scrape myself free of this reflection (kate, jack) pg
Title: scrape myself free of this reflection
Fandom: LOST
Pairing/Characters: Kate, some Jack
Rating: PG
Word Count: 709
Spoilers: General S4, mostly for flash-forwards
Summary: It’s easy to forget, after months on an island and years on the run before that, that comfort isn’t a made bed and milk cold in the refrigerator. Kate takes a long hard look at herself, both figuratively and metaphorically. Post S4.
Author's Note: Flashforward Kate bugs me. If you compare her side by side with S1 Kate, they are nothing alike. So I decided to try to rectify this by getting inside her head and working it through. Yes, I do have a side job as a psychotherapist to fictional characters. Call it a hobby. Written for the prompt Lost Haven at 50_darkfics.
When she really looks in the mirror, when she lets the makeup scrub itself clean from her face; the newly painted house fading away; the clothes lying deflated at her feet; the play dates and grocery stores and chatty phone calls slipping into the atmosphere; Kate knows it’s a lie. She tries to shove herself into the mold, her sharp edges chipping off at the forced fit, tries to convince herself that this is what she really wants.
It’s easy to forget, after months on an island and years on the run before that, that comfort isn’t a made bed and milk cold in the refrigerator. She has money, a luxury that she never been afforded in her childhood trailer or her beat up Buick Regal. It makes her feel powerful, in control. It’s only until it’s too late that she realizes it only makes her weaker.
Kate looks herself in the eye, studies the planes of her face and the dark of her eyes, before she admits it to herself: she’d never felt more at home than when she was hiking and climbing and running through the jungle, her hair tangled with leaves and her face smudged with dirt and her hands full of guava fruit. This shell she wears, to one that dresses in floral prints and bakes cookies (however burnt)… it isn’t her.
“Kate?”
“I want to go back, Jack.”
A deep breath, let out controlled and slow. Trying to decide whether to believe that she really does know what she wants. There is darkness there, weathered and beaten, but it reminds her of checkups on the beach, of decisions that he never really wanted to make. Yet that was almost child’s play compared to this. This thing that could change everything, or nothing at all if they fail and that is starting to be her worst fear, bleeding from Jack’s heart to hers. It had been simple then, she realizes, though at the time she hadn’t thought that was possible. In a way they were too young then, even if she thought she was so grown up in her dead man’s big boots and her tiny plane scratched like her insides. And him, with the responsibilities of forty people strapped to his back… that’s what turned out to be easy.
She’s so much older now, and it shocks her every morning when she looks in the mirror that she isn’t starting go gray, because she feels so aged in her bones and her soul. It’s all this pretending, she tells herself; she isn’t a hero and she isn’t a mother. She knows that she did save people (from monsters, from themselves) and that she is Aaron’s mom (she feels it when he says it every night, every time he whispers I love you mommy as he drifts into sleep) but those things are temporary. The people she saved only found themselves in the same trouble and eventually Aaron will look at her when he’s grown and he’ll know. That recognition used to be the vision that haunted her dreams, that years from then he’d figure out it had been a fluke; she’d just been the most mothering person in the vicinity (which was saying something) when his real mother left him for God only knows what reason. That he’d been passed to her randomly and she just hadn’t ever thought to let go.
But now she has nightmares about the island, about ghosts drenched in black smoke creeping up the beach and strangling the ones left behind. It hadn’t hit her until she’d seen the blonde hovering over their son, that Claire is still trapped there. That the woman who had (unwittingly or not) given her this perfect child to call her own and given her a purpose is in danger and (she almost wants to say) it would be disrespectful to sit by and do nothing.
“I need to go back.”
This is, after all, much stronger than want; she needs to prove that she’s still Kate under all these plastered on layers, that the one trait that held firm in her metamorphosis isn’t the fact that she was (still is) a liar.
“Okay.”
And Kate can feel it all start to fall away.