Written for the Lost Comment Fic Battle at lostsquee. Prompt: after, Alex/Jack.
She hadn't seen him when he was their captive. She'd seen Kate and Sawyer, but she'd been denied access to Jack every time she asked.
"We need him." Danny said. "We can't have you saying the wrong thing and screwing this up, Alex."
She wouldn't have said the wrong thing. She may have hated Ben, but she didn't want him dead. Teenagers were supposed to hate their parents but still love them, right?
She met Jack after, when he had his own house and had fixed her father. She snuck in one night after Juliet left. She wasn't sure why.
He was playing the piano, and that reminded her of Ben. But the look on his face, serene and open, reminded her of Karl. Jack was the only other person she'd ever seen to look like he didn't have care in the world, like everything was okay. She guessed it was the piano that did it, because it certainly wasn't the circumstances.
He stopped playing then, and she could see the tension flow back into him, and that saddened her, because she wanted that look back. She wanted him to pretend that everything was okay again. Because if he could, then so could she, and Karl wasn't there anymore to do it for her.
So she did all she knew how to do, the thing that always made Karl look like that. She walked over to Jack and kissed him. He didn't respond at first, shocked as he was, but then he reciprocated, just for a few seconds, because they both belonged to other people, but it was there. And when they pulled away, his hand was on her cheek and she saw that look again, of serenity and openness.
"Why?" he asked, and she paused before answering him.
"Because we needed to." she answered, and he slowly pulled his hand away and nodded.
She left that night and never saw him again until she and Ben met him at the radio tower, and by then there was nothing she could do to get that serenity and openness back.