devil’s on the horizon line (your kiss and i'm alive)
Title: the devil’s on the horizon line (your kiss and i’m alive)
Character(s): Kate, Jack/Kate
Fandom: Lost
Rating: pg-13
Words: 1178
Spoilers: Season six.
A/N: This is to make up for the supreme lack of JK this season. I miss them
Disclaimer: Lost is not mine. Nor is Foxy and his insane hotness this season. Unf.
Something has shifted since the last flash.
The forest beats differently under her feet - the soft padded leaves collapsing under her boots as she ducks under branches and runs past trees she used to know in what felt like a dream. But she hasn’t dreamed in years - since those nights on the run when her nightmares shadowed over her sleep and she woke up perspiring in the hot air of the outback trying to remember the last time she wasn’t afraid.
She’s afraid now.
“You and me,” Sawyer had said “we’re getting the hell off this island,” and the battered edges of her worn down impulsivity disintegrated completely as she stared into the fire and knew even at that moment she would not be leaving with him. She had pledged and promised to them all (but mainly to herself) that she did not care, pretended to accept this terminal state of loneliness, that she was not bothered that the man who always came running back to her was running off to his destiny.
(“But nothing, nothing in my life has ever felt so right.”
Not even, she had wanted to ask, but with nothing to fill the sentence with, she hadn’t)
There are too many memories she would rather do away with: they carry on under the thump of her apparent indifference -- she masquerades them well enough. In the recent weeks, Jack's eyes had followed her everywhere, always lingering on her a second too long, carrying the pain of forgotten promises and declarations. He set off a bomb because he wanted to erase the past, so even though it hadn’t worked, it might as well have. Everything feels blank, untouched, a reversion back to the unspoken feelings she thought they had done away with long ago. So much of her hates him, hates him for making her love him like she does.
The thing she came back for - the mother that has fallen into a trap of insanity - feels worthless now and she dreams of the blond haired, blue-eyed boy, the memories she has of him tearing and pulling in a womb that was never full, but which has never felt so barren. Life carries on all around her and she blindly follows a dead man, wondering when someone will tell her what to do.
“Bring him to me,” Locke says one day.
“What if he won’t come?”
“He’ll come.”
“What about the others?”
“They’ll follow.”
“What if I don’t?”
“You will.”
It was a bargain, a trade-off. Bring him Jack, and she and Claire could go safely off the island. But what of Claire, Kate wonders, as she finds the beach and chases the shoreline south. What of the mother who clings to a dilapidated skeleton of an animal used to replace a boy who’s first words she never heard, first steps she never saw?
These questions pull at her, and she blinks away the tears of an anxiety that, if surfaced, would bring her to her knees.
At the camp, Sun sees her first. Then Richard, then a woman she’s never met, then Hurley and then Ben. Jack, coming out of the forest, sees her last.
It’s mid-afternoon before he pulls her into a tent, his hands like a reclaimed fire against her wrist.
She will not look at him.
“I’m supposed to bring you back.”
“Why?” he asks, beginning with the questions, and she can practically hear a slew of them building at the back of his throat. His head brushes against the ceiling tarp of the tent, and she closes her eyes, so lost and so tired, so tired of thinking.
She will not look at him.
“He just wants to talk to you,” she chokes out. With her penchant for lying, he should know that this is one. She loathes this newfound apathy in him.
She will not look at him. Here, before, long ago, in the aftermath of a crash that claimed 252 and left 72, she could linger on white sand and watch him with only a film of potential running through her head. She will not meet his gaze here and now, when she cannot look at him without seeing empty wine glasses and twisted bed sheets, Millennium Falcons and Lewis Caroll, a ring buried at the back of a dresser, goodbye hugs, kisses, fucks.
“Kate,” he starts, and her world has been spinning for days, for weeks, as she longs for things she cannot articulate, wanting so much to latch onto him and hold tight as she always has, to not have to think and decide, but what do you do with love in motion? Nothing is stationary anymore. She wants it all to slow, to stop.
There have always been things they fail to talk about, but now the memories sift quietly under the surface, an untouchable vein of reminiscence, back on an island that always seems to want to wrench them apart.
The tears begin to course down her cheeks, and it isn’t until they hit the sand in front of her that she realizes she’s crying.
“Jack,” she whispers. “I’m so tired,” she sobs, the tears feeling overwhelming cathartic as they pull from her eyes, and she leans forward and clutches a fistful of his shirt in her hand. He tenses, but only briefly, and after a moment she can feel his arms wrapped firmly around her.
She will not look at him.
It is three days later before he challenges her on it.
They are trekking their way through the forest, like before, only she still cannot look at him.
“Talk to me, please,” he says, pleading again, like he can feel her, weightless, floating away from him without his consent.
“Just forget it.” She turns
“Hey, don’t walk away from me.”
(“No…don’t walk away from me…no.”)
His hand on her wrist, again. She can pretend that they are back in the past, back in that moment, but she cannot ignore the weight of every subsequent occurrence on her shoulders. They are not how they used to be. This is not like the past.
In the past, he tended toward restraint, but something has unraveled, she can see it when she finally lets herself look at him, feels it when he palms her head and kisses her. And in moments, their inhibitions fall silently to the ground with their clothes.
Humidity saturates the air, and the sweat pools across their skin, their bodies sliding together in the sticky heat. His hands touch and grope at every angle, feeling their way across the contours of her skin that aches to be touched in the current drag of the world around her. He backs her up against the rough trunk of the tree, hard, and lets his tongue travel everywhere: the crook of her arm, the nape of her neck, the curve of her breast. She moans underneath his gaze, his touch, his lips.
In the drowsy air of midday, on an island that feels more and more dead by the hour, he breathes the life back into her.