Title: Surrender
Characters: Jack/Kate
Rating: T
Summary: They're both addicts.
Disclaimer: nothing belongs to me

Note: this is for carrielynne2323's birthday.
Note2: This all started with Alanis Morisette's "21 things I want in a lover", don't ask why or how.
Note3: I had so much trouble finishing this thing. So I just did.
Note4: Last one, LOL. this keeps switching between Jack and Kate's pov's. hopefully not too confusing.

There's never a middle ground when it comes to Jack and Kate. They never do things in healthy dozes. They play rough, they laugh hard, they sing loudly. They always let their passions turn into addictions. They give in to them. They let themselves become vulnerable to their addiction until they are consumed by them. When Jack and Kate love, they soar. When they fall, they crash.

There is a thin line between passion an addiction, they have come to learn that, painfully. And when exactly their passions became addictions they cannot truly remember.

..........................................................

It was your second night on the Searcher, a little past midnight, and everyone had gone to bed. Hurley had offered to watch Aaron and you were lying on the bed unable to fall asleep. Your thoughts were travelling at a hundred miles an hour not allowing you a minute's rest.

He knocked lightly on your door bringing you out of your reverie. You let him in and without a word his lips are on yours. Not soft and gentle. Passionate. Forceful. Sucking and biting at your upper lip, mercilessly, demanding access.

With the same intensity you had seen in him many times on the island as a leader, as a doctor, it was encompassing you now in lust. Unleashed passion. And you wanted it to devour you.

So you gave him access. His tongue wasted no time in exploring every warm corner of your mouth. His arm wrapped around your waste and pulled you against him. His body warm. Hot, and strong, pushed you inside and the door was kicked shut. The next thing you knew your body was pressed between his and the cold wall. Your hands found his hair. Soft and short and a little wet from the shower he took earlier, and his fingers worked on the buttons of your shirt. And his lips still mercilessly on yours. You moaned. His lips moved to find your breast and you moaned. The first sound uttered since the knock on your door and it snapped him back. His dark eyes look into yours, and you could only say,

Jack...please...

..........................................................

It had been two weeks since the plane landed in LAX, bringing you home. You were amazed at how nothing had changed. You still had your old job. Your old office was still intact and yours. Your apartment was the same way you left it, down to the pile of laundry you thought could wait a couple of days until you returned from Sydney. I knew you were coming back, you mom said. Your car was still parked in its space. It all was too unchanged, too familiar. But none of it was normal. None of it was home.

Normal was her. Only her. Her smell that intoxicated you. Her touch that burned you. Normal was having her body trapped under yours. Trembling. Her nails drawing blood from your shoulders. Her breath hot in your ear. Her voice gasping your name. You made her scream. She made you breathless, dizzy with lust, need and want. And that was what became normal.

You were up before her. Early surgery and you did not want to wake her up. You were busy staring at the paper, your mind a million miles away, leaning against the counter when you felt her bare leg brush against yours. Morning, she whispered casually, and took a peek at the paper. She rolled her eyes at another article about the miraculous survival of the Oceanic 6. You asked her if she wanted coffee, but she did not reply. You moved the paper aside to see her facing you, a mischievous twinkle in her eye. I'd rather have something else for breakfast, she teased, dropping down, taking your boxer shorts with her. And all you could do was grasp at the cold marble counter top.

..........................................................

Do you want to run? He said that too casually and it caught you off guard.

You were lying on your new bed. In you new house. You had spent the last two days christening every surface and room of it. He had taken the day off to make sure you had made love in every closet and corner.

You were lying exhausted, you body humming, and he was on top of you, languidly kissing your jaw, down your neck and along your collar bone. Your fingers were tracing an invisible pattern on his back, memorizing every muscle.

His question scared you. You wondered if he was having doubts, of if he was having flashbacks to that day in the jungle. He realized the implications of his question and the reason you were suddenly still.

He chuckled against your neck and it sent a tickling vibration through your body. I mean work out together, exercise, he explained and you felt you could breathe again. Yeah, sure, you murmured.

You ran together every day after that. You ran in the gym, but that was too fake, too suffocating. You tried the tour de stade, you ran track together. Your favourite was running on the beach. The sand made it harder to keep your pace. The sun was hotter and ruthless. Running became an obsession for both of you together. Running from something, together.

But then he ran away. Alone. After his father's wake. But that only made you run more. You added another mile each day. You ran until your feet bled, until your muscles tore and until every bone in your body was screaming with pain. But that was the only way you would have it. He was not there anymore and nothing made you feel alive. Nothing except the equal intensity you got from feeling the unbearable pain cut through you and letting it consume you. Because that was the kind of obsession that made you feel alive again.

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It was only three days after her trial when you found yourself parking next to her house and walking up the porch step.

Ok, was all you said and then she was pulling you in by the collar of your shirt. That was all the control you gave her that night, though. You needed this tonight. The need for her had been eating at you since you saw her in the parking lot. Her smell intoxicated you, and suddenly memories came crashing on top of rendering you helpless and reminding your every sense that you needed her to survive. It had been too long but it all came back to you in flash. You remembered every spot, every curve. You remembered how and where she liked to be touched. She needed you to touch. Her breathing short and fast. And you touched her there. You kissed her there. Your fingers found their way blindly. Both your senses were alive again, too alive.

You were drunk with it. And you could breathe again.

..........................................................

The living room still smelled of alcohol. But you had been trained since you were twelve to not let it make you sick. You learned that the morning you threw up in the living room after one of Wayne's wild nights. You threw up and your mother smacked you. You threw up again and Wayne took out his belt. No, the smell of alcohol did not bother you.

The problem was that the living room smelled of alcohol and of him. Of Jack. And that made you sick.

And his smell never left the room. And you did not want it too. You did not give him back his things. He never asked for them. You slept in his shirt every night until it lost his smell. When that happened you threw it away and wore another one. You kept on wearing his shirts one after the other until none of them smelled like him anymore. And that was when it became impossible to find any sleep. Not even on his side of the bed.

That was why you agreed to meet up with him. The heartache and the pain of seeing him like that. Of seeing him and not being able to wrap your arms around him, of standing so close to him and not being able to pull him down to you and kiss him, to run your fingers through his hair, to feel his hands on your face, around your waist, under your shirt... all that was worth it if only you could smell him again. His smell alone could give you that fix of him that you needed, until you met up with him at the airport again.

He might have moved on to alcohol and drugs, but he is still your only addiction, and nothing else can keep you alive.

..........................................................

You constantly tried to rationalize your drug and alcohol abuse. You were seeing ghosts. You were over stressed at work. Locke was back in your life and back on your nerves. But you knew the only reason you were doing drugs and drinking was because you lost her. And you often wished you never had her because the agony in knowing what you could not have anymore was worse than never knowing what you could have had. So you drank. And you took pills. And you hoped, you prayed that they would numb you enough to forget what it was like to have her under your skin, to have her running in your veins. You begged the pills to have an effect and erase all your sensations so that your fingers would forget the feeling of her soft skin, so that your skin would stop craving hers, so that you did not compare every smell to her, and they all came short. You wanted to shut off all your systems because she was gone and nothing was worth touching, or smelling, or hearing or feeling or tasting any more.

You drowned yourself in pain and self pity, but it all failed because she still ran in your blood. The taste of her lips was still on yours, her warm breath was still in your ear, her legs were still wrapped around your body. But she was not there. And the only way to stop the incessant need, the ravenous hunger was to end all sensation. But your new addiction was too mediocre compared to her.

You weren't addicted to the pills or to the alcohol. You are addicted to her.

End.