FILLING THE VOID
By: AliLamba
Rated: M
Notes: This is raw but it had a title. So I finished it.
* * *
Jack clapped hands with Sawyer, then used his free one to pat Sawyer's uniform-clad shoulder.
"We'll miss you, buddy," he said, sincerely. "Don't you fucking die, okay?"
Sawyer looked like he was fighting back tears, but both men knew he would never admit to it. Gradually they both eased away from each other, leaning towards the third in their small party.
Kate was a crying mess. Tears not just fell down her face, but they stained, her eyes full of water. It made Jack feel uncomfortable just being close to her. He tried to step back and not to look as Kate launched herself at Sawyer, flung herself on top of him and cried silently as she kissed him goodbye.
Jack tried to dig a hole in the dirt with his shoe.
How long had he known her? He wasn't sure he knew her last name. She'd just simply been…around, some night that he'd met Sawyer for baseball and beer. He remembered the Phillies were playing the Rays…shit, had it already been a year?
"Alright soldiers!" someone yelled, and Sawyer instinctively turned toward the voice of the body of the man standing right outside the gate. The gate that led through the chain link fence into the marine base that would be Sawyer's home for the next few weeks. Until he shipped off to Afghanistan. Sawyer wasn't able to really tell them much, but it was certain that they couldn't count on hearing from him…on any sort of schedule. Jack would just have to wait. And Kate would too, he guessed.
He hated himself for it, but Jack watched. He watched their last kiss goodbye.
* * *
The ride back was…quiet. The radio was on but Jack wasn't sure which button in Sawyer's truck turned it off, though it was low enough that it didn't really matter. Kate was sitting in the seat next to him, silently crying. Every time he looked over there would be fresh tears about to fall down her cheeks.
* * *
He was back at his house after dropping Kate off. It had started to rain, and Jack couldn't imagine what he was supposed to do with himself. He could have just seen his best friend for the last time, and he felt like something monumental should be happening. That he should feel some sort of sea change, or cry, or spend the night paying tribute in some matter.
After a few minutes of sitting on his couch, indecisive and silent, Jack turned on the game.
Hours started to go by, one rolling into the next. He could probably do some work, but he was going in tomorrow anyway.
The problem seemed to be that he couldn't muster up the want to do…anything.
So he sat on his couch, half listening to the rain, and half watching commercials for some cheap kitchen appliance or another.
Then he remembered something.
The night Sawyer had brought a slap-chop into the bar, and they'd spent the night getting hammered and trying to slap-chop everything in sight. Nuts had worked well, but napkins and coasters not so much, and by the time they were drunk enough fingernails hadn't seemed like such a bad idea. They'd ended up in the emergency room (no surprise there), laughing their asses off and acting like fools.
It made Jack smile, the tired muscles in his face feeling heavy with the effort to move. They felt…stiff, and cold.
There was a ring at the doorbell.
Jack nearly jumped out of his seat.
Who was he expecting? No one. Maybe Sawyer had changed his mind and come back, or maybe his dad was springing one of his surprise visits. Jack waited until the second ring to convince himself he wasn't making it up, then leaned into a standing position and started walking through the living room. The rain had muffled the sound of someone driving up to his house, or walking up the path… His bare feet padded across the carpet, and it wasn't until halfway to the door that he realized that it must be…
Kate.
She was dripping wet in the rain, her jacket looking like glass with how much it shone with moisture. Her hood hid part of her eyes, but he could see they were rimmed with raw, red skin. Her lips were quivering, though it could have been from cold.
Jack really wasn't sure what to say. They stood there like that, in the doorway, for what seemed like minutes. Every thought in his head seemed ridiculous.
He was thinking so hard that at first he wasn't aware Kate was moving, and before he could see she was pressed against him, and before he could think her lips were on him, and before he could protest she was putting her fingers in his hair and prying his lips apart with her own sudden, soft, delicate lips…
They were falling together. They fell into each other, and then they fell into bed. And when their clothes were off and he was touching her clammy, cold skin and warming it with the pads of his fingers, and trying to breath life into her with his kisses…he didn't stop to think of Sawyer.
When he took her, and picked her up in his arms and moved her body so it would match with his, so he could stare into her eyes in the dark and watch them glimmer not with tears but with light…he wasn't much thinking.
It could've been feeling, but...he wasn't sure.
* * *
Rain was still falling when Jack woke up early the next morning. Out the large bedroom window he could see light gray fog hovering a few feet off the ground, smothering the trees and rocks and broken fences.
He already knew why he would be naked when he stood from bed, and why he would be alone. Jack was surprised when he found Kate's clothes mixed with his own and still on the floor around the bed. He picked out a pair of sweat pants and headed to the kitchen.
Kate was sitting at the table, a mug of stone-cold coffee clasped in her hands. Jack wordlessly grabbed a mug of his own and filled it, taking the seat next to her at the table. She looked like hell. Face pale and washed out, bare arms pocked with goose bumps. She was staring at nothing at all, hadn't moved once to indicate she knew Jack was sitting next to her.
They sat in silence, haunted by ghosts.
* * *
Kate was pulling so hard at his jacket that he thought the seams would burst. She was sobbing into his shoulder, so hard that he could feel it in his lungs, and the effect was so overwhelming he thought the earth must be shaking beneath them.
Her throat was ragged, sore, and every breath felt like shards of glass. It was holding back the bile though, that thick acidic vomit that threatened her what seemed like every waking moment.
Jack picked her up, as he wasn't sure what to do. He hated that feeling of helplessness, and his teeth were grounding together as they moved towards his house, Kate clawing at his neck and shoulder as she tried to hold on while so slowly breaking down.
The door seemed to just open in front of them, and it wouldn't be until the next morning that Jack realized he'd kicked it. But he flew through rooms and then threw her on his couch, where she flopped and settled and then shook with tears and emotion.
"What is wrong with you!" he bellowed, the rage so surprising that he collapsed next to her with guilt, on the floor, putting his head in his hands.
His words seemed to bounce around the room, echoing off every wall.
And then silence touched everything, claiming every lamp and shade and fiber. It wouldn't allow either of them to breath.
"I…I tried to kill him."
Jack's head moved with the sort of shock that springs the muscles in your neck. Where you're so overwhelmed by thought that you've just barely shifted, and you're staring so hard into the middle distance that it looks effortless.
"We—we fought." Kate's voice was being ripped apart by dry heaves. "He—he tried to prop—propo—propose to me, and then—and then I just got so—so—mad…and then I—I—I tried to—to kill him—"
"Because you didn't want him to die."
Jack finished her sentence, and Kate's dissolution into sobs was indication enough that Jack was right.
He rested the palm of his hand on his forehead, using his fingers to pull at his short strands of hair.
He should really go into work.
* * *
They never made a formal agreement, but every night it was the same.
Jack started going to work a few days later, and Kate started moving in her stuff. They fucked whenever they were feeling sad. A month later he realized her eyes were green. And then it was her birthday, and then it had been a few months, and then he started to expect her to be at home and started to take her places and then once at a party he called her his girlfriend.
And then he started to hate checking the mail. And then he started to hate answering the phone. So he changed his number and went unlisted.
When baseball season started again he told her he loved her. And she smiled and looked down then away then back at him, with this secret smile that told him she felt the same.
But then one day Jack came home from work and there were people standing at the door. People in military uniforms who could have been Sawyer but when they turned around Jack saw that they had a folded flag in their hands.
Jack should've felt sad but instead he panicked. He pushed through the men at his door, the ones meant to deliver him the bad news, and went to find Kate. She was crying again in this tiny little ball and Jack wondered when he'd let her get so skinny.
He sunk to the floor and put his arms around her, so sure that this is what he was supposed to do. He rocked her gently and kissed her hair and realized he wasn't even sad.
They kissed again and again and Jack slowly lowered her to the cold stone floor. They made love. You could actually call it that. Their kisses were filled with warmth, their fingers were actually caressing. They were gentle and amazing to each other, and Jack woke up confused. Were they happy now? He knew he should feel glad, but it only felt like a goodbye.
* * *
When Kate left him he started to remember everything about her.
The first time she'd walked into the bar Jack had known it. She was probably the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen, though his mind was slow to come to that conclusion. Instead he was only thinking about how gorgeous she was…until she'd sat down next to Sawyer and he'd given her a quick kiss hello.
He remembered the first time she told a joke, what her work schedule was in February, and the name of her father. He remembered that he always asked Sawyer about her when she wasn't there, and how Sawyer never caught on. He remembered that she'd bought a yoga mat and taken three yoga classes that year, and the first time he'd seen her legs. He remembered the night the three of them had gotten so drunk that Sawyer had passed out, and that he and Kate had almost kissed in a telephone booth while calling for a cab.
He remembered that when he saw her next she hadn't remembered.
* * *
Jack had seen her only once after that, in his whole life. Sarah was in the store, picking flower arrangements. Jack had needed some air, and was now sitting on a bench halfway down the block.
He wasn't sure why he looked up, but he could have been looking up already. What he noticed was her brown hair, curlier than before. He couldn't even be sure it was her. The woman disappeared inside the police precinct, and though it was completely, and utterly irrational to do so…he waited. Jack kept darting glances towards the florist's, seeing Sarah noncommittally wander with a sales woman so closely shadowing her, obviously getting more and more frustrated with Sarah's indecision.
How long had it been—two minutes? Three?
In the middle of the fucking street he was getting a hard-on. Sitting on the bench, willing it to go down…all he was thinking about suddenly was the curve of her back, and the way she had freckles on her shoulders…he was remembering the taste of her, the smell of her, the everything about her and about how Sawyer had died and how much he wanted to see her face again, and feel her lips…anywhere…
She stepped back out onto the street, and in the moment he realized it was Kate he realized she wasn't alone; both in the fact that an obviously plains-clothes cop had his arm around her waist, and for the fact that she was obviously a few months along.
Everything in him went cold in that moment, and he let himself feel everything he'd so carefully tried not to. When she left he'd so painstakingly folded all the memories of her away, merely collected them like rare insects and pinned them down to paper…framing them, keeping them behind panes of glass to be admired for what they were: dead, beautiful things.
* * *
end notes: I'm not sure if this is finished or not. It feels way too dark, when I was trying really hard to go for…realism? I'm not sure. Leave a comment if you can.