
It’s cold that year, and Jack hits snooze on his alarm more than he used to, lying under stiff white sheets at four-thirty in the morning while it’s still pitch black outside, and when his eyes slip closed he’s convinced he can see a skyline dotted with stars, one that you simply can’t find in crowded Los Angeles, among the neon signs and street lights.
“You went back,” someone always whispers.
The voice echoes in his head, in the walls, as far away as those stars.
---
She’s a vision of white heading into an art gallery one Sunday afternoon.
Her skirt swirls around her ankles, blowback from early May air conditioning as soon as the heavy door opens and she disappears from view, obscured by an older gentleman and his wife.
For once, nothing happens. Jack follows.
The walls are white, plain, and the artwork is surprisingly muted, no bright bursts of color to be found. Cool palettes instead of warm, not that Jack knows all that much about artwork, but Sarah had made some big deal about color schemes when she’d moved in with him and redecorated. Chasing after some pretty blonde has her on his mind, in all the worst ways. Despite the weekend and the nice weather, the patrons are sparse, spread out through the various rooms, and she’d be easy to find if the place wasn’t reminiscent of a maze.
When he finds her, she’s alone. It’s the room farthest to the back, and she’s taken a seat on a backless wooden bench that rests against the lone empty wall, facing a piece that easily spans the entire wall it’s hung on. Her eyes are glued to it, so much so that she doesn’t notice when he walks in, and he lets himself take her in, everything from the line of her spine, to the way her legs cross at the knee. Blonde waves fall past her shoulders and her eyes are a startling blue, but it isn’t her beauty that he’s struck by, it’s the fact that after months of chasing her he’s ten feet away from her and he still can’t place her.
He’s struck by the possibility that he never knew her at all.
“It’s beautiful isn’t it?” she says, her voice crisp and clear, still looking at the painting, so maybe she’s known he’s been here this whole time.
“Yeah,” Jack replies, before he’s even really looked, and when he finally does take the time to do more than give a quick glance at the painting on the wall his stomach sinks and his chest tightens.
The painting is of the stars in an inky black sky, a skyline unbroken by tall buildings or smog, hovering over a deep blue ocean.
---
Two weeks later she’s in line behind him when he goes to get coffee, and she smiles when he passes her, wide enough that he takes a seat at one of the round tables and tries to look approachable enough that she’ll at least stop by to say hi.
She sits down.
Her name is Claire Littleton. The name rings no bells, and when Jack says his Claire’s face remains just as blank.
“Australia?” He asks, after a minute or two of listening to her voice as she makes small talk, the obvious accent piquing his interest.
“Yeah,” she replies, but her face doesn’t brighten. Instead she gets this look of faint disappointment, and her eyes change and he sees it.
There’s a familiarity in her blue eyes, the shade and the feeling behind them, and the way she almost looks right through him sometimes. It makes him think of a man in a recently dug grave, a man who came back from Australia in a cargo hold, and somehow it clicks and he blurts, “You were on the plane.”
Claire frowns, deep, her mouth half open, and she must have been talking all this time that he hasn’t been listening. She recovers quickly; she seems used to it.
He searches for the number, finds it after a moment. “Oceanic 815? Back in September.”
Her smile is tight, sad. “Right,” she says, into her coffee.
Moments later, she checks the watch on her thin wrist and makes up some obvious excuse to leave. He lets her.
Jack keeps finding her anyway, even when he doesn’t mean to.
---
Claire finds him first instead.
She’s a shadowy form in a dim light hallway as he moves down the hall towards his apartment, sometime after ten. The pumps on her feet look awkward on her, like she’s trying to be someone else, and she has her right leg bent at the knee behind her, foot flat against the beige wall behind her.
“Claire,” He says, almost as soon as he sees it’s her, and she straightens with a jolt that makes him wonder just how long she’s been standing here in the silent hallway. There’s a mumbled ‘hi’ that he barely catches; her hands fidget with the purse she holds in her hands. “How did you know where I live?”
“There’s only three Jack Shephard’s listed. I called two of them already; you were the one who didn’t pick up.” She looks embarrassed by her persistence; he fights the urge to let a hand fall on her bare shoulder, reassurance, and instead focuses on sticking the key in the lock and turning it. “I didn’t know you were a doctor.”
He stumbles over a reply to that, a half-smile finding its way onto his thin lips. “It’s not something I advertise.”
“Right,” she says, and it sounds different than the last time she said it, much less bitter and sorrowful, sheepish almost. Her laugh sounds nervous, and she pushes her hair behind her ear. “Of course you don’t.”
The way she says sounds like she’s saying something about him as a person but he isn’t sure what, much less if it’s supposed to be a compliment or an insult. He hesitates for a moment with his hand on the doorknob, and he asks, “So what are you?” Claire gives him a curious look that says her mind already went elsewhere and she’s lost the conversation. He starts, “I’m a doctor and you’re a…”
“I don’t really know,” sounds shaky and unsure, and for the first time he wonders how old she is.
He holds the door to his apartment open in reply, and she ducks under his arm and enters.
---
When he let her in, he had an inkling of where this might lead. He’d be a fool not to consider it.
Jack just didn’t intend to let it go all that far.
“It’s a little place about five minutes from here,” is all the description she’s willing to give when he asks about her own living arrangements. He has other, more pressing questions he wants to ask, but he’s careful. He only feels like he knows her. “Nothing special.”
“I saw you leaving a motel once,” he admits, recalling the rush of blonde hair and limbs that had evaded him.
She shrugs, and the oversized cardigan that she pulled on, to combat the cooler evening temperatures, slips down her shoulders an inch or two. “It’s a long story.”
It’s also a story that, for now, will remain untold, as she comes to stand between his legs, looking up through her mascara-laden lashes at him, childlike, not asking but testing. She doesn’t give him all that much time to react, even if he wanted to (his throat is dry and his hands are clammy against the countertop, stuck there of their own volition, and most likely he would’ve stayed just like that, but the illusion of opportunity is always nice to have), raising onto her tiptoes so that she can press her lips to his, her hands to the back of his neck, his cheek. He remains unsurprised by how chaste she is, gentle, like everyone she’s ever laid a hand on has done nothing but turn to dust underneath her fingertips.
He wants to know her history, her flaws, and mostly what the hell has brought her here, Los Angeles, a city that’ll alternately make you disappear or make you want to if you aren’t careful, but his roaming hands seem to have the more pressing need to know other things, like the curve of her spine or the little sound she makes in the back of her throat when he accidentally, and then purposefully, brushes against her breasts, the hard points of her nipples. He wants to tell her that this is too fast, and he’s never been good at that, at easy and casual, but he’s almost sure she came here for a reason and if he stops her now she might just walk out that door and leave. He thinks either way is just defeating the purpose because if he lets go she might leave, and if he holds on she might do the same, and he still doesn’t know who she is past being that girl on the plane, the girl he found sitting in front of a painting scarily similar to whatever he kept seeing in his dreams. He thinks there is more to it, more to what he’s seeing now.
And so eventually Jack just stops thinking. His hands tangle in all those blonde waves, along the nape of her neck, and she shifts her weight so that she’s leaning a little more heavily on him, arms around his neck, teeth against his lower lip, nipping and needy, and he takes the hint, lifting her up as she wraps her legs around his waist. He says a silent thanks for the proximity of the couch to the kitchen and maneuvers them onto it, his body braced over hers. In the short space of time where they break apart, her head falling back against the pillows as he shifts to avoid putting his weight on her, she gives a heavy sigh, something sad and he’s ready to throw in the towel, sit back and reassess what the hell they’re about to do, but she pulls him down to her first, finding his lips once more, and he forgets all about good judgment and doing the right thing, values that have been drilled into his head practically since birth, and lets it run it’s course.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, after all.
---
He doesn’t see her for five days after that, and he couldn’t call even if he thought he was supposed to. He doesn’t have a number or an address, and there’s no listing for her or anyone else with her last name. She lives five minutes away, in some unknown direction, and he wouldn’t even know where to start, so he just goes about his normal routine and tries not to spend too much time thinking about how she hadn’t said anything when he last saw her, standing in her underwear and white tank top, searching for her skirt on the floor, her makeup smeared under her eyes and along her cheeks, and he’d already started blaming himself for things that he probably could not help and was even more likely not a part of.
On the third day, he visits his mother, some sort of penance, at least that’s how it works in his head. Or, it’s more like he tries to. He finds her upstairs, in her bedroom with his father’s stuff spread all over the room, on the bed and the floor, disorganized in the face of his mother’s normal tidiness.
“It seemed like a good day for cleaning,” his mother tells him, when he asks, except Jack doesn’t quite buy that. From the way she’s searching through, tossing everything in the same pile or right back where it was, it seems more like she’s looking for something specific.
“Anything I can help with?” It’s his day off, after all, and he’s left without plans. It’s either this or the four walls of his apartment.
“No,” she replies, sounding absent-minded. Never once does she look at him, something that doesn’t go unnoticed. “Why don’t you come back later sweetheart; I’m quite busy.”
He lets himself out, and forgets to return.
---
“You’re avoiding me,” he says from behind her, at a bar on the night of the five day. He’d seen her car in the parking lot; it was on his way home.
The sad smiles and pained looks of days ago are gone, and this time when her lips curl at the corners he can see teeth and pink at the apples of her cheek. “I’m not avoiding you; you could’ve found me at any time.”
“You didn’t exactly leave me a business card,” he says, watching the bartender eye him carefully from the other end of the bar. “Besides, you know where I live.”
“Normally,” she raises a glass of something fruity and alcoholic to her lips, taking a sip before continuing, “this kind of conversation happens the other way around. Girls are supposed to be the needy, desperate ones.”
He laughs, even if it’s not all that funny in context. “I’m not needy. Or desperate. Just worried.” Jack watches her empty the rest of her drink as her eyes search out that bartender. “How many of those have you had?”
“What are you, my dad? My brother?” He notes that she doesn’t finish it up with boyfriend; it wouldn’t fit anyways, they’re in too much of a gray area right now. “It’s just a little fun.”
“Come home with me,” he says, before he thinks it through, about how he has to go to work at an insanely early hour tomorrow and how he’s never been very good with drunken women, or drunken people in general. About how if she comes home with him there’s either the couch or the bed and he’s having trouble seeing a way where this is going to stay nice and clean without serious effort being put forth. Not that Jack has ever been much for backing down from a challenge.
She reads his mind, knows it too, turning her body into him, so that her hip is pressed against his groin and whenever she moves some part of her anatomy is bound to brush against his. He’s always considered himself rather good at thinking with his brain instead of other parts of his body, remaining logical and in control, even in the face of flirty women and seductive tones, but this particular woman does something radically different to him, and he’s unable to figure out just how or why. “Are you propositioning me?”
“Come home with me,” he repeats, because he doesn’t have an answer to her question, and he’s also always been a horrible liar.
Unsurprisingly, she does just that.
---
His hand falls heavy on the alarm clock at four the next morning, and he opens his eyes to messed up sheets, an otherwise empty bed, and the smell of coffee.
Claire’s chirpy and overly caffeinated, showing no signs of paying for the presumably large number of drinks she’d downed the night before, and it reminds him once more of how damn young she is. Not that he knows a number, but he knows there is an age difference there, most likely a large one. He’s nearing forty; she has to be in her early twenties. Marc would laugh and call him a cradle robber, but he hasn’t seen Marc, but for a half hour lunch two months ago, for the better part of half a year, and he probably wouldn’t tell him or anyone else about Claire anyway. Not until he figures out what he would even say about her - there was no specific title befitting her.
“It’s early,” he says, pouring himself a cup of coffee. It’s strong, the way he prefers it, not that she could possibly know that.
“I like the mornings,” she replies, taking her own mug and perching herself on his countertop, along with the newspaper she must have already grabbed. She doesn’t look at it, just lets it sit next to her, untouched, and keeps her eyes straight on him. If he was the kind of guy who read the newspaper in the mornings then he’d have to grab it from where it rests next to her butt.
He turns on the television instead, settling on the first news channel he can find. Maybe she frowns.
Jack’s still on the same topic though. “Generally people who like mornings don’t stay out all night at bars.”
She shrugs, “Maybe I don’t sleep so well.”
“Why not?”
“Maybe I’d rather look at the stars.”
He swallows funny and it goes down the wrong pipe, so he ends up with a coughing fit and a sore throat that lasts for the next half hour. Her face gives away nothing.
When he gets out of the shower, she’s gone and that newspaper is on his coffee table, open to the business section.
Oceanic Airlines has declared bankruptcy, and the name sticks in his mind, a memory of a downed plane from months ago. He shrugs it off and goes to work.
---
As soon as she calls him, he saves the number and hopes it isn’t a pay phone or that of a hotel room.
“Do you ever get weird visitors? People acting like they know you but you can’t remember them?” She asks; her voice shakes, just a little, enough to get him nervous and jumpy.
He remembers a bald man and an unsettling smile that sent chills down his spine and gives an automatic, near-suspicious, “Yeah.”
“There’s a guy who keeps coming to my door; he says he knows me. Only, I’ve never seen him before in my life.”
“How long?” When there’s no reply, he repeats, adds on, “How long has he been coming by?”
“A week or so,” she replies, sounding markedly better, like knowing that it wasn’t just her had provided some sense of relief.
“Is it an older, bald man?”
“No.” He frowns, completely expecting it to have been the same person. It added up easier that way. “Young, British,” she pauses, and there’s a little laugh on her end of the line. “He says he’s a rock star.”
“You want to - “ he’s about to her offer her a place to stay again, but she cuts him off quickly.
“No, I just wanted to know.”
She hangs up without a goodbye. It makes him more than a little uneasy.
---
His mother calls within that same hour.
“Do you ever remember your father going on a business trip to Australia?”
Jack frowns; he feels a headache coming on. He wants to ask what that has to do with anything, but she doesn’t sound like she’s in the mood for explaining, and so he just gives her a dry, “No.”
The next two minutes is made up of small talk, the standard ‘how are you’s’ that generally come first, and then he makes up some excuse about a call on the other line and it ends there.
Later that night, as he’s trying to fall asleep, a distant memory crops up: it’s one in the morning and he’s fourteen, standing at the foot of the stairs because he heard the front door open and wasn’t expecting his father home just yet.
“I got an earlier flight back,” his father tells him, answering a question that Jack never asked. His father was always good at that, reading people. It’s how he got so good at manipulating them without letting them know it. “You should be in bed; it’s a school night.”
“I heard the door,” is the only excuse he can come up with. It works and his father wanders into the other room; Jack can tell from his body language that he’s had something to drink.
He still doesn’t know why he did it, but as soon as he was sure his dad was out of sight and not coming back right away, he’d glanced at the ticket. The business trip to Seattle his father had mentioned had in fact taken him to Sydney, Australia. It was the first day Jack truly realized how good of a liar his father was; it was the only day that Jack bothered to snoop in his father’s things. Because sometimes ignorance really is bliss.
In the morning, Jack won’t mention it to his mother.
---
Claire’s back at his apartment before the end of the week. He asks about her unwanted visitors and she blows the question off, so Jack figures he’s stopped coming by. Or she’s figured something out and she doesn’t want to share.
It’s frustrating, the amount of questions that he won’t let himself ask, worried that it’s none of his business or he’ll scare her away. He treats her as fragile, as the girl he found waiting for him in front of his apartment that one night, even if there are times when he’s fairly sure that’s just one mood, one face of hers. It’s getting old, and patience and tolerance is getting him exactly nowhere.
“Why were you in that art gallery?” He asks, after the silence in his apartment has dragged on too long. She looks up at him, from where she’s curled up on the far right side of the couch, but doesn’t answer right away. Instead she gives him a look of confusion and innocence that doesn’t work on him anymore; he knows her well enough now to know what’s fake and what’s genuine. This is the former. Still, he elaborates, “The day we met.”
“Boredom,” she says, flipping idly through a magazine that’s been sitting on his coffee table for weeks now. “Why were you there?”
He realizes that the actual answer to that question is probably the one he shouldn’t say, because of the way it’ll come off. So he lies, and reminds himself just how much of a hypocrite he’s being while doing so. “I heard about it from a colleague of mine.”
She lets the conversation drop right there, goes back to reading the magazine spread over her knees; he isn’t done with it, not completely.
“I’ve seen that painting before.” He can tell by the way her head snaps, instinctively, at the comment that he has her attention now. That this is of some interest to her. “Those stars. I’ve seen them before. Only I haven’t. It’s like…” he trails off, trying to find a way to explain this without sounding like he should be checking himself into the psych ward.
Her face falls a little, and whatever mask she’s been hiding behind for the better part of her time here today falters and disappears. There’s a different tone to her voice, as she finishes his sentence for him, “Like you saw it in a dream.”
Their eyes lock from across the room; it’s the first time that Jack knows, without any shred of doubt, that they’re connected somehow, by something. It’s why he’s felt like he knows her all this time, even if he couldn’t place why.
It’s just not in the way he thought it was.
---
A man jumps eight stories to his death and makes the early morning news. When they show his face it’s easily recognizable as the man who stood at his door all those months ago. Jack isn’t quite sure what to do with that, in light of whatever this new realization about his dreams and Claire’s own was supposed to mean. So he writes it off in his mind as a deeply disturbed man who died under tragic circumstances and turns the television off.
The phone rings not long after, and Claire answers it before he can reach for it - no matter, a minute later she’s holding it out to him, “It’s your mother.”
“What are you doing up this early?” He asks, noting that it’s still sometime before six, and for someone who has no reason to be up in the morning, it’s quite early.
“Jack,” she sounds exactly like someone who never went to bed in the first place, the unfortunately likely option. “Your father was having an affair.”
It’s not groundbreaking news. It should be, but with all he knew about his father, with the memory of that night he found that damning plane ticket, it didn’t come as much of a surprise. Even so, this isn’t really the type of conversation that you have over the phone, and he tells her as much in different words, phrased more like, “I can come over if you want to talk about this.”
“That’s not all.” There’s another pause; he’d wonder if it was just for drama’s sake but she sounds far too numb for that. “It seems one of his relationships produced a…a child.”
Jack stills, nearly losing his grip on the phone in his hand. His other hand comes up to rub over his eyes, eventually resting on the bridge of his nose. Claire stirs next to him, turning both her attention and her body towards him. “I’ll come over when I get off from work.”
His mother doesn’t reply. Gingerly he tells her goodbye and ends the call, leaning back against the couch heavily.
“Something wrong?” She asks, her blue eyes fixed on his, and he gets that distinct feeling that she’s looking right through him once more. It’s a familiar sensation, one that this time causes something in his gut to twist.
He takes a shot in the dark over letting the idea eat at him. “Did you know your father?”
“Not really,” she answers, looking down like he’d reopened an old wound. “My aunt Lindsay said he was some American doctor who wouldn’t choose my mother over his wife. I met him once, after my mom got in her accident.”
He knew the part about her mother, but he’d know nothing of her father, and now he sees what he failed to ask. Because her story fits a little too well, and where Jack was open to coincidence previously, he’s starting to see the error in that. This thing with her, whatever connection they have, is anything but coincidence.
“Why?”
Jack looks away, trying to come up with a way to tell the girl he’s been sleeping with that there’s a good chance that they might be related, if his hunch is correct, but finds that he just can’t do it Not yet. Instead, he tells her a different truth. “Be glad you didn’t.”
---
Fandom: Lost
Characters/Pairings: Jack/Claire. Various other characters are mentioned.
Rating: R
Word Count: 4,804
Author's Note: Written for gigglemonster . The ending of this is, well, very open, so I may write a sequel. Also, this is way plottier than I intended.
Summary: Post Season 5 finale. There is something about her, this girl that he's never seen before in his life, something that fools him into thinking he knows her.
*this story takes place as if the bomb did in fact reset everything*
---
Jack finds her on a street, with fifteen minutes left on his lunch break.
She looks like a child, eyes wide and innocent like a china doll, and from a hundred feet away he knows two things: she isn’t from around here and he knows her from somewhere.
Seconds later, he’s lost her in the crowd, and Tom Gablehauser, the colleague he’s out with in an attempt to be more social, has found him.
---
Twice afterwards, that same week, he sees her.
The first, on his drive home, outside of a motel. The doors are a garish robin’s egg blue, gold numbered markings, and she’s pulling a bag off her shoulder and tossing it in her car in a hurry, slamming the door before climbing in the driver’s side. She’s gone, in the opposite direction, before the light turns green.
The second, outside of a coffee shop. A woman in her forties holds an umbrella in defense of the suddenly gray skies and shakes her head, her voice audible but her words masked by the din of the people on the streets. The pretty girl’s face is colored in rejection, pleading eyes and a small mouth that forms around words before biting them back as the woman leaves. Jack watches her back hit the brick of the building, in time with the vibrations of the pager clipped to his belt, and when he looks back up she isn’t there.
It’s a game of ‘catch me if you can’, and he’s starting to think the fates or whatever god he stopped believing in long ago is taking on the role of the third party in a two-party game.
---
A plane falls from the sky in November.
What he means to say is that a plane disappears from radar and they never hear from it again.
Wreckage is never found, and two days later a bald man with a smile that freezes the blood in his veins to ice shows up and asks if Jack knows who he is.
Jack doesn’t; he closes the door in his face without ever asking for a name and forgets all about it.
---
The girl evades him through the holidays, well into February.
It’s cold that year, and Jack hits snooze on his alarm more than he used to, lying under stiff white sheets at four-thirty in the morning while it’s still pitch black outside, and when his eyes slip closed he’s convinced he can see a skyline dotted with stars, one that you simply can’t find in crowded Los Angeles, among the neon signs and street lights.
“You went back,” someone always whispers.
The voice echoes in his head, in the walls, as far away as those stars.
---
She’s a vision of white heading into an art gallery one Sunday afternoon.
Her skirt swirls around her ankles, blowback from early May air conditioning as soon as the heavy door opens and she disappears from view, obscured by an older gentleman and his wife.
For once, nothing happens. Jack follows.
The walls are white, plain, and the artwork is surprisingly muted, no bright bursts of color to be found. Cool palettes instead of warm, not that Jack knows all that much about artwork, but Sarah had made some big deal about color schemes when she’d moved in with him and redecorated. Chasing after some pretty blonde has her on his mind, in all the worst ways. Despite the weekend and the nice weather, the patrons are sparse, spread out through the various rooms, and she’d be easy to find if the place wasn’t reminiscent of a maze.
When he finds her, she’s alone. It’s the room farthest to the back, and she’s taken a seat on a backless wooden bench that rests against the lone empty wall, facing a piece that easily spans the entire wall it’s hung on. Her eyes are glued to it, so much so that she doesn’t notice when he walks in, and he lets himself take her in, everything from the line of her spine, to the way her legs cross at the knee. Blonde waves fall past her shoulders and her eyes are a startling blue, but it isn’t her beauty that he’s struck by, it’s the fact that after months of chasing her he’s ten feet away from her and he still can’t place her.
He’s struck by the possibility that he never knew her at all.
“It’s beautiful isn’t it?” she says, her voice crisp and clear, still looking at the painting, so maybe she’s known he’s been here this whole time.
“Yeah,” Jack replies, before he’s even really looked, and when he finally does take the time to do more than give a quick glance at the painting on the wall his stomach sinks and his chest tightens.
The painting is of the stars in an inky black sky, a skyline unbroken by tall buildings or smog, hovering over a deep blue ocean.
---
Two weeks later she’s in line behind him when he goes to get coffee, and she smiles when he passes her, wide enough that he takes a seat at one of the round tables and tries to look approachable enough that she’ll at least stop by to say hi.
She sits down.
Her name is Claire Littleton. The name rings no bells, and when Jack says his Claire’s face remains just as blank.
“Australia?” He asks, after a minute or two of listening to her voice as she makes small talk, the obvious accent piquing his interest.
“Yeah,” she replies, but her face doesn’t brighten. Instead she gets this look of faint disappointment, and her eyes change and he sees it.
There’s a familiarity in her blue eyes, the shade and the feeling behind them, and the way she almost looks right through him sometimes. It makes him think of a man in a recently dug grave, a man who came back from Australia in a cargo hold, and somehow it clicks and he blurts, “You were on the plane.”
Claire frowns, deep, her mouth half open, and she must have been talking all this time that he hasn’t been listening. She recovers quickly; she seems used to it.
He searches for the number, finds it after a moment. “Oceanic 815? Back in September.”
Her smile is tight, sad. “Right,” she says, into her coffee.
Moments later, she checks the watch on her thin wrist and makes up some obvious excuse to leave. He lets her.
Jack keeps finding her anyway, even when he doesn’t mean to.
---
Claire finds him first instead.
She’s a shadowy form in a dim light hallway as he moves down the hall towards his apartment, sometime after ten. The pumps on her feet look awkward on her, like she’s trying to be someone else, and she has her right leg bent at the knee behind her, foot flat against the beige wall behind her.
“Claire,” He says, almost as soon as he sees it’s her, and she straightens with a jolt that makes him wonder just how long she’s been standing here in the silent hallway. There’s a mumbled ‘hi’ that he barely catches; her hands fidget with the purse she holds in her hands. “How did you know where I live?”
“There’s only three Jack Shephard’s listed. I called two of them already; you were the one who didn’t pick up.” She looks embarrassed by her persistence; he fights the urge to let a hand fall on her bare shoulder, reassurance, and instead focuses on sticking the key in the lock and turning it. “I didn’t know you were a doctor.”
He stumbles over a reply to that, a half-smile finding its way onto his thin lips. “It’s not something I advertise.”
“Right,” she says, and it sounds different than the last time she said it, much less bitter and sorrowful, sheepish almost. Her laugh sounds nervous, and she pushes her hair behind her ear. “Of course you don’t.”
The way she says sounds like she’s saying something about him as a person but he isn’t sure what, much less if it’s supposed to be a compliment or an insult. He hesitates for a moment with his hand on the doorknob, and he asks, “So what are you?” Claire gives him a curious look that says her mind already went elsewhere and she’s lost the conversation. He starts, “I’m a doctor and you’re a…”
“I don’t really know,” sounds shaky and unsure, and for the first time he wonders how old she is.
He holds the door to his apartment open in reply, and she ducks under his arm and enters.
---
When he let her in, he had an inkling of where this might lead. He’d be a fool not to consider it.
Jack just didn’t intend to let it go all that far.
“It’s a little place about five minutes from here,” is all the description she’s willing to give when he asks about her own living arrangements. He has other, more pressing questions he wants to ask, but he’s careful. He only feels like he knows her. “Nothing special.”
“I saw you leaving a motel once,” he admits, recalling the rush of blonde hair and limbs that had evaded him.
She shrugs, and the oversized cardigan that she pulled on, to combat the cooler evening temperatures, slips down her shoulders an inch or two. “It’s a long story.”
It’s also a story that, for now, will remain untold, as she comes to stand between his legs, looking up through her mascara-laden lashes at him, childlike, not asking but testing. She doesn’t give him all that much time to react, even if he wanted to (his throat is dry and his hands are clammy against the countertop, stuck there of their own volition, and most likely he would’ve stayed just like that, but the illusion of opportunity is always nice to have), raising onto her tiptoes so that she can press her lips to his, her hands to the back of his neck, his cheek. He remains unsurprised by how chaste she is, gentle, like everyone she’s ever laid a hand on has done nothing but turn to dust underneath her fingertips.
He wants to know her history, her flaws, and mostly what the hell has brought her here, Los Angeles, a city that’ll alternately make you disappear or make you want to if you aren’t careful, but his roaming hands seem to have the more pressing need to know other things, like the curve of her spine or the little sound she makes in the back of her throat when he accidentally, and then purposefully, brushes against her breasts, the hard points of her nipples. He wants to tell her that this is too fast, and he’s never been good at that, at easy and casual, but he’s almost sure she came here for a reason and if he stops her now she might just walk out that door and leave. He thinks either way is just defeating the purpose because if he lets go she might leave, and if he holds on she might do the same, and he still doesn’t know who she is past being that girl on the plane, the girl he found sitting in front of a painting scarily similar to whatever he kept seeing in his dreams. He thinks there is more to it, more to what he’s seeing now.
And so eventually Jack just stops thinking. His hands tangle in all those blonde waves, along the nape of her neck, and she shifts her weight so that she’s leaning a little more heavily on him, arms around his neck, teeth against his lower lip, nipping and needy, and he takes the hint, lifting her up as she wraps her legs around his waist. He says a silent thanks for the proximity of the couch to the kitchen and maneuvers them onto it, his body braced over hers. In the short space of time where they break apart, her head falling back against the pillows as he shifts to avoid putting his weight on her, she gives a heavy sigh, something sad and he’s ready to throw in the towel, sit back and reassess what the hell they’re about to do, but she pulls him down to her first, finding his lips once more, and he forgets all about good judgment and doing the right thing, values that have been drilled into his head practically since birth, and lets it run it’s course.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, after all.
---
He doesn’t see her for five days after that, and he couldn’t call even if he thought he was supposed to. He doesn’t have a number or an address, and there’s no listing for her or anyone else with her last name. She lives five minutes away, in some unknown direction, and he wouldn’t even know where to start, so he just goes about his normal routine and tries not to spend too much time thinking about how she hadn’t said anything when he last saw her, standing in her underwear and white tank top, searching for her skirt on the floor, her makeup smeared under her eyes and along her cheeks, and he’d already started blaming himself for things that he probably could not help and was even more likely not a part of.
On the third day, he visits his mother, some sort of penance, at least that’s how it works in his head. Or, it’s more like he tries to. He finds her upstairs, in her bedroom with his father’s stuff spread all over the room, on the bed and the floor, disorganized in the face of his mother’s normal tidiness.
“It seemed like a good day for cleaning,” his mother tells him, when he asks, except Jack doesn’t quite buy that. From the way she’s searching through, tossing everything in the same pile or right back where it was, it seems more like she’s looking for something specific.
“Anything I can help with?” It’s his day off, after all, and he’s left without plans. It’s either this or the four walls of his apartment.
“No,” she replies, sounding absent-minded. Never once does she look at him, something that doesn’t go unnoticed. “Why don’t you come back later sweetheart; I’m quite busy.”
He lets himself out, and forgets to return.
---
“You’re avoiding me,” he says from behind her, at a bar on the night of the five day. He’d seen her car in the parking lot; it was on his way home.
The sad smiles and pained looks of days ago are gone, and this time when her lips curl at the corners he can see teeth and pink at the apples of her cheek. “I’m not avoiding you; you could’ve found me at any time.”
“You didn’t exactly leave me a business card,” he says, watching the bartender eye him carefully from the other end of the bar. “Besides, you know where I live.”
“Normally,” she raises a glass of something fruity and alcoholic to her lips, taking a sip before continuing, “this kind of conversation happens the other way around. Girls are supposed to be the needy, desperate ones.”
He laughs, even if it’s not all that funny in context. “I’m not needy. Or desperate. Just worried.” Jack watches her empty the rest of her drink as her eyes search out that bartender. “How many of those have you had?”
“What are you, my dad? My brother?” He notes that she doesn’t finish it up with boyfriend; it wouldn’t fit anyways, they’re in too much of a gray area right now. “It’s just a little fun.”
“Come home with me,” he says, before he thinks it through, about how he has to go to work at an insanely early hour tomorrow and how he’s never been very good with drunken women, or drunken people in general. About how if she comes home with him there’s either the couch or the bed and he’s having trouble seeing a way where this is going to stay nice and clean without serious effort being put forth. Not that Jack has ever been much for backing down from a challenge.
She reads his mind, knows it too, turning her body into him, so that her hip is pressed against his groin and whenever she moves some part of her anatomy is bound to brush against his. He’s always considered himself rather good at thinking with his brain instead of other parts of his body, remaining logical and in control, even in the face of flirty women and seductive tones, but this particular woman does something radically different to him, and he’s unable to figure out just how or why. “Are you propositioning me?”
“Come home with me,” he repeats, because he doesn’t have an answer to her question, and he’s also always been a horrible liar.
Unsurprisingly, she does just that.
---
His hand falls heavy on the alarm clock at four the next morning, and he opens his eyes to messed up sheets, an otherwise empty bed, and the smell of coffee.
Claire’s chirpy and overly caffeinated, showing no signs of paying for the presumably large number of drinks she’d downed the night before, and it reminds him once more of how damn young she is. Not that he knows a number, but he knows there is an age difference there, most likely a large one. He’s nearing forty; she has to be in her early twenties. Marc would laugh and call him a cradle robber, but he hasn’t seen Marc, but for a half hour lunch two months ago, for the better part of half a year, and he probably wouldn’t tell him or anyone else about Claire anyway. Not until he figures out what he would even say about her - there was no specific title befitting her.
“It’s early,” he says, pouring himself a cup of coffee. It’s strong, the way he prefers it, not that she could possibly know that.
“I like the mornings,” she replies, taking her own mug and perching herself on his countertop, along with the newspaper she must have already grabbed. She doesn’t look at it, just lets it sit next to her, untouched, and keeps her eyes straight on him. If he was the kind of guy who read the newspaper in the mornings then he’d have to grab it from where it rests next to her butt.
He turns on the television instead, settling on the first news channel he can find. Maybe she frowns.
Jack’s still on the same topic though. “Generally people who like mornings don’t stay out all night at bars.”
She shrugs, “Maybe I don’t sleep so well.”
“Why not?”
“Maybe I’d rather look at the stars.”
He swallows funny and it goes down the wrong pipe, so he ends up with a coughing fit and a sore throat that lasts for the next half hour. Her face gives away nothing.
When he gets out of the shower, she’s gone and that newspaper is on his coffee table, open to the business section.
Oceanic Airlines has declared bankruptcy, and the name sticks in his mind, a memory of a downed plane from months ago. He shrugs it off and goes to work.
---
As soon as she calls him, he saves the number and hopes it isn’t a pay phone or that of a hotel room.
“Do you ever get weird visitors? People acting like they know you but you can’t remember them?” She asks; her voice shakes, just a little, enough to get him nervous and jumpy.
He remembers a bald man and an unsettling smile that sent chills down his spine and gives an automatic, near-suspicious, “Yeah.”
“There’s a guy who keeps coming to my door; he says he knows me. Only, I’ve never seen him before in my life.”
“How long?” When there’s no reply, he repeats, adds on, “How long has he been coming by?”
“A week or so,” she replies, sounding markedly better, like knowing that it wasn’t just her had provided some sense of relief.
“Is it an older, bald man?”
“No.” He frowns, completely expecting it to have been the same person. It added up easier that way. “Young, British,” she pauses, and there’s a little laugh on her end of the line. “He says he’s a rock star.”
“You want to - “ he’s about to her offer her a place to stay again, but she cuts him off quickly.
“No, I just wanted to know.”
She hangs up without a goodbye. It makes him more than a little uneasy.
---
His mother calls within that same hour.
“Do you ever remember your father going on a business trip to Australia?”
Jack frowns; he feels a headache coming on. He wants to ask what that has to do with anything, but she doesn’t sound like she’s in the mood for explaining, and so he just gives her a dry, “No.”
The next two minutes is made up of small talk, the standard ‘how are you’s’ that generally come first, and then he makes up some excuse about a call on the other line and it ends there.
Later that night, as he’s trying to fall asleep, a distant memory crops up: it’s one in the morning and he’s fourteen, standing at the foot of the stairs because he heard the front door open and wasn’t expecting his father home just yet.
“I got an earlier flight back,” his father tells him, answering a question that Jack never asked. His father was always good at that, reading people. It’s how he got so good at manipulating them without letting them know it. “You should be in bed; it’s a school night.”
“I heard the door,” is the only excuse he can come up with. It works and his father wanders into the other room; Jack can tell from his body language that he’s had something to drink.
He still doesn’t know why he did it, but as soon as he was sure his dad was out of sight and not coming back right away, he’d glanced at the ticket. The business trip to Seattle his father had mentioned had in fact taken him to Sydney, Australia. It was the first day Jack truly realized how good of a liar his father was; it was the only day that Jack bothered to snoop in his father’s things. Because sometimes ignorance really is bliss.
In the morning, Jack won’t mention it to his mother.
---
Claire’s back at his apartment before the end of the week. He asks about her unwanted visitors and she blows the question off, so Jack figures he’s stopped coming by. Or she’s figured something out and she doesn’t want to share.
It’s frustrating, the amount of questions that he won’t let himself ask, worried that it’s none of his business or he’ll scare her away. He treats her as fragile, as the girl he found waiting for him in front of his apartment that one night, even if there are times when he’s fairly sure that’s just one mood, one face of hers. It’s getting old, and patience and tolerance is getting him exactly nowhere.
“Why were you in that art gallery?” He asks, after the silence in his apartment has dragged on too long. She looks up at him, from where she’s curled up on the far right side of the couch, but doesn’t answer right away. Instead she gives him a look of confusion and innocence that doesn’t work on him anymore; he knows her well enough now to know what’s fake and what’s genuine. This is the former. Still, he elaborates, “The day we met.”
“Boredom,” she says, flipping idly through a magazine that’s been sitting on his coffee table for weeks now. “Why were you there?”
He realizes that the actual answer to that question is probably the one he shouldn’t say, because of the way it’ll come off. So he lies, and reminds himself just how much of a hypocrite he’s being while doing so. “I heard about it from a colleague of mine.”
She lets the conversation drop right there, goes back to reading the magazine spread over her knees; he isn’t done with it, not completely.
“I’ve seen that painting before.” He can tell by the way her head snaps, instinctively, at the comment that he has her attention now. That this is of some interest to her. “Those stars. I’ve seen them before. Only I haven’t. It’s like…” he trails off, trying to find a way to explain this without sounding like he should be checking himself into the psych ward.
Her face falls a little, and whatever mask she’s been hiding behind for the better part of her time here today falters and disappears. There’s a different tone to her voice, as she finishes his sentence for him, “Like you saw it in a dream.”
Their eyes lock from across the room; it’s the first time that Jack knows, without any shred of doubt, that they’re connected somehow, by something. It’s why he’s felt like he knows her all this time, even if he couldn’t place why.
It’s just not in the way he thought it was.
---
A man jumps eight stories to his death and makes the early morning news. When they show his face it’s easily recognizable as the man who stood at his door all those months ago. Jack isn’t quite sure what to do with that, in light of whatever this new realization about his dreams and Claire’s own was supposed to mean. So he writes it off in his mind as a deeply disturbed man who died under tragic circumstances and turns the television off.
The phone rings not long after, and Claire answers it before he can reach for it - no matter, a minute later she’s holding it out to him, “It’s your mother.”
“What are you doing up this early?” He asks, noting that it’s still sometime before six, and for someone who has no reason to be up in the morning, it’s quite early.
“Jack,” she sounds exactly like someone who never went to bed in the first place, the unfortunately likely option. “Your father was having an affair.”
It’s not groundbreaking news. It should be, but with all he knew about his father, with the memory of that night he found that damning plane ticket, it didn’t come as much of a surprise. Even so, this isn’t really the type of conversation that you have over the phone, and he tells her as much in different words, phrased more like, “I can come over if you want to talk about this.”
“That’s not all.” There’s another pause; he’d wonder if it was just for drama’s sake but she sounds far too numb for that. “It seems one of his relationships produced a…a child.”
Jack stills, nearly losing his grip on the phone in his hand. His other hand comes up to rub over his eyes, eventually resting on the bridge of his nose. Claire stirs next to him, turning both her attention and her body towards him. “I’ll come over when I get off from work.”
His mother doesn’t reply. Gingerly he tells her goodbye and ends the call, leaning back against the couch heavily.
“Something wrong?” She asks, her blue eyes fixed on his, and he gets that distinct feeling that she’s looking right through him once more. It’s a familiar sensation, one that this time causes something in his gut to twist.
He takes a shot in the dark over letting the idea eat at him. “Did you know your father?”
“Not really,” she answers, looking down like he’d reopened an old wound. “My aunt Lindsay said he was some American doctor who wouldn’t choose my mother over his wife. I met him once, after my mom got in her accident.”
He knew the part about her mother, but he’d know nothing of her father, and now he sees what he failed to ask. Because her story fits a little too well, and where Jack was open to coincidence previously, he’s starting to see the error in that. This thing with her, whatever connection they have, is anything but coincidence.
“Why?”
Jack looks away, trying to come up with a way to tell the girl he’s been sleeping with that there’s a good chance that they might be related, if his hunch is correct, but finds that he just can’t do it Not yet. Instead, he tells her a different truth. “Be glad you didn’t.”
---